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The Novel and the Nation
63
chapters— the way tales usually conclude with “That, at any rate, is what
I have learned” [Eso es, al menos, lo que yo he sabido]— ^works to under
mine any narrative authority, if we think o f the storyteller as an individual,
such as Saiil; but it works also, or alternatively, to situate this discourse as
a repetition o f other discourses.^'’
As is clear from the way the novel boldly does what the narrator
finds impossible— invents a language for a people with a radically differ
ent worldview— this is a novel that takes risks in approaching the prob
lem o f the nation and o f those who, it seems, cannot be included with
out losing their identity. The impossible relation between the novel’s parts
dramatizes the unsolvable problem o f the position o f the Indians in Peru,
where inclusion means assimilation, transformation, and destruction o f
their world, just as surely as exclusion will bring their destruction. In his
debates with Saiil, the narrator argues for integrating and modernizing,
but the story puts his position in doubt (shouldn’t they, on the contrary,
be left alone in their own world?), and his research obsession, which seems
disinterested by comparison with that o f missionaries, makes more plau
sible Saiil’s position. Yet if the hablador is Saiil and not just a fantasy o f the
narrator’s, this implies, on the one hand, a critique o f the notion o f the In
dian community’s purity and, on the other hand, the view that preserva
tion occurs through the intervention o f an outsider. Culture is preserved
through imitation, repetition, and adulteration (for instance, the assimila
tion to Machiguenga culture o f tales from Kafka and from the history o f
the Jews). Moreover, and this is especially pertinent to the novel’s perfor
mance, from the point of view of the reader, it is precisely the “dubious,”
“compromised” representation, in Spanish, o f the Machiguenga world that
earns support for the idea o f preserving this world in its supposed purity
and autonomy.
26.
In addition, assertions frequently close with perhaps [quizd, or tal ve£\
(“Everything was going very well, perhaps”)— another device that is likely to strike
the reader as undermining narrative authority, as traditionally conceived. Efrain
Kxistal, discussing the language of these chapters, writes that “the most salient fea
ture of this stylized language for the reader is a recursive pattern of ungrammatical
conventions, suggestive of a different way of thinking” (Efrain Kristal, Temptation
o f the Word: The Novels o f Mario Vargas Llosa [Nashville, TN ; Vanderbilt Univer
sity Press, Г988], 165).
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4
T H E O R Y
In juxtaposing these two sets o f chapters (as if to fulfill Bakhtins
dubious claim that the novel is a dialogic form that cites all forms o f dis
course without any one dominating) and in offering no explanation or
claim about the authenticity o f the Machiguenga lore, the novel stages the
national project articulated by San Martin, in his claim, before the exis
tence o f Peru, that the Indians were “children o f Peru.” Or rather, as An
derson claims, citing Walter Benjamin’s paradox that every document of
civilization is at the same time a document o f barbarism, E l hablador “con
siders the truth o f Benjamin’s paradox, taking all its terms together. One
could say that it ‘performs’ the impossibility o f transcending it, as well as
o f escaping from it. This is, perhaps, the only way in our time in which the
national novel, the narrative o f the nation, can be written, and rewritten,
and rewritten” {Spectre, 359).
Unlike what Anderson calls the “old-fashioned novel,” whose nar
rative voice easily encompasses characters unknown to each other and
creates “in the mind o f the omniscient reader” the community to which
they could belong, which is or is like that o f the nation, here there is no
all-encompassing narrator, no possibility o f inventing a voice that can in
clude all those who might be claimed by the nation. That impossibility
may be read— so Anderson does— as bringing “the timbre o f tragedy as
well as the semantics o f shame” to the nation {Spectre, 359), but it may
also be read as an attempt to imagine a community without unity, or what
Jean-Luc Nancy calls a “communauté désoeuvrée” : community as spac
ing rather than fusion, sublation, or transcendence. The community is a
“communauté désoeuvrée" because it is based on the fact that “there can be
no singular being without another singular being”^^ and that what beings
share “is not a common work that exceeds them but the differential ex
perience o f the other as finite being.
One does not recognize the Other
27. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bour
geois, 1986), 71.
28. Natalie Melas, A ll the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the
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