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Ends o f Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), chap. 3
. 1
am
indebted to Melas’s discussion of the usefulness of Nancy’s concept for conceiv
ing community in the postcolonial world and breaking away from the Hegelian
model of mutual recognition as a dialectical model of community based on iden
tity. She herself develops a notion of dissimilation to set against the model of as
similation.
but “ éprouve son semblable” [experiences one’s counterpart], who is simi
lar in being singulan^^
Anderson reads E l hablador in the register o f tragedy and shame in
part because he reads it not just as a novel o f Peru but as a novel fo r Peruvi
ans about the problem o f their nation; he speaks o f “the Peruvian Spanish-
reading public which is the writer’s first audience” {Spectre, 355). But one
might wonder. Vargas Llosa is a novelist o f international fame, whose non-
Peruvian Spanish readers far outnumber his Peruvian ones. In “The Na
tional Longing for Form” Timothy Brennan describes the way in which—
especially for a group o f eminent writers from the third world— the novel
functions today above all in an international market. Today the novel is
“the form through which a thin foreign-educated stratum (however sen
sitive or committed to domestic political interests) has communicated to
metropolitan reading publics, often in translation. It has been, in short, a
naturally cosmopolitan form that empire has allowed to play a national role,
as it were, only in an international a r e n a In particular, there has emerged
an important strain o f third-world writing: “the lament for the necessary
and regrettable insistence o f nation-forming, in which the writer proclaims
his identity with a country whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven
him into a kind o f exile— a simultaneous recognition o f nationhood and
alienation from it.”^‘
Though this is not exactly true o f Vargas Llosa (Brennan is thinking
o f writers such as Rushdie and Naipaul), it helps prevent us from taking
it for granted that the community o f readers addressed by E l hablador is a
national one. Read again its opening lines:
I came to Firenze to escape Peru and Peruvians for a while, and suddenly my un
fortunate country [malhadado pai's] forced itself on me this morning in an unex
pected way. I had visited Dante’s restored house, the little Church of San Martino
del Véscovo, and the lane where, so legend has it, he first saw Beatrice, when in
the little Via Santa Margherita, a window display stopped me short: bows, arrows,
a carved oar, a pot with a geometric design, a mannequin bundled into a wild cot
ton cushma.^^
The Novel and the Nation
6 5
29. Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée, 82.
30. Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” 56 (my italics).
31. Ibid., 63.
32. Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller, 3.
66
T H E O R Y
What sort o f narrative audience is addressed here? It is first o f all one that
does not need explanation o f the easy references to Firenze and to Dante’s
glimpse o f Beatrice. Proper names, taken for granted, delineate the Euro
pean scene, but when the narrator turns to the materials from the jungle in
the window display and then to the photographs that “suddenly brought
back for me the flavor o f the Peruvian jungle,” he uses terms accessible to
the European reader— “bows, arrows, a carved oar”— and only the mild
exoticism o f the “cotton cushma.” If one had to describe the reader whom
this opening page appears to imagine and address, it would not be the Pe
ruvian national so much as an international cosmopolitan reader, one like
ly to be struck by the unexpected contrast between the archetypal literary
site and reminders of the unmarked scene identified with Peru: “The wide
rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised on pil
ings, and the knots o f men and women, naked to the waist and daubed
with paint, looking at me unblinkingly from the glossy print.
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