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E l hablador may not be addressed to Peruvians, and indeed Peruvian
readers may be precisely the wrong audience for this novel. Doris Som
mer, whose “About-Face: The Talker Turns” is a brilliant, conflicted critical
study of the novel, reports that educated Peruvians dislike it: “One simpli
fied version o f the impatience Vargas Llosas novel, along with his fiction
in general, elicits among educated Peruvian readers, is presented by Mirko
Lauer. . . . His fundamental objection, it seems, is that the novelist fails to
maintain an ethical and coherent posi ti on .Per uv ians may be in a par
ticularly bad position to read it as a novel, for as inhabitants o f a country
where the status o f the Indians has been a burning political question for
some time and where Vargas Llosa is also a political figure with a record o f
actions, pronouncements, and essays on political and cultural topics, they
33. Ibid. O f course, many Peruvians have had a cosmopolitan education
and can certainly join this audience without difficulty but I do not believe that
the audience is a national one.
34. Doris Sommer, “About-Face: The Talker Turns,” boundary 2 23, no. i
(spring 1996): 129П. See also the fine treatment by Lucille Kerr, Reclaiming the Au
thor: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992); and the discussion by Efrain Kristal in Temptation o f the Word. Jane
O ’Bryan-Knight, in The Story o f the Storyteller (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1995), main
tains, wrongly in my view, that this is a novel about the novelist writing this novel.
I think that the narrator’s inability to write the part of the storyteller is crucial.
are likely to take the novel, as Sommer herself does for most o f her essay,
as primarily a political statement, which can then be faulted for quietism
or evasiveness. Sommer herself as a critic responsible to the cultural con
text, interprets the novel in the light o f Vargas Llosa’s essays and political
activities, where she finds insensitivity to the Indians, “readiness to sacri
fice the Indian cultures, since they interfere with modernity’s fight against
hunger and need.”^^ In a passage early in her essay she suggests that the
novel is his attempt to give himself an alibi. Vargas Llosa, she argues, does
not see himself as internally divided, does not presume to contain the two
sides o f Peru;
Either this reluctance to contain Peru is a facile admission of limits, based on rigid
notions of difference between Indian tradition and modern projects, or the lack of
presumption can be an ethical caution against containment and control of the in
commensurable cultures in a multifarious nation. On the one hand, Vargas Llosa
could be absolving himself from the moral obligation o f inclusiveness and toler
ance, a likely hand, given his impatient prescriptions for neutralizing and nation
alizing specifically Indian cultures. But on the other hand, more promisingly, the
refusal could be read against his politics, as a defense of difference.^'’
She makes it clear that his countrymen take the first, “more likely” view,
which she resourcefully pursues for most o f her essay. The duality that the
novel presents “can lead to dismissing indigenous otherness as inassimi
lable and inessential to the Peruvian body politic, a dismissal that coun
trymen read in Vargas Llosa’s consistent carelessness about Indian cultures
and lives.
But in the end, putting Peruvian contexts behind her, Som-
35. Sommer, “About-Face,” 126. In what might be a key point, Sommer sug
gests that in constructing the Machiguenga chapters Vargas Llosa has been influ
enced by the better-known native language, Quechua, spoken in the mountains of
Peru, and that he there deploys what she calls “Quechua-inflected Spanish”: “The
Andean sounds are so improbable in the jungle that the effect is to suggest the
writer’s indifference to Indians” (97). If this were true, it would be a pertinent cri
tique of the artistic realization o f these chapters and their failure to imagine a plau
sible language of otherness. I myself am not competent to judge this point and can
note only that other critics I have consulted do not see the Machiguenga chapters
in this way, including Efrain Kristal, who has the most convincing discussion of
the style o f these chapters and especially o f the grammatical and other devices by
which Vargas Llosa has created the effect of a non-Western mode of thinking.
36. Sommer, “About-Face,” 94.
37. Ibid., 128.
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