Religion and the Novel in Mario Vargas Llosa's La guerra del fin del mundo

Abstract

Mario Vargas Llosa's “favorite novel,” The War of the End of the World (1981), may be read not just as a rewriting of Euclides da Cunha's account of the Brazilian government's war against religious fanatics in the Canudos rebellion in Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), but also as a profound critique of the religious elements that are intertwined with the “total novels” of the Latin American Boom. Unlike the powerful, all-knowing narrative demiurges of the Boom novels (Morelli, Melquíades, Oppiano Licario), in The War of the End of the World, the power to narrate has become disseminated and democratized to the point of anarchy: Each of the characters creates his particular story, relying on his individual experience to tell it, and deriving from it his own personal meaning. A deeply skeptical exploration of the role of belief in narrative arguably forms the backbone of Vargas Llosa's masterpiece.

Keywords:

• belief
• Boom
• Euclides da Cunha
• narrative
• total novels
• Mario Vargas Llosa

Acknowledgments

Aníbal González is Professor of Modern Latin American Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Love and Politics in the Modern Spanish American Novel (2010). He is currently writing a book on of the role of religious discourse in the contemporary Latin American novel.

Notes

1. As historian of religion Jaroslav Pelikan points out: “In the sacred literatures of religious faith, faith-as-experience has often been described in highly individualistic terms.…Except for passing moments of intense mystical rapture, however, such individualism has been shown to be illusory…When examined in its total context, moreover, it becomes apparent that the individualized experience of faith has repeatedly taken place during or after corporate worship: The setting of the private vision has often been the temple itself; or when the vision has come in the solitude of the desert or in the privacy of the soul, it has come as a consequence of participation in the ritual of the temple or as a response to instruction in the lore of the community's tradition” (2957).

2. Jorge Luis Borges's observations in this regard in his essay “El arte narrativo y la magia” (1932) are already well-known: “Para el supersticioso, hay una necesaria conexión no solo entre un balazo y un muerto, sino entre un muerto y una maltratada efigie de cera o la rotura profética de un espejo o la sal que se vuelca o trece comensales terribles. Esa peligrosa armonía, esa frenética y precisa causalidad, manda en la novela también” (Obras completas, I 231).

3. See M. H. Abrams's classic essay, “Belief and Suspension of Disbelief,” in which he discusses the basis for what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (qtd. in Abrams 28). Although Abrams insists that only the evocation of common human experience can suspend the readers’ incredulity, he also recognizes, in the last lines of his essay, that “the great writer does not merely play upon the beliefs and propensities we bring to literature from life, but sensitizes, enlarges, and even transforms them” (30).