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Abstract
The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most prolific and distinguished Spanish American novelists of the twentieth century and the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, is also the author of eight plays, which have frequently been overshadowed by his narrative production. Going beyond the relationship traced by critics between his novels and his plays, this essay underscores the prevalence in his theatrical work of a tug of war between biographical and autobiographical voices as part of a fundamental exploration of real and fictional memory. From Vargas Llosa's early plays of the 1980s to his most recent ones, he has frequently dramatized the life of both real and imaginary, famous and infamous others and selves, creating the illusion that the audience is witnessing someone's life trajectory. This is the analytical angle from which this essay approaches not only Vargas Llosa's first play, La señorita de Tacna (1981), but in particular one of his most recent ones, Odiseo y Penélope (2007). In both analyses, the definitions of biographical and autobiographical discourses are interpreted in light of theatrical representation, underscoring in this way the subjective, dramatic, and metaphorical perspectives of these expressions.
Acknowledgments
Priscilla Meléndez is Visiting Professor of Spanish at Southern Connecticut State University and a specialist in contemporary Spanish American theatre. She is the author of two books—La dramaturgia hispanoamericana contemporánea: Teatralidad y autoconciencia and The Politics of Farce in Contemporary Spanish American Theatre. At present, she is completing a study on the theatre of the Mexican playwright Sabina Berman.
Notes
1. The Spanish film El abuelo—based on Pérez Galdós's 1897 homonymous novel—was directed by José Luis Garci.
2. In “Bridging the Quantum Gap: Considerations on the Novelist as Playwright,” Frank Dauster underscores the tendency of both Boom and post-Boom writes such as Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, and Manuel Puig, to engage in theatre writing (5).
3. In his blog, Alexis Soloski states: “I will freely commiserate with anyone forced to endure Virginia Woolf's Freshwater; that Woolf never intended it for performance only confirms her great intelligence. … Of course, this cuts both ways. Playwrights have also contributed to our stock of mediocre novels. Tom Stoppard's Lord Malquist and Mr Moon is certainly not a terrible tome, but it is hardly on the level of even his one-acts. George Bernard Shaw never enjoyed much success with his fiction, and while Luigi Pirandello did, his books have been forgotten while his plays endure. Were it not for university courses, the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet might remain unread, even as their plays are widely produced.”
4. Regarding the relationship between theatre and narration, see also Brian Richardson's “‘Time Is out of Joint’: Narrative Models and the Temporality of the Drama.”
5. In his memoirs El pez en el agua, Vargas Llosa explains when and how La huída del Inca was written while he was a high school student in Piura (see pp. 189, 197–99). For the English versions of some of Vargas Llosa's plays, see David Graham-Young in Mario Vargas Llosa's Three Plays: The Young Lady of Tacna, Kathie and the Hippopotamus, La Chunga. Regarding essays, books, and interviews on the theatre of Vargas Llosa, see Dauster (“Bridging,” “Vargas Llosa y el teatro como mentira”), Eva Golluscio de Montoya, Dick Gerdes, Dick Gerdes and Tamara Holzapfel, Oscar Rivera-Rodas, Jacqueline Bixler, Espinosa Domínguez, Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, Concepción Reverte Bernal, Jesús M. Santos, Rita Gnutzmann, and Priscilla Meléndez (“Creación y autocreación,” “Transcription”), among many others.
6. In his frequently quoted prologue to La señorita de Tacna, “Las mentiras verdaderas,” Vargas Llosa takes delight in reflecting on how stories come to life: “Cuando escribía esta pieza de teatro en la que estaba seguro de recrear (con abundantes traiciones) la aventura de un personaje familiar al que estuvo atada mi infancia, no sospechaba que, con ese pretexto, estaba, más bien, tratando de atrapar en una historia aquella—inasible, cambiante, pasajera, eternal—manera de que están hechas las historias” (11–12). And in the prologue to La Chunga he adds: “Igual que en mis dos obras anteriores—La señorita de Tacna y Kathie y el hipopótamo—he intentado en La Chunga proyectar en una ficción dramática la totalidad humana de los actos y los sueños, de los hechos y las fantasías” (4).
7. In Dauster's essay, he accurately argued that Vargas Llosa's theatre employed a series of shifts of memory where “the actors move back and forth from one time to another, from one personality to another. These zones of action include both the realistic (in which the characters function) and the nonrealistic (the shifting levels of memory which obsess their every movement and thought). This is not necessarily easy to do on stage, but it [is] basically theatrical rather than novelistic in its conception, and its end product is a series of complex and rich dramatic figures” (“Bridging the Quantum Gap” 9). It should be underscored that Dauster's pertinent comments on Vargas Llosa's theatre were written in 1990, that is, when he had written only three plays out of eight. This indicates that the Peruvian author has persisted throughout his theatrical production on specific dramatic constructions and on his obsession with the role of memory.
8. In Philip Lejeune's On Autobiography, he states that the relationship between biography and autobiography, and the relations of the novel and autobiography are the classical topics of discussion “to which the genre of autobiography always gives rise” (3).
9. In his review of William Randall Beard's adaptation of Homer's epic adventure The Odyssey, Matthew Everett reminds us that The Odyssey “is not only one of the oldest surviving stories of Western literature, it's also one of the first non-linear stories ever told. It starts in the middle, with a man washed up on a foreign shore, far from home.”
10. For Lejeune, the difference between an autobiography and a memoir is that the latter is not the story of a personality (4).
11. In “Point of View in Drama” (1988), Richardson questions the traditional view that rejects the connection between narration and representation, stating that this stance does not apply to works of our own period: “It is conventionally assumed that, because plays are non-narrative, the complex issue associated with theories of point of view can have nothing to do with the stage. Furthermore, major theorists of both narrative discourse and the semiotics of theatre generally agree that drama is exclusively a mimetic genre, while fiction combines mimesis and diegesis” (193–94).
12. Among many, the distinguished semiotician of theatre, Keir Elam has stated that drama is “acted rather than narrated” (119).
13. As suggested by Kronik when examining diegesis in Spanish American theatre, “Narration makes visible what would normally remain unseen” (42).
14. Lejeune states: “In order for there to be autobiography […], the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (5).
15. Vargas Llosa's manipulation of Mamaé's senility reminds us of Rodolfo Usigli's theatricalization of Carlota's madness in Corona de sombra (1943), as she attempted to help Maximilian keep his political power in Mexico to the point of erasing from her mind her husband's death.
16. In El pez en el agua, Vargas Llosa tells the story of his relative Mamaé, who is the young lady of Tacna of his 1981 play (73–74).
17. In the premieres of Odiseo y Penélope and Las mil noches y una noche, Vargas Llosa performs the role of Odiseo and Sahrigar (Sherezada's husband), respectively, in both occasions with the Spanish-Italian actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón (1968). In the first scene of Las mil noches, Mario and Aitana recollect their previous experience performing together in Odiseo y Penélope, and Mario acknowledges that he continues to feel panic on stage but that now he is able to mask it. Aitana welcomes him to his new artistic reality: “Vas aprendiendo el oficio, entonces” (32).
18. There is a long history of adaptations of The Odyssey, among them one recently directed by William Randall Beard and performed in Park Square Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota in January 2011 (Everett).
19. Another recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott, created in 1993 a stage version of Homer's Odyssey, three years after he had published his well-acclaimed epic poem Omeros.