Going native

Ignacio López-Calvo

pp. 103-124

in: Juan E. De Castro, Nicholas Birns (eds), Vargas Llosa and Latin American politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

In 2005, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa received from the American Enterprise Institute, one of the premier right-wing think tanks, the Irving Kristol Award. He opened his reception speech by thanking his hosts for seeing him as a "unified being," in contrast with many of his Hispanic critics who tend to separate his literary work from his political views. In light of the author's statement, in this essay I shall contextualize the representation of indigeneity and indigenism in his fiction with the evolution of his political thought. As Efraín Kristal reminds us, according to Vargas Llosa's "doctrine of the demons of artistic creation, a writer is not responsible for his literary themes, and his personal convictions may contradict the contents and messages of his literary works' (Temptation of the Word 197). Nevertheless, as we shall see, there is an ideological common ground between the novels considered in this essay and the author's political thought at the time he published them even if, as can be expected of the novelistic genre, in the fictional discourse we can often find polyphonic contradictions and ethical ambivalence.