Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published:La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977 (English translation, 1982)

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Lima, Peru

Principal Characters:

• Mario, the protagonist, partial narrator, radio journalist, and writer
• Aunt Julia, Mario’s aunt by marriage, a divorcée who is fourteen years Mario’s senior, and whom he finally marries
• Pedro Camacho, the Bolivian scriptwriter, a “one-man industry,” whose scripts form a second pattern of narration

The Novel

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a comedic novel about the education of young Mario (called variously Marito and Varguitas) that combines numerous elements of Vargas Llosa’s own life with the fictional relationship with Aunt Julia and Pedro Camacho in Lima in the 1950’s to form an autobiographical fable of identity that is neither autobiography nor history but rather an artistically rendered portrait of the artist as a young man. The primary narrator of the work, Mario, recounts, from a distance of at least twelve years later, his youthful love for his aunt by marriage, their improbable courtship and hilarious attempts to circumvent the law to get married, and his own life as a law student, radio newswriter, and would-be short-story writer. Each of the novel’s twenty chapters, except the last two, which conclude Mario’s narrative, are arranged so that the odd-numbered ones are Mario’s attempts to describe his life and fortunes and the even-numbered ones are actual scripts of soap operas by Pedro Camacho, the indefatigable and prolific Bolivian scriptwriter.

The work begins with a semiserious Mario introducing himself as a student and news director of Radio Panamerica, the lesser of Lima’s two radio stations owned by the Genaro family, with the importation of Pedro Camacho from Bolivia to write original radio serials to replace those which the Genaros brought from Cuba, and with the arrival of the newly divorced Aunt Julia, also from Bolivia. Mario’s initial encounters with Camacho and Julia are equally unpromising but turn out, in true melodramatic fashion, to be important first steps in forming a professional bond between Mario and the scriptwriter and a very personal one with Aunt Julia.

The story of the furtive courtship between Mario and Julia is the central portion of Mario’s narrative, as the two fall quite hopelessly, passionately, and madly in love with each other. Their love, when it is finally discovered after their ill-starred elopement, brings down upon them a family catastrophe that competes, in all of its absurdity and odd manifestations, with elements of Camacho’s soap operas, the stories which are recounted antiphonally throughout the novel. Indeed, the comedy of errors of their elopement—they dash about the countryside to find a mayor who will, for a bribe, marry the underage Mario without parental consent—has exactly enough improbability about it to make it truly resemble the vicissitudes of real life. So does life often resemble bad literature and B-pictures.

Meanwhile, Pedro Camacho’s soap operas make him the toast of Lima: The stories and the fortunes of their characters are on everyone’s lips when Camacho begins to evidence signs of fatigue and then madness. His villains all turn out to be Argentines or Peruvians with Argentinian proclivities. Despite official protests to Radio Panamerica by the Argentine ambassador, Camacho persists in vilifying Argentina and its people. Far more serious is the growing bewilderment among his listeners: Characters who died in one serial are resurrected in another, sometimes with different professions; other characters move in and out of several serials; still others change their names in mid-script. Public confusion and dismay grow as, one by one, the principal continuing characters are killed off in one catastrophe after another until, after a series of disasters, each worse than the one before, all of fictional Lima is destroyed cataclysmically, and Camacho is finally committed to an insane asylum.

The work’s final chapter serves as a neat conclusion to all the cliff-hanger questions about Mario’s narrative and explains what has happened, over a twelve-year period, to Mario, Julia, Pedro Camacho, and lesser characters such as Pascual, Javier, and Big Pablito. In so doing, it serves both to provide a neat summary of much of the novel’s action and to mark a decidedly new phase in Mario’s fortunes.

The Characters

Mario is, despite the title, the principal focus of interest in the novel, which covers a brief period in his life and examines the widely different effects that both Julia and the scriptwriter have upon him. This novel of the education of a young man focuses not only upon his sensations and ideas but also upon his improbable actions and their sometimes hilarious consequences for him. Although several of the minor characters, chiefly his relatives and his companions at the radio station, do, in fact, have their own existences and concerns, one sees them predominantly through Mario’s eyes and in relation to his own growth, concerns, and aspirations. In his painstaking characterization of his friends and relatives and in his precise details of the urban geography of Lima, Mario the narrator consistently views his environment personally, in relation to his sense of it and its meaning for him. In this sense, he is as much “the scriptwriter” of his own life, times, and place as Pedro Camacho is the scriptwriter of dozens of domestic and civil tragedies and melodramas of his contemporary Lima. Further, both Camacho and Mario are the creations of Mario the novelist.

As the young Mario makes his way through these few weeks and months of this extraordinary period in his life, he examines his journalistic apprenticeship at Radio Panamerica and the disparate writing assignments that he undertakes to help support Julia and himself as prologues to his Stephen Dedalus-like flight to the artistic Mecca where he aspires to work: Paris.

Pedro Camacho, the celebrated Bolivian scriptwriter who soon becomes a household word in Lima, is a prime example of one who creates his art for its own sake. Steeped in a devotion to his work that would have done credit to such prodigious creators of fictional worlds as Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Charles Dickens, Camacho finds his characters moving away from him, assuming independent lives of their own, jumping from one serial to another, and finally ending in chaotic and apocalyptic episodes that evidence the deterioration and madness of their creator. Camacho is a highly comic character whose outrageous characters complement his own absurdly melodramatic view of himself and of life. It comes as an amusing but somewhat shocking revelation to Mario that Camacho begins to dress like his characters, male and female, so that he can better interpret them in his stories. It is a darker and more sober revelation that Camacho has a wife who is Argentine and who keeps food on their table through utterly unromantic prostitution.

Of great interest, at times of greater interest than Mario, is the wonderful Aunt Julia, as perfect a foil to the numerous stereotypes of Spanish American Princesses (SAP’s) as can be found in Latin American fiction written by men. Independent, witty, beautiful, intelligent, resourceful, charming, arch, and eminently commonsensical, the thirty-two-year-old Julia entirely captivates the young Mario, concedes to a marriage on the condition that it will last at least five years, and shares his dreams, hardships, difficulties, and ultimately his achievement of the goal to live the life of a writer. In the wry final chapter one learns that the marriage really was a success and lasted longer than “all the parents and even she herself had feared, wished or predicted: eight years.” At this point Julia fades, her function in the work now accomplished. With her fades a time of hope and joy in Mario’s narrative; the remainder is the “real” world of his present in a new and ostensibly confining marriage and in a sentimental journey back to Lima and the reacquaintance with former friends and the much altered scriptwriter.

Critical Context

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter has been variously hailed as a “ribald classic,” a pure example of the “literature of exhaustion” that reflects upon itself, and a postmodern novel that ratifies Vargas Llosa’s early preeminence in el boom latino americano of the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is likely to become an international classic and one of the basic works upon which Vargas Llosa’s literary reputation will ultimately rest. Unlike most of his previous and subsequent novels (especially La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984), it is a distinctly comic work, handled with a light touch, testimony to his versatile imagination.

Indeed, Vargas Llosa has produced a consistently first-rate series of works in the fields of criticism, journalism, fiction, and drama, explicating and elucidating the varied facets of Latin American life and culture both to fellow Latin Americans and to an increasing number of European and North American readers. While he shares, surely and clearly, the “Magical Realism” of such pioneering figures as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, he has transmuted this technique into a more immediately accessible form of fiction that has been widely accepted in the last half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. A thorough examination of Vargas Llosa’s works from a postmodern point of view. Includes a comparison between Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Vargas Llosa’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Dipple, Elizabeth. “Outside, Looking In: Aunt Julia and Vargas Llosa.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 17 (Spring, 1997): 58-69. Dipple argues that Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter are examples of the author’s tendency to separate reality and fiction, revealing that the main characters are a limited version of himself. However, Vargas Llosa believes that the representation of himself in his works is distorted by his own beliefs and obsessions.

Gerdes, Dick. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Vargas Llosa and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.

Kristal, Efrain. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. A collection of perceptive essays on Vargas Llosa’s novels written from the 1960’s through the 1980’s. A helpful bibliography for further reading is also included.

Standish, Peter. “Contemplating Your Own Novel: The Case of Mario Vargas Llosa.” Hispanic Review 61 (Winter, 1993): 53-63. Standish explores Vargas Llosa’s use of metafictional devices in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The Storyteller. He maintains that Vargas Llosa’s use of metafiction is chiefly digetic rather than linguistic and reflects Vargas Llosa’s preoccupation with the topic of storytelling.