The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

First published:El hablado, 1987, in Spain (English translation, 1989)

Type of plot: Philosophical realism

Time of work: The 1950’s to the 1980’s

Locale: Lima, Peru; the Peruvian Amazon; and Florence, Italy

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a Peruvian novelist and former television host
• Saúl Zuratas, a Jewish-Peruvian student, a long-lost friend of the narrator
• The Storyteller, a Machiguengan man who travels the Amazonian jungles telling stories
• Tasurinchi, the Machiguengan creator, whose name also denotes each particular man in the tribe

The Novel

The Storyteller is an intriguing, often disturbing exploration of the Machiguengas, a real, indigenous, nomadic tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, and of the encroachment of modern life and values into their environment and culture. Mario Vargas Llosa frames this exploration as a quest for information about both the tribe and a Jewish student from Lima who may have been absorbed into it.

The narrator resembles Vargas Llosa himself. Like the author, he is a Peruvian novelist who vacations in Florence, Italy, and who once hosted a Peruvian television magazine. Although the narrator is never explicitly identified as Vargas Llosa, such identification is neither denied nor contradicted. Within the fictional world, many factual particulars of the novel suggest that it is written in the author’s own voice.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator, on vacation in Florence and immersed in a reading of the works of Dante, wanders into a photographic exhibit on the Machiguengas, an indigenous people of eastern Peru. The tribe has long fascinated him and once played a central role in an ongoing debate he had with a friend at the university, Saúl Zuratas. In one of the photos, the narrator sees a native storyteller who strongly resembles Saúl. This prompts an account by the narrator of the two students’ friendship.

Saúl was an intense young Jewish man with an enormous purplish birthmark that covered half his face and earned him the nickname La Mascarita, or Mask-face. He was deeply concerned about the survival of indigenous peoples in Peru and had strong criticism for those who sought to evangelize, assimilate, or “culturally advance” such peoples under the guise of scientific, anthropological, and linguistic research. Saúl turned down a lucrative scholarship to study in France, choosing instead to remain with his aging father and continue his studies in Peru.

The narrator and Saúl shared discussions on many issues, including the Machiguengan people. The narrator found Saúl’s views too strident. The narrator went to study in Europe; although he tried to maintain contact, he never heard from Saúl again. Upon returning to Peru, the narrator learned that Saúl and his ailing father supposedly had moved to Israel.

The account of the students’ relationship is rendered in a speculative, impressionistic fashion. Few scenes or conversations are presented in detail; all is filtered through memory and, to a degree, emotion. Plot and action are outpaced by a wealth of information and meditation on the Machiguengas, Peruvian politics, and modern life.

Interwoven into the account of Saúl Zuratas are chapters written in the voice of the Machiguengan hablador, or traditional storyteller. In these chapters, Vargas Llosa employs a language that is at once naïve and wise, suiting Machiguengan lore, beliefs, and rituals. The storyteller describes Kientibakori, the spirit of evil; Kashiri, the sometimes benevolent; the seripigari, or wise men; the Viracochas, or dangerous outsiders; and Tasurinchi, the Machiguengan creator whose name is also used to refer to any Machiguengan man.

The storyteller chapters relate story after story of Tasurinchi after Tasurinchi: their family relationships, their lifestyles, and the lessons they have learned from the environment and animals that surround them. Some of the stories are amusingly scatological, while others clearly establish the Machiguengan cosmogony. The Machiguengan people come into focus as a loose society of wanderers, “the men that walk,” believing that their walking keeps the sun in the sky. In addition, the storyteller relates his own experiences as the link among the scattered Tasurinchis.

As the novel alternates between the narrator’s account and the storyteller’s tales, the two sequences, already linked by the photograph in Florence, begin to merge. The narrator describes his interest in Machiguengan storytellers and the unavailability of pertinent information. In the early 1980’s, as host of a television program called The Tower of Babel, he ventured back into the jungle to report on the Machiguengans. There he encountered the Schneils, a husband-and-wife team of American linguists working with the Summer Institute for Linguistics. He had met them once before: It was Edwin Schneil who had first mentioned Machiguengan storytellers to the narrator. During this later visit, to the narrator’s amazement, Schneil described an “albino” storyteller with a large birthmark on his face. In speaking with a Jewish coworker, the narrator also discovered that Saúl did not go to Israel as rumored. After his father’s death, he disappeared.

In the following chapter, the storyteller relates how he found that vocation. He refers somewhat cryptically to his birthmark, his previous life elsewhere, his acceptance among the Tasurinchis, and his transformation from a studious listener to an itinerant teller of stories. It is strongly suggested, though not explicitly articulated, that the storyteller is Saúl Zuratas.

By the end of the novel, the narrator returns to the present moment in Florence, where he repeatedly visits the photography exhibit to view the singular image. He contemplates his friend’s destiny, puts together the pieces of the puzzle he has been investigating, and decides for himself that the storyteller in the photograph is none other than his lost friend Saúl Zuratas, La Mascarita.

The Characters

The Storyteller is an extended meditation rather than a compelling dramatic narrative. Thus, the novel’s characters are more strongly developed in terms of the ideas they hold and represent than in their human desires and interrelationships. Vargas Llosa seeks to particularize the larger struggle of indigenous peoples against the encroachment of modern, technological influence by focusing on two students, their ill-fated friendship, and their different interactions with a fascinating tribe.

As a stand-in for the author, the character of the narrator pulls the reader into the novel by blurring the separation between the real and fictional worlds. Clearly, the tribe described is a real tribe, and many of the people, places, and incidents evoked in the novel are authentic. The use of a semifictional narrator demands complicity, asking the reader to participate in the ideological discussions and to form an opinion about the Machiguengas.

In the narrator’s chapters, the characters are not fully fleshed out with complex behavioral patterns based on personal, emotional responses to external situations. Saúl is kept at a distance; his father, Don Salomón, is referred to but not seen; and the Schneils are barely developed beyond expository purposes. Likewise, the university professors, the television crew, the missionaries, Machiguengan leaders, and many other minor characters seem only to exist to help elucidate the novel’s central question.

In contrast, the characters in the storyteller chapters, though united by the common name of Tasurinchi, are of flesh and blood, with human desires and functions and clear links to land and nature. The storyteller himself conveys his fears and vulnerability, and in the stories he tells he creates a Machiguengan world that is vibrant with life and its own natural logic.

Thus, in his use of character, Vargas Llosa subtly supports an ideology that is central to the novel’s debate. The Western narrator and his world are dry, fact-based, single-minded, and extremely impersonal and cerebral. The world of the storyteller and the Machiguengans is, conversely, rooted in visceral functions, emotions, physical acts and phenomena, and chance and improbability. In each half of the novel, one of the storytellers expresses how he has come to puzzle out his universe, but their methods, reflected in their characters and the worlds they portray, could not be more different. This difference provides ironic commentary on implicit assumptions about the civilization of “civilized” society and the primitiveness of “primitives.”

Critical Context

Vargas Llosa has always drawn from personal experience to document the injustices and uncertainties of life in modern Peru. His earliest novels, La ciudad y los perros (1962; Time of the Hero, 1966) and La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), explore themes of repression and corruption in the military academy of his adolescence and a small jungle town of his youth. Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975) is a panoramic portrait of Peru in the 1940’s and 1950’s under the dictator Manuel Odria. In these early novels, Vargas Llosa began to experiment with an interweaving, nonlinear narrative style.

His next two novels, Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978) and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982), incorporate humor and farce and draw on the author’s knowledge of military life and the television industry. Both use the technique of incorporating fictional documentary material into the body of the novel.

With La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984) and Historia de Mayta (1984; The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1986), Vargas Llosa returned to his serious, political writing, focusing on turn-of-the-century religious zealotry in Brazil and contemporary radicalism in Peru. For Vargas Llosa, writing is a political act; in 1990, the author ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru. The Storyteller, not surprisingly, gives evidence of the political leader that Vargas Llosa has become, concerned with the larger issues confronting Peruvian government, society, and culture.

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. “The Metamorphosis.” The New Republic 202 (January 8, 1990): 41-42. In this review, Alter focuses on the Jewish themes, the light characterizations, and the links to Joseph Conrad. He closely examines Vargas Llosa’s craft in creating the style of the storyteller chapters.

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 chapter entitled “Narrative, Metanarrative, and Utopian Fantasy in The Storyteller.”

Castro-Klarén, Sara. Understanding Mario Vargas Llosa. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Castro-Klarén traces the thematic evolution of Vargas Llosa’s oeuvre. The well-developed but sometimes dense chapter on The Storyteller examines the work’s ideological underpinnings and the power of the storyteller chapters.

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 belives that the representation of himself in his works is distorted by the warping of his own beliefs and obsessions.

Johnston, George Sim. “The Call of the Wild.” National Review 42 (February 5, 1990): 56-57. Johnston’s review is ultimately critical of the novel for its implausibility and incompleteness. He discusses Vargas Llosa’s views of human morality, his sense of irony, and his European-style intellectualism.

Sommer, Doris. “About Face: The Talker Turns.” Boundary 2 23 (Spring, 1996): 91-133. Sommer notes that Vargas Llosa’s novel portrays moments of confrontation between Amazonian narratives and modern history, resolving such conflicts either through dismissal or identification with the other. She argues that when the Jewish anthropologist becomes the tribe’s storyteller, the parallels between the Jews and the Indians as marginalized groups become more apparent.

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.

Updike, John. “Writer-Consciousness.” The New Yorker 65 (December 25, 1989): 103-104. Updike places Vargas Llosa in the postmodernist tradition of Italo Calvino, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov. He praises the author’s inventiveness and the blending of the novel’s real and imaginary worlds but bemoans the text’s speculative quality and its lack of romance and sensuality.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. A Writer’s Reality. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1991. A collection of thoughtful and candid essays by the author, reflecting on his literary roots, his creative method, and his political beliefs. Although containing only a few references to The Storyteller, the volume is nevertheless a fascinating glimpse into the mind behind the novel.

Williams, Tamara. “The Storyteller.” America 162 (March 24, 1990): 298-299. Williams discusses Vargas Llosa’s didactic and political purposes in the novel, enjoying the story as a quest for a lost way of life. She also examines how the novel reflects on the author as a storyteller and chronicler of his culture.