"Dissonant Worlds: Mario Vargas Llosa and the Aesthetics of the Total Novel." (original) (raw)

This paper provides an overview of Vargas Llosa’s theory of the total novel, followed by a discussion of its position within the broader debates that arose in the post-World War II period in response to the revelations of the extent of human rights abuses under totalitarian regimes as well as concerns about the possibilities for democratic governance in the era of mass culture. As my examination of Vargas Llosa’s thought on the total novel reveals, despite its apparently purely aesthetic propositions, the total novel as a literary form was designed specifically to disrupt consensual ideological constructs that claimed to “close the book” on reality by accessing absolute truth. In this regard, the theory of the total novel comprised an incipient postmodernism that shared ground with early deconstructionism (due, at least in part, to the common influence of Blanchot and his reading of Mallarmé), recognizing the ultimate symbolic and ideological nature of all representation; but it was also decisively modern in its hierarchical privileging of representational forms that are closer to what Vargas Llosa, influenced by Karl Popper, calls “objective” or “real reality.” The total novel’s unmasking of the symbolism sustaining ideological interpretations of reality was designed to carry humanity closer to the horizons of unmediated, chaotic reality, even if those horizons could never be delineated clearly due humans’ inability to extricate themselves from culture. On the other hand, this process of desymbolization—of detachment from historical and political identities--has also been linked to the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism and globalized market segmentation, that is, the construction of consumer identities distributed within ever more refined demographic categories. In this view, the total novel would play an important part within the Boom’s commercial project of (re)inventing Latin America as a regional marketplace, as the site of production of distinctive cultural products, and as a new demographic (the Latino) during the rapid expansion of globalization in the neoliberal capitalist model from the 1960s on. As I will show in my conclusions, however, there are ongoing tensions between these two distinct if entwined projects, since the total novel’s explicit supplementarity to reality draws into question the pragmatism claimed by the neoliberal consensus within which the Boom functions as a commercial paradigm. In this reading, the total novel persists as a destabilizing form rooted in modernist aesthetics of rupture within the larger integrationist project of the Boom and post-Boom. The internal tensions between the novel as critique and as commodity led to the abandonment of the total novel in the 1980s by the majority of its practitioners; but it has returned in recent years to contest the hegemony of the neoliberal consensus that portrays itself as the only possible reading of reality, thus taking on totalitarian overtones of its own.