Mario Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo: History, Fiction, or Social Psychology?

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA’S LA FIESTA DEL CHIVO: HISTORY, FICTION, OR SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY? by Helene C. Weldt-Basson Wayne State University THE Latin American novel of dictatorship has long constituted a “subgenre” of Latin American historical fiction.1 The mid-nineteenth-century novel Amalia, by José Mármol, is frequently cited as the very first work of this sort, based on the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas in Argentina. A long list of novels has followed, including Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El señor presidente (1946), Alejo Carpentier’s El recurso del método (1974), Gabriel García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975), Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (1974), and Luisa Valenzuela’s Cola de lagartija (1983), just to name a few. MarioVargas Llosa has twice forayed into this genre: first, in his novel Conversación en La Catedral (1969), based on the dictatorship of Manuel Odría (during the years 1948-1956 in Peru); second, in his novel La fiesta del chivo (2000), based on the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1931-1961. In an interview with Enrique Krauze, Vargas Llosa explains his motivation for writing La fiesta del chivo: Yo estuve en República Dominicana [en 1975] cerca de ocho meses y oí muchísimas anécdotas sobre un tema que parecía inevitable en todas las conversaciones con dominicanos: la era de Trujillo. También leí algunos libros sobre este personaje, sobre la conspiración para acabar con él, sobre la vertiginosa represión. Y de todo eso quizá lo que más me impresionó fue la conducta de personajes como el general Román, conspiradores importantísimos que hicieron fracasar la conspiración. ¿Por qué fracasó? Porque los principales conspiradores quedaron paralizados por lo que habían hecho . . . Trujillo seguía dentro de ellos, vivo aunque el cadáver estaba allí. (22). 113 Thus, the author’s stated intent is to illustrate the effects of Trujillo’s dictatorship on the Dominican psyche through a historically-based, novelistic recreation of the Trujillo era. Since its appearance in 2000, many critics have commented upon the historical basis of La fiesta del chivo, but none has fully explored the relationship between the novel and history. Only Robin Lefere has discussed the text’s place within the Latin American historical novel, suggesting first, that La fiesta del chivo falls short of what a contemporary historical novel should be, because it does not problematize its relationship to history (“Lectura crítica,” 544). Second, Lefere claims that because the novel lacks any aclaratory paratextual information regarding its historical sources, it would be: erróneo – no procedente, contrario al ‘pacto ficticio’ que se nos propone – inferir del texto datos y conocimientos relativos a un referente extratextual determinado, como la dictadura de Trujillo [. . . ] en rigor , sólo podemos y debemos leer la novela como una fábula, que nos habla de la dictadura y del poder, pero de forma metafórica y universalista; cualquier parecido con la realidad es pura coincidencia. (“La fiesta del chivo” 332) Lefere’s comments ignore a long tradition of surreptitious use of historical intertexts in contemporary Latin American historical fiction. Although some novels, like García Márquez’s El general en su laberinto or Roa Bastos’ Yo el Supremo make explicit reference to some of their historical sources, other intertexts are covertly cited or alluded to within these texts, in a way similar to Vargas Llosa’s employment of historiography in La fiesta del chivo. Such “hidden” references and parallels nonetheless invite a simultaneous reading of historical sources (which, in the case of Vargas Llosa’s novel, are, not surprisingly , easy to discover) as well as a dialogue with them on the historical figure portrayed in the novel. In this manner, Vargas Llosa, like his predecessors, implicitly questions the relationship between fiction and history, and the relative truth values of each.2 Lefere’s confusion on this topic may stem in part from the specific type of historical fiction that Vargas Llosa creates in La fiesta del chivo. First, the author ’s work neatly reflects Noé Jitrik’s definition of the historical novel in Latin America. Jitrik...