Critics who praise José María Arguedas's first novel share the assumption that there is an essential correspondence between a work of fiction and the reality it “describes,” that a novel is successful to the extent that it faithfully represents its model; and so they underscore the similarities between this story's bloody fiesta and life in the Andes. I assume the opposite: that there is an incompatibility between reality and fiction that separates truth from lies (and a hidden complicity that ties them together, since one cannot exist without the other). A novel results from a rejection of a real “model,” and its ambition is to attain sovereignty, an autonomous life, distinct from whatever appears to inspire it and whatever it pretends to describe. Thus the genuineness of fiction is not that which brings it closer to but rather that which distances it from lived experience: the substitute life it invents—not the reflection of some detached and prior experience but the dream, myth, fantasy, or fable its power of persuasion and verbal magic render as reality. And it is in precisely this sense that Yawar Fiesta succeeds as fiction.

In July of 1935 Arguedas became interested in the idea of an Indian bullfight that would function as the center of a conflict facing the social classes and races of an Andean community. Finding himself on vacation in Puquio, he attended a bullfight like the one described in Yawar Fiesta. That day, one of the amateur Indian bullfighters—nicknamed “el Honrao” (your Honor), like the character in the novel—was torn to pieces by the bull.¹ Then, in 1937 a work entitled “El despojo” (“The Dispossession”)—which would figure in the book's second chapter—appeared in Lima. And that same year, the story “Yawar (Fiesta),” a rudimentary version of the book, written a year earlier, appeared in the Revista Americana de Buenos Aires.² Arguedas's subsequent plan to revise and amplify this tale was interrupted by the year he spent in jail as a political prisoner. He was unable to execute it until the second half of 1940 in Cuzco's province of Sicuani. Recently married to Celia Bustamante Vernal, he had moved there in March of 1939 and served as professor of Spanish and Geography at the Mateo Pumacahua National Men's College until October of 1941. It was after a trip to Mexico in 1940, to attend the Indigenist Congress of Patzcuaro, that Arguedas took advantage of some midterm vacation time and wrote the novel, almost all of it without interruption. As he worked, he sent chapters to the poet Manuel Moreno Jiménez in Lima. The correspondence between the two friends during those months, published by Roland Forgues, minutely documents Arguedas's work on this, his first novel, which, though based on personal experience, as was everything he wrote (as is everything novelists write), was more an act of invention than of memory, a depersonalization of experience that, thanks to fantasy and language, functions to create a fictive world.³ And in this novel, even more than in the stories of Agua, his first book, Arguedas succeeds in creating that axis and infrastructure of all fiction: the narrator.

THE VERSATILE NARRATOR

The main (though almost always invisible) character of this intense and beautiful novel is not its mistis (whites or near whites, the privileged class), nor its chalos (cholos: mestizos or Westernized native peoples), nor its Indians—those collective protagonists who seem to act in unison as though following choreography. Nor is it the pale individual figures who emerge from those collective placentas—the mestizo Don Pancho Jiménez, the landowner Don Pascual Aranguena, the subprefect from the coast, the sergeant from Arequipa, nor even Misitu, the bull positioned halfway between the reality of the bullfight and the mythology of the Andes, with vague reminders of the Minotaur. Instead it is the one who either emphasizes or elides them, astutely and skillfully displacing himself from them, recounting some of the things they say and silencing others. He can go back in time to illuminate deeds and events that throw light on the present (the regional mining crisis that brought so many white settlers to Puquio and the agrarian extortion that victimized the native communities and imposed the socioeconomic structure that manifests itself as events unfold in some undesignated year during the thirties). He travels through space, from the Andes to the poor districts of Lima where the lucaninos (emigrants from Lucanas province) live. He moves endlessly among the worlds of the whites, the mestizos, and the comuneros (members of Indian communes), peasants or police, Quechua- or Spanish-speaking, highlanders or coast-dwellers, coming and going between Christianity and animism, reason and magic, with a freedom and ease that no one but he enjoys in this rigidly hierarchical society where, according to his testimony, each and every person is confined to live within his social group, his race, his rites, his beliefs, and his moment in history as though behind bars.⁴

The narrator is the most important character in fiction, whether an omniscient being, external to history—the self-worshiping God the Father of classic romantic tales or the discreet, invisible one of modern works—or an implied narrator, witness to or protagonist of that which he narrates. He is the first character an author must invent to represent him in the made-up story. This is so because his movements, his mannerisms and silences, his perspectives and points of view determine whether what he talks about appears to be true or unconvincing, an illusion that imposes itself as reality or one that stands out as mere artifice. The narrator of Yawar Fiesta faces an immense task, because, although he tells a brief story, really a long tale more than a novel, the world he refers to is divided into radically different ethnic groups, into cultures bent on destroying themselves, societies separated by gulfs of hatred and incomprehension. Nevertheless, thanks to his versatility and resourcefulness, he manages to fulfill his narrative assignment, presenting this world as an indivisible though heartbreaking totality.

Who and what is this narrator? There is no doubt that he is a male and from the highlands (because he regards people from the coast as “them” and people from the mountains as “us”), either white or mestizo, who feels a psychic closeness to the Indians. He has a deep internal knowledge of them and shares their hardships, fears, and beliefs. He is omniscient and speaks in the present but shifts tenses in order to tell of the whites' arrival in Puquio three centuries earlier, when they laid waste to the surrounding mines, or to recall the Indians' voluntary work on the construction of the Puquio-Nazca road some years before that bullfight that is the central occurrence in the novel, or to evoke the waves of migration of Andean peasants toward the cities of the coast, which that road and others like it made possible.

From time to time he draws near to the mouths of the mistis, the chalos, the Indians; and by means of a few phrases—an exclamation, a song, an exchange of insults, a speech—he allows them a word, but then quickly takes back control of the story. He has a very sharp visual sense and his observations on the nature of this corner of the Andes—the province of Lucanas, the town of Puquio—are vivid, delicate, and poetic. He is bilingual and when describing the landscape (the rivers, the valleys, the trees, the fields, the mountains) expresses himself in a neutral, elegant, pure Spanish that afterward, as it comes in contact with his characters, becomes mestizo-like: peppered with Quechua words or hispanized quechuanisms and colored by the phonetic transcription of the distortions of popular speech.

He has a musical spirit, a superior calling for songs and dances, human activities that he privileges, assigning them a principal role in social life and adorning them with a sacred religious air. He is endowed with a sensitive ear capable of registering all the differences between social groups in terms of tone, accent, and pronunciation; and he possesses a stylistic dexterity that allows him to make the reader know, by means of the distinct music with which they express themselves, when people from the coast (like the subprefect and the sergeant) are speaking (the latter, though a native of Arequipa, talks as though he came from the coast) or when someone else has the floor, be it the members of a Lima-ized elite like Don Demetrio Caceres and Don Jesus Gutierrez, highland provincials like the landowner Don Julian Aranguena and the shopkeeper Don Pancho Jiménez, the literate and politicized cholos of the Lucanas Union Center, or the Indians of Puquio's four ayllus.⁵ This expressive accuracy, this plurality of speech modes that distinguishes Yawar Fiesta's characters, each one expressing himself according to his culture and his rank, has justly been highlighted by critics as one of the novel's artistic achievements; but such praise often misses the point since it applauds the indigenous characters' mode of expression for its authenticity, its genuineness. In truth, this manner of speaking is “authentic” only in a literary sense, not in any historical or sociological way. It is an effective narrative device, but an invention more than a reflection of living language, a creation rather than a linguistic document.

INVENTED SPEECH

In a letter to Manuel Moreno Jiménez—who upon reading the manuscript of Yawar Fiesta registered certain reservations over the characters' language—Arguedas responded as follows: “I have an idea that anyone who can write about the panorama and life of our highland people from on high and in a refined, controlled Spanish, will, on the other hand, be unable to capture the germinal essence of this world with sufficient force and urgency, a world caught up in a violent and magnificent debate.”⁶ It was, rather, the reverse. The invention of a language like that spoken by the Indians of Yawar Fiesta required not only a mastery of Spanish but a working knowledge of true indigenous speech as well. However, these are both just raw materials that have no capacity to predetermine the final literary outcome: in the hands of a writer less artistic than Arguedas, this language might have sounded as false as that of so many indigenist novels.

In the oft-quoted 1950 article “The Novel and the Problem of Literary Expression in Peru,” Arguedas evocatively explains his “long and anguished” search for a style that would allow Indian characters—who in reality communicated among themselves in Quechua—to speak Spanish in a manner that would appear plausible.⁷ His aim was to “guard the essence,” to “impart the very substance of our spirit to an almost foreign tongue.” The solution (which Arguedas calls an “aesthetic discovery”) came after multiple attempts “as in a dream” and consisted of “finding the subtle dislocations that would turn Spanish into the proper mold, the adequate instrument.” This literary, or, more accurately, rhetorical solution was “to create a language for them [the Indians] built upon a foundation of the Spanish words incorporated into Quechua and the elementary Spanish some Indians managed to learn in their own villages.” Do actual flesh and blood highlanders talk this way? Arguedas's own testimony on this subject is unequivocal: “But the Indians don't even use this Spanish with those who are native Spanish speakers, let alone among themselves! It's fiction.”

Yes, this language is fiction and as such implies an unnegotiable distance between itself and the reality, the living speech it pretends to take as its inspiration. It is a semantic fiction, above all musical and melodic, a generic language that dissolves individuals into group categories and makes them express themselves in a depersonalized manner, as though massed together. Now, every generalization is an adulteration; it suppresses the specifically individual in order to foreground something generic, the common quality, the related tendency that marks a group or series. With this device Arguedas creates an effective and expressive verbal object, but one that is autonomous, distinct from Andean linguistic reality. Landowners, mestizos, and Indians do not exist simply as masses—classes, races, social strata; they are also individuals with personal characteristics that distinguish each one from the other members of their own ethnos, social group, or collectivity. By suppressing specific differences and registering only common denominators within language modes, the narrator turns away from conventional reality, separates it from the real model, turns it into a representation. Since on stage all the interpreters of a dance, like practitioners of a rite or ceremony, acquire a transitory collective identity, their individual traits become abolished by the gestures and movement of the group to which everyone contributes and of which all are a part.

Yawar Fiesta's fabricated Indian language, with its torn syntax full of quechuanisms and Spanish words disfigured by phonetic transcription, with its abundance of diminutives and dearth of articles, never expresses an individual; it expresses a multitude—one that when it communicates always does so in a plural voice, like a chorus. In contrast to what happens in many other novels belonging to indigenist or regionalist literature, where the figurative language coming out of the Indians' mouths ends up as caricature and destroys the reader's illusions, speech is persuasive in Yawar Fiesta; it appears “authentic” not because it is more genuine than that found in other works but because its coherence and the cut of its form—above all, its musicality and coloration—confer artistic status upon it.

THE FANTASY OF THE SOCIAL MILIEU

It is true that this invented language very effectively helps to give a literary form to one of the most impressive traits found in the novel's Indian society: its collectivism, the community's absolute hegemony over separate individuals. But this does not prevent that language from being a spectacle in and of itself. In other words, it is more than just a vehicle of expression. Breaking forth in rich sonority and plastic originality, it becomes an autonomous reality that engages a reader's attention before any actual message becomes clear. When the novel's Indians speak, their words efface them: language lives, people disappear. This is similar to what happens during a concert when the music's spell makes the music lover forget that what he hears is the product of various instruments and various instrumentalists, or what happens when the perfection of the voices in a chorus vanishes behind the composer's melody. All regionalist writing, constructed at the outset from those “dislocations” of language to which Arguedas refers in his 1950 article, implies a certain aestheticism, a formalism, because it emancipates the form of the narrative matter and establishes the predominance of expressiveness over anecdote. The way characters speak obscures what they have to say. And while they picturesquely chat, this verbal exhibitionism—the deformities, distortions, mannerisms, anomalies, and liberties taken with linguistic norms—comes to be an actual theme of the story. Since a good number of those regionalist stories put social, moral, or ideological goals before artistic ones, the expressive “formalism” they make such a show of, that aestheticism that replaces ideas with the eccentricity and polychromatism of the language that enfolds them, produces a certain incongruity that deprives them of persuasive power, denounces them as fraudulent. In reality, this is the case only—but that only is everything in literature—with artistic failures, with an insurmountable breakdown between means and ends.

Why doesn't this happen in Yawar Fiesta? Why, even though the Indians' made-up language might be just as fabricated as that of the stories in Ventura García Calderón's Vengeance of the Condor or the novel Tungsten by César Vallejo, doesn't it give (as in these works) a false impression instead of a true one? Because Arguedas possessed the literary skill to disarrange Spanish artistically, of course, but also because, in Yawar Fiesta, a colorful expressive form, offered to readers as a spectacle, doesn't work against but rather coincides with the profound intentionality of a story that was meant not as a denouncement of the social horrors of the Andean highlands, but as a vindication of Quechua culture's right to exist; and it enacts this intention through the medium of one of that culture's most controversial creations, that is to say, a spectacle: that “bloody fiesta” that the book flaunts as its title just so there can be no mistaking the matter.

THE UNDEFEATED CULTURE

Now, unlike so many costumbrista novels, Yawar Fiesta is not a superficial apology for some local fiesta. In truth, it is motivated by an unbiased intention to stop time, to freeze history. The novel is an argument against the modernization of the Andean community, a subtly disguised yet vigorous defense of what we would call multiculturalism: the separate, autonomous evolution of different cultures and the rejection of any integration that could be understood as the destructive absorption of indigenous culture by Western society. This problem is beautifully symbolized by a forceful and vivid anecdote: the conflicts and incidents provoked by the central government's decision to prohibit the Indianized bullfight. Complete with spectators-turned-bullfighters, dynamite, drunkenness, and packsaddles, the yawarpunchay traditionally takes place in the ayllus on National Independence Day, July 28; but the authorities try to replace it with an orthodox Spanish bullfight, fought by a professional bullfighter in an enclosed arena.

The narrator presents his story with so much skill that in the end the reader can have no doubts as to what the proper conclusions must be: whoever undertakes to suppress the yawarpunchay clearly neither understands nor respects the Indians' culture—their customs, their beliefs, their rites—and, in truth, wishes to deprive them of something precious, their identity. All of the novel's “foreign” characters—the prominent citizens who bow to the subprefect, the “Lima-ized” highlanders, the coast-dwellers who hate anything that smacks of the mountains, the chalos, those educated mestizos and Indians left confused and culturally detached by life in Lima and the strange doctrines they find there—all share a certain complicity in this anti-Indian pretension.

Even though the bullfight may be an exhibition of savagery, this defense of the “bloody fiesta” is not a defense of barbarism. It is, instead, the defense of a cultural identity that survives and even renews itself despite the secular exploitation, ignorance, and isolation that mark the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Andes, an identity that functions on its own terms, that is, by acclimating the foreign—as it has done in the case of the Spanish practice of bullfighting—to its own magical, collective, animistic Andean tradition, a tradition sharply differentiated from that of its invaders (Spanish, coastal, Christian, white, and Western).

Yawar Fiesta's narrator is a discreet and relatively impartial presence until the fifth chapter; but in the pages that describe the conflict—the prohibition of bullfights without professional bullfighters—he abandons the appearance of neutrality, though without too much show, and takes sides with those who defend the toropukllay. He does this by ridiculing the leading citizens who support the subprefect and distance themselves from the shopkeeper Pancho Jiménez. He insinuates that they act out of servility rather than conviction in order to ingratiate themselves with the authorities. Later on, in this same chapter, he shows them at a council session which he invokes in order to foreground racism, since they all seem to believe, along with “the honorable citizen Caceres” that all Indians have “backward minds.”⁸

Why does the narrator align himself with those who defend the Indian bullfight? Certainly not because he is unaware of the inherent violence and cruelty that victimize unfortunate peasant bullfighters like Wallpa, whom Misitu disembowels; but rather because the bullfight represents a cultural creation, a symbol of the Quechua people's sovereignty, because the yawarpunchay—which at the outset was a colonial imposition—has now been torn from its original culture, transformed, and absorbed into the common property of indigenous practice. The narrator sees foreign as a negative concept, something that implies danger, menace, betrayal of the culture to which it attaches itself. And so the narrator ridicules those mistis who live on Bolivar Street, who sell their souls so easily, who dare to proclaim: “We need authorities who will come teach us and who will resolve to impose culture from the outside” (102).

IDEOLOGY, ACCULTURATION, AND BETRAYAL

These criticisms are not aimed solely at Puquio's Lima-ized, racist elite. They are also leveled against the well-meaning chalos who favor suppressing the Indian-style bullfight in order to bring progress to Puquio, a kind of progress that has a clear political and ideological orientation for those lucaninos who emigrated to Lima and became admirers of Mariátegui, a promoter of socialism and Marxism. The narrator uneuphemistically rebukes the “literate cholos” for taking sides against the native culture from which they came and for aligning themselves—because blinded by an abstract vision of progress—with “the mistis” and corrupt authority. It is true that their motives are altruistic: to bring modernity to Puquio, to put a stop to a barbaric celebration in which Indians are disemboweled for the pleasure of the white spectators. But the narrator finds the chalos' solution to be a mistaken approach to the problem, a case of simply begging the question, because he denounces a Westernized, “white,” anti-Indian assumption about the idea of progress, an idea in which everything that diverges from or contrasts with certain patterns preestablished by a colonizer or conqueror is rejected as an expression of barbarity and backwardness. Were he to accept this conception, the Quechua peasant in pursuit of “progress” would have no alternative but to assimilate the white world and renounce his language, his beliefs, his customs, and his traditions. And for the narrator—the one created by José María Arguedas who wrote Yawar Fiesta—to de-Indianize the Indians (“to save the Indians from superstition,” as Guzman, one of the literate cholos says) would be a crime even worse than exploiting, abusing, and discriminating against them.

The narrator of Yawar Fiesta refuses to vacillate between magic and ideology. He chooses the former and thus induces us to share his secret sympathy and respect for the mestizo Pancho Jiménez and the landowner Don Julian Aranguena, who, confronting the problems of cultural identity, side in favor of preserving toropukllay and thereby demonstrate themselves to be more lucid than the literate cholos. Although the first may be a less than scrupulous shopkeeper and the second an abusive exploiter of peasants, at least they both have a refined sense of the land and its customs. They are not ashamed to be what they are. They refuse to renounce their idiosyncracies as provincials and highlanders. They don't aspire to become “foreigners,” to Lima-ize themselves, and though in its own way it may be crude and instinctual, they defend an Indian fiesta as if it were their own.

THE MALE WORLD

They both have yet another outstanding virtue in Yawar Fiesta's viscerally machista world: they are brave. In this fictitious reality machismo is a totem worshiped by everyone: whites, mestizos, and Indians. Oppositions and antagonisms among races, cultures, and regions disappear when it comes to the relation between men and women, since no matter what his education, his background, or his heritage, every man is machista, and in such an obstinate and exclusive way that women hardly figure at all in the society described by the novel. That is, when they do appear, always as furtive apparitions, they seem to lack the degree of humanity with which the men are endowed, as though they belonged to some inferior species, halfway between human beings and animals or objects.

All of the men are machistas: mistis, chalos, and Indians, despicable bigwigs like Don Demetrio or prominent would-be rescuers such as Don Pascual, the generous Don Pancho, or that human ruin, the subprefect. All worship physical force and believe in courage. A defiant stance, a disdain for all life (including one's own), recklessness, and even sadism—these represent a kind of bravery. All despise women equally, treating them as presences designed to be beaten so that the macho can confirm his own superiority for himself or vent his rage and disappointment. All use the word womanish to denote an impoverishment of the masculine condition, something that borders on ignominy. Even the narrator participates in this prejudice, judging by the naturalness with which he presents the men's abusive and despotic attitudes toward women (whereas he always adopts a critical distance when dealing with the extortions and outrages suffered by the Indians). He himself uses expressions such as “even the most womanish” (of the villagers) in a disparaging sense (161).

But woman's extreme condition of inferiority in this world—victim among victims—is made most evident by the narrator's failure to invoke her as either protagonist or actor in events. She appears only sporadically and always as horizon, shadow, or bulk. She moves en masse, a landscape. One could say she exists solely to cry over or pray for men's exploits and tragedies and to allow herself to be shoved, insulted, or mistreated whenever males need to vent their fury on someone. That is what happens to the wife of the misti Don Jesus. Furious for having been swindled by the corrupt subprefect, he throws a plate of stewed corn in her face, “because his rage against the subprefect had not yet subsided” (147). And at another point in the story the Indians of K'ayau resort to kicking their women for the most trivial of reasons: so they will remove the children from the neighborhood plaza (154). And when, enraged over the loss of their traditional fiesta, Puquio's Indians hurl insults at the little Spanish bullfighter Ibarito II, they shout “Woman!” (191).

RAGE

This conduct is the expression of a more general phenomenon that is characteristic of José María Arguedas's world. It is something François Bourricaud, in one of the many fine studies on this novel's machismo, calls “the displacement of aggression.”⁹ In order to vent the rage that grows out of abuse and frustration (but which often seems to arise for no apparent reason), men commit physical violence against someone or something weaker than they are, someone or something incapable of self-defense. Much of the time this means women, but it also includes subordinates—servants, employees, children—or animals, plants, even mere objects. But to interpret this rage in social psychological terms, to see it as a rebellion that wells up in the face of an intolerable state of affairs, as a resistance that is externalized in individual anarchic, irrational outbursts by those exploited, is to miss the way this phenomenon functions in fictitious reality. Characters suffer these emotional explosions—in a transitory yet recurrent way—regardless of race or social position: the exploiters as well as the exploited, people from the coast as well as highlanders. Fury blinds them all and drives them to destroy, injure, torture, or kill. In fictitious reality this sudden rage that possesses individuals or groups and drives them mad, converts them into malignant beasts, is more a magical plague or mysterious inherent malady of the human condition than a Freudian transference of resentment and revenge that inspires the weak to behave as brutally as the strong.

Besides these instances of battered and humiliated women, Yawar Fiesta is filled with other examples of the sharp exchanges brought about by the rage in manly souls. After a meeting with Don Pancho Jiménez, one that seems to end on good terms, the subprefect, watching the shopkeeper move off through the shadows of Puquio's town square, suddenly, arbitrarily, and inexplicably orders the sergeant to pick up his rifle and shoot him in the back: “Shoot him! And let him lie there like a dog” (117-18). And if the sergeant had not disobeyed, that would have been the end of the emotional merchant. Don Julian Aranguena, after a frustrated attempt to capture Misitu, first blindly shoots at his own men as they run away terrified by the violent animal and then fires at the sky in a curious mix of exasperation and exultation over his own failure and the impressive power of his bull. The narrator describes this state of mind in an unforgettable way: “He was going to kill it, but kept on firing at the sky, in a joyous rage” (136). Still and all, moments later, this rage mingled with joy impels him to kill the horse belonging to his foreman, the chalo Fermin, in order to discharge the remaining fury rising within him.

COLLECTIVE DEEDS

The counterpart to this rage can be found in those affecting outbursts of generosity to which individual characters are occasionally given. This is what we see when Don Julian Aranguena bestows his treasured Misitu upon the Indians of K'ayau or when the bullfighters Honrao, K'encho, Raura, and Wallpa are moved to throw themselves in front of the bull's horns during the yawarpunchay. But it is most apparent in its collective form among the Indians, where the individual dissolves into the group, where the private person blends into the social fabric. It is here that these outbursts of devotion and sacrifice reach their highest degree of generosity and selflessness and generate collective deeds such as the competition between the native communities of Puquio and Parincocha that produced a market square in only two months or the Nazca-Puqio road—186 miles in twenty-eight days—constructed by Puquio's Indians. The narrator describes these accomplishments as epic feats that express all that is most positive in the Quechua way of life: its nobility, its idealism. Sometimes these collective deeds have practical benefits for the community—as doubtless is the case with the market and the highway—but their utility does not always determine their moral and cultural value. For example, it would be difficult to establish precisely how the people of Puquio profit from the energy and courage the k'ayaus expend in capturing Misitu, another collective enterprise the novel offers as a model. No, these deeds are valuable in and of themselves, for the simple fact of having been accomplished, for the lack of self-interest with which they are undertaken, because they show the Indians' powerful potential, their capacity for work and sacrifice, the solidarity and will to move mountains that make it all possible. Certain notions of “progress” and “modernization” are at odds with the spirit that governs these collective deeds. The narrator makes this obvious when he describes what happens in response to Puquio's exemplary project of community road building. Throughout the central highlands, this feat unleashes construction fever aimed at opening roads to the coast. The local bosses want these routes to pass by their own haciendas and so road construction turns into a “business,” something despicable that denaturalizes a collective effort that started out as a disinterested, “pure” undertaking (121-26).

DEGRADING BUSINESS

In a tentative way, something manifests itself here, a stance that will take on a more precise form in Arguedas's later novels: the rejection of urban civilization, of the market, of the industrial world. Commercial calculation and the love of money are manifestations of egoism and individualism, things that soil and degrade life, phenomena of the city. Human life—even though it may be wretched and seem backward when observed from that urban perspective—only maintains its moral purity in a rural world: there man lives close to Nature, the group prevails over the individual, feelings over figures, and reason has not yet defeated the spiritual, the religious, the magical.

These assumptions are developed far more elaborately in Yawar Fiesta than in the novel's prototype, the 1936 short story “Yawar (Fiesta).” A comparison of the two texts shows how much Arguedas's narrative technique has improved and how he has gone on to refine and complicate his literary world in the intervening four years. The short story is full of descriptions of folkways and traditions. The Indians' dialogue sounds like caricature because it has not been reworked in a literary way. The narrator's position is constant and explicit in relation to that which he narrates and his sentimentalism and truculence debase his testimony and undermine the story.¹⁰ In the short story the violence of the mistis and the police borders on the improbable. Their amusement over the Indians' blood and suffering could be called demonical. And the Indians, although capable of “collective deeds” like the construction of Puquio's market, fail to personify, as they do in the novel, a rich and ancient culture hidden beneath a surface primitivism. Instead they are a drunken lot with senses dulled by cheap cane liquor, the “poison from the coast.” The crazed and greedy native bullfighters throw themselves at the bulls, actually hoping to be gored so they can collect the money Puquio's señoritas have stuffed into packsaddles with this corrupt end in mind. The whites' wickedness stems from their individualism and affinity for commerce: “their souls were almost always enemies to one another because they were dominated by the spirit of business, by ambition; but the Indians were not.”

The feature that most differentiates one version from the other is the appearance, in 1940, of a new social sector, a wedge between the Indians and the mistis that did not exist in the 1936 text: the mestizos or chalos. They introduce a new dimension of reality: the ideological, the realm of progressive ideas committed to a transformation of society aimed at establishing justice. This is represented by the humble lucaninos who emigrate to Lima: Escobar the student, Martínez the chauffeur, Rodríguez the street-car conductor, Gutierrez the tailor, all those who go to the capital and are progressively de-Indianized and acculturated by the jobs and activities they find there. We see that the narrator condemns such influences because they bring the ingenuous youths, eager for Puquio's modernization, to make common cause with the Indians' exploiters—the subprefect and the mistis—in a major crime: the prohibition or, worse yet, the alienation of a cultural creation belonging to the Quechua people.

When they move to Lima's coastal world, the chalos begin to lose their ethnic and cultural roots. This clouds their judgment and induces them to become the accomplices of the political authorities and the local bosses. But fortunately, those roots have not disappeared completely, as becomes obvious when we see them, carried away by the spectacle of the Indians bringing Misitu into town, ask the varayok (staffbearer, Indian leader) to allow them to help haul the animal in. In other words, if only for a moment, they wish to set reason aside and act out of atavistic emotions and impulses—as the Indians do.

THE DEFEAT OF REASON

Reason tells the chalos to put an end to the Indian bullfight. For them it is a manifestation of backwardness, a cruel spectacle in which the villagers are gored for their executioners' entertainment. (“Never again will Indians die in Pich'kachuri square just to make those pigs happy!” says Escobar [130].) These ideas come to the lucaninos from José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), founder of Peru's Communist Party, a writer and journalist who disseminated Marxist ideas throughout Peru, whose portrait presides over the novel's Lucanas Central Union meetings, and whom the chalos respectfully invoke, calling him “werak'ocha” and “taita” (father and lord) (131). Although Arguedas was never an official member of the Communist Party, he frequently declared that Mariátegui's essays and Amauta, the journal he directed, had a decisive influence on his development. What is more, while writing Yawar Fiesta, he was relatively close to the communists and his correspondence with Manuel Moreno Jiménez shows him sending articles to the party newspaper, Democracy and Labor, and selling bonds to finance it, clear proof that, without being militant, he at least approved of the ideological, rationalistic, modernizing, and Westernizing theories of Marxism in regard to the Indian problem.¹¹

But once he began to write the novel—following his natural inclinations, the spontaneous dictates of his spirit—his “demons” turned out to be stronger than his ideological sympathies and ended up introducing a paradox into Yawar Fiesta, one to which the story owes a great deal of its dramatic tension. Although the narrator makes an effort to emphasize all the good intentions that guide the mestizo ideologues in their plans for modernization, the story he actually tells makes them appear blind and confused when it comes to dealing with the problem of the Andean people. It makes the chalos look like the victims of an intellectual mystification that prevents them from approaching this matter in a complete way, makes them appear unable to see it as something more than a fight against the economic deprivation and political abuse suffered by the Indians, unable to see it as a battle for the preservation and defense of the Andean being, his rites, his beliefs, and his customs, which, precisely because they are ancient and tied to tradition, guarantee the identity and perdurability of all that can be called “Indian.” By invoking socialism against “magic,” the chalos stop being a part of their people and become allied with their enemies.

The narrator, on the other hand, when faced with this dilemma, openly chooses the yawarpunchay and everything it symbolizes: the originality and force of a culture rooted deep in the past and in the harsh Andean geography—its lofty mountains, brilliant skies, and terrifying chasms, whose secret life of myths and miracles and intense spirituality can be found nowhere else.

SYMBOLIC VICTORY

Although its presence is suggested throughout the entire length of the novel, this magical and ceremonial, archaic and Andean, Quechua and rural culture bursts forth in all its atavistic force and vividness in chapter 7, “El Misitu.” Here the narrator introduces us to the mythic beliefs and magical practices of the Indians of the high plateau, the k'oñanis. They try to prevent the k'ayaus from bringing Don Julian's bull to the ring for the July 28th fiesta. This animal is a legendary and semidivine figure to them: they believe that, endowed with mythical powers, he emerged from the waters of a lagoon (Torok'ocha) one stormy night.¹² In that same chapter we see the narrator blending in with the sorcerer Kokchi while he makes an offering to the k'oñanis' tutelary mountain (Lord Ak'chi) in hopes that he will protect Misitu; and then we see him, from the k'ayaus' perspective, sharing the magico-religious ceremony in which the village Indians ask another mountain spirit (the auki or demigod Karwarasu) for help in capturing the bull. In this way an ancestral, animistic, irrational, and magical Indian world appears in full relief, one that coexists, half-hidden, with the more modern and Westernized world of Puquio. And although, like Puquio, it is plagued by divisions and fractures—k'oñanis and k'ayaus disagree over Misitu—it still denotes, despite its primitivism, genuine character. That magical world has an authenticity that the other culture lacks because, besides being degraded through cruelty and servitude, the culture of Puquio bears the appearance of complete bastardization, the appearance of a poor imitation of some remote model inimical to this place in the Andes and to its people, an imitation that culminates in rootlessness. In contrast, the Indians' culture stands out like a natural transcription of that untamed landscape and a faithful copy of the uniqueness of the Quechua people, a culture that flows from lived experience and which, though discriminated against and exploited by white outsiders, still remains uncorrupted because self-interest does not hold sway there, business does not corrode its communitarian and collective social links. Everything is a function of the community, a moral force superior to the individual; and spirituality and religion—the dialogue with the transcendent—continue to preside over human activities.

This dialogue with the other world goes on constantly, through ceremony, music, and dance. They create a milieu in which the human becomes integrated with the divine and the individual becomes integrated with the natural world, a world that has vital and sacred meaning for the comuneros because it is inhabited by tutelary gods whose benevolence or hostility determines the success or failure of human enterprises. And so the comuneros' capture of Misitu—described in a chapter significantly entitled “The Auki”—is not a sporting event but a religious festival, complete with processions and offerings, a sacrifice made by the lay'ka (sorcerer), and the music of the wakawakras, trumpets made of horn, whose vibrant and dismal sounds, multiplied by the echos of the hills, perform an incantational function, instilling a sense of mystery, terror, uneasiness, and even exultation in the townspeople of Puquio as the hour of the fiesta arrives. It is this context, which gives meaning to the presence of the dancers Tankayllu and Tayta Untu (who reappear in many of Arguedas's fictions, above all in the lovely story “The Agony of Rasuñiti”). We see them running through the streets on the eve of the fiesta, tracing their mysterious labyrinth with dance steps and tinkling scissors, like emissaries from the beyond, from a pantheon of gods and spirits of whom the music is a privileged manifestation.

It is this context that explains and justifies the yawarpunchay, the barbarous fiesta to which all of these preparatory rituals lead in the book's final chapter. In the end the fiesta imposes its own law—its own irrepressible magico-religious force, bearer of the faith and solidarity of the Indian people—over the fragile intrigues and prohibitions of the authorities from the coast, who, with their court of servile mistis and acculturated chalos, attempted to replace “the genuine yawarpunchay” with that foreign simulacrum, the Spanish bullfight, complete with the little bullfighter from Lima, Ibarito II, whom Misitu, with his strange tricks and turns, drives from the ring. When the native bullfighters, summoned by the screams of the crowd (including those of the mistis), come out to face Misitu and the sticks of dynamite go off, and, despite all the mistis' entreaties, the bullfight is restored to its traditional Indian style, the narrator, breathing what appears to be a discreet sigh of relief, suspends his narration—precisely at the spectacle's apogee. This ending is not gratuitous: Misitu's death, his chest blown to pieces by the comuneros' explosives, is the victory—futile, symbolic—of a culture that, though often beaten down and denigrated by its enemies, renews itself in spectacles like this one and demonstrates its capacity for survival, its unbending will neither to vanish nor to be assimilated.

Despite its indignation and denunciations in the face of the iniquities the mistis inflict on the Indians, is it possible to imagine a work of fiction more conservative than Yawar Fiesta?

Notes

1. Letter from José María Arguedas to Manuel Moreno Jiménez, from December 1940, in Arguedas's La letra inmortal: Correspondencia con Manuel Moreno Jiménez, ed. Roland Forgues (Lima: Ediciones de los Ríos Profundos, 1993), 101.

2. “El despojo,” Palabra en Defensa de la Cultura: Revista órgano de los alumnos de la Facultad de Letras de la Universidad (Lima) 2, no. 4 (1936); “Yawar (Fiesta),” Revista Americana de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires) 14, no. 156 (1937). See also Arguedas's Obras completas (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1983), 135, n. 11.

3. La letra inmortal, principally the letters from Arguedas to Moreno Jiménez from August 1940 to June 1941 and which contain valuable information on the gestation of the novel, the literary competition at which it was presented and from which it was discarded by the jury (who gave the award to the today completely forgotten Panorama hacia el alba, by José Ferrando), and information on the book's publication and the commentaries and reviews that it received. Among these there was one by the historian Luis E. Valcarcel, the father of “indianismo,” who was a part of that jury, which, according to Valcarcel, preferred Panorama hacia el alba because it embraced “the coast, the sierras, the mountains,” while Arguedas's book only referred to one region of Peru and was “unintelligible” to anyone who had not “lived with the Indians” (La letra inmortal, 128).

4. In the original manuscript the story takes place in 1931, but then Arguedas decided to erase the “1 from the date, and put in two ellipsis points,” according to what he said to Moreno Jiménez in an undated letter (8 November 1940) (La letra inmortal, 94).

5. Ed. Note: ayllu in this case means both a subdivision of the Indian village or community and a kinship group.

6. Typewritten letter, without a date (October 1940), in La letra inmortal, 90.

7. Published in Mar del sur: Revista peruana de cultura (Lima) 9 (January-February 1950): 66-72. There is a version, revised and corrected by Arguedas, that appears as a prologue in the edition of Yawar Fiesta put out by Editorial Universitaria, in Chile, in 1968. I am quoting from this last version.

8. Arguedas, Obras completas 2:107 (all citations from the novel are to this edition, which, although not free of errata, suffers from fewer than do earlier ones).

9. François Bourricaud, “El tema de la violencia en Yawar Fiesta,” in Recopilación de textos sobre José María Arguedas, ed. Juan Laro and Serie Valoración Múltiple (Havana: Centro de Investigaciones Literarias, Casa de las Américas, 1976), 209-25.

10. “But who cared about this blood? Who pitied this poor cholo, split from top to bottom by the bull's horns?” (135).

11. La letra inmortal, 100.

12. For Gladys C. Marin, La experiencia americana de José María Arguedas, Colección Estudios Latinoamericanos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Fernando García Cambeiro, 1973), 66, magical reality is present from the novel's first chapter, when the narrator, describing Bolivar Street, compares the street of the mistis to a snake, the Amaru, an animal that, in the world of Indian mythology, represents evil, destruction, death. In this way, the narrator would be, from the very beginning, subtly classifying the area's leading white citizens as the villains of the story he is going to tell.