[In the following essay, Dipple discusses Vargas Llosa's ambivalence in accepting the classification of much of his fiction as autobiographical.]

In Mario Vargas Llosa's late 1980s novel The Storyteller, his typical and frequent narrator, who is a thinly fictionalized Vargas Llosa, beckons the reader to join him in Florence during an undated stay there, while Vargas Llosa, pursuing his European agenda, reads Dante, Petrarch, and Machiavelli in the tourist-ridden summer heat. The story that he draws us into, after seeing an exhibition of photographs depicting an Amazonian tribe by a recently deceased Italian photographer, is that of a college friend of his, a Peruvian Jew named Saul Zuratas, marked by otherness not only by his Jewish background but also by a huge disfiguring strawberry birthmark that covers the entire right side of his face. Zuratas's subsequent nickname, Mascarita, indicates his life within and behind a mask, his very being altered by the marred countenance he presents to the world.

Vargas Llosa has also posed for the camera with a mask coquettishly held beside his face—an indication no doubt of his disguised persona in the novels. That persona, he argues, is automatically a mask or fiction, although it might call itself Mario, Marito, Varguita, Vargas Llosa. That all too thinly disguised hero dominates the form and function of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977; trans. 1982) as it later does The Storyteller (1987; trans. 1989). My emphasis on the mask would, however, be an inefficient introduction to a brief commentary on Aunt Julia if a simple but important semiotic reading were not called into play. Abe Franjndlich's photograph of Vargas Llosa (reproduced on p. 8) depicts the writer in partial three-quarter facial view, the face nervously grim and cropped off at the right border. Held in the subject's right hand is a carnivale mask that dominates two-thirds of the photograph and is presented full face to the viewer. The allegorical reading is straightforward: the writer Mario Vargas Llosa dons the mask of literary fiction in order to alter freely the autobiographical self presented. The mask is the fictional representation; the reality behind that mask is inaccessibly other.

The complication that presents itself, of course, is the fact that the face is not behind the mask but beside it. Vargas Llosa doesn't don a mask but holds it out at a fair distance and angled away from his face, stressing the separation between the two—and no doubt cautioning critics to beware of the salacious voyeurism of autobiographical commentary. I shall return later to the hauteur of such a warning, but for the moment I wish to contrast it to the lived-in, inescapable mask of Saul Zuratas in The Storyteller.

Against all odds, in an extended act of passionate identification, Zuratas sheds his Jewish and Peruvian cultures and becomes a speaker or story teller among the isolated, uncontaminated Machiguengas, a wandering Amazonian tribe spread through the “unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios.” Vargas Llosa's narrator describes the habladores or speakers thus:

I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings … bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who—by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim—using the simplest most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings.

(93)

Saul Zuratas knows that, marred and masked as he is by his bizarre birthmark, he would not have survived the first culling within the tribe; he nevertheless gives himself, body, life, and soul to them, leaving the Vargas Llosa narrator to puzzle his way through a situation that is alien to him. This narrator can understand Zuratas's hatred of the “intrusion of destructive modern concepts,” the longing for “an equilibrium between man and the earth, the awareness of the rape of the environment by industrial culture and today's technology, the reevaluation of the wisdom of primitive peoples, forced either to respect their habitat or face extinction” (242). He can understand that

Mascarita should have decided to turn his back on a bourgeois future and go to Amazonia in search of adventures. … He erased all trace of his departure and of his intentions. … It is evident that he left Lima with the intention of never coming back, of being another person forever … I am able to follow him this far, though not without difficulty, I believe that his identification with this small, Marginal, nomadic community had—as his father conjectured—something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world's societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted.

(242-43)

The narrator also accepts that “surely, his fellow feeling for the Machiguengas was influenced … by that enormous birthmark that made of him a marginal among marginals, a man whose destiny would always bear the stigma of ugliness” (243).

This limited comprehension, although generous, sympathetic, and rational, also defines even as it haunts Vargas Llosa: the narrator goes on to say that what moves him most in Saul's story and makes him “weave and unweave it a thousand times” is the next stage, which he cannot understand. Taking a giant step beyond conversion, Zuratas in becoming an hablador “was adding what appeared impossible to what was merely improbable” (244). Saul has gone beyond the possibilities that Vargas Llosa can imagine as a writer, and it is this knowledge of limitation that makes this novel so crucial, so touching, so important within the career of this self-divided novelist. A translation of Vargas Llosa's own words is useful:

The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes.

Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who—in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues—roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make A community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid. That my friend Saul gave up being all that he was and might have become so as to roam through the Amazonian jungle, for more than twenty years now, perpetuating against wind and tide—and above all, against the very concepts of modernity and progress—the tradition of the invisible line of wandering storytellers, is something that memory now and again brings back to me, and … it opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done.

(244-45)

Years before, after the narrator's first visit to the Amazonian jungle, the idea of the habladores raised goosebumps, as it does in the novelistic present in Florence. On the earlier occasion he had explained it to Mascarita by saying that the habladores are “a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment … something primordial, something that the very existence of people may depend on” (94). Saul's disappointed response is “Oh, I see. It's the literary side that interests you.”

In the terms set up in this novel the limitations of Vargas Llosa's career as a writer are here poignantly and honestly encountered. What interests me principally in this writer's struggle with both the technical and ideological aspects of fiction is the sense, unavoidable within the dynamic bond between writer and critic, that he actively suffers from a fragile sense of not being inside the mask he would don, of failing at some level to participate. His analytical and observational capabilities are exceptional, and, as we learn from his autobiographical narrators, he does his literary homework—he is extremely well read in Western cultural texts and has been thoroughly influenced by his infrequent but profound contacts with the primordial Amazonian forests. Unlike the resolute Mascarita, his narratorial use of the mask is a literary device, not a commitment involving body, soul, life in a single-minded way that denies the temptations of power, the love of women, the wealth and progress of a successful professional. He can therefore tell the story of Mascarita's dedication but must stand uncomprehendingly outside of it, made nervous by it, coming up in goosebumps over a profound path not to be taken by himself as a successful Westernized ecrivain.

By contrast, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter presents a more mixed representation within the same contours of a deep problematic in Vargas Llosa's fiction. Here, he offers a version of the fictionist's dilemma within the traditional genre of the bildungsroman. Whereas The Storyteller describes a state of affairs, Aunt Julia ironically presents a series of obstacles within a complex mise-en-abyme framework. Aunt Julia and The Storyteller share a structure of contrast and balance, tightly conducted in Aunt Julia and ingeniously interwoven in The Storyteller. A few words about that structuring device are both appropriate and necessary.

Vargas Llosa describes himself as a man driven by obsessions and writing out of them—indeed, he is at pains to convince the readers of his interviews and speeches that he is passionately committed to the very principle of obsession. This tenet, if correct, should verify his absolute insider status in the novels and obliterate most of what I have been arguing through an internal reading of a single text, The Storyteller. The actual structure of the novels and the literary problems of realism in the works are, however, more revealing and contradictory.

Formally, Vargas Llosa's tendency is to alternate tales of his own early life and background with the primary subject matter of the text he is writing. He does so in both of the novels I have mentioned and also, interestingly, in the account of his ill-fated political run for election as president of Peru, A Fish in the Water. In each case the fixing of his obsession is on his life as lived up to the age of twenty-two; he carries that life farther only in terms of prologue, epilogue, or, in the case of the memoir, as part of an ongoing political expose. It is as though the passion of obsession was spent early and that his interim years have been spent in analysis, rumination, reworking, fictionalizing, finding a form, thinking about the underlying structures of his art. As A Fish in the Water points out, his second wife Patricia saw his political ambition to be president as “the adventure, the illusion of living an experience full of excitement and risk, of writing the great novel in real life.”

The key word here is illusion, which indicates Vargas Llosa's removal from a firm concept of materiality and belies much of his often stated desire to root his work in reality. There is no doubt that crucial things happened to Vargas Llosa in the world of material existence—his marriages, his exile, his study of European literature, his political ambition; it is equally true that he relives them in the written word in ways that have more to do with illusion than with realistic (i.e., potentially objective) accounts. The very fact that he sees himself as an ex-patriot and a cosmopolitan combines with his hatred of nationalism and the Peruvian rancor he describes in the memoir to help define the primary life decisions that he has made. I am certainly not the first to remind others that his marriages, first to his aunt, the titular Julia of the novel, and then to his first-cousin Patricia, express an extraordinary halt in emotional attachment at a young age, leading him to consolidate his position within the love of his mother's family—the first and best love he knew—and to regain partially the paradise that was lost when his macho father returned to reclaim his wife and make miserable the ten-year-old Mario. Within the boundaries of potential criticism of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the narrator's wanton cruelty to Julia through his casual discarding of her after eight years of marriage and then absolving himself of blame by vindictively citing her expectation of no more than five years, invites a strong Lacanian feminist reading. His illusion that he is presenting a real story is quickly upset.

It seems clear and much more to the point that the experienced world of Vargas Llosa as a writer in the late twentieth century is troubled by the exigencies of both his obsessive autobiographical interest in himself as a young man and his writing fiction in a postrealist period. In some ways the hapless term postmodern is worthwhile, if only because its various usages raise the issue of the materiality of fiction, study the appropriation of novels as a commodity through the history of capitalism, and present a perception of fictional literature as parody, while destroying its formerly privileged position of realism.

Although Vargas Llosa began his career as an impassioned defender of the possibility of a totalizing fiction that perfectly balances subjective and objective and high and low culture and presents a whole vision of society, he shortly came to see the idea of the total novel as naive and even demented. That did not, however, reduce his interest in the accomplishments of medieval romance, his interest in melodrama, his admiration of Dumas, his taste for pornography, his study of Flaubert's complex theories of realism, and so on—all of them part of his onetime sense of how a totalizing fiction could be stitched together.

In spite of the extraordinary fecundity of experimentalism in the early novels, especially The Green House, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the pivotal novel for his acknowledgment of the entire problem of realism and especially of how he as a writer is affected by it. In The Green House the very foundation of the realist enterprise is questioned when Anselmo claims that there never was a green house, with the result that the pastiche of stories and opinions and reportages compiled as a compendium of the tales told by local inhabitants of Piura crumbles. But it is in Aunt Julia, eleven years later, that the specific issues of Vargas Llosa's sensibility as a writer within the realist agenda come into direct play. Naively reviled by some as a frivolous novel because it and the preceding novel, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, define the moment when Vargas Llosa says he learned the art of the comic, it is, I think, central to an understanding of this writer's work.

I wish to refer specifically to two moments when Vargas Llosa himself discusses the novel, one in an interview with Jose Miguel Oviedo just after the completion of the novel, the other in A Writer's Reality, a compilation of lectures on his own work. In the Oviedo interview, given on the heels of his having just completed Aunt Julia, there is a spontaneity that allows some of the contradictions intrinsic to realism to rise to the surface. Vargas Llosa chose to alternate the fantastic soap operas of Pedro Camacho (based on a real figure he had met in 1953 when he worked for Radio Panamericana in Lima, Raul Salmon) with “another story that serves as a kind of counterpoint, that anchors in the tangible, verifiable world the purely imaginary, purely fantastic, mad world of the protagonist and his soap operas” (Oviedo, “A Conversation” 157). Originally, Vargas Llosa saw this other story to be precisely the opposite of the soap operas—“something absolutely objective and absolutely true” (“A Conversation” 157). During the construction of the novel, he learns, or perhaps relearns, the basic lessons of realism:

my project began disintegrating when put into practice. That is, it was totally impossible to write the chapters in which I wanted to be absolutely truthful and tell only of things which I was absolutely sure had happened precisely so, because memory is tricky and gets contaminated with fantasy, and because even as one is writing, an element of imagination seeps in, takes hold and inevitably becomes part of what one is writing. And at the same time, in the chapters that are supposedly syntheses or paraphrases of the soap operas of the protagonist there is no “pure invention.” There, too, there are foreign ingredients which come from objective reality, which infiltrate little by little.

(“A Conversation” 159)

In his 1991 lecture Vargas Llosa is less precise and works harder at the level of theory to differentiate the binary structure of the novel, arguing that “A serious writer is someone who is able to distort reality out of a personal obsession or personal belief, and to present this distortion in such a persuasive way that it is perceived by the reader as an objective description of reality, of the real world. This is what achievement in art and literature is. A good scriptwriter of soap operas is also someone who distorts reality, not out of a personal obsession or personal vision, but out of the stereotypes that are established in society” (A Writer's Reality 115). Here, Vargas Llosa tenaciously maintains a distinction that had attracted him years before—Roland Barthes's differentiation between ecrivain and ecrivante. For Vargas Llosa, the scriptwriter is an ecrivante who uses language only as an instrument for the minor task of entertaining, whereas a real writer, an ecrivain, “is someone who uses language as an end in itself, as something that in itself has justification” (A Writer's Reality 115).

I find his earlier sense of the reciprocal flow between the two forms of writing in Aunt Julia more creatively and critically interesting than his Barthesian allegiance, which tips him over into the structuralist camp and helps fuel a sense of his separation from the practical function of language as it extends itself into extra-aesthetic realms. Interpreting at a political extreme, one can say that the passage quoted above regarding the definition of a serious writer denotes romantic existentialism and participates in an elitist culture that the experience of reading Aunt Julia almost but does not quite encourage.

In speaking of the cultural past, Vargas Llosa claims that “the richest moments in civilization, in history, have occurred when the boundaries separating popular and creative literature disappear, and literature becomes simultaneously both things—something that enriches all audiences, something that can satisfy all kinds of mentalities and knowledge and education, and at the same time is creative and artistic and popular” (A Writer's Reality 116). His examples are Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, and Perez Galdos. Although he could also mention his Latin American contemporaries—Puig, Garcia Marquez, Carpentier, and others—he is typically stuck in the nineteenth century. He overlooks, however, an important quality, especially in the case of Dickens: the lack of contempt for popular culture, a contempt that is irreversibly part of the fabric of his structurally divided novel. This disdain is ideologically dangerous, defining as it does much of the sense Vargas Llosa has of himself as an artist, as a power figure, and as a man. In A Fish in the Water he studies not only the vicious political battlefield but also Peruvian rancor. Paralleling to some degree the negativity that Garcia Marquez sees in the idea of soledad, Vargas Llosa gives analyses of the deep pain of his background, of his rancorous father, of the various miseries and indignities he suffered at the hands of that tyranny at home and school. He also furnishes a distinction between the concept of blanco versus cholo, white versus colored, not only seen as racist terms but also in common usage in Peru to indicate where the power lies in any given personal or political situation. As he describes it in A Writer's Reality,

We were surrounded by a world of ignorance and prejudice that we took for granted was objective reality.

The divisions in Peru were many. First, racial: there was the Peru of white people, the Peru of Indian people, the Peru of the blacks, and the small minorities of Peruvians, the Asians and the people of the Amazon region.

(41)

Given the painful uncertainty of his and his father's status, Vargas Llosa can be understood as a person eager to be symbolically blanco, and it is no doubt an essentializing of this that lost him the Peruvian presidency.

It is nevertheless true that in Aunt Julia the overriding sense of the superiority of the ecrivain that young Varguita will become is a double-edged sword. At the level of social materiality, it justifies his prioritizing of writing styles and of readerly competence: young Marito sees his piddling stories as literarily more valuable than Pedro Camacho's symbolically cholo soap operas, and above both hovers the actual achievement of the mature Mario Vargas Llosa who has written the text(s) we read. Similarly, Aunt Julia is an unliterary ignoramus who has read only Argentine magazines, trashy books, and two novels, The Sheik and Son of the Sheik by E. M. Hull: erotically suggestive stuff and no doubt an addition to the comic structure of the novel—but sexist in the extreme and used to arm the snobbish Mario against a continuation of the marriage. Pedro Camacho has read nothing, partly because he has no time and interest and also because he pretentiously feels it would contaminate his style: it is this ignorance that makes him a bad writer. Young Marito reads all the correct literature of the European past, and the assumption is that the mature Mario Vargas Llosa is in clever collusion with the sophisticated reader of Aunt Julia, who shares the scale of values presented.

I take little pleasure, however, in the social politics that would render Vargas Llosa's work less interesting than it is. In a recent study M. Keith Booker compellingly argues that a sophisticated metareading of Aunt Julia and of Italo Calvino's marvelous If on a winter's night a traveler creates an ironic situation in which both naive readers and sophisticated metareaders are finally equivalent in their quasicrotic desire to watch the misé-en-abyme complexities. Like Vargas Llosa himself, however, Booker is delighted with the idea that the pleasure of the metareader's experience of the novel is heightened by a gentle contempt for the more naive reader (Mon semblable! Mon frere!). The charms of ingenuity are intrinsic to the mise-en-abyme structure in which endless repetitions of irony upon irony, parody upon parody are called out, as in the novel's epigraph from Salvador Elizondo's The Graphographer. “I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am writing …” etc. I do not, however, think that the novel's primary justification or interest lies on this side of the ecrivain's task.

The presentation of the binary fiction, divided between Pedro Camacho's stories and Vargas Llosa's tale of his youthful marriage, is doubly engrossing in that the author seems to me to have chosen the wrong title for the novel. In the Oviedo interview he still, shortly before publication, thought he would give it a picaresque title: Vida y milagros de Pedro Camacho (The Life and Miracles of Pedro Camacho). The fact that he changed his mind at the last minute and called it La tía Julia y el escribidor foregrounds Aunt Julia but nevertheless tries to balance the two parts of his structure. In doing so, he stresses the unequal tale of the young Marito's marriage to Aunt Julia, which in spite of its sentimental and fantastic elements can be seen as an antifeminist tract unconsciously feeding the male vanity of a callow, ambitious boy who wants very much to take his place within what Adorno called the culture industry.

Critics of Vargas Llosa said that he would get a good book out of the Peruvian presidential election, and so he did, as he did out of the early marriage which, despite its fourteen-year age difference, is not as grotesque or unreal as it is assumed to be within the sexist text. To say that Julia is the mother of his creativity, as Oviedo and others do, is a sleight of hand and not acceptable within social politics; to argue that Vargas Llosa is the victim of his own acquiescence to the social construction imposed by the mainstream culture on his liminally uneasy family is to make him look less intelligent than he obviously is.

The adventures of Pedro Camacho, however, are of riveting significance. Once again Vargas Llosa's narrator, like that of The Storyteller, is on the outside looking in and attempting to use a sort of argumentum ad blanco to ease himself as writer into a dominant position. I write now from a vantage point beyond the charms of the text, the metafictional games, the sophisticated mise-en-abyme and the rigorous self-discipline, analysis, and questioning of Vargas Llosa's extraordinary genius; and I do so in order to try to clarify what the internal workings of the novel reveal about the author's realist agenda. In Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction the realist critic Paisley Livingston's central argument is summarized in his statement that “assumptions about agency and rationality are in fact essential to all literary phenomena” (5). Vargas Llosa's life of literary discipline has taught him to believe this, in spite of the great amount of experimentation, self-reflexivity, and metafiction that characterize his work. He states firmly and frequently that he has never written fantastic literature and that his is a neorealist agenda. Cerebrally it is, but in the praxis of fiction something else comes out, and that is his deep separation from the obsessions he describes, the commitments he observes, the mad fantastical tricks that others play. Thus, when he proposes to Aunt Julia, her answer and his response ruefully tell all:

“Are you asking me to marry you to show your family you're grown up now?” Aunt Julia asked me affectionately.

“There's that, too,” I granted.

(242)

Basic eroticism and impressing the family are hardly the stuff of a grand obsession, and indeed the marriage is so curtailed from the beginning by reiterations of its unsuitability and its short-term projection that it is not really in the category of Camacho's parallel fantasies. Aunt Julia says that the marriage of an older woman to a young boy is part of soap opera lore, but as a device, it lacks conviction.

Pedro Camacho's scripts, on the other hand, are so ebulliently told, so bizarre, so full of violence and morbidity, that they transcend their genre and explode on the page. The reader, naive and sophisticated alike, fastens attention onto them and is consistently disappointed by the tepidity and political, moral blindness of the Marito-Aunt Julia text, which functions, at its best, as mere commentary. Vargas Llosa thus achieves something beyond the high crafting that is immediately evident: he manages to widen the base of realism into the realm of the fantastic and to allow Camacho, an essentially naive writer, to become an exemplum of the sturdy (but now nonviable) roots of realism, rather than the merely parodic figure that metafiction would make of him. Why are his alternating tales so much more successful than Marito's story? Not because fantasy is superior to the neorealist experiments presented in the Marito-Aunt Julia line but because, I would venture to guess, Vargas Llosa is more restrained, more inhibited, more uneasy, more self-involved with his own narrator, whereas in the productions of Camacho, his imagination is freed and his creativity is full flow. Oviedo argues (in “La tía Julia”) that both lines offer a betrayal and critique of reality: I would go further and say that all realism does this in our time and that Nabokov was right (in his commentary on Lolita) when he said that “reality” should always be put in quotation marks.

But whereas Vargas Llosa's narrator is perforce cool, rational, ironic, and restrained, Camacho is not. His scripts bridge the popular and the structurally significant, and his use of language is far above the junk-speak of popular culture. He is also a man dedicated to his task of ecrivante, obsessed by his work, austere in his life, and endowed with an enormous capacity for work—all qualities instantly recognized and admired by Marito and the mature narrator of the novel. Dedicated to realism even as he plunges in roiling fantasy, Camacho passionately plays the characters he creates, pulling out of his suitcase “an incredible collection of objects: an English magistrate's court wig, false mustaches of various sizes, a fireman's hat, military badges, masks of a fat woman, an old man, an idiot child, a traffic policeman's stick, a sea dog's cap and pipe, a surgeon's white smock, false ears and noses, cotton beards” (134), which he quickly tries on, transforming himself into a rapid succession of characters, and arguing thus: “And why shouldn't I have the right to become one with characters of my own creation, to resemble them? … What is realism, ladies and gentlemen—that famous realism we hear so much about? What better way is there of creating realistic art than by materially identifying oneself with reality?” (134-35).

Vargas Llosa contends that he is materially present in the realism of his work but that it is much altered and thereby utterly changed; Pedro Camacho's passionate entry into the reality of his characters involves a masking and costuming of himself, a losing of himself in an unrestrained, joyful act of composition. Vargas Llosa's creation of Pedro Camacho is a triumph; his creation of himself is not. The only way he can justify his central literary achievement in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is by praising Camacho's commitment but ambiguously applauding and damning his achievement and status: Camacho's hilarious confusion of his story lines, his certifiable madness, and his subsequent sorry life as a reporter/office boy put him firmly into his place in the ultimate value structure of the novel.

But just as Vargas Llosa is divided against himself, so is this book, where the sense of the author looking from the outside at a verbal star shows how his rational agency is somehow limited by characters that he has met in his life and fictionalized with only a partial view of them. The poignancy of Vargas Llosa as a writer consists in the fact that his work reflects an awareness of his separation—from Mascarita, from Pedro Camacho, from Julia whom he poorly understands, from the Peruvian mainstream.

At the same time, it must be pointed out that his fiction shines brilliantly within the possibilities of genre. Mikhail Bakhtin, stressing the idea of unfinalizability as a mark of major literary works, distinguished between the ideas of context and code: “A context is potentially unfinalized; a code must be finalized. A code is only a technical means of transmitting information; it does not have cognitive, creative significance. A code is a deliberately established, killed context” (147).

Among the many anomalies that characterize Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is an essential and unresolved problem of genre. Every appearance of serious attention has been paid to elements of this enigma by both Vargas Llosa and his critics, without any firm sense of resolving the problematics of the novel. It is a fiction written under the aegis of realism, participating in postmodernism and metafiction, but it nervously defies definition. It escapes the killed context of code and enters freely and originally into the category of the unfinalized, with the cognitive, creative significance thereby implied. Its importance lies in this haunting unfinalizability, which reaches backward and forward through aesthetic, social, political, and personal categories, without ceasing. If Vargas Llosa were freed further in his creative consciousness, anything might be possible.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “From Notes Made in 1970-71.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986. 132-58.

Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1994.

Livingston, Paisley. Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991.

Oviedo, Jose Miguel. “A Conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa about La tía Julia y el escribidor.” Mario Vargas Llosa: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Charles Rossman and Alan Warren Friedman. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1978. 153-65.

———. “La tía Julia y el escribidor, or the Coded Self-Portrait.” Rossman and Friedman. 166-81.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982.

———. A Fish in the Water. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994.

———. The Storyteller. Trans. Helen Lane. London: Penguin, 1990.

———. A Writer's Reality. Ed. Myron I. Lichtblau. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1991.