In Jorge Luis Borges' “La muerte y la brújula,” a story of murder, sleuthing, and revenge in Buenos Aires, a single character controls the course of the investigation from behind the scenes, planting evidence—and plotting new crimes—that ultimately deliver the detective, his arch-enemy Erik Lonnrot, directly into his hands. Red Scharlach the Dandy, also known as Ginzberg, Ginsburg and Gryphius, is deliberately depicted as Godlike in his omniscience and apparent omnipotence. While Mario Vargas Llosa's 1993 murder mystery, Lituma en los Andes, takes place far removed—both spatially and culturally—from the city streets of Buenos Aires, one of its characters nevertheless invites comparison to Red Scharlach.

In what may be construed as a nod to Borges' story, a Danish anthropologist known as Stirmson, Stirmsson, and Stirmesson, but also as Escarlatina, plays a small but absolutely pivotal role: armed with a seemingly unbounded knowledge of the Andean indigenous populations, he provides Vargas Llosa's protagonist with information on local beliefs which allows him to identify the culprits of the murders that he has been investigating. Establishing the exact nature of the relationship between these two works is not the goal of this essay. Rather, after a brief summary of the novel and an overview of the political context within which it was written, I hope to demonstrate how “La muerte y la brújula” and the novel's numerous other intertextual references revolve predominantly around a single theme with a longstanding tradition in Spanish American literature and cultural studies: the struggle within society between forces of civilization and savagery. Far from being a mere exercise in literary virtuosity, however, the novel deliberately deploys a wealth of references in order to underscore Vargas Llosa's sense of the urgency and implications of the political crisis and social breakdown in Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s.

In Lituma en los Andes, Lituma, a character who has appeared in several other Vargas Llosa works, is stationed in the fictional mining town of Naccos in an extremely isolated part of the Peruvian sierra during the height of Sendero Luminoso's terrorist activity. He and his subordinate, Tomás Carreño, are there ostensibly to keep tabs on the construction of a road through the mountains. Although their presence is intended to serve as a reminder of official Peruvian authority, frequent Sendero attacks in the vicinity provoke a sense of fear in the pair that leaves little doubt as to who is truly in control of the region. The narration of five separate and brutal Sendero attacks in the early part of the novel serves to heighten the tension and lend credence to the men's fear of being killed in Naccos. The novel revolves around two main story lines which are interwoven in the manner of Vargas Llosa's trademark vasos comunicantes. On the one hand, Carreño tells Lituma of his love affair with a woman whom he “rescues” from her druglord escort, but who ultimately runs away from him. On the other hand, Lituma is investigating the disappearances of three men from the town. The scant information that he is able to glean through interviews is supplemented by information gathered from Stirmson and Adriana who, with her husband, Dionisio, runs the town's only bar and seems to be implicated in the disappearances. From these data, Lituma is eventually able to imaginatively reconstruct what happened to the men in a manner that satisfies his curiosity, even though he lacks the empirical evidence necessary to prove it to the authorities.

Vargas Llosa finished writing Lituma en los Andes before Abimael Guzmán, Sendero's leader, was captured, and the waves of terrorism and violence that had plagued Peru since the early 1980s began to subside. The novel was also written in the wake of the autogolpe carried out by President Alberto Fujimori in April of 1992 with widespread public support, in an attempt to restore order to and eradicate corruption from the country's government. With the autogolpe, Fujimori dissolved Congress, regional governments and the constitution, assumed control over the judiciary, and gave the armed forces free rein to pursue terrorists. In a series of articles that appeared in periodicals in Europe during this period, Vargas Llosa excoriated the actions of Sendero and the President alike, claiming that the violence wrought by both sides, in conjunction with the fear and social chaos that they had engendered, had set the nation on a course towards destruction. While the titles of many of these articles—for example, “Regreso a la barbarie” and “El Perú en llamas”¹—clearly convey Vargas Llosa's concern with Peru's social and political disintegration, it is in the essay “Violencia y ficción,” written in August of 1992, that he explicitly characterizes the deterioration as a “devolution” or descent to a level of savagery from whence the human race had, supposedly, long since evolved. The vocabulary in the article, as shall be seen in a moment, suggests that Vargas Llosa's argument is at least partly rooted in nineteenth-century anthropological paradigms for social evolution such as that of Lewis Morgan, who posited that societies evolve from a state of savagery through one of barbarism to arrive, finally, at the telos of civilization.² Similar paradigms, of course, inform yet another of the novel's intertexts: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo: Civilización y barbarie—vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (1845), which sparked the longstanding debate over the role and strength of these two forces in Spanish America. Progress is the driving force behind these Western-oriented models, whose index of development is the complexity of a group's tools and technology, and which presuppose the establishment of institutions and rules to restrain violent behavior, as well as the privileging of reason and rationality over instinct in order to protect the social order.³ The return of—or to—the predominance of such uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces may be either symptom or cause of the breakdown of community. In either case, as we shall see, the simultaneous and concomitant nature of both processes is foregrounded in Lituma en los Andes.

Vargas Llosa's scathing criticism of Sendero and Fujimori in “Violencia y ficción” is worth quoting at length, for it clearly illustrates his strategy. Today, he writes,

hay peruanos convencidos de que, volando en pedazos edificios y viviendas y pulverizando a familias … se repara injusticias y se mejora la condición de los pobres. Eso ya no tiene nada que ver con la política. Es el triunfo de lo irracional, el retorno a ese estadio primario de salvajismo del que el hombre partió, hace millones de años, a conquistar la razón, el sentido común, los valores primordiales de la supervivencia y la convivencia, en una palabra, a humanizarse.

Pero acaso lo más terrible de todo lo que ocurre en el Perú es que la helada crueldad con que Sendero Luminoso perpetra sus crímenes parece estar dando exactamente los frutos previstos: la gradual barbarización del conjunto de la sociedad. No de otra manera se explica que, si las encuestas no mienten, una inmensa mayoría de peruanos haya celebrado como una bendición del cielo que el ingeniero Fujimori, en complicidad con una cúpula de generales, pusiera fin al sistema democrático, clausurara el Congreso e instalara un régimen basado, como todas las dictaduras, no en la ley sino en la fuerza bruta.

(Desafíos a la libertad 144)

With the autogolpe, he states that Fujimori has replaced a legitimate government with “una forma de barbarie semejante a la de quienes [la] combaten con asesinatos y atentados,” and that Peru has “triz[ado] esa delgada película que separa la civilización de la ley de la jungla, aceptando que lo que era el enfrentamiento de la legalidad contra el terror … se convirtiera en la lucha entre … dos encarnaciones del salvajismo” (146). Democracy, then, which Vargas Llosa views as one of the hallmarks of civilization, has been one of the worst casualties in the battle with forces representing humanity's atavistic impulses. The implications of this are of the utmost importance in a subcontinent witnessing the growth of fragile, new democracies, for Vargas Llosa fears that Fujimori's caudillista regime “inaugurar[a] otra larga noche de brutalidad y salvajismo políticos para toda América Latina,” that it might become “un mal ejemplo que de cundir retrocedería a los países latinoamericanos a una época de barbarie que ya parecía superada” (116).

It is against this political and social backdrop, as well as Vargas Llosa's interpretation of its significance from an evolutionary standpoint, that Lituma en los Andes must be read and its use of intertextuality explored.⁴ Intertextuality pervades the novel and operates at numerous levels. For example, the frontispiece, Picasso's The Minotaur, and the epigraph—“Cain's City built with Human Blood, / not Blood of Bulls and Goats,” from William Blake's The Ghost of Abel—function as frames which anticipate the novel's classical Greek and biblical intertexts as well as its central themes and motifs: labyrinths, bacchanalia, human sacrifice and fratricide (in this case, figurative). All of these are, additionally, construed as indices of Peru's social disorder. Also, Cervantes' immortal twosome serves as a structural prototype for the two voices which dominate the novel, although, as is the case in “La muerte y la brújula” as well, the pair is additionally filtered through the detective story mold of Sherlock Holmes and his companion, John Watson. And, finally, interpolated stories such as reworkings of the myths of Dionysus and Ariadne explore the roots of the instinct-driven behavior and irrationality whose release threatens society's stability and, ultimately, existence. The varied sources of these intertexts suggest both the constancy throughout history and the cross-cultural ubiquitousness of the beliefs and practices that the novel depicts (Penuel 453). However, further analysis of these references, as well as the novel's Christian symbolism and use of other motifs from the Western literary tradition, will show that they complement and expand the implications of Vargas Llosa's tale of Peru's decline, as well as emphasizing the autochthonous sources thereof.

Direct and oblique references to the Quijote abound throughout the novel. As Arnold Penuel has observed, Vargas Llosa makes the connection explicit by having his narrator “mistakenly” refer to Tomás Carreño on two occasions as Tomás Carrasco, invoking the character of Sansón Carrasco from part II of the Quijote as well as echoing Cervantes' fluctuating denomination of Sancho's wife (455; Lituma 13, 249). As both Penuel (455) and Mary Berg (26-27) have noted, it is Carreño who more closely resembles the hidalgo: he is the knight in not-so-shining armor who is intent upon rescuing his damsel-in-distress from the sordid world that she inhabits, whereas, as in his previous appearances in Vargas Llosa's works, the corporal tends to be more concerned with his creature comforts (or the lack thereof), physical pleasures (or the lack thereof), and his general physical well-being. But Vargas Llosa's pairing is also reminiscent of Borges' reworking of Cervantes' duo as Detective Lonnrot, who prides himself on being a “puro razonador” and whose belief that logic will lead him to the truth leads him instead to his death, and Commissioner Franz Treviranus who, with consummate practicality, immediately figures out the solutions to the murders that are under investigation, only to have them dismissed as insufficiently interesting (148). Thus I would like to return to “La muerte y la brújula,” for I believe that, in many respects, it functions as a blueprint for the novel's setting and central concerns, as well as its characters.

In “La muerte y la brújula” and in Lituma en los Andes, the fumbling lead investigators, Lonnrot and Lituma, meet with authoritative figures—Scharlach and Escarlatina, respectively—who provide them with the clues that allow them to identify the murderers even as they lead them not into the light of clarity and reason, but further towards knowledge of the evils of which humans are capable. Red Scharlach the Dandy, with his dual trinity of names, uses the sacred name of God—in search of which the Hasidim had been known to commit human sacrifices (161)—to trap Lonnrot. He is seemingly aware of the detective and his partner's thoughts and activities during their search, controls their actions, and, in the end, holds the power of life and death in his hands. The presence of Stirmson-Stirmsson-Stirmesson in Vargas Llosa's novel is much more limited, but his role is nevertheless critical: he brings to Lituma's attention the pre-Conquest indigenous practice of offering human sacrifices to placate the apus or spirits of the mountains for the destruction of land entailed by the construction of roads. This information leads Lituma to the conclusion that Naccos' victims had died in an atavistic resurgence of this practice triggered by the construction of the highway. As crucial as the information provided by Escarlatina is, Lituma's apotheosis of the Dane—he comments that Stirmson “era como Dios, sabía todo y conocía a todos,” and almost believes at one point that a halo is about to form about the latter's head (174, 180)—seems fairly excessive; it is only when I look at Escarlatina through the lens of the infinitely powerful Scharlach that I find it more understandable.⁵

The settings of Borges' and Vargas Llosa's works are both literally and figuratively labyrinthine. Both are pervaded by images of and references to the labyrinth which, in addition to suggesting the difficulty of escape, is often used in modern fiction as a metaphor for the contingency of knowledge and order, and the difficulty of comprehension even when the truth is right before one's eyes. In the two works, labyrinths comprise the site of the murders as well as their solutions, even though the issues that they raise remain far from resolved. The final confrontation between Scharlach and Lonnrot takes place in a maze-like mansion in the outskirts of Buenos Aires where outlaws thrive, that is, in a hinterland where the “law of the jungle” prevails, beyond the reach of the rules of civilization. Here, roles and binaries are reversed, as is emblematized by the statue of the two-faced Janus that is one of the last images that Lonnrot sees: the hunter has become the hunted, and Scharlach takes his pursuer as his prey. In Lituma en los Andes, the mountains themselves are Lituma's labyrinth. They are a geographic hinterland in which Lituma additionally finds the people, their language and even the very forces of nature incomprehensible. Their unintelligibility renders both his investigation and his daily life fraught with difficulties, as well as the fear that he will not be able to escape the trap that the sierra and Senderistas alike represent to him. The symbolism becomes even more charged when we see him longing nostalgically for his hometown of Piura, cast as a “paraíso perdido” (177), and convinced that the sierra is “infernal” (71).

In the end, like the settings, the “solutions” to the murders serve to undermine the role of reason as the key to unlocking the mysteries of human experience and preserving (the) social order: Lonnrot's “logical” interpretation—or, rather, misinterpretation—of facts leads him to his death, while Lituma solves the mystery but, try as he might, can find no rational explanation for the killings, only truths about the human capacity for evil that he wishes had remained hidden. That is, the latter's powers of reason unveil reason's own absence as a force guiding human behavior. Thus both works turn the detective story—essentially a genre whose goal is to make sense of events, and whose successful outcome is predicated on the assumption that events are governed by a logical chain of causality for which a rational explanation may be reconstructed—on its head. And as the murder mystery in Vargas Llosa's novel is itself, as Mary Berg has pointed out, an investigation into the state of the nation, his attack on the genre may be read as a synecdoche of his depiction of a nation where reason and the other tools of civilization have ceased to hold sway (27).

The breakdown of order and the attendant ascent of primal forces are also dramatized in Lituma en los Andes through the use of the myths of Ariadne and Dionysus, both of which converge in the frontispiece, Picasso's The Minotaur, which shows the monster engaged in bacchanalian revelries. According to Greek mythology, Ariadne (in Spanish, “Ariadna,” an anagram of Adriana) was the daughter of King Minos of Crete and the lover of Theseus, whom she helped to escape from the labyrinth after he killed the minotaur to whom several Athenian youths were sacrificed each year. Subsequently, the couple moved to the island of Naxos, where Theseus abandoned Ariadne, and where the latter later met and married Dionysus. Vargas Llosa fuses the story of Theseus' rescue with indigenous folklore: the minotaur here is a pishtaco, a malevolent figure in Andean legend who, as shall be discussed further presently, is often depicted as a foreigner, and who, in this case exacts a yearly tribute in the form of several of Adriana's hometown's virgins; Timoteo Fajardo slays the pishtaco and escapes from the labyrinthine mountain caves in which it was living, thanks to Adriana's ingenuity; the couple then moves to Naccos, where Adriana eventually meets (and marries) Dionisio while Timoteo disappears.

Adriana's tale renders explicit the novel's motifs of human sacrifice, the labyrinth, and the man-beast dominated by the instincts of its baser half and symbolic of the dark forces at work in society. Nevertheless, it is Vargas Llosa's reworking of the Dionysus myth that is much more pertinent to the novel's endeavors as a whole. Despite the prominence afforded to Adriana's tale by having her narrate it herself, in the final analysis, it is the Dionysiac symbolism that brings to the foreground Peru's struggle between the forces of civilization and those of savagery that are constantly attempting to undermine them. Vargas Llosa's Dionisio draws on several variants of the myth of Dionysus, as well as Euripides' play, The Bacchae. According to these sources, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman from Thebes who was killed when struck by a lightning bolt from the divinity. He is eventually granted divine status, and becomes the god of nature, its chaos and fertility; of irrational states such as drunkenness, ecstasy and madness; sexual energy; liquids, including wine and the reproductive fluids; the theater; and festival or Carnaval in the Bakhtinian sense of a celebration in which the normal social order is suspended or inverted. That is, Dionysus incarnates the forces and sources of instinct, irrationality and chaos. He is both catalyst and emblem of a world upside-down: he travels around the country accompanied by a group of women, the maenads, introducing wine wherever he goes; to avenge Thebes and his family for not recognizing him as a divinity, he leads the women of the city away from their home and families—the ultimate social transgression—and away from the city and its law, to the open space of the mountains where they engage in disorderly behavior; and his final act of revenge is to have his mother's sister slay her own son, Pentheus, heir to the throne of Thebes, while under his spell. By the time Dionysus has finished, Thebes is shattered: the progenitor has destroyed her offspring and, as the victim is a public figure, both representing and representative of public order, the ultimate symbol of disorder at the level of the family also brings down the macrocosm of the city.

Vargas Llosa's Dionisio has numerous superficial parallels with the god: his mother is rumored to have been killed by lightning (212, 243) and he travels around the Peruvian sierra with his maenads—here “unas indias medio putas” (200-1), “locas” (241) who by night “se enloquecían y hacían barbaridades” (241)—introducing pisco to the local populations. More importantly, however, is the threat that he, like his namesake, poses to culture's creations and, above all, structure. His presence represents the eruption of nature in all its wildness, for he reawakens the needs that humans have tried to repress, shattering the fragile veneer of social order. His role in Naccos renders this aspect of his personality explicit: he is a bartender whose greatest delight is to ply his customers with alcohol, incite bacchanalia and Carnaval,⁶ and spur on homosexual liaisons—“mariconadas” (73)—which fly in the face of conventional morality. Time and again, he is depicted as encouraging the townspeople to “visitar a su animal,” to let loose the instincts whose repression is demanded by the needs of communal living. Together with Adriana, Dionisio is directly responsible for catalyzing the behavior that results in the sacrifices at Naccos which, not surprisingly, take place during such revelries. This violence, moreover, springs from an allegiance to superstitions that have been eradicated in “lugar[es] civilizado[s],” but that the couple reintroduces and promotes (104). In this way, the savagery that they engender is cast as a resurgence of primal instincts at the level of the individual and, at that of the collectivity, of a “primitive,” irrational belief system. In the end, Naccos, like Thebes, is destroyed by their revival. Thus Dionysiac impulses collaborate with the larger political forces that are propelling Vargas Llosa's Peru backwards, towards prior stages of social evolution.

There is one final motif rooted in classical Greek literature that Vargas Llosa draws on to emblematize the climate of social disorder that is destroying Peru. Since the times of the tragedies and Thucydides' histories, the plague has been the symbol of a world turned upside-down. In conjunction with revolution, the counterpart whose origins may be traced to human actions, the plague has served as the metaphor par excellence for the collapse of the social order: both are cast as precipitating a rampant disregard for laws and conventions which results in the disintegration of civilization as a whole, and both foreground the insufficiency of human powers such as reason either to put an end to the upheaval or to control its effects. Vargas Llosa's 1992 statement that Sendero's terrorist activities and the efforts to combat them had pushed Peru to the brink, bringing about “el deterioro generalizado de la vida, [el] desplome de la moral cívica y de los supuestos básicos de la convivencia” implicitly invokes this paradigm (Desafíos 143). Here, as in Lituma en los Andes, revolution is, of course, represented by the battle between Fujimori's government and Sendero, and the attendant violence which spreads unchecked across the nation. But the plague itself appears in the novel, too. It is construed as the indigenous superstitions which further undermine civilization's veneer of logic and rationality, as well as directly causing even more violence. The characterization of superstition as irrational beliefs associated with societies that are less “advanced” on the evolutionary scale pervades the novel. For example, when mountain spirits such as the muki, apu, and pishtaco are first proposed as possible suspects in the disappearances of the three men, Lituma dismisses them as “cosas que no se cree ya nadie en ningún lugar civilizado” (104). Nevertheless, in keeping with the plague motif, these superstitions have “contagi[ado]” such “civilized” places as Lima, Chiclayo and Ferreñafe (188).⁷ The Lima newspapers that Lituma reads attest to their destabilizing effects in the city: they carry stories about “robaojos,” gringos believed to be kidnapping young children and removing their eyes, and the posses set up to find and lynch them. Lituma understands the “robaojos” to be the capitol's counterpart to the pishtacos feared by the Andean indigenous populations, figures who, anthropologist Enrique Mayer writes, are “believed to be white marauders who capture Indians and kill them to obtain human grease needed to cast specially sonorous bells for sale abroad, to run complex machinery … or to pay Peru's international debt” (472). Belief in the pishtaco is common among Andean communities, and became even more prevalent with the increase of political violence in the highlands (473). Lituma deems the spread of these beliefs “una epidemia,” explicitly casting it as a modern version of the plague which has transported the savage instinct of the mountains to the metropolis (Lituma 188). But to a certain degree, this is a vicious circle, for has not the current political crisis fostered a climate which makes acting upon such superstitions possible, as well as making the notion of human sacrifice credible? “¿No matan aquí de todo y por todo?,” one character remarks, “Qué de raro que comiencen los sacrificios humanos también” (201-2). Hence Naccos' problems are seen to be not just causes but also symptoms of “los diablos y la locura” that are “adueñándose del Perú” (189): certainly the sacrifices reflect compliance with “primitive” belief systems in order to ensure the construction of the highway, but in turn, the completion of this project, which was the only thing standing between the town and certain economic death, was also being jeopardized by the nation's political and economic crises.

The use of the apocalyptic motifs of the plague and revolution to encompass the situation in Peru,⁸ as well as the trajectory of violence and social breakdown which heads from the mountains to the metropolis, bring to mind Vargas Llosa's 1984 work, Historia de Mayta, his first attempt at exploring the political upheaval of the Sendero era. This novel is based on a historical event which took place in 1962, an unsuccessful Marxist uprising in Jauja, in the Peruvian highlands. In the novel, however, the rebellion takes place in 1958; that is, it is set up as the spark which precipitates the Cuban Revolution and is therefore responsible for all subsequent socialist activity throughout Spanish America, including the “Perú de apocalipsis” that is the setting for the novel's frame tale. In effect, the novel dramatizes Vargas Llosa's contention that the contemporary crisis in Peru and, on a larger scale, throughout Spanish America as a whole, was the culmination of the violence unleashed by the Spanish American Left in the early years of the revolutionary movement. In Historia de Mayta as in Lituma en los Andes, the mountains are the site from which the chaos of terrorism irradiates, turning the civilized life of the capitol upside-down and threatening Peru's stability and sovereignty. However, where the earlier novel holds the various splinter groups of the Spanish American socialist movement in Peru responsible for the region's current political predicament, Lituma en los Andes foregrounds the internal, homegrown sources of violence.

Time and again, Vargas Llosa deliberately traces Peru's troubles back to its own roots, counterbalancing a Peruvian tendency that he has criticized elsewhere, that of blaming outsiders for the nation's problems (see Penuel 453-458 for an extended discussion of this topic).⁹ Hence the political violence is ascribed to the reawakening of instincts from a prior stage in the nation's own social evolution which had been thought extinguished by the advent of modernity and civilization. “Me pregunto,” one character remarks, “si lo que pasa en el Perú no es una resurrección de toda esa violencia empozada. Como si hubiera estado escondida en alguna parte y, de repente, por alguna razón, saliera de nuevo a la superficie” (178). This atavistic quality is further underscored by Stirmson's observation that Sendero's massacres “no tienen explicación racional” (178), and by Lituma's designation of the goings-on at Naccos as “cosas de salvajes calatos y caníbales” (204-5). And several other characters take a historically-revisionist stance, asserting that the image of the Incas, who had virtually obliterated their enemies, had been whitewashed, as if there were “un complot internacional de historiadores para disimular el aporte peruano al arte de los sacrificios humanos” (170). On numerous occasions, Vargas Llosa shows the contemporary violence to be part of Peru's cultural patrimony, a direct outgrowth of pre-Conquest indigenous cultures. This is a provenience which places the blame for the actions of the Senderistas, but also the government forces and the people of Naccos, squarely on the nation and its heritage, refuting any suggestion that foreigners may be responsible.

The Peruvian tendency to fear difference is acknowledged by the novel's treatment of pishtacos who, according to Mayer, are generally construed as “quintessential outsiders … coherent and historically mythologized versions of the real threat of externally perpetrated violence against which collective outrage is one possible outlet” (473).¹⁰ But while the demonization of the Other is conceded a certain amount of legitimacy, ultimately, their culpability in the novel proves to be no more than a red herring; even Tomás, who was raised to fear pishtacos, declares that he would rather face one of them than the Senderistas. On the whole, rather than predators, outsiders—whether by virtue of nationality, belief or physical difference—are portrayed in the novel as victims: Sendero's and Naccos' victims alike are identified in some manner as outsiders, and many embody positive qualities, or could have made a difference to Peru and its future. The French tourists whose death is narrated at the beginning of the novel had a primitivist love for the country which they would have promoted, enhancing Peru's reputation abroad, upon returning home. Similarly, the European-born Mrs. d'Harcourt had devoted many years to the promotion abroad of her adopted homeland, setting up environmental programs to preserve its natural resources for those who would be able to take advantage of them when peace returned, and informing and inspiring the Peruvians to take an interest in their own heritage. The disappeared of Naccos are likewise all cast as outsiders: Casimiro is an albino, Pedro is mute and retarded, and Demetrio is considered to be impure for having changed his name and for living under a false identity. Casimiro, it must be confessed, is portrayed as a fairly unsympathetic character. Pedrito and Demetrio, on the other hand, are not: the former's association with vicuñas underscores his innocence, whereas the latter, the former lieutenant governor of Andamarca, had attempted to restore order to his town after the Senderistas—“en nombre del fomento del espíritu colectivista” (78)—incited its inhabitants to accuse, try, and punish one another for wrongdoing until the streets were littered with unburied dead.¹¹

The magnitude of the wrongdoing wrought by Naccos is underscored by the final intertextual frame that I would like to consider here, the Christian symbolism used to frame the deaths of the town's victims. Both Demetrio and Pedrito are victims of violence three times over: each sees the community in which he lives brutally destroyed by Sendero; the government aggravates the initial situation, in Demetrio's case by vandalizing the town and refusing to protect Andamarca from further Sendero attacks, and in Pedro's by torturing him mercilessly—without realizing that he can neither understand them nor even speak—for information about the terrorists; and each is finally sacrificed in a ritual which deliberately echoes Christ's crucifixion. Lituma reconstructs Pedro's sacrifice as a procession in which the victim is first marked by the “besos de Judas” given to him by Dionisio (263, 264),¹² and subsequently dressed up as Naccos' “santo” and “salvador” prior to being taken to his death (266). Although the details of Demetrio's death are never disclosed, Lituma does ultimately learn that those who sacrificed him had also partaken of his remains—textually, had “comulga[do]” (311), or taken communion.¹³ And while both deaths bear out the epigraph's promise of “Cain's City built with Human Blood,” Demetrio's represents an even deeper level of betrayal. His death in Naccos, whence he had fled in order to avoid reprisal, represents a figurative turning of brother against brother, for at least one of the coworkers who killed him was a former neighbor from Andamarca, now also relocated to the mountains. Moreover, as I mentioned before, the act of cannibalism is figured here as a rite of communion, a reliteralization of the symbolic partaking of Christ's flesh and blood which renders the gesture wholly intranscendent and unredemptive. And, to make matters worse, the sacrifice fails: in the end, a landslide levels the town of Naccos and, with it, all hopes of continuing work on the road. The gods have abandoned their people and primal forces have been released irreversibly; the death of the innocent, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the one man who had tried to protect his town and later hold it accountable for wrongdoing, signals the triumph of evil. And certainly, the death of Demetrio—that is, of Demeter—suggests the ascendancy of the forces of darkness and the lack of a harvest of anything other than evil for the nation as a whole.

In the end, violence is the factor that unifies the novel. Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian government and its anti-terrorist forces, and the town of Naccos are all agents and emblems of the violence—evidence of the unleashing of instinct—that has set the nation on a course towards self-destruction. Sendero tortures the innocent, destroys communities and the bonds that hold them together, and kills both those who could promote the nation abroad and those who have done the most at home to protect its resources. Government forces similarly torture the innocent and refuse to protect communities threatened by Sendero; additionally, their anti-terrorism campaigns exacerbate the prevailing climate of violence and destruction. And, finally, Naccos commits the ultimate act of human brutality, without really being able to explain why.

Not only is violence the thematic center around which the intertextual references revolve, it is also the bridge between the novel's fictional world and the political reality that Vargas Llosa has set out to criticize. For the complementarity between Lituma en los Andes and his journalism of the same period (as was discussed at the beginning of this essay) clearly demonstrates that, although the novel deploys a battery of timeworn literary topoi,¹⁴ from Sarmiento's dialectic between civilization and barbarism through the regionalist and primitivist novels of the early twentieth century, to indicate the extent of the political and social turmoil in Peru, it is far more than a mere rhetorical exercise. In fact, as Efraín Kristal has observed in his recent study of Vargas Llosa, Temptation of the Word, the Peruvian's novels as a rule “could have been written as conscious attempts to exemplify his own political and moral views … [Moreover,] the political content of his novels happens to coincide with his most passionately held political beliefs” (197). The political content of Lituma en los Andes clearly reflects the failure of Vargas Llosa's political aspirations and a loss of hope in a better future for Peru: his 1990 campaign for the presidency of Peru (which he lost to Fujimori) was predicated on eradicating Sendero Luminoso through legal means (189). Hence during the early years of Fujimori's regime, he grew increasingly disturbed by the violence and violations of human rights perpetrated by the military in its ineffective efforts to quell terrorism, and watched as social order from Lima to the Andes deteriorated even further. In effect, Vargas Llosa saw the autogolpe of 1992 and concomitant near-dictatorial rule as a reflection of Fujimori's inability to control the situation within the rule of law (ibid.)—or, rather, with the tools whose use, in his view, defines “civilized” societies.

However, even as he excoriates Fujimori for implementing a mode of government that has plunged the nation even deeper into political and social chaos,¹⁵ Vargas Llosa also criticizes the Andean indigenous populations for what he considers to be their perpetuation of violent practices derived from pre-Columbian cultural traditions (ibid.).¹⁶ He faults the indigenous groups for the current crisis by further telescoping its origins back to Peru's own roots, a strategy reminiscent of Historia de Mayta, in which historical cause-and-effect is short-circuited in order to visit the blame for the nation's political situation during this same period on the actions of Spanish American socialist groups in the 1960s. In both novels, the result is disappointing, for it offers a simplistic, essentialist (and essentially idiosyncratic) analysis of Peru's complex situation by completely skipping over determining factors in the nation's recent political history, as well, of course, as the buildup of these problems over centuries of colonial and postcolonial rule. In the end, though, the dual targeting of Fujimori's regime and the indigenous populations in Lituma en los Andes renders the ubiquitous topos of civilization and barbarism both a timely description of the predicament brought about by the president and a timeless synopsis of the author's view of the relationship between modern, Westernized Peru and its “primitive” populations.

Recently, Kristal has shown how Lituma en los Andes represents a turning point in the representation of violence in Vargas Llosa's works. He observes that in the author's previous novels,

violence always had an explanation or a rationalization, such as passion, rebellion, or vengeance. In his socialist period, violence was inherent to the inhumanity of capitalist society, and in his neoliberal period it was the result of a fanatic's utopian dreams for a better world. In Death in the Andes, some participate in the most depraved acts of murder and cannibalism for no apparent reason at all. The brutal massacre of the three people is therefore more disturbing and perverse than the killings of the Shining Path guerrillas, who justify violence as a means toward military and political aims, or the murder that Tomás Carreño commits when he thought his loved one was being tortured.

(195)

As was mentioned before, it is suggested that the men were offered as sacrifices to apus prior to building the highway; it is also claimed that, as all of the victims had at one point been victims of Sendero, their presence in Naccos opened the town up to the risk of a future attack, and that eliminating them was therefore an act of self preservation. But these excuses “explain” the killing alone; the cannibalism has no conceivable justification, self-serving or otherwise, and none is, in effect, offered. The men marked by Sendero become convenient sacrificial offerings, and also, in a sense, scapegoats which, traditionally, are blamed for a disruptive force or event and expelled from the community as a symbolic banishing of evil. In this case, the three men are eliminated in order to avert the disaster threatening the town, whether its source is the apus or Sendero.

William Arrowsmith has written of The Bacchae that “if we understand that the rewards of the Dionysiac life are here and now, that the frenzied dances of the god are direct manifestations of ecstatic possession, and that the Bacchante, by eating the flesh of the man or animal who temporarily incarnates the god, comes to partake of his divinity, we are in a position to understand the play” (144). In Lituma en los Andes, as in the Dionysiac rite, the scapegoats are ingested rather than being excised. But in this act, which is also explicitly a distortion of the communion ritual, rather than partake of the divinity of the god whose substitute is eaten, evil, and evil alone, is literally internalized. Ultimately, knowledge of the secret—tantamount to participation in the sacrificial rites—establishes a pact of solidarity and silence among the participants, uniting people of different backgrounds (from the miners to Dionisio and Adriana) into a community which clearly separates insiders from outsiders. Here, then, violence is paradoxically the only force which still has any power to hold a community together. It is effective in Naccos alone, however, for Peru's larger cities are falling apart under the destabilizing effects of terrorism, anti-terrorism and superstition. And in the end, even that fails when the highway, symbolic of the advent of progress and the advantages of civilization into the wild space of the mountains, is destroyed by the landslide, and the project, like the town itself, is abandoned.

This essay has thus far focused primarily on Vargas Llosa's rewriting of timeworn Western paradigms, motifs, and intertexts in his depiction of the breakdown of civilization in Lituma en los Andes. I conclude by identifying two canonical Spanish American works whose presence in this novel—however understated—suggests further ramifications that this incarnation of the Spanish American debate over civilization and barbarism may have for the entire region. In the opening pages of the novel, a troubled Lituma, who has been unable to make any headway in his investigation of two disappearances, is informed that there has been yet a third, and he asks himself “¿Se los habían tragado los cerros, entonces?” (12). His question reworks a phrase which is familiar to all students of Spanish American literature, the final words of José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine: “los devoró la selva.” This phrase is, however, better-known to many as “se los tragó la selva,” perhaps as a result of Carlos Fuentes' famous misquoting of the same passage in his widely-read La nueva novela hispanoamericana.¹⁷ By invoking the novela de la tierra in which, as Fuentes has claimed, nature—with all its symbolic implications of wilderness and wildness—is the protagonist (10), and by paraphrasing this statement in particular, which signals the triumph of the wild over man and his attempts at civilization, with all that that implies for Colombia's—and Spanish America's—future, Vargas Llosa sets the stage for his dramatization of a “regreso a la barbarie” from the very beginning of the novel.

The final source that I want to discuss is one that is practically hidden: Miguel Angel Asturias' Hombres de Maíz. Asturias' novel, about which Vargas Llosa has written a brief essay,¹⁸ offers a vision of society in which the traditional representatives of the forces of civilization and barbarism are—as in much primitivist literature—reversed: he presents Guatemala's indigenous populations as a source of cultural revitalization and redemption, an antidote to the advent of modernity and its dehumanizing values in Spanish America. Additionally, he proffers a unique rewriting of the Dionisiac myth which so informs Vargas Llosa's novel. Much of Hombres de Maíz is devoted to showing how Nicho—short for Dionisio—rejects his role as mailman, that is, as a bearer of written culture who is a go-between between the changing life of his indigenous community and the modern life of the city, and instead undertakes an apprenticeship in the traditional way of life. Nicho's ability to transform himself into a coyote, his nahual or protective spirit in the Maya tradition, reflects his continued contact with and desire to uphold the beliefs of his people. For this Dionisio, then, being in touch with his animal is an affirmation of positive values and the symbiotic relationship with a nourishing nature upon which indigenous culture is predicated and which Asturias feared was being destroyed by capitalist society. It is a far cry from here to the characterization of visiting one's animal as the release of primitive forces disruptive to the social order that is the traditional interpretation of the Dionysiac myth, as well as the message underlying Vargas Llosa's novel. It would seem, then, that Vargas Llosa has reclaimed Asturias' challenge to the traditional paradigm, and realigned it with the struggle between order and disorder which pervades his novel, and which he saw Peruvian society as being on the verge of losing. “To understand Dionysus,” Helene Foley writes of The Bacchae, “is to understand that the order imposed on the world by human culture is arbitrary, and the permanent potential for a reversal or collapse of this order exists” (124). To understand this, in turn, is to understand Vargas Llosa's Dionisio, the evil that he incites in Naccos, and the deterioration of Peruvian society as a whole.

Notes

1. These have been collected and published in a volume entitled Desafíos a la libertad, along with other articles written between 1990 and early 1994.

2. Needless to say, by choosing disputed teleological models of social evolution based on highly-charged and value-laden terms, and by describing the nation's situation as a “regression” to a prior stage of its social evolution, Vargas Llosa is advancing an extremely controversial argument.

3. Ramón Mujica Pinilla has shown how Vargas Llosa's privileging of notions of progress and rationalism also conditions his analysis of José María Arguedas' work in the novelist's recent La utopía arcaica (see “La ‘mentira literaria’”; this subject is also discussed in an unpublished interview with Mujica done by María Rita Corticelli). Vargas Llosa expresses his own views on the impact of the discourse of progress on Andean indigenous populations in his essay, “Questions of Conquest,” and dramatizes them in his novel, El hablador.

4. Mary Berg and Arnold Penuel have identified several main sources for Lituma en los Andes, including: Greek myths and numerous motifs from classical Greek literature; the Old and New Testaments; beliefs and myths held by Peru's indigenous populations, both pre-Conquest and modern; and, last but not least, Don Quijote. My reading of the novel is indebted to their analyses.

5. For Penuel, what I have interpreted here in terms of a struggle between civilization and barbarism is instead a battle between Apollonian and Dionysiac forces. Penuel sees the former, which include the use of reason and the desire to uncover the truth, as positive forces that might contribute to Peru's regeneration, and that are (for him) personified by Lituma, Mrs. d'Harcourt, and Stirmson; in fact, he attributes Lituma's apotheosis of the latter to his reverence for the constructive values embodied by the Dane (454-55). Given the overall pessimism of the novel and the fact that Lituma's rationality provides him only with answers that he wishes he did not have, I find this argument unconvincing.

6. Adriana's description of Dionisio's first visit to Naccos corresponds item by item with Bakhtin's description of Carnaval as a festival in which conventions are suspended, limits erased, roles reversed and the body's lower or baser needs exalted. Dionisio, she says, exhorted the miners to “‘sabore[ar] el pisco purito de uva de Ica, hace olvidar las penas y saca al hombre feliz de tus adentros.’ ‘¡Visita a tu animal!’ … Atendía a los clientes y salía a bailar y contagiaba a todos su alegría … Horas de horas, poniéndose y quitándose las máscaras del Carnaval de Jauja, hasta que todo Naccos era un remolino de gente borracha y feliz: nadie sabía ya quién era quién, dónde empezaba uno y dónde terminaba aquél, quién hombre, quién animal, quién humano, quién mujer” (242). Given the political moral of the novel, it is hardly surprising that the holidays thus celebrated were the Fiestas Patrias.

7. As I mentioned previously, Adriana's description of the introduction of Carnaval and pisco to Naccos similarly notes that Dionisio “contagiaba a todos su alegría” (242; emphasis added).

8. Their apocalyptic implications are underscored by the characterization of the rains which eventually precipitate the landslide in Naccos as “el diluvio universal” (200).

9. In a 1986 essay, he articulates this belief within a general Spanish American context as follows: “One of our worst defects—our best fictions—is to believe that our miseries have been imposed on us from abroad, that others have always had the responsibility for our problems; for instance, the conquistadores. There are countries in Latin America … in which the ‘Spaniards’ are even now severely indicted for what ‘they’ did with the Indians. Did ‘they’ really do it? We did it. We are the conquistadores. They were our parents and grandparents who came to our shores and gave us the names we have and the language we speak. They gave us also the habit of passing to the devil the responsibility for any evil we do. Instead of making amends for what they did, by improving and correcting our relationship with our indigenous compatriots, mixing with them and amalgamating ourselves to form a new culture which would have been a kind of synthesis of the best of both, we—the Westernized Latin Americans—have persevered in the worst habits of our forebears, behaving towards the Indians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Spaniards behaved towards the Aztecs and the Incas” (“Fiction and Reality” 16). His article, “El preso 1,509,” in Desafíos a la libertad, on the capture of Abimael Guzmán, reflects this belief within the specific context of Peru. It first traces Peru's troubles back to the Conquest and through the Colony and Republic, throughout which period a small elite dominated all of the country's resources, creating conditions of irremediable poverty for the majority of the population, predominantly indigenous. Subsequently, Vargas Llosa credits these conditions, aggravated by the policies of the Velasco regime (1968-1975), with having fostered a social and political environment that led on the one hand to the founding of Sendero Luminoso and, on the other, to a receptive audience in certain sectors of a desperate population (156-7).

10. Both Dionisio, who is an itinerant outsider, and one of the victims, Casimiro, who is both a wanderer and an albino and therefore physically distinct from the majority of his compatriots, are also considered to be pishtacos.

11. Since the time of the Homeric epics, improper burial has, in the Western literary tradition, been a sign of the breakdown of social order and, eventually, of the community as a whole.

12. Previously, Dionisio had represented himself as a Judas figure, claiming that he had planned to tell Lituma about the murders “por plata, a sabiendas de que lo mandaba al matadero” (102).

13. The death of the other victim, Casimiro, also has explicit Christian resonances: having escaped near-death at the hands of the Senderistas, he considers himself to have already died and been resurrected, and thus to be invulnerable to death (he is, as one of the men of Naccos says, “como Jesucristo” for precisely this reason [226]); the moments preceding his death, when the men of Naccos took him, drunk, out of the bar, remind Lituma of a “procesión” as well as of the Holy Week Masses of his childhood (238). Despite these parallels, however, I consider his case to be different from those of Pedro and Demetrio for, in the first place, his lack of compassion and failure to take responsibility for his actions deliberately cast him as unsympathetic and, in the second, his boastful public claims to invincibility cast him more in the mold of the characters of Greek epic and tragedy whose hubristic vaunting inevitably betokens their downfall.

14. The sheer number of intertextual references in the novel has, in fact, left a number of readers wondering why Vargas Llosa felt compelled to rely to such a great extent on such crutches, rather than on the strength of his own story.

15. As Kristal writes, Vargas Llosa believes that “authoritarian practices encourage the growth of revolutionary groups … He believes that the conditions accounting for the rise and success of the Shining Path have worsened because he considers Fujimori to be a dictator” (189). Kristal further observes that, “from Vargas Llosa's perspective the revolutionaries are responsible for their crimes, but in the final analysis the Peruvian government is responsible for the neglect of the Andean population and for the social climate wherein groups such as the Shining Path can flourish” (188).

16. This attitude gains currency in Vargas Llosa's work as of 1983, when he was appointed by then-President Fernando Belaúnde Terry to head a commission to investigate the brutal massacre of eight journalists by the Iquichano in Uchuraccay. The Commission, Mayer observes, ultimately ascribed part of the blame for this act of collective violence to inherited traditions, buying into a fallacy that points toward “historical evidence of cruelty, bloodthirstiness, and ritual involvement with violent acts using pre-Hispanic iconography, historical text, and hearsay as proof of the ‘inherent violent nature of the Indian,’ a psychological or racially inherited trait” (473). For further discussion of this subject, consult Mayer's “Peru in Deep Trouble”; also, Kristal (188-93) links Vargas Llosa's investigation directly to the attitude towards indigenous populations that informs Lituma en los Andes.

17. “‘¡Se los tragó la selva!’, dice la frase final de La Vorágine de José Eustasio Rivera” (9). That this is the way that Vargas Llosa remembers the phrase is apparent in his 1987 novel, El hablador, where one character remarks that “Pero, a los misioneros se los está tragando la selva, como al Arturo Cova de La vorágine” (94).

18. “Una nueva lectura de Hombres de Maíz,” in Gerald Martin's critical edition of Hombres de Maíz.

Works Cited

Arrowsmith, William. Introduction to The Bacchae. Euripides V: Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae. By Euripides. Trans. William Arrowsmith. Eds. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. 142-53.

Berg, Mary G. “Narrative Multiplicity in Vargas Llosa's Lituma en los Andes.” La Chispa '95: Selected Proceedings. The Sixteenth Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures. Ed. Claire J. Paolini. New Orleans: Tulane University, 1995. 25-38.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “La muerte y la brújula.” Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza, 1987. 147-63.

Foley, Helene. “The Masque of Dionysus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 110 (1980): 107-33.

Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969.

Kristal, Efraín. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998.

Mayer, Enrique. “Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's ‘Inquest in the Andes’ Reexamined.” Cultural Anthropology 6.4 (November 1991): 466-504.

Mujica Pinilla, Ramón. “La Utopía Arcaica: Mario Vargas Llosa y la negación occidental del mundo andino.” Revista Debate 19.94 (Mayo-Junio 1997): 40-44.

———. Interview. By María Rita Corticelli. Lima, Peru (September 3, 1997).

Penuel, Arnold. “Intertextuality and the Theme of Violence in Vargas Llosa's Lituma en los Andes.” Revista de estudios hispánicos 29.3 (Octubre 1995): 441-60.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. “Una nueva lectura de Hombres de maíz.” Hombres de maíz (Edición crítica). Ed. Gerald Martin. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1977. xvii-xx.

———. Historia de Mayta. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.

———. “Latin America: Fiction and Reality.” On Modern Latin American Fiction. Ed. John King. NY: The Noonday Press, 1987. 1-17.

———. El hablador. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987.

———. “Questions of Conquest.” Harper's (December 1990): 45-53.

———. Lituma en los Andes. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1993.

———. Desafíos a la libertad. México: Aguilar, 1994.