Mario Vargas Llosa: the fictionalization of history in La guerra del fin del mundo

Abstract

Llosa presents a rewriting and fictionalization of Euclides da Cunha's foundational text Os Sertões. The article relates this novel to the radical change in Mario Vargas Llosa's ideological and political convictions in the 1970s and intends to analyze how the author's neo-liberal positions are reflected in the poetics of this novel. The central argument is that in this process of fictionalization of Euclides da Cunha's text, two strategies can be discovered: the first being the individualization of History, that is, the narrative privileges the subjective experiences of the characters to explain their disposition to violence; the second refers to the fictionalization's paradox of pretending to represent the unrepresentable while letting the reader know that it is just fiction. In other words, the reader has to decide to what extent s/he is willing to identify the narration with the historical "truth". In both cases we are dealing with a poetics that values individual and subjective responsibility instead of the individual's dependence on the collective or the narrative's commitment to objectify history.