Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)

The Inscription of Masculinity and Whiteness in the Autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa
Author(s): Robert Richmond Ellis
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 223-236
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS)
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BullLatinAm.Res..Vol.17,No.2, pp.223-236,1998
Ltd
Science
Published
Studies.
forLatinAmerican
byElsevier
? 1998Society
inGreatBritain
Printed
Allrightsreserved.
$19.00+ 0.00
0261-3050/98

Pergamon

PII: S0261-3050(97)00089-2

The
in

of

Inscription
the

of

Autobiography

Robert
Occidental

College,

and

Masculinity
Mario

Richmond

Vargas

Whiteness
Llosa

Ellis

1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles,

CA 90041-3314,

USA

Abstract ? This essay examines the interconnectedness of whiteness and heterosexual

masculinity in the autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, El pez en el agua \_AFish in the
Water]. In this text Vargas Llosa critiques Peruvian racism and machismo, and in his
self-portrait attempts to distance himself from the categories of whiteness and masculinity.
But in so doing he in fact obscures the workings of race and gender not only in Peruvian
society but in his own writing, where the self is implicitly asserted in opposition to an image of
nature as the realm of the indigenous and the feminine. ? 1998 Society for Latin American
Studies. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Key words ? Vargas Llosa, autobiography, whiteness, masculinity, homosexuality

The autobiography
of Mario Vargas Llosa, El pez en el agua [A Fish in the Water] can be
read as the capstone in a novelistic enterprise that he himself defines as autobiographical
in
thrust.1 Yet while traditional autobiographers
write in an ostensible
effort to inscribe the
self and in so doing hold it up to the reading public, novelists,
he claims, write with the
intention

of covering up the self. In a now famous statement he contrasts the writer of fiction
with a strip-tease artist: 'en un strip-tease la muchacha esta al principio vestida y al final
desnuda. La trayectoria es la inversa en el caso de la novela: al comienzo el novelista esta
desnudo y al final vestido' (La historia secreta de una novela [The secret history of a novel]
7) [in a strip-tease the girl is at first dressed and in the end naked. The trajectory is the
reverse in the case of the novel: at first the novelist is naked and in the end he is dressed
as a masculine undertaking
aimed at
(trans. mine)]. Vargas Llosa interprets fiction-writing
as
the
and
whereas
the
he
identifies
whom
female,
concealing
writing-subject,
stripper,
exposes herself to an objectifying gaze, the male writer shields himself from scrutiny in order
to avoid objectification
In La tia Julia y el escribidor
\Aunt Julia and the
altogether.
his own project of rhetorical
concealment
Scriptwriter]
Vargas Llosa undermines
by
a series of fictional narratives with an autobiographical
account of his first
intertwining
marriage to his aunt. This text can be seen as a postmodernist
pastiche that shatters the
boundaries

fictional and autobiographical

discourses.2
But with the
separating
of El pez en el agua it can also be viewed as the beginning of a disengagement
of
from fiction and an attempt to disclose a life history and thereby make
autobiography
visible a camouflaged
textual subject. Yet despite its autobiographical
pact (with its
generic

hindsight

of the writing subject and the subject of the written text and its concomitant
El pez en el agua cloaks the autobiographical
truth-claim),
persona in what might be
called the gender and racial 'drag' of masculinity
and whiteness.
These signs of identity
are represented
as invisible,
but rather than allow the reader to see through
the
conflation

224

Robert

Richmond

Ellis

self, they in fact work to deflect the reader's gaze onto the binary
autobiographical
opposites of femininity and colour. The structures of sexuality and race that Vargas Llosa
purports to attack thus remain intact.
Like La tia Julia, El pez en el agua delineates two distinct narratives: in the former, Vargas
Llosa interweaves fiction and life history, while in the autobiography
he juxtaposes chapters
on his 1990 campaign for the presidency of Peru with a narration of his childhood
and
adolescence.
Here the personal and the social not only mirror one another but are the two
sides of a private/public,
inside/outside
through which hierarchy is constructed
dichotomy
and enforced. The primary sites of dichotomisation
are the home, the school, and the
within the larger spatial
brothel, though in the final analysis all three are subsumed
of Europe and Peru, and civilisation and nature. The dynamic that holds them
oppositions
in place is violence, of which Vargas Llosa as a child is an innocent victim.
In the narration of childhood
and adolescence,
Vargas Llosa charts the mechanisms
which
made. Like many traditional Peruvian
is
fashioned
and
men
are
through
masculinity
and in
writers, he equates the facticity of maleness with masculinity,
as synonymous
turn posits masculinity
with male heterosexuality.3
His representation
of
and
in
the
is
nevertheless
unusual
that
it
relation
between
gender
sexuality
highlights
heterosexual
masculinity and its perceived contrary: homosexual
femininity. In El pez en el
and Latin American

agua homosexual
femininity not only haunts heterosexual masculinity but actually precedes
it in the textual subject of Mario. To be sure, Vargas Llosa does not identify his autobio?
graphical persona as gay, but the child's actions and mere presence incite the virulent
of the father. In Mario femininity is a given, a seemingly natural condition
homophobia
from
reconstituted
as masculine
but that continually
threatens to subvert masculinity
within. The father, as the grim agent of masculinisation,
literally beats any queerness out of
the son for the supposed purpose of saving him from homosexuality
and the powerlessness
entailed in his notion ofthe feminine. His violence, a 'cruel love' intended to make possible
the son's accession
to his own position
of power (something
that the son eventually
achieves, although not through physical violence but by writing), in the short run elicits only
fear and loathing, and leads the son to regard his childhood home as the most abnormal in
all the world (52).
The abnormality

ofthe father,
In fact, it is symptomatic
violence. At the outset of El pez
father is a misguided
reaction
Llosa.

however, is not so peculiar in the Peru depicted by Vargas

of what he regards as an inherent, national proclivity to
en el agua he maintains that the domestic violence of the
to his class status as a poor white and to his implicit

identification,
through class inferiority, with the cholo (mestizo) and the Indian. Yet any
Indianness in this blond-haired,
blue-eyed man is clearly only figurative, and in keeping
with a widespread Latin American perception of race Vargas Llosa suggests that race itself
is not a fixed determinant
of social class but rather a marker of social inequities that can
exist irrespective

ofthe biological

race of either the oppressor

or the oppressed.

As he puts it,

Blanco y cholo son terminos que quieren decir mas cosas que raza o etnia: ellos situan a la
de
persona social y economicamente,
y estos factores son muchas veces los determinantes
a las circunstancias
la clasificacion.
Esta es flexible y cambiante,
y a los
supeditada
vaivenes de los destinos particulares. Siempre se es blanco o cholo de alguien. (11)
IBlanco [white] and cholo are terms that refer to other things besides race or ethnic
and many times these factors are
group: they situate a person socially and economically,
the ones that determine

his or her classification.

This latter is flexible

and can change,

Inscription

of masculinity

on circumstances
and the vicissitudes
depending
blanco or cholo in relation to someone else. (5)]

and whiteness
of individual

225
destinies.

One is always

Here Vargas Llosa insightfully recognises the relationality

of race, yet he ignores how white
racism functions independently
of social class. He further argues that racial prejudice is not
unidirectional
but operates across a wide range of racial and ethnic lines.
Es un grave error, cuando se habla de prejuicio racial y de prejuicio social, creer que estos
el blanco al
se ejercen solo de arriba hacia abajo; paralelo al desprecio que manifiesta
cholo, al indio y al negro, existe el rencor del cholo al blanco y al indio y al negro, y de
cada uno de estos

tres ultimos a todos los otros. (12)

[It is a grave error, when discussing racial and social prejudices in Peru, to believe that
they act only from the top down; parallel to the contempt that the white shows toward
the mestizo, the Indian, and the black, there exists the bitterness ofthe mestizo against the
white and the Indian and the black, and of each one of these latter three against all the
others.

(6)]

In this passage Vargas Llosa seeks to substitute the image of a vertical racial hierarchy ('the
But in so doing he does less to situate the
top down') with one of parallel racial antagonisms.
racism.
races on an even plane of action than to obscure the enormity of white-Peruvian
a
mask
that
hatreds
with
racial
a
nation
Llosa
deep and
fraught
Vargas
presents
intractable class conflict. He locates the origin of this conflict not only in concrete, material
? or
conditions
but in 'sentimientos,
perhaps it would
pulsiones o pasiones' (12) ['feelings
be more accurate to speak of impulses or passions' (6)]. Ultimately,
however, he abandons
for what amounts to a kind of biological
determinism,
arguing
psychological
speculation
that the dynamic of prejudice and hence violence itself 'se mama con la leche materna
y empieza a formalizarse desde los primeros vagidos y balbuceos del peruano' (12) ['is taken
in with one's mother's milk and begins to be shaped from the time of the Peruvian's first
birth-cry and babblings as a baby' (6)]. 'Race' then is made to reappear as the overdeterminant of Peruvian social life. Yet it is not the race ofthe Indian, the cholo or the white, but
a vague albeit sinister national identity that functions to erase the very real racial distinc?
to all
plague Peru. This identity is a moral defect endemic
the
thus
Llosa
this
in
'Peruvian
the
expresses
Vargas
way,
problem'
By positing
an
inelucin
individuals
time
same
isolates
at
the
but
of
societal
violence
ubiquitousness
that vitiates any effort to achieve communal
table battle for dominance
praxis or effect
tions

and struggles

that

Peruvians.

change.
of
Although Vargas Llosa advances an essentialist paradigm of identity, his conception
race is
From his perspective
a narrow racial essentialism.
race as relational transcends
a position of power that one occupies vis-a-vis the other. This position is forever in flux, and
as a consequence
someone identified as white in a rural context might conversely be labeled
of the signs 'white',
Indian in an urban setting. But regardless of the interchangeability
remains
of Peruvian society
relatively fixed. It
"cholo9, and 'Indian', the racial foundation
positive

might be said, therefore, that Vargas Llosa discerns both

racism and the interactive process of inequality but that he
an illusion
out, as it were, as if racism were somehow
(including those of the Indianised white urban worker and

of
underpinnings
fails to 'see' race itself, whiting it
and all economic
oppressions
the Indian toiling in the Andean
the economic

study of Ruth
mines) were the same. As the recent anthropological
this tendency to evade race is in fact an aspect of whiteness,
demonstrated,

has
Frankenberg
though as Vargas

Robert

226

Richmond

Ellis

in the minds of Peruvian whites. The

writing reveals, race is ever-present
is
racial
text
of
interest
as
a
document
of
precisely insofar as its subsumption
Vargas Llosa
race within social class shows how whiteness inscribes itself while simultaneously
'covering
Llosa's

own

its tracks'. It is of interest

postmodern
character.

caipitalism,

in terms of class to the extent that social class, in keeping with

of national
even made to disappear
in the shadows

is itself

According to Vargas Llosa's reading of the past, the violence of the father results from his
inherent rancour as a Peruvian as well as a desire to save his son from femininity and by
extension
Yet by positing the young Mario as feminine and, as such,
homosexuality.
the
father
forces
him to assume the same position of Indianness that he, as his
powerless,
wife's social inferior, had previously been made to occupy. The son thus becomes a means
through which the gender and racial identity of the father is affirmed. Ironically, the only
possible reaction that both the child and the adult life-writer seem capable of imagining is
a corresponding
assertion
of masculinity
and whiteness,
an option denied the abused
mother on the grounds of sex but in principle available to the son. What is impossible is any
collective resistance to oppression, either by the mother and son in unison or by the son and
other males. The world of Vargas Llosa is hence one of every man for himself. It is also one
in which women

and non-whites,

while pitied by the white-male

writer, remain

silent and

objectified.

ABNORMAL

HOUSES

The young Mario is ten years old when he meets his father for the first time. Prior to this
pivotal event in his life he lived with his mother and her family in Bolivia and provincial
Peru, believing that his father had died before he was born. When his father suddenly
reappears in their lives, he takes Mario and his mother from their home in Piura, to Lima.
For Mario this marks the end of an idyllic childhood and the beginning of a nightmare of
and verbal abuse from which death itself seems the only possible escape. Mario first
the awesome power of the patriarch through the 'ojos de luz cortante' (51) ['steely
look in his eyes' (47)], which, like the Medusa-gaze
of the Sartrean Other, functions to
reduce its prey to silence and inertia. Mario nevertheless resists his father by ignoring his
orders, and in one gesture of rebellion begins to attend church, not out of religious
physical
discerns

conviction

but in express defiance of his father's anti-clericalism

and disdain for kneeling
before 'men in skirts'. For doing so, however, he is ruthlessly punished: 'Sin decir palabra,
me pego una cachetada que me derribo al suelo, me volvio a pegar y luego me metio al auto
a empellones,
donde empezo a decir estas terribles palabrotas que me hacian sufrir tanto
como sus golpes. Y, en la casa, mientras me hacia pedirle perdon, me siguio pegando, a la
vez que me advertia que me iba a enderezar, a hacer de mi un hombrecito,
pues el no
su
fuera
el
maricueca
habian
criado
los
Llosa'
permitiria que
hijo
que
(54) ['Without a word,
he gave me such a hard slap on the face that it threw me to the ground; he hit me again and
then pushed me into the car, where he began to say those terrible dirty words that made
me suffer as much as his blows. And, once we got back home, as he forced me to beg his
pardon, he went on beating me, as he warned me that he was going to straighten me out,
to make a little man of me, because he would not allow his son to be the sissy the Llosas
had raised' (50)].
This is but one instance of abuse suffered by Mario. In fact, the dynamics of Vargas
Llosa's childhood family follow a typical pattern of domestic violence: the father beats the

Inscription

of masculinity

227

and whiteness

and son; the two flee to the home of one of her relatives; several days pass and they
the
violence resumes. On one occasion, Mario's father actually kidnaps him, an act
return;
which the son mistakenly
of paternal love. But the father's
interprets as a demonstration
violence is unyielding,
and the object that comes to emblematise
their family home, and
mother

indeed

Mario's

childhood
and adolescence,
is the revolver with which his father
to kill him, along with his mother and her sheltering relatives, whom he
como decir que de
spoiled his son and fostered in him 'mariconerias

entire

threatens

repeatedly
blames for having
grande seria torero y poeta' (63) ['fancy-pants
I'd be a bullfighter and a poet' (59)].

ideas like saying

that when I was grown

up

The father's apprehension

regarding poetry is not as absurd as it sounds, since it is
discovers
the most effective
precisely through writing that the young Mario eventually
means of challenging
his tyranny and authority. As Vargas Llosa explains, 'Escribir esos
poemas era otra de esas maneras secretas de resistir a mi padre, pues sabia cuanto le irritaba
la bohemia y lo que mas
que yo escribiera versos, algo que el asociaba con la excentricidad,
podia horrorizarlo: la mariconeria' (69) ['To write poems was another ofthe secret ways of
resisting my father, since I knew how much it irritated him that I wrote verses, something he
associated with eccentricity, bohemia, and what could horrify him most: being queer' (66)].
this comment begs the larger question of why Mario
Though apparently straightforward,
is what
does not decide to be gay, if defying the father is his primary goal and homosexuality
that the adult Vargas Llosa is
abhors. Were it not common knowledge
straight, readers of the narrative of childhood
might expect such an outcome, especially
the
of
given
repetition
gay-related
epithets (pansy, sissy, queer) invoked to describe his
childhood persona. Queerness actually presents itself in this context not as an essence either
the father most

to be.realised

or repressed but as the possibility of a rebellion that Mario implicitly rejects.

His identification
as a heterosexual,
however, results less from any conscious choice on his
that continually
absorbs and
part as from a patriarchal (and racial and class) mechanism
erases difference and diffuses potentially subversive acts in ways that rebels themselves are
unable even to recognise.
a position
of difference.

Mario does attempt to rebel through writing and thereby to assert

Yet his writing is not all that different, much less queer, but is
instead a re-enactment,
albeit in far more subtle and sophisticated
terms than those of his
father, ofthe very dynamics of masculinity, whiteness, and class privilege that as an abused
child he himself intuitively detested. Vargas Llosa will lay claim to the title of parricide
(346/342),
world.

but the father will live on in him and in his own masculinist

way of writing

the

It is ultimately not in the childhood home but in the larger sphere ofthe military academy
that Mario is finally 'straightened
out'. The elder Vargas had often threatened him with
and
in
the
internment,
end, like so many fathers of his social class whose sons were
military
inhibidos
o
de mariconeria'
'discolos, rebeldes,
rebellious,
sospechosos
(101) ['disobedient,
or
of
he
felt little compunction
in submitting his child
inhibited,
suspected
being queer' (97)],
to a brutal regime of terror. In contrast to the domestic violence that the extended family at
least ostensibly condemned,
the violence of the academy is not only officially tolerated but
In what Vargas Llosa describes as that 'gran oceano de indios, cholos, negros
condoned.
y mulatos' (103) ['vast ocean of Indians, mestizos, blacks, and mulattos' (99)] wherein he
and the other whites constitute a small minority, acts of hazing, like the abuse perpetrated
of deep resentments
and ancient social
by his socially inferior father, are expressions
hatreds.

The idiom

feminise

and Indianise

of this violence

is machismo,
an instrument
both to
that functions
the other. According to Vargas Llosa, the violence of the military

Robert

228

Richmond

Ellis

academy is not freely chosen but obeys the Darwinian law ofthe jungle. He conceives of this
The academy, nonethe?
law, as he does the Peruvian national identity, as overdetermining.
less, like the house ofthe patriarch and like capitalist society in general, is a constructed site
necessary for the realisation of any 'natural' order of violence. Vargas Llosa manages to
of the academy, but by grounding it in an essential law he in reality
the possibility of ever overcoming
it.
In depicting the military academy, Vargas Llosa highlights its dual sidedness. On the
the students regulate themselves by replicating
inside, as in the Foucauldian
Panopticon,
the hierarchies of power operative on the outside. The most powerful is the most macho,
disclose

the violence

diminishes

and the most macho is the one who succeeds in escaping from the school. To escape, or tirar
contra (literally 'to go against' but used to mean 'to go over' the wall), is a ritual whereby the
bravest sneaks out and returns without being caught. The goal of the contrero (the one who
goes 'against', or 'over' and 'out') is to situate himself through his daring in a position of
superiority vis-a-vis the other students and the guardians of the institution. Escape, there?
of power. The expression tirar
fore, is not a gesture of freedom but instead a reconfiguration
contra is itself telling in that it emphasises oppositionality
rather than actual liberation. Like
all ofthe boys, the contrero occupies a 'contra' or contrary position with regard to his fellow
and the staff, and his 'outing' in no way threatens the institution but simply reveals
the 'inside/outside'
binary structure through which prison power is organised. The contrero
is also known as a loco [crazy one], but this term is also deceiving since not for a moment
of
does he deviate from the 'logic' of the military institution,
which is the maintenance
hierarchy. The objective of the loco, like that of the future soldier, is to break the will of the
students

other, as occurred with one boy who, as a result ofthe constant taunts initiated by the most
unrestrained of the locos, 'llego a convertirse en una posma, sin iniciativa, sin voz y casi sin vida'
(106) [finally turned into a sluggard, with no initiative, voiceless and almost lifeless' (102)].
The military students not only harass each other but occasionally
even the teachers. One
of these is Cesar Moro, a poet and intellectual whom Vargas Llosa later comes to admire.
At the time, however, he joins with his fellow students in deriding him for his perceived
effeminacy and the rumors that he is both a poet and gay. The mindset of the school thus
duplicates that ofthe father's house, only here Mario is not the object of abuse but one of its
With hindsight
Vargas Llosa views his former teacher with compassion,
perpetrators.
he
still
fails
to
his real struggle: 'El profesor Moro soportaba nuestras
though
comprehend
como si lo
diabluras y groserias con estoicismo,
y, se diria, con una secreta complacencia,
divirtiera que esos precoces salvajes lo insultaran....
Debia ser para el uno de esos juegos
a que los surrealistas
eran tan propensos,
una manera de ponerse a prueba
arriesgados
de
su
la
limites
los
de
los
fortaleza
y explorar
y
estupidez humana a escala juveniT
propia
(113) ['Professor Moro put up with our deviltry and rudeness with stoicism, and, it might
even be said, with a secret pleasure, as though it amused him that these little savages
insulted him. For him, it must have been one of those risky games that the Surrealists were so
inclined toward, a way of testing oneself and exploring the limits of one's own fortitude and
those of human stupidity on a juvenile scale' (109)]. This risky
with Surrealism than with trying to hold onto a job in a hostile
Moro's situation is the classic double bind ofthe harassed gay
and hence complicitous
with his tormentors, or he can report

game, of course, has less to do

Indeed,
working environment
or lesbian: he can remain silent

them and in so doing risk even

greater peril by drawing attention to the sexuality for which he is being attacked.4
In his childhood house Mario is the victim of masculinity, whereas in the school he is its
accomplice, partaking in collective acts of harassment, as in the classroom of Cesar Moro.

Inscription

of masculinity

and whiteness

229

and at
But in reality he occupies a middle zone between the loco and the huevon [chicken],
to
for his fellow-students
times assumes the role of intermediary
by composing love-letters
from
the transition
send to their girlfriends.
writing he in fact commences
Through
in heterochildhood femininity to adult masculinity,
along with his gradual apprenticeship
in escaping to the local brothels, and it is in
sexuality. Eventually, he joins his companions
From the
is completed.
this third space that the construction
of heterosexual
masculinity
When he was a child, the
outset, however, he expresses a dual attitude towards prostitution.
his
And during adolescence,
word puta [whore] filled him with both horror and fascination.
as
a
for
well
a
source
of
as
with
are
having
guilt
nagging
pleasure
experiences
prostitutes
of poor women.
participated in the degradation
his university
After leaving the military academy but before beginning
studies, Mario
a
in
there
he
is
a
Piura.
While
in
Lucho
the
home
of
his
Uncle
frequent visitor to
spends
year
in his
the local bordello, the Casa Verde, or the Green House, which will figure prominently
later novels. He recalls it with a surprising degree of nostalgia. It is his view that in recent
but that
and impoverished
permissiveness
years sex has been trivialised
by widespread
sex was
during his youth, because of the greater restrictions placed on sexual expression,
and
the
a
Like
the
sacred
home
school, Vargas
experience.
actually
privileged and even
Yet in contrast to the
Llosa configures the brothel in terms of an 'inside/outside'
dichotomy.
former two, he remembers it not as a reflection of larger social conflicts but as an idealised
site beyond society, where for a few short hours he might live a life apart. In his reminisviolence that permeates the
is free from the masculine
cences, the house of prostitution
home and the school, and in a sense it represents the feminine world that his father's house,
despite the presence of the mother, never was. It also possesses a 'queer', non-hierarchical
dimension, not only because ofthe gay men who work as waiters and bouncers but because
? whores,
? all interact
everyone
Vargas
harmoniously.
johns, gays, musicians, cooks
Llosa calls it 'happy and poetic', with poetic signalling precisely what his father feared most:
not gay sex per se but a loosening
of the binary structures
through which hierarchy is
maintained.

In the final analysis, Vargas Llosa paints it as a kind of natural utopia,

its
highlighting
green colour and its liminal position at the edge ofthe town, near the river.
To be sure, he is aware that memory and nostalgia can embellish the past, and after leaving
Piura he would regret having frequented the Casa Verde like a 'contemptible
bourgeois'.
his embellishment
of the brothel in El pez en el agua is itself a gesture of
Nonetheless,
masculinity and an erasure of masculine oppression where it is most concrete: on the body
of the female sex worker. The naturalness of the Casa Verde, moreover,
can be perceived
in opposition
to its urban contrary of Piura. As Vargas Llosa writes, he and the
often
had
sex out of doors because of the insufficient
number of beds. But, 'La
prostitutes
incomodidad
estaba compensada
por la tibia atmosfera azulina de las noches piuranas, de
tiernas lunas Uenas, y sensuales curvas de medanos entre los que se divisaban titilando, al
otro lado del rio, las luces de la ciudad' (193) ['The lack of comfort was compensated
for by
solely

the warm bluish atmosphere

of Piuran nights,-with the soft light of the moon when it was
full and the sensual curves ofthe dunes amid which one caught glimpses, on the other side of
the river, of the twinkling
These sandy dunes, outside the
lights of the city' (189-190)].
already exteriorised
gaze with
space of the brothel, are endowed through his masculine
a feminine quality (the sensual curves) and re-connected
to the interiorised
space ofthe city
which he never leaves behind, just as he never left the school even when tirando contra and
his most daring escapes. More significant than the adolescent's
machismo,
performing
however, is that of the adult life-writer who continues to east the scene in semi-darkness,

230

Robert

Richmond

Ellis

for the ostensible

recycling the conventional
imagery of Romanticism
his youthful sexuality while simultaneously
obscuring the conditions
the commodification
of women.5

purpose of expressing
of
and consequences

In the spatial configuration

of El pez en el agua, the masculine is equated with the social
(and even the domestic itself) whereas the feminine is identified with the natural. Femininity,
as well as its susceptibility
to masculine inscription, in fact increases with distance from the
explicitly social. Mario learns to read 'feminine nature' in the company of his Uncle Lucho,
In
the 'good father' who, for a year at least, eclipses the role of his biological progenitor.
contrast

to the latter, his uncle encourages

him to become a writer, and during their
the
while
Lucho
attends to the business of his farms, Mario
through
countryside,
to
invent
'de
stories
estruendosas
begins
y rusticas
pasiones entre jovenes hacendados
and
between
landowners
apanadoras' (185) ['about earth-shaking
young
peasant
passions

excursions

girls who picked cotton' (182)]. Surprisingly, Mario fails to notice the parallelism between
these stories and the accounts of his previous schoolmates
who provoked such uneasiness in
him when boasting of having raped the chola servants working in their houses. Those
occurred in the hostile environment
of Lima. In the natural landscape
events, nevertheless,
? the little huts made of
Piura
that
Mario
with
of
of
observes
his uncle, any image
injustice
?
wild reeds and clay, for instance
is tempered by a promise of freedom and possibility: 'yo
de espacio, ese horizonte
un hirviente impulso.
Esa amplitud
sentia gran excitacion,
ilimitado ? de cuando en cuando aparecian, como sombras de gigantes, los contrafuertes
de epicas anecdotas, y eran
de los Andes ? me llenaba la cabeza de ideas aventureras,
las historias y los poemas que planeaba escribir usando ese escenario, poblana seething impulse. That vast space, that boundless
(201) ['I felt great excitement,
horizon ? every so often the lower ranges ofthe Andes appeared, like the shadows of giants
? filled
ideas, with epic tales, and the number of stories and
my head with adventurous
To Mario
I
to
write
this
setting,
using
planned
peopling it, was endless' (198-199)].
poems
the natural world at first seems empty and undefined, but when he looks more closely
These
the Andes.
into the quintessence
of Peruvian
nature coalesces
geography,
are not unmediated
mountains
but appear in terms of a cultural fiction, the myth
incontables
dolo'

and power. Yet rather than

of hierarchy
of giants, which is itself a representation
Nature
is therefore given as an illusion
actual giants they are but their shadows.
through whose mists a fiction is gradually made visible. By writing, Mario will attempt to
is one
that this undertaking
realise, as it were, the fiction of giants. He recognises
either since he does not
without ending, though strictly speaking it has no beginning
through which it is reproduced. As the
turn, generating stories, poems, and ideas, nature (and
as
and occupied.
His writing career hence functions
degree coextensive with the Peruvian historical project
that his father and
itself. As a consequence,
he comes to assume the role of dominance
military instructors so desperately sought to inculcate in him. Ironically, this is achieved not

the imaginary but is instead

of his imagination
begin to
indeed his own head) is filled in
a project of colonisation
to a certain

invent

the instrument

wheels

through
Lucho.

TRAVELS

their crude

and unbridled

violence

but under

the guidance

of the gentle

Uncle

OF A WRITER-POLITICIAN

During late adolescence,

Vargas Llosa
a French magazine
and to his delight

submits a short story to a contest sponsored

by
wins the first prize: a trip to Paris. His earliest

Inscription

of masculinity

and whiteness

231

as a writer is thus granted not by his home-country

but Europe. In fact, it is
that
the
French
Llosa
begins to develop a sense of
through
literary establishment
Vargas
a
writer.
what
he
believes
to be a new vision oflife and
He furthermore acquires
authority as
with
of
the world.6 He compares his experience in France
that
Julio Cortazar: 'El tambien
una perception
de lo
sentia que Paris habia dado a su vida algo profundo e impagable,
validation

mejor de la experiencia humana, cierto sentido tangible de la belleza' (464) ['He too felt that
Paris had given something profound to his life that could never be repaid: a perception of
what was best in human experience; a certain tangible sense of beauty' (457)]. In adopting
this perspective, Vargas Llosa chooses Europe as the privileged vantage point for seeing and
the world. The upshot of his choice will ultimately be realised in a manner that the
Peru in postMario
could never have imagined, when years later he abandons
young
election defeat and assumes European citizenship. For the moment, however, his identifica?
and he subsequently
embarks on a voyage of discovery of
tion with Europe is postponed,
knowing

his own native land.

Several years later, Vargas Llosa journeys to the Alto Maranon region of the Amazon.
This expedition, he maintains, was the most fruitful of his entire life, providing him with the
raw material for three of his novels, including La casa verde [The Green House]. In the
natural site bordered
jungle setting, the artificial green of the Piuran brothel, a supposedly
flora. The
Amazonian
the
of
in
the
the
town, reappears
all-encompassing
organic green
by
riven
zone, at once free while even more thoroughly
jungle is nevertheless a contradictory
all
of'civilised'
with the law of violence permeating the home, the school, and by extension
de la Amazonia,
Peru: 'descubrir la potencia del paisaje todavia sin domesticar
y el mundo
en el Perii urbano, me dejo
aventurero,
primitivo, feroz y de una libertad desconocida
sobre los extremos de salvajismo
Tambien, me ilustro de manera inolvidable
total a que podia llegar la injusticia para ciertos peruanos' (472) ['discovering
and its adventure-filled,
power of the still untamed landscape of Amazonia,
in
urban
left
me filled with amazeunknown
with
a
freedom
fierce
Peru,
world,
primitive,
me in an unforgettable
ment. It also enlightened
way with regard to the extremes of
savagery and total impunity to which injustice might lead for certain Peruvians' (465)]. In
the Amazon, Vargas Llosa is not on new ground and, though he implicitly recognises this,
he persists in reading the jungle, as he does the landscapes
Piura, from the
surrounding
maravillado.

e impunidad
the awesome

and
of it as an untouched
that conceives
of an aesthetic
of colonisation
perspective
unlimited source of literary capital: 'desplego ante mis ojos un mundo en el que, como en las
grandes novelas, la vida podia ser una aventura sin fronteras, donde las audacias mas
casi siempre riesgo, cambio
tenian cabida, donde vivir significaba
inconcebibles
perrios
unos
manente. Todo ello en el marco de
y unas lagunas que parecian los del
bosques,
paraiso terrenal. Ello volveria una y mil veces a mi cabeza en los anos siguientes y seria una
inagotable fuente de inspiracion para escribir' (472) ['it unfolded before my eyes a world in
which, as in great novels, life could be an adventure with no frontiers, where there was room
feats of daring, where living almost always meant risk, boldness,
for the most inconceivable
? all within the framework of forests, rivers, and lakes that seemed like
permanent change
those of Paradise on Earth. It would come back to my mind a thousand and one times in
for my writing'
source of inspiration
and would be an inexhaustible
Peruvian
ofthe
the
'El
Dorado'
This
writer, is
white,
house',
20th-century
'green
(465-466)].
and
of civilisation
the very fulcrum of the classic Latin American literary opposition
riveted
and
forever
barbarism: it is primitive and enlightening,
changing
yet
angelic,
savage
as the object of someone else's narrative gaze.
years

to come

Robert

232

Richmond

Ellis

of the journeys to France and the Amazon are followed in El pez en el

The recollection
agua by the last of the campaign chapters, in which Vargas Llosa recounts his final defeat in
his bid for the presidency of Peru by Alberto Fujimori. He blames his loss on the politics of
race, and in reflecting on the end of the campaign he returns to the racial themes introduced
He highlights concrete instances of racism in modern
at the beginning of his autobiography.
society and contends
such Latin American countries
Peruvian

that race relations

as Mexico

than in
in Peru are more exacerbated
over the centuries has
that all Peruvians are

as racial mixing
chapter, he insists

insofar

been less complete. But just as in his opening

the perniciousness
of white
equally racist, thereby mitigating
as
as
their
racial
malign
racially oppressed
oppressors.

racism

and rendering

the

According to Vargas Llosa, his campaign is derailed by what he sees as the demagoguery
of the non-white majority
of Fujimori, who manages to paint himself as the representative
the
of the minority
Llosa
as
of Peruvians,
while pigeon-holing
Vargas
spokesperson
white-elite. Yet Vargas Llosa's observations
reveal more about his own perception of race
than they do about his opponent. He argues, for example, that the non-white majority of
voters, 'al votar por un amarillo contra un blanco (es lo que parece que soy, en el mosaico de
las razas peruanas) cumplia un acto de solidaridad y de desquite etnicos' (509) ['by voting
for a yellow man against a white one (that is what it appears that I am, in the mosaic of
Peruvian races), they were engaging in an act of ethnic solidarity and retaliation' (502)].
Racial politics aside, the most striking aspect of this comment is the hesitation on the part of
Llosa to identify himself as white. His race only 'appears' (and then only parenof the self-serving and false rhetoric of his political rival. The
thetically) as a consequence
del Peru
upshot is that he is not 'raced', even if, to his apparent surprise, 'los blanquitos
parecian apoyar como un solo bloque mi candidatura' (508) ['my candidacy had seemed to
enjoy the support ofthe 'whites' of Peru en bloc' (502)]. Clearly, Vargas Llosa prefers not to
Vargas

whiteness as an aspect of his own identity, and to be sure, his eye is better
acknowledge
attuned to shades of brown and black. What proves more significant, however, is that the
non-whites
in his midst are completely
unambivalent
about their racial status and its
meaning within Peruvian society.
In an effort to denounce
the worsening
economic
condition
of Peru, Vargas Llosa
invokes a menacing,
snake-like image of 'los pueblos jovenes y barrios marginales
que
habian avanzado por los desiertos y los cerros hasta convertirse en un gigantesco cinturon
de pobreza y miseria que apretaba cada vez mas a la vieja Lima' (519) ['the shantytowns
and marginal districts that had crept across the deserts and the mountains
until they had
turned into a gigantic belt of poverty and misery that squeezed the old [i.e. white] part of
Lima more and more tightly' (513)]. This benighted Peru, unlike the white Peru whose face
has remained indistinct throughout the text, finally reveals itself to Vargas Llosa in a scene
reminiscent of all the horror as well as the racism of such classics of European imperialism
as Heart of Darkness. The setting is the beloved and 'natural' Piura of Vargas Llosa's
adolescence,

where he now travels

to stage a final rally for votes.

de palos y piedras y todo tipo de armas contundentes,

me salio al encuentro una
enfurecida
de hombres y mujeres, las caras descompuestas
por el odio, que
parecian venidos del fondo de los tiempos, una prehistoria en la que el ser humano y el
animal se confundian,
pues para ambos la vida era una ciega lucha por sobrevivir.
con unos pelos y unas larguisimas, por los que no habia pasado jamas una
Semidesnudos,
para
tijera, rodeados de ninos esqueleticos
y de grandes barrigas, rugiendo y vociferando
Armada
horda

Inscription

of masculinity

and whiteness

233

darse animos, se lanzaron contra la caravana como quien lucha por salvar la vida o busca
con una temeridad
inmolarse,
que lo decian todo sobre los casi
y un salvajismo
la vida para millones de
a que habia descendido
inconcebibles
niveles de deterioro
peruanos. ?Que atacaban? LDe que se defendian? <LQue fantasmas estaban detras de esos
(520-521)
y navajas amenazantes?
[Armed with sticks and stones and all sorts of weapons to bruise and batter, an infuriated
horde of men and women came to meet me, their faces distorted
by hatred, who
appeared to have emerged from the depths of time, a prehistory in which human beings
and animals were indistinguishable,
since for both life was a blind struggle for survival.
garrotes

Half naked, with very long hair and fingernails never touched
by a pair of scissors,
and shouting to
surrounded by emaciated children with huge swollen bellies, bellowing
vehicles
their
on
the
caravan
of
as though
hurled
themselves
courage up, they
keep
with a rashness and
themselves,
fighting to save their lives or seeking to immolate
a savagery that said everything about the almost inconceivable
to
levels of deterioration
which life for millions of Peruvians had sunk. What were they attacking? What were they
clubs and
from? What phantoms were behind those threatening
defending themselves
knives?(514)]
he used to
In reading this uprising Vargas Llosa employs much of the same vocabulary
describe the jungle years before when he found that 'la prehistoria
estaba aiin viva' (471)
['prehistory was still alive' (465)]. Though his earlier experience provided an inexhaustible
source for his later writing, it blinds him at this critical moment in both his life and that of
the nation. If we are to take him at his word, he Is unable to distinguish
the human other
that appears to him from an animal ? although the status of his own humanity is never in
doubt. As in the military academy (that 'vast ocean of Indians, mestizos,
blacks, and
which
he
himself as
he
it
is
a
law
to
the
Darwinian
law
ofthe
but
detects
mulattos'),
jungle,
a lone fish in 'darkened waters' is not susceptible because of his inherent moral rectitude.
it not for the gravity of the situation, the surprise he reveals at the sight of his
But
unkempt hair and nails might seem a caricature of bourgeois fastidiousness.
within his particular discourse of the natural, the reference to scissors is a bit sinister, as if
there were a need to cut back an appalling outgrowth of nature impinging upon civilisation.
Were

assailants'

Vargas Llosa claims to understand the context of their action (the law ofthe jungle) but not
its motivation.
there is nothing about him that these people could
From his perspective
logically reject, so in the end he attributes their rage to irrational, even mythic causes. Yet
what they attack is not a phantom of some ancient crime, but Vargas Llosa himself as the
bearer of a plan for economic and national recovery that in the final analysis would benefit
not them but the minority white-elite to which he belongs.
the entire text, fail to
These Indianised
haunting
poor, like the spectre of femininity
register a voice, but they nevertheless are able to assert a common action, as a group, that in
a sense contradicts Vargas
are locked in an intractable

Llosa's law ofthe jungle, according to which discrete individuals

struggle for power. Later, as he prepares to leave the country for
in
fact
Europe, 'they'
begin to articulate a voice, shouting at him from a crowd:' iFuera,
out
of here, gringo!' (522)]. Now it is he who is pushed out, though since
gringo!' (529) ['Get
he maintains control of the narrative gaze, he is not really 'outed' in terms of whiteness and
but instead withdraws
from sight by emigrating.
A younger
of
masculinity
generation
Peruvian writers including Jaime Bayly will actually do far more to expose the structures of
dominance
in Peruvian
and
of whiteness
society and to make explicit the interstices

234

Robert

Richmond

Ellis

masculinity by implicating themselves in the workings of race and gender. Vargas Llosa, in
himself very little, and even in exile manages to have the last word
contrast, implicates
? when
executes
his 1992 self-coup and Vargas Llosa concludes El pez en el agua
Fujimori
as if with a self-satisfied 'I told you so'.

RE-VIEWING

THE

FATHER

it is Vargas Llosa's father who wins in the end. Throughout his long
writing career, Vargas Llosa has sought to carry out an extended parricide. But he has
the dynamic of oppositionality
to destroy him as
that threatened
actually internalised
In the novel, No se lo
a child and that now functions as his own means of self-assertion.
digas a nadie [Don't Tell Anyone], Jaime Bayly depicts a similar father-son conflict. Like
In some sense, however,

Mario, his fictional character, Joaquin, is perceived as effeminate by an abusive father bent
on masculinising
him at any cost. Both are subjected to domestic violence and a brutal
school regime. But whereas Mario establishes a straight identity, Joaquin considers himself
gay from the outset. What is more, his adolescent sexual experiences (which also involve
of
prostitutes and sexually predatory priests) differ from the more aestheticised recollections
El pez en el agua and are marked by anguish and violence and at times a fatalism that results
on cocaine. From his position as elder statesman of Peruvian letters,
from his dependency
Llosa
No
as
se lo digas a nadie but chooses to distance himself generationally
Vargas
praises
well as ethically from what he en visions as its unprincipled world ? as if his own childhood
and youth were somehow more anchored in moral values: 'Esta excelente novela describe
con desenvoltura
nihilista y sensual de la nueva
y desde adentro la filosofia desencantada,
novel
excellent
describes
and
within
the disillusioned,
from
nihilist,
generation' [This
boldly
and sensual philosophy
ofthe new generation (dust cover; translations mine)]. As a matter
of fact Bayly's text can be read as disillusioned,
but it also stands as a searing indictment of
racism, sexism, and homophobia.
The Bayly title, 'Don't tell anyone', is an injunction
aimed at silencing a truth. This
conundrum ofthe gay closet or for that matter all secrets,
utterance, like the epistemological
reveals and conceals the truth in question ? in this instance the sexuality of
simultaneously
Joaquin. By breaking the injunction, that is, by refusing to replicate Joaquin's sexuality qua
secret, Bayly not only un-closets gay sexuality and renders it visible but exposes its binary
and in his social milieu, the congruent structures of masculinity
opposite, heterosexuality,
and whiteness. To the extent that gay sexuality is the ostensible secret of the text, what
Bayly outs is sex and gender oppression.
discloses. The reality of Peruvian racism
father, who posits Indianness
Joaquin's
inferiority but as an immutable essence:

is in fact the deeper secret that he

in the words of
is expressed most poignantly
not as a shifting and fluid marker of social
Yet racism

El que nace cholo, muere cholo. Puede ser cholo con plata, cholo blanco, pero el que
nace cholo, muere cholo, y lo demas son cojudeces. (299)
[He who is born a cholo, dies a cholo. He might be a cholo with money, a white cholo,
but he who is born a cholo, dies a cholo, and the rest is a lot of crap.]
Here the 'white cholo9 is not a poor white, like the father portrayed by Vargas Llosa, but the
who has managed to raise his or her economic
status, that is, a 'cholo with
is not erased through
Indianness
the
of
In
the
of
white
Peru, then,
'stigma'
eyes
money'.
It
the
contention
of
the
economic
is
father, moreover, that the cholo
heightened
position.
non-white

Inscription

of masculinity

and whiteness

235

lacks the intelligence necessary for success (299) and therefore must work for the white: 'El
cholo tiene que trabajar para el blanco, hijo, eso es ley' (299) [The cholo must work for the
white, son, that's the law]. Unlike the Darwinian law of the jungle posited by Vargas Llosa,
which sets the races on equal footing as potential oppressors
but implicitly conflates the
non-white
and the non-civilised,
the racial law articulated
in the Bayly text is made to
emanate precisely from the white man in a discourse aimed at justifying exploitation.
In No
se lo digas a nadie whiteness hence becomes visible in the face of the father and audible in
his words: 'Los blancos no queremos a los cholos' (298) [We whites don't like cholos'].
and though he is unable to counter in any
Joaquin sees the racism of the father-figure,
effective way the workings of race in Peruvian society, neither does he allow himself to be
when someone
co-opted
suggests
necesitamos
una esperanza blanca
like you].

that
como

he should take up politics, 'porque en el Peru

tu' (192) [because in Peru we need a white hope

El pez en el agua and No se lo digas a nadie thus represent differing albeit interrelated
expressions of racism. All of the white characters of the Bayly text (with the sole exception of
Joaquin himself) assert an essentialist racism that privileges whiteness over colour. In the
in contrast, rhetorical whiteness moves from an essentialist
Vargas Llosa autobiography,
racism towards what Frankenberg
calls an 'essential sameness' (14), a stance that attempts
to evade race but that is ultimately not only colour blind but inattentive
to the inequalities
of power that continue to operate specifically as a consequence
of white racism. The colour
blindness of Vargas Llosa is not a passive narrative gaze but one that casts a diffuse white
'glare' that in the final analysis hinders readers from seeing their way clear as they attempt
to navigate the racial terrain of Peruvian society. The Bayly narrator, on the other hand,
is more sensitive to racism per se, and though his white text continues to observe rather
than speak from the position of racial alterity, it nonetheless
begins to recognise certain
commonalities
of oppression
between persons of colour, white women, and gay white
men.

NOTES
1. See the speech titled La novela [The Novel], in which Vargas Llosa states: 'Yo creo que todas las novelas son
autobiograficas' (17) [I believe that all novels are autobiographical (trans. mine)].
2. For discussions of the autobiographical aspects of La tia Julia, see Feal (1986) (94-116) and Oviedo (1978).
3. Vargas Llosa does not allow for a distinction between masculinity and maleness or femininity and femaleness,
and as Duncan notes in her Lacanian study of masculinity in Los cachorros [The Cubs\ 'whether technically
homosexual or not, an unmasculine man can only be viewed as a maricon [queerj (313).
4. Mario has a previous encounter with a gay teacher, a priest who tries unsuccessfully to seduce him. This event is
significant in that it leads to his gradual loss of interest in religion. It also reveals his own emerging attitude
towards different kinds of masculinities. He is paralysed by fear in the presence of his father, whereas his
reaction to the priest is one of disgust coupled with angen 'Recuerdo su cara congestionada, su voz tremula, un
hilito de baba en su boca. A el yo no le tenia miedo, como a mi papa. Empece a gritar "iSuelteme, suelteme!"'
(76) [*I remember his congested face, his tremulous voice, a thread of saliva dangling from his mouth. I wasn't
afraid of him, as I was of my papa. I began to shout "Let me go! Let me go!"' (72)].
5. In reading Vargas Llosa's description of the female nude in this passage, Guillermoprieto speaks of his 'ideal
machismo, made up of sharp lust and delicate sentiments' (20), and points out that in his novels, Vargas Llosa is
actually more perspicacious in his representation of life under machismo.
6. Shortly after Mario's arrival in Paris, his literary sponsor makes the mistake of thinking that he will enjoy
visiting a gay bar. In fact, Mario finds the experience disconcerting in spite of his illusion of having freed himself
from all social prejudices.

236

Robert

Richmond

Ellis

REFERENCES
Bayly, J. (1994) No se lo digas a nadie. Seix Barral, Barcelona
Duncan, C. (1994) The splintered mirron male subjectivity in crisis in Los cachorros.In Mario VargasLlosa: Opera
Omnia,ed. A. M. Hernandez de Lopez, pp. 307-318. Pliegos, Madrid.
Feal, R. G. (1986) Novel Lives: the Fictional AutobiographiesofGuillermo CabreraInfante and Mario VargasLlosa.
North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, Chapel Hill.
Frankenberg, R. (1994) White Women, Race Matters: the Social Construction of Whiteness. University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Guillermoprieto, A. (26 May 1994) The bitter education of Vargas Llosa. The New York Review of Books 41(10),
19-24.
Oviedo, J. M. (1978) La tia Julia y el escribidor,or the coded self-portrait In Mario VargasLlosa: a Collection of
Critical Essays, eds C. Rossman and A. W. Friedman, pp. 166-181. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1995) Los cachorros. Catedra, Madrid.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1966) La casa verde. Seix Barral, Barcelona.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1994) A Fish in the Water.a Memoir (trans. H. Lane). Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1971) La historia secreta de una novela. Tusquets, Barcelona.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1974) La novela. America Nueva, Argentina.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1993) El pez en el agua: memorias.Seix Barral, Barcelona.
Vargas Llosa, M. (1977) La tia Julia y el escribidor.Seix Barral, Barcelona.