The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa and Temptation of the World: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa by Efraín Kristal
David William Foster

Mario Vargas Llosa. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. Trans. Edith Grossman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 259 pp. $23.00; Efraín Kristal. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1998. 256 pp. $34.95.

Erotic fiction in Latin America remains confined to the margins of cultural production. While the reader may find strategically placed erotic encounters in “mainline” fiction, the idea of focusing a work on the erotic is still not widely appreciated. Notebooks is a notable exception: a masterful exploration of the abyss of erotic endeavors. Such explorations constitute an abyss in that, by challenging the conventional morality that narrowly circumscribes them—and the genius of conventional morality is that a modicum of sexual life is constantly transgressing it—one must live with the constant panic of the loss of a legitimate relationship to constituted society. The fact that Don Rigoberto is more of an intellectual eroticist than a Sadeian activist provides the novel with a metafictional dimension which can be viewed as either taming erotic desire by inscribing it with complex narrative structures or as leading to a contemplation of how erotica must necessarily be an intellectual undertaking, since the brain is the one human organ most capable of unlimited sexual fulfillment.

Kristal points out in his fine study that Vargas Llosa’s recent writing, including Notebooks, is concerned with “the importance of imagination and fantasy in curbing those irrational elements that can endanger social coexistence,” that it, I assume, is better to create cultural texts of enormous erotic depth rather than to seek to pursue an erotic program with other bodies, certainly a reendorsement in favor of the latter of eros versus civilization. However, the value of Kristal’s comment is, as he goes on to demonstrate in this finely nuanced examination of Vargas Llosa’s literary output, that the project of containment in Notebooks fails and the irrationality that underpins the pursuit of eroticism cannot ultimately be contained by literature or any other form of sublimation. This may end up effectively challenging the popular image of Vargas Llosa as the 1960s committed-writer-gone-reactionary. But that depends on whether one wants to see this investment in the “inevitability of irrational propensities” as stridently challenging bourgeois decency and order and the authoritarianism they require or as doing little more than entertaining pessimistic, and therefore potentially quite dangerous, male fantasies. [David William Foster]