Deborah Cohn

McGill University

Critics such as Mary Berg and Arnold Penuel have commented on the ubiquity of intertextual references in Vargas Llosa's 1993 Lituma en los Andes. After a quick overview of the political context within which the novel was written, I will identify a number of these references, focusing on how they revolve around a single theme, a struggle within Peruvian society between forces of "civilization" and "barbarism." For Vargas Llosa enlists the rhetoric of this timeworn debate to underscore the implications of the political crisis and social breakdown in Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In the novel, Vargas Llosa's recurrent character, Lituma, is stationed in the Peruvian sierra during the height of Sendero Luminoso's activity. While keeping tabs on the construction of a road through the mountains, he is caught up in investigating the disappearances of three men from the town. He eventually learns that the men were sacrificed by the townspeople in a resurgence of a pre-Conquest indigenous practice of offering human sacrifices in order to placate the apus or spirits of the mountains for the destruction of land entailed by the construction of roads. The novel was written before Abimael Guzmán was captured, and in the wake of Fujimori's autogolpe. Both in the novel and publicly, Vargas Llosa excoriated the actions of Sendero and the President alike, claiming that the social chaos wrought by both sides had set the nation on a course towards destruction. That he further characterized this as a descent into savagery is evident from the following excerpts from his 1992 essay, "Violencia y ficción." Today, he writes

hay peruanos convencidos de que, volando en pedazos edificios y pulverizando a familias … se repara injusticias y se mejora la condición de los pobres. … 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, … en una palabra, a humanizarse.

The result has been "la gradual barbarización del conjunto de la sociedad." Moreover, with the autogolpe, Vargas Llosa claimed that Peru had "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). His vocabulary implicitly invokes nineteenth-century anthropological paradigms for social evolution which posited that societies evolve from a state of savagery or barbarism to arrive, finally, at the telos of civilization; progress along the continuum is measured in terms of the eradication of violence and the privileging of reason over instinct in order to protect the social order. The return of&emdash;or to&emdash;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 nature of both processes is foregrounded in Lituma en los Andes.

It is against this political and social backdrop that the use of intertextuality in Lituma en los Andes must be explored. Intertextuality pervades the novel and operates at numerous levels. For example, the frontispiece, Picasso's The Minotaur, and the epigraph&emdash;"Cain's City built with Human Blood, / not Blood of Bulls and Goats," from William Blake's The Ghost of Abel&emdash;function as frames which anticipate the novel's classical Greek and biblical intertexts as well as its central themes and motifs: labyrinths, bacchanalia, and human sacrifice. Additionally, interpolated stories such as reworkings of the myths of Dionysus and Ariadna and the Western motif of the plague explore the roots of the instinct-driven behavior whose release threatens society's stability and, ultimately, existence. During the next few minutes, I will focus primarily on these references and the novel's Christian symbolism in order to show how they complement and expand the implications of Vargas Llosa's tale of Peru's decline.

The ascent of primal forces is dramatized in Lituma en los Andes primarily through the use of the myths of Ariadna and Dionysus, both of which converge in the frontispiece, Picasso's The Minotaur, which shows the monster engaged in bacchanalian revelries. Lituma's main suspects are Dionisio, the local bartender, and his wife, Adriana&emdash;an anagram of Ariadna. According to Greek mythology, Ariadna 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 Ariadna, 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, in this case, exacts a yearly tribute in the form of several of the town's virgins; Adriana's first husband 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 the town of Naccos, where Adriana eventually meets (and marries) Dionisio while her first husband disappears.

Adriana's tale renders explicit the 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 as it brings to the foreground the struggle between the forces of civilization and those of savagery that are constantly attempting to undermine them. In Greek mythology, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman who was killed when struck by a lightning bolt from the divinity. He travels around the country accompanied by a group of women, the maenads, introducing wine wherever he goes. Ultimately, he becomes the god of irrational states such as drunkenness and madness; sexual energy; liquids, including wine and the reproductive fluids; and festival or Carnaval in the Bakhtinian sense of a celebration in which the normal social order is 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.

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 sierra with his maenads introducing pisco to the local populations. More importantly, however, is the threat that he, like his namesake, poses to culture's creations, for he reawakens the needs that the social order has tried to repress: as bartender, he plies his customers with alcohol, incites Carnival, and spurs on homosexual liaisons; also, he encourages 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]," and that the couple has reintroduced (104). In this way, the violence 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. Thus Dionysiac impulses collaborate with the political forces that are propelling Vargas Llosa's Peru backwards, towards prior stages of social evolution.

I'd like to take a look at one other 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 which results in the disintegration of civilization as a whole. Revolution is, of course, represented here by the battle between Fujimori's government and Sendero. And Vargas Llosa's statement that this battle had brought 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). But the plague itself appears in the novel, too. It is construed as indigenous superstitions, "irrational" beliefs associated with societies that are less "advanced" in evolutionary terms. For example, when mountain spirits such as the pishtaco&emdash; believed, according to Enrique Mayer, "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)&emdash;are first proposed as possible suspects in the disappearances, 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). In Lima, "robaojos," gringos believed to be kidnapping children and removing their eyes, and figures whom Lituma understands to be the capitol's counterpart to the pishtacos, are tearing the city apart. And, of course, we learn at the end of the novel that the three missing men were sacrificed in a resurgence of belief in similar superstitions. 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 Vargas Llosa argues that the current political crisis has 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 Vargas Llosa shows Naccos' problems to be not just causes but also symptoms of "los diablos y la locura" that are taking over Peru (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, the only thing standing between the town and economic death, was also being jeopardized by the nation's crises.

Targeting indigenous superstitions serves yet another purpose for Vargas Llosa. He has often criticized Peruvians for blaming outsiders for the nation's problems. In Lituma en los Andes, he traces Peru's troubles back to its own roots, showing the contemporary violence to be a direct outgrowth of pre-Conquest indigenous cultures or, following his evolutionary models, a reawakening of instincts from a prior stage in the nation's own social evolution This provenience places the blame for the actions of the Senderistas, the government forces, and the people of Naccos, squarely on the nation and its heritage, refuting any suggestion that foreigners may be responsible.

The final intertextual frame that I would like to consider today is the Christian symbolism that Vargas Llosa uses to frame the deaths in Naccos in order to underscore the magnitude of the wrongdoing. Two of the victims are depicted sympathetically: Pedro, the caretaker of vicuñas, is mute and retarded, emphasizing his innocence, and Demetrio, the former mayor of Andamarca, had attempted to restore order to his town after the Senderistas had incited its inhabitants to accuse and punish one another until the streets were littered with unburied dead. Both are victims three times over: their lives are destroyed figuratively by Sendero and the government well before they are taken literally by the people of Naccos in a sacrificial ritual which deliberately echoes Christ's crucifixion. In Demetrio's case, the killers additionally ate his remains&emdash;textually, they had "comulga[do]" (311). By figuring the act of cannibalism as a rite of communion, the symbolic partaking of Christ's flesh and blood is reliteralized, and the gesture itself is rendered intranscendent and unredemptive. To make matters worse, the sacrifice fails: in the end, a landslide levels 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 hold his town accountable, signals the triumph of evil. And certainly, the death of Demetrio&emdash;that is, of Demeter&emdash;suggests the lack of a harvest of anything other than evil for the nation as a whole.

In the end, violence is the factor which unifies the novel; it is the thematic center around which the intertextual references revolve. Sendero, the Peruvian government, and the town of Naccos are all agents and emblems of the violence&emdash;evidence of the unleashing of instinct&emdash;that has set the nation on a course towards self-destruction. Sendero and government forces alike destroy communities and all hope for the nation's future. And, finally, Naccos commits the ultimate act of human brutality, without really being able to explain why. Efraín Kristal has observed 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 (195)

the acts of Sendero or the government. Several excuses&emdash;including self-defense&emdash;are given by the townspeople for the murders, but none even remotely justifies the act of cannibalism. The men marked by Sendero become convenient sacrificial offerings, and also, in a sense, scapegoats: they are cast as outsiders, blamed for the town's predicament, and expelled from the community&emdash;in this case, simply eliminated&emdash;in order to avert the disaster threatening the town, whether its source is the apus or Sendero.

In the end, 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, his powers of reason unveil reason's own absence as a force guiding human behavior, turning the detective story&emdash;essentially a genre whose successful outcome is predicated on the assumption that a rational explanation for the events in question may be reconstructed&emdash;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).

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&emdash;tantamount to participation in the sacrificial rites&emdash;establishes a pact of solidarity and silence among the participants, uniting people into a community. 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 due to terrorism, anti-terrorism and superstition. And in the end, even it fails when the highway, symbolic of the advent of civilization into the wild space of the mountains, is destroyed by the landslide, and the project, like the town itself, is abandoned.

Throughout this paper, I have focused primarily on Vargas Llosa's rewriting of Western intertexts in his depiction of the breakdown of civilization in Lituma en los Andes. I would like to conclude by identifying a canonical Spanish American novel whose presence in this novel&emdash;however understated&emdash;suggests further ramifications that Vargas Llosa would have this incarnation of the debate over civilization and barbarism have for the region. I am referring to Miguel Angel Asturias' Hombres de Maíz. This novel offers a vision of society in which the traditional representatives of civilization and barbarism are&emdash;as in much primitivist literature&emdash;reversed: he presents Guatemala's indigenous populations as a source of cultural redemption, an antidote to the advent of modernity 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&emdash;short for Dionisio&emdash;rejects his role as mailman, as go-between between 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 his nahual or protective spirit in the Maya tradition reflects his continued contact with 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 nature that 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" ("Masque of Dionysus" 124). To understand this, in turn, is to understand Vargas Llosa's Dionisio, the evil that he incites in Naccos and the deterioration of Peru's social structure as a whole.