Tradition, (post)modernity, and decadence in Vargas Llosa’s Lituma en los Andes and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto

Abstract

At the beginning of his essay La civilización del espectáculo, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa states that “la cultura atraviesa una crisis profunda y ha entrado en decadencia�? (13-14). This statement is representative of a rather pessimistic worldview and a keen interest in individual and social pathologies and processes of decline.1 However, the significance of the term “decadence�? within his oeuvre is neither obvious nor coherent, and we do not find a clear definition of the concept by the author himself. This writer normally does not embrace what could be called the aesthetics of decadence.2 In addition, his ultraliberal ideology is opposed to the antimodern attitude displayed by most of the famous theories of decadence (cf. my first contribution to this book). The present chapter aims to shed light on this issue by examining two of his novels with intertextual relationships to key works of nineteenth-century decadent literature. In Lituma en los Andes (1993), the character of Dionisio develops a theory of decadence that can be interpreted as a parody of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872). In Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto (1997), the main character shares many traits with Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884).