Andrei Simuţ

“Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

 

 

Apocalypse, Solipsism, and Millennialism in

The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

 

 

Abstract: The aim of this study is to take a closer look at a particular genre of fiction, namely the post-1945 apocalyptic novel, through a concise analysis of an illustrative example, The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa. We shall underscore the differences between Vargas Llosa’s use of the apocalyptic scenario and the way in which “comic apocalypses” by such authors as Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut envision the possible end of human civilization. We shall focus on the strategies used by the Peruvian novelist in his re-reading of the apocalyptic narrative, including the rise and fall of Antonio the Counselor’s millennialist movement, the misinterpretation of reality used as a poetic principle (and a technique for constructing characters), and also the poetics of paranoia, through which the world and history can be read as “text”. The intention of this study is to distinguish The War of the End of the World from the comic apocalypses of the post-war North American writers and to show their common features (a culture of conspiracy, solipsism, the failure of the apocalyptic prophecy, the clash of interpretations, their metahistorical assumptions).

Keywords: Apocalyptic Novel; Millennialism; Clash of Interpretations; Solipsism; the Promised Land.

 

 

The War of the End of the World is considered to be the best accomplished work by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. It is a novel that belongs to his second phase of creation which consists of the works he published during the 1980’s, a period when the author abandoned his socialist illusions. This neoliberal phase is characterized by the importance of imagination regarded as a strategy to surpass his discontentment with politics, violence and social sistem, but also with fiction, ideology and dogmatism (Kristal, 1999: XIV).

 

Fiction, an Ambiguous Construct

 

There is a certain amount of ambiguity regarding Vargas Llosa’s conception about fiction. On the one hand, he points to a deicidal aspect in the act of fiction, i.e. the writer reconfigurates reality and substitutes god in his fictional world. Vargas Llosa reinstates a Kantian and Romantic idea about genius which nurtured Western culture throughout the nineteenth century but progressively ceased to be functional during the twentieth century. The second half of the previous century championed the end of ideologies, and its growing suspicion with the dogmatic fictions is strikingly visible in The War of the End of the World. Vargas Llosa himself hinted at the numerous similarities between fiction and ideology. Fiction is considered a „seductive lie” and a dogma susceptible of raising fanaticism and violence, “I have nothing against fictions (…) but there are benign and malign fictions, those that enrich human experience and those that impoverish it and are a source of violence” (Kristal, 2005: 284). The interference between literature and ideologies (seen as „seductive lies”) brings Llosa closer to the postmodernists’ rejection of the latter. His entire work has at least one essential feature in common with the works that established the Counterculture during the Sixties: the suspicion regarding all forms of authority. The army, the church, the courts, the political parties are harshly criticized in his novels as a source of oppression, dogmatism, and inhumanity. On the other hand, Llosa is confident in the power of fiction, the equivalent of the foundational deed of civilization. Fictions can offer a way for freedom from the contingencies of an increasingly coercive world. Ideologies are used to establish authority, institutions, and totalitarian systems of thought. As if they were meant to reflect the problematic essence of liberty in the real world, Vargas Llosa’s characters are all caught in a web of inevitable forces that allows them little chances of undermine the System, other than imagination (Munoz, 2000: 26). In The War of the End of The World, fiction represents a vision of salvation, a means of spreading chaos, fanaticism, and a possible way towards the disintegration of reality.

 

Apocalyptic Fictions and “Comic Apocalypses”

 

The post-1945 apocalyptic novel is a genre which could only emerge from the post-war reality and atmosphere. It relies on the poetics of paranoia, solipsism, conspiracy, and the apocalyptic scenario. The apocalyptic novel is a literary form where religion and literature do interfere dramatically and initiate an intense dialogue with surprising and fecund results for the benefit of fiction. However, modern apocalypse has been dramatically secularized. Its religious component has been displaced by fears derived from recent history and typical of the nuclear age, namely the fear that humanity will annihilate itself and the supposition that the entire history may be a set-up. Douglas Robinson distinguishes between five types of apocalyptical hermeneutics: the biblical, the annihilative, the continuative, the ethical, and the romantic hermeneutics. (Robinson, 2000: 368). The War of the End of The World is a mixture of annihilative, ethical, and romantic hermeneutics. It is apocalyptic in literary form, ethical in intent, and also an apocalypse in its vision. The “apocalypse of the mind” is the syntagm coined by Emerson and it is a concise definition of the Counselor’s solipsistic vision about the end which dramatically distorts reality. Briefly, it means that Antonio himself puts an end to Canudos, which brings us close to the “comic apocalypses”, a very praised pattern in North American fiction in the post-war era. According to this pattern, at first the apocalypse may be just a solipsistic dream of a character obsessed with the end of the world. However, once imagined, the end is actually bound to take place imminently.

Upon a closer look, Vargas Llosa’s approach to the genre is entirely different from the series of post-apocalyptic novels by Pynchon, Vonnegut, Barth, or Malamud. His purpose is neither to deconstruct the apocalyptic fears nor to reveal the futility of the apocalyptic scenarios, but to emphasize the power of apocalyptic fiction and its ability to destroy civilization itself. There is an intertextual dialogue between Llosa’s novel and Rebellion in the Backlands by Euclides Da Cunha, but he avoids using striking postmodern strategies such as the parody or the pastiche. In his re-reading of the rise and fall of a millenarist movement, Vargas Llosa also implied a very serious approach to the power of fiction which is not only capable of founding a world but also of overthrowing it. The narrator is always a simple witness puzzled by the rebels from Canudos, never underestimating the tragic power of their destiny, and the mystery of their fanaticism. Both drive them literally to an apocalyptic end. In fact, the prophecy of Antonio the Counselor is fulfilled entirely by the end of the novel not only with an undeniable proof (the massacre of the entire male population of Canudos), but also by the authorial decision to conclude such an epic narrative with the symbolic interpretation of the facts by the old woman. Being interrogated about the whereabouts of Joao Abade, the famous rebel, she answers, “Archangels took him up to heaven. I saw them” (Vargas Llosa, 1997: 574). Canudos remains as enigmatic as ever and the author keeps it far away from any explanation, even if delivered by the characters. By multiplying the versions upon the true causes of events, the author deliberately puzzles the reader. Canudos is an ambiguous construct and an ambiguous turning point in history, an uchronic crossroads. The narrative discourse hermetically closes upon the Secret that gave birth to Canudos.

Both the apocalyptic novel and the comic apocalypses rely upon the interpretation and the misinterpretation of past and present events as a “declique” that configures the entire plot, characters, and their actions. This clash between the numerous ways to represent reality is meant to undermine it to a such great extent that even the characters would find it impossible to design a unique and adequate picture of the world. The essential conflict in this novel is envisioned not only through opposite instances as the Center (the authority, the coercive System, literally the armies of the State of Bahia) and the periphery (sertao-backlands, Antonio the Counselor, and his followers), but also by the impossibility of reconciling each character’s vision about the events at Canudos. Antonio the Counselor, General Moreira César, Galileo Gall or the unnamed journalist have radically different ideas about the same series of events undergoing in front of their eyes.

History may have reached a certain point where it is no longer comprehensible. Through this implicit assumption, Llosa alludes to other traumatic events in the course of the twentieth century history: the Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution. But his main concern is Latin American history as a whole,

“I decided to write this novel because in the history of the Canudos war you could really see something that has been happening (…) the total lack of communication between two sections of a society which kill each other fighting ghosts” (Moses, 1995: 152).

Fictions can be the source of chaos in history as long as they facilitate fanaticism and the chimeric creation of enemies, “this kind of reciprocal incapacity of understanding what you have opposing you is probably the main problem (…) in Latin America”. (Moses, 1995: 152). The last decades of the nineteenth century seemed the best choice for the temporal setting of an apocalyptic novel since this is the point in Western culture when we can find the co-existence of all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm, from Decadence to the hope of renovation (Kermode, 2000: 12). The end of the nineteenth century in Latin America seems the best choice because it provides the novel with a wide range of historical realities which hack back to the Medieval times, from the premodern forms of organization (theocracy, the feudal aristocracy, the authoritarian dictatorship) to the Joachimite doctrine of the Millennium. The Canudos war was the best example of a regressive movement of history. Euclides da Cunha was the first to notice this, “the war of Canudos marked an end, a backward flow, in our history. What we had to face was the unlooked resurrection, under arms, of an old society, a dead society galvanized into life by a madman..” (Moses, 1995:148).

The War of the End of the World can be considered the palimpsestic response to the Brazilian classic Rebellion in the Backlands (1902), but we shall not overestimate the influence of da Cunha. The metahistorical perspective on the events belongs to Vargas Llosa and it shaped many other post-war fictional worlds: from Thomas Pynchon’s novels to Garcia Marquez’s. The first script that Vargas Llosa wrote trying to adapt da Cunha’s novel focused upon the theme of conspiracy, and also upon the misinterpretation of facts which eventually lead to catastrophe. Gall’s cadaver serves as the pretext to repress the rebels in Canudos. The second script (War Dogs, 1974) also thrives on the conspiracy scenario, but Epaminondas Gonçalves is the key element, the originating mind behind it.

 

Canudos, the Solipsistic Dream of Antonio the Counselor

 

The initially reductive struggle between the fanatic leaders (Antonio the Counselor and Moreira César) is enriched with multiple meanings by Llosa who has made the right authorial decision. He doesn’t side with the world outside Canudos, with the forces of Authority who punish the rebels and with their rationalistic (pragmatic, non-religious) perspective on the events near Canudos. From the beginning Llosa realized the great artistic challenge in the presentation of the rebels’ point of view. It is a historiographical enigma, entirely absent from all accounts and thus becoming an object of imaginative speculation. The missing link was the record of events made by a witness or a participant. This blank fragment of history fueled Llosa’s novel and inspired a character lost in the wasteland, and left without his glasses in a crucial moment of the war. This character is the unnamed journalist who is also a portrait of da Cunha himself.

Canudos is progressively invested with symbolical meanings. Once a territory owned by the Baron of Canabrava, it suddenly becomes a remote and almost legendary place, assigned with multiple meanings, represented as being devoid of temporal contingencies. The first to notice this temporal vacuity is Galileo Gall, a European who goes on a troublesome pilgrimage to Canudos, a source of innumerable ill-fated events in his life. For him, Canudos becomes the incarnation of utopia, and the first sign is the abolition of any chronological trace as if time had been dissolved (Llosa, 1986: 315). The more he progresses into the deluded labyrinth of the desert in search of the road to Canudos, the more he is devoid of any preconceptions from the civilized world he left behind. Consequently, his life also gets infused with the features of the land through which he travels. His life unfolds rapidly as if it was a dream, a sum of chaotic images that no longer corresponds to his past imbued with Western thought and ideologies. The main cause of this rapid downfall of the reference points in Gall’s mind is the erasure of chronological time, the sign that the objective perspective and the neutral vision on facts will crumble during the remaining novel. Galileo Gall is the nineteenth-century European who cannot overcome the general state of confusion. This submission to chaos is a process familiar to all the characters who approach Canudos from the profane perspective beginning with the first soldiers easily defeated to the army of general Moreira Cesar. Their disorientation increases as they are drawn near this utopian space. They are unable to grasp the cause of their failure and Canudos becomes a legendary place. This is also the novel’s enigma, its irreducible mystery, a crossroads of destinies, a turning point not only in Brazilian history, but also in world history, a paradigmatic episode for the twentieth century as a whole. After all, it is a century dominated by revolutionary fervor and Galileo Gall’s misinterpretation of the profile of Canudos rebellion (the religious fanatics are taken for revolutionary men fighting the State and its oppression) has a prophetic content.

History could have taken another possible turn. Vargas Llosa selected an historical episode that is susceptible of receiving various fictional and uchronic interpretations. Canudos becomes the centre of his fictional world. All the characters’ biographies are dislocated by their interaction with Canudos and with Antonio the Counselor. At a certain moment in their life, they all become part of this immense progression towards Canudos, either as participants to the Authority’s efforts to suppress the religious movement, or as the followers of the Counselor. The world outside Canudos focuses on it as if the real authority did not emanate from the political leaders ridiculed in the presentation made by the unnamed journalist in Book Two but from the religious leader, Antonio the Counselor. The latter soon becomes a mythic figure due to the rebels’ victories. The population gathered in Canudos by the Counselor’s sheer magnetism is the analogical representation of humanity in its racial, social, and geographical variety. There are priests, anarchists, ex-criminals, convicts, army men, prostitutes, prophets, merchants, bandits, brigands, etc. Although the name existed before, the Counselor invested it with an entirely new meaning. Canudos is the equivalent of the Promised Land for his followers and an incarnation of a utopian space. By the end of the novel it also becomes dystopian. It is extremely significant that the Counselor has chosen this remote territory surrounded by mountains and enclosed within natural and artificial borders, the bandits having plundered the farms nearby and put everything to the ground. It is a territory difficult to reach, like an oasis in the wasteland. Its utopian condition is suggested literally by the text, each time a stranger approaches Canudos. It seems that these multiple concentric barriers cannot be trespassed by outsiders, and when this happens by accident (as with the journalist), the place must not be desecrated by their voracious looks. Its proper geometrical figure is a circle whose centre is in the Counselor’s mind. Its design was first envisioned by him, and it is significant that the destruction of Canudos takes place at the specific moment of the Counselor’s death. The soldiers put an end to a solipsistic dream which was the foundation of Canudos. Its ruins are meaningless after the Counselor’s death and the entire episode is bound to be erased from the collective memory. This event is noticed by the sole survivor, the astonished journalist who presents the whole tragic conflict and enigma in a dialogue with the Baron of Canabrava.

All the attempts to explain the mystery of Canudos are bound to fail. There are at least three characters who could deliver the just interpretation of facts: Galileo Gall, the Baron of Canabrava, and the myopic journalist. The first gets killed by Rufino before he reaches Canudos. The second is embittered by the loss of his properties and his wife’s madness. As for the third his glasses get broken before he can record anything as a direct eyewitness of the fights. Upon his first contact with Canudos, the unnamed journalist feels estranged, as if hypnotized, and is not capable to believe what he sees (Vargas Llosa, 1986: 379). The narrator gives minute details about the anonymous journalist and particularly about his glasses, an ironical suggestion that, although present in the middle of the war, he won’t be able to function as a witness and journalist. He breaks his glasses when he finds that Moreira César is defeated, killed, and beheaded. It is the point when he realizes he has fallen between two systems of reference. The journalist is a transitional character, a messenger of the Republic (the profane world) and a survivor of the Canudos catastrophe. Lois Parkinson Zamora, a subtle critic of apocalyptic literature, implies that the unnamed journalist becomes a novelist upon being forced to re-create the facts from his own memory (Zamora, 1997: 74). The truth about Canudos rebellion can only be expressed in fiction.

Far from reducing the Counselor to a clown figure as da Cunha did, the author avoided the schematic approach towards a problematic character, such as Antonio the Counselor, who could easily have been ridiculed. After the first part of the novel he nearly disappears from the scene. He is isolated somewhere in Canudos and closely protected by his armies. What is the real reason of the rebellion of Canudos and its tragic demise? If we answer this question by giving the name of Antonio the Counselor, we simply deliver another enigma. The secret about his powerful influence over the crowds is protected from any plausible explanation with the help of a fluid narrator who undergoes an unexpected metamorphosis. When in the vicinity of the Counselor and his followers, he uses his apocalyptic metaphors. When observing the journalist, his sentences reflect his chaotic ways. When introduced in Parliament, he gets suffocated with the ridiculous discourse of the political authorities. He reflects the character’s thoughts with one exception: Antonio the Counselor. We are never informed about his plans, thoughts, reasons, or actions, and his sentences are always sibylline. His prediction is fulfilled by the linear and historical unfolding of events but his actions are entirely unpredictable, even for his closest servants. His followers do identify him with the real Messiah and this becomes very visible after the first half of the novel dominated by miraculous conversions and various authorial references to the well-known scenario of a millennial movement.

Apocalyptic fervor spreads across the Brazilian backlands. It seems as if the course of history reverses reiterating a recurrent episode in Western history, i.e. millennialism, the essence of the rebellion of Canudos. Vargas Llosa resumed, in his novel, all the incongruities of millennialism. We refer, at this point, to the converted ex-killers, their complicity with their victims (also present in Canudos), the faith of the inhabitants in their final resurrection and redemption, their suicidal determination to fight the war with the Antichrist (the Republic) to death, their belief that Canudos is the Promised Land and a period of absolute peace and blessing will come, their sheer violence and cruelty against the soldiers, their atrocities, their fascination with the Counselor, their certitude that the end is imminent, that the Millennium will come, and supernatural forces would intervene for their victory. The Counselor is pictured as their Savior according to the medieval pattern of the Emperor of the Last Days including numerous examples from Norman Cohn’s seminal study on millennialist movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Antonio the Counselor actualizes the warrior king’s typology spreading the idea that he is the incarnation of Jesus, he can make miracles, he possesses supernatural powers, and Canudos will last until the end of times. After Moreira César’s defeat, the profane world almost shares this perspective with those in Canudos.

Reading the world as a text, the Counselor’s followers are ’semiotically aroused’, like all the apocalyptic believers. This may be one of the causes of the Canudos rebellion and this is the principal way to configure the novel’s plot. This poetics of paranoia can be detected in many other post-war novels, especially during the Sixties in North American fiction. Usually, these novels focus upon a main character who triggers the whole narrative through an apocalyptic hypothesis about the imminent end of the world and who reads reality, history, and facts as ”text” (Zamora, 1997: 72).

This is also the case with Antonio the Counselor whose supremacy over the other characters comes from his ability to generate a literal all-cohesive interpretation of the world, an interpretation that melts all details into one single construct, a coherent and immutable Sense that permeates every aspect of his followers’ ordinary life. This world-text is hermetic and it cannot be deciphered by anyone except the Counselor himself (his name suggests this). He lets everyone know that his interpretation will be another Revelation and the essential Truth will transform the world. As in a fictional pact, his followers are his creations and they regard him as their maker. The Counselor offers them a completely new life and Canudos is built upon their credulity. At a certain point, the unnamed journalist suggests that the outer world does not believe that the Counselor ever existed. This ontological deficiency undermines both the existence of the Counselor and of his creation, Canudos. The latter is the equivalent of the vacuum centre of the novel capable to absorb its characters, biographies, dramas, armies, and the entire fiction as well. This authentic and annihilative force relies on the solipsistic dream of Antonio the Counselor and results in the question: has a place named Canudos ever existed? This can be tested when regarding the only possible rule of survival in this novel. The characters who regarded Canudos as something very real, as a true force, and a lively creation, they all perished either as part of it, or as the force trying to overthrow it. Both characters who outlived Antonio the Counselor are non-believers skeptical about Canudos, each one in his own way. They are the Baron of Canabrava and the unnamed journalist. The former is tempted to erase Canudos from collective memory (after the events) or to view it in the light of the Counselor’s almost fictional creation. Accidentally, the unnamed journalist succeeds in observing the events that take place before his short-sighted eyes as something unreal. They are recorded with his other senses, but not with his sight. After the death of Antonio the Counselor and the massacre at Canudos, he has endless Socratic discussions with the Baron of Canabrava because he has to fill the blanks from his recollections with imagination. Consequently, he has to re-construct Canudos as a fiction.

The main apocalyptic feature of this novel resides in its essential image which is reiterated at multiple levels. The hastened and implacable progression of events, plot and characters towards a catastrophic end are part of a technique which was first envisioned by the Greek tragedians. Vargas Llosa’s major artistic achievement is to construct his novel on the dialectic between circularity/repetition on the one hand, progression/linearity/irreversibility, on the other hand. For his followers, the Counselor reiterates the figure of Christ. To some extent, Canudos appears to be an event foretold by the book of Revelation. Canudos is the final destination for many characters. Canudos represents an irreversible change in the lives of all the characters. The progression towards Canudos abolishes an instance of linearity, of chronological time.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of Millennium, Secker and Warburg, London, 1957

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction: with a New Epilogue, Oxford University Press, 2000

Efrain Kristal, Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, Vanderbilt University Press, 1999

Efrain Kristal, The Cambridge Companion to the American Novel, Cambridge University Press, 2005

Mario Vargas Llosa, The War of the End of the World, translated by Helen R. Lane, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 1997 (for the Romanian Edition: Războiul sfârşitului lumii, În româneşte de Mihai Cantuniari, Editura Cartea Românească, 1986)

Michael Valder Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture, Oxford University Press, 1995

Braulio Munoz, A Story Teller: Mario Vargas Llosa between Civilization and Barbarism, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000

Douglas Robinson, Literature and Apocalyptic, in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, edited by John Joseph Collins, Bernard Mc Ginn, Stephen J. Stein, Continuum, 2000

Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Usable Past: the Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas, Cambridge University Press, 1997