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

First published:La guerra del fin del mundo, 1981 (English translation, 1984)

Type of plot: Historical chronicle

Time of work: The late 1890’s

Locale: Brazil, primarily the backlands

Principal Characters:

• The Counselor, an apocalyptic prophet and Lord of Canudos
• Galileo Gall, a revolutionary and a phrenologist
• Epaminodas Goncalves, the head of the Progressivist Party
• Baron de Canabrava, the head of the Bahia Autonomist Party
• Rufino, a tracker and guide
• The Nearsighted Journalist, whose mission is to explain Canudos
• Jurema, Rufino’s wife, Gall’s victim, and the Journalist’s lover

The Novel

Using the epoch-making historical work of Euclides da Cunha, Os sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944), Vargas Llosa re-creates the turbulent events of late nineteenth century Brazil in a novel of revolution that has a clear relationship to the continuing history of revolt in Latin America as exemplified in the Maoist el sendero luminoso of his native Peru. As he elaborates the facts and biases of Cunha’s “Bible of Brazilian Nationality,” he follows the career of the millenarian preacher Antonio Conselhiero, his sectarian community at Canudos in the backlands of northern Brazil, the military campaigns to destroy the anti-Republican stronghold of the Counselor’s followers, and the political intrigues of the monarchists and Republicans in a newly independent Brazil. When he departs from Cunha’s social history, he carefully maintains a fidelity to the historical details and backgrounds against which his characters act.

Like much late twentieth century fiction, the novel is, in part, a work about writing. The efforts of the unnamed Nearsighted Journalist, likely modeled on Cunha himself, to whom the novel is dedicated, to explore, record, and explain the facts and hypotheses of a revolt doomed to failure, are central to the plot. The Journalist is, himself, caught up in the campaign against Canudos and becomes a questionable eyewitness to the events (he lost his eyeglasses there). As the Journalist encounters each of the figures whose exploits and intentions he will later seek to note, classify, and explain, so Vargas Llosa develops his own story by notation, classification, and explanation. At one point in the process of conducting his research into the revolt, its antecedents and consequences, the Journalist exclaims that Canudos is filled with stories; the telling of those stories becomes his obsession and the telling of the Journalist’s story is a major portion of the novelist’s objective.

This work combines these many stories into a version of history that merges imagination with fact and provides a complete fiction that clearly embroiders the facts yet also rests upon the facts of the siege of Canudos. The story of the Counselor, for example, is a fully articulated exercise in hagiography which includes such standard elements as a mysterious birth, a period of childhood isolation, a time of itinerancy that includes wanderings in deserted places, the gathering of a band of unlikely followers, the performance of good works for the poor and oppressed, the function of preaching, the foundation of a community of believers, and martyrdom at the hands of the established political force. This overarching fictionalization of the Counselor’s life contains overtly biblical dimensions as well as elements common to many aspects of the Acta Sanctorum, with the difference that Vargas Llosa’s clear-eyed reconstruction of history eschews a pietistical viewpoint usually associated with hagiography. The novel also works on a political level, pitting the ostensibly hapless band of Canudos against the inexorable military machine of the Brazilian Republic. In this phase of the narration Vargas Llosa creates an unrelieved and intensely stark chronicle of the dehumanizing aspects of military campaigns and warfare. From the first pitched battle in which the republic suffers ignominious defeat to the virtual extermination of the sect, the novel explores the effects of the politics of confrontation upon all who engage in it and does so by using the vehicle of fiction to comment on the meanings of historical events.

The stories of the many characters intersect in the apocalyptic battle of the siege of Canudos which pits the fanatic band that follows the Counselor’s anti-Republican teachings against the military strength of the Brazilian Republic. This climactic “war of the end of the world” represents, for those few survivors who followed the Counselor, the triumph of the Antichrist as embodied by the republic and its trappings, the census, the metric system, civil marriage, and the separation of church and state.

The Characters

One of the novel’s indisputable strengths lies precisely in the telling of the many stories of Canudos through a highly artistic rendition of characters. Vargas Llosa works through an accumulation of physical detail, psychological description, and expert dialogue to create memorable, individualized, and well-articulated characters who both create history and bear its burden. The Counselor is both a realistically portrayed and a mysteriously evoked presence throughout the work. He gathers into his New Jerusalem at Canudos the poor, halt, deformed, mad, and fallen as well as a considerable group of sometime bandits and outlaws; the figurative lions lie down with the lambs in a unity of peace that is quickly galvanized into a church militant. At times, the Counselor appears to be John the Baptist preaching conversion in the wilderness; at times he appears to be a reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth who has come to bring fire and the sword.

In the tradition of those whom he has called “God-supplanters,” such as Henry Fielding, Honoré de Balzac, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, Vargas Llosa not only re-creates reality but also competes with it. His rich characterizations of the Counselor and the Journalist are replicated in a variety of lesser characters such as his soldiers, bandits, adventurers, circus performers, and clerics whom he imbues with a protoliberationist theology so that they would be quite at home in late twentieth century Brazil. One of the many successful creations in the work is the adventurer Galileo Gall, a red-headed Scot with a penchant for phrenology, Marxist thought, and the spread of international revolution. Gall turns up in Brazil after several revolutionary escapades in Europe just in time to participate in the Counselor’s revolt. The naïve Gall plays into the hands of the head of the Progressivist Republican Party and editor of the Journal de Noticias, the diabolical Epaminodas Goncalves. Goncalves tricks Gall into smuggling guns to Canudos, arranges for his ambush, and plans to expose him as a British agent serving the monarchial and imperial interest of Queen Victoria, who is in league with the deposed Emperor of Brazil, the Bahia Autonomist Party, and the Baron de Canabrava (the owner of the land at Canudos). Gall’s bizarre activities, outlandish appearance, incoherent revolutionary speeches, unwitting role in the destruction of Canudos, and uncanny escapes from certain death combine to make him one of contemporary fiction’s more interesting picaresque characters.

One of the novel’s true protagonists (along with the Journalist) and its unexpected heroine is Jurema. She alone can provide details of her own experience and indignities to the Journalist, can provide him with information about his own bewildering time at the siege of Canudos, can finally explain the circumstances of Gall’s exploits, and can thus help the Journalist forge the links between Gall and Goncalves and between Goncalves and the Baron de Canabrava, whose unspoken and uneasy alliance rests upon the secret of the guns of Canudos. Just as the novel works to explore a segment of Brazilian history forgotten or unknown outside Latin America, so Vargas Llosa explores, in the character of Jurema, conventions about Latin American women and the ways in which Jurema transcends them. The wife of Rufino, a tracker and guide, she saves Gall’s life in the ambush that Goncalves had planned; she then becomes Gall’s sexual victim and later his comforter, companion, and fellow traveler on the way to Canudos. After she has been violated by Gall, she seems to have little choice except to travel with him, tend his wounds, and wait for Rufino to find and kill her. On her journey to Canudos, however, her fatalism and passivity change, and she becomes, of necessity, increasingly assertive and resourceful at saving her own life, as well as Gall’s and the Journalist’s. This last act of saving the Journalist’s life eventually causes her to become the heroine of the Journalist’s life and of his numerous stories of Canudos.

Other characters are the subjects of extreme authorial irony. The reformed criminal, Abbot Joao, and the odd Little Blessed One aim at high spiritual goals but have little notion of what they mean or how to attain them. Still other characters become caricatures, such as the lion of Natuba, a bearded lady, and a dwarf. In all, the characters range from hundreds of “extras” to fully developed multifunctional protagonists in this drama of Brazilian life in the late nineteenth century.

Critical Context

In The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa continues a probe of Latin American history, life, and culture that has occupied his works for more than a quarter of a century. Long recognized as one of the more important writers in Latin America, his works include volumes of plays, literary criticism, and nonfiction. He has steadily gained in reputation as a remarkable novelist of international stature for such earlier achievements as Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), La casa verde (1965; The Green House, 1968), and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982).

The War of the End of the World, like Vargas Llosa’s earlier novels, presents a vision of Latin American life and culture that has, in the last half of the twentieth century, provoked considerable interest in the English-speaking world, particularly in the North American discovery of el boom latinoamericano of the 1960’s and 1970’s, a literary renaissance in which Vargas Llosa is a major force.

Bibliography

Book World. XIV, August 26, 1984, p. 1.

Booker, M. Keith. Vargas Llosa Among the Postmodernists. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. A thorough examination of Vargas Llosa’s works from a postmodern point of view. Includes an essay on The War of the End of the World.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Vargas Llosa’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Choice. XXII, December, 1984, p. 564.

Commonweal. CXI, October 19, 1984, p. 566.

Gerdes, Dick. “Mario Vargas Llosa.” In Spanish American Authors: The Twentieth Century, edited by Angel Flores. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1992. Profiles Vargas Llosa and includes an extensive bibliography of works by and about the author.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, July 1, 1984, p. 600.

Kristal, Efrain. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. A collection of perceptive essays on Vargas Llosa’s novels written from the 1960’s through the 1980’s. A helpful bibliography for further reading is also included.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 2, 1984, p. 1.

The New Republic. CXCI, October 8, 1984, p. 25.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, August 12, 1984, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, June 29, 1984, p. 97.

Vogue. CLXXIV, September, 1984, p. 582.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIV, December 10, 1984, p. 24.