Mayta's story

Mayta's story ( Spanish Historia de Mayta ) is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, from 1984.

The focus of the novel is the fragmentary biography of the somewhat unknown Peruvian Trotskyist Alejandro Mayta Avendaño, which culminated in March 1958 with his participation in a failed insurrection with a handful of insurgents in Jauja, Junín department . The novel could be read as a satire on a failed attempt at insurrection. However, it must be understood as a development novel by a fictional person, whose political convictions are not broken by a concrete defeat of their political struggle or their individual inability, but are instead exemplarily the victim of the collective inability of the entire political party system and which is ultimately wiped out in the gray of everyday life. The focus is not on the differences between individual parties, groups, splinter groups and trade unions, but rather on the inability of a society to engage in political dialogue across ideological boundaries, which in the author's opinion leaves behind lasting destruction and inhibition of development. The willingness of Peruvian society to use violence instead of political dialogue, in addition to the international balance of power, prevents economic and social development.

shape

Two tempos - the present and the past - refer to two narrative levels. In the present - that is in 1983 - the first-person narrator shares the research about his fictional classmate Mayta. In the past 25 years, in 1958, Mayta had a say. The comprehensibility of the text is made very difficult by the constant, sudden change of level in some chapters (see, for example, Chapter 4). The reader finds some support at the respective tense. Since the 1970s, Vargas Llosa has been using a fragmentary narrative technique that deliberately interweaves various narrative strands; People are given different names at different times.

The questioning of a contemporary witness by the first-person narrator is always associated with countless jumps between the two time levels mentioned above. Mayta mostly acts on the level of the past. Vargas Llosa is forced to step back into the role of the omniscient narrator . The novel is essentially divided into those chapters that describe Mayta's personal career before and after the events in Jauja. If Mayta and the novel were rather static up to Mayta's departure for Jauja, his personality and the narrative style change significantly afterwards. Although Vargas Llosa uses the role of the omniscient narrator, the change is not carried out as an interpretation of the narrator, but as a description of his contemporary witnesses. The role of the omniscient narrator becomes clear when he suggests that the witnesses disputed their own participation in the attempted insurrection.

content

The first-person narrator Vargas Llosa, a well-known and not unwelcome writer among the people of Lima, admits at the end of the novel that he invented almost everything: his schoolmate Mayta, his criminal misconduct and his homosexuality. But in the last sentence of the text, Vargas Llosa makes it unmistakably clear: He spent a whole year with his inventions. However, two things are by no means invented - the beginning and the end. It describes the rubbish dumps in the outskirts of Lima, on the edges of which people vegetate in miserable dwellings that were feverishly cobbled together in one night. The rampant rubbish dumps become a symbol for the disrespectful way the Peruvians treat their heavenly beautiful country and the neglect of an uprooted society. The social environment in Peru in those years was not invented.

In appearance, the "average Peruvian" Mayta is a mestizo . After the death of his mother, a nurse, Mayta was raised by his aunt. The father disappeared before Mayta's birth and consequently played no role in his upbringing; a fate that he shares with many South Americans, not least with the author. As a child Mayta attended the Catholic school of the Salesians Don Bosco in Lima. Mayta wanted to be a lawyer to ensure justice, but never did. After a year of studying at the National University of San Marcos , he loses his respect for and interest in university professors who wither without inner conviction and commitment in any “secondary war zones” in their subject areas and lose love for the subject matter of their field of knowledge. His political commitment does not adequately replace this void. In the course of this process, Mayta turns into an atheist Trotskyist who is arrested several times during his propaganda campaigns and therefore survives various prison terms without wavering in his convictions.

In an interview style, the first-person narrator asks people in Lima and Jauja who played a role in phases of Mayta's fictional life: This includes his aunt, but also his former political companions, who were in the political and cultural scene in the present from 1983 established in the Peruvian capital - not as Trotskyists or as revolutionaries, but as an opportunist senator who temporarily formulates speeches for the former dictator or as the opportunist director of the cultural center "Center for Development Promotion", which is supported by Americans, Russians, Chinese and West Germans, Obtaining grants and commissioning studies. As early as his Catholic childhood, Mayta took offense at the extreme poverty in his country and carried out a kind of hunger strike for weeks out of sympathy with the starving poor until he was admitted to a clinic after a collapse. This scene is repeatedly referred to in order to emphasize the seriousness and individual willingness to make sacrifices of his political and social engagement. Mayta is described as someone who, unlike his contemporaries, does not claim any special treatment or care, but is credibly unselfishly willing to stand up for his convictions. The consistency with which he pursues his convictions leads him to switch to ever smaller political groups of the always isolated, illegitimate, political left of Peru in order to prove the purity and straightforwardness of his attitude. Illegality regularly provides these groups with an excuse to find out about the state of the “revolutionary situation” in other parts of the world, such as B. to philosophize Ceylon instead of dealing with the everyday suitability of their missing recipes for fighting poverty in their own country. In retrospect, Mayta's political companions describe him as a splitter with a penchant for heresy . It is remarkable when a political companion who regards Lenin's and Trotsky's political theory as scientific uses a term from Catholic doctrine to describe Mayta's deviant behavior!

In the seventh chapter, Adelaida, the attractive and coveted young girl, first wife of the professional revolutionary Mayta, is interviewed. Adelaida divorced Mayta early in her pregnancy to marry a former hot suitor, postal worker don Juan Zárate, after realizing that her husband was gay and decided that she did not want to continue the farce of marriage with a child . The marriage with Zárate took place on the condition that he recognized the child she was expecting as his. The farce of their second marriage does not seem to bother them. Later, when Adelaida and Mayta's son is almost grown up, the son discovers that Zárate has taken a lover. In order to bind the disturbed son to himself, Adelaida then tells him about his origins. The son no longer understands the world, gives up his pharmacy studies and turns his back on Lima to work in a sawmill in Pucallpa or in Yurimaguas .

In a series of sections, the novel deals extensively with the changing role and self-image of the Catholic Church in Latin American society in the form of interviews with Vallejo's sisters who work as religious sisters in the slums of Lima. In the 1950s, the Catholic Church was still clearly on the side of the rulers because it regarded the social hierarchy as a necessary principle of order - in which the rich numb their lack of conscience with the fact that their children are children of the poorer (the children of the poor, The Mayta the Lumpenproletariat calls, can usually not afford the school because they look for usable on the dumps for usable to contribute to the maintenance of their families) "adopted" their school, to whom they deliver cake and sweets by the driver on his birthday let go (so that the child of the oligarch family does not have to descend into the lowlands, the dirt, the diseases and the crime of the slums) - the position of the church changes under the influence of liberation theology to a "church of the poor", which makes itself vulnerable . The author takes a critical look at this change in his novel and comes to the conclusion that the ruling class is offering its symbolic aid to the poor, e.g. B. ceased without replacement by promoting individual children under the influence of liberation theology. Even the patronizing birthday cake or the paternalistic school scholarship no longer takes place. The poor middle class - and with it Mayta - dreams in vain of a daily shower in a country where it is taken for granted, e.g. B. to appear in bright white clothes to school.

Mayta's increasing political and human isolation and apparent hopelessness culminated in the situation when, after meeting the 20-year-old non-party Alférez Vallejos - also known as Lieutenant Vallejos - the head of Jauja's prison, he was infected by his optimistic revolutionary euphoria and he was infected with seven Men made up of a Trotskyist group proposes participation in the subversive attempt at insurrection: The salon revolvers, who have for years dreamed of an uprising of the masses under their leadership and planning, find Mayta's contact with a rival Communist party and his homosexuality as an excuse to exclude Mayta. During Mayta's ten-year membership of the Trotskyist “Partido Obrero Revolutionario (Trotskyistas)”, Mayta's homosexuality was certainly not hidden from the other six members. But of all people, his friend Anatolio - Senator Campos - who had come out with Mayta the night before, brought up his sexual orientation. Vargas Llosa, who often criticizes machismo in his country, demonstrates its questionable effect in this novel not primarily on a woman, but on a homosexual. Later in the novel, Mayta's role as a homosexual is toned down a little. To further emphasize the hypocritical stance of Mayta's comrades, the author describes how they force Mayta to declare his "voluntary" resignation in their party leaflet. The veteran politician Mayta is alone. What the others criticize as divisive about him and what actually documents their sectarian attitude becomes catharsis for Mayta .

Ironically, the flat-footed, 40-year-old Mayta - so far at best a "revolutionary of the word" - finally decides to identify himself as a "revolutionary without a party" (a figure that is excluded in theory because a revolutionary by definition only belongs to the revolutionary avant-garde can be revolutionary because otherwise he is ideologically diverse, splitter) to join the life-threatening undertaking of his like-minded fellow Vallejos to become a “man of action”. To do this, he gets his outstanding wages, packs his suitcase with the machine gun hidden between laundry, medicine and bandages - a gift from Vallejos. The battle ahead can be bloody. These preparations make it clear to the reader that Mayta is aware of the seriousness, of the break with twenty years of subversive political life, and of the finality of this step. With leaving the coastal city of Lima - the economic and cultural metropolis of his country, which becomes a symbol of the country's stagnation - Mayta embarks on a new, dynamic life. Jauja - the provincial capital at over 3,300 m altitude in the Andes and a scene of the planned uprising - becomes a metaphor for Mayta's rapid development. As a retarding element, this upheaval into a new life is underlined once again by an encounter with Adelaida. He wants to see their son before he leaves, which Adelaida refuses to do.

In Jauja, Mayta sleeps on the barber's chair of the hairdresser Don Ezequiel - a co-conspirator against his will. The baby chair, which is extremely uncomfortable to stay overnight, becomes a metaphor for Mayta's willingness to make sacrifices, just as his recurring altitude sickness in the thin air of the highlands is a metaphor. But in the interests of the revolutionary struggle, he puts up with all adversities. Professor Ubilluz and Lieutenant Vallejos are the real masterminds behind the uprising. Lieutenant Vallejos has to bring the start of the uprising four days forward because his superior authority in Huancayo has summoned him for participating in a demonstration. Thus he unwittingly gives some fickle-minded people a solid reason to stay away - including Professor Ubilluz, who emphasized his role in Vallejo's political education in the interview - and then left with his truck just before the start of the uprising! The command company is started anyway. Since the announced mineros and campesinos - symbols of mass participation that Mayta's comrades dreamed of because they had to give away their party organ in front of the factory gates - did not appear, the Alférez armed seven young people from Jauja who were enthusiastic about the revolutionary idea. These students of the Colegio San José (Spanish = Saint Joseph) in Jauja are called Josefinos. The uprising begins with the arrest of prison guards and the liberation of two political prisoners. These - Condori and Zenón Gonzalez - join the crowd of revolutionaries. Together they are eleven people after all - more than the self-styled Trotskyist avant-garde, which has been reduced to six by Mayta's exclusion. The police station and the Civil Guard post are occupied, their teams disarmed and also imprisoned. The telegraph office is demolished to make it more difficult for the inmates to request reinforcements. Two banks in Jauja are robbed to cheers for Peru and the revolution. In exhilaration of their rapid success, the handful of revolutionaries paraded across the plaza de armas (Spanish = arsenal), with the Josefinos shooting into the air. It is remarkable that these rebels have not yet mastered the "Internationale" and therefore a. sing the national anthem. Rebels who fought against the unity of the country would certainly have a corresponding "regional anthem". Their uprising does not claim any deaths or injuries in Jauja, but it also has no real political program.

After the bizarre bank robbery, the expropriation of the "imperialists", the revolutionaries want to join the rebellious comuneros in the Selva of Uchubamba with the captured weapons . Leaving Jauja without destroying the telegraph at the station already endangers the original plan. When the hijacked taxis then get off the road on the way to the agreed meeting point with the hoped-for latecomers in Quero , they lose more precious time to their pursuers. They fail to blow up an important bridge, which would have given them the necessary lead over their pursuers. The bridge can be interpreted as a symbol of the connection with the outside world, figuratively as a painful way back. Here rebels are by no means breaking all the bridges behind them. The descent into the Selva of Uchubamba can also be interpreted as emblematic: the climax has been exceeded.

After Teniente Dongo, incarcerated in prison, freed himself, he cabled to Huancayo for assistance. The motorized combat troops under Teniente Silva and Sergeant Lituma, already known from the Vargas Llosa novel “The Green House”, have since advanced to become a corporal who also returns in the novel “Death in the Andes”, takes up the pursuit and thanks pass the gorge over the not blown bridge. The insurgents manage to hire pack animals and escape from Quero, but a shooting begins in the Huayjaco valley , in which Condori and Vallejos are hit and die. The prisoners' shoelaces are stripped to prevent them from escaping. Only two Josefinos can escape capture. The revolution lasted almost twelve hours. Mayta's former comrades have hurriedly distanced themselves from the uprising as a "petty-bourgeois adventure". Apparently the two other political companions (besides Mayta) originally determined to get an impression of Jauja and Vallejos had not even managed to board the legendary train or another vehicle to get their own impression of the situation in approx. Jauja 300 km away before they reach their verdict.

After a few hours of questioning, the Josefinos are placed under house arrest by their parents. Mayta and Zenón Gonzalez spent a few years in prison in Lima. As expected, none of Mayta's former comrades showed up to visit him in prison during this time. On the occasion of the inauguration of a new president, both are amnestied. Socialism was not introduced in Peru.

Mayta is incarcerated twice more. Towards the end of his novel, the narrator wants to visit him in the Lurigancho prison , but learns there of his release a month earlier and records his current address. The ailing Mayta, who is around 65 and works in an ice cream parlor in Lima, shows no remorse. Mayta got married again. The couple have several children. Mayta was convicted of his alleged involvement in a bank robbery with kidnapping and subsequent death of the hostage in 1963 and detained again. However, he unsuccessfully denies his participation. There is often talk of more successful revolutionaries, whose uprising was far more bloody: the Cuban Revolution and Lenin are discussed in several places. Various political groups in Peru, such as For example, the Aprists or the Peruvian Acción Popular party, which promise land reform, education etc. to the bitterly poor population, do nothing to change the hopeless situation of the poor. On the contrary: the many uprisings, coups and coup attempts not only kill a large number of people, they leave fields untreated, destroy houses and vehicles, impoverish entire areas, lead to supply shortages even for the relatively wealthy e.g. B. in Jauja and cause the emigration of large parts of the population to Venezuela, Mexico, Florida etc.

In the last dialogue between the first-person narrator and the real Mayta, the latter indicates that he and his former comrades carried out two successful bank robberies in support of Hugo Blanco's attempt at insurrection , which happened to take place at the same time as the one for which he was convicted. On the basis of an anonymous tip-off, the police suspected the convicted Mayta, who because of his involvement in the real bank robberies cannot produce an alibi without betraying his former comrades. But the loot from the bank robberies never reaches the rebels, as agreed, but the alleged friends of opinion share it privately. Mayta suggests that the tip to the police probably came specifically for this reason from his co-robbers in order to enable the privatization of the loot. The lifelong straight Mayta, who does not betray his former co-thinkers, in the end loses his political drive: “I didn't know anyone and I'm no longer interested in politics.” Betrayal of one's own convictions is the low point. Looking back on the outstanding event of his participation in the uprising, he says: "I have probably never been as happy as I was at this moment."

interpretation

It is remarkable how the author also interweaves the dubious role of the Latin American military as unfit for war, as an element of repression of the bourgeoisie , in the novel: The bourgeoisie in Lima is more oriented towards Europe and Miami than towards the Puna and Selva , the poor Peruvian parts of the country are so much closer. The fictitious military conflict with Bolivian-Cuban armed forces, in which the Peruvian military appeared worried after the cameras, and the reprimand that they have not fought a foreign army since the saltpeter war against Chile, also belongs to this category, as well as the description of the US Marines as a fictional intervention force that is unloved by all. Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, like Argentina, cultivate the myth of their military heroes from the wars of liberation against Spain as a national unifying element. This national myth is the fictional scenario of a successful Bolivian-Cuban intervention satirizes .

Although the novel interweaves almost every imaginable Latin American political party, insurrection movement and person, it is striking that two important contemporaries are not mentioned in the novel: The Sendero Luminoso , who raged in Peru in the 1980s, and the Argentine Che Guevara , who serves as a reference for the entire Left Latin America and Africa, yes worldwide. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guevara was popular with the left, especially in Latin America, when the revolution in Nicaragua over Somoza in 1979, following the example of Guevara, together with the Castro brothers in 1958 in Cuba over Batista. Guevara, like Mayta, was impressed by the extreme poverty as a young man and decided to do something effective about it. Like Mayta, Guevara did not hang around in big parties or trade unions, did not try to ensure justice through his professional practice, but preferred small clandestine groups. Like Guevara, Mayta saw himself as a professional revolutionary, got to know the high mountains of the Andes and the poor, unsanitary living conditions of its inhabitants. But that is where the similarities between the two revolutionaries end: While Guevara traveled the continent between Argentina and Mexico, Mayta only stayed in Peru. Unlike Mayta, Guevara ends his political struggle not as a sectarian of a tiny splinter group, but as a myth of the military struggle, precisely the same violent myth that Vargas Llosa questions in his novel: Guevara's motto "Create one, two, many Vietnamese". It is true that Guevara was admired for his determination and straightforwardness, his willingness to sacrifice himself. But unlike Guevara, Mayta had no military training. While Mayta calls on his opponents to surrender so that he does not have to shoot them, Guevara made a clear decision to kill, preaching hatred. Unlike Guevara, Mayta does not break off all bridges behind her. While Guevara's revolutionary path ended with his arrest and execution by the Bolivian military in the Selva near La Higuera , Mayta was captured alive and given an amnesty after a few years . Mayta could perhaps be referred to Vargas Llosa's literary fictional Guevara biography. What an irony of the author, if you consider that Guevara was an ardent supporter of Stalin who commissioned the murder of his rival Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico. Perhaps that is why Mayta's story has at times echoes of satire.

Vargas Llosa questions the myths of the left and the right with his sometimes dryly descriptive, sometimes satirical and bizarre novel.

Quotes

• "There are always more lies than truths in a novel."
• When asked why he researched so meticulously on site, the author replied: "To lie with expertise."
• Mayta on the renegade revolutionaries: "The action separates the wheat from the chaff."

Testimonials

• Vargas Llosa explains in the text how he came across the material. In Paris, a brief newspaper report revealed that Mayta's “attempt at insurrection” in Peru had failed.
• The author calls the novel "a political book".

reception

When Vargas Llosa wrote the text in the early 1980s, he - like any writer - knew that he could hardly influence political processes. But the disquiet about the developments in Peru - see for example the activities of the " Shining Path " - was one of the drivers for writing. Scheerer and Lentzen read the book as a settlement with the Latin American left. In the novel, as in the " War at the End of the World ", Vargas Llosa wanted to articulate that socialism and Christianity had not only brought good things to Latin Americans.

literature

Used edition

• Mayta's story. Novel. Translated from the Spanish by Elke Wehr. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1986 (1st paperback edition (st 1605) 1989), ISBN 3-518-38105-9

Secondary literature

• Thomas M. Scheerer : Mario Vargas Llosa. Life and work. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38289-6
• Norbert Lentzen: Literature and Society: Studies on the relationship between reality and fiction in the novels of Mario Vargas Llosas. Romanistischer Verlag, Bonn 1994 (Diss. RWTH Aachen 1994), ISBN 3-86143-053-3
• Wolfgang Binder: pp. 25–26 in: "Half the night weighs heavier than its silence". Mixed Writings: Reviews and Afterwords on US, Latin American, and Caribbean Literature. With a foreword by Holger Jergius (Studies on the »New World«; 5) . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1446-4

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Edition used, p. 4, 1. Zvo
2. ↑ see for example the edition used, p. 278, Zvu 14 or also p. 281, Zvu 4
3. ↑ Scheerer, p. 124, 17. Zvo
4. ↑ Edition used, p. 127, 6. Zvu, p. 341, 16. Zvo and p. 343, 3. Zvo
5. ↑ Edition used, p. 359
6. ↑ Edition used, p. 60
7. ↑ Edition used, p. 16
8. ↑ Edition used, p. 40
9. ↑ Edition used, p. 266, 5. Zvo
10. ↑ Edition used, p. 208
11. ↑ Edition used, p. 266, 4th Zvo
12. ↑ “Comunidad Indígena”, see edition used, notes p. 373, second entry from above
13. ↑ Edition used, p. 328, 13. Zvu
14. ↑ eng. Lurigancho
15. ↑ see for example the edition used, p. 17, 5. Zvu, p. 56, 8. Zvo, p. 109, 12. Zvo, p. 203, 12. Zvu, p. 328, 15. Zvo
16. ↑ Edition used, p. 71, 10. Zvo
17. ^ Span. Acción Popular , edition used, p. 328, 2nd Zvo
18. ↑ eng. Hugo Blanco , see for example edition used, p. 362, 6th Zvu
19. ↑ Edition used, p. 356
20. ↑ Edition used, p. 267, 10th Zvu
21. ↑ Edition used, p. 341, 2nd Zvu
22. ↑ Edition used, p. 247, 16. Zvo
23. ↑ Edition used, p. 266, 6th Zvu
24. ↑ Edition used, p. 312, 2nd Zvo
25. ↑ quoted in Scheerer, p. 124, 1. Zvo
26. ↑ Scheerer, p. 124, 6. Zvo and p. 125 middle
27. ↑ Scheerer, p. 129, 17. Zvo
28. ↑ Lentzen, p. 113 middle
29. ↑ Lentzen, p. 93 below