El Paraíso en la otra esquina by Mario Vargas Llosa

His novels include The Green House, about a brothel in a Peruvian town that brings together the innocent and the corrupt The Feast of the Goat, a vivid re-creation of the Dominican Republic during the final days of General Rafael Trujillo’s insidious regime and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, a comedic semi-autobiographical account of an aspiring writer named Marito Varguitas, who falls in love with Julia, the divorced sister-in-law of his Uncle Lucho. Lituma’s recurrent and fragmented image is examined in several texts but mainly in La casa verde La tía Julia y el escribidor La Chunga ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero? y Lituma en los Andes.Mario Vargas Llosa, born in Peru in 1936, is the author of some of the most significant writing to come out of South America in the past fifty years. My exploration encompasses Conversación en La Catedral Elogio de la madrastra Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto El hablador La fiesta del Chivo y El Paraíso en la otra esquina. In order to underline the evolution of character’s interiority, I have chosen to study novels presenting recurrent characters or those that manifest an increased complexity of their inner worlds. An analysis of the modes of construction and diversity of these embedded worlds leads the reader to reflect on the structural coherence of the fictional world and the mutual confrontation of the fictional world of reference with the subworlds also forces the reader to question the nature of the “real” world.

I examine the way Vargas Llosa transforms his characters into producers of short films, which multiplies the levels of interpretation and sheds light on the fictional plot either revealing its ambiguity or destabilizing it by foregrounding the Creative process but consistently inducing readers’ involvement in the interpretation and recreation of the text. I contend that in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, these subworlds are produced in a highly visual and animated fashion as if they were projected on a stage or a cinematic screen.

According to Umberto Eco, characters can conceive imaginary worlds, or “subworlds,” which are embedded within the fictional universe.

My study highlights the way the Peruvian writer uses the linguistic sign to create images or to reproduce visual art (paintings, photographs) by means of the character’s fantasies or musings, which in tum, convert them into fictional authors. My project consists in the exploration of the function of the visual linked to the concept of “small worlds” which stem from characters’ interiority. This dissertation examines the increasing ontological tendencies characteristic of Mario Vargas Llosa’s narrative in the light of Brian McHale’s theory of the ontological dominant in postmodernist fiction.

El Paraíso en la otra esquina by Mario Vargas Llosa