Vargas Llosa's Late Turn Against Imperialism in El Sueño Del Celta ______
Tricontinental Modernities: Vargas Llosa's Late Turn against Imperialism in El sueño del celta __________________________________ NICHOLAS BIRNS EUGENE LANG COLLEGE, THE NEW SCHOOL 1. Revising the Celtic In its mixture of the personal and the political, its concentration on an individual making difficult moral choices, and its wide historical lens, Mario Vargas Llosa's El sueño del celta (2010), published only weeks after he garnered that year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, is reminiscent of many of his earlier novels. I wish to contend that, even more, it is an effective sequel to his 1981 novel La guerra del fin del mundo, not only treating many of the same themes but also providing a contrast between Vargas Llosa in the wake of his disillusionment with left-wing radicalism and the Peruvian writer after more or less thirty years being on the center-right. Whereas the Brazil-set novel seemed aimed at the errors of leftist utopianism, the more recent work indicts imperialism in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. This essay will show how this “tricontinental” agenda is complemented by a “modernity” that, for Vargas Llosa, is both ideological and stylistic. The Celt of El sueño del celta is Roger Casement, the British government official, imperial muckraker, and, ultimately, committed Irish nationalist revolutionary. But Casement is not the first Celt (a category that includes, among others, both the Scots and the Irish) in Vargas Llosa’s oeuvre. Galileo Gall, the chronologically inclined anarchist in La guerra del fin del mundo was a Scotsman as well. Furthermore, Gall was originally intended to be, like Casement, an Irishman, only, as Efraín Kristal points out, becoming a Scotsman in the “final version” (125).
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