The drafts of A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua) in the Mario Vargas Llosa Papers at Princeton University Library bear witness to a creative, literary process in the work of autobiography: organising a life into language and genre. The preliminary drafts catalogued as ‘First Draft Version A’ and ‘First Draft Version B’ (over 200 pages each) closely follow Vargas Llosa's run for the Peruvian presidency, which he lost to Alberto Fujimori in 1990. Between his ‘Second Draft’, with the indication that it was completed in November 1991, during his residency at an institute for advanced studies in Berlin, and the completed book, with the indication that it was completed at Princeton in February 1993, he had composed at least four other drafts. The final version alternates between two kinds of chapters. The even chapters, closely related to the content of original drafts, amount to a political memoir of his failed political campaign. The odd chapters are a coming-of-age autobiography that chronicles Vargas Llosa's formative years, while the political chapters shed light on the private story of an individual who became a political figure. The coming-of-age narrative evokes aspects of the Bildungsroman. The pattern of alternating chapters resembles Vargas Llosa's most recurrent literary technique from Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) until The Dream of the Celt (El sueño del celta, 2010), in which he alternates narratives that correspond to different periods in the lives of his characters, or to different literary registers. In short, there was a considerable amount of literary thinking brought to bear in the gestation of this book.

A life in movement

The house where Vargas Llosa was born, on 28 March 1936, has wooden railings, a small front garden and a door flanked by white columns. Relatively close to Arequipa's Plaza de Armas, at Boulevard Parra 101, its façade looks today much as it did eight decades ago. Mario lived there with his grandparents, Don Pedro Llosa and Doña Carmen Ureta; and his mother, Dora, went to church from that home on her wedding day.

Vargas Llosa, however, was too young to have a conscious recollection of his first home. He was only a year old when the Llosa clan, led by his maternal grandfather, moved to Cochabamba in Bolivia, where he would live for the next nine years. In 1946 he returned to Peru to study at the La Salle school in Piura, a city in the northern coastal area of Peru where he would set the brothel that gave the title to his second novel, published in 1966, The Green House (La casa verde). In 1947 he would go to Lima, and become a cadet in the military academy he would immortalise in his first novel in 1963, The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros). He returned to Piura in 1952, and moved back to Lima the following year to begin his university studies, a period that inspired the literary world of Conversation in The Cathedral (Conversación en La Catedral).

Arequipa, Cochabamba, Piura, Lima: by the time he was sixteen years old, he had moved six times and had lived in two countries and four different cities. When Vargas Llosa was eleven years old, he learned of the existence of his father, whom his family had led him to believe was dead since he was a little boy. Until then he had idealised his father from a photo in which he appeared, friendly and smiling, in a sailor’s cap. The authoritarian, irascible man who came into his life was a stark contrast to Mario’s fantasies of a caring father he had lost as a little boy.

Set during the years of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorist campaign that wrought havoc on Peru's social and political systems, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Mayta, 1984) and Death in the Andes (Lituma en los Andes, 1993) coincide in their exploration of political violence within revolutionary contexts: both depict a nation that has become apocalyptic as a result of Sendero Luminoso's actions; both look to the past to identify the origins of the destructive forces that have taken over the nation; and both cast the Andes as the place of origin of Peru's political crises, with turbulence in la sierra setting the course for the nation's urban centres. Vargas Llosa also grapples with the role of Peru's indigenous populations in bringing about this social upheaval in both novels. In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, this question is subordinated to explorations of political ideology and of how history is written – vehicles for a critique of socialism's legacy in Latin America – but in Death in the Andes, the representation of the indigenous lies at the heart of the author's assessment of the state and fate of the nation. Hence this essay's attention to the representation of Peru's indigenous populations in both novels, and to the role that Vargas Llosa posits for them in determining Peru's political stability and future.

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta recounts the investigation into a failed rebellion led by Alejandro Mayta and a young military officer named Vallejos in Jauja, a town in the Peruvian highlands, in 1958. In each of the novel’s first nine chapters, an anonymous first-person narrator, a Vargas Llosa persona researching the uprising for a novel, interviews participants in the rebellion and individuals connected to its organisers. The narrator claims to have chosen Mayta as his subject because the latter was a former classmate.

In a heated discussion about the value of historical novels, Ives LeSpark says to his son in Mason & Dixon (1997), “Facts are Facts, and to believe otherwise is not only to behave perversely, but also to step in imminent peril of being grounded, young Pup.” LeSpark is an arms dealer, and his profession, his threat and his assumptions about history are not linked by accident: for Pynchon, the Western military-industrial complex has always advocated a common sense view of things that tends to stifle dissent and sanctions business as usual. To believe that history is a series of inevitable and indisputable facts that add up to a narrative of Western progress is, for Pynchon, both to standardize and to colonize history and to make it congenial to totalitarian, or just oppressively uniform, world views and seemingly determined ends.

In the same passage in Mason & Dixon, however, LeSpark's son Ethelmer pronounces judgment on this theory about the facticity of history:

In 2006 when Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarism in his novel Atonement, Thomas Pynchon unusually broke his silence to publish a letter of support, where he declared:

Giving us a rare glimpse of his working methods, Pynchon points out in effect that his fiction consists to an important extent of a montage of historical material garnered from diverse sources. This does not mean that the only thorough reading of Pynchon must be a study of his sources, but rather that we should approach his texts as fields where different representational systems and verbal registers are constantly encountering one another. Julia Kristeva's explanation of intertextuality is particularly helpful here since she describes a process of transposition, revealing “the signifying process' ability to pass from one sign system to another, to exchange and permutate them.”

Thomas Pynchon is perhaps best known for knowing a lot and not being known. His novels and the characters within them are typically engaged in the manic collection of information. Pynchon's fiction is crammed with erudition on a vast range of subjects that includes history, science, technology, religion, the arts, and popular culture. Larry McMurtry recalls a legend that circulated in the 1960s that Pynchon “read only the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” While Pynchon is renowned for the breadth and depth of his knowledge, he has performed a “calculated withdrawal” from the public sphere. He has never been interviewed. He has been photographed on only a handful of occasions (most recently in 1957). Inevitably, this reclusion has enhanced his cult status and prompted wild speculation (including the idea that Pynchon was actually J. D. Salinger). Reliable information about Pynchon practically disappears around the time his first novel was published in 1963.

While Pynchon the author is a conspicuous absence in the literary marketplace, his fiction has a commanding presence. His first major work, V. (1963), has a contrapuntal structure in which two storylines gradually converge. The first line, set in New York in the 1950s, follows Benny Profane and a group of his bohemian acquaintances self-designated the “Whole Sick Crew.” The second line jumps between moments of historical crisis, from the Fashoda incident in 1898 to World War II and centers on Herbert Stencil's quest for a mysterious figure known as “V.”

Irving Howe, in the introduction to the 1977 collection, Jewish-American Stories, poses an unsettled and unsettling question: “What is the likely future of American Jewish writing?” Howe's problematical response bears the weight of an anxious history of Jewish exile. American Jewish writing, in the second half of the twentieth century had, Howe contends, “probably moved past its high point,” having found “its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approache[d] disintegration.” The culture of Yiddishkeit – the distinctive ethos of a culture derived from the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern and Central Europe – was diminishing from the urban landscapes of American Jewish sensibilities, absorbed and attenuated by the mainstream culture to which it aspired. American Jewish writers, Howe contended, ran out of literary steam, a situation certainly no-good-for-the-Jews, to borrow a phrase from Philip Roth, and counterintuitive given the Jewish penchant for words. For if they do little else, Jewish characters in and out of literature talk. The urban landscape of American Jewish literature has, since the fiction of the immigrant and through the end of the twentieth century, resonated with sound, with characters who talk their way through their self-invented lives.

Most certainly there has continued now beyond the twentieth century a long tradition of Jewish storytelling, established well before the arrival of the immigrant on the shores of America, a tradition of talking lives, a language of memory and desire. This tradition developed out of the rich Yiddish conventions of storytelling, established notably by the Eastern European writers Sholom Aleichem , Mendele Mocher Sforim , and I. L. Peretz and brought to America most prominently by I. B. Singer.

African American fiction of the last seventy years has largely been defined by dichotomies: ideological/aesthetic, male/female, traditional/experimental. While there is some relevance to these categories, the deeper reality is that there has been a remarkable range of themes, styles, and techniques displayed in this body of work. Despite pressures at various times to make black writing fit a rigid definition or to expel authors from the race for their work, authors have consistently produced narratives that defy easy categorization. Much of the debate about black narrative has been carried out in essays and articles that extend back to the early twentieth century, when W. E. B. Du Bois contended that black writing should serve as propaganda for the advancement of the race and attacked Claude McKay, among others, for his failure to do so. Langston Hughes responded with his declaration of artistic freedom that rejected either black or white proscriptions on the black writer. We see variations on this conversation in the critiques of Richard Wright by Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; in the Irving Howe/Ellison debate; in the denunciations of Ellison by participants in the Black Arts Movement; in Clarence Major's responses to his work; in Ishmael Reed's assaults on white critics, feminism, and black women writers; and finally in the manifesto by Trey Ellis on a New Black Aesthetic. All the while, writers were going about the business of producing an array of fictions that always exceeded the arguments about what they were doing.

In 1945, Allen Tate declared that “the Southern literary renascence … is over.” This was a startling claim, not least given its source: as a poet, novelist, and essayist, Tate had been both a creative participant in and critical shaper of the “renascence.” Ten years earlier, Tate had argued that “From the peculiar historical consciousness of the Southern writer has come good work of a special order” – literature that, by taking a “backward glance,” was “conscious of the past in the present.” Between 1929 and 1945, “good work” by Tate, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and others disproved H. L. Mencken's notorious accusation that the South was “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” Tate's announcement that the Southern Renaissance was over, therefore, seemed premature: that same year, Welty published her powerful novel Delta Wedding (1945), while 1946 witnessed the appearance of Warren's opus All the King's Men. Furthermore, The Portable Faulkner (1946) triggered a rapid revival of interest in Faulkner that culminated with the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Yet in the 1950s modern Southern literature was, like the South itself, at a crossroads. The region, as both a social reality and a literary subject, was changing in profound ways. The prominent social, economic, and cultural role of what the Nashville Agrarians in I'll Take My Stand (1930) termed “the agrarian tradition” was in terminal decline.

At the close of 1979, the New York Times identified “women's lib” as one of the major and defining publishing phenomena of the previous decade. Yet the novel that Times author Ray Walters chose to exemplify this trend, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973), was largely disdained by members of the women's liberation movement that it supposedly represented. Despite the fact that journalists like Walters had no trouble discerning feminist content in the novel, by 1985 Fear of Flying had come to be viewed by many in the movement as “ultimately ‘not feminist’,” according to critic Rosalind Coward. In 1998, however, Lisa Maria Hogeland included Jong's novel in her analysis of women's liberation novels, arguing vigorously that previous analyses had overlooked the novel's genuinely feminist critique of the sexual revolution, and, by 2008, some feminist critics at Columbia University felt positively enough about the novel's politics that they organized a symposium celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary as a “feminist classic.” Bringing the process full circle, the pop-feminist website Jezebel responded to a report on a family fracas at the conference by debating whether Jong's unsanctioned fictionalization of her sister's marriage in Fear of Flying should be considered an anti-feminist act.

In fact this checkered history suggests that Fear of Flying may indeed be an exemplary American postwar feminist novel, though not precisely in the way meant by the New York Times. Rather, the contentious yet circular trajectory of the discourse surrounding the novel provides a case in point of the myriad literary-critical dilemmas that accompanied the growth of postwar feminist fiction.

In the “Epilogue” to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the anonymous narrator says, “I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest … On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to ‘justify’ and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.” When juxtaposed with the novel's final line – “Who knows but that, on lower frequencies, I speak for you?” – this statement suggests how much Invisible Man functions as a quintessential Cold War narrative, in addition to being, arguably, the definitive novel of pre-desegregation African American literature. Ellison's Epilogue, in other words, gives his modernist representation of African American history and culture a Cold War interpretation, replete with its sense of, and fear about, the ethos of conformity.

That ethos, memorably named other-directedness in David Riesman's 1950 bestselling sociological study, The Lonely Crowd, is posited on Riesman's belief that the notion of a social character is more or less accepted fact. A troubling new social character, Riesman argued, was starting to dominate twentieth-century urban America. Cultures ranging from prehistoric Africa and pre-Christian Athens to the pre-Columbian Americas, from the Ptolemaic Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty to contemporary Japan and Italy had shared the same social character, which he labeled tradition-directed.

In Paris, on August 25, 1944, a trim, dark-eyed survivor of the Utah Beach landing sat down for a drink with a burly war correspondent who had written very famously about an earlier world war. At the time of this meeting, Jerome David Salinger was twenty-five years old, struggling to break into the exclusive pages of The New Yorker. At forty-five, Ernest Hemingway had already immortalized the psychic wounds of war and, along with James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson, had reinvented the short story as a modernist art form: spare and concrete, yet riddled with meaning. On the popular front, the slick magazines were publishing upbeat, neatly turned consumable fiction well into the 1940s. Salinger's clever potboilers, closer in spirit to F. Scott Fitzgerald's society sketches than to Hemingway's “Lost Generation” tales, had appeared in venues like Collier's. Hemingway knew of Salinger and praised a story the younger man showed him. Perhaps he caught a glimpse of the fallout to come.

In 1948 Salinger's gently explosive story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” appeared in The New Yorker. Its hero, Seymour Glass, showing signs of what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder, is on his honeymoon in Florida. Through an introductory conversation between the nail-polishing wife and her badgering mother, Salinger deftly characterizes the superficiality of postwar America. Seymour delights in puncturing complacency with antic non sequiturs.

While World War II offers a convenient dividing point for mainstream American literature and is often used as a breaking point between modernism and postmodernism, 1945 does not have the same import in the history and development of American Indian fiction. For American Indian literature, the most important milestone comes in 1969, the year that N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968). To be sure, there were accomplished American Indian authors writing in English in the twentieth century who preceded Momaday, and many of those earlier narrative works were not critically recognized until the postwar period (D'Arcy McNickle's 1936 novel The Surrounded, for instance, or Ella Cara Deloria's novel Waterlily, which was completed in the 1940s but not published until 1988). But this chapter focuses on the outpouring of American Indian fiction since 1968 to provide an overview of some of the key writers and developments of this remarkable period.

In approaching Native literary texts, one must keep in mind that social, cultural, and historical contexts are crucial. Federal policies concerning Indian affairs and indigenous responses to those policies influence the themes and forms of works by American Indian writers. Popular culture matters as well: the antiwar and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, led to increased interest in Native peoples and texts as middle-class whites sought out alternative cultures and spiritual lifeways.

This may well be the last volume ever to survey American fiction from 1945 to the present. That is not because scholarship on this body of narrative is waning. Far from it. There is a more pragmatic reason for my prediction: the period is getting a little long in the tooth. The Victorian Era will never exceed sixty-four years. Modernism is often dated from 1890 to 1945 (a solid fifty-six-year run), but the post-1945 period (which until recently we simply called “postmodernism”), if a person, could now be collecting Social Security. It is only a matter of time before the profession decides that, if for nothing more than curricular reasons (after all, there is only so much one can teach in a semester), we need to close off the postwar period in some definitive fashion. Certainly, no one in 2045 will be teaching a course in contemporary American fiction from 1945 to the present.

Not surprisingly, because the postwar period has been left openended for so long, there have been generational shifts, so that post-1945 fiction looks quite different now than for earlier critics. One of the earliest attempts to make sense of American fiction following World War II occurs in John Aldridge's After the Lost Generation (1951), which saw contemporary novelists falling short of the achievement of American modernist writers.

In Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), David Bell abandons his role as a network television executive and takes to the road to make a film only to confront “the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the gallop of panting adjectives” that have preceded his vision of the nation. The novel adumbrates many of the themes that inform DeLillo's later works: the often embattled relationship between words and images, the human need for systems in the seeming absence of a divine plan, the competing paradigms of contingency and conspiracy, the limits of knowledge and the desire for mystery, the responsibility of the artist to take stock of the world, and the erasure of subjectivity in an increasingly mediated century. Noting that he “had almost the same kind of relationship with [his] mirror that many of [his] contemporaries had with their analysts,” David confesses that his “whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that [he] was living in the third person.”

Describing DeLillo as a “postmodern Henry Adams,” David Cowart has noted both authors' interest in “gauging ‘the track of the energy’ that makes or transforms a civilization,” but the connection between DeLillo and Adams goes further. Adams's ironic use of a third-person perspective in an autobiography certainly speaks to a crisis of identity engendered by a classical education ostensibly unsuitable for a modern world run by machines.