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The War of the End of the World
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Background
Historical Context: Brazil in the Late 19th Century
The War of Canudos took place between 1896 and 1897, when the fourth expedition sent by the First Brazilian Republic finally annihilated the last surviving rebels and raised Canudos to the ground. The novel’s description of the military strategy is largely accurate, but it is also an account of how the conflict was politicized as a battle between reactionary monarchists and progressive republicans. These factions are represented by the fictional characters Epaminondas Gonçalves and the Baron de Canabrava, respectively. Gonçalves’s conspiracy theory, which proposes that monarchists allied with the English are supporting the rebels, a lie spread via his newspaper, was a real tactic used by republicans. The riots against newspaper owners in Rio did really happen, and it took years before the reality was recognized: that the army had massacred a group of landless peasants without any connection to foreign powers or restorationists.
The republicans’ anxiety is understandable given that the monarchy had only been overthrown in 1889. The former emperor, Pedro II, was still deeply popular and the republic only had narrow support among military officers who wished to establish a dictatorship. Part of the basis for the monarchy’s popularity was that it had forced through the abolition of slavery in 1888, against the wishes of the landowning class. Hence the Counselor’s fears that the Republic will attempt to re-impose it. Many of the Counselor’s followers are former slaves or mixed-race people, who made up a large proportion of the Brazilian population. Like the American South, Brazil was a highly stratified society, split between exceptionally wealthy landowners and extremely poor peasants, and it operated under a similarly racist ideology. In Bahia, this state of affairs was at its most pronounced.
Vargas Llosa published the novel in 1981, almost 100 years after the events it describes. At that time, Brazil was governed by a military dictatorship, following a 1964 coup. The situations between 1981 and the 1890s thus form a remarkable parallel, and the political criticisms aired in the novel carry contemporary currency. As a Peruvian, Vargas Llosa grew up under a dictatorship, and has been a frequent political critic of Latin American authoritarianism in his nonfiction. He has consistently condemned propaganda, state violence, and fanaticism. The War of the End of the World the tragic results of political violence for both individuals and society.
Literary Context: The Latin American Boom and Magical Realism
The Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, brought to a whole generation of Central and South American writers to worldwide prominence. Reading The War of the End of the World in this context helps to clarify some of its structural techniques and its political orientation.
The best-known genre to emerge from the Boom is magical realism (realismo fantastico). This genre combines magical elements with a realistic setting to create an uncanny effect that attempts to bring the powers of myth to modern fiction. Vargas Llosa, while never producing a magical realist novel, was inspired by its structural daring to reinvigorate the traditional realist novel. He has spoken about reacting against the provincialist literature of his youth and wanting to situate his region within a worldwide context. Most of the major influences on his work are foreign writers: Jan-Paul Sartre, Victor Hugo, and William Faulkner. From Sartre, he got the idea that writing is a political act; from Hugo, the ambitious historical sweep; and from Faulkner the non-chronological timeline and mix of different points of view.
This latter feature is an immediately distinctive part of The War of the End of the World. By giving equal authority to contrasting perspectives, Vargas Llosa undermines the manipulative narratives of propaganda that Gonçalves and his modern equivalents pump out. The combined points of view enable the text to present the machinations of political elites alongside their effects on the ground, juxtaposing the privilege and comfort of those who make decisions with the devastating effects those decisions have on the poor. The novel’s aesthetic and structural features thus have a political aim. Despite the contrast between Vargas Llosa’s realism and the fantastic imagination of writers like Cortázar and García Márquez, this aim is widespread across the Latin American Boom.
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