Textual Interventions of Power and Ideology: A New-Historicist Study of Vargas Llosa’s Left-Wing Novels

Abstract

Drawing on New Historicist theory, this paper rereads Mario Vargas Llosa’s first three novels The Time of the Hero (1963), The Green House (1966), and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) as active interventions in the contest over Peruvian historical discourse. Following Stephen Greenblatt’s “poetics of culture” and Hayden White’s claim that history is constituted through emplotment, rhetorical figuration and ideological investment, I argue that these texts function as micro-historiographical machines: they calibrate narrative tempo, redistribute focalisation, and encode political violence in metaphoric regimes that manufacture socially circulating memories of the 1950s–1960s. Close analysis shows that polyphonic form simultaneously amplifies subaltern voices and folds their difference into a single, assimilationist timeline of modernity, thereby supplying a cultural script for the exclusionary logic that would characterise Peru’s neoliberal 1990s. The constitutive contradiction of this “left-wing historiographical apparatus”, denouncing power while reproducing its ideological surplus, guarantees the novels’ continuing public value: after the collapse of grand narratives they preserve an open, self-interrogating historical consciousness that offers readers a reusable critical protocol for re-imagining Latin America’s past and future.