Narrative

Excepting a few geniuses—like Joanot Martorell and Victor Hugo whose Les Miserables Vargas Llosa read while attending the Leoncio Prado Academy— the novel before Flaubert and Faulkner, according to Vargas Llosa, is primitive. The novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century carried out the project of realism and naturalism too well. They made the novel serve the function of documentation. Conversely, and Vargas Llosa has written on this many times, the modern novelist uses what the primitive novel documents—feelings, events, facts, etc.—to make art. As he says in The Perpetual Orgy "everything depends essentially on form, the deciding factor in determining whether a subject is beautiful or ugly, true false. . .the novelist must be above all else an artist, a tireless and incorruptible craftsman of style." The primitive novelist depended on plot and character to create mystery and suspense. The modernist uses narrative techniques...