Mario Vargas Llosa (post 3): New York Times review of Nobel Prize winner’s latest novel fails to mention he is known for characters with multiple personality.

The New York Times review of Llosa’s latest novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/books/review-neighborhood-sabers-utopias-mario-vargas-llosa.html

Two past posts:

May 2, 2016

Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality.

“El sueño del celta opens with an epigraph citing a text by the turn-of-the-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, Motivos de Proteo:

‘Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves.’

“This quote from Rodó is a kind of theory of human personality that appears in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, but underlies in a consistent and significant way La casa verde, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta” (1, pp. 110-111).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

May 9, 2016

Unacknowledged multiple personality in “The Bad Girl” by Mario Vargas Llosa (post 2): Title character’s true problem never recognized by anyone in novel.

In my previous post, having misread a biography, I said that “Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, is said to write novels based on the premise that people have multiple personality.” However, now that I have read one of these novels, “The Bad Girl,” I find it questionable that the author recognizes his characters have multiple personality, per se.

I jumped to conclusions when the biographer said, “The Bad Girl states that by living life as she has chosen (a bizarre series of events with multiple personalities), she experiences it more ‘intensely’ ” (1, p. 106). The fact is, no narrator or character in the novel ever says that she has multiple personality. Even when she is psychiatrically hospitalized for a month of evaluation and treatment, including hypnosis, the doctors focus on her recent trauma, ignore her history of alternating identities, and don’t realize that she has multiple personality.

Ricardo (the narrator and other main character) knows very well that the Bad Girl changes attitudes and identities, using different names and behaving in different ways, but he sees her as a calculating adventurer, who seeks out rich men, not as a person with multiple personality, per se.

Ricardo does not recognize multiple personality when he sees it. For example, he meets her when she is in her new identity of Comrade Arlette. She does not recognize him. He reminds her that the last time he knew her “your name was Lily” (2, p. 23). Then she does remember him from back then, quite clearly. “Still, a moment later…she absolutely denied knowing what I was talking about. How could I have made up a thing like that? I was thinking about somebody else. She never had been named Lily” (2, p. 24).

This novel reminds me of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (search past posts), not only in that it is about the adventures of a mistress with multiple personality who comes to a tragic end, but in the reader’s belated discovery of the title character’s real name. Roxana’s real name is Susan. The bad girl’s real name is Otilia (2, p. 234). And if Ricardo had understood that the love of his life, the bad girl, had multiple personality, he would have addressed her by that name with the expectation of either seeing a personality switch or of hearing the bad girl speak of Otilia in the third person. But he never addresses her by, or even asks her about, her real name, since this novel does not acknowledge or recognize the issue of multiple personality, per se.

Nevertheless, Vargas Llosa seems inclined to a conception of human nature that verges on multiple personality. For example, near the end of the novel, he makes a point of mentioning a ballet “where each dancer would be many, each man and woman containing countless human beings” (2, p. 261).

1. Raymond Leslie Williams. Mario Vargas Llosa: a life of writing. Austin, University of Texas Press, 2014.

2. Mario Vargas Llosa. The Bad Girl. Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2006/2007.