In Latin American literary studies, the flourishing of realism well into the second half of the 20th century has often been considered a sign of the region’s belated literary (and economic) development, and inability to find an authentic continental voice. According to this story, realist literary currents such as indigenismo and neo-indigenismo, the ‘novela de la tierra’ or socialist realism employed devices that were both aesthetically outmoded and naïve, especially in contrast with the high modernism of the Boom generation. Carlos Fuentes remarks, for example, that up until the arrival of the “new novel” he champions, Latin American literature had been trapped in a naturalistic mode that made it “more like a document of protest than real creation.”1 The critic Gerald Martin, in turn, quips that the Peruvian novelist Ciro Alegría’s epic realist novel Ancho y ajeno es el mundo (Broad and Alien is the World), published in 1941, is “one of Latin America’s best 19th century novels.”2 The assumption here is that the proliferation of realisms well into the 20th century in Latin America marks the region as out of date according to some ideal (European) progression of forms.

Such preferences for modernism over realism are not restricted to Latin America. As Colleen Lye, Jed Esty and Joe Cleary have argued in a special issue of MLQon “peripheral realisms,” the privileging of modernism over realism as pertains to the former Third World needs to be periodized and put to new scrutiny. As Lye and Esty show, the preference for peripheral modernisms over realisms corresponds with a Cold War script that associated modernism with (Western) freedom, and realism with (Soviet) conformity, overlooking the richness of realism as a formal mode.3 And as Joe Cleary shows, almost all discussions of the relationship between realism and modernism rely on European periodizations. While it is perhaps true that realism ran out of steam with larger crises of imperialism in the late nineteenth century, allowing modernism to gain a better grasp of history, the same is not necessarily true in other parts of the world, which while developing in capitalism, do not experience the same crises in the same way.4 In this manner, necessitates approaches beyond classic European case: “(w)e need, but lack, comprehensive theories and historical atlases of twentieth- century realism.”5

My contribution to the discussions of peripheral realisms opened by Lye, Esty and Cleary is to posit something like a resurgence of the realist historical novel in mid-20th century Latin America, as part of an attempt to narrate and give form to wide-scale capitalist transitions in the region, especially in their rural-agrarian guises. If, as Fredric Jameson has argued, glossing György Lukács’ The Historical Novel, the realist novel is “historically a narrative form generated by the passage of the old order to a bourgeois society, as well as the representation of that historical passage,” why shouldn’t realism be reborn under transitions to capitalism in different parts of the world, even when occurring at a different date and with different contours?6

Like the 19th-century Western European novels studied by Lukács, 20th-century Latin American literature is marked by an epic streak that attempts to narrate wide-scale transitions under capitalism. Works ranging from the novels composing José Lins do Rego’s “sugar cane cycle” and Jorge Amado’s “cacao cycle” in Northeastern Brazil, to Ciro Alegría and José María Arguedas’ realist epics of indigenous dispossession in Peru might be recharacterized as historical novels, a genre that, as Perry Anderson has already suggested, gained a new lease on life in the Third World.7 To no small degree, the resurgence of the historical novel in mid-twentieth-century Latin America (along with, I would hazard, other parts of the world), attempts to narrate the massive, though always uneven, incorporation of predominantly agrarian societies into commodity relations.

Sensing this world-historical shift, novelists like the Peruvian José María Arguedas (1911-1969), considered below, reinvented the historical novel in Latin America. In what follows, I argue that Arguedas—who is today vaunted for his insights into the particularities of Quechua-speaking indigenous cultures—was in fact a realist who conceived of his project in a manner quite consonant with Lukács’ conceptualization of the historical novel as an (always partial) expression of a social totality under capitalism. Against the widespread assumption that realism—and on a wider level, Marxism—flattens the cultural and historical particularities of Andean society, I examine how Arguedas’ novel Yawar Fiesta (1941) throws those particularities into relief through its patient attention to constant historical movement. Finally, I show how realism allows Arguedas to express a vision of indigenous people and belief systems as themselves subject to historical transformation, a vision that separates his realist project in Yawar Fiesta from Latin America’s best-known literary current: magical realism. My objective is not to champion realist aesthetics at the expense of magical realist ones, or to argue that only realism can capture the historical dynamics of Latin American society; rather, I explore how these aesthetic modes might capture distinct moments within processes of capitalist transition in the region. By the same token, this essay is interested in the particularities of realism in Latin America, which, as the Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz has shown for 19th-century Brazilian literature, necessarily suffers formal disjunctures when “imported” to the periphery.8 At the same time, I want to place Arguedas’ fiction within a global realist tradition that emerges from within consonant—but by no means identical—historical transitions under capitalism in different parts of the world.

The Historical Novel in Peru

By the time José María Arguedas published the second edition of Yawar Fiesta (1941) in 1968, the discrediting of realism was so entrenched in Latin American literary circles that the author himself felt the need to apologize for his use of the form. Although Yawar Fiesta, he writes, offers knowledge of an “intricate” and little-known Andean universe, it is sure to “disenchant” readers enamored by the “great formal conquests of the modern novel.”9 Such an apology was surely motivated by Arguedas’ own challenging encounters with well-known authors of the Boom such as Julio Cortázar, who infamously relegated Arguedas’ fiction to the status of provincial and “folkloric” realism, in unfavorable contrast to his own “supranational” experimental writing.10

Notwithstanding Arguedas’ own apology, I seek to show here that his use of realist form was not simply a default mode, but rather a meaningful choice motivated precisely by the “intricacy” of the social world he sought to represent in his novels. Arguedas’ realist endeavor, that is, set out to examine, on a granular level, Andean society in all of its complexity, not as a snapshot of local color, but instead—like the great nineteenth-century realists who preceded him—as part of an effort to track historical change in moments of intense social upheaval.

The period stretching from the 1930s and 1960s, when Arguedas was active writer, was marked by nothing less than the collapse of the seigneurial hacienda system, and—most catastrophic for Arguedas—the mass expulsion of indigenous peasants from their semi-autonomous agricultural communities, or ayllus. Writing in 1960, Arguedas wrote that these shifts marked nothing less than “Peru’s most important feat since the Conquest.”11 Such a dramatic transformation—ongoing since the 1930s—demanded epic treatment, which was most readily available to Arguedas in the form of the realist novel. In this manner, as I explore below, Arguedas should be studied not in spite of or in indifference to his use of realist form, but rather because of it might have been the form most adequate to his literary project. Here I follow the lead of the Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo, who notes that Arguedas’ literary project as a whole evokes “the universal process that is the development of capitalism. But as lived by flesh and blood humans” in Peru (15).12 Or as Lukács put it in The Historical Novel, Arguedas’ novels “evoke the totality of the process of social development” under capitalism in Peru, giving the impression of “an entire society in movement.”13

This invocation of Lukács to discuss Arguedas will likely be met with suspicion by contemporary critics who take for granted the inadequacy of both realism and Western Marxist critique to understanding Arguedas and, by extension, Latin American literature. In past decades, Arguedas has become an emblematic figure within an explicitly anti-Marxist culturalism that hinges on the irreducible cultural particularity of the Andean world. Yet when speaking of the Peruvian novel as an aesthetic form, it is Arguedas himself who ends up sounding a lot like Lukács in The Historical Novel. In his 1950 essay “The Novel and the Problem of Literary Expression in Peru,” Arguedas corrects the widespread assumption that the so-called indigenista novel as practiced in Peru is “about” indigenous people; instead, he insists, the genre seeks to conjure an entire society in “all of its elements, in its disturbing and confused human reality, in which “the Indian” (“el indio”) is only one of many different characters.”14 Among the “myriad” characters, whose “different souls can only be defined through the novel,” Arguedas includes the (old) and (new) landlord, the student, and the mestizo.15 These characters are not stable: the mestizo, for example, “who for the most part, does not know where he is going,” and might equally “serv(e) the landowners,” “sin(k) down into the crowd” or “identify himself with the Indians and generously sacrifice his life to defend them.”16 The novel’s charge, as Arguedas sees it, is to identify and track where such characters are going, “to show how people are constantly being disconcerted by the ebb and flow of their day-to-day destiny. Such a tide, under a definition of limits that is only apparent beneath the surface, forces them to make a constant effort to accommodate, to readjust to a permanent drama.”17

Arguedas’ understanding of the Peruvian realist novel is wholly consonant, then, with Lukács’ understanding of the 19th-century European realist novels in The Historical Novelas “modern epics,” in which the action of “typical” characters works to uncover the hidden logic of historical movement in different moments of the development of capitalism. Arguedas, as far as I can tell, never read Lukács, and he almost certainly never read The Historical Novel, which was translated into Spanish in 1971, two years after Arguedas’ death. Arguedas’ understanding of realism was forged by his own reading of realist and socialist realist novels (which ranged from Victor Hugo and Herman Melville to Maxim Gorki and César Vallejo) as well as by his materialist-inflected understanding of history. It is even less likely that Lukács knew anything about Arguedas; if he had, it is entirely possible—judging from his notoriously uncharitable reading of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World—that he wouldn’t have approved of the Peruvian author’s use of realist techniques.

Even so, the resonance between Lukács and Arguedas’ understanding of realist form, arrived at in radically different contexts by the two writers, is mutually illuminating. On the one hand, the strong epic current that drives Arguedas’ literary project allows us to expand Lukács’ periodization of realism (which movies from England to France and finally to Russia) into still new zones, as part of the global “atlases of twentieth-century realism” Joe Cleary advocates. Conversely, placing Arguedas within a wider literary tradition—and the world history of capitalist development to which it refers—serves to wrest his works from dominant particularist and culturalist interpretations. Such interpretations, which attempt to valorize Arguedas’ writing on their own terms (primarily with reference to indigenous culture), paradoxically confirm Julio Cortázar’s view that what matters in Arguedas is the local and particular, occluding the author’s own commitment to concepts such as totality and universality, and, with it, any relationship of his work to larger material structures. As I argue below, it was because of, and not in spite of Arguedas’ commitment to these concepts that novels such as Yawar Fiesta were able to produce stunning insights into the particularities of highland Peruvian culture and society. A Marxist interpretation of Arguedas’ work along the lines of The Historical Novel, far from flattening cultural and historical differences, throws them sharply into relief.18

Yawar Fiesta: Highland Dialectics

Yawar Fiesta(1941) is set in the highland town of Puquio sometime in the 1930s. The novel focuses on the belated incursion of state power into the heavily indigenous highlands, long dominated by large, quasi-feudal landowners: a government official, recently arrived from the coast to Puquio, hears about the yawar fiesta of the title. This name, which unites the Quechua word for “blood” and the Spanish word for “festival,” refers to the annual bullfight that takes place on Peruvian Independence Day, in which men from the neighboring indigenous communities fight with a bull, eventually blowing it up with a stick of dynamite. The unnamed official—fancying himself a civilized man—is scandalized at the custom, and tries to prohibit the fight, stipulating (hilariously) it be replaced with a more “modern” form of Spanish bullfighting. The rest of the novel focuses on the contradictory and unpredictable alliances that the prohibition calls forth, as on one hand, old-style landowners and indigenous communities align to preserve the fight; and, on the other, “new” landowners and indigenous migrants to the capital city, Lima, align to prohibit it.

Yawar Fiestais thus a small story of conflict in an Andean town circa the 1930s, emerging when a minor state official tries to meddle in the customs of a remote highland town. At the same time, the novel invokes much larger processes of social transformation, alerting us to the much larger contours of Arguedas’ project. We can begin with its expansive temporal frame, which while focusing on a single week, opens onto a much longer, indeed epic, history of expropriation and incipient commodity relations in the highlands. The novel famously opens with two introductory chapters dedicated to describing the much longer history of how the town’s four indigenous communities or ayllus were dispossessed of much of their lands. In the chapter “Indian Town” (Pueblo indio) an omniscient narrator relates how, in the aftermath of the exhaustion of nearby silver mines in the seventeenth century, Spaniards dispossessed the communities to establish hacienda agriculture, pushing them higher and higher into the mountains. The communities, however, survived for centuries, and Puquio remained, as a disembodied voice interjects several times throughout the chapter, an “Indian town!” (¡Pueblo indio!).19 The second chapter, titled “The Dispossession,” tells how, in a moment closer to the present, demand for cattle from Lima unleashed a further wave of dispossession of the four ayllus, as the mountaintops (punas) previously left alone were seized by landowners as grazing land. The landowners “began to make a clean sweep, once and for all, of the stone huts, of the hamlets; they began to put of stone walls and fence of the free puna with thorn bushes and stone.”20 Many of the dispossessed were forced into the town, “carrying their pots, their pelts and their children.”21

It is only after establishing this long history of primitive accumulation and the incipient expansion of commodity relations—topoi par excellence of both European realism and Andean indigenismo—that the novel reopens in the third chapter to narrate events taking place in the novel’s present concerning the town’s annual bullfight. A sweeping, epic story sets up a small one; or, put alternately, a story about material dispossession and incipient commodification sets up a story about a struggle over a cultural practice. As noted, these days Arguedas is read mainly from a culturalist standpoint, and the novel’s turn to a cultural practice after the second chapter of the novel might at first glance be viewed as a turn to what the author is really interested in: the communities’ attempt to preserve their tradition. But such an interpretation is only possible if we disaggregate the material transformations outlined in the first two chapters from the unfolding of culture in the present, as if culture were a discrete entity that exists independently of the material contexts in which it emerges and transforms. In insisting upon the long history of indigenous separation from land, first through colonialism and then through the incipient emergence of an internal market, Arguedas is not just establishing a backdrop for the novel’s plot, but a set of structuring determinations that simultaneously free and constrain its characters within the bounds of the realist novel. Along these lines, it is surely not accidental that the recent commodification of cattle opens onto a story about bullfighting.

The epic story of primitive accumulation and commodification laid out in the first two chapters thus establishes the conditions for Arguedas’ granular examination of a single cultural practice as part and parcel of larger material transformations. And so, after two chapters that narrate a long process of change in Puquio, the novel “begins again,” as Horacio Legras puts it, in the third chapter to zero in on events unfolding in the novel’s present: “On the puna and on the mountains surrounding the town they were now sounding the wakawak’ras(trumpets). 22 When they heard the turupukllay(bullfight song) on the country roads and in the wheat fields, Indians and townspeople spoke of that year’s bullfight.”23 In classic realist fashion, a single element (the sound of the trumpet) unites separate but coeval narrative planes, as members of one ayllu discuss plans to capture a bull for the bullfight; landowners and townspeople complain about the noise; and the Vicar, saying mass, calls it “Devil’s music!”24 The fact that an indigenous trumpet becomes the literal instrument through which the novel creates separate but coeval narrative planes is interesting on two levels: on the one hand, it establishes the pervasiveness of indigenous culture in Puquio, which extends to all spheres of social life, even as these spheres are separated along lines of race and class. And whereas in a European context we might expect a clock or a calendar to mark coevalness, Yawar Fiestaenlists an element of indigenous culture not so much as a sign of cultural particularity, but rather to achieve a form of (mediated) objectivity on the part of the realist apparatus.

This objectivity extends into the novel’s examination of the different responses to the subprefect’s edict, which –as an extension of the historical unfolding established in the first two chapters of the book—creates surprising and unexpected outcomes. The most important of these are the two sets of contradictory alliances that emerge in the wake of the subprefect’s edict prohibiting the yawar fiesta.

On the one side, an alliance develops between the subprefect, a subset of landowners, and a group of chalos, or indigenous migrants to Lima. This alliance emerges when, at a gathering at the official’s house, a group of landowners excitedly relate the upcoming bullfight to him. The subprefect, every bit the pompous provincial official, is horrified at what he interprets as the barbarity of the practice. In larger terms, as others have shown, the subprefect represents the rather new presence of the state in the highlands under the Leguía administration, and its attempt to challenge the overweening power of landowners.25 The subprefect, in a word, is a representative of the (quasi)bourgeois state, or rather, a state that at least on the surface seeks to reform the highlands. Immediately, a group of landowners attempt to ingratiate themselves with the official by supporting his initiative. The landowner who represents this group in the novel, Demetrio Cáceres, in spite of his own enjoyment of the festival for decades announces: “the Puquio bullfight is a disgrace to our town. It makes us look like African savages.”26

In the appeal to civilization by both the state and landlords, we have something like the ideological comedy Roberto Schwarz describes in his classic essay “Misplaced Ideas,” in which elites on the periphery have no choice but to ventriloquize “civilized” ideals, even when doing so immediately throws into relief the inappropriateness of those ideals in their local context.27 In 20th-century Peru, the commercial “progress” that has begun in the highlands, bringing the state on its heels, depends upon the plunder of communal lands and relations of servitude on haciendas. In a word, it is an order that is anything but civilized.

Providing a more rather more serious indictment of the yawar fiesta is a group of chalos, former members or descendants of Puquio’s indigenous communities who have in the past decade migrated to the capital city as domestic servants and laborers. At their social club in Lima, the chalos receive the subprefect’s telegram inviting them to hire a Spanish bullfighter for the July 28th bullfight, which they accept on the grounds that it is a brutal practice in which their brothers die for the entertainment of the landowners. The student Escobar, an open admirer of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, whose photograph hangs in his room in Lima, vows: “Never again shall the Indians die in the Pichk’achuri square to give those pigs pleasure!”28

On the one side, the novel calls forth a set of social forces represented by the state official, a set of landowners who ape his “civilized” values in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with the official while retaining their dominance, and a group of acculturated indigenous migrants in Lima who align with the state against the landed order. On the other side, the novel posits an equally contradictory formation that sets out to preserve the festival: old-style landowners or gamonales, represented by the largest landowner in the region, Don Julián; town mestizos like the storekeeper Don Pancho; and the indigenous communities themselves, who, tellingly, are not represented by a single character but as a collectivity (more on this in a moment). In the context of the long and bitter history of conflict between the landowners and the communities outlined in the first two chapters of the novel, the alliance between Don Julián and the indigenous communities is highly contradictory. It emerges when the landowner authorizes the K’ayau community to capture a wild bull, nicknamed Misitu, in the forest of his estate for use in the fight. Don Julián allows the community to capture the bull because he has no use for the bourgeois mores of subprefect, perhaps showing a degree of security in his power relative to smaller landowners, but on a deeper level because he doesn’t want the state meddling in town affairs. For male members of the indigenous communities, on the other hand, the yawar fiesta isn’t—as the chalos believe--a sign of subservience to the landowners, but the reverse: it affirms their manliness and strength to the misti (non-indigenous) usurpers. To this end, the narrator recalls how at last year’s bullfight, Honrao, his clothes tattered and blood oozing from his ribs, shouted: “I Pichk’achuri runakuna, k’alakuna!” [I’m a pinchk’a churi person, you outsiders].29

In the end, it is the “old” order that prevails. The Spanish bullfighter from Lima, rattled by the songs sung by the women of the ayllus, and scared senseless by the giant bull Misitu, quickly runs from the ring in fright. At that moment, the town’s mayor—previously aligned with the subprefect—suddenly authorizes the indigenous bullfighters to enter the ring. As one man is gored, blood gushing from his groin, another sticks dynamite in the bull’s face. And the novel ends as the mayor, amidst the roaring excitement of the ring, yells into the ear of the stunned subprefect: “You see, Señor Subprefect? This is how our bullfights are. The real yawar punchay!”30

On one level, nothing has changed. In contrast with earlier indigenista narratives, Arguedas’ included, the novel does not end with a (failed) insurrection or assault on landowner power, but rather with the preservation of a festival embraced by landowners and indigenous communities alike. The indigenous communities, much to the dismay of the chalos, act against the state but not the landowning class, in a gesture that is decidedly ambiguous (and to the chalos, incomprehensible). Landowners, in turn, fall back into their default positions, relinquishing the values of “civilization” as quickly as they had adopted them.

The modernizing state, on a basic level, has failed, and the novel’s resolution also points to the high improbability of anything like a bourgeois revolution in the Peruvian highlands. At bottom, the state is only able to appeal to a set of cultural values with which even some landowners might concur, if only because their pronouncement does nothing to threaten basic social relations in Puquio. In this way, in its representation of the thinness of the state apparatus, the novel formalizes Mariátegui’s observation in the 1920s that it was already was “too late” for a bourgeois revolution in the countryside; the only real revolution possible would be socialist, and rooted in the indigenous collectivity, as explored below.31 Here we can point to the persistent references in the novel to July 28, Peruvian Independence Day, as a metonym for this weak nation state whose symbols adorn, but cannot as yet not transform, highland society.

In The Historical Novel, Lukács argues that this form assumes and is the result of bourgeois revolutions in England and France, cataclysms that make possible a new understanding of the historical.32 Yawar Fiesta is a novel that not only does not assume the victory of a bourgeois revolution in Peru, but dramatizes the inability of the state to accomplish any such feat across its national territory. This is not to say that the novel unfolds as if no bourgeois revolutions had taken place: they indeed have, just not in Peru. The state, which comes off as comical and thin, is not the element from which the epic quality of the novel springs: instead, to return to the first two chapters of the novel, this epic quality lies in the relationship between the indigenous collectivity and its relationship to wider—indeed global—forces of colonialism and capitalism as forces that extend well beyond the reach of the weak peripheral state.

At the same time, these economic forces do not abruptly and inalterably change Puquio, but unfold slowly, with moments of intensity, over a long period of time. Here we might contrast what happens in Yawar Fiestawith what happens in Gabriel García Márquez’s far better-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) with the sudden arrival of the foreign banana company. This arrival signals a total social upheaval so severe that it culminates in the mythical annihilation of Macondo. Returning to the question of why an author like Arguedas employs a realist mode, it might not be because he hadn’t yet discovered more experimental modes, but because the realist apparatus lent itself especially well in Yawar Fiestato home in on slow, uneven and therefore nearly imperceptible moments of capitalist transition in a setting like Puquio.33

Transition is slow and almost imperceptible, but present. A market imperative is in place (bringing with it the state on its heels); in this context, upon closer inspection, it is not that nothing has changed over the course of the week leading up to the bullfight. Here I would like to temper Antonio Cornejo Polar’s early assertion that by the end of the novel “the traditional model of Andean society recomposes itself.”34 For a key result of Arguedas’ realist intervention is to reveal that, beneath the surface, everything has changed--there is no going back to the way things were. This principle of constant change is expressed most powerfully on the level of the indigenous collectivity, which, as explored below, asserts its strength (and by extension submerged revolutionary agency) at the same time as this very assertion under changing circumstances opens, dialectically, onto the possibility of the dissolution of the collective.

The Realist Ayllu

To begin to explore the forces of history at work beneath the surface of Yawar Fiesta, it is necessary to turn to Arguedas’ representation of the ayllu or indigenous agricultural commune, the social unit whose presence most distinguishes Yawar Fiestafrom European versions of the historical novel. For Lukács, the emergence of the historical novel in England and France assumes “the separation of means of conditions of production and labour-power,” and with it the creation of the bourgeois individual.35 This separation freedom cannot be assumed in Peru, where the community—even as it is battered over long periods of time by colonialism, the quasi-feudal landed order, and market forces—persists and is thus immediately available as a horizon of collectivity in Yawar Fiesta. Against the thinness of character like the subprefect, there is a historical density and vitality within the communal organization of the indigenous ayllu, the horizon of revolutionary possibility Arguedas inherits from José Carlos Mariátegui. This possibility, as the resolution ofYawar Fiestaunderscores, is neither immediate nor straightforward, as demonstrated by the inability of the chalos to understand why the comuneros want to preserve the festival, as well as by the comuneros’ lack of interest in the chalos’ Marxist politics. And yet, beneath the surface, the potential of the collectivity to change reality—and be changed by it—constitutes the core of the novel’s utopian vision.

The representation of this collectivity, to be sure, provides real challenges to the realist novel as a form. As Arguedas himself noted, “there are scarcely any Indian names in Yawar Fiesta.”36 This is because members the ayllu cannot be figured as “typical” characters, because they are not individuals in a bourgeois sense. While indigenous people, always male, occasionally emerge to speak or act for a brief moment (such as Honrao getting gored by the bull), they do not develop as characters, but instead quickly recede back into the collective. More than through characterization, the contours of indigenous collectivity are captured, as John Kraniauskas has argued, through the omniscient narrator’s gestures toward indigenous ways of seeing. The interjection ‘¡Pueblo indio!’ (Indian town) in the novel’s first chapter, for example, mark the ayllu as “the subject of Arguedian (literary) history.”37 In similar manner, the omniscient narrator draws the reader’s attention to the fact to elements the mistis (the Quechua word for non-indigenous people) are unable to see and hear: “From the mountain peaks four streams descend and flow near the town; in the cascades the white water is calling, but the mistisdo not hear it. On the hillsides, on the plains, on the mountaintops the yellow flowers dance in the wind, but the mistishardly see them.” The mistis, oblivious to what the comuneros have for centuries understood as a fundamental unity among all living things, get drunk, “sneeze” and “calculat(e) the weight of their steers,” oblivious to what the community understands as a fundamental unity among all living things.38

On the one hand, the ayllu is a stable collectivity that perseveres in the face of abuse from the time of the Spanish conquest until the present; at the same time, however, Yawar Fiesta submits the ayllu to realist examination, showing how all attempts by the community to preserve itself under new circumstances, might accelerate the decay of that very form. Marx made a similar observation about precapitalist communal structures in the Grundrisse:

In all these forms, the reproduction of presupposed relations—more or less naturally arisen or historical as well, but become traditional—of the individual to his commune, together with a specific, objective existence, predetermined for the individual, of his relations both to the conditions of labour and to his co-herders, fellow tribesmen etc.—are the foundation of development, which is therefore from the outset restricted, but which signifies decay, decline and fall once this barrier is suspended.”39

The ayllus of Yawar Fiestaare of course not precapitalist in the same sense as the ancient Romans or Incas, but instead had coexisted with and transformed under regimes of colonialism and capitalism for over 400 years. This history, rather than invalidate Marx’s observation, though, makes it even more likely that the barriers protecting the commune will be breached under the conditions of primitive accumulation and commodification outlined in Yawar Fiesta, even as the specific contours of the process cannot be predicted. This is why, once again, the novel—and the realist novel in particular—acquires importance in sensing the possible directions taken by history.

There are two main instances of this dialectic of preservation and decay of the ayllu in Yawar Fiesta: first, the construction of a highway from Puquio to the coast a decade earlier; and, second, the capturing of the wild bull Misitu for use in the bullfight. As we learn from the narrator, a decade earlier the ayllus of Puquio had built a road to the coast in an astonishing 28 days, in a friendly competition with ayllus from another town. Completely self-organized and autonomous, the feat demonstrates the unrivalled productive potential of the commune, which effectively achieves what the landowning class “had never dared to think about.” And so again on July 28, Peruvian Independence Day, “the first truck arrived in Puquio.”40 Once built, the road acts as a possible solvent of community as it places Puquio into greater contact with faraway markets and sparks incipient migration out of the highlands.

The instability that results from the highway reverberates into the present in the guise of the novel’s main event, the Yawar Fiesta. The highway brings the state with it on its heels, which in turn crafts a new prohibition that must be fought. But once again, the attempt to preserve integrity and show strength creates the possibility of disintegration, as we see in the novel’s narration of the capture of the wild bull Misitu and the fissures it creates among the ayllus themselves.

For members of one ayllu, the K’oñanis, the bull is a sacred and feared incarnation of an auki, or mountain deity. As legend has it, Misitu appeared suddenly one night, out of a flash of lightning on a lake. This story, the narrator intimates, emerged when Misitu—who was not part of Don Julián’s herd—escaped from another ranch, “who knows whether it was from Wanakupampa, Oskonta, or farther away?”41 The legend of Misitu, that is, while well-grounded in indigenous beliefs, emerges as a response to a bull’s escape from one ranch to another. The story takes a new turn, though, when as a result of Misitu’s fame as an auki, members of the K’ayau ayllu plan to capture him for use in the bullfight. They do not believe Misitu is an auki, and insist that he is just a ‘big sallka” or big bull.42 With authorization from Don Julián (who is unable to capture the bull himself), members of the K’ayau ayllu essentially raid the Koñani plain to take Misitu. At least six hundred men advance across the plain, as “The K’oñanis ran out of all the fields, little farms, and stone huts.”43 The description recalls the collective building of the road years earlier, but it also uncomfortably recalls the descriptions of the misti raids of ayllu lands in the first two chapters of the novel. The chief staff bearer of the K’ayau tells the Koñanis Don Julián has ordered them to take Misitu. A sorcerer who accompanies the staff bearers, in turn, tell the Koñanis that an even higher authority, the auki himself, has mandated that Misitu belongs to K’ayau, and will give them an even wilder bull later. The narrator, it should be noted, relates this conflict in realist fashion, achieving a distance through which competing viewpoints can be observed. It is possible that the sorcerer has communicated with the auki; but it is perhaps more probable that he and the K’ayau are manipulating beliefs about the auki to secure Misitu.

While there is much to be gleaned from Arguedas’ fine-grained analysis of the conflict between the two ayllus, I will limit myself to two basic points. First, the Yawar Fiestasimultaneously affirms the cohesion of the ayllu in opposition to misti society at the same time as it opens onto conflict and competition within the community itself. By the same token, what is on one side an affirmation of an indigenous worldview at the same time opens onto a process of desacralization that might, in the long run, erode the mythic structures that underpin collective life. For the chalos in Yawar Fiesta, this desacralization is a first step toward revolutionary consciousness. As the student Escobar says: “They’ve killed anauki. And the day they kill all the aukiswho are tormenting their minds…we shall lead this country to a glory no one can imagine.”44 But for Arguedas, who takes some distance from the chalos’ position, desacralization expresses the possible erosion of communal structures themselves, and is therefore not automatically desirable from a socialist point of view.

Second, Arguedas’ realist depiction of indigenous myth in Yawar Fiesta differs greatly from the better known and more critically appreciated proto-modernist current known “magical realism.” Again, a brief contrast with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is instructive. In that novel, everyone in Macondo (the narrator included) believes that “magical” events happen, giving rise to what Franco Moretti has identified as the monological character of this novel’s narration.45 When a character like Remedios La Bella ascends, there is no sense of conflicting belief structures in the town. This homogeneity vis-à-vis belief can be mapped, in turn, onto the homogeneity of Macondo’s population, which is not riven by class or race, at least until the banana company comes. Contrast this with Arguedas’ realist depiction of beliefs, in which what different sectors and even subsectors of society believe becomes a mediated expression of conflict and change. As a larger point, 20th-century realisms might be particularly adept at depicting the processes of historical transformation that so-called magical realism takes for granted, but cannot account for on the level of its own narrative apparatus. Alternatively, realism might be especially adept at marking moments of desacralization under forced modernization, while magical realism might mark the re-enchantment of the world during even more intense rounds of market pressure, often by way of the literary apparatus itself.

In Arguedas’ own literary oeuvre, the presence of indigenous myth would assert itself with ever-greater intensity in his later novels, but always in inverse relationship to the strength of the allyu. While Yawar Fiestalimits itself to depicting myth in realist fashion, as what people believe; his later novels incorporate myth into the narrative apparatus on a much greater level. For example, in the novel Todas las sangres (All the Bloods,1966), a sprawling realist epic of the collapse of the hacienda system and the imposition of imperialism in the highlands, the yawar mayu or river of blood, a millenarian symbol of renewal, really does shake the earth: even capitalists in Lima feel it. And in his final novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo(The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, 1971), left unfinished at the time of his death by suicide, indigenous mythic structure becomes the narrative principle of the text as a whole, as the millenarian foxes chatter to one another and morph into different human characters. Importantly, this break with realism and entry into something like what is (imperfectly) called magical realism is made possible by the relocation of members of highland indigenous communities to the industrialized port city of Chimbote in the novel, where they are no longer members of any ayllu, but atomized individuals. In this final novel, the mythic pull on narrative apparatus is the strongest, even as—as William Rowe has stressed—the novel’s characters (who have now become individuals in the full sense of the word) themselves cease to believe in myth.46

From the vantage of his larger oeuvre, Yawar Fiestarepresents the initiation of a long process of the transformation of indigenous belief systems and social structures. More than a default choice, the realist mode Arguedas employs in this novel attempts to demonstrate how indigenous belief structures change historically, and as a result become available as aesthetic registers in later literary texts. Fredric Jameson’s still-useful definition of magical realism as an aesthetic mode that expresses the simultaneity of capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production (that is, uneven and combined development) still holds; what I would like to add is that realism and magical realism might correspond to different moments within histories of uneven and combined development.47 Along with Cleary’s world “atlases of twentieth- century realism,” we still need literary periodizations of these moments of transition. From the vantage of our present, in the midst of the near-universal expansion of commodity relations, it remains an open question as to whether the Latin American novel, realist or non-realist, might continue to make history “appear.” But before even answering this question, realists like Arguedas might help us understand what was historical in the 20th-century novel in the first place, alerting us by way of its form to a rich past that lays beneath the surface(lessness) of the present.

1. Carlos Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (México: J. Mortiz, 1969) 11, my translation.
2. Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989) 87.
3. Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, “Peripheral Realisms Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (1 Sept 2012): 277.
4. Joe Cleary, “Realism after Modernism and the Literary World-System,” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (1 Sept 2012): 257.
5. Cleary, “Realism after Modernism” 256
6. Fredric Jameson, The Antimonies of Realism (New York: Verso, 2013) 271.
7. Perry Anderson, “From Progress to Catastrophe,” London Review of Books 33.15 (28 July 2011): 24-28.
   www.lrb.co.uk/v٣٣/n١٥/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe
8. See, for example, Roberto Schwarz, “A Brazilian Breakthrough,” New Left Review 36 (2005): 91-107.
9. José María Arguedas, “Preliminary note,” in Yawar Fiesta,trans. Frances Horning Barraclough (Austin: University of Texas Press,1985) xii.
10. On Cortázar’s uncharitable characterization of regionalist realism, and Arguedas’ responses, see Mauricio Ostria González, “Sobre árboles y pájaros: La polémica Arguedas-Cortázar,” Encuentros y Desencuentros, Actas del IV Congreso Internacional del C.E.L.C.I.R.P (Universidad de la Laguna: Tenerife, 2002) 341-354.
11. Arguedas, “Discusión de la narración peruana,’ cited in William Rowe, Mito e ideología en la obra de José María Arguedas, (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1979) 134, my translation.
12. Alberto Flores Galindo, Dos ensayos sobre José María Arguedas, (Lima: Casa de Estudios del Socialismo Sur, 1992) 15.
13. György Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 139.
14. Arguedas, “The Problem of Literary Expression in Peru,” in Yawar Fiesta, xiii.
15. “Problem of Literary Expression” xv.
16. “Problem of Literary Expression” xiv.
17. “Problem of Literary Expression” xv.
18. I am indebted as well to William Rowe’s excellent Lukácsian reading of Arguedas’ historical novels in Mito e ideología en la obra de José María Arguedas (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1979).
19. Yawar Fiesta1.
20. Yawar Fiesta 12.
21. Yawar Fiesta 15.
22. Horacio Legras, Literature and Subjection: The Economy of Writing and Marginality in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) 20.
23. Yawar Fiesta 19.
24. Yawar Fiesta 22.
25. See Legras, and Misha Kokotovic, “Transculturación narrativa y modernidad andina: nueva lectura de Yawar Fiesta” in Jose Maria Arguedas: hacia una poetica migrante, ed. Sergio R. Franco (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana 2006).
26. Yawar Fiesta37.
27. Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas,” Misplaced Ideas: Essays On Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992) 27-28.
28. Yawar Fiesta 72
29. Yawar Fiesta 20.
30. Yawar Fiesta 147
31. “In keeping with my ideological position, I believe that the moment for attempting the liberal, individualist method in Peru has already passed. Aside from reasons of doctrine, I consider-that our agrarian problem has a special character due to an indisputable and concrete factor: the survival of the Indian “community” and of elements of practical socialism in indigenous agriculture and life.” José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Jorge Basadre (Austin: UT Austin Press, 1971).
    www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/7-interpretive-essays/essay03.htm
32. In the midst of 18th and 19th century bourgeois revolutions across Europe, “(m)en are able to conceive of their existence as historically conditioned” for the first time, according to Lukács, The Historical Novel, 24.
33. Antonio Cornejo Polar makes a similar point about indigenista texts as narrating “the gradual, zigzagging but real integration of the country.” Literatura y sociedad en el Perú : La novela indigenista (Lima, Perú: Lasontay, 1980) 87.
34. Antonio Cornejo Polar, Los universos narrativos de José María Arguedas (Buenos Aires:Editorial Losada, 1973) 79.
35. The Historical Novel21.
36. Arguedas, “The Novel” xiv.
37. John Kraniauskas, “A Short Andean History of Photography: Yawar Fiesta,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies ٢١.٣ (٢٠١٢): 362.
38. Yawar Fiesta 9.
39. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993) 486-7, emphasis in original.
40. Yawar Fiesta 60.
41. Yawar Fiesta 81.
42. Yawar Fiesta 96.
43. Yawar Fiesta 105.
44. Yawar Fiesta 121.
45. Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: the World-system From Goethe to García Márquez(London: Verso, 1996) 246.
46. William Rowe, “No hay mensajero de nada”: la modernidad andina según los Zorros de Arguedas,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana (2010): 61-96.
47. Fredric Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 (1986): 311.