64 pages • 2 hours read
Mario Vargas LlosaThe War of the End of the World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Tragedy of Political Idealism
“A strange breed, idealists,” comments the Baron de Canabrava to his political allies, after trying to win over Galileo Gall and Moreira César and being rejected by both men as an “enemy” (244). Despite holding conflicting political ideals—César wants to establish a dictatorial republic under control of the army, while Gall is an anarchist revolutionary who detests all forms of centralized authority—the attitude and language of each man mirrors the other. What becomes clear over the course of the novel is that all forms of political idealism, right or left-wing, religious or secular, modernizing or traditional, share the same uncompromising character. By rejecting reality, they inevitably lead to tragic results.
The book’s central conflict, between Canudos and the federal army, is, on one level, a conflict between political reality and political idealism. The Counselor is perhaps the most idealistic character in the book, in the sense that the baron defines it. Speaking of Moreira César, the Baron says, “He’s not interested in money or honors, and perhaps not even in power for himself. It’s abstract things that motivate him to act” (247). Just as Moreira César’s values “nationalism, the worship of technical progress, the belief that only the army can impose order and save this country from chaos and corruption” above any practical consideration, the Counselor’s values his abstract image of the afterlife over the reality of life itself. The culmination of this ideal comes in Abbot João’s massacre of those trying to surrender to the army. He thinks that by gunning them down, he is sending them to heaven, whereas if the soldiers don’t keep their word and end up slitting their throats, they will be condemned to hell. Because his black-and-white ideals are so extreme, he judges it better to kill them instead of allowing the possibility they might survive.
Just as Canudos ends in tragedy, so do the lives of Gall and César. Gall is killed in a struggle with Rufino, whose machismo and sense of honor he ridicules as absurd and backward. It is his inability to understand a conflicting point of view that results in his death, preventing him from ever witnessing the culmination of his political ideals in Canudos. Moreira César likewise is unable to respond to the reality before him. His entire campaign is conducted against an imaginary army of traitors trained and advised by English agents. He fights as he would against a traditional army instead of preparing for the guerilla tactics employed by the jagunços. His death, charging toward the enemy on his white horse and being shot by unseen assailants, exemplifies the contrast between his deluded ideals and brutal reality.
In contrast with Gall, César, and the Counselor’s tragically idealistic projects are the slow, amoral, compromising political maneuvers of the Baron de Canabrava and Epaminondas Gonçalves. Both men survive to the end of the novel and, in some sense, achieve their aims. But the baron’s political realism also has at its heart a fundamental sense of pessimism. By elevating self-preservation above any ideal, he is condemned to be trapped by events beyond his control. His two loves—nature and his wife, Estela—are destroyed by politics. He had to abandon his boyhood ambition to become a naturalist, and Estela is driven mad by the destruction of Calumbi. So while he does survive, he also leads a stunted existence, bereft of the joy and pure sense of purpose idealism can confer. The final image of him staring out the window at fisherman tossing flowers onto the water, “praying and perhaps singing” is an allegory for the distance between him and authentic, simple joy (542).
The Radical Power of Religious Fanaticism
Closely related to the text’s theme of the tragedy of political idealism is the radical power of religious fanaticism: The utopian community at Canudos has clear political significance, evidenced by the lengths the new government goes to in order to crush the settlement. Although the Canudos settlement ends in tragedy, for more than two decades it is a sanctuary for the poor and dispossessed of the backlands. Many of its inhabitants, living on the margins of society, had little hope before the settlement was established. Big João was enslaved, then became a violent bandit and later begged to be killed for the brutal murder of his master’s sister. The Lion of Natuba would have been burnt at the stake if not for the Counselor’s intervention, and before that was bullied as a freak and lived at risk of being kidnapped whenever the travelling circus rolled into town. Abbot João was known as the cruelest bandit in Bahia, responsible for countless rapes and murders. But by choosing to abandon their old lives and follow the Counselor, each character’s talents are redirected to create a society that lifts up the poor and ends the violence among the sertanejos. The magnitude of this change is symbolized by the adoption of new names for almost all the Counselor’s inner circle: Satan João becomes Abbot João; Maria Quadrado, formerly “the filicide of Salvador” (420), becomes the Mother of Men; even the Counselor himself disposes of his real name, which is only mentioned once in the entire text. This technique alludes to St Paul’s conversion, after which he abandoned his birth name, Saul, and became Paul. For the Counselor’s followers, the new names signal their faith in the new world they are building.
Despite its destruction and the death of almost all the Counselor’s followers, their religious fanaticism effects radical change. The power of the old aristocracy is broken, while republican power is greatly strengthened. This is ironic, given that they viewed the Republic as the Antichrist. But more ambiguous is the impact Canudos has had on those who didn’t abide by its interpretation of Catholicism. The nearsighted journalist asserts that Canudos “changed my ideas about history, about Brazil, about men. But above all about myself” (423). However, he never specifies what these ideas were changed to, just that his preexisting ones were destroyed. Throughout his time in Canudos, his glasses are broken—a broken product of the modern, scientific world and thus a metaphor for rational understanding—yet despite seeing hardly anything, the journalist finds love for the first time in his life. Likewise, the soldiers bombarding Canudos are nonetheless moved by the sound of its bells ringing. It’s as though its spiritual power is such that it’s able to break through even to those armed against it.
Ultimately however, none of the novel’s competing ideologies can explain it. By withholding the answer to the question of why Canudos happened, Vargas Llosa leaves it to the reader to decide, from the evidence his book presents. Realist throughout, the final sentence introduces the hint of magical realism, when an old lady taken prisoner says that, “Archangels took [Abbot João] up to heaven […] I saw them” (568). The image echoes a famous scene from García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; but the deeper point may be that to understand Canudos, the realist mode is inadequate. Literary realism emerged in the 19th century, a product of the rationalism that Gall, César, and the baron all favor. None of them would admit to literally seeing an angel carry a human being up to heaven. But the woman’s faith is so strong that it refigures her sense of reality. Vargas Llosa seems to be saying that only a sense of reality divorced from realism and rationality can possibly understand Canudos. For everyone else, its power, though undeniable, is mysterious.
How Stories Create History
As a historical novel, The War of the End of the World is by definition interested in how history is told: who tells it, what prejudices and preconceptions shape the telling, the differences between events on the ground and what’s reported of them, and how these stories are reshaped by everyone who hears them. The book’s structure emphasizes the discrepancies between versions of the same event: The nonlinear chronology shows the gap between events as they happen and as they are reported, while the shifts in perspective demonstrate how different people interpret the same events in totally contrasting ways, even in real time.
The war in Canudos is introduced to readers in Part 1, Chapter 2, as a second-hand report from Pires Ferreira and his defeated company. Immediately, doubt is introduced: The city commissioner doesn’t believe that a group of peaceful pilgrims could have routed federal soldiers. The commissioner is the messenger who will carry back news to the Bahia government, and Vargas Llosa implies that his account will thus be biased in favor of his skeptical interpretation. At the same time, the nearsighted journalist is making notes in a corner: his account will be the one the public reads, different again from what the politicians hear. And in a small detail that has enormous ramifications, the doctor notes that the men’s wounds were likely caused by advanced explosive bullets. This mistake is only revealed later, in Part 3, Chapter 3, by the Baron de Canabrava: In fact they are traditional “limonite projectiles” (216) used in the backlands for decades. Vargas Llosa seems to be making two points: Proximity to events does not guarantee accuracy, and one tiny mistake in the historical record can grow until it warps the entire narrative. Epaminondas Gonçalves uses the news of the explosive bullets as a key part of his argument that the English are helping to arm the rebels, and that Canudos is a conspiracy against the republic. This leads to the federal army’s intervention and, ultimately, shifts the balance of power in Bahia from the baron’s conservative faction to the republicans led by Gonçalves. A single lie changes the course of history.
The role of the press in creating a narrative that directs events, while pretending merely to comment on them, is central. Gonçalves uses the Journal de Noticías to further his political aims. In Part 2, after reporting on the English “plot” in an article for the paper, the nearsighted journalist comments, “Whether true or false, it’s an extraordinary story” (136). The power of the story is what will make it stick; whether it’s true is irrelevant. This is shown again during the journalist’s conversations with the baron in Part 4; he describes his replacement at the paper, reporting on the final assault on Canudos, thus: “A good man. Honest, with no imagination, no passionate biases, no convictions. The ideal man to provide an impassive, objective version of what happened up there” (416). Yet, seeing some jagunços wearing an unidentified uniform, he assumes they are English soldiers. In another dispatch, finding a letter in one of their pockets, because the handwriting is “aristocratic,” he theorizes that the baron has been advising the rebels.
But Vargas Llosa is not entirely skeptical that a true understanding of history can be unearthed from so much deception. One of his nonfiction books, tellingly entitled The Truth of Lies (1997), argues that fiction, as a lie which is out in the open rather than concealed, bridges human beings’ dissatisfaction with their lot and the inconsistent stories those in power use to justify the status quo. By protesting reality as it’s presented, fiction both opens the way to truth and creates the possibility for an alternative: it is thus a revolutionary act. According to this philosophy, the responsibility for interpretation is on the reader; rather than accept the stories of the press, each person should make up their own mind. This process is mirrored in the nearsighted journalist’s development from amoral propagandist to doubtful truth seeker. His ambition to write a book is his attempt to understand Canudos for what it really was. But by ending the novel before this book has been written, Vargas Llosa forces the readers to make up their own mind about Canudos.
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