"REGRESO A LA BARBARIE": INTERTEXTUAL PARADIGMS FOR PERU'S DESCENT INTO CHAOS IN LITUMA EN LOS ANDES

In Jorge Luis Borges' "La muerte y la br?jula," a story of murder, sleuthing, and revenge in Buenos Aires, a single character controls the course of the investigation from behind the scenes, planting evidence?and plotting new crimes?that ultimately deliver the detective, his arch-enemy Erik Lonnrot, directly into his hands. Red Scharlach the Dandy, also known as Ginzberg, Ginsburg and Gryphius, is deliberately depicted as Godlike in his omniscience and apparent omnipotence. While Mario Vargas Llosa's 1993 murder mystery, Lituma en los Andes, takes place far removed?both spatially and culturally?from the city streets of Buenos Aires, one of its characters nevertheless invites comparison to Red Scharlach. In what may be construed as a nod to Borges' story, a Danish anthropologist known as Stirmson, Stirmsson, and Stirmesson, but also as Escarlatina, plays a small but absolutely pivotal role: armed with a seem ingly unbounded knowledge of the Andean indigenous populations, he provides Vargas Llosa' s protagonist with information on local beliefs which allows him to identify the culprits of the murders that he has been investi gating. Establishing the exact nature of the relationship between these two works is not the goal of this essay. Rather, after a brief summary of the novel and an overview of the political context within which it was written, I hope to demonstrate how "La muerte y la br?jula" and the novel's numerous other intertextual references revolve predominantly around a single theme with a longstanding tradition in Spanish American literature and cultural studies: the struggle within society between forces of civilization and savagery. Far from being a mere exercise in literary virtuosity, however, the novel deliberately deploys a wealth of references in order to underscore Vargas Llosa's sense of the urgency and implications of the political crisis and social breakdown in Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s.