Narrating Ambiguity: Spatial and Spectral Politics in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House

This paper proposes that in Llosa's The Green House the “movement” of narratives map terrains of power-invested ideological and discursive spaces which are allegories of postcolonial Peru. However, the multiple fragments of narrative time-lines challenge any understanding of these spaces as seamless and cohesive. I argue that the rhizomatic narrative courses tease out the discrepancies and contradictions inherent in modernity as a historical and social project, serving the interests of a liberal market economy and neo liberal state. The generic linearity of spatial allegories with its dominant voices and discourses of progress, development, and humanistic ethics disintegrates through hauntings of diverse perspectives and narrative discourses that reveal the past's systemic excesses of violence, exploitation, exclusion, and normalization. By relating insights from spatial theories, specifically, literary cartography and geocriticism, to views of allegory as symbolic places of embodied movement infused with meaningful spatio-temporal memories and interactions of power, the idea of spatial allegories as discourse is employed to provide a critical frame for reading the text. Further, the concept of specters offers possibilities for understanding spaces as marked by tangible and intangible traces left by historical-political events and ideologies, which question the State's claims of democracy and justice. A spatial reading of the text also reveals an ambiguity in Llosa's portrayal of Latin American modernity, visible in the interpenetrative, dialectical spatial structures and geographies. This, I claim, is an artistic response of the novel to the challenges of adequately portraying the complexities of spaces and voices in postcolonial Peru.