Towards a New Environmentalism: Indigeneity, Ethics and Ecology in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Two Recent Ecocritical Studies

Abstract

Starting with the premise that postcolonial writers are increasingly interested in aspects of indigenous thinking, this paper draws on recent ecocriticism to analyse Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller. In this novel, Llosa dramatises in fictional form the worldview of the Machiguenga Indians of Peru. He constructs the voices of two university friends in Lima: those of Saúl Zuratas and an unnamed narrator. Chapter by chapter, through their juxtaposed conversations, visits to the remote jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios in eastern Peru, and Saúl’s narration of the stories he tells the Machiguengas, the reader encounters the worldview of this small isolated tribe. Their cosmology values and customs are revealed to be ecologically sensitive, offering an interconnected communal vision on which the survival of the ecosphere depends.