The Storyteller.

Call of the Wild

'DONT CANT about savages," Johnson admonished Boswell when his friend quoted Rousseau about the superiority of primitive cultures. Boswell's nostalgia for mud huts and bamboo poles was typical of the Enlightenment. This was the daydream side of modernity; Rousseau was its avatar. Today ethnologists tell us that primitive tribes aren't much different from the Harvard faculty; but there are still plenty of lost souls in the West who see primitive culture as a kind of homeopathic cure for the contradictions of modernity.

Mario Vargas Llosa explores this mentality in his new novel The Storyteller. Much of his fiction thus far has been a protest against the degradations of "progress" in South America. "At what precise moment had Peru f--d itself up?" he asks in Conversation in the Cathedral, perhaps the most famous sentence in modern Latin American literature. But Vargas Lloosa himself is a European-style intellectual who is not abouot to go off and run naked in the forest. He is, in fact, running for president of a country that is in far worse shape than when he asked that question in 1969.

As in several previous novels, the narrator of The Storyteller is an ironic, cultured type not unlike Vargas Llosa himself. Back in the Fifties in Lima, he had been friendly with a Jewish student named Saul, who was obsessed with a certain primitive tribe that kept moving deeper into the Peruvian jungle to avoid contact with modern civilization. The friend disappeared, and now, years later, the narrator spots him in a photograph of this tribe. Saul has apparently gone entirely native and become a "storyteller" who keeps the Machiguenga Indian culture going by preserving its collective memories.

The photograph gives the narrator a deep nostalgia for a time when storytelling meant something. He sets himself a problem--"how primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story." The result is long chapters in which we enter the mind of Saul as he travels with the tribe. This part of the novel reads like Frazer's The Golden Bough on acid. Literary recreations of the archaic mind are seldom convincing. But the story of the narrator's growing fixation on Saul is done in the light-hearted manner of Vargas Llosa's delectable Aunt-Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) and is very entertaining.

The Storyteller is, in part, a meditation on the impact of "higher" civilization on primitive man. It puts before us the appalling exploitation that the West has visited on primitive peoples who were minding their own business. Vargas Llosa, however, does not take any cheap shots; in fact, he has pointed out before that the extermination of Indian tribes in Latin America was mainly the work of republican, not colonial, regimes. Such observations have not made him popular with fellow Latin American intellectuals.

On a deeper level, The Storyteller plays with the same idea as Dostoyevsky's "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." Was modernity a Second Fall? Did man lose something deep and subtle when he engineered his way out of a dependence on both God and the whims of nature? In this view, even the best-intentioned linguists and anthropologists can infect primitive peoples like a plague bacillus. They only have to stand there with their ballpoints and tape recorders to corrupt the inner being of their subjects.

In his usual ironic manner, Vargas Llosa poses some large questions then shies away from them. "One of the problems of our ever-so-powerful culture," the narrator's friend says at one point, "is that it's made God superfluous." Is this good or bad? Vargas Llosa lets the question hang. He keeps his distance from religion in Paul Tillich's sense of it as the "ultimate concern." Given the big themes Vargas Lllosa likes to play with, his refusal to search out the hidden principle of things constitutes a kind of metaphysical sloth.

This may be why, although he has made some large narrative efforts, he does not quite measure up as a major novelist. You need only compare his novel on South American radicals, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), with Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. The Vargas Llosa novel is full of sound observations and amusing ironies, but makes no attempt to explore the well-springs of political nihilism.

But the fact that Vargas Llosa even suggests such a comparison is a measure of his intellectual curiosity. He makes the current crop of American novelists, who seldom write about anything larger than themselves, seem like the "regional" school in this hemisphere.

Mr. Johnston is a freelance writer living in New York.