Abstract
This essay undertakes a comparative study of Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother, inviting us to explore how Vargas Llosa, influenced by Georges Bataille’s novels Story of the Eye and Pierre Klossowski’s Roberte, Tonight, reinterprets Greco-Latin myths to construct an atmosphere charged with eroticism in the triad of characters: Doña Lucrecia, Don Rigoberto and Fonchito, the latter being the representative of a synthesis of childhood innocence and perversion, desire and the transgression of moral and social limits. Thus, it is argued that In Praise of Stepmother manages to balance the tension between myth, fantasy and reality, proposing a reflection on the nature of desire and the construction of subjectivity through literary and symbolic play.
Keywords: Mario Vargas Llosa, simulacrum, transgression, eroticism, comparative literature, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski.
Introduction
Antoine: Is there also a fourth person?
Octave: No, but a third person who stands between you and me, between me and your aunt Roberte, between your aunt and yourself. […] And this third party is a pure spirit.
Pierre Klossowski, Roberte, tonight[1].
In 1978 Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a prologue entitled ‘El placer glacial’ in a subversive, erotic, surrealist and, above all, psychoanalytical novel. I am referring to the book Story of the Eye by the French writer Georges Bataille, published in 1928.
In the prologue, Vargas Llosa praises the figure of the ‘naughty children’, who, at a still infantile age, satisfy their desires by transgressing the symbolic prohibitions of adults. These desires range from the most innocent to the most criminal. Therefore, Vargas Llosa will say that infants: ‘They obey their instincts and their fantasies without taking into account, at all, the prohibitions and prejudices that adults have erected to channel and restrain these forces’. Later, the Peruvian writer will ask himself: Is there a more exciting game for children than disobeying their elders?[2]
Those who know the book Story of the Eye will remember with lucidity the scene in which Simone forces her faithful accomplice to remove a priest’s eye with a pair of scissors and then introduce it into her Temple of Venus. This, if in itself contains a strong symbolic charge of the sadistic and the perverse, represents something more than a crime or a simple childish prank, it signifies the perfect sovereignty of the Id, which transgresses the symbolic order of the social as the sacred, thus transforming it into the Ego par excellence.
However, this will not be the only novel that influenced the Nobel Laureate in Literature, in this sense, I make direct reference to the trilogy The Laws of Hospitality by the writer Pierre Klossowski, particularly to Roberte, Tonight.
In this novel with theological and erotic overtones, we are told the story of Octave, an acclaimed ecclesiastical professor who, through his teachings, will carry out the ritual of offering his wife Roberte to guests as a symbol of hospitality; not only in a carnal but also in a spiritual way, and it will be Antoine, Octave’s nephew, who will narrate the marital complications of this singular couple.
Development
Under this influence, in 1988, Vargas Llosa, captivated by the work of Bataille and Klossowski, published his book In Praise of Stepmother for the erotic literature collection ‘La Sonrisa Vertical’, dedicating it to the illustrious eroticist Luis García Berlanga.
This work tells the story of the amorous and platonic relationship between the characters Doña Lucrecia, a mature woman of enviable beauty, and Don Rigoberto, a collector and art enthusiast. At this point, as we can see, the parallel between In Praise of Stepmother and Roberte, Tonight is evident.
Let us see then that in the relationship between Don Rigoberto and Doña Lucrecia – a possible allusion to a character of the same name from the history of Ancient Rome – there is a play of erotic fantasies inspired by Greco-Roman myths, my favourite being the myth of Diana and Actaeon, 
for in it, the meaning of the novel becomes clear, because Diana represents the erotic archetype of the hunt and the pursuit of desire.
However, there is a third character who will be the main driving force of the novel: Fonchito, the son of Don Rigoberto, a creature no older than ten years old; a child who mixes both childish innocence and the perversity of an adult.
To make sense of this narrative, Vargas Llosa takes up and applies the concept of Tableaux vivants (livingpictures/pictures/images) 
to elaborate a mythological atmosphere that is narrated through descriptions that manifest the reveries of Don Rigoberto with his wife Lucrecia; sometimes naming her Diana; in other cases Lidia and sometimes Venus. 
All this to feed the simulacrum of love, diluting them like oil paint in a series of meanings, where fantasy, reality and myth merge. As for example occurs in the following dialogue between Lucretia and Rigoberto, where both play at changing identities, nationalities and divinities, as well as passing from the real, toying with the imaginary, to fall, finally, into the realm of the symbolic: ‘’You are not you but my fantasy”, she says, whispering to him when he loves her. -Then he says, ‘Today you will not be Lucretia but Venus, and today you will pass from Peruvian to Italian and from earthly to goddess’[3], but this game of simulacra – understanding the term not as a copy, but as a simulation that defies identity, truth and breaks with the real world. It is, in other words, an image that simulates something invisible or ineffable, like an obsessive ghost that becomes an “instrument” to exorcise that obsession. Thus, a simulacrum is a representation that distances itself from reality to account for something that escapes direct comprehension, like a “ghost”. This simulacral play is most evident in Lucretia’s description of herself as the goddess Diana:
it is I, Diana Lucretia. Yes, me, the goddess of oaks and forests, of fertility and childbirth, the goddess of the hunt. The Greeks call me Artemis. I am related to the moon and Apollo is my brother. Women and commoners abound among my worshippers. Temples in my honour are scattered throughout the jungles of the Empire. On my right, leaning down, looking at my foot, is Justiana. [4] 
While Don Rigoberto is in the shower, scheming erotic fantasies with his wife, he is unaware that, in one of the adjoining rooms of his own home, his son Fonchito is in the arduous company of his stepmother, exploring – shamelessly – the pleasures of the flesh.
The development of the novel is simple, obsessive, repetitive, simulacral, all this, until the eventual tragedy. For Don Rigoberto, in an unexpected moment, discovers the incestuous couple and, therefore, with all the disappointment of his heart, decides to sever all relations with Doña Lucrecia, abandoning her to her fate.
In this way, Mario Vargas Llosa completes his first novel, In Praise of the Stepmother. The continuation of this story can be found in The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. This is a novel of greater length, where eroticism continues to be the central theme, but this time focusing more on the theme of painting, focusing on the Austrian painter known for his scandalous erotic paintings, Egon Schiele.
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I would like to return to one of the main points made in the introduction to this essay. So I would like to put in dispute the two terms of the two French authors in the character Fonchito, who is both innocent and perverse, i.e. he is a child angel, but also a little devil. Hence the title of this essay, where the transgression of Georges Bataille, and the angelic and mythological simulacrum of Pierre Klossowski, is clarified in the following paragraph, where Doña Lucrecia, confused by Fonchito’s innocent and perverse dichotomy, expresses the following:
‘Maybe I don’t have the impression that I am doing something wrong because Fonchito doesn’t have it either’, she thought, brushing the child’s body with her fingertips. “For him it’s a game, a prank. And that’s our thing, nothing more. He is not my lover. How could he be, at his age?” […] He was the child that Renaissance painters added to the bedroom so that, in contrast to that purity, the love fight would be more ardent. ‘Thanks to you, Rigoberto and I love each other and enjoy ourselves more,’ she thought, kissing him on the neck with the edge of her lips.[5]
In this sense, Vargas Llosa manages to strike a balance between the two novels that inspired him. In Story of the eye, the children are criminals, but at the same time innocent. Whereas in Roberte, Tonight, the only infant in the novel is a child-teenager with angelic features who has a certain incestuous relationship with his aunt Roberte.
In the case of Vargas Llosa’s two novels, Fonchito seems to be the perfect blend of the infants in these two classic works of French literature. As the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, who understands perversion not as a form of sexual deviance, but as a tool that helps us to question and transform society and culture, would say. For perversion is a way of breaking with limitations and exploring new possibilities of being and existing, where transgression and perversion break the taboo and transform it into art.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges, Historia del ojo, Tusquets, México, 2013.
Klossowski, Pierre, Roberte, esta noche, traducción de Juan García Ponce y Michéle Alban, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1997.
Vargas Llosa, Mario, Elogio de la madrastra, Grijalbo, México, 1998.
[1] Pierre Klossowski, Roberte, esta noche, traducción de Juan García Ponce y Michéle Alban, Tusquets, Barcelona, 1997.
[2] Mario Vargas Llosa en el prólogo a la edición española de Historia del ojo de Georges Bataille, Tusquets, México, 2013, p. 11.
[3] Mario Vargas Llosa, Elogio de la madrastra, Grijalbo, México, 1998, p. 103.
[4] Ibid. p. 69.
[5] Ibid. p. 146.
