1 IDEOLOGY AS SMOKESCREEN IN ALFREDO BRYCE ECHENIQUE’S DOS SEÑORAS CONVERSAN

Alfredo Bryce Echenique is a contemporary Peruvian novelist and essayist who was born into ‘el seno de una vieja familia aristocrática del Perú ’ (the bosom of an old aristocratic family of Peru) (Ferreira, 11) in 1939. He counts a former president, José Rufino Echenique (1808-1879), and a viceroy amongst his ancestors. He has published a number of novels including his most critically acclaimed Un mundo para Julius (A world for Julius, 1970) and No me esperen en abril (Don’t expect me in April, 1995). His works bear witness to the social, political and economic changes that Peru (a country that he finds himself unable to live in and regularly flees) has undergone in the last fifty years and the effects of these changes in the national imagination. His characters, who are, for the most part, members of Lima’s so-called ‘oligarchy, ’ also take flight from their everyday realities into the realms of fantasy. In fact, the common denominator linking many of Bryce’s works of fiction is the unwillingness of his protagonists to come to terms with the world in which they live. Alienated from realities that they are unable to accept, they usually take refuge in the world of their past in order to combat their feelings of nostalgia and frustration. The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the creation of an imaginary world is predicated on a particular ideology in Bryce’s Dos señoras conversan (Two old ladies chat). In other words, the questions I will be asking are: do the fantasies of Bryce’s characters speak out against the society that produced them, or do they confirm its ideology? What do the end of the novel and the patterning of events tell the reader about the ideology of the novel? To what extent does fantasy have an ideology or strategy in Bryce’s narrative fiction (in particular, how fantasy uses particular strategies to voice a