Iván Thays is the most prominent and successful alternative to the mass cultural marketing of Jaime Bayly of the more than twenty novelists to have emerged on to the Peruvian literary scene since the early 1990s. It is the aim of this chapter to study Thays’ three novels published to date – Escena de caza, El viaje interior, La disciplina de la vanidad – in terms of the three ways in which they have played an active part in the regeneration of Peruvian narrative since the late 1990s: (1) their oppositional response within Peruvian culture and postmodern narrative to the work of Bayly by re-mystifying the ideal of Peruvian Literature and by fortifying certain elitist, cultural pretensions; (2) their contribution to the integral role played by Peruvian culture in the processes of socio-political regeneration at the end of the 1990s, even if Thays himself attempts to posit Literature as an entity detached from political dynamics; (3) their exploration of the novel-writing process, focusing on structure, language, intertextuality and the image of the writer. These central characteristics and themes of Thays’ narrative will be discussed in a theoretical framework that includes Bourdieu's (1989) exploration of how divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture operate in society, García Canclini's (1995a, 1995b and 1999) study of the functioning of written culture in an age dominated by global media technologies and of the relationship of popular culture to Latin American societies, and Jameson's analysis of antinomies in The Seeds of Time, focusing on the fact that the most striking characteristic of postmodern Peruvian narrative is this coexistence of contradictory cultural responses, of a radical split between the increasingly mass-marketed and global books of Bayly and the explicitly literary and elitist novels of Thays.

Thays has emphasized his literary pretensions within the Peruvian cultural market by publicizing his work as university lecturer, cultural critic and protagonist of literary workshops. The novel La disciplina de la vanidad foregrounds Thays’ activities at a fictitious Lima-based taller called Centeno, and Thays has represented Peru at the Foro Joven de Molina in Spain and the Taller Latinoamericano de Jóvenes Escritores in Venezuela. His three novels mention inside their covers that Thays has both studied and taught literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.