Touchstones Read online

  Mario Vargas Llosa

  Touchstones

  Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Peru’s foremost writer, he has also been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, The Bad Girl, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World, and The Storyteller. He lives in London.

  For Efraín Kristal,

  wise and generous friend

  Contents

  Editor’s Preface

  Literature

  Seed of Dreams

  A Twenty-First-Century Novel

  The Heart of Darkness

  Death in Venice

  Mrs Dalloway

  Nadja

  La Condition humaine

  Tropic of Cancer

  Seven Gothic Tales

  L’Étranger

  The Old Man and the Sea

  Lolita

  The Tin Drum

  Deep Rivers

  Neruda at a Hundred

  How I Lost My Fear of Flying

  Literature and Life

  Art

  A Dream Factory

  Grosz: A Sad and Ferocious Man

  Two Friends

  Traces of Gauguin

  The Men-Women of the Pacific

  The Painter in the Brothel

  When Paris Was a Fiesta

  Botero at the Bullfight

  Culture and Politics

  Nationalism and Utopia

  The Man Who Knew Too Much

  The Thief in the Empty House

  Culture and the New International Order

  Responses to 9/11

  Novelist in New York

  Iraq Diary

  A Story about Rats

  The Captain in His Labyrinth

  The Pinochet Affair

  Chilean Yawns

  The Odyssey of Flora Tristán

  Editor’s Preface

  Paradise is not of this world and those who set out to look for it or to construct it here are irremediably condemned to failure.

  ‘Traces of Gauguin’

  Some ten years after the publication of an anthology of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa entitled Making Waves, this new volume, Touchstones, includes essays written, in the main, over this intervening decade. ‘Touchstone’ is the title of Vargas Llosa’s regular column – ‘Piedra de toque’ – in the Spanish newspaper El País. The two contrasting titles naturally imply a shift in the writer’s outlook, between ‘making waves’ and using a touchstone, between being immersed in every debate – as epitomised by his running for the presidency of Peru in the late 1980s – and having a more detached, perhaps less optimistic view of the possibility of taming or overcoming the demons that haunt our own lives or inhabit wider society.

  The critic Efraín Kristal has usefully divided the development of Mario Vargas Llosa’s work into three distinct periods from the early 1960s to the late 1990s – his socialist beginnings, in which his novels diagnosed the corruption of capitalist society in Latin America; the liberal period which followed his break with the Latin American left in the 1970s, during which he explored the dangers of fanaticism and utopian thinking; and the period since losing the Peruvian elections of 1990, in which he seems to have lost his optimism regarding the effectiveness of political action. His contempt for authoritarianism remains as strong as ever, but is tempered by a recognition of the frailties of those with whom he disagrees.1

  Making Waves consisted principally of essays from the first two of these stages. Touchstones covers those written in the post-1990 period, together with several essays on literature written at the time of his direct involvement in politics in the preceding years.

  The view that Vargas Llosa has become more pessimistic – others might say more realistic – or conciliatory with the years, does not suggest that he has become any less outspoken about certain political developments, in Peru and in the wider world, as we will discuss below: just read the essays dedicated to the fall of President Fujimori in Peru and the imprisonment of his sinister right-hand man, Montesinos, or the more recent essays on the rise of the left in Latin America where he contrasts the ‘boring’ (in a good way) Chilean model of gradual social development of a Ricardo Lagos or a Michelle Bachelet with ‘Third World’ Latin American elections ‘where countries going to the ballot box are staking their political model, their social organisation and often even their simple survival’ and where we find the increasing influence of the populist president Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

  Nor does this view suggest any slackening in an extraordinary pace and breadth of production. If we take the decade from 1996 to 2006, not only has he published four novels, but also, in terms of non-fictional writing, a book-length study of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas; a collection of essays taken from his ‘Piedra de toque’ articles published in El País; a short book, Cartas a un joven novelista (Letters to a Young Novelist, 1997); a 2002 re-edition of his book of essays on twentieth-century fiction, La verdad de las mentiras (The Truth of Lies); an Iraq Diary (2003); a book-length study of Victor Hugo, based on lectures given in Oxford in 2004; a short book on Israel and Palestine that came out early in 2006 – all in addition to writing a regular column for El País and giving lectures all over the world, in a number of different languages, most of which have been published in some form.

  Essays on contemporary politics in Latin America and across the world, essays on art – which has taken an increasingly prominent place in his fictional and non-fictional worlds – and essays on literature. These are the three broad categories I have used in selecting material for this book from the vast range of Vargas Llosa’s writings in Spanish.

  The epigraph to this introduction was written in January 2001, on the island of Atuona. Vargas Llosa is a meticulous researcher and an inveterate traveller. For his novel based on the early nineteenth-century political activist Flora Tristán and her grandson, Paul Gauguin – The Way to Paradise – he retraced the itineraries of his central characters. This involved, in the case of Gauguin, a trip to the South Seas, where Gauguin had sought an ever-elusive utopian space for his art and his life. The journey to the Marquesas Islands in search of Gauguin’s final resting place had involved many hours on increasingly small and bumpy planes. In an essay written in 1999, he had confessed to a fear of flying: ‘Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred thousand miles an hour, and ask, “What the hell am I doing here?” And begin to tremble’. He eventually discovered that this fear could not be overcome by sleeping pills or alcohol, or fasting and just drinking copious amounts of water – ‘these forced diets made me very miserable, and added to my fear the demoralising torture of hunger and constant peeing’ – but by reading a good book that would last precisely the duration of the journey. His literary pharmacy in this article includes stories and short novels by Carpentier, Melville, Henry James, Stevenson, Rulfo, Monterroso, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and Isak Dinesen, especially Dinesen’s delirious tale ‘The Monkey’.

  He also discovered that literature could be a source of comfort and repose during his immersion in politics between July 1987, when he first spoke out against the privatisation of banks in Peru, under the government of Alan García, and June 1990, when he narrowly lost the presidency of the country to a then obscure politician, Alberto Fujimori. On the campaign trail, his life threatened by the Shining Path guerrilla group, every moment taken up in political debate, in meetings and campaign rallies,
he found himself at the beginning and end of the day rereading his favourite works of twentieth-century fiction and, in hastily snatched moments, writing articles on them. He was unable at this time to write fiction – ‘it was as if my beloved demons had fled from my study, resentful at my lack of solitude during the rest of the day’2 – but reading fiction offered a private, personal space of ideas and dreams. He is explicit about this in his essay on The Tin Drum. He read the novel for the first time in English in the 1960s, living in a tedious London suburb, where everything shut down at ten at night. In this mind-numbing environment, the Günter Grass novel was an exciting adventure. More than twenty years later, on the campaign trail, he returns to The Tin Drum:

  I have reread it now in very different conditions, at a time when, in an unpremeditated and accidental way, I have found myself caught up in a whirlwind of political activities, at a particularly difficult moment in my country’s history. In between a debate and a street rally, after a demoralising meeting where the world was changed by words, and nothing happened, or at the end of dangerous days, when stones were hurled and shots were fired. In these circumstances as well, the Rabelaisian odyssey of Oskar Matzerath with his drum and glass-shattering voice was a compensation and a refuge. Life was also this: fantasy, words, animated dreams, literature.

  These essays would be collected in La verdad de las mentiras. The section on literature draws extensively from this volume, first published in 1990 with twenty-six essays, and reissued, in an expanded version with thirty-seven essays, in 2002. In his prologue to the 2002 edition, Vargas Llosa writes:

  I would like to think that in the arbitrary selection included in this book – which responds to no other criteria than my preferences as a reader – we can see the variety and richness of novelistic creation in the century that has just passed, both in the range and originality of the topics explored and in the subtlety of the forms employed. Although it is true that the nineteenth century – the century of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Melville, Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert – can justifiably be called the century of the novel, it is no less true that the twentieth century deserves the same title, thanks to the ambition and visionary daring of a few narrators from different traditions and languages, who could emulate the remarkable achievements of nineteenth-century writers. The handful of fictions analysed in this book prove that, despite the pessimistic prophecies about the future of literature, the deicides are still wandering the cities, dreaming up stories to make up for the shortcomings of History.3

  Limitations of space allow us to choose only a dozen or so titles from this book. We can add to these the essays on Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce and Lessing from the same collection included in Making Waves; however, essays on the work of Bellow, Böll, Canetti, Carpentier, Frisch, Greene, Hesse, Huxley, Kawabata, Koestler, Lampedusa, Moravia, Pasternak, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Solzhenitsyn still await translation and publication.

  What do these essays on literature tell us about the recurrent concerns of Vargas Llosa the writer? In ‘Seed of Dreams’, he points out that every writer is first of all a reader, and that being a writer is a different way of continuing to read. His first childhood attempts at literature were rewritings of stories that he had heard or read. As a writer, therefore, he is a ‘flagrant literary parasite’, rewriting, amending or correcting other works of literature. In addition, everything he has invented as a writer, he argues, has its roots in lived experience: ‘It was something that I saw, heard, but also read, that my memory retained with a singular and mysterious stubbornness, that formed certain images which, sooner or later, and for reasons that I also find very difficult to fathom, became a stimulus for fantasy, a starting point for a complete imaginary construction’. While literary influence is seen as a largely unconscious process, Vargas Llosa is clear that the greatest influence on his work was William Faulkner: ‘It was thanks to the Yoknapatawpha saga that I discovered the prime importance of form in fiction and the infinite possibilities offered by point of view and the construction of time in a story’.

  His analysis of the ‘twenty-first-century novel’ Don Quixote points out the skill with which Cervantes deals with the two main problems all writers have to solve: the construction of the narrative point of view and the question of time in fiction. Don Quixote also explores an area of constant interest to Vargas Llosa, the truth of the lies of fiction: the ways in which reality is contaminated by fiction, the ways in which great writers create such a persuasive alternative fictional world that the fictions become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. The Cervantes novel is also used to illustrate Vargas Llosa’s views on liberty and of the nation, which we will examine below.

  Other essays are also concerned with the craft of fiction. Virginia Woolf offers a model of writing, in particular the effortless complexity of the narrative point of view – the melding of the style indirect libre and the interior monologue – which was to be a hallmark of Vargas Llosa’s own writings from the 1960s. In Woolf, also, the demarcation between the real world and the world of fiction is made very clear: ‘What gives a novel its originality – marks its difference from the real world – is the added element that the fantasy and art of the writer provides when he or she transforms objective and historical experience into fiction…Only failed fictions reproduce reality: successful fictions abolish and transfigure reality’. This interest in Virginia Woolf as a stylistic revolutionary was shared by Vargas Llosa’s contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who signed his early journalistic writings from the late 1940s as Septimus, in homage to the tormented character in Mrs Dalloway.

  Literature can also explore mankind’s desires, the demons that have to be banished in order to live in society. This is a theme that runs through the essays on Conrad and Thomas Mann. Writing about The Heart of Darkness in 2001, he argues that it is ‘an exploration of the roots of humankind, those inner recesses of our being which harbour a desire for destructive irrationality that progress and civilisation might manage to assuage but never eradicate completely. Few stories have managed to express in such a synthetic and captivating manner this evil, that resides in the individual and in society’. In his analysis of Death in Venice, he argues that ‘the quest for the integral sovereignty of the individual…predates the conventions and rules that every society…imposes’. Even ascetic intellectuals like the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach can succumb at any moment to ‘the temptation of the abyss’.

  Terms like ‘evil’ and ‘sovereignty’ refer us to the writings of Georges Bataille, one of Vargas Llosa’s most quoted influences. Bataille argued that the desire to transgress (evil) is inherent in all of us, for it is through transgression of different prohibitions that we can assert our own individual sovereignty. Yet there must be a way of expressing these desires without undermining society. Literature, especially erotic literature, offers a site where such Dionysian transgressions can be envisaged: ‘Sex is the privileged domain where these transgressive demons lurk…to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of euphoria and elation – fiesta and adventure – which are also integral to life’.

  The essays on Henry Miller and Nabokov pick up on the ways in which literature explores restraint and excess. The essay on Breton also explores the link between surrealism, transgression and the erotic, an abiding interest in Vargas Llosa’s work. It was from his early readings of the Peruvian surrealist César Moro, whose own work stressed the exploration of irrational drives as a way of achieving freedom, that Vargas Llosa would start out on a route that would take him to Breton and, in particular, to Bataille, and to his abiding interest in the maudit writers of contemporary fiction.

  While Vargas Llosa is drawn to both the adventurous practitioners of technical innovation and the demonic explorers of desire, he is also attracted by well-crafted, exemplary, moral stories, as illustrated by the novels of André Malraux. He is fascinated by the life and work of Malraux, a writer now much maligned. As a ‘literary fetishist’,
in his own words, Vargas Llosa’s criticism always gives a sense of a writer’s life and milieu – and nothing could be more exciting and glamorous than the biography of the writer and man of action, Malraux. When Vargas Llosa first read about Malraux’s involvement in many of the great events of the twentieth century,

  I knew that his was the life that I would have liked to have led…I feel the same every time I read his autobiographical accounts, or the biographies that, following the work of Jean Lacouture, have appeared in recent years with new facts about his life, that was as abundant and dramatic as those of the great adventurers of his novels.

  Here is a man of action, but also a writer who did not allow politics to weigh down his writing, who was instead lucid and inventive enough to transform lived experience into successful fiction, moral stories that represent ‘the human condition’ in its most exemplary form. When he writes about Malraux, Vargas Llosa could in many ways be writing about himself.

  Karen Blixen, the writer Isak Dinesen, also led a life of adventure – in her case in Africa – before turning to fictions which did not attempt to ‘reflect’ the world around her, but instead to express an unbridled fantasy. True to the creed of the ‘truth of lies’, Dinesen is a writer whose re-creation of history and life itself can express a more profound, a more coherent, truth than those writers who look merely to reflect society. Dinesen’s protagonists, like their author, are inveterate storytellers, characters akin to those of the Arabian Nights: ‘The truth of fiction was the lie, an explicit lie, so well constructed, so exotic and precious, so excessive and attractive, that it was preferable to truth’. Another great adventurer, Ernest Hemingway, offers a similar moral outlook to that of Malraux: the idea that life is always challenging, and that ordinary men and women can achieve moral greatness, a justification for existence, even though they might be defeated.