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  Vargas Llosa’s study of Günter Grass reveals another crucial aspect of his conception of the novel. The Tin Drum reveals a ‘colossal appetite to tell everything, to embrace the whole of life in a fiction…which, above all, defined the writing of literature in the century of the novel, the nineteenth century’. The novel is a ‘deicide’, offering ‘such a minute and vast reconstruction of reality that it seems to compete with the Creator, breaking up and re-forming – correcting – what He created’. For Vargas Llosa, great novels (and here Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables comes to mind) are often big novels. He also believes that the novel tends to find sustenance in its depiction of the city, although he acknowledges that the landscape of the country and its inhabitants often has a crucial role to play, especially in Latin American writing.

  Günter Grass is the subject of Vargas Llosa’s most recent article, which I am reading while putting the finishing touches to this introduction. It is a response to journalists’ repeated questions about Grass’s declaration that he had served in the Waffen-SS for a few months when he was seventeen years old. For Vargas Llosa, this disclosure, which Grass had been hiding for some sixty years, was a sign of his humanity; the revelation did not jeopardise in any way Grass’s own radical novels or his frequent statements in favour of progressive democracy. Vargas Llosa had maintained a sometimes heated polemic with Grass in the 1980s regarding the nature of political development in Latin America, in which he accused Grass of double standards, of preaching social democracy for Europe and revolution for Latin America. In this 2006 article, however, he sides once more with his erstwhile opponent. In a revealing comment, he argues that the reason that Grass is currently being ‘pilloried’ is because he was really too much for the society he lived in, the last of a line of figures such as Victor Hugo, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who believed that writers could also be guides or polemicists with respect to the great social, political, cultural and moral issues of our age. Nobody today, according to Vargas Llosa, believes that writers should be the ‘conscience of society’, and so figures such as Grass are debunked for maintaining these aspirations. The condemnation of Grass, then, is not a personal attack, it is rather an attack

  on the idea of the writer that he had tried to embody, desperately, throughout his life: the idea of a writer who had opinions on and debated everything, who wished that that life could be moulded to dreams and ideas, in the same way as fictions, the idea that the writer’s function was most important of all because writers do not just entertain, they also educate, teach, offer guidance, give directions and offer lessons.4

  Shifting to apostrophe, Vargas Llosa concludes: ‘This was another fiction that captivated us for a long time, Günter Grass, my friend. But it is over.’ This blend of pessimism, conciliation and a very clear wistfulness, an elegiac tone, can be found in several articles in this book concerning the role of writers and intellectuals and the social function of literature. It is also very clear in his most recent novel, Las travesuras de la niña mala (The Bad Girl).

  With Arguedas and Neruda we look at two literary figures from Latin America. Vargas Llosa has long been fascinated by his compatriot Arguedas: he was the subject of one of Vargas Llosa’s first published articles, in 1955, and a book-length study in 1996 entitled La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (The Archaic Utopia: José María Arguedas and the Fictions of Indigenismo). In the opening chapter, Vargas Llosa argues that Arguedas was one of a generation of writers and intellectuals for whom social issues were more important than purely artistic or literary concerns: ‘This idea of literature, that Arguedas embraced, often at the expense of his talent, did not allow a writer to be responsible just to him or herself…it demanded of a writer ideological commitment and political involvement. Writers had to become, through their writings and their words, actively involved in finding solutions to the problems of their country.’5 In the case of Arguedas this meant exploring the genre of indigenismo, which sought to represent the indigenous community of Peru in literature and art and, following the teachings of the Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui and others, concentrate on the political rights and revolutionary potential of the Indian population. The young Vargas Llosa sympathised with the radical aspects of this creed, although he was never convinced that the main responsibility of a Peruvian writer was to concentrate on Andean, Indian culture. He always rejected indigenismo as a genre, while pointing out Arguedas’s successes as a writer, almost despite the burden of social and political responsibility placed on him. But over the years, especially following his disenchantment with Marxism from the early 1970s, Vargas Llosa came to feel that the ‘archaic utopia’ of Indian life was just that, both utopian and increasingly out of step with the modernisation of society, and that socialist solutions, based on pre-Columbian social organisation as advocated by Mariátegui, were equally utopian. These views, intricately conveyed in Utopía, have consistently been attacked by Vargas Llosa’s critics, who continue to support a Mariátegui-style analysis of indigenous communities. These debates have become more acute in recent times, when left-wing governments in Latin America often espouse the cause of indigenous rights, as in the case of Evo Morales in Bolivia.

  In the late 1970s, Vargas Llosa criticised the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s support for Communist regimes, accusing him of being Manichean and dogmatic in his politics. In a recent essay, however, he offers a most sympathetic portrait of Neruda. He stresses the sensual man behind the symbol of Latin American social poetry, as well as expressing his own preference for Neruda’s early surreal poetry, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He remembers that, despite Neruda’s constant embrace of socialist causes and his long commitment to the Communist party of Chile, he was often caught in ideological disputes, attacked by the dogmatic left. One example of this was at the famous PEN Club meeting in New York in 1966, which attracted many writers from Latin America, but which was vilified by the Cubans, who sought out Neruda for their specific opprobrium at having accepted an invitation to appear in the imperial north. Despite constant attacks from critics, Vargas Llosa’s Neruda is a man who at the end of his life – he died of cancer a few days after the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973 – was looking to forget ideological differences and accept erstwhile enemies. Students of Vargas Llosa might also remember the remarkable tendency in his earliest novels, written in the 1960s, to imagine unlikely reconciliations (for example, between Alberto and Jaguar in La ciudad y los perros (Time of the Hero, 1963), and the doctor and the priest in Conversación en la catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral, 1969)). It is as if, in some Borgesian way, the early writer has already imagined this, his later self.

  While Vargas Llosa writes in the main about literary figures and works, in recent years art has played a more central role in his work. He has been writing about painting since the mid-1970s. The first of a series of essays on the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo, for example, was published in Octavio Paz’s magazine Plural in 1976. In a blend of art and politics, it was in Szyszlo’s studio in Lima that Vargas Llosa helped launch a new political party, the Freedom Movement, in September 1987. References to art have become increasingly prominent in his novels since his publication of the erotic novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother) in 1988, which is structured around a fantasy gloss on different paintings. The sequel to Stepmother, Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1997), is in part a meditation on the work of the Viennese painter Egon Schiele. And, of course, his most sustained fiction about art and artistic inspiration is El Paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003), which also contains a number of close readings and reinterpretations of the most famous late works of Gauguin – the painter who would often refer to himself as a ‘savage Peruvian’. This volume contains several essays written at the time the novel was being researched: they explore Gauguin’s bisexual interests, his relationship with van Gogh and his utopian search for art
istic and personal fulfilment in the South Seas. The erotic charge of art – the artist’s quest for sovereignty in Bataille’s terms – is explored in the essay on Picasso. And for Vargas Llosa the transgressive artist of the twentieth century par excellence is George Grosz:

  Grosz was not a ‘social artist’. He was a maudit…What I mean is that Grosz’s work is absolutely authentic, and expresses an unrestrained freedom. His fantasies stirred the bilge of society and the human heart, and his invention of reality has, over time, become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. When we talk of the ‘Berlin years’ today, we are not thinking of the years that Germany suffered and enjoyed, but rather the years that Grosz invented.

  The bullfight has been a lifelong fascination for Vargas Llosa ever since his uncle first took him as a boy to the bullring in Cochabamba. It is another transgressive spectacle, a moment that appeals to the ‘appetite that, deep within us, links us to our remote ancestors and their savage rites, in which they could unleash their worst instincts, the instincts that need destruction and blood to be sated’. This spectacle would also appeal to the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, who, at one point in his remarkable career produced an extensive series of works based on the bullfight (see Vargas Llosa’s essay on Botero’s artistic development in Making Waves). However, unlike Grosz, and unlike Goya’s depiction of the bullfight, Botero is a painter who can remake the world in his art as a serene space, who can cleanse the bullfight of all its frightening cruelty and present it as a serene spectacle: ‘Botero’s bullfight is a civilised celebration of the senses, in which a discrete intelligence and a flawless technique have skilfully remade the world of the bullfight, purifying it, stripping it of all that burden of barbarism and cruelty that links the real bullfight to the most irresponsible and terrifying aspects of human experience’.

  The link between art and transgression is not the only recurrent concern in Vargas’s Llosa’s writings on art and literature. Describing the Prado Museum in Madrid, he writes: ‘We go to a museum…to step out of real, pedestrian life and live a sumptuous unreality, to have our fantasies embodied in other people’s fantasies’. Describing the effect of reading literature, he argues:

  Literature can only pacify momentarily this dissatisfaction with life, but, in this miraculous interval, in this provisional suspension of life afforded by literary illusion – which seems to transport us out of chronology and history and turn us into citizens of a timeless, immortal country – we do become these others. We become more intense, richer, more complex, happier, more lucid, than in the constrained routine of our real life…Even more, perhaps, than the need to maintain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the main contribution of literature to human progress is to remind us (without intending to in the main) that the world is badly made, that those who argue the contrary – for example the powers that be – are lying, and that the world could be better, closer to the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create.

  For Vargas Llosa, art and literature can offer moments of respite, of imagined intensity, but they also bring the realisation that the world of art is not the real world, and that our reality can never achieve the perfection of art or literature. On a further visit retracing the steps of Gauguin, he finds himself in the Place Lamartine in Arles, where Gauguin and Van Gogh had lived together for a time in the famous Yellow House, a stormy cohabitation that ended, as we know, with Van Gogh’s self-laceration. Inspired by his recollections of the two friends, Vargas Llosa decides to drink an absinthe, that literary, maudit tipple:

  I had imagined it as an exotic, aristocratic spirit, a green viscous colour, that would have a dramatic effect on me, but I was brought instead a rather plebeian pastis. The horrible drink smelt of pharmaceutically prepared mint and sugar and, when I rather unwisely forced it down, I started retching. Yet one further proof that dull reality will never live up to our dreams and fantasies.

  Absinthe will always taste better in the poetry of Verlaine or Baudelaire or Rubén Darío, or in paintings.

  While Vargas Llosa generally acknowledges that he no longer believes in the view he held in the 1960s – that art and literature can help change the world – he still clings, at least in his essays, to some vestiges of optimism about the social function of fiction. If it cannot radically change the world, it can make it more bearable and, moderately, better; at the very least, it can attenuate the world’s ills. He now argues that what he calls the ‘lies’ of fiction contains certain fundamental truths. In the final paragraph of his book-length study La tentación de lo imposible. Victor Hugo y Les Misérables (The Temptation of the Impossible. Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, 2004) he states:

  There is no doubt – that in the history of literature, Les Misérables is one of the works that has been most influential in making so many men and women of all languages and cultures desire a more just, rational and beautiful world than the one they live in. The most minimal conclusion we can make is that if human history is advancing, and the word progress has a meaning, and that civilisation is not a mere rhetorical fabrication but a reality that is making barbarism retreat, then something of the impetus that makes all this possible must have come – and must still come – from the nostalgia and enthusiasm that we readers feel for the actions of Jean Valjean and Monseigneur Bienvenu, Fantine and Cosette, Marius and Javert, and all who join them on their journey in search of the impossible.6

  This optimism is contained in his view of globalisation, which leads us to his essays on politics. In his essay ‘Culture and the New International Order’, he argues that good literature traverses and breaks down borders and barriers between nations and classes. He gives an example from the 1960s when, as a young journalist in Paris, he heard a group of writers giving readings from literature and explaining their choices to very diverse audiences. He remembers the writer Michel Butor talking about Borges to a group of French workers, hypnotising them with Borges’s world of fantasy. Interestingly, Vargas Llosa has recently started his own equivalent of this programme, giving a series of readings from his selection of different works of literature, a performance to which he once again gives the title ‘The Truth of Lies’.

  Culture creates a sense of community, by recognising the humanity of others, beyond the differences between ethnicities, creeds and languages. Vargas Llosa does not support the neo-imperial argument that globalisation equates with Americanisation, and he uses this essay to focus his attack on nationalism in whatever form. Collective identity, the breeding ground of nationalism, is, for him, an ideological fiction:

  When we explore the cultural, ethnic and social mix that is Latin America, we find that we are linked to almost all the regions and cultures of the world. And this, which prevents us from having a unique identity – we have so many that we have none – is, contrary to what nationalists believe, our greatest wealth. It also gives us excellent credentials for us to feel fully-fledged citizens in the global world of today.

  Cervantes had intuited such a world when he talks about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza moving in a world of ‘homelands’, where, before the barriers of the nation state are erected, the characters carry their sense of place with them, in a landscape where boundaries are porous.

  In contrast to this image of fluidity, Vargas Llosa sees nationalism as an abiding ill. In an essay written just after losing the presidential election in 1990, he states:

  Nationalism is the culture of the uncultured, the religion of the demagogue, and a smokescreen behind which prejudice, violence and often racism can be found lurking…It is the easiest thing in the world to play the nationalist card to whip up a crowd, especially if that crowd is made up of poor and ignorant people who are looking to vent their bitterness and frustration on something or someone.

  This essay is structured around an appreciation of the work of Isaiah Berlin, who became increasingly influential on Vargas Llosa’s thought as he moved away from his socialist convictions of the 1960s. Berlin’s essays
began to appear, thanks to the dedicated editorial work of his former student Henry Hardy, from 1978 with the volume Russian Thinkers. The collection Against the Current came out in 1979. The title of Vargas Llosa’s volumes of collected essays, Contra viento y marea (Against the Wind and the Tide), which first appeared in 1986, alludes to Berlin’s title.

  Berlin provides Vargas Llosa with certain ways of expressing a liberal credo, such as the term ‘negative’ liberty, which allows individuals to do what they want as long as this does not impinge on other people’s freedom, as opposed to ‘positive’ liberty (the basis of socialism and communism), which seeks to use politics to liberate people from either inner or outer barriers or repressions. Democratic government in the main offers a better guarantee of negative freedom than other regimes. Vargas Llosa often quotes Berlin’s insight that the values underlying democracy – equality, freedom and justice – usually contradict each other, leading to possible conflict and loss. It was because of these contradictory values that Berlin came to reject any notion of an ideal society or ideal human behaviour, an insight that would inform Vargas Llosa’s criticism of utopias, in particular the utopia of socialism.

  Berlin also offered a reading of historical thinkers that pointed out the roots and the dangers of cultural nationalism – for example, in the German Romantic movement, with its insistence on a distinctive German Kultur. Ultimately, Berlin was perhaps too much the rationalist for Vargas Llosa, in need of a dose of Georges Bataille, although Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Berlin – reviewed in this volume – conveys to Vargas Llosa a much more complex character than the belle lettriste essayist might reveal, a man riven by torment and self-doubt.