“I write because I am not happy. I write because it is a way of struggling against unhappiness,” Vargas Llosa once remarked.
The last survivor of the Latin American Boom, a literary movement that reinvented the novel in our time. Author of more than 50 books, Vargas Llosa has ranged from comic romps and erotic novels, such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), to chilling studies of the psychology of power. The Feast of the Goat (2000), perhaps his most famous book, explores the cruelties and corruptions of personal integrity that happen under dictatorship.
“Love always comes with tests. Otherwise, it is not love. Tests make it stronger. They help to forge love. But love always comes with a price. Everything comes with a price.” “No. Literature, especially reading, has only brought me satisfaction,” he murmurs.
“Writing is what I do. It is my life. To be alive but dead is the worst possible thing, although it happens to many people. In fact, I hope to die writing.”
In his masterpiece, Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman sketches out an idea for a story. “If one man is fated to be killed by another,” he says, “it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start [we] might be miles away from one another . . . and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it.”
The belief that the spread of popular culture threatens high art has a long history. Flaubert made his allegiance plain in 1871: “I believe that the mob, the mass, the herd will always be despicable,” he wrote. Early in the 20th century, TS Eliot thought that mass education would lead to barbarism. On the other side of the argument, Arnold Bennett denounced the snobbish notion that any commercially successful work of art was, by definition, lowbrow because it was accessible to a mass audience. In “A Brief Discourse on Culture”, Llosa echoes Eliot’s concern, declaring that the desire to put an end to elites has meant that “everything is culture and nothing is”.
Llosa lays down some key definitions. He does not approve of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between official culture and popular culture. Though he does not refer to him, his vision is closer to that of the 19th-century critic Matthew Arnold, who saw culture as the best intellectual artistic practices of a society. Vargas Llosa asserts: “Hierarchies in the broad spectrum of human knowledge . . . this was what culture meant in the most enlightened times and societies, and this is what it should mean again if we do not want to progress, blindly and without direction . . . towards our own disintegration.” For him, narrowing the gap between the highbrow and the lowbrow is precisely what has led to the current cultural crisis.
I kind of agree with him as I studied physics in which the Second Law of Thermodynamics says all system will evolve to chaos without energy coming in.
But indeed there is a contradiction here as Vargas Llosa believes in a free-market economy but complains that the commercial imperative has led to a lowering of cultural standards. That needs to be sorted out. He extols 19th-century France for establishing secular public schooling, which he calls a great step towards the creation of an open society — one, that is, where there is “equality of opportunity” and where young people from underprivileged sectors have a chance to succeed. Yet elsewhere he suggests that an open society undermines high culture. Indeed, he laments the paradox that it is precisely in the world’s most democratic nations that literature is an increasingly frivolous form of entertainment.
He praises Edmund Wilson for writing with intellectual rigour in magazines and newspapers while remaining clear and intelligible. This appears to be a recognition, on Vargas Llosa’s part, that intellectual seriousness and accessibility can be compatible. So it is odd to read his rejection, in another essay, “The Civilization of the Spectacle”, of any moral obligation to combine them, fearing that “this commendable philosophy has had the undesired effect of trivializing and cheapening cultural life”.
Liberalism, Vargas Llosa has said elsewhere, is “an open, evolving doctrine that yields to reality”. Yet the very freedom he espouses also produces, as he writes in one of these essays, “a desire to flee from the void and anguish” into a “fickle, ludic culture” and away from any self-knowledge that might arise from thought and introspection. This partly explains why, in “Forbidden to Forbid”, he dismisses the May 1968 students’ rebellion in Paris.
In “The Disappearance of Eroticism”, one of the most entertaining essays here, he welcomes sexual emancipation. But again, he expresses misgivings elsewhere: it has led to the act of sex becoming banal “in the public glare”. One of the chief themes of this collection, indeed, is that the increasing breakdown of the demarcation between the public and the private represents “an assault on freedom itself”.
Here again, I am not surprised as I studied physics in which the Uncertainty Principle tells us things are not compliant with each fundamentally.
This is a pessimistic book. Vargas Llosa acknowledges in the concluding essay that the human race has made some progress, but adds: “Never has the survival of the species been less secure due to the risk of nuclear weapons, the bloody madness of religious fanaticism and the erosion of the environment.” He insists that literature has a moral duty to help in mobilising public opinion, “to demand that democratic governments take resolute action to support peace.” The trouble is that literature and the other arts have become escape mechanisms, allowing us to ignore our problems and enter an “artificial paradise”.