Ithaka gave you the splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn’t anything else to give you.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn’t anything else to give you.
C. P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’1
Mario Vargas Llosa has been making waves for some thirty-five years. In this period he has become established as one of the world’s most prolific and consistently interesting writers, with a dozen major works of fiction and several plays. He has also recently published what is doubtless only a first volume of memoirs, A Fish in the Water, which combines memories of the first twenty-one years of his life with a detailed account of his involvement in politics between 1987 and 1990, culminating in a bid for the Peruvian presidency. These works are all available in English language editions. Yet this is only a part of Vargas Llosa’s oeuvre: then there are another ten volumes in Spanish, and hundreds of uncollected newspaper articles, of literary criticism, chronicles, art and film criticism and political commentary. Of this, only the study of Flaubert, The Perpetual Orgy, is widely available in English, together with a book of essays on his own fictional work, entitled A Writer’s Reality. This volume, therefore, seeks partially to redress the imbalance by providing a collection of Vargas Llosa’s writings from the early sixties until 1993. The selection is my own and I have tried to provide as broad a range as possible of Vargas Llosa’s recurring obsessions, the development of his literary and political views and his very diverse interests.
The book takes the form of an intellectual odyssey, a journey through different geographical locations and ever changing cultural and political landscapes. It picks up one of the narrative strands of A Fish in the Water, with the aspirant writer and scholar heading off to Madrid on a doctoral bursary in the late fifties, and it ends with a series of articles published in the Spanish newspaper, El País, where Vargas Llosa now writes a regular column. The order of the articles is
in the main chronological, although some are grouped together thematically rather than chronologically, to illustrate an abiding interest in a particular topic, writer or location.
After an opening chapter that serves as an introduction to the first two decades of his life in Peru (autobiographical memories also explored in A Fish in the Water, that have been reworked and reinvented in several of his major novels), the selection begins with a memoir of Vargas Llosa’s student days in Madrid. For him, Madrid was a sleepy village in the late fifties, light years (albeit only three decades) away from the cosmopolitan, post-modern city of today. Nothing could be further from the setting of an Almodóvar film than Vargas Llosa’s daily routine of gentle conservatism, boring classes at the university and visits to the movies to see prints cut to shreds by Franco’s censors, often with hilarious consequences. There were also illicit readings in the National Library, where he developed a lifetime’s attachment to romances of chivalry, in particular Tirant lo Blanc by the fifteenth-century Valencian knight, Joanot Martorell. Tirant, he would later argue, was the first in a lineage of fictions by writers – including Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Faulkner – who were ‘God supplanters’ or ‘Deicides’ and who tried to ‘create in their novels an all-encompassing reality’.2 Vargas Llosa’s own fictions would seek this same ‘all-encompassing’ critical realism.
From the dusty library benches, Tirant could also offer an imaginary model of a committed adventurer, defending Christendom against the Saracens, obeying the chivalric code and seeking the favours of a princess whose complexion was so white that, when she drank red wine, one could watch the wine flowing down her throat. ‘How base and loathsome I would hold myself’, remarks Tirant, ‘if I shunned knighthood’s duties! Each man should know his worth and I declare that though chivalry were infinitely more hazardous, nothing could deter me from joining that noble order.’3 Like the knight errant Tirant, Vargas Llosa would remain an adventurer both in his own robust fictions and in his life. His adventure in the late fifties needed to be pursued in locations other than Madrid. Spain remains in his writings a place of warmth, generosity and hospitality – indeed, he took up dual Spanish and Peruvian nationality in the early nineties when the president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, was making life difficult for his erstwhile rival for presidency, and he has recently been elected to the Spanish Academy – but this hospitality alone was not enough for a young man for whom the long dreamed of journey to Europe could only mean one destination: Paris.
France could provide a stimulating intellectual and literary climate for the writer who completed his first two major novels, Time of the Hero and The Green House, while scraping a living by working nights at Radio-Television Française. Paris was the home of the intellectual mandarins, in particular Sartre, who, with essays such as ‘What is Literature?’, had informed Vargas Llosa’s thinking about cultural politics since the early fifties. The new novelists and the new critics in vogue, such as Robbe-Grillet, Butor and Barthes, would not be a source of inspiration for him: he would resist throughout his life any easy assimilation of what he would see as the latest ‘fashions’ of critical theory. But earlier writers, in particular Flaubert, could offer literary lessons and shared pleasures: the ‘perpetual orgy’, in Flaubert’s terms, of reading and writing. Being ‘down and out’ in Paris was also the destiny of many American expatriate writers in the twentieth century, from the Peruvian poet César Vallejo to Ernest Hemingway. Yet this hard apprenticeship was at the same time ‘a movable feast’ of readings and experiences, shared with friends and mentors such as the Paris-based Argentine writer Julio Cortázar who, in 1963, published Hopscotch, a dazzling fictional account of Latin America’s complex relationship with Europe. Vargas Llosa would explore the nature of his self-imposed literary ‘exile’ in ‘Literature and Exile’, included in this volume, countering a belief current in Latin America and elsewhere that a writer living outside the country of his birth is somehow betraying that country. While this inveterate transformer of autobiography into fiction has yet to base a novel on his life in Europe, his Parisian experiences and readings are extensively represented here. There are several vignettes, which can be read either as social chronicles or as short stories, concerning friends and everyday life. Even though the critical canon has Vargas Llosa discovering a sense of humour in his writing in the early seventies, with the publication of Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, these essays clearly show an amused intelligence at work throughout his career, enjoying the epitaphs at the Paris dog cemetery or the anarchist views of film-maker Luis Buñuel. One of the reasons he gives, in the essay ‘The Mandarin’,
for his growing disillusionment with Sartre in the sixties was Sartre’s tendency ‘to turn his disciple against humour, to make him think that laughter was forbidden in any literature that sought to be profound’. (p. 133)
His essays on Sartre and Camus in particular – his first volume of collected literary and political criticism was entitled significantly, Entre Sartre y Camus (Between Sartre and Camus, 1981) – reveal what he has called ‘the itinerary of a Latin American who undertook his intellectual apprenticeship dazzled by the intelligence and dialectical swings of Sartre and ended up embracing the libertarian reformism of Camus’.4 They show his way of coming to terms with ‘the myths, utopias, enthusiasms, quarrels, hopes, fanaticism and brutalities lived by a Latin American in the sixties and seventies’.5 For although the writer was in voluntary exile in Paris and later London, his main focus was Peru and the social upheavals occurring throughout Latin America. The Cuban revolution of 1959 had a profound political and symbolic influence in the continent. As his early writings reveal, Vargas Llosa first saw it as a nationalist, anti-imperialist revolution which seemed exemplary and which demonstrated a need for commitment and for political clarity. He would visit Cuba on five occasions in the sixties since, in the early years of the Revolution, the Cubans invited many members of the artistic community to the island, awarded literary prizes and organized seminars and conferences. The group of the Latin American ‘boom’ novelists who achieved national and international acclaim in these years – led by Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Vargas Llosa himself – were initially closely identified with this process, none more enthusiastically than Vargas Llosa. Several extracts in this volume – ‘Chronicle of the Cuban Revolution’, ‘Socialism and the Tanks’, ‘Letter to Haydée Santamaría’, ‘The Death of Che’ – mark his growing distance from the Cuban process. It was a position that he made explicit in 1971 when, together with many other intellectuals throughout the world, including Sartre, he signed two open letters protesting against the crude handling by the Cubans of a dissident poet, Heberto Padilla. But for much of the sixties, Cuba was an example that he felt should be emulated throughout the continent. He was a friend of the Peruvian poet turned
guerrilla, Javier Heraud, who was killed in 1963, and he wrote in support of guerilla activity in Peru, although he did not see this as an option open to himself as a writer (see the affectionate homage to his friend Paul Escobar). He called Frantz Fanon a ‘great Third World idealogue’ and the campaign diaries of Che Guevara ‘one of the fascinating books of our time’.6 The strength of his feeling in the sixties is in direct proportion to his later vigorous condemnation of what he would see as his mistaken and utopian views.
The political commitment that the volume traces is from the pro-Cuban Left of the sixties to a radical liberalism in the nineties, and politics remains one of Vargas Llosa’s constant concerns. It does not, however, supersede his dedication to literature. Apart from the direct political involvement between 1987 and 1990 (which in the event was very soon transformed into a massive political memoir), writing and reading dominate his life. He makes clear the exclusive nature of the literary vocation in his Sartrean study of his friend and mentor, the writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy, and he is speaking of himself when he refers to the discipline shown by Hemingway: ‘Because literature is a passion and passion is exclusive … Hemingway is in a café and by his side there is a young woman. He thinks: “You belong to me and Paris belongs to me but I belong to this notebook and pencil.” That is exactly what slavery means. The condition of a writer is strange and paradoxical. His privilege is freedom, the right to see, hear and investigate everything … What is the purpose of this privilege? To feed the beast within, which enslaves him, which feeds off all his acts, tortures him mercilessly and is only appeased, momentarily, in the act of creation. ’ (pp. 39 – 40) If the literary vocation is enslaving, he has no doubts about the primary importance of literature as an expression of freedom and discontent, as his memorable essay ’‘Literature is Fire’ states: ‘It is important to remind our societies what to expect. Warn them that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion, that the raison d’être of a writer is protest, disagreement and criticism.’ (p. 72) The same sentiments are echoed over twenty years later in the article that closes the volume ‘The Truth of Lies’: ‘By itself, literature is a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology: a blazing testimony of its insufficiencies, its inability to satisfy us.’ (p. 330)
In the development of this vocation, Vargas Llosa acknowledges his attachment at different times to certain writers. To the names Sartre and Camus must be added Georges Bataille, a reference point that criticism on him has tended to ignore. The essay included shows Vargas Llosa’s affinity to many aspects of Bataille’s literary criticism: literature’s relationship to what Bataille calls Evil (obsessions, frustrations, pain and vice); its communication of essentially negative – maudit – experiences; the literary vocation as a quest for sovereignty; the fundamental importance of eroticism and the interest in the legendary Gilles de Rais as an example of unrestrained sovereignty. Even when Vargas Llosa explicitly links himself to the belle lettriste, harmonious liberal vision of Isaiah Berlin, he feels that this ‘healthy’ or ‘serene’ analysis of man and his actions must be complemented by Bataille’s exploration of the world of unreason, of the unconscious, ‘the world of those obscure instincts that, in unexpected ways, suddenly emerge to compete with ideas and often replace them as a form of action and can even destroy what these ideas have built up.’ (p. 147) The realm of Dionysus can hold sway in the most unexpected places at the most unlikely times, as his latest novel, Death in the Andes, reveals. While Vargas Llosa would surely agree with Freud’s observation that only in the realm of fiction can we find the ‘plurality of lives’ that we need for existence, the question that he poses is how to keep the boundaries clear between fiction and reality.
This interest in exploring literary and societal taboos attracts Vargas Llosa to Faulkner’s fictional world. Together with Joyce, Faulkner has been the main precursor for modern Latin American novelists and Vargas Llosa has explicitly stated that, ‘He wrote in English, but he was one of our own.’ Faulkner was ‘one of our own’ because he wrote of a world of ‘turbulent complexity’, ‘backwardness and marginality’ which ‘also contains beauty and virtues that so-called civilization kills.’ (p. 151) When Vargas Llosa is in a remote Amazon settlement, researching his epic novel The War of the End of the World, he finds himself witnessing experiences similar to those shared by the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County: violence, heat, greed, untameable nature, unrestrained instincts. Faulkner’s South is also recognizably Latin America. It was Faulkner’s particular genius, for Vargas Llosa, to be able to tell these ferocious stories in formally innovative ways: Faulkner was the first writer he read with pen and paper in hand in order to decipher the structural complexities of the narrative. Unlike
many early Latin American writers who told brutal stories with equally brutal techniques of clumsy social realism, Faulkner could demonstrate the art of form to Vargas Llosa’s generation.
Many articles express the desire to learn the lessons of international modernism as part of a concern for the development of literature within Latin America. From within the continent, the formal perfection of the stories of Jorge Luis Borges was a constant inspiration, but Vargas Llosa would also engage polemically with the ‘indigenist’ writers of his own country. (Indeed his next work, in press as I write, is a book-length study of literary indigenismo.) He was conscious of being part of a process of narrative innovation, as his essay on Julio Cortázar reveals: the excitement at reading Hopscotch in 1963 is contagious. He also prepared in the late sixties a doctoral thesis, published as a book, on the work of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, then a great friend. He has since distanced himself from that writer, their parting of the ways marked by a famous right hook that Hemingway would have been proud of. His engagement with critics from Latin America has also been similarly forthright and bruising. There were famous polemics in the sixties and seventies with the critics Oscar Collazos and Angel Rama over the nature of literature, revolution and the status of literary criticism and this desire to engage remains a constant in his writing. One polemic, with Günter Grass (‘Freedom for the Free?’) is included here.
The study of Garcia Márquez was completed in Britain, while Vargas Llosa was teaching at the University of London. London became in the late sixties, and remains to this day, his favourite city in which to write. Having survived the shock of a cup of murky, cold tea on the boat train from Dover to London, he took up residence in West London and has returned there, on and off, for thirty years. This, despite the terrifying attentions of Oscar the mouse in his first Earls Court house and the British attachment to lukewarm beer and draughty pubs. This relationship with Britain and Ireland is illustrated in a number of articles. There is an evocation of Joyce’s Dublin through an analysis of Dubliners and a meditation on Karl Marx in London, who lodged in the most extreme poverty at Dean Street in the 1850s – then a slum, now, in 1966, the centre of ‘swinging’ London – while writing his greatest works. Vargas Llosa, like Karl Marx, would form a disciplined attachment to the Reading Room of the British Museum. He also reads Doris Lessing and accompanies Salman Rushdie
to a football game. In his political analyses of the eighties and nineties, Margaret Thatcher is seen as a liberal reformer. And, in one of his most famous comic essays, the British public school system is put under the microscope for not noticing that, under its charge, his youngest son had become a Rastafarian.
The seventies and eighties would see a return to Peru and frequent stays in Britain, Spain and, in later years, the United States, as Vargas Llosa’s growing international stature would give rise to frequent invitations to lecture and teach at campuses all over the country. He returned to a Peru under military rule, but to a regime that proclaimed itself to be socially just and interested in state-directed national development. Initially under General Velasco and later in much more muted form under General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, there was a policy of selective nationalization of foreign enterprises, widespread agrarian reform and state intervention into many aspects of the economy. While many, including Vargas Llosa, pointed to the mismanagement of these regimes – Vargas Llosa was particularly critical of Velasco for placing daily papers and television channels. under state control and condemned intellectuals who supported his measures – the military governments had the effect of radicalizing the country. By 1978 Vargas Llosa was talking of antidemocratic socialism and warning of the gains of the far left under Hugo Blanco in the polls. The presidential elections in May 1980 brought back the conservative Fernando Belaúnde Terry after twelve years of military rule. This year also marked the military emergence of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path guerrilla movement, which had been founded by a philosophy lecturer, Abimael Guzmán. Within a few years this ultra-violent group – whose literature spoke of the necessary ‘quota’ of blood sacrifice for each militant 
had built up bases in the south central Andes and the shanty towns of Ayacucho, Huancayo and Lima, heralding a decade of what became known as ‘Manchay tiempo’ – the Time of Fear.
had built up bases in the south central Andes and the shanty towns of Ayacucho, Huancayo and Lima, heralding a decade of what became known as ‘Manchay tiempo’ – the Time of Fear.Sendero received countrywide attention with the press and television coverage of the massacre, early in 1983, of eight journalists and their guide by villagers in Uchuraccay, north-west of the capital of Ayacucho, an area in which Sendero conducted operations. The government set up a commission to investigate the killings, with Vargas Llosa as a member. Its report was hotly contested in the country. Vargas Llosa’s account of this incident, ‘Massacre in the Andes’, should be read in conjunction with Death in the Andes. Both serve as documents
of this time of disorder when ‘emergency zones’ (where Sendero and the armed forces were locked in violent combat) covered some twenty-seven provinces of Peru. Vargas Llosa’s criticism of Günter Grass for depicting Latin America as a place of necessary revolutionary activity should be read in this context. The violent struggles in Peru also colour his views on Central America when he argues, in 1985, for a curb in revolutionary activity and the implementation of democratic reforms in Nicaragua.
The period was also marked by shifts in government economic policy in Peru to combat a grave economic, as well as political, crisis. Belaúnde had tried, unsuccessfully, to impose an International Monetary Fund stabilization plan in return for a loan. In 1985, the populist president Alan Garcia chose a different course, increasing but later freezing prices and imposing a fixed exchange rate and import controls. He also opposed the banking community and the IMF by declaring his own level of debt repayment, a move that led to a virtual boycott of Peru by international financiers. When Garcia announced in July 1987 that he would nationalize all banks and financial institutions in Peru, Vargas Llosa wrote an article in opposition: ‘Towards a Totalitarian Peru’ beginning a process, outlined in great detail in A Fish in the Water, that would lead to his presidential candidacy.
Having opposed Vargas Llosa’s liberal reform programme in the election campaign of 1990, the new president Alberto Fujimori performed a U-turn and introduced a programme that became known as ‘Fujishock’. Prices rocketed the price of petrol went up 3000 per cent overnight wages were frozen, public spending was cut back drastically and privatization became the norm. In 1992, with military support, Fujimori flouted democracy by suspending the constitution and abolishing Congress. Vargas Llosa’s opposition to Fujimori has been public and trenchant, as can be seen in ‘The “People” and the “Decent People’”.
the price of petrol went up 3000 per cent overnight wages were frozen, public spending was cut back drastically and privatization became the norm. In 1992, with military support, Fujimori flouted democracy by suspending the constitution and abolishing Congress. Vargas Llosa’s opposition to Fujimori has been public and trenchant, as can be seen in ‘The “People” and the “Decent People’”.Vargas Llosa is currently based in Europe, but he makes frequent visits to the United States. North American literature has always been important to his literary development, as the essays on Faulkner, Dos Passos and Hemingway reveal. He has also contributed articles to a number of North American newspapers and journals. As his international reputation became established, the visit to the North American campus became a regular event. In many of these university environments he depicts himself, in humorous vein, as somewhat of a
fish out of water, or at least as someone swimming against the current critical tides. While his appointment as a visiting professor at Cambridge in England involved him, by his own account, in teaching just one student, in North America a rather larger, more demanding and expectant audience awaited. He could not always satisfy these expectations. In Princeton, he remarks, ‘People hope that, in these times of scarcity, at least the Third Worldists might still be revolutionaries. Whoever is not a revolutionary disappoints them. Like me, for example. ’7 This critique of foreign intellectuals who like to place their revolutionary utopias in Latin America is constant in Vargas Llosa’s fictions and critical essays, as can be seen both in the polemic with Grass and in ‘Swiss Passion’. Other essays comment, through an analysis of recent work by Saul Bellow, David Mamet – ‘Visual Contact’ – and also of the Bobbitt affair, on the current US interests in contemporary literary theory and the politics of gender, race and minorities.
These recent articles on the United States were first published in a regular column that he now writes for El País, entitled Piedra de toque (Touchstone), which is syndicated throughout Latin America. They have been collected in the volume, Desafíos a la libertad (Challenges to Freedom, 1994). Other essays from this book covering the late eighties and early nineties are included here, and they focus on what Vargas Llosa calls in his introduction to Desafíos the ‘challenges to the culture of freedom that have emerged with post-communism and a criticism of nationalism and its thousand insidious faces … religious traditionalism and the new attempts to re-establish the authoritarian tradition in Latin America.’ In its place, he argues for internationalism and ‘the liberal option as a simultaneous and indivisible alliance of political democracy and economic freedom’.8 It is from this standpoint that he can talk of the influence on his thought of Popper, Hayek and Isaiah Berlin and of his filial attachment to and unreserved admiration for Popper, Faulkner, Borges and Margaret Thatcher. In this last list there is an interesting tension between a will to define stark clarities and an awareness, from a pluralist sensibility, that such clarities are necessarily elusive and contingent.
While few writers or politicians would mention Borges and Margaret Thatcher in the same breath, even fewer would also be able to analyse
Maradona’s footballing skills or the work of the Colombian Botero. Like Camus before him, Vargas Llosa is a football fan and in 1982 he was given an ideal assignment: to cover the World Cup in Spain. Several of these columns are included here. His appreciation of Maradona’s early footballing skills can be contrasted to his more recent scorn at Maradona’s enthusiastic support for Fidel Castro and the Cuban regime. Vargas Llosa has also written extensively on art, as illustrated by the long essay on Botero, Latin America’s best known living artist, a short appreciation of the Peruvian Szyszlo and a discussion on art within totalitarian Germany in the thirties, ‘Degenerate Art’. In this article he makes reference to George Grosz and would later develop his fascination with Grosz into a lavishly illustrated book.9
Art critic, football commentator, film buff, polemicist, political essayist, literary critic, chroniqueur, autobiographer, short story writer: Making Waves illustrates these many facets of the work and personality of Mario Vargas Llosa.
John King
Warwick, 29 February 1996