The great adventure” is what Mario Vargas Llosa called his trip to Stockholm when he boarded the plane in Madrid on a rainy Sunday afternoon on December 5, 2010. He was about to leave on a flight to Sweden in order to begin a week of activities that would culminate in his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had participated in two conferences in Stockholm before, and this was his third professional trip to that city, and the most important. Once in Stockholm that Sunday evening, he and Patricia checked into the classic Malmö. Within an hour after their arrival, the newest Nobel laureate and his wife were on their way to dine at a traditional Swedish restaurant, Den Gyldene Freden, specialist in traditional Scandinavian food since 1922 and the same establishment in which a group of Swedish academics had met every Thursday evening to discuss the Nobel Prize. Along with Mario and Patricia, present at the dinner were his son Álvaro, his daughter Morgana, the Peruvian painter and confidant Fernando de Szyszlo, his wife, and one representative of the Nobel Committee.
The day before this trip to Sweden, Vargas Llosa had been honored at a soccer match between Real Madrid and Valencia at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. This public recognition in Spain took place approximately two months after the Nobel Prize announcement in Stockholm. At this event Vargas Llosa, of Peruvian and Spanish nationality, called soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo “a novelistic figure” (“una figura novel-esca,” as reported in the Spanish newspaper El País, December 4, 2010).
Before Vargas Llosa’s own trip to Stockholm, the Latin American writers who made this monumental journey were Octavio Paz (in 1990), Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Pablo Neruda (1971), Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967), and Gabriela Mistral (1945). The most resounding, poetic, and highly cited of their acceptance speeches had been delivered by García Márquez and Neruda. In his speech, titled “The Solitude of Latin America,” García Márquez reviewed the historical traumas of the region of his origin, the thousands of deaths, and the plethora of European solutions to the dilemmas of Latin America. Speaking of Europe, García Márquez lamented that the interpretation of Latin American reality through patterns not their own only has served “to make us more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” The Colombian Nobel laureate quoted Faulkner, who had affirmed in his Nobel speech (when Vargas Llosa was still a high school student in Lima) that he declined to accept the “end of man.” García Márquez ended his Nobel presentation with a grand flourish, affirming the power of the writer to imagine and invent a better reality. In Neruda’s lyrical speech in Stockholm, he compared the work of a poet to the work of a baker. He then claimed that the writers of the Americas listen increasingly to “the call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood.”
Their grandiose, broad-sweeping statements about the past and present of the Americas were perhaps one reason why Vargas Llosa’s Nobel acceptance lecture was the opposite: a fundamentally nonlyrical, non-metaphorical, and non-utopian, down-to-earth series of observations and statements about his life as a writer. This was classic Vargas-Llosathe-essayist, and the words of a writer whose enthusiasm and optimism, with age, had perhaps waned a little compared to García Márquez and Neruda.
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“I am not a neoliberal, I am a liberal, someone who believes in democracy, liberty, and against all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism” (“No soy neoliberal, soy liberal, alguien que cree en la democracia, en la libertad, en contra de toda forma de autoritarismo y totalitarismo”). Vargas Llosa made this affirmation at his press conference in Stockholm the day after his arrival, on Monday, December 6, 2010. This adamant rejection of “neoliberalism” was an important statement to articulate at this moment, the zenith of his career, after over two decades of being criticized regularly for supposedly being a neoliberal. He had appeared at the press conference in his standard Vargas-Llosathe-lecturer elegance and formality: black suit, pink shirt, solemn demeanor. The discussion on literature and politics in Latin America and the world, carried out in Spanish and English, in addition to his imposing physical presence, was so sobering and serious, in fact, that one Peruvian journalist simply requested a smile from the most recent Nobel laureate.
Given the intensely increasing drug violence in Mexico in 2010, Vargas Llosa was asked about the international drug-trafficking issue. In matters such as this, Vargas Llosa’s more progressive side is apparent. He responded that drug consumption should be “decriminalized” and that the resources currently being used to fight the governments’ drug wars in nations such as Mexico and Colombia should be invested instead for the recovery and rehabilitation of the individuals affected by drug use.
With respect to a journalist’s inquiry about the function and importance of literature, the Peruvian author responded with an explanation that was familiar to his readers. On the one hand, he spoke of how literature’s imaginary stories can enrich our lives and provide deeper insights into ideas and experiences of life. On the other hand, he repeated statements from as early as the 1960s, that literature can play a critical role in respect to the status quo of political and social reality.
. . .
Vargas Llosa delivered his Nobel speech on Tuesday afternoon, December 7, 2010, at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. During the day, he and the other Nobel laureates were given a tour of the Nobel Museum, where they saw artifacts from the lives of previous Nobel laureates, including typewriters, which might be expected, and some of the less expected, such as the bicycle one Nobel laureate had used during his research in Africa.
Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech accentuated, above all, his gratitude to the family members, friends, and writers who had made this literary recognition possible. In his lecture “Elogio de la lectura y la ficción” (“In Praise of Reading and Fiction”), he began by announcing that he had learned to read at the age of five in the Colegio de la Salle in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and that reading gave him access to the world of literature. As a child, his first writings were continuations of the first stories that he read. Some seven decades later, he realized that he had spent his life doing a very similar exercise: continuing, as he grew up and aged, the stories that had filled his youth with adventure, excitement, and entertainment.
Among the literary masters who taught him how to write fiction, he first cited Flaubert, who had taught him that talent is a tenacious discipline requiring much patience. He explained that he learned from Faulkner about form—the writing and structure of form—which adds to themes or detracts from them. With the naming of these two masters early in his speech, Vargas Llosa was underlining the two key figures for not only the beginning of his literary career, but for his entire life: Flaubert and Faulkner were his real models. The other writers, several of whom he cited in his Nobel speech, are relatively minor in comparison.
Beyond the carefully articulated gratitude for the contributions of his relatives and friends, as well as the writers to whom he owed debts, Vargas Llosa then rehearsed well-known explanations that he has set forth over the years concerning matters such as why it is important for humans to read and write literature. Without the good books we have read, Vargas Llosa argues, we would be more conformist and less critical, and for him, criticism is the generator of progress. With this statement, Vargas Llosa alluded to the progress that is the foundation of all of his critical thinking. “Progress,” “modernization,” and “modernity” are the keywords that reappear throughout his work.
According to Vargas Llosa, as he explained in Stockholm, reading and writing are a protest against the insufficiencies of life. For this Peruvian writer, the human condition is such that life would be unbearable if literature did not offer possibilities that we can never live in our real lives. This portion of the Nobel speech is one that Vargas Llosa has developed in a variety of essays and interviews over the years.
Other than the adamant statement about not being a neoliberal, the most politically noteworthy topic in Vargas Llosa’s Nobel speech was his statement about indigenous peoples, which was more carefully wrought, precise, and uncontroversial than most of his previously articulated positions on these people. He had been harshly criticized for his earlier opinion that the long-term solution for the indigenous peoples of the Americas is modernization. His statement in the Nobel speech was unambiguous: for over two centuries the emancipation of the indigenous peoples has been exclusively the responsibility of all Peruvians (“es una responsibilidad exclusivamente nuestra”) and one in which Peru has failed. Vargas Llosa defined the liberation of indigenous peoples as the task of all Latin America with no exceptions. This statement was a response to the current situation of indigenous peoples, which he called a “shame” (“verguenza”).
The remainder of Vargas Llosa’s Nobel acceptance speech was familiar terrain for his readers, including such frequent topics as liberty or freedom (libertad), his Marxist period, his fascination with the French writers in vogue in the 1950s (Sartre, Camus), and, once again, the importance of literature for society. Vargas Llosa associates freedom with literary expression, pointing out that despots always control the citizens’ access to literature. Vargas Llosa has never denied the Marxist period of his past: this was not only an important stage in his intellectual formation, but also an example of an aspect of human behavior that the writer regularly exploits in his fiction—his own contradictions.
In the concluding part of his Nobel speech, Vargas Llosa reaffirmed his point of departure, insisting that dreaming, reading, and writing are a response to the inevitable passage of time, a way to make the impossible possible.
. . .
In the freezing temperatures of Stockholm, with a blanket of snow covering the entire city, Vargas Llosa’s limousine pulled up to the local institute for Hispanic studies late in the morning on Wednesday, December 8, 2010. He looked physically drained as he moved through the crowd of Spanish photographers, journalists, and fans who were there on the sidewalk to get a glimpse at the new Nobel laureate.
Vargas Llosa entered the institute, which, on the main floor, contained a comprehensive exhibit covering the writer’s life and career. Pictures from key periods of Vargas Llosa’s life were the anchors of this exhibit. Visitors could mingle among life-size pictures mounted on large rectangular blocks spread throughout the space of the exhibit, which also showcased early manuscripts written in the writer’s trademark notebooks.
On Wednesday evening, a day after Vargas Llosa delivered his Nobel speech and two days before he actually received the prize, the Nobel laureates were honored with a concert. The special guest performer was the American violinist Joshua Bell. Mario and Patricia were seated in the balcony with the Swedish royalty and the other Nobel laureates. Bell’s performance was spectacular, and the audience responded with great enthusiasm.
On Thursday morning of December 9, 2010, Vargas Llosa visited a public school in the suburbs of Stockholm. This multiethnic elementary school hosted a discussion with the author on multicultural topics.
The Nobel Prize ceremonial dinner and conferral of the prize itself took place in Stockholm on Friday, December 10, 2010. Vargas Llosa was accompanied by his family, the Swedish royalty, and the other 2010 Nobel laureates. Mario was invited to give the official toast, which he did in the form of a story—a fairy tale in which a five-year-old boy learned to read and saw this change his life. Thanks to the adventure stories that he read, he discovered a way to escape from his poor home, from his poor country, and from the impoverished reality in which he lived, and to travel to marvelous places, encountering beautiful people and surprising things every day and every night. This young boy enjoyed reading these stories so much that he too started inventing stories and writing them. He was very aware that the world of dreams and literature was one thing, and quite another was the reality of the “real” world; he knew too that the former only existed while he was reading or writing. Until one New York morning the boy got a call from Stockholm about a prize. Since then, his life has been a fantasy in which he has not been sure if he is living a literary dream or “real reality.”
. . .
After the Nobel activities in Stockholm, Vargas Llosa flew the following week to Lima for the celebrations in Peru. President Alan García presented him with a special, newly coined award, and the author made two public appearances. The reception of the politically controversial intellectual figure was mildly positive, perhaps more positive than might be expected, given the number of severe critics that Vargas Llosa had had in Peru since his political interventions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Vargas Llosa’s first public appearance was at an academic conference in the historical center of Lima. It involved a brief statement by him, followed by the standard questions about the role of the writer and the public intellectual.
The second public appearance was at the Museo de la Nación (National Museum) in the afternoon of December 15, 2010, where there was a large and elaborate exhibit on Vargas Llosa’s life and career. Quite similar to the exhibit in Stockholm, the Museo de la Nación setup featured the same enlarged pictures of Vargas Llosa’s entire life from his infancy, as well as material objects related to his reading and writing: notebooks with handwritten notes, articles from the press, and even clothing from cadets at the Leoncio Prado military school.
Vargas Llosa’s public appearance at the Museo de la Nación involved a dialogue (“Conversatorio”) with the Peruvian writer Alfonso Cueto and the academics José Miguel Oviedo, David Gallagher, and Efraín Kristal. The focus of this conversation was the novel that had just appeared in print a month before, El sueño del celta. Each of the four gave a brief presentation on the novel, followed by remarks by the author, who was visibly impressed with their work on his novel. When asked to comment upon these presentations, Vargas Llosa offered an anecdote from his early experience as a writer that convinced him, supposedly, that his critics know his work better than he does. In the mid-1960s, in a private discussion with a French critic, Vargas Llosa mentioned the ambiguous death of the cadet in the recently published La ciudad y los perros. Much to Vargas Llosa’s surprise, the critic vehemently proclaimed that Jaguar had indeed killed him. Standing corrected by the self-assured critic, Vargas Llosa explained—evoking chuckles in the audience in Lima—that he had learned his lesson: his critics know his novels better than he does.
. . .
In early November of 2010, a month after the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Vargas Llosa flew to Madrid to introduce his new novel, El sueño del celta. The first edition in Spanish, published by the multinational Alfaguara, was an instant best seller in Spain and Latin America. In the press conference related to the publication of this novel, Vargas Llosa spoke briefly of the extensive research and travel involved in telling a story with historical roots in Africa, Latin America, and Ireland.
. . .
On October 7, 2010, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, had announced in Stockholm that the Nobel Prize for Literature was being awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa. The official statement of the Swedish Academy with the announcement was the following explanation, written as an incomplete sentence: “Cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Vargas Llosa had received the phone call from Stockholm at 5:30 a.m. in New York, and by that afternoon had already taken a stroll in Central Park, done an interview for Swedish television, and held a press conference at the Cervantes Institute. He was teaching two classes as a visiting professor at Princeton University that fall semester of 2010; with the announcement of the Nobel Prize, his previously scheduled October lecture on campus had to be moved to a larger venue.
A month after the announcement of the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature, the North American novelist and English professor David Milofsky, writing for the Denver Post (November 7, 2010), commented on the recent selection of Mario Vargas Llosa. He asserted that “the Nobel Committee actually got it right,” even though the book-making chain Ladbrokes had given the Peruvian writer 25–1 odds of receiving the award. Milofsky observed that the last North American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature had been Toni Morrison. Milofsky quoted the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy of two years previous, Horace Engdahl, who had told the Associated Press, “The United States is too isolated. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”
The opinion of the Swedish Academy is interesting in the context of Vargas Llosa as a twenty-first-century writer. As a participant in the “big dialogue of literature” this is a writer in constant dialogue with Flaubert and Faulkner, and who in the twenty-first century has researched and written books set in historical contexts of the Dominican Republic (La fiesta del Chivo), France, Peru, and Tahiti (El paraíso en la otra esquina), France and Peru (Travesuras de la niña mala), and the Belgian Congo, Ireland, and Peru (El sueño del celta). During the period these novels appeared in print, Vargas Llosa published a journalistic account of the war in Iraq (Diario de Irak) and took strong positions as a public intellectual on the political affairs and drug-trafficking struggles of several Latin American nations. For a committee interested in a writer involved in the “big dialogue of literature,” Vargas Llosa was a logical, and apparently ideal, selection.
. . .
That same November, the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico invited a group of Vargas Llosa scholars to their campus for a two-day symposium on the author. I accepted with the assumption that I would be seeing Mario there, since he was listed as a major speaker at the International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro), taking place at the same time. Once I arrived at the conference, I was to present brief comments on Tirant lo Blanc, citing the medieval text in the original Catalonian that I had recently learned to read as part of my work on Vargas Llosa. I was disappointed to learn at our preconference dinner that Vargas Llosa was to be present the next day at the book fair, but not actually at our conference at all. In mid-morning, our conference was interrupted by a special guest: Vargas Llosa had taken note of our program and decided on his own, independent of the book fair, to greet and thank his scholars. We were all most pleased to see him and to shake his hand as he exited back to the book fair. (When we met in Madrid in 2011, I thanked him for having publicly recognized me personally by name in Monterrey; contrary to the cliché, not all writers dislike their critics, and although I doubt if we actually impress him very often with our academic writings on his work, he has been exceptionally kind and courteous to us.)
. . .
In 2006 Vargas Llosa made his second trip to Stockholm, having been there in June 1978 as the president of the PEN Club International. Neither trip was particularly pleasant in professional terms. On the first trip, he was involved in polemics about having the Spanish language accepted as an official language of the PEN Club. At the end of the conference, he did have a conversation with Artur Lundkvist of the Swedish Academy (well known at the time as the key member for writers in Spanish) about the Nobel Prize and writers of the Spanish language.
At the 2006 conference, Vargas Llosa was accompanied by his Swedish and French translators, as well as scholars of several nationalities. Vargas Llosa found himself involved in a heated, hourlong debate with an exiled member of the Shining Path, who claimed that Vargas Llosa does not care about Peruvian politics. As the interchange escalated in emotion, Vargas Llosa screamed at the Peruvian exile “Read me!” (“¡Léanme, léanme!”).
After the conference, a Swedish newspaper referred to Vargas Llosa as a “giant” of international fiction.
. . .
I strolled around Vargas Llosa’s neighborhood in central Madrid right on the Plaza de las Descalzas, near the Barrio de las Letras, for a few hours before our conversation that took place on July 4, 2011, seven months after the Nobel Prize activities. I got a sense for some of the author’s daily life—the places where he likes to read and write in the afternoon. I ate at the nearest restaurant to his residence, the Mesón Las Descalzas. His third-floor residence (a condominium that in Spain is called a piso) overlooks the Plaza de las Descalzas, and is close enough to the Pirámide de Egipcia that he and Patricia do their morning walk there. In the afternoon, he often goes to cafés to edit his writing and to read. Since the October 2010 announcement of the Nobel Prize, he has had to abandon some of his preferred afternoon cafés, such as the Café Central, which had been his favorite spot until right before the announcement of the prize. In his twenty-first-century life in Madrid, he has also continued one of his favorite routines since his student days in the 1950s—going to the Biblioteca Nacional to read.
After I made it through the labyrinth of stairs and elevators to the third floor of his building, I was in exactly the same environment of all of Vargas Llosa’s previous homes: modern furniture accentuated with glass, with a large glass desk where he works. Contemporary avant-garde painting and sculpture were abundant, particularly the work of his friend the Colombian world-class artist Fernando Botero.
This was the first time we had ever spoken in Madrid, so I began with the city as our first topic. Why Madrid, I wondered, rather than the city that had always fascinated him, Paris. In response, Vargas Llosa described himself as a citizen of the world who finds Madrid, above all, a good place to do his work—reading and writing. My probing invited him to say something negative about Paris, but to the contrary, Vargas Llosa insisted on his having a very good relationship with Paris, a place that he still enjoys visiting frequently. Madrid, however, in addition to being a good workplace for this bi-national and multilingual writer, is an exceptionally comfortable urban living space for Patricia and the remainder of his family, who love the daily life of Madrid a few blocks from the Plaza Mayor.
We then moved to the Nobel Prize and any effect it might have had on Mario’s work. As flattering as receiving the prize has been, he explained, he believes that it has not made him a better writer or a worse writer. It has made him a more public figure, which sometimes, according to Vargas Llosa, has been uncomfortable or distracting. He has always exercised a defined work regimen, but since the Nobel Prize, for the first time in his life, he has occasionally not been able to maintain his disciplined writing schedule.
His references to writing discipline per se remind me of our 1983 breakfast conversation in St. Louis, Missouri, in which he revealed that writing by hand was his “therapy” (terapia). I reminded him of that conversation and asked if writing by hand was still his therapy. He responded affirmatively and this led us to a brief discussion of his notebooks: the elegant Italian notebooks that he always purchases on his trips to Italy, and in which he writes the first draft of all his creative work. When I asked him if he ever considered professional work with a psychologist or psychiatrist, he responded with one adamant sentence that closed this subject of inquiry: “Uno tiene que cultivar la neurosis” (“one must cultivate one’s neuroses”).
With this exchange, I felt I had updated myself on the writer’s personal situation in the context of his traumas, and we moved to El sueño del celta. Vargas Llosa explained that the origin of his interest in Roger Casement, the protagonist of El sueño del celta, was the fact that he happened to be reading large portions of Conrad simply out of interest in Conrad. In the process of reading Conrad’s biography of Casement, however, Vargas Llosa became interested in Casement’s case per se. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written because of what Conrad had learned about Casement, Vargas Llosa pointed out. The more he read, the more Vargas Llosa found Casement to be a fascinating man. In reading the Conrad biography and additional writings about Casement (including academic studies), Vargas Llosa became interested in a novelistic project, an interest that subsequently brought him to Africa, Ireland, and London for further research. The visit to Africa and the related research exposed Vargas Llosa to an ugly side of colonialism, the sacking of Africa for natural resources and the cruelest forms of human exploitation.
A centerpiece for the controversy that has always surrounded Casement was the set of diaries he had written; the British government used these diaries to defame the diplomat’s character. Vargas Llosa went to London to undertake his own analysis of the diaries, and found these writings (in different versions) to be ambiguous and contradictory at best, and not in any way conclusive. He also found the language of the supposed personal diaries to be unreliable; they contain vulgar language, for example, that Vargas Llosa believes not to be the discourse of Casement, for the latter, as a diplomat, was a proper gentleman of his times. In a statement that repeats one of Vargas Llosa’s tenets about writing, he explained: “I believe he used the diaries for what he could not live.” The brutal exploitation of human beings and natural resources in Africa and Latin America, as well as the ambiguous diaries, make it understandable that Vargas Llosa was fascinated with this project. Indeed, the Peruvian author’s biography has much in common with Casement’s.
This initial interest in Roger Casement had begun while Vargas Llosa was still finishing El paraíso en la otra esquina. El sueño del celta was a novel that Vargas Llosa researched, developed, and completed relatively quickly: many of his novels, such as El paraíso en la otra esquina, were decade-long projects, but El sueño del celta took approximately half that time. El paraíso en la otra esquina, on the other hand, was a novel that Vargas Llosa thought about and developed in a period longer than a decade. I remember Mario talking about his interest in a Flora Tristán project in the early 1990s. It began as a novel about the French Peruvian feminist, activist, and writer, but as Vargas Llosa began to see the parallels between Flora and the French painter Paul Gauguin, he developed Gauguin as the other major figure in the novel.
In now-classic Vargas Llosa fashion, his research for El paraíso en la otra esquina involved both library work and travel. He spent approximately three weeks in the islands around Tahiti, exploring the utopian world Gauguin saw there, as well as following Flora Tristán’s route around France, staying in several of the towns where she had lived.
Vargas Llosa and I concluded our conversation in Madrid that July on the subject of poetry; I had been surprised to find him publishing poems in the latter part of a career that had been dedicated entirely to prose. When I queried Mario about this, he began by referring to Borges’s early statement that poetry permits only excellence, i.e., less than excellent poetry is bad poetry. Aware of this, the young Vargas Llosa had always destroyed all his poems. In the late 1990s, however, he was working on a Homer project for which he was studying different translations, since he does not read Greek. After finishing these readings, he decided to write a poem in honor of Homer, the father.
I believe this return to poetry late in life is quite likely Vargas Llosa’s ultimate Oedipal reaction to his own father, the man who had ridiculed him as an adolescent for reading and writing poetry.
. . .
For many years, I believed that Vargas Llosa’s main debt to Flaubert was technical, for it was in Flaubert’s novels that he discovered the most neutral and transparent of omniscient narrators, as well as his much-used “telescoped dialogues.” I have never given much credence to his claim in his book on Flaubert that he actually fell in love with the character Madame Bovary when he first read the novel in Paris at the age of twenty. Today, after several decades of reading Vargas Llosa and rereading his work, my understanding of this claim has changed: I believe Vargas Llosa has always identified closely with the fictional character Madame Bovary as the traumatized victim whose life was limited by provinciality until she rebelled. That was the nature of his supposed passion for Madame Bovary.
. . .
At the university in Mexico’s northern city of Monterrey, the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, the organizers of a special chair, the Cátedra Alfonso Reyes, invited me along with Vargas Llosa in April 2000 for a two-day visit: one day to lecture about Vargas Llosa and another day to serve as moderator of a dialogue between the Peruvian writer and a large audience of students (all in Spanish, of course).
On the first day, we began our public dialogue in Monterrey with my asking him to talk about his then-recent book Cartas a un joven novelista (Letters to a Young Writer). I asked him how this book came about and how it related to his previous critical ideas on the novel, these concepts such as “craters,” “demons,” and the like. Vargas Llosa explained that Cartas was the first book that he had written that was not one of his own ideas, but that of an editor. This editor had proposed publishing a set of letters to young writers, along the lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous letters to a young poet. The young writer asked Rilke questions about his experience as a poet and this interchange resulted in what Vargas Llosa considers a beautiful book in which the poet explains in rational terms what poetic creation might be considered. Vargas Llosa immediately accepted the editor’s proposal, not so much because he thought the book would be instructive to young writers but, rather, in order to organize in his own mind the diverse set of ideas that he had set forth over the years on writing, the creative process, and the like. His Cartas a un joven novelista, Vargas Llosa emphasized in Monterrey, demonstrated above all the personal and subjective nature of his critical ideas. More than anything else, he wanted to describe in these letters how subjective and unconscious forces take over the novelizing process once the initial plan is complete.
Vargas Llosa insisted on adding one more prefatory comment about this book: it represents his own personal critical vocabulary, as opposed to academic critical discourse. For Vargas Llosa, the scientific pretense of academic critical discourse in effect kills the vitality of his more subjective, personal way of doing critical reading and writing. He uses as his example of his critical vocabulary the term “crater,” which seemingly has no equivalent in academic literary theory. In this book, of course, I have written of these “craters”: the episodes in a novel with exceptional force, anecdotes that concentrate more experience than the other passages, making them the most memorable of the novel. It seems to Vargas Llosa that this happens with certain episodes of a novel that are “grabados” (“left taped”) in our imaginations and immediately come to mind when we remember a novel.
In this dialogue in Monterrey, Vargas Llosa was particularly interested in emphasizing something that some everyday readers or nonacademic readers have had difficulty accepting: the narrator of a story is never the author. There is a natural tendency, Vargas Llosa observed, to identify the narrator who tells the story with the author. But Vargas Llosa reiterates that it is really never this way: the narrator is always a character, an invention.
Then I asked the author about two other concepts that Vargas Llosa has discussed over the years: vasos comunicantes (“communicating vessels”) and “total novel.” Vargas Llosa was uncertain about whether anyone else had ever used the term “communicating vessels” in a literary context. He remembered beginning to use the term when he was working on an essay on Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell. He explained that “communicating vessels” is a technique that consists of narrating by creating unity among episodes that appear in different spaces and times, but which share a common denominator. It is a technique, he continued, that modern novelists, as well as classic writers of the past, use frequently. In Madame Bovary there is the famous scene in which the farmers bring their animals and products to the fair, and the narration about this fair is intercalated with a dialogue between Madame Bovary and a local aristocrat who is attempting to seduce her. This contrast—the use of communicating vessels—affects both of the episodes taking place. This is not merely the mechanical juxtaposition of two narratives, but a masterful enrichment of both story lines. Vargas Llosa admires Faulkner’s The Wild Palms very much, a novel in which two story lines are told in alternating chapters. As we have seen in parts II and III of this study, of course, Vargas Llosa consistently uses the communicating vessels exactly as Faulkner did in The Wild Palms.
In our public discussion in Monterrey, we then moved to the subject of the “total novel” (novela total), a concept that Vargas Llosa and Fuentes popularized in the Hispanic world in the 1960s. In response to my question, Mario explained that his idea for the “total novel” was born, again, reading Tirant lo Blanc, what he called an “enormous” and “immense” novel, as novels of chivalry tend to be. According to Vargas Llosa, Martorell’s work is difficult to identify, difficult to categorize: an epic novel, a novel of customs, a military novel, a psychological novel. It is a novel about individuals, but also about collectivities, for many of its anecdotes are about mass movements. Consequently, this novel eventually creates a sense of dizziness, as Mario explained, because of the richness of the material elements it contains. Reading Tirant lo Blanc and reflecting on its extraordinary abundance, Vargas Llosa suddenly realized the importance of the quantity in itself. He thinks that this is the only genre that works this way, for poetry can be very concentrated and present an entire universe in very brief space. In a novel, Vargas Llosa explained, this kind of condensation or synthesis is not necessarily a virtue. When a novel expands in time and space, it can present individuals and social worlds, as well as the political, social customs, the erotic, and the like.
. . .
I met for an evening with Mario and Patricia in London in July 1994, more with intentions of maintaining contact than conducting a formal interview on a specific topic. But, as always, I gained further insight. I came by their home in London, on Montpelier Walk, and from there we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant, followed by a play. London has been very important for Vargas Llosa’s career. Fuentes once explained to me how he appreciated the relative anonymity of the Latin American writer in London, an experience different from Paris. Both Vargas Llosa and Fuentes appreciated, as well, the sense of civil behavior of the British in the public sphere; in many ways, London is more than a cosmopolitan city for the Latin American writer—it is also a comfortable one.
We began our informal conversation with the usual interchanges that Mario, Patricia, and I often have about health. Beyond the typical light courtesies about how young and healthy we claim each other seem to be, we have talked in some detail about what we have been doing for our health. This exchange often begins when I ask him if he is still jogging, as he was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Patricia has always been far more concerned about health—and particularly diet—than has Mario, and she has taken the initiative to assure me that her husband eats healthy food, as well as occasionally going to France to re-energize in health resorts. It was not until 2010 and 2011 that for the first time, this writer, scholar, and public intellectual seemed to be paying a price for his busy schedule and travel: he had visibly aged and had the physical appearance of an elderly senior citizen. Among the four writers of the Boom, nevertheless, Vargas Llosa is the youngest and the only one to establish an identity as a writer of the twenty-first century: Cortázar died in 1984; García Márquez finished his creative work by the end of the twentieth century and has been ill in recent years; Fuentes published novels that are likely to be considered only his minor work in the twenty-first century and died in 2012. Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, has published at least two major novels in the twenty-first century (La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta), received the Nobel Prize in the twenty-first century, and continues writing in his mid-seventies.
In my 1994 encounter with Vargas Llosa and Patricia, more than at any other time other than the 2010 interview in Madrid, I could clearly perceive in a new way his vast and deep interests in a broad range of the creative arts. In his public persona, he comes across so well as the dedicated and professional novelist, as well as the public intellectual, that the human being who lives very much in the world of arts in general is perhaps obscured. In London (and Madrid), more than in his brief visits to the United States, this artistic side of Vargas Llosa—the poet and art enthusiast—was evident. The preparation for this insight had come in my 1991 interview with Mario’s mother in Lima, for Dora de Vargas was a highly artistic person in her own right.
. . .
In May of 1991, I traveled to Cochabamba, the town where Vargas Llosa spent his childhood, with the intention of beginning my second book on Vargas Llosa, perhaps a biography, there in highland Bolivia.1 I strolled around the space where the child had lived, until he was eight years old, with the Llosa clan. The spacious Llosa home was still intact, probably little changed from the late 1930s and early 1940s. The nearby Plaza de Armas (central plaza) also appeared to be a postcard-picture scene of an idyllic small town, although it is surrounded today by urban sprawl. The nearby small private Catholic school where Mario learned to read was still there. I began to think of Vargas Llosa’s idyllic childhood. A few days later I was in Arequipa, where he was born, and saw another spacious, late nineteenth-century, two-story home. Arequipa reeks of the colonial order and paternal authority that marked Vargas Llosa’s life so traumatically.
At the end of this trip, I was graciously received by Vargas Llosa’s staffin Barranco, and his primary person, Rosa, kindly gave me access to the writer’s personal library and papers. This was the first of several times I had the opportunity to peruse a library collection organized by preference: his most cherished books—the actual editions of Flaubert, Faulkner, and Hugo—are on the shelves closest to his desk. A biographer’s dream. (When I returned in 2011, the books on Roger Casement were directly above his desk.)
I interviewed his mother, Dora de Llosa, on May 22, 1991, in her Lima apartment. She confirmed what I thought and what Mario confesses in his partial autobiography, El pez en el agua, surrounded by several doting women as a child in Cochabamba, he was a very spoiled child. With Rosa and her staff we went out for meals at Mario’s preferred hideouts (a pizzeria in Miraflores being his favorite) during his recent political campaign for the presidency, and I got a blow-by-blow account of how that campaign was lived on a daily basis. We also went to another of his favorite restaurants with him, a seafood restaurant.
That trip to Bolivia and Peru did provide much of the groundwork for my second book on Vargas Llosa, Vargas Llosa: Historia de un deicidio, which I began writing (in Spanish) in a café in Cochabamba in 1991 and finished years later in Colombia. I left Lima in May 1991 with a sense that Vargas Llosa’s character and integrity had been seriously distorted by the press in Lima during the political campaign, and grateful that he lost the bid to become president.
. . .
When I was on the faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Vargas Llosa accepted our invitation, in April 1991, to lecture at two universities in Colorado and at the University of New Mexico. Since my first hosting of Vargas Llosa in St. Louis years before, I had always recognized this author’s fascination with what he calls “literary fetishism,” his interest in seeing the physical objects associated with the lives of deceased writers. After his presentation in Boulder on Borges, I drove the fifty-one-year-old Vargas Llosa first to Colorado Springs and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for his lecture at the University of New Mexico. I invited a graduate student, Fletcher Fairey, to join us on the trip in order to join in the conversation and take notes along the way.2
Our primary interest before arriving in Albuquerque, however, was to discuss with Vargas Llosa the D. H. Lawrence legacy as we drove from Boulder to the D. H. Lawrence ranch in Taos, New Mexico. During this lengthy conversation, Vargas Llosa shared his ideas about Lawrence’s work and his ranch, and about art and pornography, and provided some background on what was then his most recent novel, Elogio de la madrastra.
Fletcher and I initiated the conversation by asking Vargas Llosa why it was attractive for him to visit a place where D.H. Lawrence had spent a few years of his life, and where his ashes are now to be found. Mario began by confessing that he is indeed “a bit of a literary fetishist.” As mentioned, he is intrigued by the places and objects of writers’ experience. In Lawrence’s fiction personal experience was particularly important, and it was fascinating, according to Vargas Llosa, to see firsthand a part of his life.
We inquired about the circumstances of his introduction to Lawrence’s fiction, and Mario explained that he had first read Lawrence as a university student in Lima in the early 1950s. He read the novels Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Vargas Llosa especially enjoyed Lawrence’s essays on American writers. As far as the language of these texts, reading Lawrence was similar to the method for reading Faulkner and other Anglo-American writers: Vargas Llosa had read them first in Spanish translation in the 1950s, and then he did a second reading in the original English in the 1960s. (As I reflect on this conversation many years later, in the twenty-first century, I realize that it was just as Vargas Llosa was writing his first novels in the 1960s that he was reading his masters in English [Faulkner and others, including Lawrence] and in French [Flaubert and others, including Balzac].)
Why did Vargas Llosa return to Lawrence in the 1960s? It was the result of reading F. R. Leavis’s book on the English writer, a book which Mario found interesting although arbitrary, especially Leavis’s fascination with the moral goals of Lawrence’s work. So he read Leavis’s book along with corresponding Lawrence novels. He had also read a wonderful and influential essay on Lawrence by André Malraux.
Why was Vargas Llosa’s generation so attracted to Lawrence? They read Lawrence, Mario explained to us during this trip to New Mexico, because he was a rebel. Among Latin American writers of his generation, there was a mystique about Lawrence because of the censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Vargas Llosa and his generation read Henry Miller for the same reason.
Fletcher and I then noted the lack of cultural sensitivity in The Plumed Serpent, and, in response, Vargas Llosa deemed it to be Lawrence’s worst novel. He considered it a failure because it reveals Lawrence’s total incapacity to understand Mexico. The writing in The Plumed Serpent, according to the Peruvian writer, is kitsch, and he repeated his previous point: Lawrence didn’t understand anything about Mexico. Instead, he fabricated a story about this different world. Nevertheless, one can compare this novel, according to Mario, with other great novels, such as Women in Love and Sons and Lovers, and some of Lawrence’s short stories because it shows a fascination with esoteric worlds.
If Vargas Llosa had read Faulkner with pen in hand, we observed, this would not seem to be the case with Lawrence. Mario agreed, affirming that Lawrence was not a model for his writing; he never read Lawrence with pen in hand, for Lawrence’s narrative technique was conventional and he was not very innovative, although his language was quite interesting.
We speculated as to whether or not Vargas Llosa saw any points of contact between Faulkner and Lawrence, and the Peruvian writer did. Lawrence was not unlike Faulkner in his reaction against intellectualism. Both writers, according to Vargas Llosa, felt that intellectualism killed life and pleasure, that it took away from the richness of living. They both stressed the idea that theory and intellectualism suppressed spontaneity, which is the life-giving force.
We then asked Vargas Llosa to talk about the role of sexuality in Lawrence’s work and fiction in general. Mario maintained that sexual experience is a central part of life and for an artist to ignore that is inappropriate. Especially the novel, as total representation, should not ignore the sexual, the sensual, and the erotic. It is only if these elements completely dominate a work that their use becomes mechanical and something resembling pornography. As far as the line between the sensual/erotic work and pornography, Vargas Llosa considers it a fine one, and a matter of form. While the sexual in Lawrence is prudent and orthodox, as opposed to the baroque and torturous sex in Faulkner, it is often hyperbolic. This caused problems. But for Vargas Llosa it was not gratuitous sex: it was expressed very beautifully, with a stylistic excellence not found in pornography.
As we talked about the sensual and the erotic in Lawrence’s fiction, this led us to the subject of the erotic in Elogio de la madrastra. We asked the author how he had conceived this work. Mario explained that the original idea was to create a book—a joint project—with Fernando de Szyszlo: Mario was going to write the text and Szyszlo was going to create the illustrations. They were never able to coordinate their ideas on the book. Nevertheless, the concept of relating paintings and fiction continued to intrigue him. That is why the language in Elogio de la madrastra is so visual and descriptive. For the first time, Vargas Llosa did what he called langage précieux: the language in this novel is not transparent; rather, it is a presence by itself.
. . .
In the spring of 1986 (at the age of fifty), Vargas Llosa visited Washington University in St. Louis for a month. That institution, in which I was a recently tenured associate professor of Spanish at the time in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, had established the Lewin Distinguished Visiting Professorship, allowing them to invite once a year—to stay for a month—a visiting writer in residence. Under the auspices of this program, we had invited Carlos Fuentes in 1984, and he had delivered four sterling public lectures. These public appearances were the one requirement of the visiting professorship, and Fuentes’s stunning performances paved the way for future invitations for Latin American writers. At the time Vargas Llosa accepted our invitation, he was a world-class novelist and a healthy jogger who had not yet emerged as a candidate for the presidency of Peru. His political and economic positions had recently become more aligned with nineteenth-century liberalism (or what his critics would call “conservative”), based on the writings of authors such as Hayek, whom he had recently read at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.
When Vargas Llosa arrived on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis he had recently published Historia de Mayta. One setting awaiting Vargas Llosa there was a long-standing faculty seminar in the humanities, which had been established and directed by the writer and philosopher William H. Gass, an enthusiastic reader of Latin American fiction. This faculty-only seminar, with its weekly readings and discussions over wine and cheese, had covered such wide-ranging topics as Plato and Adorno. The topic for Gass’s faculty seminar for that spring semester was Latin American fiction, partially because Vargas Llosa was visiting and partially because I, as a regular participant, had proposed that topic.
Vargas Llosa seemed truly interested in our faculty seminar when we invited him to join us in a session. (Years later, in fact, Vargas Llosa remembered the seminar, inquired if it had continued, and remarked more than once that he had enjoyed this activity very much; of the writers of the Boom, Vargas Llosa is the most comfortable in a strictly academic setting.) A group of fifteen of us joined with Vargas Llosa for a dialogue on Wednesday, April 9, 1986.3
I began the discussion by asking Vargas Llosa to reflect a little on the 1960s Boom some two decades after this international phenomenon was at its zenith. I pointed out that obviously his writing of the 1980s was quite different from his writing of the 1960s, and asked him how he now viewed La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral. The main difference he could see from the early novels was his attitude about form, he explained.4 Vargas Llosa was so enthralled with form that it was very visible in those works. As was the case for many Latin American writers of the 1960s, for him form was almost like a theme or a character in a novel. Since then, Vargas Llosa claimed, things had changed. Now, in the mid-1980s, he was interested in being less explicit about form in itself. He thought that many Latin American writers, including himself, now hid structure and technique in the story. In the case of Fuentes (whom Vargas Llosa mentioned specifically by name), this is evident when you compare his early writing to his recent fiction. Perhaps this was not the case for García Márquez, Vargas Llosa speculated, although it had been for Fuentes, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa himself.
I then asked Vargas Llosa if he had imagined that he would ever again write a novel such as La casa verde, and his first response was that he did not think so. But he did not completely discard the idea, because he has remained interested in the technical possibilities of telling a story. He reiterated that now, unlike before, he simply attempts to be more invisible than when he wrote his first novels. (Interestingly, some two decades after this conversation, the author did return to some of the strategies and settings of La casa verde—most directly in El sueño del celta.)
At this point in the conversation, Gass entered the dialogue, suggesting that what Vargas Llosa was talking about was what some North American writers call the difference between hard-bodied and soft-bodied books. In the insect world, the caterpillar has a soft body, while the beetle has all the bones on the outside, and the rest of it is inside. Gass thus speculated that what Vargas Llosa was evoking was a work in which the bones are hidden inside instead of outside. Furthermore, Gass had not noticed any such change with Cortázar. He seemed to be even more bony at the end.
Vargas Llosa was not sure about Gass’s speculations and assertions, reminding him that the last books that Cortázar wrote—the short stories—were not as experimental as the previous works. The Peruvian novelist did agree with Gass in the sense that Cortázar was always trying to renew himself, including on a formal level. His last book, Vargas Llosa stated, was an experiment.
Gass pursued further the matter of “renewal” by asking Vargas Llosa if he was suggesting that this process of renewal which used to be formal had shifted to another type of fiction. Vargas Llosa responded that when he wrote his first novels, he wanted very much to be modern. With this response, Vargas Llosa was reiterating what Octavio Paz had set forth in the late 1960s: the insane project of the Latin American writer, since the late 1960s, was a desire to be modern.
Gass then moved the discussion to politics and writing, asking Vargas Llosa if he was prepared to recommend his political views in the area of the arts. Vargas Llosa responded that he was not prepared at all for this recommendation; there is a different kind of integrity when you write fiction or poetry than when you become a politician, a political thinker, or a journalist. Writing fiction, according to the Peruvian writer, depends entirely on one’s capacity to put a whole personality in what one is doing and to obey one’s most intimate drives.
Michel Rybalka continued this line of thought, asking if these intimate drives perhaps relate to those private demons about which Vargas Llosa had written. Now (in the mid-1980s), Vargas Llosa explained, he would rather use the word “obsessions” or something like that, for that was his experience as a writer. He went on to explain how, after all of his rational planning of these books, these irrational obsessions eventually take over and become the most important factor in his fiction. What Vargas Llosa originally identified as “demons” (“demonios”) and later called his “obsessions” can be understood, in retrospect, as his traumas, many of which inevitably go back to his childhood experience with his father.
It is also noteworthy that by this 1986 conversation in St. Louis, before his political campaign in Peru, he was already very critical of Latin American intellectuals. Later in the interview, when we talked about the role of intellectuals in the Canudos debacle in Brazil, I asked Vargas Llosa if he thought intellectuals were a problem now. “Yes, very much so,” he responded, “I think that a very important reason why it is so difficult in Latin America to defend the idea of democracy is because the intellectuals, and particularly the writers, have created so much prejudice and resistance against it.”5
In an article offering glimpses of free-marketers in Vargas Llosa’s novels, Jean O’Bryan-Knight takes note of exactly when Vargas Llosa’s political transformation took place: in 1980, as we saw, while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, the novelist read with interest the writings of Friedrich von Hayek, one of the intellectual pioneers of free-market liberalism and critic of socialism’s planned economies.6 O’Bryan-Knight also points out that Vargas Llosa often blends free-marketers and black-marketers. For example, he conflates the two in “La revolución silenciosa,” an introduction to Hernando de Soto’s book El otro sendero. In this essay, Vargas Llosa praises the informal or underground economy as a form of “popular capitalism.” Informal markets, Vargas Llosa argues in various essays of the 1980s and 1990s, should not be viewed as a form of delinquency that impedes economic development, but as evidence of workers’ creativity and resiliency that actually favors economic development.
As Vargas Llosa stated in his 1986 interview in St. Louis, what he and his generation desired, above all, was to be modern. This insistence on modernity, which was often articulated by Fuentes, García Márquez, and a host of other writers from the 1950s forward, is a constant in Vargas Llosa’s thinking and writing during his entire career. In political terms, different variants of Marxism and socialism were viewed by Latin American writers in the 1950s and 1960s as ways of rejecting traditional modes of capitalism and, consequently, were more modern. In the 1980s, on the other hand, Vargas Llosa’s embracing of Hayek was part of this lifelong search, I believe, for the modern. One of the paradoxes of Vargas Llosa’s political persona is that his desire to be modern has been viewed in many circles as a “conservative” move when, in some ways, he continues to be “modern” and progressive in many spheres of his literary, intellectual, and political activity.
It does indeed seem to be the case that Vargas Llosa’s reading of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom marked the beginning of changes in the Peruvian writer’s thinking. Apparently, many readers of Hayek’s book have been persuaded of the virtues of classical liberalism.7 Hayek’s book is an unusual combination of treatise in classical economics, defending the market against government intervention as the most efficient mechanism for setting prices, while marrying this thesis with an argument in political theory that this is also the best way to preserve individual liberty. Somewhat as Marx used economics to argue for a classless society, Hayek used economics to make a realistic case for liberty. In this respect, Vargas Llosa’s eventual shift from one to the other is not as strange as it might seem. It helps explain why “liberty” became the mantra in Vargas Llosa’s later campaign for the presidency, as well as in his political writings of the twenty-first century.
Taking into account Vargas Llosa’s lifelong dedication to the proposition of being modern, as well as certain similarities in the thinking of Marx and Hayek, Vargas Llosa’s political changes since 1980 are understandable. In his public persona as the Latin American public intellectual, some of his statements and acts have suggested alliances with conservative forces. On the other hand, his portrayal of fictional characters—probably more an unconscious projection of his deep-seated Oedipal feelings than a conscious act—reveals a writer consistently in opposition to all forms of authoritarian rule. At the deepest levels of his writing, then, Vargas Llosa has written consistently against the traditional forces of political conservatism.
. . .
My conversation with Vargas Llosa in Oxford, Mississippi, and along the banks of the Mississippi River on I-35 was our most substantive interchange of the encounters over the years. It grew out of the writer’s month-long stay in St. Louis at Washington University. Our plan, during his visit to St. Louis, was to meet in Memphis, Tennessee, at the historic Peabody Hotel (which Vargas Llosa knew well from his readings of Faulkner).
I spent several weeks preparing this interview. Mario and Patricia had gone to New Orleans in response to a lecture invitation, and on their return trip, my wife and I met them in Memphis. We began our homage to Faulkner with brunch at the Peabody Hotel; from there, we drove to Oxford. As we entered the town, Vargas Llosa was struck by how much Faulkner’s legacy was being ignored and purposely obscured in his hometown. Indeed, there were no visible references to the author. Using our written guide to Oxford, we found Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home converted into a museum, with only moderate difficulty. After signing the guestbook at the entrance, Mario was approached by two tourists from the Netherlands; they explained that they were in the Faulkner home precisely because they had read Vargas Llosa’s books with great interest and later came across a newspaper interview in which the Peruvian writer had spoken so highly of Faulkner.
After touring the Faulkner museum, we proceeded to the nearby University of Mississippi to visit the Faulkner collection. A Faulkner specialist, Professor Frederick Karl of New York University in residence at the University of Mississippi, served as our tour guide through the collection and fielded Mario’s questions. For the third part of our trip to Oxford, we made a visit to the Faulkner tomb. Vargas Llosa insisted on buying some flowers, a vase of red geraniums, which he left solemnly at the gravesite. Having dedicated several hours to our homage to Faulkner, we began our drive back to St. Louis and our previously planned conversation on Faulkner. We drove as far as southern Missouri, to the town of St. Genevieve; quite fatigued by the end of the car trip, we slept overnight at a small bed-and-breakfast, Mississippi River–style hotel, before proceeding to St. Louis the next morning.
I began our conversation that afternoon by asking Mario what he considered the best moment of the prior day. Vargas Llosa began by explaining that he was very moved at the cemetery, by the great austerity of the grave. He was intrigued by the lack of indication that a great man was buried in this modest setting. In addition, he found the Oxford area to be quite beautiful. Mario reflected on the fact that the attractive trees and homes probably had not changed much since Faulkner’s time, and that he had seen a lot of it as it was in Faulkner’s lifetime. He reiterated what we had established years before: he is very fetishistic in his relationship with the writers he admires. For him, it’s a moving experience to see a writer’s books, his manuscripts, and the objects of his daily life. Vargas Llosa was also very impressed by the fact that in Oxford—particularly the courthouse and the homes—one can see how close to reality the fiction was; this is rarely the case. For Mario, then, this trip to Oxford, Mississippi, was a wonderful experience. He found it difficult to explain, as we rode beside the Mississippi River along I-35, but for him another touching moment was when the Dutch couple said, “We are here because we have read you. We have read your novels. We decided to start reading Faulkner after reading your commentary on him in a newspaper.”8
I asked if what he had heard and seen in the past few hours had changed his sense of Faulkner, and he answered that he thought it might be too soon to say. Perhaps, he reflected, the new revelation was what Frederick Karl had explained to us about Faulkner’s drinking. Vargas Llosa knew that Faulkner was a heavy drinker, but he never realized that he drank so much. Now, Mario claimed, his admiration for Faulkner was even greater: if one drinks so much, how is it possible to create such a vast and complex world? How is it possible for a mind totally saturated with alcohol to handle such detail and create such coherence? On the other hand, the image Karl provided—of Faulkner drinking alone—was what Vargas Llosa considered tragic.
Eventually, our conversation moved from Faulkner the man to his books. I asked Mario if he remembered his first reading of Faulkner and if it was as dramatic as the well-known story of his first reading of Madame Bovary. He remembered it well. It was in 1953, his first year at the University of San Marcos in Lima. The first book was Absalom, Absalom! That year, he read the short stories from These Thirteen too. Back then, he was reading Faulkner in Spanish and French translations. The French translations by Maurice Coindreau were, according to Vargas Llosa, marvelous. He was a great translator. Vargas Llosa had read his excellent translation of Sanctuary with its preface by André Malraux. He said that he believed that he discovered only then the importance of form for literature. Faulkner showed him that a given organization of time and point of view was absolutely essential, determining whether the text is subtle and ambiguous or rough and superficial. He discovered how form itself could be a character or theme in a novel. What Vargas Llosa remembered very well—and considered it important in understanding his relationship with Faulkner—was that the first writer whom he read with a pen in hand and paper at the side of the book was William Faulkner.
When questioned about further details related to having a pen in hand when reading Faulkner, he clarified that he was looking for a rationale, a structure. At the time (early to mid-1950s), he was already writing a bit, and reading Faulkner opened his eyes to formal invention. Vargas Llosa was very excited about this idea. Faulkner also gave him the firm conviction that form should always be attached to a story; the story cannot be a goal, an end in itself. According to the Peruvian writer, fiction should always include the human experience. As one can see, Vargas Llosa claimed, he has always been very loyal to Faulkner’s idea of the novel.
Despite this lifetime loyalty, Vargas Llosa never read Faulkner as obsessively as had been the case with Madame Bovary, primarily, perhaps, because at the beginning he could not read Faulkner in English. When Mario started reading Faulkner in English it was in the early 1960s, and with the French translation at his side. But Faulkner is one writer whom he has never stopped reading. He has read Light in August at least a half-dozen times. According to Vargas Llosa, that superb passage with High-tower preaching and mixing the Bible in his sermon and the castration of Joe Christmas is extraordinarily well done. As has been well established in this book, Vargas Llosa confirmed in this conversation that the writers he has read and reread the most are Faulkner and Flaubert.
I then evoked a Faulkner issue oft-discussed among Latin American writers: the similarities between Latin American society and Faulkner’s South. Vargas Llosa agreed, pointing out that the societies are very similar because in each there are two basic cultures: that of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. He pointed out that the coexistence of these two societies is difficult. Also, the presence of the past is something very important in Latin America, as well as in Faulkner’s South. It’s a phenomenon, Vargas Llosa observed, which one does not have in the eastern portion of the United States. Faulkner’s is a traditional society, exactly like Peruvian and Colombian society. The class structure in Faulkner is totally Latin American. And Faulkner invented a technical tool to give this world life. This invention was very important for those Latin American writers, according to Vargas Llosa, who were searching for an instrument to do the same. One needs a kind of naïveté to dare to attempt to become a twentieth-century Balzac. This was very important for many Latin American writers, Vargas Llosa affirmed.
When we moved this discussion to which of Faulkner’s novels was the most important, Vargas Llosa said that Light in August is probably the book that he prefers. But he thought that the whole of Faulkner’s work is better than any book taken separately. For example, a weak novel, such as Mosquitoes, becomes more interesting when seen in the context of his total work. In Mosquitoes the young Faulkner was trying to be an intellectual rather than a creator, to write with his ideas rather than by instinct. He failed, and Mario thinks that this failure was instructive for him: he learned that he had to return to his own land. Perhaps Oxford was a kind of prison for Faulkner—Vargas Llosa speculated—but staying in Oxford was the price he paid for writing masterpieces. This whole thing was very interesting for Vargas Llosa.
Because he felt similarly?, I asked Vargas Llosa. In some ways, he responded, he did feel similarly. Sometimes, he hated Peru, but he knew that even though he hated it, he needed that country. He felt that when he was in Europe in the 1960s. He knew that if he did not return to Peru, he would be finished. Unlike some other writers—such as Cortázar—Vargas Llosa is stimulated by his home country, even with all its problems.
As the long conversation extended into the afternoon along I-35, I realized we had not talked at all about the important novel The Sound and the Fury. Vargas Llosa responded that it was a novel that he loved very much, even though he did not consider it a masterpiece. Here, according to Vargas Llosa, the equilibrium between form and content is broken. From time to time form predominates over what is told. In The Sound and the Fury, unlike Light in August, Faulkner approaches the mistakes of Joyce, who was defeated by indulgence in form. When I asked him if he considered As I Lay Dying more successful, he agreed wholeheartedly. For Vargas Llosa, As I Lay Dying was definitely more successful than The Sound and the Fury: here, form is consistent with the story.
. . .
I take note of Vargas Llosa’s claim in our 1986 conversation that he had never read Faulkner as obsessively as Madame Bovary. The reason for this, according to the writer, is that at the beginning (in the early 1950s) he could not read Faulkner in English. I find it acceptable that the matter of reading in translation was a factor. Nevertheless, the protagonist in Madame Bovary relates deeply to Vargas Llosa’s childhood traumas, the traumatic experiences of the authority of the patriarchal order. For Vargas Llosa, Madame Bovary was a book much closer to his own experience that became his lifetime “demons” and “obsessions”—his traumas.
Flaubert and Faulkner have in common one of Vargas Llosa’s lifetime interests in literature: probing forbidden subjects. During the period when Vargas Llosa was most intensely engaged in rereading Flaubert and Faulkner, in the 1960s, prominent French intellectuals whom Vargas Llosa admired, such as Sartre, were writing about these two writers.
. . .
The twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa still carries much of his political and economic readings of the early 1980s. In his bi-weekly columns in the Spanish newspaper El País (which is widely distributed throughout the Hispanic world), in the first decade of the twenty-first century, he frequently criticizes numerous forms of government intervention. Thus the libertarian twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa writes against state pensions, labor unions, and the European welfare state, and writes in favor of “labor flexibility” (absence of job security). In his October 18, 2004, article “Toque de Piedra” in El País, he portrays South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore as models of modernization and the ability to integrate themselves into the world economy. Again, the consistency of Vargas Llosa’s thought—consistency that dates back to his first essays in the late 1950s—is his embracing of modernity.
. . .
In 1983 I extended the first invitation in my academic career to Mario Vargas Llosa to give a lecture on the campus where I was employed. This first invitation, which I sent to him in a handwritten letter, was an offer for him to practice some of his famous “literary fetishism”: I invited him to lecture on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis and then also to visit Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. He delivered a campus-wide lecture in English—far more fluent than the first lectures I had seen him deliver on the campus of Washington State University in 1968. He also engaged in a dialogue in Spanish that same day in the Spanish section of our Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. The next day, he spoke in French in a round-table discussion with my colleagues in French, and the following day the English professor Wayne Fields and I took him to Hannibal. The two days on campus were a huge success, leaving students and faculty both impressed and energized.
When we went to Twain’s home in Hannibal, Vargas Llosa was fascinated in seeing the objects that had been part of the daily life of Mark Twain. During the return trip to St. Louis, he asked Professor Fields, a specialist in American literature, what I would call a classic question of Vargas-Llosa-the-novelist: “What do we know about Twain’s private life? Did he have any lovers?”
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Unlike Fuentes, who constructs novels around ideas or concepts, and García Márquez, who fabricates novels from a single image, Vargas Llosa organizes novels around a structure.9 In many ways, consequently, reading Fuentes is an intellectual experience related to history, reading García Márquez is a visual experience related to the pleasure of seeing a plot unfold, and reading Vargas Llosa is the experience of discovering a pattern unfold. Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate novels—La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, and El sueño del celta—are elaborate expansions of complex structural schemes, always with a host of continually transforming characters. Once his organizational plan for his novels is conceived, the early novels follow a variation of the original pattern; in the later novels, Vargas Llosa tends to resist the early pattern. In a process that seems to be irrational for both the writer and the reader, enough of Vargas Llosa’s “demons” (i.e., traumas) enter to create novels that are compelling and, ultimately, transgressive.
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José Miguel Oviedo—an academic specializing in Vargas Llosa’s work and Latin American literature—organized a conference at the University of Indiana in 1980, inviting three celebrity writers of the Hispanic world as the plenary speakers: Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo, and Mario Vargas Llosa. By 1980, as a recent PhD in Latin American literature, I had published my first two articles on Vargas Llosa, apparently the credentials that resulted in Oviedo inviting me to participate in the conference with a paper presentation. I vaguely remember presenting a brief paper on Vargas Llosa’s recent novel La tía Julia y el escribidor. More importantly, this conference was my first opportunity to meet Vargas Llosa personally.
The forty-eight-year-old Vargas Llosa was an impressive, eye-catching physical presence when he entered the stage for his plenary lecture. After the lecture, I introduced myself as the person with whom he had agreed by letter to an interview. He was friendly and suggested I come to his room at mid-morning the next day. In the interview, I asked him questions about morality and his fiction; this was the topic which I then believed to be central to my first book on Vargas Llosa. Seven years later, when my first book on him (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1987) did appear in print, it was not actually on this subject. Nevertheless, the interview went well: he was a courteous and attentive listener and responded thoughtfully to my questions.
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The twenty-first century is one of the most interesting and compelling periods of Vargas Llosa’s six-decade career as a writer. The five novels of this period—El sueño del celta, Travesuras de la niña mala, El paraíso en la otra esquina, La fiesta del Chivo, and Lituma en los Andes—are comparable in quantity and quality to the work of Vargas Llosa that is generally considered his major work of the 1960s Boom: La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, and Conversación en La Catedral.
Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century work also offers interesting comparisons with the novels of the new generation of Latin American writers who began publishing in the early 1990s. Among the most prominent of these was the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), who enjoyed the most international recognition in the twenty-first century after the publication of his monumental novel 2666 (2004, 2666 appeared in English translation in 2008); Vargas Llosa would consider it a “total novel.” Among the most accomplished of this generation to publish novels in the twenty-first century, I would include the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza, the Argentine Rodrigo Fresán, and the Mexican David Toscana. Works such as Fresán’s Mantra (2000), along with 2666, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta, are comparable to the best moments of the total novels of the 1960s Boom. The heir to Vargas Llosa’s novelistic tradition? Toscana.
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The first time I saw Mario Vargas Llosa (although I did not meet him) was on the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, in the fall of 1968. I saw him deliver three public lectures that fall in the auditorium of the music building on the top of that campus’s hill. Vargas Llosa’s translator into German of his early novels, Professor Wolfgang A. Luchting, had invited the young thirty-two-year-old Peruvian writer to the Washington State campus as artist-in-residence, where he offered a graduate seminar, gave three public lectures, and worked on the manuscript for Conversación en La Catedral in the basement of a home that he and Patricia rented from an English professor on a sabbatical leave of absence.
This small and isolated college town, located in wheat fields near the Idaho border, was the opposite of the cosmopolitan settings in Vargas Llosa’s life since he left Piura as an adolescent. Pullman did not even have a movie theater; Mario and Patricia had to drive to the nearby town of Colfax on Sunday afternoons to see movies—commercial Hollywood movies. From Paris to Pullman, undoubtedly, was quite a cultural leap. Nevertheless, it was a productive semester for the writer, a place where he advanced the writing of his novel Conversación en La Catedral into its final stages and taught some of his ideas on García Márquez in a graduate course—making it clear to the students that for him the true masters were Flaubert and Faulkner—ideas that soon thereafter appeared in the book-length study of the Colombian writer under the title García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (untranslated, García Márquez: history of a deicide). Other than his time working on these projects in the basement of his rented home, life in Pullman was not particularly attractive. During an unsuccessful attempt to cook some eggs in this rented home, unfamiliar with cooking on the gas stove, Mario managed to spill burning grease on the kitchen floor, destroying it.
The first time I saw Vargas Llosa in person was while waiting outside the lobby of the music building auditorium at Washington State University. Escorted by the faculty in Spanish—professors Robert Knox, Billy Weaver, Angelo Cantera, and Luchting—an elegantly dressed future Nobel laureate entered the lobby followed by his small academic entourage, all speaking in Spanish. Again, I did not actually meet Vargas Llosa that fall; I observed his lectures from a distance. They were not refined performances, primarily because in 1968, before living in London, his English was heavily accented. His lectures, however, were informative, engaging, and even entertaining. I still remember one of them as the essay he published soon thereafter in Spanish about how he wrote the novel La casa verde. In the fall semester of 1968, many of us on that campus in Pullman became avid readers of Vargas Llosa.
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The most permanent image of Vargas Llosa for me is one of a man with a pen in hand. His daily writing by hand is his therapy, as he mentioned briefly at breakfast in St. Louis in 1983. Writing by hand is his way of “living his neuroses,” as he affirmed in our interview in Madrid, and is the proper way to deal with the Oedipus complex and related traumas. Reading Faulkner with pen in hand was the beginning of a writing career as a major modernist of the West. Reading Flaubert while taking notes was the key to the creation of a very particular kind of modernism that has become trademark Vargas Llosa.