PROFILE
The aesthetics of politics
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Mario Vargas Llosa's aesthetic quest is one with his political concern, says SHELLEY WALIA, profiling the career of the writer who once wanted to be the President of Peru.
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IN a sincere quest for authenticity in artistic portrayal of Latin American mores, nature, myth, and society, Mario Vargas Llosa stands as one of the most important contemporary novelists. European and nativist tendencies jostle with each other in the cosmopolitan climate that he inhabits. A Peruvian social activist, novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, literary critic, he has emerged as a pioneer theoriser of comparative literature, and has been recently appointed as the Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford.
Oxford lectures
I had the pleasure of attending his five lectures on Les Miserables, which were given at the Said Business School. Llosa argued that "it may seem strange to some that Hugo tends to glorify the horrors that take place in insurrection, an idea that Hugo himself battled with and confronted in his novel, Quatre-Vingt Treize(Ninety-Three), but symbolically, it all leads up to the grand idea of revolution, and ultimately, change. The idea of salvation from below is enumerated several times in the book, namely in Valjean's sanctuary in the convent and his descent into the sewers with Marius."
In A Fish in the Water, the memoir that Vargas Llosa published in 1993, he recollected the advice with which Paz tried to dissuade him from entering politics: "incompatibility with intellectual work, loss of independence, being manipulated by professional politicians, and, in the long run, frustration and the feeling of years of one's life wasted." Nevertheless, "the decadence, the impoverishment, the terrorism, and the multiple crises of Peruvian society", as Vargas Llosa explained it, drew him to the challenge of seeking "the most dangerous job in the world". Llosa's bid for the presidential election many years ago made anonymity impossible.
Anonymity in exile
But now in Oxford, he could walk the streets, visit libraries and concerts without being recognised. Left to his pursuits in his Oxford college flat, he almost becomes faceless, passing his time away from his country where he once enjoyed a celebrity eminence. Now living in exile from the nation that disclaimed him and in retirement from the public life he grew to despise, Llosa is as obsessed with his native land as Rushdie, who physically abandoned India but wrote about nothing else. It is the calm life of the writer as a contrast to the political life that he once lead in Lima, surrounded by the security police and the mob that for some time took him away from the cultured and quite cosmopolitanism that he so much exudes. But he has not lost touch with the wilderness and the mystery, the past and the future of his land. The ascending bourgeoisie and the constant struggle between the civilised and the barbaric marks the overall character of his writings and his potential role in the development of national literature. Although Vargas Llosa has followed the tradition of social protest of Peruvian fiction, exposing political corruption, racial prejudices and violence, he has underlined that a writer should never preach or compromise artistic aims for ideological propaganda.
In Oxford or in his tastefully decorated flat in Knightsbridge surrounded by posters from his stage production and wall hangings of contemporary Spanish and Columbian art, he remains unflustered by any engagement, whether it is a lecture he is to deliver in another hour or fly off to Chile on a lecture tour. He speaks English fluently but with a heavy accent, full of enthusiasm for what is at hand, may it be a new play that he has written for the stage or is setting out to write a critical essay. This gusto is visible when he looks back with alarm at the likelihood of being elected as the President in 1990. He is of the view that his life as a novelist and a playwright would have been ruined as both politics and writing "are activities that demand total dedication and have a very different attitude towards many things. As a politician, you don't really have the independence, the isolation that is indispensable for a writer; I knew that would mean at least a temporary sacrifice."
In his lectures at Oxford he showed the oratory of a politician. The forceful style of his spoken word made his lectures rather out of the ordinary. The enthusiasm behind his love of drama and poetry indicated the renewed vigour with which he has recaptured his almost lost profession. It is apparent, therefore, that his defeat in the elections was a blessing. It has enabled him to concentrate on writing plays, short stories as well as take up teaching positions around the world: at Harvard and Princeton he has taught Latin American Literature. And now at Oxford he has been lecturing on Les Miserables. He has no intention of returning to Lima, though his aged mother has gone back after spending 30 years in Los Angeles. He jokingly remarks that he might be "lynched if I return to Peru". Taking advantage of the good relations between Spain and Peru in the early 1990s, he has obtained Spanish citizenship.
He was raised in a country where the writer occupied himself with other things rather than full time writing. As he recalls, writing was left for the weekends. Away from the writing of speeches, he can now concentrate only on writing, and more so on drama: "I very rapidly discovered, you know, that I was not a politician... I really had not the aptitude, which was something I discovered during the campaign. You can't go into politics for moral reasons; you have to have the appetite too. And maybe my secret reason for entering politics was to live a kind of novel-adventure in a very unconscious way."
Writing and politics
Emphasising the close link between writing and politics, especially in Latin America, he elaborates on it: "The basic problems are not solved yet in our countries. They are not like advanced Western societies where the basic model is more or less agreed upon by everybody, and writers don't feel pushed to intervene. But in countries where nothing is settled, where basic decisions are still uncertain, I think that pushes writers to be much more engaged in political matters — as they were in Europe in the 19th Century." He has written in his autobiography, A Fish Out of Water, how other Latin American nations have adopted the free market economy, except Peru, which continues to live in abject poverty. Haiti, Cuba and Peru are three military dictatorships left in Latin America, whereas other nations are striving for democratic principles and a vision that has pulled their people out of misery and exploitation: "There is now real popular support for the democratic system, and also rejection of the Marxist revolution — collectivism and socialism — that we have been criticising for at least 20 years. The guerrilla model is finished in Latin America; the mainstream has accepted the democratic option."
Central to a tradition
Like Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Asturias, Llosa's aesthetic quest is one with his political concern, though he has time and again been accused that his writings are not truthfully devoted to the Latin American cause of political and cultural emancipation. In their theoretical writings, the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos and Llosa take up a position of defence for the autonomy of literature, while recognising the significance of its function within the socio-political sphere. These writers have played a central role in an attempt to fashion a Latin American literary tradition. The creative output and the theoretical and critical motivation has always had close links with the continuing cultural growth, a deep-seated critical self-awareness of its history and native reality being the source of the efforts towards political, economic and cultural revolution.
Llosa's keen and hilarious satire on Latin American backwardness and machismo, with a more imaginative exploration of the myth and legend of Peru, sets him somewhat apart form his other fellow writers. The Time of the Heroes remains his finest book, a savage satire on life at a Peruvian military academy. The Green House, also good, is more experimental. And Conversation in the Cathedral remains one of the most frightening and impressive portraits of political evil, a monumentally engrossing novel. Vargas Llosa's doctoral dissertation about García Márquez (1971) was followed by several books on literary criticism, among them La Orgía Perpetua (1975) about Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary. With Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and García Márquez, Vargas Llosa is among the most notable writers, whose endeavour has been to invigorate the Latin American novel.
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