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Noble Writer
We know that we are not big on reading in Guyana. It’s a pity. The human predicament is not unique to any one individual – it just wouldn’t be “human” if it were. It cannot but help to better apprehend our own circumstances when it is filtered through the sensibilities of a great writer.
The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature is just one such artiste and his subject matter, which focuses on life in the Third World – specifically the Latin American enclave – has to resonate with any Guyanese that picks up his books.
Mario Vargas Llosa is from Peru and as a writer he makes no apologies for delving into politics: “It’s very difficult for a Latin American writer to avoid politics,” he said when he received the news of his Nobel in New York. “Literature is an expression of life, and you cannot eradicate politics from life even if you think that politics is in many ways a disgusting, dirty activity. It’s a fact of our life.” Starting out as an idealistic leftist as a young man, he embraced the Cuban Revolution and Castro as so many progressives at the time. But in 1971, when Castro imprisoned the poet Heberto Padilla, Llosa made a clean break and moved, in the eyes of many, to the “right”.
He becomes an outspoken advocate of liberal democracy as the system most conducive to protecting individual freedom and curbing absolutist power.
But as he pointed out on Thursday, “I have always been very critical of all kinds of dictatorships, dictatorship from the left, dictatorship from the right. I have criticised the Cuban dictatorship as I criticised the Chilean dictatorship in times of [Augusto] Pinochet.”
He was definitely not an armchair ideologue. In 1990, he jumped into the Peruvian presidential race and campaigned against both the brutal Maoist guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and right-wing candidate Alberto Fujimori. He received the largest number of votes in the first round but lost to Fujimori, whose repressive regime in later years was a frequent target of the writer’s passionate rhetorical opposition.
He later said of his campaign: “Countries today can choose to be prosperous. The most harmful myth of our time, now deeply embedded in the consciousness of the Third World, is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries which have arranged things to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.” In bestowing its award, the Swedish Academy commended Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
The 74-year-old Llosa is extremely sceptical of utopian thinking, populist cults of personality and the notion that flawed human beings are capable of building an earthly paradise. “The idea of a perfect society lies behind monsters like the Taliban,” he once said in an interview. “When you want Paradise you produce first extraordinary idealism. But at some time you produce hell.”
Vargas Llosa’s political views can be summed up by the pre-eminence of freedom — the idea that everyone, everywhere, must live unburdened by tyranny, be it political, economic, or cultural.
But we should not imagine that Vargas Llosa’s writings were only political: they also delved very deeply into that other constant of the human condition – love. This more whimsical and tender side of Vargas Llosa’s writing surfaces in novels such as “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.”
Inspired by the author’s youthful real-life romance with an older woman, it reads like a soap opera written by a wise philosopher scrutinizing his past illusions. He’s also fascinated with the way in which our subjectivities alter our apprehensions of the world around us but unlike the dry philosophers he explored the theme in a detective novel: Who Killed Palomino Molero?
Vargas Llosa is not the one subject hedgehog like his contemporary Gabriel Garcia Marquez but that fox who knows of many things and has produced criticism, journalism and plays as well as fiction. We hope that some Guyanese will be moved to read him.
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