Mario Vargas Llosa: an intellectual journey.

• Author: Cole, Julio H.
• Position: Report

If one reads all his work, beginning with his first novels, one can see that Vargas Llosa has always preferred brilliant realists and mocking moderates to utopians and fanatics.

--Orhan Pamuk, "Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature"

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the world's greatest living writers, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010, the latest in a long series of awards and prizes honoring a distinguished and prolific literary career.

In the Spanish-speaking world, however, he is more than just a great novelist. He is a public intellectual in the full sense of that expression, and his regularly aired opinions on political events, literature, culture, and the arts are a fixture of the intellectual life of this part of the world. His writing is always intelligent and urbane. Moreover, it is informed by a definite point of view, which is that of a classical liberal. Indeed, he is undoubtedly the most prominent expositor of this point of view writing in the Spanish language today. (1)

The Young Writer as a Man of the Left

It was not always so. Indeed, given his current prominence as a spokesman for classical liberalism, it is easily forgotten that as a young man Vargas Llosa was a typical "man of the left." Like most intellectuals coming of age in the 1950s and early 1960s, he was closely identified with left-wing causes, and he greatly admired the Cuban Revolution. This ideological stance was in part owing to the prevailing climate of opinion among intellectuals at the time, especially in France, where he spent his formative years as a struggling young writer. Two other factors were a personality that has always exhibited a strong antiauthoritarian streak and the association of authoritarianism in Latin America with right-wing regimes.

He eventually became convinced, however, that armed revolution was not a real option for improving social conditions in Latin America and that gradual reform within a functioning democratic polity was the only way to achieve social justice. (2) He consequently became increasingly interested in the preconditions for a well-functioning democratic society.

This interest was not merely intellectual or academic. During the 1980s, he became personally involved in political activism, to the point of running for the presidency of Peru during the 1990 elections. He was defeated by Alberto Fujimori, who later imposed one of the most brutal and corrupt dictatorships in that country's history. Peru's loss was the world's gain, however, because as a result of this experience Vargas Llosa essentially withdrew from active political militancy, and since then his literary output has continued unabated. Books and essays have flowed from his pen in a constant stream, and his bibliography includes a remarkable political memoir (Vargas Llosa [1993] 1994), which relates in painstaking detail the joys and sorrows of his political campaign. (3)

The distance between his early beliefs and his current convictions is evident in two contrasting assessments of a "canonical" text of the revolutionary left--the "Diary" of Che Guevara--: "If the Latin American revolution occurs according to the method proposed by Che, following the stages that he envisioned, the Diary will be an extraordinary document, a historical account of the most difficult and heroic moment of the continent's liberation," be wrote in 1968. "If the revolution does not occur ... the Diary will still endure, as a testament to the most generous and most daring individual adventure ever attempted in Latin America" (reprinted in Vargas Llosa 1986a, 214, my translation). That was then. Twenty-five years later Vargas Llosa had come to believe that Che's revolutionary strategy "did not work anywhere," and its only result was that "thousands of young people who adopted it and attempted to put it into practice [ended up] sacrificing themselves tragically and opening the doors of their countries to cruel military tyrannies." Instead of offering solutions, Che's ideas and his example "contributed more than anything to undermine democratic culture and to plant in universities, trade unions and political parties in the Third World a contempt for elections, pluralism, formal liberties, tolerance and human rights as being incompatible with authentic social justice. This delayed by at least two decades the political modernization of Latin America" (1996, 295).

Confronting Latin American Reality

In his narrative work, Vargas Llosa expressed this shift in his political and social thought most forcefully in two major novels of the early 1980s: The War of the End of the World (La guerra del fin del mundo [(1981) 1984]) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Historia de Marta [(1984) 1986b]). Both of these novels deal, in different ways, with the myopia that renders ideological adversaries incapable of understanding their opponents' viewpoints. As Vargas Llosa himself later explained (in commenting on Mayta), he came to realize that all ideologies are fictions and that instead of providing solutions, they were making problems even worse:

Many young people, many intellectuals, many avant-garde politicians were using ideology, were using these political ideas that presumed to describe reality ... and were, in fact, adding to reality a purely imaginary world. It seemed to me strange that this fiction ... was a major source of violence and brutality in Latin America; that these sometimes elaborate and complex ideological constructions in which one society was described and then another ideal society was also described as a goal to be reached through revolution ... were, in fact, a mechanism that was destroying our societies and creating major obstacles to real progress. (1991, 149-50) Prior to The War of the End of...