Berlin was less interested in commenting on contemporary politics, and when he did so he lacked the subtlety of his philosophical and historical essays. The intellectual Jean-François Revel, by contrast, was very much immersed both in the everyday (as the editor of L’Express) and in current political upheavals. He began his career as a philosopher; according to Vargas Llosa, he never stopped writing about philosophy, basing his discussions around a current problem or event. Revel was a man who showed him that ‘journalism can be highly creative, a genre that can combine intellectual originality with stylistic elegance’. Revel’s own intellectual trajectory was not dissimilar to that of Vargas Llosa: he had started out on the left, critical of De Gaulle and a candidate in the 1960s for Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, but he came to reject the authoritarianism of socialist parties and governments in such works as La Tentation totalitaire (1976) and Le Terrorisme contre la démocratie (1987). In his obituary to Revel, published on 7 May 2006 in El País, Vargas Llosa states that they became friends in the 1970s, ‘comrades on the barricades’ because neither of them were ashamed at being called liberals. Perhaps they also shared a sense of being caught up in continual polemic, as he points out when reviewing Revel’s memoirs: ‘These memoirs show Revel on top form: ardent, troublesome and dynamic, passionate about ideas and pleasure, insatiably curious and condemned, because of his unhealthy intellectual integrity and his polemical stance, to live in perpetual conflict with almost everyone around him’.
Karl Popper is the third political theorist whom Vargas Llosa quotes extensively (see the essay on Arguedas in this volume). In his essay ‘Karl Popper Today’ (‘Karl Popper al día’), Vargas Llosa talks about Popper’s theses, in particular the idea of relative rather than absolute truths, truths that must always be submitted to a process in which conjectures are refuted by more plausible conjectures. This means that all dominant truths must be constantly subject to questioning and revision. Criticism – the exercise of freedom – thus becomes the basis of progress. Critical intelligence dispels dogma and mythical or magic thinking. There is a progression from ‘closed’ societies, dominated by the tribe and magical thinking, to ‘open’ societies – from the ‘first world’ of things or material issues to the ‘third world’ of art, science and culture in general. This definition of tribal thought is premised on the belief that there are certain truths that cannot be doubted: in such thinking the roots of religious or political fanaticism can grow. The danger of closed societies is that they tend to embrace utopian ideas. In such ‘historicism’ lies the road to fascism and communism.7 Vargas Llosa talks of his immersion in Popper’s work at the time he was campaigning for the Peruvian presidency. In his treasured hour or two of reading each day he would read novels or testing works such as those of Popper: ‘Ever since The Open Society and Its Enemies fell into my hands in 1980, I had promised myself to study Karl Popper. I did so in these three years, every day, early in the morning, before going out for my daily run, when it was just barely daylight and the quiet of the house reminded me of the prepolitical period of my life.’8
While on occasion Vargas Llosa does talk about theoretical ideas in the abstract, in the main he is a consummate storyteller, and his ideas usually emerge with greatest clarity when he describes a scene or responds to a concrete situation. The dangers of ‘closed’ thinking can be seen in the horrors of the 9/11 bombings. The terrorists needed to bomb New York, he argues, since that city represents everything that is open and plural:
I have always felt in New York that I was in the centre of the world, in modern Babylon, a sort of Borgesian aleph, containing all the languages, races, religions and cultures of the planet, a place that, like a giant heart, sends out to the furthest corners of the globe fashions, vices, values, trivia, ways of behaving, music and images that have been formed by the incredible mixture of people in the city. The feeling of being a tiny grain of sand in an Arabian Nights cosmopolis might be somewhat depressing; but, paradoxically, it is at the same time very energising, as Julio Cortázar once remarked about Paris: ‘It is infinitely preferable to be nothing in a city that is everything than to be everything in a city that is nothing’. I never felt what he felt about the capital of France; but in New York, yes, every time.
Cosmopolitanism is diametrically opposed to fanaticism, and he has commented on the terrorist atrocities in New York, Madrid and London, contrasting his own memories of living in these vibrant cities with the outrages committed by fanaticism.
If such outrages bring to attention the difference between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ mentalities and societies, they also illustrate Vargas Llosa’s continued interest in the means that are used to effect social change, in particular the utopia of revolutionary change. In his article on the London bombings, he draws a comparison with the anarchist bombers in London of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – immortalised in Conrad’s depiction of political fanatics, The Secret Agent – who targeted specific, ‘class’ enemies, with the indiscriminate killing of dozens of people on London underground trains and buses. His essay on Malraux’s La Condition humaine in this book (written in 1999) also explores the issue of the moral justification for violence.
Vargas Llosa’s own novel Historia de Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, 1984) depicts a deluded revolutionary activist in the early 1960s, and several of his novels of the 1980s and early 1990s explore the utopia of revolutionary violence, with increasing criticism of fanaticism in whatever form. For Vargas Llosa, the explanation for the bombings of the last years seems to be the creation of a world purged of sacrilegious and corrupt elements of whatever race or background, in which ‘only the community of the true believers will reign. This is the craziest utopia yet amongst all the utopias that have littered the history of humanity with corpses’.9 Yet in his latest work he does not paint all utopian thinking with the same brush of fanaticism, as his analysis of La Condition humaine reveals. Travesuras de la niña mala (2006) contains a fictionalised account of a friend who joined the guerrilla movement in Peru in the 1960s and was killed. This character is treated with much greater sympathy and understanding than the deluded Mayta of the mid-1980s; there is an understanding of what might be seen as wrongdoings in others.
In recent years Mario Vargas Llosa has worked with his daughter Morgana, who is a photographer, on several projects, including two illustrated books, one on Iraq – Diario de Iraq (Iraq Diary, 2003) – and the other on the Israel–Palestine conflict – Israel/Palestina: paz o guerra santa (Israel/Palestine: Peace or Holy War, 2006). Both of these are based on a core group of eight articles, initially published in El País, describing visits to Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, and the West Bank/Gaza Strip at a moment when several Jewish settlements were being removed.
This volume includes the eight central articles from the Iraq Diary. When interviewed about the threatened invasion of Iraq in February and early March 2003, he declared himself to be against the invasion without the proper UN mandates. Two and a half months after the symbolic toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, he visited Iraq to see for himself the aftermath of the regime. In the course of a packed twelve-day visit, from 25 June to 6 July, he gained access to some of the most important political figures involved, from US Ambassador Paul Bremer to the principal Shia ayatollah, Mohammed Bakr al Hakim, as well as a range of other interlocutors: students, businessmen, teachers, army officials, religious clerics, people in the street surveying the effects of the widespread looting, chance encounters in cafés and restaurants. Three of his main sources, the imam al Hakim, the UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and (Spanish) navy captain Manuel Martín-Oar, were assassinated between his departure from Iraq on 6 July and his writing a prologue to the book on 6 September. In the course of this visit, he changed his mind about the invasion and argued that in very exceptional circumstances it could be justified as a lesser of two evils, since it rid the world of an abominable dictator. The invasion should have had a
UN mandate, but Jacques Chirac – one of his pet hates, along with other self-serving French politicians – had vetoed this option. His observations about Iraq and the people he interviewed, his depiction of a devastated but still optimistic society (certain political commentators see the six months following the invasion as a time of relative optimism, before the situation became increasingly violent) rank amongst his best journalistic writings. The book operates in part as a non-fictional sequel to La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000), his novel about the dictatorship of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and its aftermath: many of the actions of Saddam Hussein and his brutal son Uday – torture, massacre and overwhelming cruelty – remind Vargas Llosa of what he heard about the Dominican dictator. I say non-fictional, but Vargas Llosa also adds a fictional gloss to the photographs taken by Morgana, imagining the daily lives of the Iraqi people in the pictures – images that, in general, show some degree of optimism, of people in the immediate aftermath of the invasion hoping for a better future.
The book on Israel–Palestine has appeared recently, too recently to be included in this selection of essays. It is based on a two-week visit to the region between 30 August and 15 September 2005, and once again it shows an independent line with respect to international relations. A long-time defender of Israel and recipient of the 1995 Jerusalem Prize, Vargas Llosa is not afraid to point out his opposition to what he sees as a mistaken policy towards the Palestinian population. In this analysis, he supports a number of Israeli critics working inside Israel. He makes what might at first appear a surprising observation, declaring that the only place he can ever feel left-wing now is in Israel, amongst the Israeli left that he sees as undogmatic, open, heroic and ethical: les justes, in Camus’s terms.
It is this community of les justes that he finds in the main lacking among the left in Latin America. He speaks of a moment in the mid-1970s when he visited Israel for the first time, a moment when he was reconsidering his attachment to the ‘hemiplegic’ left – a phrase borrowed from Revel to describe moral double standards – in Latin America which, at that time, ‘would condemn dictators if they were right-wing, whilst praising them and bathing them in incense if they declared themselves communist, like Fidel Castro’, defending populism and turning a blind eye to corruption, intellectual censorship and outmoded state-led, dirigiste economies.10
His conversion in the 1970s to what he calls ‘bourgeois democracy, individual sovereignty, a reduced State and an expanded civil society, and the market politics of liberal philosophy’11 also marks his current writing on the nature of Latin American societies. I have included four examples, two on the break-up of the Fujimori regime in 2001, and two that chart the advances of Chile, a country forging, after the dictatorship of Pinochet, a strong social democracy. Fujimori, who defeated Vargas Llosa in the presidential election campaign of 1990, is seen in these two articles as a corrupt dictator, abetted by a sinister henchman, Vladimiro Montesinos, who kept a video record of all the politicians, businessmen, judges, bankers and media personnel he bribed over the decade. Chile is now seen as a model for Latin American development, turning its back on the seventeen-year dictatorship of Pinochet – who should be subject to the processes of international law for systematic violations of human rights – embracing liberal reforms and conducting itself in accordance with the rules of democratic processes.
The failure of this desired liberal model has been shown in recent months in Peru when, after one presidential term, post-Fujimori, of Alejandro Toledo, the surprise front-runner for the presidency was an army officer, Ollanta Humala, running on both a populist and indigenous ticket. It was only through an alliance of all parties opposing Ollanta Humala that Alan García was elected president in June 2006. García was the president in the late 1980s whose economic policies so incensed Vargas Llosa that he stood as the leader of a new political party that went on to contest the elections. The story of García is told in great detail in Vargas Llosa’s autobiography, El pez en el agua. Memorias (A Fish in the Water. A Memoir, 1993). Vargas Llosa justifies his subsequent vote for García in 2006 in the following terms:
The victory of Alan García in the Peruvian presidential elections has been a serious setback for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan quasi-dictator, and his megalomaniac ambitions to create a group of loyal client states the length and breadth of Latin America that would follow the populist, nationalist and state-led model that is rapidly turning Venezuela into a typical little Third World republic. And it has probably saved Peruvian democracy from falling once again into another military authoritarian regime, led by Comandante Ollanta Humala, a confessed admirer of the dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado, the general who ended constitutional government in Peru in 1968 (democracy would only be restored some twelve years later).12
García, then, rather than being a cause for optimism, is very much the lesser of two evils. Vargas Llosa’s dystopian vision, narrowly averted for now in Peru, sees the rise of the left in Latin America as being controlled by a Castro–Chávez axis, with willing amanuenses such as Evo Morales in Bolivia. For Vargas Llosa, the model of political democracy, economic growth and increased income distribution is represented by Spain or Chile.
While he is an outspoken advocate of liberal democracy and the market, and is scathing in his opposition to autarkic populism, Vargas Llosa today seems more conciliatory towards those that try to bring certain utopian ideas to this world. He has always been drawn to heroism, courage in the face of abuse, and idealism, and sees all these attributes in the early nineteenth-century French-Peruvian political activist, Flora Tristán, the grandmother of Paul Gauguin, and the subject of Vargas Llosa’s penultimate novel, The Way to Paradise. Hers was in many ways an exemplary life, full of incident and dedicated to a cause – the formation of a great international workers’ movement, a Workers’ Union, that would secure the rights of women – that Tristán believed in and campaigned for until her early death. Of Tristán Vargas Llosa says:
She was a bold and romantic campaigner for justice who, first in her difficult life, plagued by adversity, then in her writings and finally in the passionate militancy of the last two years of her life, offered an example of rebelliousness, daring, idealism, naivety, truculence and adventurousness which fully justifies the praise that she received from the father of surrealism, André Breton.
Tristán is without doubt one of les justes. Society may have little place for such figures, as Vargas Llosa argued in the case of Grass, and indeed, as he wrote of Gauguin, paradise may not be of this world. Nevertheless, for Vargas Llosa the world today needs les justes more than ever.
John King
Warwick University
31 August 2006
Literature
Seed of Dreams
The house in Ladislao Cabrera Street in Cochabamba, where I spent my earliest years, had three patios. It was single-storey and very big, at least in my recollection of that period, which my memory preserves as an innocent and happy time. What for many people is a stereotype – the paradise of childhood – was for me a reality, although doubtless since that time this reality has been embellished by distance and nostalgia.
In this Eden, the main focus is the house with the solid front door that opened onto a hallway with a concave roof which sent back an echo of people’s voices. This led to the first, square patio, with its tall trees that were good for rerunning Tarzan movies, around which the bedrooms were laid out. The last year that we lived there, one of those rooms housed the Peruvian Consulate, which, for economic reasons, my grandfather moved from a building close to the Plaza de Armas to the family home. At the end of that patio there was a pillared terrace, protected from the sun by an awning, where my grandfather would nod off in a rocking chair. To hear him snoring, his mouth an open invitation to flies, made my cousins and me fall about laughing. From there, one entered the dining room that was always busy and noisy on a Sunday when the vast family tribe all appeared to savour the spicy dishes and that dessert pre
pared by grandmother Carmen and Mamaé that was everyone’s favourite: pumpkin fritters.
Then there was a small corridor, with the bathroom on the right, that linked the first to the second patio, where the kitchen, a pantry and the servants’ rooms were located. At the far end were wooden railings with a squeaky little door through which one could glimpse the third patio, which must have once been a garden with vegetables and fruit. But then it was just open ground: it was used as a corral and sometimes as a zoo, because on one occasion it housed a goat and at another time a monkey, both species brought by my grandfather from the country estate in Saipina, around Santa Cruz, where he had been sent from Arequipa by the Saíd family to start up cotton cultivation. And there was also a talkative parrot which imitated me and screamed ‘granmaaaaaa’ all day long. The laundry room was there, and lines with sheets and tablecloths and clothes billowing in the breeze that the washerwoman came to wash and iron every week. The gardener, Saturnino, was a very old Indian who carried me on his shoulders; the day the Llosa family returned to Peru, he came to the train station to see us off. I remember him, holding on to my grandmother Carmen, sobbing.
There were many people living there: grandfather Pedro and grandmother Carmen, Mamaé, my mother and I, uncle Juan and aunt Laura and their two daughters, my cousins Nancy and Gladys, uncle Lucho and aunt Olga. Their first daughter, Wanda, was born in the house one memorable afternoon when, caught up in the general excitement, I climbed a tree in the first patio to spy on what was happening. I could not have understood much because it was only later, in Piura and in 1946, that I learned how babies came into the world and how their fathers made them. Uncle Jorge also lived there until he married aunt Gaby, as did uncle Pedro, who turned up in Cochabamba to spend the holidays, because he was studying medicine in Chile. There were at least three employees in the second patio, together with two intermediate figures of uncertain status: Joaquín, an orphan boy that grandpa had found in Saipina, and Orlando, a boy who had been abandoned by a cook in the house who had disappeared without trace. Grandma Carmen ended up grafting them onto the family.
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