Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  The Outsider, like other good novels, was ahead of its time, anticipating the depressing image of a man who is not enhanced morally or culturally by the freedom that he enjoys. Instead this freedom has stripped him of spirituality, solidarity, enthusiasm and ambition, making him passive, unadventurous and instinctive, to an almost animalistic degree. I don’t believe in the death penalty and I would not have condemned him to the scaffold, but if his head were chopped off by the guillotine, I would not shed a tear for him.

  London, 5 June 1988

  The Old Man and the Sea

  Redemption through Courage

  The story of The Old Man and the Sea seems very simple: after eighty-four days without any success, an old fisherman manages to catch a giant fish after a titanic struggle of two and a half days. He ties it to his skiff, but loses it the next day, in a no less heroic combat, to the jaws of the voracious sharks of the Caribbean. This is a classic motif in Hemingway’s fictions: a man is caught up in a fight to the finish with an implacable adversary, after which, no matter whether he wins or loses, he achieves a greater sense of pride and dignity, becomes a better human being. But in none of his earlier novels and stories does this recurrent theme find as perfect an expression as in this tale, written in Cuba in 1951, with a limpid style, an impeccable structure and with a wealth of allusions and meanings to rival his best novels. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1953 and also the Nobel Prize in 1954.

  The apparent clarity of The Old Man and the Sea is deceptive, like certain biblical parables or Arthurian legends that, beneath their simplicity, contain complex religious and ethical allegories, historical references and psychological subtleties. As well as being a beautiful and moving fiction, this tale is also a representation of the human condition, according to Hemingway’s vision. And, to some extent, it was also a resurrection for its author. It was written after one of the biggest failures of his literary career, Across the River and into the Trees, a novel full of stereotypes and rhetorical flourishes which seems to be written by a mediocre imitator of The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), and which the critics, above all in the United States, reviewed with ferocity, some of them, as respectable as Edmund Wilson, seeing in that novel the signs of the writer’s irremediable decline. This cruel premonition was close to the mark, because the truth is that Hemingway had entered a period of waning creativity and output, ever more crippled by illness and alcohol, and with little energy for life. The Old Man and the Sea was the swansong of a great writer in decline and, thanks to this proud tale, he became again a great writer by producing what in the course of time – Faulkner saw this – would become, despite its brevity, the most enduring of all his books. Many of the works he wrote, which in their time seemed as if they would have a lasting effect, like For Whom the Bell Tolls and even the brilliant The Sun Also Rises, have lost their freshness and vigour and now seem dated, out of touch with current sensibilities, that reject their elemental macho philosophy and their often superficial picturesque nature. But, like a number of his stories, The Old Man and the Sea has survived the ravages of time without a wrinkle, and preserves intact its artistic seduction and its powerful symbolism as a modern myth.

  It is impossible not to read the odyssey of the lone Santiago, battling against the gigantic fish and the merciless sharks along the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba, as a projection of the fight that Hemingway himself had begun to wage against the enemies that had already taken up residence within him. These enemies would first attack his mind and later his body, and would cause him, in 1961, impotent and having lost his memory and spirit, to blow his brains out with one of the guns that he so loved, and which had taken the lives of so many animals.

  But what gives the adventure of the Cuban fisherman in those tropical waters its extraordinary breadth is that, by osmosis, the reader recognises in the struggle of old Santiago against the silent enemies that will end up defeating him, a description of something more constant and universal: that life is a permanent challenge, and that by facing up to this challenge with the bravery and dignity of the fisherman in the story, men and women can achieve a moral greatness, a justification for their existence, even though they might be defeated. This is the reason why when Santiago returns, exhausted and with bloody hands, to the little fishing village where he lives (Cojímar, although that name is not mentioned in the text) carrying the useless skeleton of the big fish eaten by the sharks, he seems to us to be someone who, through his recent experience, has gained enormously in moral stature, surpassing himself and transcending the physical and mental limitations of ordinary mortals. His story is sad but not pessimistic. Quite the contrary, he shows that there is always hope, that, even with the worst tribulations and setbacks, a man’s behaviour can change defeat into victory and give meaning to his life. The day after his return, Santiago is more worthy of respect than he had been before setting sail, and that is what makes the child Manolín cry: his admiration for the resolute old man, even more than the affection and devotion that he feels for the man who taught him how to fish. This is the meaning of the famous phrase that Santiago utters to himself in the middle of the ocean and which has become the watchword of Hemingway’s view of life: ‘A man can be destroyed but never defeated.’ Not all men, of course: only those – the heroes of his fictions: bullfighters, hunters, smugglers, adventurers of every hue – who, like the fisherman, are endowed with the emblematic virtue of the Hemingway hero: courage.

  Now, courage is not always an admirable attribute, for it can be used irresponsibly or stupidly, like the lunatics for whom using violence or exposing themselves to violence is a way of feeling manly, that is, superior to their victims, whom they can flatten with their fists or wipe out with a bullet. This contemptible version of courage, a product of the most retrograde macho tradition, was not completely foreign to Hemingway, and it appears at times in his tales, above all in his accounts of hunting in Africa and his peculiar conception of the art of bullfighting. But, in its other aspect, courage is not found in exhibitionism and physical display, it is a discreet, stoical way of confronting adversity, without giving up or falling into self pity, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, who endures in a quietly elegant way the physical tragedy that deprives him of love and sex, or like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls when faced by imminent death. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea belongs to this noble lineage of brave men. He is a very humble man, very poor – he lives in a wretched shack and uses newspapers for bedding – and the butt of the village’s jokes. And he is also alone: he lost his wife many years earlier, and his only company since then has been his memories of the lions that he saw walking along the beaches in Africa at night from deck of the tramp steamer where he worked, some American baseball players like Joe DiMaggio, and Manolín the boy who used to go fishing with him and who now, due to family pressure, has to help another fisherman. For him, fishing is not as it was for Hemingway and many of his characters, a sport, a pastime, a way to win prizes or of proving themselves by facing up to the challenges of the deep, but a vital necessity, a job which – through great hardship and effort – keeps him from dying of hunger. This context makes Santiago’s struggle with the giant marlin extraordinarily human, as does the modesty and naturalness with which the old fisherman carries out his heroic deed: without boasting, without feeling a hero, like a man who is simply carrying out his duty.

  There are many versions as to the origins of this story. According to Norberto Fuentes, who has made a detailed study of all the years that Hemingway spent in Cuba,26 Gregorio Fuentes, who was for many years the skipper of Hemingway’s boat, El Pilar, claimed to have given him the material for the story. Both would have witnessed a struggle similar to this that took place at the end of the forties, off the port of Cabañas, between a great fish and an old fisherman from Majorca. However, Fuentes also remarks that, according to some fishermen, Carlos Gutiérrez, Hemingway’s first skipper, was the model for the story, while others attribute it to a local fisherman, Anselmo Hern
ández. But in his biography of Hemingway, Charles Baker points out that the central part of the story – the fight between the old fisherman and a great fish – had already been sketched out in April 1936, in an article published by Hemingway in Esquire magazine. Whatever the true origins of the story, whether it was completely invented or recreated from some living testimony, it is clearly the case that the central theme of the tale had been in search of its author ever since he began to write his first stories, because it distils, like an essence purified of all extraneous contamination, the vision of the world that he had been fashioning throughout his work. And doubtless for that reason he wrote it with all his very considerable stylistic control and technical mastery. For the context of the story, Hemingway used his experience: his passion for fishing and his long acquaintance with the village and fishermen of Cojímar: the factory, the Perico bar, La Terraza, where the neighbours drink and talk. The text is permeated with Hemingway’s affection for, and identification with, the marine landscape and the men and women of the sea on the island of Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea pays them a great homage.

  There is a turning point in the novel, a real qualitative leap, which turns Santiago’s adventure, first with the fish and later with the sharks, into a symbol of the Darwinian struggle for survival, of the human condition, forced to kill in order to survive, and of the unexpected reserves of valour and resistance that human beings possess, which can be summoned when their honour is at stake. This chivalric concept of honour – respect for oneself, blind observance of a self-imposed moral code – is what finally makes the fisherman Santiago commit himself, as he does in his fight with the fish, to a struggle that, at an indefinable moment, is no longer just one more episode in his daily struggle to earn a living, and becomes instead an ordeal, a test in which the dignity and pride of the old man are being measured. And he is very conscious of this ethical and metaphysical dimension to the struggle – during his long soliloquy he exclaims, ‘But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.’ At this point in the tale, the story is no longer just recounting the adventure of a fisherman with a biblical name, it is recounting the whole adventure of humankind, summed up in that odyssey without witnesses or prizes, where cruelty and valour, need and injustice, and force and inventiveness are intertwined, along with the mysterious design that maps out the fate of each individual.

  For this remarkable transformation in the story to occur – the shift from the particular to a universal archetype – there has been a gradual build-up of emotions and sensations, of hints and allusions that gradually extend the horizons of the tale to a point of complete universality. It manages this shift through the skill with which the story is written and constructed. The omniscient narrator narrates from very close to the protagonist but often lets him take over the account, disappearing behind the thoughts, exclamations and monologues through which Santiago distracts himself from monotony or anguish as he waits for the invisible fish that is dragging his boat along to get tired and come up to the surface so that he can kill it. The narrator is always completely persuasive, both when he describes objectively what is happening from a point removed, or when he allows Santiago to relieve him of this task. He achieves this persuasive power through the coherence and simplicity of his language that seems – only seems, of course – to be that of a man as simple and intellectually limited as the old fisherman, and through displaying a prodigious knowledge of all the secrets of navigation and fishing in the waters of the Gulf, something that fits the personality of Santiago like a glove. This knowledge explains the prodigious skill that Santiago displays in his struggle with the fish that, in this story, represents brute force that is defeated by the seafaring ingenuity and art of the old man.

  These technical details help to reinforce the realist effect of a story which is in fact more symbolic or mythical than realist, as do the few but effective images that are used to map concisely the life and character of Santiago: those lions on the African beaches, those games of baseball that brighten up his life and the extraordinary legend of the striker DiMaggio (who, like him, was the son of a fisherman). Apart from being very believable, all of this shows the narrowness and primitiveness of the fisherman’s life, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. For the person who, in The Old Man and the Sea, represents man at his best, in one of those exceptional circumstances in which, through his will and moral conscience, he manages to rise above his condition and rub shoulders with the mythological heroes and gods, is a wretched, barely literate old man who is treated as a joke by the village because of his age and lack of money. In a highly favourable review soon after the book was published, Faulkner stated that in this novel, Hemingway had ‘discovered God’.27 That is possible but, of course, unverifiable. But he also stated that the main theme of the story was ‘compassion’, and here he hit the mark. In this moving story, sentimentality is conspicuous by its absence; everything takes place with Spartan sobriety on Santiago’s small boat and in the ocean depths. And yet, from the first to the last line of the tale, a warmth and delicacy permeates everything that happens, reaching a climax in the final moments when, on the point of collapse through grief and exhaustion, old Santiago, stumbling and falling, drags the mast of his boat towards his shack through the sleeping village. What the reader feels in this moment is difficult to describe, as is always the case with the mysterious messages that great works convey. Perhaps, ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, ‘humanity’, are the words that come closest to this feeling.

  Paris, February 2000

  Lolita

  Lolita Thirty Years On

  Lolita made Nabokov rich and famous, but the scandal surrounding its publication created a misunderstanding that is still with us today. Now that the beautiful nymphet is approaching, horror of horrors, forty, it is time to locate her where she belongs, as one of the most subtle and complex literary creations of our time. That does not mean, of course, that it is not also a provocative book.

  But the fact that the first readers of the novel could only see the provocative parts and not its subtlety – something that is now apparent to any average reader – shows us how difficult it is for the true worth of a really original book to be appreciated. Four US publishing houses rejected the manuscript of Lolita before Nabokov gave it to Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press, a Parisian publisher that brought out books in English and had become famous for being subjected to numerous court appearances and book seizures for pornography and indecency. (Its catalogue was a bizarre mixture of cheap pornography and genuine artists like Henry Miller, William Burroughs and J. P. Donleavy). The novel appeared in 1955, and one year later it was banned by the French Ministry of the Interior. By then it had already circulated widely – Graham Greene started up a polemic by declaring it the best book of the year – and it had gained an aura of being a maudit novel. It never really managed to escape from this maudit label, and to some extent it deserves it, but not in the way we usually understand the term. But it was only after 1958, when the US edition appeared, alongside dozens of others throughout the world, that the book made an impact that spread much further than the numbers of its readers. In a short space of time a new term, a ‘Lolita’, appeared for a new concept: the child-woman, emancipated without realising it, an unconscious symbol of the revolution taking place in contemporary society. To some extent Lolita is one of the milestones, and one of the causes, of the age of sexual tolerance, the flouting of taboos by young people in the United States and in Western Europe, which would reach its apogee in the sixties. The nymphet was not born with Nabokov’s character. It existed, without doubt, in the dreams of perverts and in the blind and tremulous anxieties of innocent girls, and a changing moral climate was beginning to give it credence. But, thanks to the novel, it took on a distinct form, shook off its nervous clandestine existence and gained the keys of the city.

  What is extraordinary is that it is a novel by Nabokov that provoked such turmoil, affecting the behaviour of mi
llions of people, and becoming part of modern mythology. Because it is difficult to imagine among the writers of this century anyone less interested in popular and contemporary issues – even in reality itself, a word that, he wrote, meant nothing if it were not placed between inverted commas – than the author of Lolita. Born in 1899, in Saint Petersburg, into a Russian aristocratic family – his paternal grandfather had been the Justice Minister of two Tsars and his father a liberal politician who had been assassinated by monarchist extremists in Berlin – Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov had received a refined education that made him a polyglot. He had two English nannies, a Swiss governess and a French tutor, and he studied in Cambridge before going into exile in Germany following the October Revolution. Although his most daring book, Pale Fire, came out in 1962, by the time Lolita appeared he had published most of his work. It was a vast, but little-known, body of work: novels, poems, plays, critical essays, a biography of Nikolai Gogol, translations into and out of Russian. It had been written firstly in Russian, then in French and finally in English. Its author lived in Germany, then in France, before finally opting for the United States, where he earned a living as a university professor and pursued, in the summers, his second great love: entomology, in particular, lepidopterology. He published several scientific articles and was, it seems, the first descriptor of three butterflies: Neonympha maniola nabokov, Echinargus nabokov and Cyclargus nabokov.