Incandescent novelist, seizure doctrine: The two Mario Vargas Llosa | Ignacio Ramonet

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE, November 2010

Last October 7, the Swedish Academy announced that it was awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature 2010 to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. This exquisite novelist was long on the list of "Nobelizables". But his constant militant commitment to ultraliberal ideology had ruled him out until today. Indeed, by the will of Alfred Nobel, not only the literary work of the award-winning author must have "brought eminent services to humanity" but the writer himself, to deserve the award, must also have "demonstrated his affection for a great ideal". The Peruvian novelist still hasn’t fulfilled this second aspect. And it is particularly surprising that he was awarded the prize exactly the year in which the writer justified the coup in Honduras.

by Ignacio Ramonet, November 2010

The new novel by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2010 [1], is on sale timely in the bookstores of Spanish-speaking countries on November 3rd. Title: The Celtic Dream. Your hero: Roger Casement, an exceptional (real) character. British Consul in Africa, was the first to denounce, in 1908, the atrocities of extermination colonialism (ten million dead) practiced in the Congo by Leopold II, the king who made that immense country and its inhabitants his personal property... In another report, Casement denounced the abominable misfortune of Indians in the Peruvian Amazon. A pioneer in human rights defense, Casement, born near Dublin, later joined the ranks of Irish independence supporters. In the midst of the Great War, starting from the principle that "Britain’s difficulties are an opportunity for Ireland," he sought an alliance with Germany to fight the British. He was prosecuted for high treason. Authorities also accused him of "homosexual practices" based on a alleged personal diary whose authenticity is questioned. He died by hanging himself on August 3, 1916.

Since the novel is not available yet, we ignore how Vargas Llosa has built his architecture. But we can trust him. No other Spanish-language novelist possesses like him the art of bewitching the reader, of embellishing them from the first lines and of plunging them into thrilling plots where intrigues full of passions, humor, cruelty and eroticism happen.

In any case, this novel already has a merit: that of, precisely, to remove Roger Casement, "one of the first Europeans who had a very clear idea of the nature of colonialism and its atrocities" [2]. Idea that the Peruvian writer (despite declaring himself hostile to indigenous movements in Latin America) says to share: "No barbarity is comparable to colonialism – concludes with respect to the discussion of the supposed ’benefits’ of colonization –." Africa has never been able to recover from its consequences. Colonization left nothing positive” [3].

This is not the first time Vargas Llosa is inspired by historical characters to report injustice. He emphasizes mixing the techniques of historical novel with those of social novel and realistic novel, and even those of police novel. He has demonstrated brilliantly in two of his most accomplished works: The End of the World War, a fabulous account of the revolt, in the Brazilian Northeast at the end of the 19th century, from a community of enlightened Christians in search of utopia. And the party of Chivo [4], in which he recounts, through an opulent coral construction, the perversity of the dictatorship of General Trujillo (1930-1961) in the Dominican Republic.

History – contemporary – is equally the subject of the novel considered as its masterpiece: ‘Conversation in the Cathedral’, general Odria’s masterful description of Peru (1948-1956), of Latin American reality of the 1950s and the enigmas of the human condition. A work that responds to the arguments of the Nobel jury to explain the awarding of the prize: "For its mapping of the structures of power and its gibberish representations of resistance, revolt and defeat of the individual."

At the time he wrote this book, Vargas Llosa lived in Paris and was part of a generation of talented young writers – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes... - that they were going to renew Latin American literature. They were all left handed. And everyone sympathized with the guerrillas then. In a manifesto of support for Peruvian guerrillas, Vargas Llosa stated, for example, at that time that, to change things, "the only resort is armed struggle."

Identical impeccable solidarity with the Cuban Revolution: "Within ten, twenty or fifty years - I declared, on August 4, 1967, in Caracas -, will have reached all our countries, as now in Cuba, the hour of social justice and all of Latin America will have emancipated from the empire that the loot, of the castes that exploit her, of the forces that today offend and repress her. I want that hour to come as soon as possible and that Latin America enters once and for all in dignity and modern life, that socialism frees us from our anachronism and our horror.

But shortly after, in the early 1970s, this exalted revolutionary fell intellectually lightning by the reading of two essays: The Way of Servant, by Friedrich Hayek, and Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper. This one, above all, completely transformed it: "I consider Karl Popper – he will confess – the most important thinker of our time; I have devoted a good part of the last two decades to reading him and if I were asked what the most important book of philosophy of the century is, I would not hesitate for a second to choose open society and its enemies.”

He stopped, ipso facto, from supporting the Cuban Revolution, denied his past as a "leftist intellectual" and, with the exaltation of the neophytes, became an elevated propagandist of the neoliberal faith. Their new heroes were named Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Regarding this, a symbol of the "conservative revolution", you will recognize an "unreserved admiration, a reverence little less than filial that I have not felt for any other living politician" [5]. Snatched away by that Thatcherian worship, he’ll even decide to go live in London... And when the "Iron Lady" loses power in 1990, she will deliver a bouquet of flowers with the following infuriating message: "Madam, there are not enough words in the dictionary to thank you for what you have done for the cause of liberty" [6].

Thatcheriano will also be the program that proposes to voters, during his candidacy for the presidency of Peru, in 1990. But he will be severely defeated by Alberto Fujimori. Fed up by such ingratitude of his compatriots, he expatriates himself definitively and even resigns his nationality under the pretext that Peruvians do not deserve him...

Transferred then his admiration to another leader: José Maria Aznar, president (ultraliberal) of the Spanish Government from 1996 to 2004, ally of George W. Bush on Iraq invasion and Rupert Murdoch’s current salary in the News Corporation group. A politician who the American magazine Foreign Policy has just listed among "the five worst former leaders in the world", but from whom Vargas Llosa considers that "historians of the future" will recognize him "as one of the great statesmen in history" [7].

He also admires the “charismatic personality of Nicolas Sarkozy” and the “exceptional political talent”[8] (of Silvio Berlusconi. Because this literary giant is definitely a man of double personality. The seductive mask of his novels hides a furious sectarian who, for almost forty years, devotes most of his time to travel the world arranging in neoliberal forums, intervening in the media and preaching in all kinds of congresses, where he smashes with an insistence almost fanatic the elementary principles of his ideology.

Ultraliberal agitator, active member of the Trilateral Commission, president of the International Foundation for Freedom, awarded with the Irving Kristol Award given by the American Enterprise Institute, Vargas Llosa is a professional neoconservative. He legitimized the 2003 invasion of Iraq and justified the June 2009 coup in Honduras.

On October 7, 2010, his sidekick, the French Reagan essayist Guy Sorman, revealed in his blog: "Frequently, we have coincided on the same stages in Latin America where Mario is a militant that in France we would call ultraliberal: he has not stopped fighting Castro, Morales, Chavez, Kirchner and against every program that possesses a social democrat apex."

Confirming his obsessive endeavor, Vargas Llosa insisted that he was receiving the Nobel Prize both for his writing qualities and for his ideas: "If my political opinions [...] have been taken into account, for in good time. I’m glad".

This admirer of Louis Ferdinand Celine, “an extraordinary novelist,” admits that the author of Journey at the End of the Night was also “a disgusting character.” And confesses: "But there are many cases of unestimable characters and, however, extraordinary writers" [9].

(Author: Ignacio Ramonet, Directeur du Monde diplomatique de 1990 — 2008)

[1] Mario Vargas Llosa est le sixième Latino-Américain à obtenir le prix Nobel de littérature après Gabriela Mistral (Chili, 1945), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967), Pablo Neruda (Chili, 1971), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombie, 1982) et Octavio Paz (Mexique, 1990).

[2] El País, Madrid, 29 août 2010.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Lire « Un romancier d’exception », Le Monde diplomatique, mai 2002.

[5] Cité par Julio Roldán, Vargas Llosa entre el mito y la realidad, Tectum Verlag, Marburg, 2000, p. 161.

[6] Ibid.

[7] 20 minutos, Madrid, 6 juillet 2007.

[8] Il Corriere della Sera, Milan, 9 mars 2009.

[9] La Nación, Buenos Aires, 13 mars 2006.

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