A Master's Legacy (Part 1). Vargas Llosa's Political Journey
Some low-life intellectuals have tried to gain a few hours of notoriety by attacking the political and social personality of Mario Vargas Llosa while the family was still holding a wake in the privacy of Lima.
They wasted their time They arrived late and lacklusterly in the face of the impressive avalanche of worldwide recognition for the author of one of the truly memorable literary works of our language: some twenty novels, including unforgettable pages such as The City and the Dogs, Conversation in the Cathedral, The Green House, The War at the End of the World, and The Feast of the Goat ; ten plays, a dozen essays, and newspaper columns as anthological as any written by his immediate Latin American predecessor in Nobel Prize-winning work, Octavio Paz . Readers of this newspaper of the last half-century know this well.
At the time of the death of the great writer who wrote for LA NACION for many years, the shameful astonishment that we commented on in our editorial yesterday is revived. It occurred in 2011 when the then director of the National Library, Horacio González , and others, addressed a message of unprecedented annoyance to the authorities of the Book Fair for having invited Vargas Llosa to speak at the opening ceremony of the exhibition. González was at that time the spokesperson for Carta Abierta , an organization of people linked to culture who had felt curiously attracted to the Kirchner governments and their dominant figures; among them, Some are now being prosecuted for having confused democracy with kleptocracy .
The convoluted language was one of the most striking keys in literary circles of the aforementioned Open Letter, but in the case concerning Vargas Llosa, the message was understood without the usual clumsy veiling of language about where they really wanted to get to: to destroy, with his political statement, the presence of the award-winning writer at a fair so representative in the world of the hierarchy of our letters and arts Even then-President Cristina Kirchner , no less, would have warned that the signatories had gone too far.
The case, however, served to further highlight the abysmal distance Vargas Llosa had increasingly adopted from the most radicalized continental left since 1971. This change had been formalized by the prosecution and imprisonment ordered by Fidel Castro against Cuban writer Herbert Padilla . The waters, in fact, had been prepared beforehand to descend in a different way than how Vargas Llosa had navigated in his youth as a member in Peru of the Communist Party group known as "Cahide," in memory of an Inca warrior. The glass had been overflowed by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and the brutality of the repression of patriots.
After breaking with communism and structuralism, Vargas Llosa moved toward social democracy and finally settled into liberalism. His clash with the proponents of all possible forms of populism was inevitable, and it hardened the developing thinking of the political force that has governed Argentina for the longest time, since 1946.
“ It is very difficult - he said - to understand the romanticism that exists in Argentina with Peronism, which has been the source of all its ills. ”. This earned him irreconcilable enemies and stirred criticism from leftists who have thrived, with a laziness similar to those of the defunct Carta Abierta, in Peronism as mold tends to do when it seeks refuge behind a wall, without giving anything valuable in return. Was Vargas Llosa, perhaps, so wrong in his acidic definition of the political amoeba that responds in any of its variable formats to the name of Peronism ?
José María Aznar , former leader of the Popular Party , and Felipe González , the socialist who truly introduced Spain to Europe , were at the eightieth birthday party of the man who had been the presidential candidate in 1990 – a candidate defeated in the second round by Fujimori – in Peru. If Vargas Llosa supported Jair Bolsonaro , as even his most bitter critics accuse him of, it was out of disgust, of course, with that progressivism that has led many contemporary societies – in Europe, in the United States , in Argentina – to abandon more than necessary the prudence and tolerance of rigorously liberalism and to privilege, above all, an effective counteroffensive against those who have sought to crush, in the name of unacceptable abstractions, values and principles firmly established in Western civilization.
Yes, in Argentina, Vargas Llosa supported Javier Milei 's presidential candidacy alongside Mauricio Macri and other former presidents: Vicente Fox (Mexico), Iván Duque (Colombia), and Sebastián Piñera (Chile). Would he have been better off in the company of Alberto Fernández-Cristina Kirchner, Daniel Ortega , or Nicolás Maduro ? The writers and literary critics who have buried names like Eduardo Mallea in Argentina for considering him elitist, aristocratic, or alien to popular commitments—as if providing humanity with discoveries of sublime beauty in literature or the arts weren't a higher commitment—would do well to reconsider other kinds of questions.
Was John Updike so wrong when, in a celebrated article in The New Yorker, he wrote that Vargas Llosa had replaced Gabriel García Márquez as the South American novelist with whom North American readers should catch up? Both were undoubtedly notable writers, honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, but something that set them apart as public figures was that Colombian notoriety never dared to break his friendship with Fidel Castro, the dictator who led Cuba to the loss of freedom from the first day he came to power in 1959 and to the miserable situation, incomprehensible to the world, 66 years later.
As for the essence of their lives, they equally demonstrated, as the recently deceased writer said, that good literature depends, more than on inspiration, on the perspiration of arduous, incessant, and tireless intellectual work.
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