Vargas Llosa, liberal in politics, free in fiction

The last of the four canonical authors of the Latin American Boom who remained alive has died. At the age of 88, Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima, Peru. Along with Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar, he was a protagonist of that moment when Latin American literature became a mass and global phenomenon, demonstrating how fiction could capture the life and history of the continent. This was also the generation that emerged into public life with the Cuban Revolution , which marked their lives and trajectories. Each of them followed different paths: García Márquez had his differences in the 1960s, but later he was not only his staunchest defender, but also became a close friend of Fidel Castro.

Cortázar defended the Revolution from beginning to end, and Carlos Fuentes was, of the Boom authors, the least involved and always most attracted to what was happening in Mexico, his native country. Vargas Llosa supported it at the beginning and was one of its most fervent propagandists (he even joined the Casa de las Américas Committee), but after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Padilla case (the poet was persecuted by the Cuban regime and accused of conspiracy), Vargas Llosa also became its most effective detractor. Over the years, he became a leading figure in Latin American liberal thought, and this influenced both his essays and his novels .

The War at the End of the World (1981), about the Brazilian conflict in Canudos at the end of the 19th century, was a fiction about the fanaticism and barbarism of the insurgents and the Brazilian army, and with History of Mayta , in 1984, he made an argument against the political violence of the radicalized left. The critique of fanaticism – and in this the reading of Karl Popper and his The Open Society and Its Enemies was key – runs through his essays and journalistic writings along with the idea that in Latin America we suffer the consequences of a poorly constructed and worse oriented State, what Octavio Paz called “the philanthropic Ogre”.

In fact, Vargas Llosa 's earlier novels also admit and even encourage political interpretations, but the way he began to participate in the public scene—he first ran for president in 1990—made his image as a writer inseparable from that of a politician. With a monumental body of work (almost twenty novels, ten plays, fifteen collections of essays, and a constant involvement in photojournalism), in addition to his career as a politician, he provokes both intrigue and envy in the face of such a prolific and consistently high-caliber output.

As a polemicist, Vargas Llosa drew on the rhetoric he had learned during his time on the left and did not hesitate to be an intellectual with "dirty hands," to use the metaphor of Jean-Paul Sartre, a thinker about whom he wrote many texts and to whom he contrasted the figure—which he preferred—of Albert Camus. He was also a pioneer in certain ideas that have become commonplace today: his critique of progressivism —largely inspired by the French thinker Jean-François Revel—and of ideology when it becomes a religion and "does not listen to or accept the lessons of reality," and his defense of pragmatism ("A pragmatist is not someone who distrusts ideas, but someone who knows their limits").

At one point, he criticized the role of elites in society ("Generally speaking, the people—those faceless, nameless women and men, the 'common people,' as Montaigne called them—are better than their intellectuals"), but with the rise of populism in the 21st century, he changed his position. In the late 1980s, Vargas Llosa founded a party, participated in elections, and became a globetrotter for liberal ideas.

Faced with the demands of reality and the constraints of power, Vargas Llosa experienced what many liberals (and not only liberals) experience : either he ended up defending conservative positions (as he does in The Culture of the Spectacle, a sort of vindication of Matthew Arnold's thinking) or he ended up accepting some authoritarianisms because they are less harmful than others, as when in 2021, in opposing populism, he supported Keiko Fujimori and maintained that there was fraud, something that was ultimately denied by international observers. As he himself admitted in his memoirs The Fish in the Water , which focused more on the founding of the Freedom Movement in 1988, he was concerned about seeing himself "increasingly as part of the discredited political class."

The moments in which Vargas Llosa confronts his contradictions with his fluid and precise writing are the most memorable. In "My Ethiopian Son," one of his funniest texts, he recounts his reunion with his son Gonzalo Gabriel at the Berlin Film Festival after years of not seeing him. Gabriel surprises him at the airport, having become a Rastafarian, a devotee of Bob Marley and veganism, and "willing to die for his ideas."

A few years later, the story ends with the son's new conversion to economic liberalism: "I hear him now name with the same ardor with which he previously cited Emperor Haile Selaisse, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Misses, and Milton Friedman." But isn't "My Ethiopian Son" also a displaced self-portrait in which Vargas Llosa reflects on the risks of dogmatism and absolute adherence to an ideology ? Isn't it also a self-portrait of the man who abandoned his appearance as a rebellious writer to assume the manners of a CEO, although he always maintained in his literature the "refined hedonism" (The Civilization of the Spectacle) that he always defended, from The City and the Dogs to Mischief of a Bad Girl, through In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto?

In Argentina, he always had many readers, but in 2011, he was the subject of a shameful incident. Invited to inaugurate the Book Fair , the Kirchnerist collective Carta Abierta protested and managed to have the event canceled (it was moved to the second day). It wasn't that Vargas Llosa lacked sufficient credentials to inaugurate the fair (he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the previous year), but his participation was apparently an "insult to national culture." Such provincialism (as if national culture were a closed preserve, not even open to a Latin American writer) revealed a dogmatism that brooked no dissent.

Furthermore, he omitted that, as president of the PEN Club, Vargas Llosa had written a letter of protest to Videla in 1976 and, in the 1980s, published the essay "Kafka in Buenos Aires," which denounced the persecution of the poet Juan Gelman. It's a memorable text that libertarians and supporters of the current government would do well to read , because it shows a thinker who defends freedom of expression, a plurality of positions, and the debate of ideas. The friendship he maintained with an intellectual as different and with opposing ideas as Ángel Rama, with whom he polemicized sharply and without concessions, is moving.

In the face of the collapse of modern public opinion we are witnessing today, with Vargas Llosa, we see the departure of a liberal of what we might call the old style, one who trusted in intellectual forums and a notion of civilization sustained by the strength of institutions. Because regardless of whether we share his ideas or not, the strength of his essays and interventions lies in his trust in public space and the exchange of ideas.

Hence, he found the figure of Donald Trump, his tribal nationalism, and the whole aphoristic and insulting style that dominates social media and politics unsympathetic . Only an overwhelming passion and an uncompromising faith in words explain why he was able to write thousands of pages (how come he had so much time), always at a level that ranged from the interesting to the sublime, especially in his novels, in which he managed to combine a narrative that evoked nineteenth-century realism with innovative procedures, and in his essays, in which the manners of the Peruvian conservative elite coexisted with a wild cosmopolitanism.

The work of Mario Vargas Llosa is a fundamental reference in Latin American culture and literature. As a storyteller, he is exceptional, and as a thinker, in addition to always engaging with honesty, he left numerous writings that invite the ongoing debate to which all culture should aspire.

Gonzalo Aguilar, Professor of Brazilian and Portuguese Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, has published the books Brazilian Concrete Poetry, Beyond the Village, Other Worlds , and What's More Macho?