Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died a few days ago. He was well-known at one time for both his novels and his probing intellect. As a journalist for the Atlantic put it in a recent obituary, “His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic.”

I know nothing of Llosa’s novels, though I see one or two here on the shelf. And of his turbulent personal life I know only what I’ve gleaned online in the last twenty minutes. But I’ve enjoyed reading the man’s essays for years.

For the most part they were written for newspapers in Madrid and syndicated throughout the Spanish-speaking world. That’s a good thing, in so far as it makes it likely they'll be self-contained nuggets of reasoning and description written in an accessible style and directed toward a wide audience. Ortega y Gasset hoed that same row a few generations ago, and so did Javier Marias more recently.

Llosa’s essays have been collected in several volumes. The two that I own and return to fairly often are The Language of Passion and Making Waves. Dipping into these collections is like reliving the last half century of popular culture—personal, cultural, political, and even philosophical.

For example, in the piece called “My Son the Rastafarian” Llosa combines anecdotes about serving on the Berlin Film Festival jury under Liv Ullmann with a bemused fatherly description of the radical vegetarian views of his college-aged son who’s arrived in Berlin for a visit.

There’s an insightful description of his life as a student under Franco’s repressive regime when Madrid seemed to be hardly more than a provincial backwater, and a nostalgic sketch devoted to the many hours Llosa spent in the library of the British Museum before the books were moved (alas) to the new British Library.

An essay about Cuba or Nicaragua written in 1975 is likely to sound dated today, but it also reminds us how intensely concerns about communism, authoritarianism, and neo-colonialism colored political discourse half a century ago.

Llosa’s lengthy review of The Golden Notebooks is also redolent of any earlier age: “I do not know why this novel became a feminist bible. Read from that standpoint, its convulsions are so pessimistic that they bring one out in goosebumps.”

And when was the last time you thought about Albert Camus? Llosa considers the man’s career at some length, observing at one point: 

All his life he remained true to the conviction that man fulfills himself completely, lives a total reality, in so far as he is communion with the natural world and that the divorce between man and nature mutilates human existence.

On the strength of this remark, it occurred to me that I ought to take a closer look at Camus’ book Summer (1954), which I spotted just now in his collection Lyrical and Critical Essays. But I began to have second thoughts about that project when, a few paragraphs later, Llosa remarked that:

His is a statuesque style which, apart from its admirable conciseness and the effectiveness with which it expresses an idea, seems somewhat naif: it is a stuffy style, old fashioned, smelling of starch.

In the course of these essays Llosa returns repeatedly to the role played by irrationality in history and daily life. It has no place in the world of theory, which is always rational, by definition—even theories of irrationality. Yet in personal life—the aggregate of which, considered in retrospect, is history itself— “unreason, the unconscious and pure spontaneity will always play a part.”

I might delve here into an exploration of Llosa’s comparative analysis of the theories of Isaiah Berlin and George Bataille, but we’ll save that project for another time, and turn to his essay on the Madrid World Cup of 1982. He argues here that the appeal of soccer is rooted in the fact that it’s intense and absorbing … but also “ephemeral, non-transcendent, innocuous.” At another point he describes it as “exciting and empty.”

After devoting a few paragraphs to the appeal of the Argentine hero Maradona, he takes a step back—how can he resist?—to explore the deeper roots of the appeal:

People need contemporary heroes, beings that they can turn into gods. No country escapes this rule. Cultured or uncultured, rich or poor, capitalist or socialist, every society feels this irrational need to enthrone idols of flesh and blood and burn incense to them. Politicians, military men, film stars, sportsmen, crooks, playboys, saints and ferocious bandits have been elevated to the altars of popularity and turned into a collective cult, for which the French have a good image: they call them 'sacred monsters'. Well, footballers are the most inoffensive people on which one can confer this idolatrous function.

Llosa is well aware how dangerous the enthronement of a sacred monster can be. In an essay on Salman Rushdie that appeared in 1992 he writes, “One of the truths which remains unshakeable in these times when the hurricanes of history are sweeping everything away is that civilization is a very thin veneer that can crack on the first impact with the demons of faith. At the first onslaught of social outrage.”