What's the role of the artist in the contemporary political life of a country? A conversation between Mario Vargas Llosa and Adrienne Clarkson recorded in 1988 in Toronto, part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors Archives.
In 1988, when Mario Vargas Llosa sat down on a Toronto stage with Adrienne Clarkson, he hadn't yet won his Nobel Prize for Literature (that came in 2010) so he wasn't yet a "central" figure in the world of writing. In this conversation, he teases out the hazy line between being an artist (who inhabits the world of the imagination), and being a professional politician (who inhabits the world of practical problem-solving) in a way that reflects a very different vision for the role for the artist in a society. In North America, we're more ambivalent about professional practitioners of literature who stray too far into the world of politics, as if political life will sully them and contaminate the artistic vision. But in Vargas Llosa's native Peru (as in many countries), it's expected that writers will be asked to comment on politics, and not doing so undermines the role of the public intellectual. As he so aptly notes, literature "... is something that can help people to live, that can help people to solve problems [...] literature is important, [and] rooted in life. And this idea is one of the reasons why writers are pushed in Latin America to be involved in political problems and in the public debate." It's a symbol, perhaps, of the marginal role that artists in general (and writers in particular) play in contemporary North American society. And in the background a series of important questions about the role of the artist: What does a society look like when writers are more actively involved in political discussion and even political contests? What does it do to politics when writers are central players? And more importantly, what does it do to literature?
***
This audio recording of Mario Vargas Llosa in conversation with Adrienne Clarkson was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988. It is used with the kind permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Thanks to TIFA for allowing us access to their archives for this series. Find out more about the Festival and its annual festival along with many other activities at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.
***
SHOW NOTES
Works by Mario Vargas Llosa (in English)
The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (print edition)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (print edition)
Time of the Hero (print edition) (ebook)
Who Killed Palomino Molero (print edition) (ebook)
The Call of the Tribe (print edition)
Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America (print edition)
Conversation in the Cathedral (print edition)
Works by Mario Vargas Llosa (en Español)
La civilización del espectáculo (print edition) (ebook)
La fiesta del chivo (audiobook)
El fuego de la imaginación : libros, escenarios, pantallas y museos (print edition)
Other Related Books or Materials
Mario Vargas Llosa: a Life of Writing (print edition)
Belonging: the Paradox of Citizenship by Adrienne Clarkson (print edition) (ebook)
The Shining Path : Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes (print edition)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Mario Vargas Llosa wants to talk about literature, not politics. And so he talks about literature, and then he talks about literature and politics, and then he talks about politics.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: …Literature is not pure entertainment. That literature is something that can help people to live, that can help people to solve the problems. And that literature is important, that literature is rooted in life. And this idea is one of the reasons why writers are pushed in Latin America to be involved in political problems and in the public debate.
RANDY: If you know anything about Peruvian write Mario Vargas Llosa, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, you won’t be surprised by Adrienne Clarkson’s opening question to him in this 1988 interview, about whether he wants to talk about literature or politics. He’s been engaged in both, separately and together, throughout his life, and often controversially as when his first novel, The Time of the Hero, published in 1963, was burned by members of the Peruvian military — but not banned, he recounts gleefully in this interview, as this was a great help to sales and his reputation – or when he drafted and signed a public letter critical of Fidel Castro for imprisoning Cuban poet Herberto Padilla, in 1971, or, ten years later, when had dinner with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The first action helped secure him a place in the Left literary establishment; the others worked against it, as did his thoroughgoing anticommunism and universal criticisms of dictators and support for democracy, which in fact led to charges that he wasn’t even just unacceptably conservative but in fact a dangerous Right Winger. Vargas Llosa addresses all of these matters in this interview, and also Clarkson’s curiosity about whether he’ll ever more formally pursue politics beyond affirming the rights and dignities of ordinary Peruvians then caught between the brutalities of the Shining Path rebel movement and the army fighting against them. He demurs, but he did run for President of Peru two years later, losing to an opponent who proved to be a future dictator, Alberto Fujimori.
But in fact, all of the thoughtful and punchy political commentary is secondary in this interview, and comes by way of Clarkson’s line of questioning. Vargas Llosa really wants to talk about literature – I know, I know, no big surprise, nor, for that matter, his moving affirmations of the role of the writer in Latin American public life. But for a novelist known for politically-engaged, gritty and formally demanding works of fiction, the book he fell in love with, the book that first made him want to pursue literature as a way of life, as he puts it, is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which Vargas Llosa read as a young man in Europe, an experience so visceral he remembers the month and the colour of the book cover in conversation with Clarkson. Years later, an established novelist, he wrote about Flaubert’s novel in a book called The Perpetual Orgy. The title is metaphorical, I add, as is his later analogy of drug addiction and the writing life. Regardless, Vargas Llosa’s spoken love letter to Flaubert, my friends, is what makes literature the wonder-bridge that it is. Flaubert’s world of bourgeois French domestic drama, shot through with the title character’s intense psychological strife, feels very, very far away from the world of political violence and history-pressured interpersonal betrayal that Vargas Llosa creates in his novels. But it’s the all-consuming nature of Flaubert’s writing that beguiles and inspires Vargas Llosa to do the same with the material at hand, which has in turn led to global literary acclaim and Peruvian political influence. Both. It’s an impossible balance to imagine, but for the imagination of Mario Vargas Llosa.
****
ADRIENNE CLARKSON: Are we gonna talk about literature or are we gonna talk about politics?
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: Well, I would prefer to talk about literature of course.
[laughter]
AC: Okay, let's start there. You wrote a book a few years ago called The Perpetual Orgy, which is one of the most remarkable books of literary criticism written recently. I was trying to compare it when I was coming down here in the car to anything, maybe writings by Rebecca West or that kind of thing. Because really the passion for Madame Bovary, the passion for Flaubert, and the passion for literature that comes through there, besides the fact that you yourself are a novelist. That there is... That in this book there is this passion for literature and you've taken the title from something that Flaubert said which is, that life is made tolerable by plunging into literature as into a perpetual orgy.
ML: Well, yes. It's a book not about orgies but about literature.
[laughter]
AC: Well, I was a little disappointed when I first opened it up.
[laughter]
AC: I thought, "Ah, well, I guess it was on orgies."
[laughter]
ML: Well, it's a book that I wrote first as a reaction to Madame Bovary. A novel that has been one of my greatest experiences as a reader of novels. And on the other hand, it was because I read Flaubert's correspondence which I think is the most interesting document on literature. The most fascinating testimony about what writing a novel is. The Madame Bovary novel is a case unique in literature, because the writing of the novel was documented day by day. And in certain days, you can say hour by hour. Because he had... Flaubert had this strange affair with Louise Colet, who was his lover but she lived in Paris and he lived in Rouen, in Croisset, and they never saw each other. And so they wrote letters once a day and sometimes twice a day.
ML: And of course, Flaubert was submerged in this novel and the only thing about what he was interested in was his novel. So he told day by day what he was doing, what were his problems, his ambitions, his frustrations. And it's a document quite extraordinary. I think you can follow all the complexity of what writing a novel is. And also the building of a genius. You can see reading these letters how in the case of Madame Bovary geniality was something built with an extraordinary effort, through a kind of emulation, emulation of the personality. And I was so impressed when I read this correspondence that I had really the need to say something about it, to give a testimony of my own experience reading this. And it was like that that I wrote The Perpetual Orgy.
[chuckle]
AC: How old were you when you first read Madame Bovary?
ML: It was in '59, it was when I arrived in Paris, that was December '59... No, no, it was September '59. I remember very well because I arrived into Paris from Madrid, and one of the first things that I did was to buy a copy of Madame Bovary in the...Éditions Garnier with yellow covers, and I just start to read this book immediately, and I was completely fascinated by the book, I couldn't really stop for hours and hours, and I read the novel like a great part of the day and the night. And I was really hypnotized by the richness of the prose, of the creation of the atmosphere, and by Madame Bovary herself, of course, I've been in love with her since then.
[laughter]
AC: Flaubert said that he was Madame Bovary, like when he was asked, he said…"je suis Madame Bovary." You said you were in love with her, so there's an identification with her. How are you the same as Madame Bovary? What's... Why are you like Madame Bovary?
ML: Well, no, I don't think I am like Madame Bovary.
[laughter]
ML: But I admire very much the character, I think she was an extraordinary human being, I am a great admirer of her because I think she was a rebel, a kind of revolutionary. She was a woman who fought very courageously for something that was unacceptable for her time, for her society, for her world. And she was of course defeated, she couldn't really change reality, society, but she attempted very much to materialize a fantasy.
AC: Well, materialize is an interesting word because of course there is so much emphasis on...
ML: The matter.
AC: The material.
ML: On the matter. Yes. Well, yes, absolutely. That's one of the...
AC: On the clothing, on the men who... One after the other. It's all things, objects, persons.
ML: That's one aspect in the novel, which is very, very interesting, the materialization of the world, of the spiritual world, of the sensitivity, the sensibility through the prose, through the description, this maniatic objective description, but what I admire in the book more than the formal achievements of...of…is the character. He managed to create a very mysterious and complex character, because Madame Bovary can be perceived or read from very different and contradictory points of view. One point of view, for instance, is this one, you can say that Madame Bovary is one of the first heroines, do you say?
AC: Heroines.
ML: …heroines who defended the right to pleasure, to be happy in a very materialistic way. Her battle was in the name of the right to be happy, satisfying very personal goals, goals which the morals…the established morals of the times considered selfish or unacceptable from a moral or social point of view. And I wonder if Flaubert was aware, conscious of this very in…conformist and escapement that he was doing in his novel.
AC: He must have been, surely.
ML: I don't know, I don't know. When you you read his letters at the time of the process against Madame Bovary, you are really surprised, because the arguments that he uses in defense of his book are unacceptable from the point of Madame Bovary. She wouldn't have accepted this moralistic defense of the book.
AC: Doesn't it just mean that the writer is not in control of his character?
ML: Yes. Yes, I think that is the case, I think a writer is never totally in control of the novel that he writes. I think there is always an aspect, a trend in the book that is the product of the intervention of a dark side, a dark aspect of [the] writer's personality. And this, I think, is what gives to the literary creation its fascination. You feel when you write a novel. Not at the beginning, at least this is my case, not at the beginning, but little by little you discover that you are being...putting in this novel something that you are surprised to find. You don't really aware that you were saying things that escape really the control of your intelligence and your lucidity. And I think the reason is simply that there is an irrational participation. There is something that comes not only from your knowledge or from your intelligence, but also from your instincts and from your subconsciousness. And sometimes this irrational intervention is so strong that orientates the whole story, the whole movement of the characters without the author being totally aware of what is really happening in the last run with the novel.
AC: You actually dealt with this in a very direct way with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, in which in alternating chapters you tell the story of young Vargacita and Aunt Julia interspersed with soap opera serials, and the characters get all out of control and all mixed up and move from one serial to the other. Was that an attempt to deal with that very problem directly?
ML: Well, when I wrote that novel, what I wanted first was to tell the story of this writer of soap operas who becomes submerged in his fantasy work and gets lost in the world of his characters. That was my idea. And I wanted to write the novel and to tell this story through the soap operas written by the scriptwriter. That was my first idea. And that's what I start to do at the beginning. But then I have the what I could call a realistic obsession. I need….that the novel I am writing gives the impression of the real world, of the real reality. And when I had half of... Well, maybe a bit less, of the draft of the novel, a novel told through the soap operas of the scriptwriter, I felt that this book was becoming a kind of intellectual entertainment. That all this was really very artificial. And so I decided to introduce something that would be a realistic counterpoint of the fantasies and of the scriptwriter. And that is the reason why I introduced something that can be called an objective statement and something that was supposed to be at the beginning purely autobiographic.
AC: Yes.
ML: In fact, it wasn't like that.
[laughter]
ML: At the end I introduced also changes in this personal testimony. But that was the reason why I organized the novel with this mixture of pure fantasy and objective testimony.
AC: But there must have been also a great pleasure in the technical feat of doing that.
ML: Well, yes. The technical aspect of writing is... It's one of the most exciting aspects of creation. I think the formal aspect is where you have really total control of what you do. I don't think you have total control with the characters, with the story. In that aspect of the novel, I think you are many times pushed by obscure drives and... But the form you decide, you decide the words, you decide the rhythm, the music, you decide the structure. You decide what do you give to the reader and what do you hide from the reader. All this is the more rationalistic aspect of the creation. And it's very, very interesting because you are working with great lucidity to materialize something that you feel you don't have the total...the total decision about it.
AC: Then it happens for you.
ML: Oh, it happens in all the novels or plays I've written. Well, not maybe... Not as much in the plays as in the novels, but in the novel, and at a given moment, I feel that something has happened that I couldn't really control or that the characters have been taking some orientation or that the story has distracted from the path that I had planned without being totally conscious of that. And it's at that moment that I became really very, very excited, very enthusiastic because it's then when you feel that something that can be called creation has been happening, when you become surprised with what you have been doing. It's difficult to explain because it's a kind of dialectics of rationality and irrationality, spontaneity and planning. It's language and an order that is also something that is obscure. Something that comes... Something that is not purely the result of the words or of the structure. Something that expresses a deep...
AC: Need?
ML: Need, yes. That's fine, yeah. Need. Exactly.
AC: Do you have to write it? Is there an obligation? Is there an emotional and spiritual obligation to write it no matter what, no matter what the consequences may be of that book being written?
ML: Yes. I think it's... Well, I think it's a choice. I think it's a choice. I think the vocation, an artistic vocation, a literary vocation is something that at the beginning is a disposition, but that is not enough. I think you need a choice. In a given moment, you decide yourself to be this. And it's only when you transform or you make literature a way of living, a way of living that you are really are right, that is someone who has to do some things and who has to write some things. You know, I was for a while a teacher of literature, and I used to tell my students when I talked about what is a literary vocation, what is to be a committed writer, to read a book by William Burroughs called Junkie. Junkie.
AC: Mm-hmm, Junkie.
ML: His first book, very different of what he wrote afterwards. It's a very factual book about how he became a drug addict, for me was very very similar to the way in which you become a writer.
[laughter]
ML: It's something that at the beginning, it's like an entertainment, like an experiment, an adventure, a risk adventure in the case of, of course, heroin. But, I think that was my case. And if you read Flaubert's letters, for instance, you discover an extraordinary similarity. At the beginning it's something that engage only a part of your life, a part of your time, but little by little, this divorce the rest of your life. And then you become this function, this action, and you have the feeling that everything that you do, everything, even the most innocuous activity is put at the service of this. That you have a solitaria... How do you say it? Solitaria. How do you say solitaria in English, Alex?
AC: Solitude...
Speaker 5: Lonely.
AC: Lonely.
ML: The worm that you have in the... Or maybe...
Speaker 6: Solitude.
S1: No, no. Solitaria. Solitara is a very disgusting worm that you have in the guts.
AC: Tapeworm?
[background conversation]
ML: A tapeworm.
AC: Tapeworm.
ML: Well, I think that is a literary vocation. I...
[laughter]
AC: A literary vocation is a tapeworm...
ML: It's not very... Well, maybe not very tasteful, but a tapeworm. A tapeworm. Something that is...
AC: They can eat everything, digest everything.
ML: Inside yourself, and everything that you do is just to nourish this beast.
[laughter]
ML: Well, you remember there is a letter by Flaubert to his great friend, Du Camp. When Du Camp's mother died, he wrote a letter to Du Camp saying, "Well, tomorrow you will be burying your mother, very sad. But you must not abandon yourself to the sorrow. You must try to be lucid because all this suffering you are going to experience can be so useful for your poems and for your novel."
[laughter]
ML: "So please try to remember what are... " Well, it's so exact, so just... I think that a writer, and I am sure probably that happens with any artist, is always dividing himself between the person who lives, who meet people and do all kind of things. And another one who is observing and taking, storing all this for the writing or for any other artistic activity. In this sense, your best defended against sufferance...
AC: Suffering.
ML: Suffering than other people if you are a creator, because you can transform this in a matter for recreation of life.
AC: Well, then how did it affect you when your first book, The Time of the Hero was banned and burned in your own country?
ML: It wasn't banned, no it wasn't banned.
AC: But it was burned.
ML: It was burned, but not banned.
[laughter]
ML: I was very thankful to the military. I was. Well, first...
AC: Why? Is that good publicity?
ML: Yeah. First, I was surprised because I was living in Europe at that time and when I read that my book had been burned in Peru, I said, "Well, that's an extraordinary compliment."
[laughter]
ML: Because the book was burned by the military, but it was not banned, so that was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary publicity. And the book became a best-seller.
[laughter]
ML: And until now, I don't know if it was a best-seller because it was burned or because it deserved to be a best-seller.
[laughter]
AC: Did... At that point though, when you were away and you saw that your book had been burned, you can laugh about it, and you can laugh about it now, but still, it's quite a serious matter to think in conceptual terms of books being burned. That's a political act of...
ML: That's a long tradition in the...
[laughter]
ML: A long tradition in the Latin American history of books being burned.
AC: Is that why writers are political in Latin America?
ML: I think writers are political in Latin America first because, the magnitude of the problems in Latin America. I think it's very difficult when the problems are so dramatic, even tragic as is the case in many Latin American countries to be neutral or to be indifferent to politics. On the other hand, in Latin America, there is great pressure for the writer to participate in politics. This is because in Latin America, as it was in Europe in the 19th century, there is still the idea that a writer is a man who has answers to all questions. That a writer is not only a man who is supposed to write novels or poems, but someone who has thought, who has given a lot of thinking about problems and that can advise and can give suggestions to society about moral, cultural, political, religious problems, as it was in France during Victor Hugo times. At that time everybody thought that Victor Hugo had answers for everything.
ML: And well, in Latin America still a writer is constantly asked to make statements about what is going on. And this is a very naive conception of what a writer is. But on the other hand, behind this naivete, there is something that is very moving for myself, I think is the idea that literature is not pure entertainment. That literature is something that can help people to live, that can help people to solve their problems. And that literature is important, that literature is rooted in life. And this idea is one of the reasons why writers are pushed in Latin America to be involved in political problems and in the public debate.
AC: Is that why you are being pushed in Peru? Because you are being pushed, you were asked to be Prime Minister a few years back. Now people talk about you perhaps becoming... running for the Presidency of Peru.
ML: Well look, I've been involved in politics since I was young. But as a writer, as an intellectual, as someone who wrote articles or gave lectures about political problems without having the idea to become a practical politician, that I never thought of myself. Recently, I've been pushed by circumstances to be more involved in practical policies. Yes, that's true. This is something that has happened recently. And I still feel myself a bit embarrassed with this role, which I never wanted to have. But there are circumstances in which it's very difficult to say no. If you have been involved in political discussions, defending certain values or ideas, and suddenly all these become a national issue in your country, it's very difficult to say, "No, now I'm not going to cross this border between the independent intellectual giving his opinion and the acting citizen," let's say.
AC: It's very interesting having been to South America several times in the last six months, when one has discussions about Vargas Llosa, occasionally people say, "Vargas Llosa has become extremely right wing." How do you react to that kind of comment?
ML: Well, I am so used to hear this kind of... When you are called a right wing in Latin America, this is not an objective description of what are your political ideas. This is an exorcism, this is a way to disqualify you morally. If you are a right wing, you are not a respectable person. You are not a respectable citizen. So to be a right wing in Latin America is a way to say, "Well, you are co-responsible of all the iniquities of the continent." And so you can't really discuss these kind of accusations. In this sense, I am not a right wing. I am not co-responsible of the crimes of Latin America. What is true is that I am not a communist, and I am a very strong critic of the communist solution for Latin American problems.
ML: I don't think communism is going to solve Latin American problems. I am convinced that communism wouldn't develop economically Latin America and that communism would bring more repression than what we have now. And that communism is not a solution. So I defended democratic alternative for Latin America, but to defend the democratic alternative is not to be with establishment, with the status quo. On the contrary, I am in favor of deep radical reforms for Latin America, radical reforms to reduce inequalities, to reduce poverty, to create an authentic democratic society. But I am convinced that the real reforms in Latin America should be done within the democratic system.
ML: Introducing tolerance, introducing coexistence in diversity. That is the real revolution in a continent with the tradition of intolerance, of dogmatism, of inquisition, of brutality that we have in the continent. So that are the ideas and I am defending, and that is the reason why I'm called a right wing. To be called a right wing in Latin America is to be called a sympathizer of Pinochet or Stroessner. And that is ridiculous. I've been attacking Stroessner, Pinochet all my life. The problem is that I criticize also Fidel Castro, and that's not acceptable if you are a progressive Latin American intellectual. They criticize Stroessner and Pinochet, but they consider Fidel Castro a hero. And I don't consider Fidel Castro a hero. I consider Fidel Castro a dictator exactly as Pinochet or Stroessner, and of different ideological kind, but also a dictator.
ML: And I don't want a Fidel Castro for Peru. And I am opposing the possibility of having a kind of Cuban system in Peru. But I am doing this not in the name of the status quo, of the establishment. No, I'm doing this in the name of a democratic society, something that we don't have, and to having that we need to reform deeply our society. But it's very difficult, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to have this debate in the intellectual world. It's not difficult with the common people in Latin America. This is one of the great things that is happening in Latin America. Unfortunately, the developed countries, the Western developed world is not aware of this extraordinary transformation that is taking place in Latin America in favour of the democratic alternative. And this is because the poor people of Latin America, the common people of Latin America, that is the people who have been suffering all the brutalities of the extreme right, and on the extreme left, are rejecting this extremistic and apocalyptic kind of solutions, and opting for moderate ways in which they feel very rightly that is the only way in which violence can be eradicated from Latin America.
AC: What about the role of intellectuals or other countries vis-à-vis Latin America and particularly towards, say Peru or Chile now, what about their attitudes or how they respond to you and your attitudes? Is there the similar kind of division between right wing, left wing, and so on?
ML: Well, in Latin America, in general, intellectuals are... well, with exceptions of course, but I would say that in general the orientation of the intelligentsia is very leftist. The Marxist utopia has still deep roots in the Latin American intelligentsia, unlike what has happened in Europe, for instance, that after the destruction of the Praga [Prague] Spring experiment, and after the testimonies of the Soviet dissidents, there's been a big rectification of the European progressive intelligentsia about the Marxist utopia. In Latin America and in the third world in general, these utopias are still very strong, and intellectuals, with exceptions of course, but intellectuals are still rejecting the idea that this is an illusion, that Marxism is not a solution, and that Marxism has totally failed in all the cases without one exception. That the real socialism is the most tragic negation of what was the generous, the extraordinary appealing idea of the socialist utopia. And there are of course reasons for that. One of the reasons is the dramatic conditions of the third world countries, the desperation that this provokes, the poverty, the violence, the brutality.
ML: All this creates such a reaction that you are pushed in some cases to accept the other extreme, a total rejection of that. But this is not a solution, this in Latin America history, it's very instructive about that. Revolution, violence has not solved Latin American problems, it has been a factor that has contributed to wars, our violence, our repression, military dictatorships. To oppose to the violence of the extreme right, the violence of the extreme left means to keep indefinitely with civil wars, with the dictatorships. And who is paying the cost of all this crazy attitude? The poor, the poor, the poor are the victims. We know that in Peru very well, we have more than 15,000 deaths since 1980, since the Shining Path Rebellion started. So violence is not a solution.
ML: We must try to stop this crazy bloodshed. And for this, we need democracy, this mediocre democracy, this mediocre system that is so despised by the intellectuals and... Well, but this can stop. This is the only system that can stop this killing and this suffering and this torturing of people. When you perceive this political violence from the perspective of a country like Peru, there is nothing prestigious. There is no sex appeal in this violence. This can have sex appeal if you perceive this from a very quiet and civilized place. Like for instance, Toronto. From Toronto, you can perceive the apocalyptic revolution as something very exciting. Great nourishment for the imagination and the spirit. But from the perspective of Peru, where every day people is dying, is being killed, is being tortured by fanatics, or tortured by the military who respond to this fanaticism with another kind of brutality and fanaticism.
ML: There is nothing prestigious in this violence. What is sensible is to try to stop this and to say, "Well, this is not a solution. We can't keep killing each other in this way because we have been doing this since the beginning of our history." The real revolution for a country with this tradition is to have something similar to what you have here, where people is not killing each other, to impose some model of society. This can seem mediocre for a Canadian intellectual longing for apocalypse.
[laughter]
ML: But from the perspective of a Peruvian, this is something that is very respectable. This is something that is a goal that must be reached, not to stay there. No, this should be improved, of course. But now we are in a kind of barbarism and our first priority now is to stop this barbarism and create decent conditions of living for millions of people that don't know what decent conditions of living are.
AC: If you enter active politics, and you certainly sound as if you could...
[laughter]
AC: If you enter active politics, will it... Won't it interfere with your writing, with that...
ML: Oh yes. That will be a catastrophe for my writing.
[laughter]
ML: Yes, that would be a total catastrophe for my writing. There is total incompatibility between politics and good prose.
*******
RANDY:
Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru, in 1936. After a childhood and adolescence split between his divorced parents, and time in a military academy at his father’s insistence, he spent part of 1958 journeying through the Amazon jungle, before going to Europe in 1959, where he worked on his first novel while also supporting Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. Thereafter, Vargas Llosa wrote a series of acclaimed novels about Peruvian and broader Latin American life, ranging from Conversation in the Cathedral to The Feast of the Goat. Along the way, he remained actively involved in Peruvian politics, which included a run for the presidency in 1990. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for, according to the citation, “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Gregory Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.