The Literature of Liberty – Miles Smith IV

On April 13, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa passed away. A native of Peru, he lived to see sweeping changes redefine not only his nation but much of South American society. Vargas Llosa had a long enough political memory to measure liberal Peru against its leftist and authoritarian predecessors, and he found liberal Peru imperfect, but worthy.

For much of Vargas Llosa’s life, Peru was governed by an authoritarian presidency. However, liberal democracy and the rule of law would eventually triumph. During an event at Princeton in 2009, Mario Vargas Llosa celebrated the victory of freedom in Peru: “It is so strange and so beautiful, what has happened to us in recent days, to notice that the crew spoken about in the press and by the people in the street with respect and admiration is a civilized nation, facing its path with dignity and courage, and where a civil court judges and condemns the crimes of a dictator.”

In Latin America, memory regularly faced off with what Vargas Llosa called “dreams.” Vargas Llosa’s great gift as a writer was not denying dreams to his readers, but asking them instead to make reality a priority in their cultural, social, and especially political memory. In an era when authoritarians and leftists judge modern liberal society against an idealized or demonized past, the late Vargas Llosa’s literary canon is more important than ever.

Mario Vargas Llosa lived his early years with his mother in the city of Arequipa. Circumstance and geography prepared Mario for his careers—as it were—of literary genius and marital strife. Arequipa earned a reputation as Peru’s cultural heart in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What it lacked in size and commerce compared to its larger sister to the north, Lima, Arequipa made up for in the arts and literature. Books entered into Vargas Llosa’s blood early. So too did the idea of hopeless romance. His parents’ contentious relationship kept young Mario from even meeting his father until he was ten years old. Vargas Llosa moved with his mother to Lima when his parents reconciled during his adolescent years, but the most formative episode of his teenage life occurred when he matriculated at Lima’s most prominent military high school, Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado.

Military education, and the idea of hardening boys into men, marked the Latin American elite in the twentieth century. Vargas Llosa disliked Leoncio Prado from the outset of his time there, and left the school before he graduated to indulge an interest in journalism. Leoncio Prado left its mark, however, in the form of Vargas Llosa’s first novel, The Time of the Hero. The novel, set in a military school in Peru, is in many ways the most autobiographical of Vargas Llosa’s books. Masculinity, militarism, and the nature of social orders are all probed by the then 27-year-old writer who reacted so strongly against military authoritarianism to the point that he sympathized with Fidel Castro.

For Vargas Llosa, the paradox of a military-based masculine order—the based and red-pilled order of mid-century Peru—was that it was not a real order at all. It was a series of failed attempts to create stability based not on law but on raw human willpower. Peruvian critic and writer José Miguel Oviedo noted that, to some degree, in Vargas Llosa’s political economy the price of a military order was “treason,” the path of justice was that of debasement, and reparation for crime was the commission of another, subject only to moral, but not legal, sanction. “A clean conscience,” the cadets know, “might help you in heaven, but it won’t help your career.” A militarized social order, and by proxy an overly realized political masculinity, was a return to a state of nature shorn of the rule of law. Militarized Peru claimed to be an order where all “believe in the regulations,” but what really mattered was how someone interpreted those regulations.

During his sojourns in Spain throughout the 1960s, Vargas Llosa threw off his infatuation with Marxism and became that rarest of things for a twentieth-century Latin American: a man of the secular center right. Vargas Llosa positioned himself as a critic of both Marxism and Catholic traditionalism because he deemed them forms of authoritarianism. His 1981 masterpiece, The War of the End of the World, was set in the messianic Canudos rebellion of 1896–97, when traditionalist Catholics in Brazil’s rural interior took up arms against the newly formed Brazilian republic.

In the novel, the Canudos rebels’ traditional utopianism, or utopian traditionalism, is made more explicit in the comparison between the prosaic modern Brazilian republic’s inability to summon the type of enchantment the mysterious and charismatic folk preacher, The Counselor, regularly does as he envisions an apocalyptic confrontation with the newly declared Brazilian republic. The Counselor brought about miracles. “He turned the wolf into the lamb, he brought him into the fold. And because he turned wolves into lambs, because he gave people who knew only fear and hatred, hunger, crime, and pillaging reasons to change their lives, because he brought spirituality where there had been cruelty.” The republic—the conservative-liberal republic of the 1890s was hardly a social democratic state or even an irreligious one. Yet it was seen by the rebels as anti-Christian, precisely because it sought order in law rather than a politics of enchantment. The Canudos rebels believed the Brazilian republic sent “army after army to these lands to exterminate these people. How has Brazil, how has the world been overcome with such confusion as to commit such an abominable deed? Isn’t that sufficient proof that the Counselor is right, that Satan has indeed taken possession of Brazil, that the Republic is the Antichrist?”

The weakness of the Canudos rebels was not even the desire for re-enchantment, so much as it was the rejection of the epistemology that developed in the modern era. Towards the end of the novel, a journalist says of a character, “He never once lied deliberately, he just didn’t know he was lying.” The words, written 45 years ago, seem eerily relevant for a society that can receive a million different narratives around one event by going to Facebook or X. Men didn’t write what they saw, but what they “felt and believed, what those all around … felt and believed. That’s how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it.” Despite the seeming futility of discovering the truth in a society with en masse epistemological fracture, Vargas Llosa doesn’t let hopelessness have the last word. “Cynicism is no solution, either.”

Vargas Llosa’s most productive literary period, at least with regard to his fiction, occurred before he entered Peruvian high politics, but he maintained an interest in politics as a writer. In 1983, the Peruvian government appointed him to head an investigation into the deaths of journalists in the commune of Uchuraccay. Moves in to electoral politics followed. In 1987, he formed Movimiento Libertad (Liberty Movement) as a classical liberal party. Vargas Llosa loathed the economic nationalization that occurred in Peru during the 1980s and sought to implement badly needed free market reforms in Peru. The country’s hyperinflation in the decade at one point reached 7000 percent. Liberal parties, particularly center-right liberal parties that advanced openly liberal economic agendas, historically struggled in Latin America, but real gains in liberalization and democratization in Peru under the presidency of Fernando Belaúnde allowed some market reforms to flourish. Years of military rule and the persistent violence of the Shining Path Marxist rebels convinced Peruvians to give another leftist the presidency, in the person of Alan García.

García’s relatively open corruption soured the Peruvian on leftism, and the 1990 election seemed poised to deliver Vargas Llosa the presidency. In the first round, he finished in first place and seemed poised to become president. His opponent, Alberto Fujimori, ostensibly a center-right neoliberal, lambasted Vargas Llosa’s program of privatization and market reforms in the second round. Vargas Llosa barely secured one-third of the votes cast. What made Vargas Llosa’s defeat so painful, certainly for economic liberals, was the degree to which Fujimori gained votes from those who would otherwise have supported economically leftist candidates. Vargas Llosa’s defeat in Peru a quarter-century ago foreshadowed an analogous situation in the United States, where a fusionist party of economic liberals and social conservatives gave way to a cultural and social moderate committed nonetheless to economic nationalism. Vargas Llosa’s defeat, and Peru’s eventual slide into authoritarianism under Fujimori, undoubtedly prepared Vargas Llosa (by then a Nobel Prize winner) for the last act of his life: the great liberal sage of an entire hemisphere.

The potential rise of authoritarianism became a sort of obsession for Vargas Llosa later in life. His non-fiction lacked the beauty and subtlety of his fiction, and the crankier side of his personality—he could be cantankerous, and famously punched his then-friend Gabrial Garcia Marquez over a woman—seemed more evident. But even this more real and brusque non-fiction served a purpose. Vargas Llosa noted the innate tendency towards autocracy in humans. “To present dictators as a phenomenon,” he told the aforementioned audience in Princeton, “seems to me to be a great mistake. It is an unconscious defense mechanism to say, ‘This man is not like us.’ But the terrible thing about dictators is that they are like us.” Tyrants “come from the place where we are all from, and they behave like ordinary human beings until they attain power. It’s power that brings out the monster, but we’re dealing with the monster that we all carry within us.” Dictators were simply “everyday people who have been turned into monsters by power. It’s preferable to limit a system that doesn’t allow all of the power in a society to be concentrated in one person, because in that moment, it’s when the monster comes out and lives within all of us.”

Vargas Llosa’s warning came in 2015, a decade before his death, but only a few years before a resurgent worldwide populism, predicated on perceived failures of the liberal order, laid the groundwork for a new authoritarianism. The liberal memory of rising standards of living was replaced by a populist one that saw “carnage” as the only outcome of the Cold War and liberalism’s victory over totalitarianism. Memory, wrote Mario Vargas Llosa in his 1987 novel The Storyteller, “is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.”

The death of Vargas Llosa robbed the Ibero-American and Western literary world of not only one of its greatest storytellers, but also one of the storytellers most willing to duel with politicized memory, from both the right and the left. Vargas Llosa became the great right liberal novelist of the last six decades because his care for the truth of the human condition trumped even the supposed memories a people had, or thought they had. Literature, and particularly the novel, served as his vehicle to give his readers a true vision of the humanity, more hopeful than those who offered the grim societal carnage that autocrats used to seize power, and more real than those utopian fantasies that drove the Latin American left throughout his career. Through literature, Vargas Llosa offered something enduring and hopeful. “No matter how ephemeral it is,” he wrote in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, “a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”