Vargas Losa, reactionary and tolerant

The recent death of the writer Mario Vargas Llosa brings to light a recurring theme in the history of culture: the controversial and probably also debatable ideological aspect of a fiction author (or painter, musician, singer, sculptor, etc.), as opposed to the universally recognized quality and merit of his work. In situations like these, reaching an agreement is difficult, always depending on the ideological or political perspective from which one views it. For example: We read Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and we were captivated by a kind of aesthetic miracle, by what it revealed to us about war, and above all, by how it revealed it. But one day we learned that Céline had distinguished himself as a fierce anti-Semite in the midst of the Nazi occupation. The dilemma immediately arose: should we continue reading him or not? Some dismissed him, others didn't. The author of this article was one of the former. But no one can deny, not even I, the transformation that the French language underwent in the wake of the French writer's powerful and subversive writing.

These days we are faced with a similar issue with Mario Vargas Llosa, although we must not lose sight of the enormous difference between Céline and the Peruvian writer, in terms of the direct and indirect tragic consequences of their respective ideological messages. Céline indirectly collaborated in the extermination of the Jews, at least in France, and Vargas Llosa, at most, openly encouraged, through his press articles, the insensitive neoliberal drift in the capitalist world. He also displayed a complete lack of linguistic empathy with the indigenous languages of his own country, not to mention Catalan, which he read and listened to during his stay in Barcelona. (Interestingly, the writer never stopped stating that his bedside book during that period in Barcelona was the Tirant lo Blanc, by Joanot Martorell).

Politically, Vargas Llosa was a reactionary, bordering on far-right ideological positions. So is that why his narrative and essay work shouldn't be read? I believe that, despite everything I've said, Vargas Llosa should be read. Karl Marx also had serious doubts about the moral and political validity of Honoré de Balzac's literary work. He always felt that Balzac couldn't be his saint, given his status as a staunch monarchist. However, he read him and wrote in his letters and commentaries to his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels that Balzac portrayed the contradictions of French society like no one else in his time. Marx never stopped reading Balzac; he knew that it was in his work that one could best understand the behavior of an avaricious bourgeois and draw invaluable sociological, as well as aesthetic, conclusions from it. Something quite similar is happening now with Vargas Llosa's work. It is in his work where we will see the most progressive Vargas Llosa, the most compassionate, the most incisive in his description of the pathologies of capitalist society, and in some parts of his work he is even feminist (read in this regard Paradise on the other corner). Mario Vargas Llosa is the most striking example of narrative tolerance. A few years ago, when mass reading of the Millennium saga became fashionable, he was one of the few established authors to defend Larsson tooth and nail. He defended him with strictly narratological arguments and emphasized the fundamentally entertaining nature that the novel should never lose, following the same idea that Cervantes had of fiction. In flagrant contrast to his ideological intolerance, Vargas Llosa always encouraged aesthetic tolerance.

Mario Vargas Llosa was the most lucid example of a first-class intelligence, as defined by Scott Fitzgerald in his book Crack-up"The test of first-class intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, without thereby discrediting it." That said, it will always be legitimate for someone to decide not to read the Peruvian writer because of his political views. They will always be within their rights.