 |
Mario Vargas Llosa and my wife, Graciela,
during one of the SIP meetings in 2015. |
I pay
tribute to the writer who has always honored freedom. I wrote this column in
October 2010 when Mario Vargas Llosa received his Nobel Prize, surpassing his
literary side. It is still valid. I titled it: "The Nobel Prize for
Freedom".Mario Vargas
Llosa was the only one surprised by the Nobel Prize in Literature. For the rest
of us mortals, it was a prize that had been announced or, better said,
expected; not even a hint of controversy as last year when Barack Obama
received the Peace Prize, but joy and celebration because the Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences had been indebted to the author for years.
It was a
prize that "did enormous justice," as Peruvian President Alan Garcia
said, thinking, like many, that Vargas Llosa had just evaded the list of
writers to whom the Nobel Prize was unjustly elusive, such as Juan Rulfo and
Jorge Luis Borges.
Those of us
who, in addition to his prolific literary work, delight in his libertarian
positions, which abound in his novels and essays, are grateful that, above all,
the intellectual has been recognized as the one who generously opens his mouth
to condemn nationalism, which he considers "the worst construction of man"
and calls for freedom of the press as a synonym of democracy.
The Nobel
Prize puts Vargas Llosa in the highest echelon of world literature. Still, the
Academy's political justification - "for his cartography of the structures
of power and his acerbic images of individual resistance, revolt, and defeat"
- also places him as a champion par excellence of democratic values, one who is
not afraid to confront the diatribe of populists and left-wing despots that now
abound in Latin America or to fight against dictators and right-wing
authoritarians. Vargas Llosa is a Nobel Prize for Literature and a "Nobel
Prize for Freedom."
Many
intellectuals and literati are said to be ahead of their time to justify that
they are superior to the rest. But Vargas Llosa's superiority breaks with these
canons, given by the fidelity and critical capacity with which he portrays
reality.
During the
meeting of the Inter-American Press Association in October 2008 in Madrid, I
had the opportunity to listen to his first approach to "The Civilization
of the Spectacle," an essay that is still being shaped and in the future
will surely contain harsh criticism of Facebook, which in that year was not yet
popular, and Twitter, which did not even exist.
In 50
minutes of caustic talk, with a critique similar to Enrique Santos Discépolo's
biting and eternal verses in the tango Cambalache, Vargas Llosa spoke out
against the trivialization of culture, with a deep analysis of politics,
journalism, literature, literature, cinema, plastic arts, drugs and sex.
He condemned
that culture is dominated by "light," by consumption and public
demand, which ultimately conditions creation and the market. He was terrified
that fashion designers and artists have supplanted as the axis of thought the
philosophers and scientists of yesterday and the ephemeral literature of
today's best sellers. "We have reached the eclipse of the intellectual."
He
complained about advertising manipulation and that politicians supplanted their
ideas with gestures and images. "Frivolity - he said - is to have an
inverted table of values. Everything is appearance, theater, play, amusement".
There, he grouped together the magazines of the heart and sensationalist
journalism, detached from their traditional values: truth, rigor, and respect
for privacy.
On the
subject of visual and plastic arts, confronting Bergman or Buñuel with Woody
Allen and Vincent Van Gogh with Duchamp or Damien Hirst, he charged that "civilization
has reached alarming extremes where there is minimal consensus on aesthetics...
one cannot define what is talent from what is not".
Vargas
Llosa's literary and political work is the antithesis of this "Civilization
of the spectacle." It is impregnated with pages and characters that
embrace freedom and the emancipation of the individual, transcending the author
himself and all times. It is classic.
Hence, the
Academy did not judge only the literature of a Latin American as before with
Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, or Gabriel
García Márquez. This time, it rewarded Vargas Llosa's sustained and lucid song
to freedom. Trottiart@gmail.com
