The Liberal Legacy of Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate who died this past Sunday, spent the better part of his literary career novelizing the history of Latin America.
It’s curious, then, that when he reflected on Latin America’s traumatic past in a 1995 essay for Reason, Llosa diagnosed its root cause as an excess of fiction.
Llosa agreed that when Spanish inquisitors set about suppressing the novel in their new colonies, they were targeting a subversive art form. A classical liberal through and through, he saw only problems and unintended consequences resulting from this government prohibition.
“In repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give ‘the necessity of lying’ a place in the world, the Inquisitors achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted,” wrote Llosa. “Theirs was a world without novels, yes, but also a world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything: history, religion, poetry, science, art, speeches, journalism, and the daily habits of people.”
The result of this “revenge of the novel” wasn’t a good thing.
“In fiction, which is my field, it is always possible to pretend that certain historical events did not take place, to project our fantasies into the past, to imagine utopias,” he continued in the same essay. “But it is not possible or desirable to do that when coping with social and economic problems that are all too real.”
Across his long career, Llosa would attempt to put fiction back in its place by chronicling dreamers and dictators, revolutionaries and reactionaries, and their disastrous attempts to rule the real world according to their fantasies.
Latin American history offers endless examples of such failures, on the left, right, and center. As a politically homeless free market democrat, Llosa was able to see the lies in all.
In The War at the End of the World, a novelized account of a pious peasant uprising in 19th-century Brazil, we see the country’s reforming republican government unleash extreme violence on the unwashed masses they were alleged
Article from Reason.com
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