These essays would be collected in La verdad de las mentiras. The section on literature draws extensively from this volume, first published in 1990 with twenty-six essays, and reissued, in an expanded version with thirty-seven essays, in 2002. In his prologue to the 2002 edition, Vargas Llosa writes:
I would like to think that in the arbitrary selection included in this book — which responds to no other criteria than my preferences as a reader — we can see the variety and richness of novelistic creation in the century that has just passed, both in the range and originality of the topics explored and in the subtlety of the forms employed. Although it is true that the nineteenth century — the century of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Melville, Dickens, Balzac and Flaubert — can justifiably be called the century of the novel, it is no less true that the twentieth century deserves the same title, thanks to the ambition and visionary daring of a few narrators from different traditions and languages, who could emulate the remarkable achievements of nineteenth-century writers. The handful of fictions analysed in this book prove that, despite the pessimistic prophecies about the future of literature, the deicides are still wandering the cities, dreaming up stories to make up for the shortcomings of History.3
Limitations of space allow us to choose only a dozen or so titles from this book. We can add to these the essays on Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce and Lessing from the same collection included in Making Waves; however, essays on the work of Bellow, Böll, Canetti, Carpentier, Frisch, Greene, Hesse, Huxley, Kawabata, Koestler, Lampedusa, Moravia, Pasternak, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Solzhenitsyn still await translation and publication.
What do these essays on literature tell us about the recurrent concerns of Vargas Llosa the writer? In ‘Seed of Dreams’, he points out that every writer is first of all a reader, and that being a writer is a different way of continuing to read. His first childhood attempts at literature were rewritings of stories that he had heard or read. As a writer, therefore, he is a ‘flagrant literary parasite’, rewriting, amending or correcting other works of literature. In addition, everything he has invented as a writer, he argues, has its roots in lived experience: ‘It was something that I saw, heard, but also read, that my memory retained with a singular and mysterious stubbornness, that formed certain images which, sooner or later, and for reasons that I also find very difficult to fathom, became a stimulus for fantasy, a starting point for a complete imaginary construction’. While literary influence is seen as a largely unconscious process, Vargas Llosa is clear that the greatest influence on his work was William Faulkner: ‘It was thanks to the Yoknapatawpha saga that I discovered the prime importance of form in fiction and the infinite possibilities offered by point of view and the construction of time in a story’.
His analysis of the ‘twenty-first-century novel’ Don Quixote points out the skill with which Cervantes deals with the two main problems all writers have to solve: the construction of the narrative point of view and the question of time in fiction. Don Quixote also explores an area of constant interest to Vargas Llosa, the truth of the lies of fiction: the ways in which reality is contaminated by fiction, the ways in which great writers create such a persuasive alternative fictional world that the fictions become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. The Cervantes novel is also used to illustrate Vargas Llosa’s views on liberty and of the nation, which we will examine below.
Other essays are also concerned with the craft of fiction. Virginia Woolf offers a model of writing, in particular the effortless complexity of the narrative point of view — the melding of the style indirect libre and the interior monologue — which was to be a hallmark of Vargas Llosa’s own writings from the 1960s. In Woolf, also, the demarcation between the real world and the world of fiction is made very clear: ‘What gives a novel its originality — marks its difference from the real world — is the added element that the fantasy and art of the writer provides when he or she transforms objective and historical experience into fiction…Only failed fictions reproduce reality: successful fictions abolish and transfigure reality’. This interest in Virginia Woolf as a stylistic revolutionary was shared by Vargas Llosa’s contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who signed his early journalistic writings from the late 1940s as Septimus, in homage to the tormented character in Mrs Dalloway.
Literature can also explore mankind’s desires, the demons that have to be banished in order to live in society. This is a theme that runs through the essays on Conrad and Thomas Mann. Writing about The Heart of Darkness in 2001, he argues that it is ‘an exploration of the roots of humankind, those inner recesses of our being which harbour a desire for destructive irrationality that progress and civilisation might manage to assuage but never eradicate completely. Few stories have managed to express in such a synthetic and captivating manner this evil, that resides in the individual and in society’. In his analysis of Death in Venice, he argues that ‘the quest for the integral sovereignty of the individual…predates the conventions and rules that every society…imposes’. Even ascetic intellectuals like the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach can succumb at any moment to ‘the temptation of the abyss’.
Terms like ‘evil’ and ‘sovereignty’ refer us to the writings of Georges Bataille, one of Vargas Llosa’s most quoted influences. Bataille argued that the desire to transgress (evil) is inherent in all of us, for it is through transgression of different prohibitions that we can assert our own individual sovereignty. Yet there must be a way of expressing these desires without undermining society. Literature, especially erotic literature, offers a site where such Dionysian transgressions can be envisaged: ‘Sex is the privileged domain where these transgressive demons lurk…to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of euphoria and elation — fiesta and adventure — which are also integral to life’.
The essays on Henry Miller and Nabokov pick up on the ways in which literature explores restraint and excess. The essay on Breton also explores the link between surrealism, transgression and the erotic, an abiding interest in Vargas Llosa’s work. It was from his early readings of the Peruvian surrealist César Moro, whose own work stressed the exploration of irrational drives as a way of achieving freedom, that Vargas Llosa would start out on a route that would take him to Breton and, in particular, to Bataille, and to his abiding interest in the maudit writers of contemporary fiction.
While Vargas Llosa is drawn to both the adventurous practitioners of technical innovation and the demonic explorers of desire, he is also attracted by well-crafted, exemplary, moral stories, as illustrated by the novels of André Malraux. He is fascinated by the life and work of Malraux, a writer now much maligned. As a ‘literary fetishist’, in his own words, Vargas Llosa’s criticism always gives a sense of a writer’s life and milieu — and nothing could be more exciting and glamorous than the biography of the writer and man of action, Malraux. When Vargas Llosa first read about Malraux’s involvement in many of the great events of the twentieth century,
I knew that his was the life that I would have liked to have led…I feel the same every time I read his autobiographical accounts, or the biographies that, following the work of Jean Lacouture, have appeared in recent years with new facts about his life, that was as abundant and dramatic as those of the great adventurers of his novels.