While Vargas Llosa writes in the main about literary figures and works, in recent years art has played a more central role in his work. He has been writing about painting since the mid-1970s. The first of a series of essays on the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo, for example, was published in Octavio Paz’s magazine Plural in 1976. In a blend of art and politics, it was in Szyszlo’s studio in Lima that Vargas Llosa helped launch a new political party, the Freedom Movement, in September 1987. References to art have become increasingly prominent in his novels since his publication of the erotic novel Elogio de la madrastra (In Praise of the Stepmother) in 1988, which is structured around a fantasy gloss on different paintings. The sequel to Stepmother, Los cuadernos de Don Rigoberto (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1997), is in part a meditation on the work of the Viennese painter Egon Schiele. And, of course, his most sustained fiction about art and artistic inspiration is El Paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003), which also contains a number of close readings and reinterpretations of the most famous late works of Gauguin — the painter who would often refer to himself as a ‘savage Peruvian’. This volume contains several essays written at the time the novel was being researched: they explore Gauguin’s bisexual interests, his relationship with van Gogh and his utopian search for artistic and personal fulfilment in the South Seas. The erotic charge of art — the artist’s quest for sovereignty in Bataille’s terms — is explored in the essay on Picasso. And for Vargas Llosa the transgressive artist of the twentieth century par excellence is George Grosz:
Grosz was not a ‘social artist’. He was a maudit…What I mean is that Grosz’s work is absolutely authentic, and expresses an unrestrained freedom. His fantasies stirred the bilge of society and the human heart, and his invention of reality has, over time, become more powerful and truthful than reality itself. When we talk of the ‘Berlin years’ today, we are not thinking of the years that Germany suffered and enjoyed, but rather the years that Grosz invented.
The bullfight has been a lifelong fascination for Vargas Llosa ever since his uncle first took him as a boy to the bullring in Cochabamba. It is another transgressive spectacle, a moment that appeals to the ‘appetite that, deep within us, links us to our remote ancestors and their savage rites, in which they could unleash their worst instincts, the instincts that need destruction and blood to be sated’. This spectacle would also appeal to the Colombian painter Fernando Botero, who, at one point in his remarkable career produced an extensive series of works based on the bullfight (see Vargas Llosa’s essay on Botero’s artistic development in Making Waves). However, unlike Grosz, and unlike Goya’s depiction of the bullfight, Botero is a painter who can remake the world in his art as a serene space, who can cleanse the bullfight of all its frightening cruelty and present it as a serene spectacle: ‘Botero’s bullfight is a civilised celebration of the senses, in which a discrete intelligence and a flawless technique have skilfully remade the world of the bullfight, purifying it, stripping it of all that burden of barbarism and cruelty that links the real bullfight to the most irresponsible and terrifying aspects of human experience’.
The link between art and transgression is not the only recurrent concern in Vargas’s Llosa’s writings on art and literature. Describing the Prado Museum in Madrid, he writes: ‘We go to a museum…to step out of real, pedestrian life and live a sumptuous unreality, to have our fantasies embodied in other people’s fantasies’. Describing the effect of reading literature, he argues:
Literature can only pacify momentarily this dissatisfaction with life, but, in this miraculous interval, in this provisional suspension of life afforded by literary illusion — which seems to transport us out of chronology and history and turn us into citizens of a timeless, immortal country — we do become these others. We become more intense, richer, more complex, happier, more lucid, than in the constrained routine of our real life…Even more, perhaps, than the need to maintain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the main contribution of literature to human progress is to remind us (without intending to in the main) that the world is badly made, that those who argue the contrary — for example the powers that be — are lying, and that the world could be better, closer to the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create.
For Vargas Llosa, art and literature can offer moments of respite, of imagined intensity, but they also bring the realisation that the world of art is not the real world, and that our reality can never achieve the perfection of art or literature. On a further visit retracing the steps of Gauguin, he finds himself in the Place Lamartine in Arles, where Gauguin and Van Gogh had lived together for a time in the famous Yellow House, a stormy cohabitation that ended, as we know, with Van Gogh’s self-laceration. Inspired by his recollections of the two friends, Vargas Llosa decides to drink an absinthe, that literary, maudit tipple:
I had imagined it as an exotic, aristocratic spirit, a green viscous colour, that would have a dramatic effect on me, but I was brought instead a rather plebeian pastis. The horrible drink smelt of pharmaceutically prepared mint and sugar and, when I rather unwisely forced it down, I started retching. Yet one further proof that dull reality will never live up to our dreams and fantasies.
Absinthe will always taste better in the poetry of Verlaine or Baudelaire or Rubén Darío, or in paintings.
While Vargas Llosa generally acknowledges that he no longer believes in the view he held in the 1960s — that art and literature can help change the world — he still clings, at least in his essays, to some vestiges of optimism about the social function of fiction. If it cannot radically change the world, it can make it more bearable and, moderately, better; at the very least, it can attenuate the world’s ills. He now argues that what he calls the ‘lies’ of fiction contains certain fundamental truths. In the final paragraph of his book-length study La tentación de lo imposible. Victor Hugo y Les Misérables (The Temptation of the Impossible. Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, 2004) he states:
There is no doubt — that in the history of literature, Les Misérables is one of the works that has been most influential in making so many men and women of all languages and cultures desire a more just, rational and beautiful world than the one they live in. The most minimal conclusion we can make is that if human history is advancing, and the word progress has a meaning, and that civilisation is not a mere rhetorical fabrication but a reality that is making barbarism retreat, then something of the impetus that makes all this possible must have come — and must still come — from the nostalgia and enthusiasm that we readers feel for the actions of Jean Valjean and Monseigneur Bienvenu, Fantine and Cosette, Marius and Javert, and all who join them on their journey in search of the impossible.6