At twenty, stalking has become a past time of mine. Though it
started out as inadvertent; a mere raised eyebrow at seeing the
name, Mario Vargas Llosa, in the Edinburgh Literary Festival
guide, in the later stages there was no question that I was on a
more than casual mission to meet the man. It wasn’t only for
the sake of his illustrious bio-data: Vargas is an
internationally acclaimed author of more than nineteen books,
part of a Latin American ‘holy trinity’ of fiction
alongside Borges and Marquez. Neither was it just because of his
intriguing stand as a conservative candidate for the Peruvian
presidency in the 1990 elections (which he lost to Alberto
Fujimori). The reason was more personal. What drew me to Llosa was
certainly his talent, but also my memory. At an age when I could
hardly make out what the black characters on a page stood for, I
remember my father shaking The War of the End of the Worldat me
saying, ‘Read it! It’s the most powerful book
you’ll ever read’. When I did, a few years later, I
emerged dazed, from within a haze of elemental emotions –
power, violence and lust., hunger and idealism. I couldn’t
forget the Counselor, Llosa’s apocalyptic prophet: “The
man was tall and so thin he seemed to be always in profile. He
was dark-skinned and rawboned, and his eyes burned with perpetual
fire”. So a distant memory drove me to action. I bought a ticket to
hear Llosa read from his new book, The Feast of the Goatin
Edinburgh. And after witnessing the warmth and passion with which
he spoke, the combined charm of a neatly groomed shock of silver
and a thick Spanish accent embellishing carefully chosen words, I
decided that it might be interesting to talk to him at greater
length about the whole vocation of writing. What were his
motivations? What advice would he give to aspiring novelists? But
getting answers was difficult from an author who spent so much
time travelling. And so, like Mohammed, I waited for the
mountain. It came, more than six months later, in the form of the
Weidenfeld Chair of Comparative Literature. With this position,
as I found out, Llosa would be spending Trinity term in Oxford,
giving a series of eight lectures on Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The stalking had come to an end. When I met him, Llosa seemed to fit in perfectly against a
backdrop of dreaming spires. He had the look of a college
professor and from the nature of the conversation, we could
almost have been in a tutorial. I asked him how he reconciled his
role in Oxford, that of the literary critic, with that of a
writer; did he see an opposition there? Critics are seen as the
bane of writers’ lives, torturing their intuitively wrought
texts by dissection with a sharp set of surgical knives. But
Llosa is more accommodating; he is quick to point out that the
kind of literary criticism he practices doesn’t pretend to
be ‘scientific, impersonal and objective’ but on the
contrary, he sees criticism as a point of departure, imbued with
imagination: “My purpose is not to describe or interpret but
to build something new…to use the work of others as raw
material”. He continues, “ I am very present in the critical work I
do. I use my own experience as a writer to try and understand the
work of others.” In his opinion, the opposition between a
creative and critical frame of mind comes in the sense that
“when you write, personality intervenes” and
“instincts, passions, emotions” take over from
rationality. But the critic and the writer are not two separate,
irreconcilable beings; he says, with a spark in his eye: “I
try not to influence my critics, only they can tell me
objectively, what I have done.” Llosa’s liberality doesn’t just extend to critics
but to writers who are engaging in the ‘globalization’
of literature. Like ‘Doctors without Borders’, a new
creed has been evolving of ‘Writers without Borders’. I
wondered how a person who had written consistently about Latin
America and its problems through out his career would react to
the break down of national borders – for example, to South
Asians writing in English about Europeans (as Michael Ondaatje
does in The English Patient). Should writers, for the sake of
authenticity, only write about what they know? Citing the
examples of Conrad, Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, all multilingual
authors, Llosa passionately disagrees: “literature is not
geography, not history, not an accurate description of a reality.
Because then it becomes a social science.” Would he write a novel that wasn’t based in Latin
America? “Not as a moral obligation, no…but maybe, if
it is stimulating to me at that point”. In fact, The Way to
Paradise, his most recent novel, is a step in that direction. The
novel depicts the lives of two stalwart figures in Peruvian
history – Flora Tristan, a feminist agitator for social
change in the nineteenth century and her grandson, the famous
artist Gauguin. The novel oscillates between France, Peru and
Tahiti. But the changing settings of the novel are not as important to
the story as the similarity between the characters of Gauguin and
his grand mother: “What I admire about them…is that
they pursued their utopias and sacrificed their lives to their
utopias.” Llosa said he was primarily drawn to Flora
Tristan, the idea of writing about Gauguin only struck later in
the process. The notion of writing about her accompanied him for
nearly 30 years. “I admired her courage, how she dared to
tell everything about her life in her memoirs, her ideals
especially, in a time where there were so many prejudices.”
Her zealous commitment to politics is clearly something that
Llosa sees as a special quality. Something that he chose to
emulate in his own life, perhaps? A knowing look comes into his eyes at this point. It’s
unavoidable, we cannot skirt past the topic of his presidential
campaign. It’s a topic that I’m confused about, unable
to reconcile the Llosa who drew sympathetic portraits of
revolutionaries (as in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta) to
Llosa, the conservative presidential candidate who proposed a
kind of Andean Thatcherism for his country. Yet Llosa defends his
position by saying that at the end of the 80’s Peru was in
the process of disintegration – ‘democracy was close to
collapse’. There was hyperinflation. In those circumstances
it was necessary to get involved. Writer had to metamorphose into
politician. Had he ceased to believe in Shelley’s words that,
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world”? Llosa shakes his head; it was simply a case where
more direct action was required. “My vocation is
literature”, he says, “I realised that you have to have
a real appetite to be a politician. An appetite for power which I
didn’t have”. His appetite for writing took over. Still, the experience of
political life was not wasted; it gave him enough material to
write a book, A Fish in the Water(1993), and subsequently
informed his descriptions of the world of the Dominican tyrant
Trujillo, in The Feast of the Goat.. I am tempted to ask a
beginner’s question at this point. Is it better for an
aspiring novelist to livefirst and then write? To add to a bank
of ‘meaningful experiences’ before taking up the pen in
order to say something truly profound or original? Llosa squashes
the idea in one fell sweep – “You always write from
experience, what else do you have? All that’s important is
the will to write, the discipline”. The centrepiece of his
theory about writing is simple. “Read; read all the classic
writers. You’ll learn much more from reading than listening
– from classes and lectures.” He grins wryly. Llosa advocates the world of visualization, rather than
knowledge. “I loved Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy,
Hemmingway…and Faulkner; I read Faulkner with a pen and
paper to explore all the possibilities of literary form he
provided.” Read and daydream and the rest will take care of
itself he seems to say. Is there a lot of day-dreaming in Oxford?
Llosa pauses to consider. “There are all kinds of people
here, some curious and interesting, some who know a lot but they
haven’t seen the world too much.“ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004
Knowing and seeing
