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 allegedly trying to save.
The Feast of the Goat is an unflinching portrait of the aging and impotent Dominican “anti-communist” strongman Rafael Trujillo, and the petty and personal humiliations he used to prop up his own alleged greatness.
The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta novelizes a hopeless revolution launched by starry-eyed communist revolutionaries against the dictator ruling 1950s Peru. It ends in disaster when the oppressed Indians it was launched on behalf of prove stubbornly unmotivated by Trotskyist doctrine.
Llosa was a man with deep ideological convictions himself.
His early political activism put him firmly on the socialist left. The devolution of Cuba’s revolution into abject authoritarianism sparked a conversion to liberalism in the vein of Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek.
He’d eventually run for president of Peru in 1990 as a free market reformer—and lose to soon-to-be dictator Alberto Fujimori.
Nevertheless, Llosa’s novels are remarkably unpolemical.
Other 20th-century libertarian writers like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein were never afraid of commandeering their characters’ voices for a political lecture or two. Llosa was always much more interested in the interpersonal and psychological struggles that ultimately drove politics.
He was a better novelist for this individualism. The bourgeois agnostic was able to find a sympathetic humanity in zealous Christian peasants pining for the return of Brazil’s emperor. The arch-capitalist managed to relate to communist revolutionaries taking to the jungle.
Curiously, the whiggish optimism about the possibility, if not inevitability, of liberating social change that Llosa expressed in his political writings rarely showed up in his fiction. Semi-autobiographical sex comedies aside, his novels are dark, tragic, and backward-looking.
Nevertheless, Llosa’s belief in the futility of power politics lent itself to a view that a justice of a sort awaited anyone sufficiently dedicated to obtaining power.
His penultimate novel, Harsh Times, follows the Guatemalan military officers who overthrow the country’s democratically elected president, only to fall victim to subsequent coups and leftist reprisals.
In a dissection of Llosa’s legacy, Compact‘s Geoff Shullenberger describes him as “the great neoliberal novelist.” It’s a term Llosa would have hated.
“To say ‘neoliberal’ is the same as saying ‘semiliberal’ or ‘pseudoliberal.’ It is pure nonsense,” he wrote in a 2001 essay for Reason. “One is either in favor of liberty or against it, but one cannot be semi-in-favor or pseudo-in-favor of liberty, just as one cannot be ‘semipregnant,’ ‘semiliving,’ or ‘semidead.'”
Shullenberger’s essay, and much of the other commentary following Llosa’s death, focuses on his endorsement of various right-wing candidates in Latin America in recent years—allegedly a marked shift away from his prior support for freedom in all its forms.
These claims are nothing new. Pick a point in Llosa’s career, and you’ll find plenty of essays from left-wing critics arguing the author’s professed liberalism had at last given way to right-wing reaction.
The accusations are hard to square with even his late-career work.
His aforementioned 2018 novel Harsh Times offers a remarkably sympathetic (and arguably ahistorical) assessment of Guatemala’s land reforms of the 1950s as ultimately an effort to turn the country into a middle-class capitalist democracy in the mold of the United States.
The one time I saw him speak at a Cato Institute event in 2017, on the heels of Donald Trump’s first election, his remarks focused on the dangers of populism on both the left and the right.
His very late-in-life, and very begrudging, endorsements of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro or Peru’s Keiko Fujimori as lesser evils than their far-left opponents hardly erase his legacy as one of the erudite defenders of freedom.
Indeed, one could argue that to the degree Llosa did look more favorably on right-wing candidates in his later years, this was simply a reflection of reality.
For the first several decades of Llosa’s literary career, Latin America was one of the poorest places on the globe, where dictatorship was the norm, and civil war was common and bloody.
In fits and starts, this has given way to a continent of middle-income market economies and real, if flawed, democracies that have slowly made more room for economic growth and personal freedoms.
The countries most immune to this trend are the left-wing regimes of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. It’s hard to imagine how any classical liberal wouldn’t look with alarm at far-left candidates promising similar programs for their countries.
Llosa had a keen understanding that while freedom offered promise for everyone, it was also a fragile thing. The people who loved liberty wholly and for its own sake were always a minority. Past traumas would always leave their mark. The future is still unwritten. RIP.
