Opinion How clean is Llosas Nobel?
Mario Vargas Llosa is a step in the right literary direction for a politically correct award
We are thankful that the Swedes have spared us the labour of digging up for ourselves,with the gradually exploding information and intensifying insights from the eyes and the ears of the Internet,another obscurity from the morass that goes by the name of world literature. Pardon the prejudice,but Im glad this isnt going to be about a South Korean or Chinese dissident that Beijing might have invested heavily against. On second thoughts,I might have been spared the pain. Having heavily invested myself for the most part of the decade,emotionally (the intellectual bit long having lost sight of itself),in the reading publics longstanding hopes for the Big One for Philip Mortified Roth,Mario Vargas Llosa must be as good as it gets.
That still leaves out Carlos Fuentes,but Latin American literature returns to the Nobel high table after exactly 20 years. The last Latin soul to get the literature prize was Mexican poet Octavio Paz,of literary and diplomatic associations with India,in 1990. If Horace Engdahl found contemporary American literature provincial and parochial,did the Academy think up some other monstrous reason for ignoring Latin America for this long? Or has Peter Englund,Engdahls successor as the permanent secretary,just announced an unblinkered and more generous Academy?
Well,nobodys going to complain about Llosa. Except that he should have got the Nobel at least after The Feast of the Goat (2000,original publication). Which brings us to the choice of Harold Pinter in 2005 undoubtedly Pinter was Nobel-worthy,but about three decades earlier. And a choice the Academy will hopefully be made to account for in the hell where itll go Elfriede Jelinek,2004. Add to that Doris Lessings (2007) Pinter-lite anti-Americanism,and the overt politicisation of the literature Nobel,the Academys unabashedly extra-aesthetic preferences,are marched before us every October as a hackneyed parody of a parody. Even Herta Müller,still an unknown in most climes,is suspect if Messrs Engdahl (2009 was his last Nobel supervision) needed someone to
remember 1989 and the Iron Curtain by,what about Milan Kundera or,dare one say,Ivan Klíma?
But perhaps that was just as well. Roth is in august company of the Nobel ignored Joyce,Proust,Kafka (Borges would never have got it). And Messrs Kundera-Klíma have been saved from a instant recall they would have hated themselves for. Thats why,reflexively,the timing at least is questioned,if not the recipient: Pamuk (2006) in Turkish trouble,Naipaul (2001) a month post-9/11. Thus we return to the man of this Nobel moment: Mario Vargas Llosa,arch-novelist,essayist,critic,journalist,failed politician. In candid terms,Herr Englund,how clean have you made Llosas glory?
Llosa is the antidote to Gabriel García Márquez,and the pivotal alternative of the Latin American Boom. Thats as much about style and technique,and the duel between Magic Realism and realism, as about politics. The waters here run deep. In 2007,a 1976 photograph of a black-eyed Márquez surfaced,giving the lie to those who denied the details and intensity of the parting of ways. As with Boom literature,that black eye had multiple symbolic significances.
Mario Vargas Llosa,with one of the most penetrating and perceptive of theses on his one-time friend and mentor (García Márquez: Story of a Deicide,1971),began on the left and swung to the right,losing the presidential election to Alberto Fujimori in 1990,the last year a Latin American writer won the Nobel. He calls his politics liberal,and thats been a long march from his communist sympathies. Its also the kind of journey Márquez would never make,involving at its core a denunciation of the Revolutionary Cuba that the Boom once so admired. For Llosa,Castros imprisonment of poet Heberto Padilla was an assault on his more fundamental belief in individual freedom of conscience. The other matter at the heart of Llosas transformation was the Uchuraccay investigation into the massacre of eight journalists in 1983,three years after the start of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) uprising a horror that also produced a novel,Death in the Andes (1993).
From the early Modernist seriousness of The Green House (1966) through the distinctly Post-Modernist playful lightness of the middle works such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977),to Llosas later novels (and The War of the End of the World,1981,will go down as his most ambitious,even if its greatness is subject to opinion),is a trajectory Latin America cannot match in richness and surprises. Llosa is the archetype of the Boom genius successfully transiting to the Post Boom hall of fame. As for the Academy,one last question: after years of the most nauseating political correctness,no matter how right,why have you picked a political conservative? Does Swedens,the utopia of social democracy,lurch rightwards have anything,any thing,to do with it?
Half-a-century hence,with the literature Nobel a mere curiosity,theyll seek these Octobers to see how the
literature prize spoke,only,of the Academy itself.
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
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