2023-11-05 15:00:00
Mario Vargas Llosa, I Dedicate My Silence to You, Madrid, Alfaguara, 2023, 312 pages, ISBN
You can read here, and exclusively, the good pages in French of the new — and last — novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, I dedicate my silence to him.
All his life, in his writing, his actions, his words, Mario Vargas Llosa always felt like a fish in water. Is it because you began to make a living from your pen following adolescence? To have felt recognized and to have been applauded at twenty years old from his first text: this short story “Le Défi” (ambitious program) awarded by The French Review who offers him the first trip – to Paris, no less! ─ of his long and permanent nomadism? Journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, academic, what has he not tried and done? After his failure in 1990 in the presidential elections of Peru, faithful to his vocation as a penman – as Flaubert, his literary model, to whom he paid homage in a masterful essay, defined himself, The perpetual orgy ─, he began to write his political memoirs and initially titled them “The Fish Out of Water”, meaning by this that he was, throughout his unhappy campaign, “out of his element” .
But by scratching within himself the reasons for this commitment, of his stubbornness in fighting for freedom, and in the dizziness, perhaps, of his failure, he sees his childhood and the trauma of his ten years: the discovery of a father he thought had disappeared, and with him the irruption of brutal domination and tyranny. He then glimpses the functioning of the universe: force and arbitrariness invade the scene, with their procession of violence, injustice and corruption occupy the place, and the only possible attitude for him, for man, for his survival is revolt, in other words the conquest of his freedom. This existentialist schema, eminently Camusian, then led him to modify the title of this work which became Fish in the water, and which reestablishes in him his complex personality as a writer, a public man, a citizen engaged in action, writing and speaking. The one whose portrait he will paint in the admirable man who speaks, where he disguises himself as an Amazonian tribe shaman.
All his life, in his writing, his actions, his words, Mario Vargas Llosa always felt like a fish in water.
Albert Bensoussan
From his first stories ─ The Caids ─ and his first novel ─ The city and the dogs ─, which is the chronicle of “the childhood of a chef” (named following Sartre’s short story, with its primordial impact, and on which Vargas Llosa, following his final novel, I dedicate my silence to you, intends to write an essay, testamentary), he installs violence on stage and, as a corollary, the rebellion of the individual. This is to outline the functioning of the modern novel, as defined by Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel : confrontation of Prometheus with the Gods, of Sisyphus with the rock, of the child-puppy with the pack of right-thinking people, of the son with the Father, of the “Rebellious Man” with Society. Of The Green House has Pantaleón and the visitors ─ with prostitution as the keystone ─, of Conversation at La Catedral ─ settling scores with the father, the tyrant, the dictator – to Who is Palomino Molero? ─ of which incest is the starting point, more pleasantly treated in La Tante Julia et le scribouillardand more in Praise of the stepmother ─, from The Doomsday War has The Goat Festival and to Wild Times ─ works full of blood, sound and fury, hallucinatory stories of dictatorships ─, of Paradise — a little further au Dream of the Celtic ─ two novels regarding the utopian dream, the Greek οὐτόπος, this place of nowhere, whose funerals we never stop celebrating, in the fratricidal frenzy ─, passing through Twists and turns of the naughty girl – crazy love novel – and Puppies ─ technical prowess and novel of mutilated childhood ─, he develops his vision of a society where nothing is ever acquired, where everything is only a difficult and cruel game, power rivalries, bloody conflicts, violence and abuses, where life is never anything but survival, by adding this fundamental element, which he draws from his intimate self: the devastated, emasculated, raped, flouted, betrayed childhood, whose redemption can only come from lucid analysis, confession, and writing. More than any other writer of the 20th-21st century, and undoubtedly in the wake of Sartre and Camus, whom he knew and admired, Mario Vargas Llosa believed in the saving – redemptive – virtue of literature.
His work, comprising around fifty fictions (novels, theater, short stories, chronicles) and several hundred articles brought together in essays with significant titles: Against all odds, A Barbarian among the civilized, Truth through lies, The Stakes of Freedom, The Language of Passion, Letters to a young novelist, Of swords and utopias, The Civilization of the spectacle, The Call of the Tribe to which are added great and beautiful literary essays, on Flaubert – The perpetual orgy ─, sur Victor Hugo ─ The Temptation of the Impossible ─, sur le Péruvien José María Arguedas – The archaic utopia – ou sur l’Uruguayen Juan Carlos Onetti – Journey to fiction ─, without forgetting his learned analyzes of painting, George Grosz et Fernando Botero: A Sumptuous Abundance, thus weaves the threads of the total story, of the accomplished representation of the “Grand theater of the world”, of the permanent questioning of our universe and our history. With, with age helping and wisdom coming, an ironic, sardonic, sarcastic look at the human creature possessed by his demons: Panlaleón and don Rigoberto, Pedro Camacho and the Advisor, Adriana and Dionisio, Lucrecia and Fonfon, Urania and Otilia, Ricardo and Roger Casement, Johnny Abbes and Miss Guatemala, to name just a few names from the immense gallery of characters. But, far from paralyzing him, this lucidity leads to a liberating action in him. It is always, moreover, regarding conquering one’s “sovereignty”, in the sense given to it by Georges Bataille, to which he prefaced History of the eye, in contempt of corrupt man, as he understood when translating A heart under a cassock, by Rimbaud, illuminating it with his magnificent preface: “Rimbaud the corrupter”. This is, perhaps, the key to the famous Vargasllosian “liberalism”, often controversial, sometimes poorly understood, and which, far from political divisions, neither left nor right — and its center “is not in the middle” , would add André Malraux – and definitively wringing the neck of Manichaeism in the Republic of Letters, which he has continued to stigmatize for its compromises and hypocrisies, simply places “free will” in the hands of man. And good luck to him! The writer, for his part, his hand sheathed in courage and his pen dipped in fortitude – or, as his scribbler Pedro Camacho ironically puts it – “broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, mind full of goodness and righteousness” ─, has always known how to cope, in any situation, and at the very crux of dilemmas.
More than any other writer of the 20th-21st century, and undoubtedly in the wake of Sartre and Camus, whom he knew and admired, Mario Vargas Llosa believed in the saving – redemptive – virtue of literature.
Albert Bensoussan
Following the chimerical thread: exit from the labyrinth, following the annihilation of the Demon, in Lituma in the Andesquest for Utopia – always an impossible dream – for Flora Tristan who, six years before Marx, preached the union of workers and women from all countries, quest for a distant Paradise (from Brittany to Tahiti, then to the Marquesas) at the home of his grandson, Paul Gauguin, we have reached the last days of The Scribe ─ the scribeas he ironically named his Pedro Camacho, in La Tante Julia et le scribouillard) ─ with, for the moment, a disillusioned observation which never begins or hinders the initial momentum, nor extinguishes the Promethean fire: Paradise is always a little further away. So far from elsewhere that the ultimate avatar of his creatures – or let’s say his Golems, as they have become living and evanescent myths -, Roger Casement, unlike his Gauguin who thought he would find him at the most extreme end of the ‘Far East – following Tahiti, the Marquesas, and following the Marquesas, Japan… except that it disappeared too soon -, returns from his decades as Consul-adventurer in Africa (the Congo) and America (the Amazon , Peru) with only one utopian aim left: Ireland, and that is where the Celtic Dream will be shattered. This man will never stop, the writer will never stop his inkwell, because in the wake of Victor Hugo, is he not also an “ocean man”, a river of words, a torrent of writing, a storm under a skull? Still, following receiving his Nobel Prize, Vargas Llosa told the press: “I have many projects on the table, and well advanced.” And what followed reassured us. The winds, his latest story published in French (L’Herne, 2023) is a meditation on old age – the end of the world? — full of melancholy, without losing any of the vigor of the style or its penetrating gaze.
Now that he has been elected to the French Academy (2021), how will he surprise us once more
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