Tribute: The art and politics of Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa, a prominent author of the Latin American Boom, evolved politically from a socialist ally of Castro to a supporter of neoliberalism.
Had Mario Vargas Llosa stopped writing in the late 1970s, he would still have been acclaimed not just as one of the premier authors of the Latin American Boom, but as one of the greatest from any country.
His novels like The Time of the Hero (1963), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977) upended conventions with their treatment of themes and use of techniques such as multiple perspectives, streams of consciousness, and blending dialogue and narration. But Vargas Llosa kept writing as his beliefs kept evolving. The person who once fearlessly exposed power structures became their unlikely ally.
In his youth, he was influenced by socialist and Marxist ideas, in common with other Latin American intellectuals. He supported the 1959 Cuban revolution as a harbinger of progressive change, but grew critical of the Castro regime after the imprisonment of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. Famously, he accused former ally Gabriel Garcia Marquez of being “a courtesan writer of Fidel Castro”, the start of a spat that turned ugly and personal with a notorious 1976 punch-up in Mexico City.
Vargas Llosa’s rightward turn grew more pronounced over the years, and he became a full-blown supporter of free-market policies. In particular, he opposed Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s bank nationalisation scheme, founding the libertarian Movimiento Libertad party to launch his own presidential campaign in 1990. (He lost to Alberto Fujimori.) By now, he had become completely identified with neoliberal reforms as a way of rejecting the authoritarianism of, as he claimed, both the right and the left.
The question is: how was Vargas Llosa’s political shift reflected in his fiction? Did it become more ideological and less compelling? Among his early works, The Time of the Hero (1963) was a scathing account of hierarchy and oppression in a Peruvian military academy; and Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) was a bleak portrayal of corruption under the Manuel Odría dictatorship.
A mocking of ideological rigidity gradually became apparent, even in a largely comic work like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). Another important novel, The War of the End of the World (1981), about a 19th century Brazilian rebellion, also rejected absolutism, whether left or right.
Later works put more emphasis on individual freedoms and the dangers of populism. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984) was a fictionalised portrayal of a leftist revolutionary’s failure, and Death in the Andes (1993), on the Shining Path guerrillas, contrasted both state and revolutionary violence with “civilised” order.
Similarly, The Feast of the Goat (2000) condemned Trujillo’s dictatorship, and served as an implicit warning against all sorts of authoritarianism. In this way, even the novels after his rightward shift avoided simplistic formulas, critiquing corruption on all sides. Detractors, however, claimed that they lacked the anarchic energy of his best work, with The Bad Girl (2006) in particular being dismissed as self-indulgent escapism.
It’s in Vargas Llosa’s non-fiction, though, that his ideological shifts become more apparent. While his early essays discussed literature as an instrument of social change and revolutionary idealism, he later argued that such subversive power depended on personal freedom, not collective revolution. Freedom, he said, should primarily be won through markets and individualism.
His essays on literary heroes such as Flaubert emphasised their independent views, and he dismissed Marquez’s use of magical realism as escapist, as opposed to a “realist” approach. In his newspaper columns, he lauded Thatcher/Reagan policies, privatisation, and globalisation, and framed his unsuccessful presidential bid as an embrace of Hayek-style free-market doctrines. Later, he courted controversy by supporting figures such as Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, which seemed to be at odds with his earlier anti-dictatorial stance.
Thus, while his fiction retained much of the earlier irony and ambiguity, his non-fiction became more strident and explicit. It often attacked those he thought of as intellectual adversaries and sided with thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill. In Europe and America, this liberal turn added to his prestige; in Latin America, on the other hand, former allies accused him of betraying the Left’s vision of social justice.
When he won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2010, the Swedish Academy’s citation praised “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”. This was a diplomatic way of calling attention to the achievements of both the young iconoclast and the older conservative. One could argue that all of Vargas Llosa’s work springs from a distrust of unchecked power, and that his art remained political even when his politics weren’t especially artful.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.
