Mario Vargas Llosa and Culture
Vargas Llosa, Mario. Notes
on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society. Ed. and trans. John King,
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015.
We have had overmuch talk about the crisis of the humanities
, and Mario Vargas Llosa has cleverly offered us an alternative ----
the crisis of culture. He has
dusted off and polished the subject matter of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869, 1875) to relieve us of boredom. In so doing, he doesn't invite us to jog
through the Victorian realm of Arnold's sweetness and light; instead, he
invites us to surf the contemporary ocean of chaos. His jeu d'esprit is not cheap.
But thanks to John King's lucid translation of La civilización del espectáculo (2012), we can afford the price of
the ticket to gawk at the cage wherein Vargas Llosa has sought habitation as if
he is truly a Kafkaesque hunger artist.
Shortly after Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for
Literature, the Spanish monarch bestowed him with the entitlement to be
addressed as "Ilustrisimo Señor Marqués de Vargas Llosa," a gift that
has no doubt improved the quality of Spanish nobility. Being an integral part of Spanish spectacle,
Vargas Llosa employs his new aristocracy to lecture us on the death of
culture. Like earlier efforts to
announce the Death of God, the Death of the Author, the Death of the Novel, and
the Death of Death, this recent broadcast is momentarily enthralling. Yet, the attempt to persuade us that Walter
Benjamin and Karl Popper can serve "as evidence that however rarified the
air might become, and life turn against them, dinosaurs can manage to survive
and be useful in difficult times" (226) ultimately fails. We are amused
but not persuaded when we notice the limits of Vargas Llosa's neoliberalism.
He begins the collage of essays with a swift review of T. S.
Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture (1948), a modernist work that anticipates the postmodernism
displayed in Notes on the Death of Culture.
To be fair, we admit that reminders of what Eliot said regarding
culture, the individual, the group or class, and the whole society are
necessary for specifying the character of Western civilization. It is from Eliot that Vargas Llosa derives
the notion that the democratizing force of education is fracturing and
destroying "higher culture."
In this regard, he is in synch with Allan Bloom's lamentations in The Closing of the American Mind (1987),
implying that membership in the elite is requisite for acquiring true knowledge. Yet, the idea of knowledge promoted by Eliot,
Bloom, and Vargas Llosa is suspect and much in need of deconstructive
unpacking. Certain kinds of indigenous
knowledge (which might be more respected
in advanced physics than in the sprawling humanities) seems to be beyond their
comprehension.
Vargas Llosa hints at this possibility in his remarks about
George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle:
Some Notes Towards the Re-definition
of Culture (1971). Steiner
attributed Eliot's failure to acknowledge that the carnage of World Wars I and
II was an integral element of culture to anti-Semitism, and Vargas Llosa is
uncomfortable with Steiner's alleged belief that postmodern society is
dominated by science and technology. He seeks a little comfort in Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle (1967) but actually
seems to find a more authentic comfort in La
cultura-mundo: Respuesta a una sociedad desorientada (2010) by Gilles
Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy and the best comfort of all in Frederic Martel's Mainstream (2010). After dancing in English, French and Spanish,
Vargas Llosa must conclude that pre-twenty-first-century culture was designed
to transcend time but that post-whatever cultures evaporate with noteworthy
swiftness in their own times.
However much we applaud the performance, we are left with
the enduring problem of how theories of
culture are merely incomplete speculations, particularly coming from the
imagination of a writer who apparently is uninformed about what W. E. B.
DuBois, Lu Xun, Frantz Fanon , and Edward Said have written about the life of
culture. Vargas Llosa is right in
claiming that entertainment is a universal passion. He is rather naïve in thinking that Benjamin
and Popper, whom we admit are very important in a long parade of committed
writers, show us "by writing, one can resist adversity, act and influence
history"(226). He aristocratically
glosses over the implacable dread of material suffering and dying in global
civilization as he makes a trenchant critique of our deadly passivity. We may like the spectacle of Mario Vargas
Llosa as Don Quixote, but we are not obligated to believe and dream the impossible
dream, to confuse the image with the actuality.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 17, 2016
