Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa - University of Nebraska Press

Introduction Raquel Chang-­R odríguez and Carlos Riobó

The essays included in this collection are framed by Mario Vargas Llosa’s visits to the City College of New York (ccny), the creation of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa, or Mario Vargas Llosa Chair (2013) in his honor, and the interests of the Peruvian author in reading and books. Throughout these years, ccny has been the site of gatherings with the Nobel Laureate, his friends, literary critics, writers, and the public.

They have all enriched our community as well as the understanding of Vargas Llosa’s work. Written by Vargas Llosa himself as well as by novelists and literary critics who have been associated with the Cátedra, the essays contained here comprise the twelve chapters of this book and are distributed in four sections. The first section, “In Conversation with the 2010 Nobel Laureate,” includes two lectures by Vargas Llosa and his exchange with another Peruvian author, Alonso Cueto, writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra in 2015. The contributions of Efraín Kristal, J. J. Armas Marcelo, and Alonso Cueto comprise the second section, “Life and Literature,” and illustrate the critical role of literature in Vargas Llosa’s biography. In “History, Authority and Ideology,” the third section, two key contemporary Spanish American writers, Carlos Franz and Mónica Lavín, and the critic Ángel L. Estévez analyze the Nobel Laureate’s major contributions to fiction. In the fourth and final section, “Other Tales,” Carlos Riobó, attends to The Storyteller (El hablador, 1987) an understudied novel; Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez examines Vargas Llosa’s early appreciation of Nicaraguan xi

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 11

3/6/20 10:14 AM

poet Rubén Darío; and Robert Dumont recalls Vargas Llosa’s inspirations when in the New York Public Library. What follows offers a narrative of Mario Vargas Llosa’s relationship to the City College of New York and the circumstances in which most of these essays were originally presented.

For over forty years, Mario Vargas Llosa has been a significant presence in the intellectual life of the City College of New York. His first visit was in 1977 at the invitation of the Latin American Studies Program to offer the Jacob C. Saposnekow Memorial Lecture. The writer discussed in Spanish the “inside” story of the genesis and evolution of his novel Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978). This talk, in translation, is the first chapter of our book. In it the Peruvian author reviews the decisions he took and the revisions he made in order to produce a text criticizing militarism through parody and humor. In the spring of 1993, Vargas Llosa was invited to lecture on our campus again.

He had published yet another magisterial book—­Carta de batalla por “Tirant lo Blanc” (A defense of Tirant lo Blanc, 1991)—­about the chivalric novel written in Catalan by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell and first published in 1490. Various aspects of his lecture dealt with the importance of reviving this forgotten work and his efforts to do so. The audience loved Vargas Llosa’s evocation of its distant chivalric characters, knights, and maidens, and their daring deeds. A well-­remembered example: one of the ladies had such fair skin that when she drank red wine you could see it flowing through the veins of her neck!

Mario Vargas Llosa returned to the City College several years later after he had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. On November 18, 2010, the City College of New York awarded him its highest degree, Doctor of Letters honoris causa. The ceremony was held in the Great Hall, which had been inaugurated in 1907 by another acclaimed writer, Mark Twain.

As President Vincent Boudreau reminded us in his investiture speech of March 29, 2018, the creator of Huckleberry Finn and many other literary characters felt that America needed a degree in citizenship and that ccny was the “most appropriate place for that degree to be offered.”

Mario Vargas Llosa’s presidential lecture on that day, “The Return of the xii Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 12

3/6/20 10:14 AM

2. Mario Vargas Llosa entering the Great Hall at the City College of New York to receive the Doctor of Letters honoris causa. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

Monsters,” is reminiscent of the concerns and aspirations expressed by the great North American writer more than a century before. Vargas Llosa’s presentation, chapter 2 in this book, outlines the importance of mutual respect—­particularly respect for the other, for difference—­when seeking peace in a global world marked by pervasive prejudice, cataclysmic conflict, and mass displacement of populations. Vargas Llosa concluded his lecture with the story of the happy coexistence of a hippopotamus and a turtle and shared its moral: “Is it not a disgrace that two animals belonging to species as distinct as turtles and hippopotamuses could coexist, relate to one another, and love one another, whereas stupid human bipeds savagely kill each other as soon as they discover frequently insignificant differences between them?”

In view of Mario Vargas Llosa’s literary prominence and his connection to the college, in 2013 ccny approved the creation of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. The first of its kind in the United States, it is housed Introduction xiii

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 13

3/6/20 10:14 AM

at its Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures.

The ccny Cátedra shares similar objectives with other Vargas Llosa Cátedras throughout the world: encouraging and promoting the study of contemporary literature; fostering an interest in reading and writing; supporting budding Ibero-­American writers; advancing the knowledge and dissemination of Vargas Llosa’s works; developing technological innovation models for education, research, and the dissemination of culture; and cooperating with prestigious institutions worldwide in order to promote new, related projects. One world institution with which our Cátedra has collaborated consistently is the Instituto Cervantes New York (icny). Thanks to the excellent relationship we have shared with its former executive director, Ignacio Olmos, the Cátedra holds one session and a public lecture in the icny’s elegant and renowned facilities every year.

3. Mario Vargas Llosa with Ignacio Olmos, former director of the Instituto Cervantes of New York. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

At the inaugural ceremony of the Cátedra in City College’s Great Hall on November 4, 2013, Mario Vargas Llosa—­in the presence of ccny president Lisa S. Coico and J. J. Armas Marcelo, director of the international consortium of Mario Vargas Llosa Cátedras—­signed the agreement.

Then Professor Efraín Kristal offered the inaugural lecture, “Discreet and Injudicious Heroes in the Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa,” which is chapter 4 of this book. With intelligence and flair he commented on the singular characters created by the Peruvian author: Santiago Zavala in Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975); Lituma in Lituma en los Andes (1993; Death in the Andes, 1996); Flora Tristán in El paraíso en la otra esquina (2003; The Way to Paradise, 2004); and Roger Casement in El sueño del celta (2010; The Dream of the Celt, 2012). He described the sense of doom they feel as they analyze the social order—­or rather disorder—­and their inability to meet the challenges they face. Kristal contrasted these characters with Felícito Yanaqué, the xiv Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 14

3/6/20 10:14 AM

4. Carlos Riobó, chair, Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, offering welcoming remarks during the inauguration (2013) of the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. Courtesy of the City College of New York.

protagonist of El héroe discreto (2013; The Discreet Hero, 2015) who is completely different: someone ready to face circumstances and to cope with the world as it is. In his lecture Kristal offered a perceptive analysis of Vargas Llosa’s ability to create a narrative plot that leads us through the many events of his novels. His presentation, which opens the second section of this book, elicited many questions and laid the foundation for seminars and lectures to come. Attended by students, faculty, and New Yorkers from many walks of life and framed by the Great Hall, it was a memorable evening at the City College.

Since its inception in 2013, the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa has offered seminars and brought to the campus major Hispanic writers. Vargas Llosa again visited his ccny Cátedra in October 2015, engaging with students and faculty and participating in a conversation with visiting writer-­in-­residence Alonso Cueto. Since in that year the Hispanic world was commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the second part of Introduction xv

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 15

3/6/20 10:14 AM

Cervantes’s universally acclaimed novel Don Quixote, the seminar offered through the Cátedra was dedicated to Cervantes’s masterpiece and its influence on Vargas Llosa’s fiction. Cueto and Vargas Llosa engaged in a conversation, reproduced here in its entirety as chapter 3, that, while having Don Quixote at its center, extended to North American literature and William Faulkner as well as to Peruvian literature and the surrealist poet César Moro—­a secondary character, by the way, in Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros. In his lecture, “Vargas Llosa and Cervantes: Modern Knights,” which is chapter 6 of this book, Cueto expands on the Spanish writer’s influence on the Peruvian author’s fiction, particularly through its characters and the moral code they share. In 2014 the novelist J. J. Armas Marcelo was the first writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra. His keynote presentation, reproduced here in chapter 5, reviewed significant events in the life of Mario Vargas Llosa while underscoring his constant passion for writing, for books. The essays by Kristal, Armas Marcelo, and Cueto are grouped together in the section titled “Life and Literature,” which shows how the latter shapes the former in Mario Vargas Llosa’s biography.

Carlos Franz—­the first Latin American (Chile) to win the Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa Prize for Best Spanish Language Novel published in the years 2014–­16 in Spanish America and Spain­—w ­ as the writer-­in-­residence at ccny in our Cátedra’s fourth year (2016). In Franz’s keynote lecture, his choice of Vargas Llosa’s early novels (the first five) allowed him to focus on the Nobel winner’s political trajectory through a study of key characters. Franz’s essay, “A Poetics of Freedom,” chapter 7 of this book, revisits La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966), La casa verde (1966; The Green House, 1968), Conversación en La Catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, 1978), and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1982) to discuss their protagonists and their relationship to liberal ideas. Franz also traces Vargas Llosa’s political pronouncements through his literary career and shows how he revised his way of thinking while always keeping true to his liberal philosophy. In 2017 the Mexican writer Mónica Lavín became xvi Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 16

3/6/20 10:14 AM

writer-­in-­residence of the Cátedra Vargas Llosa. Her lecture is this book’s chapter 8, “The Eye of the Beholder.” Lavín relies on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Vargas Llosa’s interest in that novel to analyze the formal development of perspective and characters in La fiesta del Chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001), about the Dominican ruler Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Lavín identifies Vargas Llosa’s ability to inhabit the perspectives of his main characters as “the organizing principle of his novel.” She refers to this power as “the crystal-­ball effect” when she attempts to explain narrative art to her students. Her essay concludes that Vargas Llosa is able to tease apart Trujillo’s discourses of dominance—­his unchecked power—­by simultaneously creating a framework of “expansion, psychological time, and counterpoint.” This section of the book is rounded out by the literary critic Ángel L. Estévez, whose essay, “Historical Fact/ Historical Fiction in The Feast of the Goat,” is chapter 9. A ccny faculty member and regular participant of the Cátedra, Estévez responds in his essay to the immediate reception of The Feast of the Goat, with “special emphasis on the dynamics between the intertwining of history and literature, with regard to the historical novel.” Through an exploration of the conventions and formal limits of history and literature, and a review of the positive and negative receptions of the novel, the essay delves into the thorny issue of truth within fiction, a matter with which Vargas Llosa himself, as a writer of historical fiction, has wrestled in his own essay, “The Truth of Lies.”

In the fourth section of this volume, “Other Tales,” Carlos Riobó and Raquel Chang-­Rodríguez analyze, respectively, one of Vargas Llosa’s less-­explored novels and the writer’s early attraction to the poetry of Rubén Darío. Riobó’s chapter, “The Storyteller: Narrating Latin America from Europe,” considers the 1987 novel El hablador (The Storyteller, 1989) in the light of the literary tradition known as the “novela de la selva,” or jungle narrative. Riobó explores Latin America’s quandary in desiring to know itself through its indigenous cultures while simultaneously wanting to refashion itself in the image of Europe. At the same time, Europe, in turn, was embarking on a voyage into the developing world in order to Introduction xvii

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 17

3/6/20 10:14 AM

find a simulacrum of its own origins. In chapter 11, Chang-­Rodríguez connects the Nicaraguan master of Modernismo, Rubén Darío, and the young Vargas Llosa in her “Rubén Darío through Mario Vargas Llosa’s Looking Glass.” As it turns out, Vargas Llosa wrote his undergraduate thesis at the National University of San Marcos on Darío and his style.

Through an analysis of the Peruvian’s study of the Nicaraguan poet’s early works, Chang-­Rodríguez traces Vargas Llosa’s burgeoning interest in the craft of writing. We understand his insightful study of Darío’s initial period while getting a glimpse of the young author’s development of the fundamentals of writing. Recognizing Vargas Llosa’s love for libraries—­in his travels he has visited the main bibliotecas of major cities—­and the fundamental role they have played in his development as a writer, the book devotes its concluding chapter 12 to “Mario Vargas Llosa at the New York Public Library” by Robert Dumont, a fiction writer and former librarian at that bastion of reading and research freely open to all. We get a rare look into the Peruvian Nobel’s craft, as Dumont shares with us some of Vargas Llosa’s writerly idiosyncrasies and colorful anecdotes of his time researching in the Rose Main Reading Room for one of his novels in the mid-­1980s and again in 2008. An aspiring fiction writer himself at the time, Dumont recounts how he struck up a friendship with Vargas Llosa over book requests and lunches and received invaluable advice from the master about his use of vasos comunicantes (communicating vessels) and other literary concerns.

We trust that readers will both enjoy and benefit from going through the essays collected in this retrospective of Mario Vargas Llosa’s creative activity at the City College of New York, as well as the events of his Cátedra. The various contributions place literature at the center of the cultural debate, take us to different worlds, endeavor to make accessible some of the complexities of Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s writings and to underscore his constant passion for books. Readers will come away with a greater understanding of Vargas Llosa’s creative process as well as a deeper appreciation for the impact his body of work has had on other great contemporary writers throughout the world. At the core of the City xviii Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 18

3/6/20 10:14 AM

5. Students at the inaugural seminar of the 2014 Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa.

Courtesy of Ángel L. Estévez.

College of New York’s mission is accessibility to an excellent education that will open doors and transform the lives of its students.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s close relationship with the college and his Cátedra’s development there have gone a long way toward providing the level of excellence and accessibility our students so deserve. This book is a testament to that as well.

Introduction xix

Chang-Rodriguez&Riobo.indd 19

3/6/20 10:15 AM