At the age of 87 and with the accumulation of practically all the awards and recognitions -except sainthood–, the Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa seems to be in a moment of very special lucidity: is going back, intellectually, to Jean-Paul Sartrethe French intellectual whom he had banned back in 1975 to then take the path of Albert Camus.
The three authors set in Europe and America -much less– the great intellectual territory of the commitment-distance dialectic since the mid-fifties of the last century. With moral, political and intellectual maturity, the return of Vargas Llosa to Sartre would form part of his pessimistic perception of the current world. The break with Sartre was ostentatious with the publication of the book Between Sartre and Camus in 1981–with texts from 1961 to 1981–, but it implied a taking of an earthly position by the Latin American-Spanish intellectual in the face of complex reality.
Like all intellectuals, Vargas Llosa was playing with his positions: in 1990 decided to sidestep his task as an intellectual and ran as a candidate for the presidency of Peru trying to show that politics was not the game of treacherous mirrors, but that it should be transparent with the honesty of ideas. However, he was defeated by the populism of Alberto Fujimori, who soon declared himself dictator and plunged the country into the pit of moral and political decomposition.
In the facts, Vargas Llosa never withdrew from literature. His book-testimony The Fish in the Water (1993) He turned his political experience into an outstanding narrative that mixes literature, the reconstruction of characters, politics, and testimony. This literary model had already been put into practice in 1977 in Aunt Julia and the Writer.
He Sartre-Camus intellectual conflict that redefined the relationship of writers with reality broke out in 1952 with the debate between these two French thinkers around the book The Rebel Man, by Camus (1951). In those years, Vargas Llosa lived in Peru, but he was already heading towards Europe, where he arrived at the end of the fifties, although involved in the conflict over the reality-fiction dialectic. Vargas Llosa was a member of the Communist Party of Peruwhich led him to maintain unconditional support for the Cuban revolution throughout the sixties.
The Sartre-Camus polemic found precisely in Cuba the turning point: in 1971, the Castro regime arrested and tortured the poet Heberto Padilla into declaring himself a counterrevolutionary; and after a very direct participation in the intellectual and personal support for the Cuban revolution, Vargas Llosa was the pivot to write two letters of protest that achieved the signature of the support of the most important European intellectuals, a fact that meant the cancellation of the support of progressive intellectuals to the cause of Fidel Castro.
The intellectual breakdown of Vargas Llosa with Sartre occurred on the Cuban stage, but on a personal level it happened precisely in December 1975 when published in the Mexican magazine Plural de Octavio Paz his essay “Albert Camus and the morality of limits”, with a Machiavellian reasoning about ends and means: “we all agree about the ends, but we have different opinions about the means. We all desire compassion, there is no doubt, and with disinterest, the impossible happiness of men. But, simply, there are among us those who believe that one can use everything to achieve that happiness and there are those who do not believe so. We are of the latter.”
Vargas Llosa’s disagreement with the commitment and Sartrean revolutionary militancy and the way to Camusian moral reflection It happened in 1969, right in the ideological hardening phase of the Cuban revolution. The break with Cuba was final, the literary themes moved away from his masterpieces La ciudad y los perros (1962), La casa verde (1966) and Conversación en La Catedral (1969), and his later references to political events were historical, among them, the extraordinary novel La fiesta del chivo (2000) that reminded Vargas Llosa de Zavalita and the cantina La Catedral. Vargas Llosa had revealed his literary disenchantment with Cuba in his controversy with the pro-Castro Colombian writer Oscar Collazos in the Marcha de Uruguay magazine in August-October 1969.
After his break with Sartre and his path with spectacular turns, Vargas Llosa had an impressive itinerary of development and intellectual recognition, culminating in at least two major events: the Cervantes Prize in 1994, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010 and his admission to the French Academy in 2023.
But like astronauts who return to earth after living in space and are nostalgic for the world that only they perceived outside Earth orbit, Vargas Llosa seems to be recovering his sensations from one of the controversies that defined his position as a writer, from starting from the reality that is already indisputable and also, worth the word, uncontroversial. In it article “Sartre and the old bookseller”, published in El País on May 6 of this yearVargas Llosa recounts, in the context of his admission to the French Academy, a walk through the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and says he has met -reality, literature, fiction?– an old book seller whose business he does more than After half a century, the young Latin American writer arrived to obtain Sartre’s publications.
Vargas Llosa says that he told that old bookseller about his communist militancy and his reading of Sartre; and to the seller’s complaint that “now nobody reads (Sartre) in France” and the question “are you also a Sartrean, like me?”, Vargas Llosa replied: “naturally” (…) because (it was) the only philosopher comparable to Heidegger.
In his reflections, Vargas Llosa, sentimental, says that “It gave me a nostalgia for bygone times and I promised myself to read one of those dazzling essays that would keep me seduced and happy for so many years”. Unlike past trials in which he harshly reviewed and almost summary reflections against Sartre, Vargas Llosa leaves a clue that should begin to be analyzed: “I refuse to believe the old bookseller’s thesis that no one now reads Sartre. It can not be possible. The truth is that one of the greatest thinkers that France has had has been him, who demonstrated it both in his novels and in his essays, in which he was equally original and groundbreaking.
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