Liberal public intellectual who wrote realist fiction

Mario Vargas Llosa, in the introduction to his recent collection of essays, The Call of the Tribe, traces the trajectory of his intellectual life, which seems to be ordinary and least surprising. It is a commonplace story of numerous intellectuals and writers of the 20th century who moved on from Marxist-oriented youthful rebellious times to a maturity realising the authoritarian nature of socialist politics, abhorring cult worship, and detesting the socialist experiments. Arthur Koestler, perhaps, is the exalted figure of this ideological conversion.

This trajectory Llosa chose for himself led to shaking hands with the foundational leaders of neoliberalism — Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — and he minutely sketches them as the semi-cult figures of the liberal world. There is a bit of irony in the fact that the free trade and free market that they espoused resulted, after decades of incessant fighting with the welfare variant of liberal politics, in turning out a tyrant of patrimonial capitalism, Donald Trump. Llosa surely had gotten a whiff of it during Trump’s first ascendancy but was fortunate not to see further unraveling of the neoliberal world during Trump’s second ascendancy.

Llosa, who died this week aged 89, was a committed intellectual of the liberal ideology. After Isaiah Berlin, perhaps you may not see another thinker who has so firmly espoused the liberal cause. In this way, he was vastly different from other Latin American writers of the Boom period, of which he was also a progenitor. His fiction had universal readership — his novels were translated into different world languages.

His nonfiction writing includes specific studies, essays, book reviews, columns, occasional interviews, and talks. Notes on the Death of Culture—Essays on Spectacle and Society, Saber and Utopias—Visions of Latin America, Making Waves, and The Call of the Tribe feature the best of his non-fiction writing and demonstrate his serious pursuits in political philosophy, explicit in his commitment to liberal utopia and loathing of socialist experiments. Llosa was also critical of the sectarianism of liberalism, a term usually attributed to left political ideologies.

For Llosa, the economists of the liberal tradition preaching market economy as the sole panacea for resolving all problems are sectarians, and he terms this approach as “infantile disorder” of liberalism in a true Leninist fashion. That said, the conservative streak of Llosa’s political ideology is visible in his failure to critique the liberal nexus with the most disastrous trends of liberal policies in the form of increasing inequality and warfare.

His fictions do not diverge from the character of his liberal political ideology. Llosa’s novels are mostly political novels, barring a few like Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter or In Praise of the Stepmother. The political novels show the edge of totalitarian systems and their devastating impact on life. He sought the western mode of modernist writing to express the Latin American worldview, unlike Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose writings are markedly rooted in the Latin American imagination.

Llosa’s fictional mode would not cherish to imagine a folk hero like Simon Bolivar as represented by Marquez but would etch out a character like that of a defeated revolutionary like Alejandro Mayta (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta). Though historically and existentially different, the characterisation also exemplifies different sensibilities: While Márquez weaves magical realism into the fabric of his stories, Llosa’s more modernist style invites readers to confront the harsh realities of their world. Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010.

Damodar Prasad is an independent media researcher and Malayalam writer. The views expressed are personal