Mario Vargas Llosa and a Blowhard
April 2, 2006
Mario Vargas Llosa stands on the left, following the first of his Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. It is a roughly biannual series of lectures on topics related to literature, given by an outstanding literary artist (Rushdie, Heaney) or critic (Vendler, Gates).
The introduction was given by Ronald Schuchard, who explained that Llosa came to us from Peru, but could just as well have come from Paris or London or Madrid or New York.. Llosa was given a status that ranked above anything merely national, and given a push into the literary universal. Schuchard rattled off a list of other great literary lights, European, American, and let's just say Elsewherean. These figures all had the magical power to raise our humanity and deepen our souls.. yeah, yeah, yeah. One wondered if Schuchard had ever watched a movie or listened to music.. or deigned to examine anything not great. I find this universal atmosphere of greatness stultifying, and for the second series of Ellmann Lectures in a row, I began them in a bad mood because of this self-important frame.
Mario Vargas Llosa was only partially able to step outside that frame. I imagine his letter of instruction to be something like: "You may speak about anything so long as it addresses universal human concerns and the importance of great literature to those concerns." So while he spoke about Don Quixote, his real attempt was to address why this work stood for fiction itself.. how Don Quixote was an idealist who saw the world that could be, while Sancho Panza was a pragmatist who used cultural knowledge and concrete details to judge life. Further he noted how these two contrary human tendencies needed each other.. Sancho Panza without idealism is stuck in a small life; Don Quixote without pragmatism is lost in fantasy.
This all comes quite near to being an allegorical interpretation.. and for an allegory of Don Quixote, one must aim to surpass the great and complex one by Miguel de Unamuno. But I was wishing for something more national, local, or personal. What is Don Quixote in Peru? How do those stories get used in a local setting? When did Llosa first fall in love with this book? Evidently those questions would have taken him outside universal human concerns.. and they were not addressed.
Toward the end of his lecture, Llosa asked an interesting question: Why do certain books become emblems of a civilization? His answer was twofold. First, the language itself marks out a level of expressiveness that is taken up as a model for later writers. Second, the values communicated by the work came to embody the way a civilization saw itself. But I would offer a third answer: civilizations or nations create their own Shakespeares, and out of whole cloth if necessary. These writers fulfill national ambitions.. how else to explain that just as nation states come to the fore, a handful of works get adopted as national masterpieces. And then later individuals make a secondary identification of great works as providing them with a symbol of education or breeding.. and they become more than happy to drop a quotation if it makes them look a certain preferred way.
One of the hardest things about teaching "great books" is the build-up that makes students approach them with fear and trembling. The frame provided by Schuchard did nothing but help build that frustrating wall.. and it appears that guest lecturers—of whatever status—have difficulty getting past those instructions that seem limitless as the universal, but which are every bit as limited as the universal really is.
