Harsh Times
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by Adrian Nathan West
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

The second sentence of Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Mario Vargas Llosa’s third novel, poses an extravagantly unanswerable question: “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” The question reads like an impertinent challenge to academic historiography.  In the absence of an exact response neither produced nor possible, the novel offers a literary one, a tangle of documented fact, fabulous contrivance, and poignant bewilderment. In the hollows between historical facts, Vargas Llosa finds an imprimatur to what he elsewhere called a “deicidal urge to remake reality.” 

The first sentence of Vargas Llosa’s latest work, Harsh Times, which dramatizes a US-engineered coup in Guatemala in 1954, is much more self-assured but equally unreasonable, and presents not a question but a declaration so panoramically reductive it cannot help but arouse the reader’s suspicion:

Though they are unknown to the broader public, and occupy a minor place in the history books, the people with the greatest influence over the history of Guatemala and, in a way, over the entirety of Central America in the twentieth century were Edward L. Bernays and Sam Zemurray, two men who could not be more dissimilar from one another in terms of origins, temperament, and vocation.

Despite the self-possessed confidence of the novel’s beginning, the remainder often belies the narrator’s intellectual conceit, a task performed by a densely woven fabric of narrative hyperbole, misdirection, and outright fantasy. The result is as peculiar as it is brilliantly provocative—a historical novel that oppugns the claims of both history and literature to objectivity, and that impresses the reader to appraise the political power of art in an age hypnotized by propaganda. At the heart of Harsh Times is the sibling rivalry between three kinds of storytelling—history, propaganda, and literary fiction—each of which draws its power from an elemental human “appetite for lies,” as Vargas Llosa puts it in a lecture he delivered in 1988 suggestively entitled “Novels Disguised as History.” 

Who were these two now largely forgotten men who held such sway over the fate of an entire nation? Sam Zemurray was the founder of United Fruit, a company that sent shiploads of bananas from the jungles of Guatemala to breakfast tables all over America. As a consequence of Zemurray’s indefatigable and aggressive brand of entrepreneurship, it quickly grew into a commercial leviathan, and became known as The Octopus, an implacable beast whose tentacles reached into every quarter of Guatemalan life. However, the cost of the company’s success was infamy—it paid no taxes, silenced even a diffident murmur of unionization, and in lieu of employment imposed upon its peasant workers a ruthless imperium. 

In order to rescue United Fruit from its well-deserved notoriety, Zemurray turned to Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and soi disant father of public relations, best known for his 1928 book Propaganda, in which he argued that the “unseen mechanism” of democracy is the manipulative rule of an invisible elite whose principal instrument of control is rhetorical deceit. Democracy less cynically understood—as the self-rule of a free people—Bernays interpreted as a genuine threat to the heretofore unchallenged hegemony of United Fruit; in fact, when Juan Jose Arevalo was elected president in 1945, advocating a confused but earnest brand of “spiritual socialism,” Bernays warned against his “boundless love for democracy.” He was the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history. 

Arevalo’s successor, Jacobo Arbenz, was the second president in Guatemalan history to rise to power by popular vote. He turned out to be an even more worrisome adversary—elected to the presidency in 1951, he staked his legacy on land reform that ambitiously promised to transform a feudal economy, a fossil of vanished times, into a highly functioning capitalistic one, both more prosperous and more egalitarian. To that end, he pushed successfully for the adoption of Decree 900, an expansive body of legislation that redistributed underused farm land to peasants, permitted the unionization of farm workers, and compelled United Fruit, for the first time, to pay taxes on its oceanic revenue. 

In order to substitute Arbenz’s new regime with “a more docile one, more congenial to their interests,” Bernays concocted a profoundly sophistic strategy, one that presented an easily refutable lie as a demonstrable truth, the sky as the ground and the ground as the sky. While Arbenz openly embraced the United States as a political and economic model for Guatemala, Bernays convinced the world that he was a revolutionary Marxist preparing the country to become a Soviet satellite. His duplicitous campaign was a resounding success buoyed both by the fear of Soviet expansion and an American government populated by powerful officials, like John Foster Dulles, with their arms shoulder deep in United Fruit’s coffers. 

Ultimately, Bernays convinced a willfully gullible US government of these easily disprovable prevarications, and the CIA, resentfully referred to as the Stepmother in Guatemala, began manufacturing a military coup, an operation named PBSuccess. The chosen head of the Army of Liberation, the band of mercenaries armed, trained, and financed by the United States, was Castillo Armas, or Hatchet Face to his detractors, an ostentatiously unimpressive man with a long history of underachievement, “rat eyes and a rather preposterous toothbrush mustache.” It’s worth taking a moment to locate a picture of him—implausibly, even comically supercilious but simultaneously abashed of a rank to which he was unequal. Armas attended the same military academy as Arbenz and loathed him for his success and family privilege, a festering resentment that was his principal qualification, along with a facile manipulability. 

Arbenz steadfastly stood his ground against the power of the United States but it proved irrepressible; he finally and predictably relented, resigning from office under the pressure of military chiefs anxiously anticipating an American invasion if they did not capitulate. He sought refuge in the Mexican Embassy and left the country of his birth never to return, penniless and mortified. Armas installed himself into the presidency, was fawningly celebrated in the American press, and immediately began to rule with despotic urgency. The land reforms which were enacted as the result of open debate and congressional procedure were terminated by tyrannical fiat. The public burning of “pernicious and subversive documents” commenced—magazines, newspapers, anything that could be interpreted as an impudent expression of dissent—and then finally books were set aflame, an “inscrutable selection of authors,” producing “bonfires around which children danced as if celebrating St. John’s Eve.” 

Of course, the destruction couldn’t possibly end with books—the burning of books is always a livid symbol, the fanatically expressive plumage of authoritarian control, both a grim celebration and a warning. Armas finally turned his sights to their potential readers, and ordered a “witch hunt unprecedented even in Guatemala’s violent history.” There is no reliable documentary evidence of the effects—how many were imprisoned, tortured, and executed—except this: approximately 200,000 Mayans, mostly disgruntled peasant farmers who benefited from Decree 900, fled Guatemala for Mexico to elude the forthcoming slaughter. 

According to the unnamed narrator of the story—and the reliability of his judgments will be of central significance to the novel—not only did the coup dash the last hope of Guatemala to achieve democracy, but it also set a transformative precedent first presented by Bernays as political prophecy: “that the twentieth century would mark the advent of propaganda as a basic instrument of power and of the manipulation of public opinion in democratic societies as well as authoritarian ones.” In fact, the narrator credits Bernays with elevating public relations to “unanticipated heights,” and “making it the central political, social, and economic weapon of the twentieth century.” The coup in 1954, therefore, serves as an obituary of political truth, its throat slit by mercenary grifters.

This is an extraordinary claim: that propaganda reached its meridian not during the century’s two world wars, not as a consequence of the ideological totalitarianism of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union, but in 1954 as the result of a nefarious collaboration between a political consultant, a fruit mogul, and the CIA, however impressively disastrous the results.

Equally extraordinary are the many, sundry ways the novel’s narrator impels the reader to probe his motives—he builds a lawyerly case that powerfully emphasizes the culpability of the United States while diminishing Guatemala’s complicity in its own demise, an argument that leans, if only by a nuanced measure, too heavily on one end of the scale. To those very familiar with Vargas Llosa’s voluminous writings on fiction, including his own, this is especially startling since, referring to Latin American self-consciousness, he once wrote: “One of our worst defects, our best fictions, is to believe that our miseries have been imposed by us abroad, that others, for example, the conquistadores, have always been responsible for our problems.” 

The narrator’s pliable relation to the historical record is generally finespun, more delicate than declamatory. He subtly insinuates and artfully omits. While it is true there is no evidence of a Soviet presence in Guatemala at the time, the Communist Party did expand under Arbenz’s rule, partly due to his hospitable reception of foreign communists fleeing nearby nations. The narrator never discloses this, but repeats twice that his “communist leanings” were never decisively established, which is something less than a refutation. Furthermore, he neglects to mention that he studied the writings of Marx and Lenin with enthusiasm, and admired Stalin. And while it is likely true that Jose Manuel Fortuny, Arbenz’s close friend and advisor, and one of the principal architects of agrarian reform, was at bottom a “pragmatic realist” with a limited knowledge of Marxist theory, he was also the founding member of the Communist Party of Guatemala, only later to be rechristened the Guatemalan Party of Labor, the only name to which the narrator refers. 

In fact, Vargas Llosa’s anonymous narrator insinuates gossamer filaments of falsehood not just where one might expect—within the lacunae of the historical record, the cavities of ignorance and hypothesis—but also much more boldly, elbowing out established fact. Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Armas’ security chief, and a principal conspirator in his assassination, was indeed murdered years later; however, he was gunned down in the street, not eviscerated by a car bomb. Why alter this historical detail beyond the perimeter of dispute? One can understand the artistic dramatization of the death of Johnny Abbes Garcia, Dominican dictator Trujillo’s cruel fixer, in Haiti—a thrillingly macabre scene, and a feat of novelistic inventiveness confected out of miasmic rumor. Similarly, there is nothing unusual about the narrator’s dark suggestion that the car accident in Thailand that killed the American ambassador to Guatemala at the time of the coup,  John Puerifoy, was retribution for his role in Arbenz’s ouster and Armas’ rise. This is neither empirically confirmed nor disconfirmed. One would think this is the special province of the author composing a historical novel—the theatrical opportunity embedded in gossip and oblivion, the permission granted by mystery.

One particular character, Martita Parra de Borrero, especially exemplifies Vargas Llosa’s turbid brew of historical record and literary reverie. Martita is born into a wealthy family—her father, Arturro Borrero Lamas, is a prominent and affluent lawyer. Even as a child, she was widely recognized for her beauty and vivacity, and was affectionately referred to as Miss Guatemala, a moniker that invites the reader, maybe heavy-handedly, to interpret her  particular fate as emblematic of the nation’s as a whole. Intellectually precocious at fifteen years of age, Martita becomes enamored of her father’s best friend, Dr. Efren Garcia Ardiles, an admirer of Arbenz, a fact which makes him an outlier at the friendly card games Arturro regularly hosts at his home. Eventually, Efren exploits Martita’s curiosity, rapes and impregnates her, and when Arturro discovers he is the father, he forces the two of them to marry before banishing them both—including the grandson he will never acknowledge—from his life forever.

Martita finally escapes that loveless marriage, a prison of Catholic respectability, and becomes first the mistress of Armas, and then of Abbes Garcia, his assassin. Once Armas is dead, she flees to the Dominican Republic where she becomes a popular radio personality, and a shill for Trujillo, all the while selling information to the CIA. Much like her native Guatemala, Martita exchanges one dictator for another while serving at the behest of the United States.

There is no Martita outside the self-contained universe of Harsh Times, though Armas did enjoy a relationship with a famously beautiful mistress, Gloria Bolanos Pons; there are some similarities between the life of Maritita as depicted by Vargas Llosa and Pons, but they are mostly threadbare. However, one could say, according to the conception of the historical novel Vargas Llosa has repeatedly endorsed, that the correspondence between his presentation of Arbenz or Armas is incidental, as well; to emphasize this or that verisimilitude is to misconstrue the cosmos fashioned by a novelist, the progeny of what Vargas Llosa once called a “deep dissatisfaction with real life.”

In fact, in a lecture he delivered on his own The Real Life of Alexandro Mayta, Vargas Llosa maintained that the novelist bears no responsibility to faithfully represent historical facts at all. The events as they truly transpired—to the extent that this can be objectively determined—furnish only the “raw materials” for the construction of a novel, the initial “point of departure,” a contention he emphatically espouses discussing another of his own works, The War of the End of the World. The singular obligation of the novelist is to be persuasive, to imaginatively materialize a world that does not reproduce, but rather negates the one normally inhabited by the reader, a substitution of such force it can induce elation, despair, and revelation. This “sleight of hand replacement of the concrete, objective world of life as it is lived with the subtle and ephemeral world of fiction” is the fulcrum of the novelistic enterprise, and its believability has nothing to do with a humble obeisance to fact, but is a function of the “ponderous and complicated machinery that enables a fiction to create the illusion that it is true, to pretend to be alive”:

The ability to persuade us of ‘truth,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘sincerity’ never comes from the novel’s resemblance to or association with the real world we readers inhabit. It comes exclusively from the novel’s own being, from the words in which it is written and from the writer’s manipulation of space, time, and level of reality.

According to Vargas Llosa, the border that distinguishes the territory of history and fiction is illegibly drawn, perpetually shifting, and always vulnerable to contention. As he observes, the Spanish word historia mischievously contains a double meaning, history and story, and itself circumspectly points to the gauzy sheet that separates the two. Discretely compartmentalizing history and fiction is not possible in principle, however naively the former claims to settle a record beyond controversy. This is especially noticeable in Latin American literature:

History and literature, truth and falsehood, reality and fiction mingle in these texts in a way that is often inextricable. The thin demarcation line that separates one from the other frequently fades away so that both worlds are entwined in a completeness which the more ambiguous it is the more seductive it becomes because the likely and the unlikely in it seem to be part of the same substance.

If the authoritative power of literature is disconnected from its relation to reality, then why write a historical novel at all? Why should the novelist not manumit himself from the “raw material” supplied by documented history? If the point is to enact the “illusion of autonomy,” the “impression of self-sufficiency, of being freed from real life,” why choose a genre that insistently invokes the irrepressibility of extra-literary existence?

In order to answer these questions, and gain some purchase on the peculiar structure of Harsh Times, it’s helpful to consider Vargas Llosa’s understanding of the two great literary influences of his life, Gustave Flaubert and Jean Paul Sartre, two constant lodestars on opposite ends of his artistic firmament. 

Vargas Llosa often and candidly writes of the inspiration he drew from Sartre—in his autobiography, A Fish in the Water, he credits the existentialist philosopher with having a “decisive effect on my vocation.” He admired Sartre’s “exhortations concerning social commitment,” and was impressed by the power of literary art to catalyze social and political change, rather than timidly encourage a monastic retreat into an aesthetic experience that posited no other end beyond itself. For Sartre, since the “essence of the literary work is freedom totally disclosing and willing itself as an appeal to the freedom of other men,” it both presupposes democracy and is pledged to its promotion. Not only can there be no apolitical literature—literature is the “subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution”—there is no amoral literature; as Sartre avers, “at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern a moral imperative.” For instance, he discounts the possibility that it is “possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism.” One can’t even permit the possibility of “gloomy” literature since every novel, no matter how sepulchral, only traffics in despair so that “free men may feel their freedom as they face it.” For Sartre, the marrow of literature is something more akin to protest than exploration, and should rouse readers to action rather than stupefy them into intellectually cloistered meditation. 

Flaubert’s conception of literary purpose couldn’t be more divergent from Sartre’s; in fact, Sartre singles him out as a particularly egregious example of a “brilliant and mortal literature” whose “extreme point” is “nothingness.” Flaubert didn’t understand art as purposeless, but it certainly had no political aim in the sense Sartre intended. In a letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantpie in 1857,  Flaubert upends the famous maxim Marx proposes in the Theses on Feuerbach: : “This is how humanity is; the task at hand is not to change it, but to know it.” As Vargas Llosa observes in The Perpetual Orgy, Flaubert was devoted to an “indifferent, objective art in which everything takes its course without emotion or outside intervention, of a literature without a moral.”

Flaubert concurs with Sartre’s contention that the pith of literature is freedom, but his conception of freedom is starkly different, an emancipation from a dreary reality rather than a liberty to correct injustice. In a letter to Louise Colet in 1852, he explains: 

That is why I love Art. It is because there, at least, in this world of fictions everything is freedom. All appetites are appeased there, everything is possible, one is at once its king and its people, active and passive, victim and priest. No limits; humanity for you is a puppet with little bells you set a-jingle at the end of a sentence the way a does at the tip of his shoe…

This freedom, for Flaubert, couldn’t be further from a spirit of reform; rather, it takes the the shape of a spiteful aggrievement, or as he puts to Colet in a letter in 1853, “revenge” on an incorrigibly disappointing world. Literary freedom, then, is the godlike creation of an alternate universe, simultaneously an indictment of the one it replaces, and an asylum from it. In 1873, he writes to George Sand: “Life seems tolerable to me only if one can conjure it away.”

Vargas Llosa, then, appears to write under the tutelage of two contradictory authorities who, in the spirit of a jealous literary monotheism, demand that his disciples eschew any allegiance to the other. However, Vargas Llosa’s work, and this is especially exampled in Harsh Times, seems to achieve an armistice between the adversaries—his works are deeply political, but they bear no unambiguous political message, and while he aspires to improve the world by bearing literary witness to its depredations, he believes every act of intentional political persuasion through literature is destined to fail. 

On the question of the novel as a conveyance of a political teaching, Vargas Llosa has been unequivocal. In a lecture on his first book, The Time of the Hero, he makes his antipathy clear, and not merely as a personal aesthetic preference: 

I am convinced that creative literature is not a good vehicle for political statements. If you try to use literature as a vehicle for political propaganda, for the dissemination of political ideas, you fail as a writer. When I write literature, I concentrate on what is truly literature, something larger than politics. You can use politics for literature, but not the reverse. Literature should not be used to promote a political idea because the result will be damaging to literature.

Literary objectivity, for Vargas Llosa, following Flaubert, is nothing other than the credibility of the world artistically begotten, an act of seduction rather than one of rational entreaty or the brute imposition of will. A novel may coax a reader into a new worldview, or even incite one to political action, but this “transmission of knowledge” cannot be planned in advance; it is an emanation of the work as a whole, an effect beyond the power of a novelist to consciously design. Achieving this sense of objectivity necessarily forecloses the possibility of an authoritative interpretation. In the context of a discussion of Flaubert, Vargas Llosa declares:

The possibility of a univocal reading is thus precluded: the interpretation will always be exterior to what is created, something added, that may well vary as the work echoes, and re-echoes in each period or each person. It is the reader who, depending on his intelligence, his convictions, and his experiences, must relate fiction and reality, connect (or disconnect) the imaginary and the lived.

Vargas Llosa explicitly contrasts Flaubert’s approach with that of Bertolt Brecht, who wrote to exclude a manifold tapestry of exegeses, and thereby seemed to presuppose “that his public is infantile or stupid: everything must be explained to it and emphasized repeatedly so as not to allow the least error, a single wrong interpretation to creep in.” Literary proselytization precludes nuance—if its substance is concise, it is the concision of the slogan and not the poem. An infinitely interpretable work cannot assuredly catalyze a narrowly finite reception. And like all preaching, such a work requires a credulous, even prostrate audience, one in search of didactic answers, not problematic questions, impatiently anathema to the inefficiency of philosophical skepticism. The “ever contemptuous” Flaubert hated life, but respected the freedom and maturity of his readers too much to condescend to them with a breviary disguised as a novel: 

Proselytizing, paternalistic, doctrinaire, it is an art that is, in a profound sense of the word, religious, not only because it is addressed to men who are already believers or catechumens, but because it demands of them—despite its apparent dogged appeal to reason—from the outset, and before all else, an act of faith: the acceptance of a single truth that exists prior to the work of art.

The mutual exclusivity of tendentious sermonizing and serious literature forms the experimental core of Vargas Llosa’s work—the artist is a creator of sovereign worlds, but has no power over an audience’s decision to happily inhabit them, and the best readers, the most perspicacious, are the least governable. Strictly speaking, then, the political novel as understood by Sartre or Brecht either galvanizes an already converted choir into action, or inspirits the unconverted but intellectually unwary, those lustful for the kind of direction that simultaneously spurns them into partisan work and relieves them of the anxious burden of thinking. 

And yet, despite Vargas Llosa’s repeated protestations against understanding the novel as an instrument of political commentary, Harsh Times concludes with precisely that: a series of synoptic judgements regarding the imperialistic interference of the United States, which not only stymied the democratization in Guatemala for generations, but also “helped popularize the myth of armed struggle and socialism throughout Latin America.” These summary explanations, however true, bear the patina of leaden didacticism, lessons offered anxiously to a readership in danger of missing the point. But this is the crucial narrative device—even though they are delivered in the first-person, they don’t come from Mario Vargas Llosa, the author of the novel, but rather “Mario,” a character in the story who has written a book that may or may or not be identical to Harsh Times. 

As Mario relates, he is presented with a unique opportunity to interview Miss Guatemala, now a still lively octogenarian, a meeting orchestrated by two of his friends, Soledad Alvarez and Tony Raful, both poets. She lives between Washington DC and Virginia, somewhere suggestively close to Langley, the headquarters of the CIA—Mario suspects she still works for the intelligence agency, but it’s not clear of what use she’d be at her age, and why that any assistance she might dispense would require a geographical proximity to its principal location.

However, this clumsy clue marks the tenor of the entire encounter—Martita’s ostentatiously decorated home features artistic homages to Latin American dictators as well as photographs of herself with two generations of the Bush family. She proudly announces her support of the Republican Party, as well as for Donald Trump, who is “doing the things that have to be done.” She is mawkishly theatrical and evasive when asked discomfiting questions about her role in Guatemalan politics, and denounces the rumors she bore a child with one of Trujillo’s henchman as “preposterous fantasies.” She is a preternaturally gifted liar—bottomlessly charming and effortlessly false, a lifetime of mendaciousness seems to have erased any visceral distinction within her between forthrightness and fraudulence. When Mario bluntly asks her about her cooperation with the CIA, Marita fumes with pique, and threatens him: “Don’t bother sending me your book when it comes out, Mario. I will absolutely not be reading it. But I warn you, my lawyers will.” One can’t help but wonder if the reader is supposed to infer that Vargas Llosa invented Martita because Gloria Bolanos Pons threatened him, thereby cheekily establishing an alibi of literary license. 

In Letters to a Young Novelist, Vargas Llosa writes at lucid length about the nature of novelistic narration—the novel is a self-contained universe, and everything within it, including even an “invisible” or omniscient narrator, is a fictional creation. The author cannot truly appear in his own book as a matter of metaphysical prohibition—his cosmos and the cosmos of the novel are heterogenous, parallel existences that can never intertwine. Nonetheless, Vargas Llosa mischievously hints that Harsh Times is an exception by naming the character-narrator-novelist Mario—one cannot help but retrospectively hear the book narrated aloud by Vargas Llosa, especially those sections that depict the life of Martita. There are unmistakable intimations throughout the book that the narrator is not some bloodless voice expounding placelessly, but somehow a part of the novel’s lebenswelt; for example, describing Martita’s’s triumph over youthful struggles, he indicates how she in fact blossomed into an alluring woman with a simple exclamation: “And how!” This injection of enthusiasm and personality, and even a hint of lecherousness—at that juncture in the story she’s barely a teenager—marks the narrator as something other than disembodied. 

Nonetheless, Mario is indeed a character; Vargas Llosa is, and must remain, a literary god on the outside of the novel's periphery. Those decisive, even peremptory political judgements at the novel’s finale do not belong to the author—they are issued by Mario within a peculiar narrative horizon: the meeting of two literary characters–one a novelist and another a propagandist—arranged by two other characters, both poets. The entire epilogue is a reminder that the chief theme of the book is the dark blandishment offered by fantasy, the allurement of fanciful flights from reality. The last chapter is a fiction addended to a fiction, a peek into the vertiginous drop of the willfully fantasied. Martita has lived within her own lies for so long—sometimes cozily wrapped within them, sometimes incarcerated by them—that she is reduced to an insipid political cliche, incapable of political discernment. Still, they furnish her some assuagement from the bedevilment of introspection. Mario—we know almost nothing about him—is a talented but impatient novelist, pushing a political prejudice that undermines an otherwise beguiling book. The epochal rise of propaganda—its shameless ubiquity and technological refinement—threatens to swallow whole its two chief narrative competitors, history and literature. Even Mario, for all his gifts, succumbs to its lobotomizing lullaby, a satisfyingly grand abstraction. One is tempted to agree with this lament of Dr. Garcia Ardiles expressed as he watches Armas crush a nonexistent Communist uprising: “Was history nothing other than this fantastical repudiation of reality? The conversion into myth and fiction of real, concrete events? Was that the history we read and studied?” Harsh Times both depicts and resists a surrender to political dissimulation by proffering a more powerfully assembled army of untruths, not by the rhetorical persuasion Mario attempts at the book’s conclusion. This strategy—“to lie without scruples”—Vargas Llosa foursquarely explains in a lecture on The Green House:

If you succeed in this deception, something true will come through these lies, something that did not exist before. But if your intention is to reproduce things of reality in fiction, you will probably fail as a writer because literature, in order to persuade and convince the reader, must become a sovereign world, independent, a world that has emancipated itself from its mother, from reality.

Fiction and ideology, Vargas Llosa argued in Transforming a Lie, a lecture delivered in 1988, spring from a common family tree, the roots of which are planted firmly in the need for salutary untruths, a hunger for a respite from the pitiless rigors of the unimagined life. Latin America, he avers, is particularly vulnerable to the conflation of the two, and evinces a history fraught with attempts to satisfy its famishment for lies with a diet of ideology. 

One day I reached this conclusion: that ideology in Latin America was fulfilling this task for many people; that ideology was the way they incorporated fiction into their lives, as other people incorporated the fictitious experiences through fiction, through novels, or through religious ideas. Many young people, many intellectuals, many avant-garde politicians, were using ideology, were using the political ideas presumed to describe reality, to identify the laws of history and the mechanisms of society, evolution, and progress, and were, in fact, adding to reality a purely imaginary world.

The infatuation with ideology is inherently prolific—it inclines to spread like a disease, infecting every province of the human mind. Literature, too, can be coopted, can become complicit in the preference for the sidereal dream over the empirically mundane. According to Vargas Llosa, Latin America’s general preference for supernatural over realistic literature likely aggravated its unhealthy relation to ideology. “We still have great difficulty in our countries in differentiating between fiction and reality. We are traditionally accustomed to mixing them in such a  way that is probably one of the reasons why we are so impractical and inept in political matters, for instance.”

For Vargas Llosa, literature is profoundly political by its very nature—to birth a new world tacitly implies the denunciation of the old one we ineluctably suffer, and only by the grace of art can escape. Creation is necessarily condemnatory, and so every act of the literary imagination is “subversive,” is unavoidably politically “insurrectional.” Flaubert, Vargas Llosa argues, is the true exemplar of this view of literature as a scorned lover, garishly promiscuous not out of lust but spite, intent on travestying one’s betrayer, hopeful in the meantime to find some deliverance from the memory of her perfidy. 

In all Flaubert’s works, even those that may be regarded as an escape into history, the novel is always an appeal of one man to other men to meet in the realm of the verbal imaginary in order, from there, to see how insufficient the life is that these works so prodigiously redeem and reject, save and condemn.

This elucidation of literature must seem nihilistically cynical—the adoption of a perch distant from life, assumed in order to execrate it. If the novel is a belletristic redress of the injustice of human existence, it should take sharp aim at its pretense to goodness, find particular delight in ferreting out hypocrisy and duplicity. One can see this in especially sharp relief in Vargas Llosa’s use of a literary device that appeared in his first novel, The Time of the Hero, and forms the narrative axis of The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, what the author calls “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes). Creating an effect that has been likened to film montage or the contrapuntal rhythm of music or even the “spatialization of time,” Vargas Llosa not only juxtaposes two scenes that occur in distinctly separate times and places, but places them in a kind of polemical dialogue with one another, often resulting in a contradiction, always in a new “amalgam,” a “narrative unity” that privileges the reader with a more complete view of the novelistic universe available to any single character. The author as literary god apotheosizes the reader into a kind of demigod—the reader is not the creator of the cosmos, but he is blessed with a synoptic view of it, however temporarily.

In Harsh Times, this is achieved to discomfiting effect: while Trujillo, with a fraternal goodwill, assures Armas of his support, he also plots with Abbes Garcia to assassinate him, resentful that his protege hasn’t expressed a deeper gratitude for his assistance, and affronted that Armas would privately criticize the dictator’s familial foibles. The falseness of all announced fidelities, the cant that constitutes the warp and woof of political affairs, is brought into luminous view. One is reminded of the judgment made by Garcia Ardiles, formed in the twilight of his failed life: “You know what conclusion I’ve come to with all that’s happened to me, Arturo, with all that’s happened in this country? That a human being is something contemptible indeed.”

This is not the whole of literature, though, as Vargas Llosa sees it—he often writes of the ways in which great literature refines the moral sensibility of those who enjoy it, makes for more discerning minds, and furnishes an education in the experience of beauty. At its best, it can be “beneficial to mankind,” and “enrich mankind psychologically but also ethically.” At the very least, it administers, like a doctor to agonized patients, a “therapy against despair.” Also, Vargas Llosa’s cynicism often has the tincture of a wounded idealism, a rancor that indignantly rises to meet treachery, a suspicious interrogation of the goodness of the world that still takes seriously goodness as a standard. 

Vargas Llosa never maintains that literature is apolitical or amoral, a strange and even absurd view—writing is a public act, and it incurs all the responsibilities that entails; the aim to create art does not magically immure one from the demands of morality. Only moral beings could make art, even the the most morally grotesque varieties. Also, he repeatedly argues that literature is indispensable to a society of free, rational citizens capable of if not astute at least sane judgement. However, to commandeer art for the purposes of narrowly partisan ends is to disfigure it, and to thereby necessarily fail on both political and artistic grounds. The reader is left unpersuaded of either the story or the tendentious message it conveys. And while great literature might be salutary for society, it flourishes during times of tenebrous decadence, finding profound inspiration in pestilential decline. “Rescuer and verbal gravedigger of an epoch, the great novelist is a kind of vulture: the putrid flesh of history is his favorite nourishment and has served to inspire him to his most audacious undertakings.” So much for Sartre’s notion that the potential of literature only becomes fully realized within a classless society. 

Literature at its best provides a tableau of human life so vividly granular it inures one to the clumsy beguilements of ideology, the blurry prepossessions that render a surgical anatomy of minute detail impossible. The age we live in is one besotted by fiction, which when made subservient to politics can contribute to despotism, and has been a  “major instrument of suffering in history because it was behind all the dogmatic doctrines that have justified repression, censorship, massacres, and genocides.” Harsh Times reconnoiters the menacing advances made by political propaganda which first consumes the historical record, and then the last line of defense, literature. One can sympathize with the impatience of Mario, the narrator-author-character, so eager to repel the onslaught of political propaganda that he turns his novel into a political manifesto. He propagandizes against propaganda. Sartre became so unimpressed with what even the most ardently political literature can accomplish he finally counsels its abandonment: “A day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must then take up arms.” Maybe this is how Vargas Lllosa felt when he ran for the presidency of Peru in 1987. Nonetheless, Harsh Times is a magisterially wily book—it compels the reader to see behind the curtain of a literary farce: the blandly leaden political sermonizing designed to ignite a spark of suspicion. Upon renewed scrutiny, one finds a delicately constructed lampoon of the tendentious homily, not a surrender to its oily charms. 

The writer who holds on to his pen, though, is both powerful and limited at the same time—literature can move history, but only if it remains narrowly confined to the province of artistic authenticity. The poets might end up the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelly proposed, but they cannot choose that role for themselves—they are closer to prophets than legislators in this respect, and must wait duteously for their revelations, setting aside its political ramifications.

Literature, for both Vargas Llosa and Flaubert, builds a sanctuary from the afflictions of life, but an odd one since it is a sanctuary bereft of peace, soiled by the inquietude of revenge. It does not promise happiness, not even the meager kind that issues from a temporary cessation of pain. However, it does ennoble one’s torment, and that elevation points to a more profound satisfaction, one maybe consistent with disenchantment. It might even point to a conception of happiness not readily available in modern public discourse, one that takes pride in the noble acceptance of tragedy. “What’s certain is that literature does not solve problems—instead, it creates them—and rather than happy, it makes people more apt to be unhappy. That’s how it is and it’s all part of my way of living and I wouldn’t change it for any other.”

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Ivan Kenneally is a writer living in California.