The Dream of the Peruvian

Mario Vargas Llosa must be one of the few great writers ever to have argued that society should place less trust in great writers. “The mandarin writer no longer has a place in today’s world,” he has observed. “Figures like Sartre in France or Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno in their time, or Octavio Paz, served as guides and teachers on all the important issues and filled a void that only the ‘great writer’ seemed capable of filling, whether because few others participated in public life, because democracy was nonexistent, or because literature had a mythical prestige.” But today, “in a free society, the influence that a writer exerts—sometimes profitably—over submissive societies is useless.”

The irony, of course, is that Vargas Llosa has had a higher public profile than almost any writer of his time. He has been famous ever since emerging in the 1960s as a leading figure of the movement called the Latin American Boom, and in 2010, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At the same time, he has been a vocal participant in the politics of his native Peru, even mounting a serious campaign for president in 1990. Though he lost the second round of the election to the future dictator Alberto Fujimori, Vargas Llosa established himself as one of the world’s most eloquent spokesmen for democracy and free markets—a position that puts him directly at odds with most Latin American intellectuals of his generation, who are likelier to share the dogmatic leftism of his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez. Yet even as Vargas Llosa insists on the need for reason and freedom in politics, his fiction has continued to explore the imaginative realms of unreason and obsession, primitivism and violence.

These themes are on ample display in one of Vargas Llosa’s best books, The Storyteller (1987), in which he imagines his way out of modern Western civilization and into the mind of a nomadic Amazonian people, the Machiguenga. The novel’s narrator is a man who, in all outward respects, is Vargas Llosa himself—a Peruvian writer and expatriate who thinks back to his Latin American upbringing while living in Florence. As a university student, the narrator relates, he had a good friend, Saul Zuratas, who was doubly cut off from ordinary Peruvian society: he was a Jew, and he was born with a disfiguring birthmark. To compensate for this otherness, Saul embraced the even greater otherness of the Machiguenga, becoming obsessed with this small, struggling people’s nomadic way of life and bizarre cosmology. Saul ultimately managed the impossible: he became a member of the tribe, and what’s more, a storyteller, or hablador, responsible for preserving and sharing the Machiguengas’ history. Alternating chapters of the novel are told in a voice that we gradually realize is Saul’s, as he coaxes the reader into an utterly alien worldview.

The Machiguengas call themselves “people who walk,” and the first premise of their metaphysics is that they must be constantly on the move. If they stop, disaster will befall them; in fact, the universe itself will die. They are kept to this principle by their memories of the darkest period in their history, “the time of the tree-bleeding.” This was the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, in which Peruvian speculators kidnapped large numbers of Indians and forced them to work on rubber plantations. Vargas Llosa imagines this period as a kind of Machiguenga holocaust, in which vast numbers of people died and the traditional culture was almost snuffed out. “Before, there were many men who walk; after, very few,” says the storyteller. “When things like that happen, they don’t disappear. . . . They linger on in one of the four worlds. . . . Those who see them come back heart-stricken, it seems, their teeth chattering with sickened disgust.”

In 1911, at the height of “the time of the tree-bleeding,” the world was awakened to the horrors going on in the Amazonian jungles of Peru by Sir Roger Casement, the greatest humanitarian investigator of his age. Casement, Irish Protestant by birth, was already world-famous, thanks to his scathing report on the abuses that King Leopold’s regime had committed in the Belgian Congo, where millions of people were killed and starved to death—again, in the pursuit of rubber. This made Casement a natural choice when the British government decided to investigate rumors of atrocities against Peru’s Putumayo Indians.

For many in Britain and around the world, Casement represented the best of Western civilization, just as King Leopold represented the worst. Indeed, Casement’s career brings into sharp focus the contradictions of European imperialism. On the one hand, it was the government of the British Empire that ordered Casement to explore the “heart of darkness” that was the Congo (indeed, Joseph Conrad was personally acquainted with and influenced by Casement). British public opinion, horrified by Casement’s revelations, drove an international movement that insisted on reforms in Africa and Peru. Yet it was the presence of Europeans in Africa, and of European capital in Peru, that unleashed those horrors in the first place. Which was the true face of Britain and the West: the exploiter or the humanitarian, Leopold or Casement?

To Casement himself, the answer finally became clear: Britain was a force for evil that one had to resist at any price. As an Irishman, he began to identify with the wretched of the earth, the victims of colonialism. Even as he became a British knight, he grew increasingly active in Irish nationalist and independence movements. At last, during World War I, he decided that the cause of Irish freedom even justified collaboration with Germany. He traveled to Germany to try to enlist Irish prisoners of war in an Irish legion to fight against Britain and also to procure German weapons for use in an Irish revolt. After being smuggled back to Ireland in a submarine in 1916, Casement was captured by the British and put on trial for treason.

But one more twist was in store for this already unlikely life. Eager to discredit a man with a worldwide reputation for probity, the British government circulated what it claimed to be Casement’s private diaries, full of graphic details of his homosexuality. The use of sex to discredit Irish leaders was an old tactic—a generation earlier, Charles Stewart Parnell had been exposed as an adulterer—and many people believed (as some still believe) that the “Black Diaries” purported to be Casement’s were frauds. Still, by the time Casement was hanged for treason in August 1916, his reputation was in ruins, and he became an untouchable figure in Irish politics for several generations.

There could hardly be a richer subject for a novelist than Casement, especially in the twenty-first century, when the attitudes of 100 years ago toward sex, race, and imperialism have changed so dramatically. Above all, Casement offers a perfect case study in the conflict between liberalism and radicalism. As a humanitarian and an anti-imperialist, Casement was a liberal hero, recalling Western civilization to its own highest ideals; as a revolutionary and nationalist, he was a radical, convinced that British ideals were a sham that had to be overthrown by violence. Which phase of Casement’s career ought we to admire, and which condemn? And if you had to name the novelist best equipped to explore just these problems, the answer would surely be Vargas Llosa. No one has written about the conflict between classical liberalism and radicalism, between freedom and utopianism, more fully than he has. He has lived that conflict himself, evolving from the conventional leftism of his Latin American generation into an exponent of political and economic freedom.