CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN EUROPE, CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN LATIN AMERICA, THE ARTS AS CULTURAL DIPLOMACY “We need societies impregnated of literature” – ‘The Dream of the Celt’, a lecture of the Nobel Prize writer Mario Vargas Llosa at the International Literature Festival (Berliner Fiestspiele)
Articolo di Giuseppe Colucci tratto da Cultural Diplomacy News (culturaldiplomacynews.com)
photos by Alexandra Vagi
Mario Vargas Llosa is an enigmatic character, always torn between his ideologies and his confrontation with the reality of life. This is especially true in a country, such as his beloved Peru, where the spirit of a socialist change that was going to spread into the most of Latin America’s countries at the middle of the last century, had to clash with the truth of a bloody revolutionary movement called “Sendero Luminoso”.
Vargas Llosa is a contradictory personality, and this is one of the reasons why, describing his last work, “The Dream of the Celt” (which gave him the honour of winning the Literature Noble Prize 2010) the author warns his reader not to search for the perfection in the people. Instead, to be aware that in every person, even in the heroes and in the pioneers of change – such as the main character of “The Dream of the Celt”, the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement – there are challenges, vices and mistakes because the human is ambiguous, and every personality has different facets.
Mario Vargas Llosa was in Berlin, on Saturday 15th October, for a lecture, in Spanish, of the “Celt”, given in occasion of the International Literature Festival at the Berliner Fiestspiele. Jens Jessen, a journalist for Die Zeit, moderated the lecture, and Matthias Brandt read the German translation of the book’s excerpts.
Vargas Llosa is a man of about seventy years, and his severe appearance clashes with the passion of his ideology and his writing. He has been a convinced socialist castrista since his youth, taking part in the turmoil that animated Latin America during the Fifties and the Sixties. He was part of the community of Latin American writers – together with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes – that harshly criticized the involvement of the US in the Southern American politics and economy. During the discussion following his lecture, he was asked to give an opinion about his relationship with those two emblematic figures of this ideological current. He answered diplomatically, that he loves to read them and, about the Colombian Nobel Prize, that he wrote his PhD dissertation (about six hundred pages) on his narrative.
However, after his enthusiastically ideological youth Vargas Llosa changed his ideas. He saw a country, his country continually threatened by the revolutionary violence of the “Sendero Luminoso” organisation; he saw the failure of the socialist utopia in Cuba, which he strongly supported in his youth. Whilst his early life friends didn’t negotiate their ideas, he decided to change and support the free trade ideology until he become a right-wing icon and ran for the Presidential elections in Peru in 1990. He failed and then decided for the first time to leave his country permanently, starting his peregrination around Europe. Firstly living in Madrid, then for short periods in Paris and nowadays London.
But politics was just a parenthesis in his life. As he proudly emphasized during the lecture, he is a writer and he will always be. “I dedicated a period of my life to politics – said – only because my country was living a critical phase, of social struggle, but I’m just a writer”. However, a writer cannot evade his specific obligations of taking part in public discussion, and promoting his political ideas when he thinks that they can influence the public opinion during critical moments. When the social conflict is strong, the leaders of opinion, i.e. famous writers, need to take a stand to explain their ideas to the people, because sometimes they are able to influence a country’s state of freedom.
In “The Dream of the Celt”, Vargas Llosa touches on the theme of colonialism, its sins, the role of colonizers in the disappearance of the native culture and society. The issue of the natives is a still existing problem: in two hundred years of independence, the Latin American societies were not able to abolish the structure that in every country divides the society in two blocks: the natives, often outsider in social and political discussions, and the descendants of the colonizers, controlling them.
Ideologies, political commitment, history, permeate the figure of this giant of the contemporary literature. Who claims: “we need more literature, we need societies impregnated of literature”. Because literature can influence the ideas of the people, and the ideas can move mountains.
Torno Subito 