- Okay, it's a great honor for me to introduce the second
lecture of this great writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. Thanks to the Berlin
Family for this generous, moving founding of a series, of this series of lecture and to Mario Vargas
Llosa for being with us, and also to the organizers of this event. My name is Thomas Pavel. I'm in Romance Languages,
Comparative Literature and Social Thought. The question I want to ask now today is where does he stand and his work stand in the development of the novel as a genre. We'll talk only about five hours, five minutes about this.
(audience laughs) Speaking first about this old division, old division which is still there between two kinds of novels. Those which are idealists
presenting human beings incredibly perfect and noble. The best example I think
everybody's at least saw the movie Les Miserables, okay? And the other side is the
more pessimistic type of novel or novels which make fun
of human imperfection and Madame Bovary would be an example. In Jean Valjean in Les
Miserables comes out of prison, converts to generosity, devotes his life to protect
a young girl, Cosette, who is not even his daughter. Madame Bovary, an unhappy, married woman in search of love affairs does not even take care
of her own daughter. I know people who like
this novel by the way. These tensions are there up to the second half of the 19th century when more and more writers belonging to the high type of literature, are attracted by pessimism. And more and more writers in towards the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century leave the idealized literature to popular low literature that they sort of have a certain contempt for it. And suddenly during the
verge of World War I what happens then shakes the certitude, the certainties of the certified societies so brutally then on its ruins
one sees a true avant-garde dada, nonsense, surrealism, dream, prose-like Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This kind of literature I would say is not unlike a mystic life. Why? Because if you want to be a good mystic you have to turn away
your faith from the world and to do penance, to suffer, okay? And it seems to me that
reading this kind of literature also makes you turn away
your faith from the world because they are often incomprehensible, and also to suffer, to
suffer, to suffer, okay? (snickers) As for South American writers they know how to moderate surrealism, moving its dream world closer to reality. And finally in France
this great Marcel Proust, that people loved, he
doesn't look at the world but looks especially inside. And the context changes. In Europe between the two world wars and in South America too and
after the Second World War, we see a strong generation
of political dictators. And writers who witness the cruelty of the totalitarian operation which instead of a sublime end of history promoted a permanent violence, they witness what is around them and they speak about that. And in France, a good
example is not enough, not known enough is this writer Vercors who writes about the war in France. There is Hans Fallada in Germany, there is Vasily Grossman who does the same thing
in the Soviet Union and it seems to me that in South America, one of the writers who does this is precisely Mario Vargas Llosa who witnesses the social inequality, the injustice, the succession
of political regimes, some dictatorial, some less so. Almost all of them very corrupt. And to speak about these issues, all these writers have to be realists. They have to look at reality as it is, to write about what is there, what happened, what has
to be fought against, resisted, prevented even. This is why his art looks as closely as he does to settings,
actions, dialogues. He mentioned Flaubert
and Faulkner last week and certainly their reverberation
is strong and audible, but there is also an
equally strong and audible social and political message. At the same time, in all his novel and especially in this
Conversation in the Cathedral, he plays and trains our attention. He plays with and trains our attention to jump a little bit
as he does in real life from one topic to the other far away and sometimes even in a
non-chronological order. And somehow, realist as he is, Mario Vargas Llosa almost never falls into the pessimist temptation. The ideal is always
perceptible at the horizon. In some way reachable, fully possible for individual human beings and for society as a whole. Here is Mario Vargas Llosa. Thank you. (audience clapping) - Many thanks to Professor Thomas for his very kind words of presentation. I'm going to talk today
about my third novel, Conversation in the Cathedral. I wrote it in the '60s. It took me more than three years and it's one of the books that has been more difficult to write. I think also that it's one of the books that is more difficult to read among the novels that I've written. But I don't think this
difficulty is gratuitous. I think that it was the only way in which this story could be persuasive, acceptable for the readers. As I told you last week, everything I have written in fiction is because I had certain experiences. Well, the experience that
is at the base of this novel was a dictatorship. Dictatorships were very,
very common when I was young. All over Latin America
there were dictatorships with the exception probably
only of three countries, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica. All the rest of Latin America was full of dictatorships in the '50s and '60s. This dictatorship was very important for myself and for my generation in Peru. The dictator was General
Manuel Apolinario Odria and it was power since 1948
until 1956, eight years. We call it El Ochenio. During those years, well, the dictatorship started
when we were young. I had 12 years and when the dictatorship
finished I was a man, I was 20 years old. All my adolescence was lived in a country in which political parties were forbidden, all, all of them. Politics had become those years a four-letter word in Peru. You couldn't talk about politics without thinking in something
subversive, dirty, dangerous. The constitutional rights were suspended. Censorship of the press and of the radio, there was no television on those years, was very, very strict. We knew that the newspapers, the radios didn't tell what was
happening in the country and that we lived in a kind of limbo particularly in the political domain but also in the social,
cultural censorship was extremely, extremely strict. Repression was very hard particularly with the left. There were two parties of the left, the APRA, Apristas, who were socialists, social
democrats, socialists and with the communists. The communist was a small party but was very seriously persecuted and repressed. That is the experience
that is the major role, raw material for this novel. Very important things happened to me during those years of
the Odria dictatorship. The first one was that in
my last year at the school I discover the social problem. I discover that Peru was
a deeply a inequal society with a small very privileged minority of rich, of prosperous families. Then that the middle
classes were very thin and that the large, the
great majority of Peruvians were poor people, deeply exploited and that this majority of Peruvians had a kind of life that was completely cut from the good things of civilization. Good salaries, culture, good education, opportunities
to improve in life. And all these produced in myself a kind of hatred against the system. And I decided to go
not as my family wanted to the Catholic University but the University of San Marcos. At that time, I'm talking of the '50s, of the 20th century, in Peru there were two universities. The Catholic University which was at that time the university
where middle class families send their daughters and sons. And the popular university, one of the oldest of Latin
America, San Marcos University. San Marcos was a public
university, open to everybody. And there was a very clear social division between
these two universities not only from ideological point of view, but also from an economic point of view. But I wanted to go to San Marcos and I wanted to go to San Marcos because I wanted to be near the
poor people of Peru. And also because it was said that in San Marcos there were
the revolutionaries. People who were fighting
against the dictatorship and the Apristas and most
of all the communists. I had decided that I wanted to be near the communists. I had read a book in my
last year of the school from a German communist, Jan Valtin, who had been in the underground
during the Nazi years and the book was absolutely exciting with these people working, risking their lives every minute moved by an idealistic idea of a society without poors, without exploitation, with total freedom, total
equality, a fraternal society. And that was what I thought communism was and I wanted very much to be part of this group, movement of heroic fighters from freedom and from justice. And I thought as everybody in Peru I think that if there were communists somewhere they were in San Marcos. I entered San Marcos and it was true, the communists were there. There were not many. The Apristas were much more numerous but the communists were there and they were trying to
resuscitate the communist party which has been deeply
brutalized by the dictatorship. Many of the leaders were
in prison or in exile, others were dead. And the survivors of the party were having a very, very
difficult underground life. Well, I make contact with them and during one year I was a
member of the communist party. The communist party didn't exist really. What existed was an
organization called Cahuide which was trying to resuscitate the party. We were not very effective
but we had at least study groups of Marxism
which of course was not a total university. And we tried to reorganize the unions of the students which had been devastated
by the repression. And we even organized an
strike of the university in solidarity with the tramway worker. There were tramways at that time in Lima and there was a union which
was near the communist. We organized a strike at the university in solidarity with the tramway union and we had the opportunity at
last to be near the workers. Other experience which was very, very important for me during those years was to meet, to see once the right hand of the dictator. The most hated man of the dictatorship which was not Odria but this strong man who was the responsible
of the political security, so, the chief of the repression. It was called Esparza Zañartu. A group of students who were
imprisoned from San Marcos, we discovered that they
were sleeping in the floor that without any kind of blankets and so we organized a
collect in the university to buy blankets for them, and we brought the blankets
to jail, to the prison. But the director of the prison said to us, "No, no, no. "I cannot accept these blankets "if Mr. Esparza Zañartu don't authorize." We discuss a lot if we
ask for an interview with Esparza Zañartu. And finally we decided
to ask for this interview and I was one of the five
students who went to see him. And this was an experience
that is still very vivid in my memory. I remember we enter the
ministry of the interior, we enter his office. We were of course afraid and he was there sitting in his chair and looking at us. It seems a very inoffensive person. He seemed to be bored completely and he looked at us as if he was looking to us from the water. There was in their eyes something liquid. I was deeply, deeply,
deeply impressed by the insignificance of this individual. He seems nothing and
the country was really terrorized by the power that he had. And by the brutality
with which he exercise this systematic repression
of anything that could put in risk the system, the dictatorship. Well, with all these I think is built the story of
Conversation in the Cathedral. What I wanted, since then, although I wrote the novel much later but since then I was thinking
in a novel, in a story that would give testimony of what we lived those eight years of Odria regime. And the novel does not pretend to tell the story of the dictatorship, although you can follow in the novel the main, the most important
events of those years, the political events of those years. But the main idea is to present the effects that the system that we were suffering in the country had in different activities, environments activities even in the more distant of the political sphere. For example, what was the
effect of the dictatorship in the professional life of professionals? What happened in the world of journalists, in the world of academy in
the universities and schools? What happened in the night sphere, the world of prostitutes, of cabarets, of all these underground world which is half criminal
and half no criminal? And what about politicians? What was the relationship of the regime and the entrepreneurs, the civil servants? The first year in which
I was writing the novel I was completely blind about the idea of the general novel. I had no idea how all these episodes that I was writing could be connected in a coherent structure. And only after writing
many, many of these episodes without any kind of integration I had one idea one day. There was a rabies
epidemic, you understand? An epidemia de rabia, yeah, in Lima and the authorities were collecting all the dogs that they could find, and they were took to a dog pound, a dog pound to be killed. They were assaulting houses
sometimes to kidnap the dogs and it happened to me, I had a little dog. And he was kidnapped by the authorities and well, I was desperate
when I discovered that and I went immediately to the
dog pound and I rescue my dog. But when I was there rescuing my dog I saw the way in which
the dog were sacrificed and it was horrendous to see
how they were killed with, how can I say it, the garrotes with. Yeah, it was really horrendous and I went immediately
after with a kind of vertigo what I have seen to take a beer in a small
cafe called La Catedral, The Cathedral near the dog pound. And I was there recovering
of the impression when I had the idea. What if my character, the main character of the
story Santiago Zavala, has this experience. He comes to rescue his dog and discover among the poor
people who are killing dogs the driver of his father, a black man, very poor
man, from very poor origins and he invited him to take
a beer here where I am now. And they had a very long
conversation of hours about deep secrets in
both lives of Santiago and of Ambrosio, the killer of dogs. And what if this conversation
is the skeleton of the story, the spine, the vertebral
spine of the story around which other
stories would come and go, attracted by the episodes
that are appearing in this conversation, in
this main conversation, this central conversation. And it was like that that
I discover the structure that I could give to the novel and to which all these episodes that I have been working
on could be attached giving them a kind of
organization, of system. I think this is what could be called the structure of Conversation
in the Cathedral. It's like a tree of conversations. There is a trunk, a central conversation which is the conversation of Ambrosio, the killer of dogs, the former
driver of Santiago's father, a very prosperous entrepreneur deeply connected to the dictatorship with the dictatorship,
beneficiary of the dictatorship, accomplice of the dictator. And his driver, a very mysterious man who has been a bodyguard. Not only a driver but a bodyguard and who had been linked to
these gangs that were formed by Esparza Zañartu, by the
chief of the repressive system to help the police in the repression of the subversive people. And well, this is a conversation that occupies the first chapter of the novel but is a conversation in which many, many, many episodes have been suppressed momentaneously. And that they would reappear
in the course of the novel attracted by episodes,
by other conversations that happens with different persons, in different periods of time, in different places. But little by little you could discover that all these is designing something like a figure of the puzzle. A figure which gives you the life, the kind of life that the
whole society of Peru had during these eight years
of the Odria dictatorship. It was very difficult for me, very, very difficult to
organize this structure trying to avoid let's say the formalism. Formalism is when a literary technique appears as a literary technique. A real, effective literary technique is that disappears entirely and makes the story
appear as self-sufficient. But when you can, when you
can differentiate the story of the way in which words appear or the time of the narration appears so the technique doesn't work. The technique to be effective
should be invisible. You have got the impression
when the technique is effective that this has not been told that this is happening,
that this is life itself. In order to make disappear this technique I had to work very, very, very hard rewriting so many times each episodes and on the other hand, I didn't want the obscurity take over and make the reader completely lost about what was going on. It was important always
to give enough elements for the reader to discover
what was happening, how the story is jumping
from the past to the present and jumping to the present to the past, attracted by not chronology
but by different reasons. Same characters, effects or
motivations of certain episodes. Well, what is this story
that the novel uses to introduce the reader
in all the complexities and diversities of the Peruvian society? Well, there is the family
of Santiago Zavala. His father, a very
prosperous entrepreneur. They are in the upper, upper class. They are rich, they are prosperous and they have a very close relationship with the military of the regime. Don Fermin is married with Dona Zoila who thinks herself to be an aristocrat and acting and speaking with all these pretentiousness, you know, of an aristocratic lady. And they have three children. The elder one Sparky, Chispas, a daughter Tete and Santiago. Santiago is the difficult one. Santiago is a rebel when he's young but then he's more than a rebel. He's deeply disappointed and
disgusted with his family. He has discovered the social problem and he feels that he's a privileged, that he belongs to a very
small, small minority which has everything for whom all the doors had
opened, all the opportunities. And he feel ashamed and
disgusted with himself because of this privileged position. And so, he's always
fighting with his family, with his parent,
particularly with his father. And his father has a great preference for
him among his children because he feels that he's intelligent, that he's sensible, that there are in him qualities that don't exist at all, nor
in Sparky, nor in Tete. And he would like his son to be very successful in life. And he's so sad, so
depressed when Santiago decides to go to San Marcos instead of the Catholic University where all good boys, good families are. And then one day he
discovered that his son, Santiago has been arrested. Has been arrested with subversives because he's a member of the
communist party, of this. Poor Don Fermin Zavala, he's really desperate, you know? Immediately he used his influences and Santiago of course
is immediately liberated. This is a tragedy for Santiago because he discovered
that he cannot follow as he would like very much the sword, the destiny of his comrades
because he's a privileged one. He does not go to jail as
the poor comrades of Cahuide. On the other hand, the communists are very few but they are very dogmatic, they are very Stalinist, you know? It was the '50s in which
Stalinism was the norm and so, he had been disappointed. He didn't find in the
communist what he thought and he become a very pessimistic person. And then he has an idea which would organize his life. And his idea is very simple. In a country like Peru, the only way in which you succeed in life is destroying people, exploiting
people, killing people. You cannot be successful in Peru without producing sufferances, misery disgrace around you. So, he decided not to
be successful in life. He chooses to be a mediocre. He chooses to be a failure by the standard values
of the society to the suffering of his father. When he see that his son instead
of finishing the law school and become a lawyer
decided to be a journalist, a little, little journalist in a second rate journal of Lima. And he tries all his
life to convince Santiago that he could be doing better things to improve the situation, the political, the economic, the social situation if he succeeded really
in life, in a profession. But he never convinced his son and this is the great disgrace of Fermin. Santiago becomes a journalist. With Santiago we enter this other world very different from the
world of Don Fermin Zavala and his friends and his families, the world of Miraflores, a
residential quarter in Lima. The journalists are middle,
middle class, poor people. Not really professionals. At that time, journalist
was not academic profession. Journalists were people who had entered journals or radios and
had been formed working improvised journalists. And as if it were very poorly paid these profession attracted second rate and even third rate kind of people, and that's what Santiago wants to be. And so, we enter this world and we discover the
way in which this world is completely manipulated
by Esparza Zañartu. And then we discover how
this world particularly in the criminal sections of newspapers is very, very near and sometimes mixed with the world of
delinquents, of criminals. Prostitution, drug addiction. All these is very, very near and you enter without knowing suddenly in this another world which
is the real underworld, and you discover that this world is also totally manipulated and
organized by political reasons because from this world, Esparza Zañartu and the
regime extracts information. And also, uses this world to victimize people, to precipitate people in scandals that push them to the ridiculous or destroy the families or lives. Little by little you discover that everything is controlled by the regime and that the activities which seem more distant of the politics are in fact directed and used for political goals. This is the case of the
workers for example. The workers play an
important part in the novel and you discover there how workers who want to be independent
of critics of the government are little by little
separated from the unions. In certain case expelled, in certain case put in
jail or sent to the exile or killed. And how the unions little by little are organized at the service of the regime which is deeply, deeply connected with the upper class and
how great entrepreneurs, owners of latifundia, of big haciendas work in very close
collaboration with the regime which guarantees peace and docility in their companies or latifundia. All the secret reality of the society comes to the surface through this different conversations
which are crossing at and decrossing themselves
through the story. And a story which lasts
more or less the eight years which were the years of the dictatorship. When I was working in the novel, one day I had this idea. The time which as I said to you last week I think it's always a
fictitious invention, something that the writer of a novel should invent exactly as the novelist has to invent a narrator
to tell the story. A common reader usually thinks that the narrator of
a novel is the author. No, the author is never the narrator. The narrator is always
an invented character. Even if it is invisible
it's always invented. The narrator is someone who lives only within the novel, not outside the novel. The narrator is made of words exactly as the other characters and is always an invention. Even in novels that use the name of the author as the narrator. Don't believe it, no. This is a fake. The narrator is always
an invented character. Well the time is always
an invented element in all novels. Chronology is a very important
aspect of the technique that gives verosimilitud
or not to a fiction. Well, one day I had this idea. Time must be in the novel in
Conversation in the Cathedral exactly as an space. And a space in which
you could move the story from the past to the future, from the future to the present or the present to the past. And all these is possible
if you do it in such a way that this will enrich the story, impregnated it of mystery, of an element that away the
curiosity and the interest of the reader. Something that would distract the reader about certain things but not at the extreme of make him to abandon the effort to keep and understanding the
intricacies of the structure. All these gave me a lot, a lot of work. I wanted to introduce in the novel like in a thriller a mystery. An element that would be looming, looming over the story giving the reader a certain malaise until in a given moment something
would be revealed to him that would have traumatic effects in everything that he
remembers of the story. Because everything would change by the effect of this revelation. And this happens in the
third part of the novel. As I told you, journalists
are very close of this night life of cabarets,
of cafes of brothels and in one of these
excursions that they do and Santiago Zavala is part of the group of journalists that go to these secret places for the
(speaks in foreign language). He hears something that makes him aware that his father has a double life. A life that is being
secret for him until now. How it is possible that one
of the girls of a brothel mentions him using not his name but in a way of referring to him that is deeply, deeply
offensive, Bola de Oro. He said, "What, Bola de Oro? "My father is called Bola de Oro?" And what does that mean? In the underground world
of prostitutes and, Bola de Oro is an homosexual. My father, my father linked to this world. He's absolutely terrified and he starts to explore what is going on. And apparently has been a crime, a prostitute has been killed and in this environment it is said that Bola de Oro, that the very respectable
Don Fermin Zavala is mixed with this crime. And that he would have ordered this crime and that the instrument that
he used to produce the crime was his driver and bodyguard, Ambrosio. When this is discovered everything changed and the novel has a kind of anecdotical regression
until the beginning. What Santiago thought of his family, of his father was completely wrong. His father was, had a secret life. A life in which he was mixed
with the worst kind of people and there were even facts,
criminal facts, corpses. He's completely blind of horror and he has the impression that he was, since the beginning and
without knowing pain with his failure in life,
with his mediocrity, pain for the horrendous facts that his family and his social world
has been able to discover. You never know exactly what has happened. You never know exactly if Don Fermin Zavala has been
mixed in this way to this crime or if this has been an initiative of the Ambrosio Pardo, of his driver who had a kind of religious
admiration for him, who discovered a kind
of religious admiration for the elegance, for the intelligence and for the kind of affection
that he had received from this kind of god with whom he has been working for for several, several years. Maybe it was Ambrosio
who took the initiative of commit this crime because he thought that this could be something that Fermin
Zavala would thank him for. Actually there are indications in one of the several conversations that impregnate the novel that Fermin Zavala is deeply furious when he discovered that
Ambrosio has produced this corpse that he has
killed this poor woman. But nothing is totally
evident in the novel. Santiago remains in this kind of confusion that in a way is the world in which he has been living all his life. I had working on this novel a grand preoccupation. I wanted the language to
be completely invisible. I didn't want that the language could seem to be an aesthetic adventure different of telling in
the most functional way the story of the novel. Unlike what the language
is in my second novel, La casa verde, The Green House, a presence, a vivid
presence which is always obstrue in the facts, I wanted the language in this novel to be strictly functional. To be totally invisible for the reader to have
the impression of being not reading a story but living it, participated in this story. As I told you I worked very hard and of course I was deeply disappointed when the novel was published and was the less read of my novels. But time has been little by little creating readers for
Conversation in the Cathedral. Little by little the novel has been gaining its right to existence and probably Conversation in the Cathedral has now in our days more readers than when it was published for the first time. I am happy because as I told you this is a novel that probably gave me all the white hairs
that I have in my time. I will finish telling you an anecdote. When the novel was
published, Esparza Zañartu, the chief of repression
that had been in exile, he went to live in Brazil for many years had returned to Peru. And the journalist immediately recognized in Cayo Bermudez that Esparza Zañartu was a
model for this character. So he went to see him and
he went to interview him and says, "Well, you have
read the book surely. "There is a Cayo Bermudez character "who is absolutely similar to you." And he said, "No, no. "If Vargas Llosa would have come to see me "I would have telling him "much more interesting
story than what he told." (audience laughing) And probably it was true. (audience laughing) Thank you very much. (audience applauding)
