If literature crosses the boundaries of life

With Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89, in Lima, where he had been living since 2022, after returning from Europe, the great myth of South American literature, of which he had been one of the main interpreters on a par with García Marquez, Jorge Amado and Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps finally died. We could not imagine the seventies without that fertile and mysterious air that enveloped the continent of Latin America, from which came stories so far-fetched that practically everyone was convinced that Cervantes had transmigrated there, finding in the lands on the other side of the Atlantic a new Spain where he could make his wacky characters take root. In fact, this was the theorem carried by writers from that vast continent marred by dictatorships, perpetually in turmoil for political reasons and never quite convinced that they were on the right side of the New World. Vargas Llosa's narrative did not have the characters of a lost visionariness that were purely Marquez's, yet even his books, however aligned to the paradigm of that literature, felt a melancholic air, perhaps more rarefied, paradoxically more European, at least in appearance, than the deflagrating fertility of magic realism. And this was perhaps attributed to the fact that the remote place where Vargas Llosa was born, Arequipa, in the south of Peru, was a point in the long Andean cordillera, a city in the midst of three volcanoes, with a frightened and baroque air, a far cry from the swampy lands of Aracataca, Marquez's Macondo. Perhaps therein lay the difference between the two South American Nobel Prize winners: unlike the Colombian author, Vargas Llosa did not have a Macondo to which he could trace all his stories, and his fleeing first to France, then to Spain was read as a sign of exile, an emblem of foreignness. We know how much disappointment his attempt to run for the presidency of Peru, in the 1990 elections, would generate in him, and how all in all he manifested political positions that over the years had swung from the anti-capitalist left to conservative liberalism. However, we also know that his most famous books - The City and the Dogs (1963),The Green House (1966), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), Aunt Julia and the Scribbler (1977) - breathe Peruvian atmosphere even though they were written in a foreign language and adhere perfectly to the literary paradigm that the 1970s sought and found in the fiction of that continent: a subversive form of realism, a clinging to the tools of fantasy and dream in order to cross the ideological boundary that Italian culture was afflicted with, despite the fact that the reasons for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 2010, when no one expected it anymore, recognised in his work a 'cartography of power structures'. It is in this strenuous struggle between individuals and society that the fate of his writing is played out: not so much the sterile opposition between real life and imagined life, but rather the disagreement that every man feels when he perceives that his life is an experience that is not allowed to rewind, but to succumb to the idea that each of us is stuck in a single destiny and that, despite the many parallel worlds, we are not allowed a trial of appeal. Herein lies the drama, but herein also lies the solution offered by the survival machine that is literature. There is something magical and unreal, even visionary, in all of this, because only human beings are allowed the miracle of ranging beyond the walls of time, at least as long as the exercise of storytelling manages to survive the dangers of asphyxiation that postmodernity brings with it. There is no better faith in the belief in literature, in its power to overcome the boundaries of life, provided, however, that it remains literature, that is, a metaphor for existing, rather than bending to the rules that cultural models impose. The world is insufficient: this is what Vargas Llosa emphasises. I happened to listen to one of his lectures at the Catholic University a few years ago. Every word, he said, ends in the act in which it is pronounced, but every word, precisely because it is pronounced, has the power to restore a semblance of infinity to that which ends, like fire, like the soul, like things that last, and to multiply it in time until we forget about their ending.