Seven Types of Disambiguation: The Mario Vargas Llosa Readings

by Kevin Anthony Brown (October 2023)

 

 

Peruvian ex-presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa has published some 30 works in a variety of genres; scripts for film and television; short-stories, stage-plays; and novels. “If I had to name the three modern thinkers to whom I owe the most, politically speaking, I would not hesitate for a second: Karl Popper; Friedrich August von Hayek; and Isaiah Berlin.” Readers seeking insights into the political and literary philosophy underlying Vargas Llosa’s body of work may find useful guides to further reading in the complementary texts under discussion here.

 

I

The Call of the Tribe consists of seven profiles in liberal political philosophy: Adam Smith; José Ortega y Gasset; Friedrich August von Hayek; Karl Popper; Raymond Aron; Isaiah Berlin and Jean-François Revel. Conversation at Princeton collects dialogues on literature and politics occasioned by a graduate seminar in which, over the course of a semester, students and faculty participated in readings of seven books written or topics proposed by Vargas Llosa ranging from fiction, journalism and history to Conversation in the Cathedral, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Who Killed Palomino Molero?, A Fish in the Water and The Feast of the Goat.

 

II

“Disambiguation” is easier to understand than to pronounce. The word has passed into everyday usage because Wikipedia uses it to differentiate otherwise unrelated people, places or things having identical names: 16^th century Peruvian chronicler Garcilaso (El Inca) de la Vega versus Spanish philosopher-poet Garcilaso de la Vega; playwright César Vallejo versus a soccer club.

As used in this essay, disambiguation simply refers to Vargas Llosa’s attempt to clarify, make un-ambiguous, to emphasize “points of convergence”[1] between views commonly held in reflexive opposition to one another— “tariffs” versus “free trade” or “liberalism” versus “conservatism” —but which aren’t always mutually exclusive. It’s as serious an error, Vargas Llosa says, merely “to reduce liberalism to an economic policy of the market functioning with minimal state intervention”[2] as it is to believe the marketplace is “capable of resolving all human problems on its own.”[3]

 

III
Adam Smith

Smith “never imagined the revolution Wealth of Nations would cause in the world of ideas, politics, and economics.”[4]

Disambiguation No. 1: Despite his renown as founding father of the dismal science, Adam Smith saw himself first and foremost as a moral philosopher, not an economist.

Conversation at Princeton proves Vargas Llosa as good at synopsizing his own work as summarizing “the thoughts of other people, considering all their arguments, weighing the attenuating circumstances they faced, the constraints of the age, never pushing their words or ideas in one direction or another to make them appear similar to his own.”[5] Vargas Llosa admits his “brief synthesis gives only a remote idea,” he says, “of the ambition and enormity of Wealth of Nations (1776), an “oceanic book.”[6] Yet Vargas Llosa’s reading of Smith on the relationship between city and countryside, on “the exchange of primary products for manufactured products,”[7] goes well beyond that of a “mere popularizer.”[8] The easier a work of intellectual history is to read, the harder it probably was to write.

 

IV
José Ortega y Gasset

The last decades of Ortega’s life roughly coincide with Vargas Llosa’s birth during the Spanish Civil War and the end of Peru’s so-called Ochenio. Back then, Lima’s now-decommissioned Panóptico imprisoned an earlier generation of novelists like Ciro Alegría. By the time he was 20, Vargas Llosa’s entire life had been shaped by dictatorships in both Bolivia and Perú. This era serves as backdrop to Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La cuidad y los perros (1962), later translated as The Time of the Hero.

Dictatorship came in two colors: Trujillo llamativo;[9] or drab shades of Fidel-don’t-dance olive-green. You could count the free-election countries on one hand: Chile; Costa Rica; and Uruguay. Dictatorships— “some soft, some hard, some brutal, but dictatorships”[10] nonetheless—dotted the Americas “from one end to the other,” Argentina to Mexico, and the Dominican Republic to Cuba.

In the years before and after Che Guevara, writers from all over Latin America—Andeans, Brazilians, Caribbeans, Central Americans, Rioplatenses, North Americans—converged on Europe. Vargas Llosa was beginning to publish under Hemingway’s influence the short stories eventually collected in Los jefes (1959; translated as The Cubs and Other Stories, 1979). Thus began the Boom in Spanish-American literature former Princeton lecturer José Donoso gives his personalized history of.

It may surprise casual readers to learn that, when Vargas Llosa left Peru to study in Spain, although the Iberian Peninsula under Portuguese dictator Salazar—who’d been in power as long as Vargas Llosa had been alive—and Generalíssimo Franco had both become insularized and underdeveloped, “few Spanish intellectuals of [Ortega’s] time [took] an interest in Latin America.”[11]

Disambiguation No. 2: Ortega was a liberal, not the conservative he’s made out to be.

As a young man shaped by media that pandered to dictatorships, Vargas Llosa admired writers who were “engaged.” The Ortega of Revolt of the Masses certainly was that. For some, Ortega’s life in exile at Buenos Aires was a sufficiently clear statement. Others criticized Ortega for refusing to state an unequivocal position on the Spanish Civil War. Vargas Llosa’s defense is that Ortega never embraced but only tolerated Franco because Spain under fascism or communism would have been even worse.

As prose writer, Vargas Llosa aspires to the virtues he sees in Ortega and others in Call of the Tribe. Ortega enriched and renewed the Spanish language as much as did “Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz.”[12]

 

V
Friedrich August von Hayek

The death of former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) reminded us how soon forgotten were the dominant socio-political orthodoxies of Vargas Llosa’s early years as a writer. For those who came of age amid “the great ideological conflicts between communism and democracy in the post-Second World War period”[13] it was all Marx, all Freud, all the time.

Politicians of invertebrate integrity abuse words like “liberal,” “radical,” “socialist” or even “communist.” Even Hayek, one of the “liberal economists of the so-called Austrian School,”[14] whom Vargas Llosa says “contributed in a decisive fashion to give liberalism a very clear content and very precise boundaries,”[15] admittedly “uses the term socialism in a way that confuses it with communism.”[16] Vargas Llosa does readers a great service in writing so lucidly about how U.S.-Soviet Cold War politics became entangled with those of Latin American countries governed by “dictatorships, military juntas, or right-wing governments.”[17]

Disambiguation No. 3: Commies Are All Alike.

In Latin America, Trotskyism was the dominant communist tendency, not Marxism-Leninism.  There are varieties of socialism and its fellow-travelers—anarchists, democratic socialists, communist socialists, social democrats. Nor can “Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Castroists, Guevarists, anarchists, progressive Christians” and other “groups and groupuscules of the extreme left”[18] be lumped together.  Any more than Hayek can “be pigeonholed within a single discipline, economics, because his ideas are as innovative in economics as they are in the fields of philosophy, law, sociology, politics, psychology, science, history, and ethics.”[19]

Vargas Llosa’s evolving political philosophy, his reading of Hayek, like Hayek’s reading of Carl Menger, would “dispel the socialist follies of his youth and turn him into a defender of individualism, private enterprise, and the market.”[20] Vargas Llosa’s contentious turn toward the “right” should worry centrist independents less than others’ widespread embrace of strident oversimplification on either side of the spectrum on any given issue. Some variant of the term “radical” occurs dozens of times in both Call of the Tribe and Conversation at Princeton, not always as a pejorative. Some form of the word “liberal” occurs more than 160 times between the two texts. Certain socialists, like young Revel, are liberals.  Certain “liberals,” like Margaret Thatcher, are conservatives.

The memoir El pez en el agua[21] (1993) covers two main periods of Vargas Llosa’s life: his childhood and coming of age as a writer; and his run for the Peruvian presidency. Give demagogues some credit. They understand, perhaps better than Vargas Llosa understood before his defeat in 1990, the subconscious wellsprings of fear and loathing. “Facts interested Revel more than theories,” Vargas Llosa says, “and he never had the slightest hesitation in refuting theories if they were not confirmed by the facts.”[22] Vargas Llosa assumed, reasonably, that possession of the facts, however demonstrably true, will always trump denial of any theory that “doesn’t fit into an ideological framework”[23] of wishful thinking, however demonstrably false. He learned the hard way that Enlightenment rationalism is not what smear campaigns appeal to. (What kind of degenerate writes a book called In Praise of the Stepmother, anyway?) When in possession of the facts, pound the facts; absent the facts, pound the podium with your shoe.

 

VI
Karl Popper

Vargas Llosa based his novel The War of the End of the World (1981) on historical events. Vargas Llosa’s disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution informs The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984). His novella Who Killed Palomino Molero? (1986) relates to Vargas Llosa’s investigation into the Shining Path massacre at Uchuraccay. Karl Popper, a philosopher of history, inspires some of Vargas Llosa’s most astute remarks on the relationship between history and fiction.

Disambiguation No. 4: History, unlike economics, has no “laws,” only tendencies.

Popper objects to Historicism, the notion Wikipedia defines as history developing inexorably and necessarily according to knowable general laws towards a determinate end. Marxist ideas of history as class struggle over the means of production, of a dictatorship of the proletariat or other distributive system of resources, in Popper’s view, tend toward authoritarianism.  And dictatorship of any kind, whether right-wing or left-wing, ideological or military, religious or lay, tends in Vargas Llosa’s view toward dehumanization of individuals under statist “rules that favor [over] flesh-and-blood men and women in the here and now abstract concepts that totalitarians use to justify their excesses.”[24] Or, as we read in the Borges/Sabato dialogues, “Cada vez que los teóricos invocan al hombre con H mayúscula hay que ponerse a temblar: o guillotinan a miles de hombres con minúscula o los torturan en campos de concentración.”[25]

“Popper’s conception of written history,” Vargas Llosa writes, “seems exactly what I have always believed a novel to be.”[26] History is an artificial construct of historians, just as fiction is a construct of storytellers: “partial, provisional, and, in the final analysis, subjective.”[27]

 

VII
Raymond Aron

Vargas Llosa’s passion for reading, typical for a writer, emerged at age five or so. By 15, with half the money he’d earned as cub reporter publishing pieces in Lima’s tabloid daily newspaper La Crónica, Vargas Llosa subscribed to Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. Hour after hour, month after month, he read it cover to cover.

There are no nonpartisans, only extremists or moderates. Ortega said the partisan’s role was either to oppose or to seduce. A bipartisan critic’s role is to moderate heated debates. His disillusionment with Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the ideological traumas of Vargas Llosa’s communist phase. Readers who haven’t mastered Sartre’s 50-plus translated volumes—autobiography and memoir, critical and philosophical essays, plays, novels, screenplays and short stories—readers who’d never raised Sartre up on a pedestal in the first place, readers for whom Sartre had less of a height to fall from, must judge for themselves whether or not Sartre is now “unreadable.”[28] Nausea appeared just two years after Vargas Llosa’s birth.  As a playwright whose first drama was produced during his teens, Vargas Llosa still thinks No Exit plays well onstage. Memoirists find Les Mots (1963) useful. Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr is, Vargas Llosa says, Sartre’s “best book.”[29] His continuing celebrity notwithstanding, how well or badly has Sartre’s work really aged? Sartre didn’t have all the answers. Prophets never do. “Aron’s writings,” on the other hand, “remain fresh and topical.”[30]

Disambiguation No. 5: Raymond Aron, not Jean-Paul Sartre, was the most important intellectual figure of post-war France.

Sartre’s sad last years were spent, like those of the aging revolutionary in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, “handing out flyers, mobilizing unions, organizing strikes.”[31] “[E]xcept on the issue of anti-colonialism, where he always had a crystal-clear and lucid viewpoint,”[32] Vargas Llosa grew dismayed at “how clumsy and wrong [Sartre] was in almost all the political positions that he defended or attacked.”[33] As for Aron, Vargas Llosa says “all his thought focused on Europe and the United States,” and he “showed an almost complete lack of interest in the third world … in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.”[34]

A reviewer’s motivation to write, paraphrasing Ortega, should be “pleasure in trying to understand” from a non-dogmatic point of view “predisposed towards benevolence.”[35] Vargas Llosa reads closely and thinks critically in these seven biographical essays, mostly “from a supportive position.” Yet, as in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin, he “does not hesitate in pointing out … errors and defects along with … virtues and excellent qualities.”[36]

Both Conversation at Princeton and The Call of the Tribe are structurally elegant at the level of the overall book, the level of the chapter or section, the level of the sentence and even at the level of word-choice. But they are unequally polished at paragraph level. Gallo justly praises Vargas Llosa’s “erudition and versatility.”[37] His is not what Hazlitt calls a “People with One Idea” problem. The process of transcribing, editing, copyediting, proofreading, then—and only then—translating text at an average rate of 2,500 words per day over the course of 250 pages is thankless, grueling work and too often unpaid work. Vargas Llosa has lived and taught for so long at places like Harvard and in the UK that one imagines this seminar could easily have been conducted in English. With Anna Kushner, you forget Conversation at Princeton is a translated work.

Making literature runs out the clock on having a full life. And vice versa. In his essay on Revel, Vargas Llosa describes trying “to go unnoticed, away from the glare of power and success,”[38] to get some concentrated work done. Between the publication of Who Killed Palomino Molero just months before Vargas Llosa declared himself a candidate for the Peruvian presidency to his political defeat at the hands of “Fujimoristas” in the elections three or four years later, he didn’t have time to read more than a few lines from Góngora, much less to write a book. Vargas Llosa was obligated “to give six speeches a day and [ended] up repeating common phrases that are pure rhetoric devoid of content, a dead language that doesn’t express ideas or experiences.”[39] Perhaps Princeton had more editorial support to throw at the problem between 2015 to 2017 than Farrar, Straus and Giroux had editorial assistants. Nevertheless, it’s hair-pulling frustration for non-technical translators to work with repetitive text, however elegant its surface polish, text he’s not at liberty to “improve upon.” Which is the case with John King in several parts of Call of the Tribe.

Fame has side-effects. Action items remain unacted on. Letters yellow in their place of good intentions, unanswered. Books, unread, pile up. Invitations are very grudgingly accepted or rejected outright. What’s more than likely is that, besieged by all the invitations a Nobel laureate receives to supply content for very disparate occasions, some of them intended to be heard and not read—a Ronald Reagan White House dinner, a centenary exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, a TV script, a conference paper on the need for privatization and a market economy, a bi-monthly column for El País, a gala in Ladbroke Grove attended by Margaret Thatcher and many others—don Mario, The Most Illustrious Marquess of Vargas, “who loved ideas so much and moved among them with such ease,”[40] simply ran out of time.

 

VIII
Isaiah Berlin

1974 saw historic convergence. Vargas Llosa published The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Hayek shared the Nobel Prize in economics with Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Popper published The Unended Quest. As TV scriptwriter, Vargas Llosa paid his first visit to the Dominican Republic, a trip culminating in The Feast of the Goat, a novel about the Dominican Republic under generalíssimo Rafael Leónidas Molina Trujillo (“El Jefe”), a dictator notorious even by the standards of dictatorship.

Same year, an Oxford scholar proposed editing the collected writings of Isaiah Berlin, who’d published only three previous books. “The rest of his vast written work,” says Vargas Llosa, was “packed in dusty boxes in his office, or buried in scholarly journals, Festschriften[41], in folders containing testimonials, lectures, reports, reviews, obituaries, or in archives.”[42]

Disambiguation No. 6: “[His] rivals were absolutely [wrong] when they implied that Berlin was merely a brilliant conversationalist, a salon philosopher, without the patience or energy to undertake work of great intellectual scope.”[43]

In Conversation at Princeton, Vargas Llosa clarifies what Cathedral, which Gallo considers among Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious works, and which Vargas Llosa himself considers among his best, is and is not. The “cathedral” is a dive-bar, not a church. Vargas Llosa says a certain amount of intended ambiguity—the suppression of dates, riddles posed but never answered (who really did kill Palomino Molero, anyway?), verb-tense distortions, the superimposition of narrative upon narrative, shifts in point-of-view—ambiguity is a conscious feature of his fiction. Conversation in the Cathedral is not a Naked-Lunch “cut-up.” The recurring conversation between Zavalita and Ambrosio, the “backbone [which] unites other stories that are scattered over space and time, and that jump from one character to another,”^[44] reads very much as it was written. (The Green House, an early Vargas Llosa novel influenced by Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, cost translator Gregory Rabassa a great deal of time and effort. To keep things in perspective, Conversation in the Cathedral took Vargas Llosa more than three years to write, and earned him a head full of gray hair.) The novel was difficult even for Vargas Llosa himself to follow in its early drafts. It is not, Vargas Llosa warns, “for passive readers.”^[45]

Wikipedia defines conversation as interactive communication between two or more people, non-verbal (tics, smiles, shrugs, frowns) and verbal. Artful conversation was practiced by John Maynard Keynes and the Bloomsbury circle. That set, perhaps more conversant with the transcribed table-talk of Boswell & Johnson or with French salon habitués from the 16^th century to the Sartrean era than with Latin-world tertulias, Bloomsbury recognized conversation, a genre unto itself, as an art form of the very highest order—a continuation of Platonic dialogue by other than written means. (In his chapter on Revel, Vargas Llosa extols “what it meant to ‘philosophize’ in the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or in the Europe of Leibniz, Descartes, Pascal, Kant and Hegel,” as opposed to “the modest and specialized activity confined often to linguistics that has usurped the name of philosophy today.”[46]) Conversations with Goethe is an example of timeless table-talk. Intellectual rigor and clarity are as fundamental to the art of conversation as to biography. But so is good gossip, defined in Clare Brant’s introduction to The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as first-person character observation, whether supportive or vituperative, about matters of social and political conformity or non-conformity, expressed behind the backs of third persons typically absent at the time.

Artful conversation combines in a way mere witty banter or pedantry does not a delicate balance of reasoned argument on broadly generalized topics with public expression of the private self. French dining rooms, salons and drawing rooms simultaneously workshopped psychology (Stendhal’s Red and Black), moral philosophy (La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes) and table manners. Academic bias in favor of written over oral forms of literacy one imagines Vargas Llosa capturing by means of oral history questionnaires, housed in the archives of Princeton, only partly accounts for this. Rude table-manners apart, anathemas of polite conversation attendant upon the breakdown of social support networks, which we see in increasingly feral societies slouching toward barbarism, is commensurate with an overemphasis on shouted expression of personal opinion and disregard for objective fact. We have a two-tiered system of elite entitlement and mass disenfranchisement, one for those que no tuvieron más escuela que la vida, as Bryce Echenique says, and another for those que no tuvieron más vida que la de una escuela.[47] Or, loosely translated, one for those who have only words and another for those whom words have failed.

“Talk” has become so cheap that what you mostly hear in dive-bars or pubs isn’t dialectic but narcissistic monologue, petty grievance, recriminatory bickering (self-justification in response to others’ accusations) or mimicry of bickering. Mental illness, inconversibly widespread and increasingly homeless, only partly accounts for it. More than non-toxic public discourse, more than what Ilan Stavans in the Oxford Book of Latin American Essays calls “the sharpening of useful ideas by means of argument,” more than mere civility, what gets lost along with the art of conversation is the ideal of civil society.

Which brings us back to Isaiah Berlin. The “talkative person is someone who speaks more than he thinks,” according to Joseph Joubert, a letter-writer and keeper of notebooks who published nothing during his lifetime. “Someone who thinks a great deal and who talks a great deal is never considered talkative.” On the Continent, in pre-Hitler Vienna, artists, musicians, thinkers and writers like Berlin gathered in salons at 7 p.m., dined at 10, then continued on to cafés, debating ideas till dawn. Vargas Llosa, like many Latin American writers exiled in Paris during the 1950s and beyond, seems closer to our idea of the French public intellectual as personified by Camus than U.S. writers tend to be. For Vargas Llosa to call Isaiah Berlin “a pyrotechnic conversationalist”[48] is as great a compliment as calling journalist Ortega “a man of letters.”

 

IX
Jean-François Revel

Chronologically, Vargas Llosa saves for last the articles and essays of Revel “a teacher, an art critic, a philosopher, an editor, a gourmet, a political analyst, a writer, and a journalist.”[49] Intellectually, he ranks them right alongside those of Raymond Aron.

Disambiguation No. 7: “In an attempt to discredit him, his opponents often labeled him a conservative.  He was never a conservative.”[50]

Sir William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity was published shortly before Vargas Llosa was born.  So foundational was this text to New Critics whom Empson inspired that, by the time Vargas Llosa began to publish, among both non-academics as well as academics, both in the English-speaking world and in France, the close reading of a text as more or less self-contained system of signs had become a dominant methodology of literary criticism for half a century. As the New Critics had been doing for decades by the time Vargas Llosa began publishing fiction, he sets forth in Conversation at Princeton the criteria by which his books should be judged. For practitioners of the essay form, Empson’s notion that the “author is discovering his idea in the act of writing” rings as true today as it did nearly 100 years ago.

From the 1970s on, feminism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and other schools of literary theory have dominated literary power structures. The author of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter provides a close reading of Hemingway on film. The pendulum has now swung both ways.  On the one hand, when Vargas Llosa quotes Hayek on the “spontaneous social forces through which the individual creates things greater than he knows”[51] you realize this probably applies not just to Vargas Llosa’s own novels, not just to literature but to language itself. You don’t have to be a semiotician to believe that the making of meaning isn’t exclusive to the maker of signs.  Though for the most part dismissive of “puzzle-theory” schools of cultural and literary criticism, and seemingly supportive of Revel’s ridicule, apparent as early as 1971, of “the pretensions of the disciples of Barthes and Derrida,”[52] Vargas Llosa in Conversation at Princeton is receptive to interpreters’ alternate “readings” of the cultural and historical subtext, the conscious or even subconscious authorial intention Vargas Llosa himself may or may not always have been aware of in his own work.

Revel and Vargas Llosa don’t always agree. Revel, author of a history of Western philosophy, admires the depth and daring of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness more than Vargas Llosa seems to.  Vargas Llosa defends Claude Lévi Strauss against criticisms by Revel he finds unjust. When Vargas Llosa calls Revel a “pamphleteer” he means it as an honorific—like “Diderot, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Zola, Marx or Breton”[53] —not an insult. Vargas Llosa says that, with the possible exception of André Glucksmann, “[if] we were to identify a notable contribution made by contemporary France in the field of ideas, we would not look to the structuralists or deconstructionists or the ‘new philosophers’ but to the work of journalist and political essayist Jean-François Revel.”[54]

 

***

 

The Peru of Vargas Llosa’s youth was a country “devastated by … a very high rate of illiteracy, enormous economic inequalities.”[55] Vargas Llosa is dismissive of “pompous language that says nothing.” With rare exceptions, he doesn’t use a word like “peripeteia” when he means a sudden reversal of fortune. Plain-speaking, seems, is not just a public courtesy but a moral imperative. Each of his seven cynosures embodies a virtue Vargas Llosa himself aspires to: Adam Smith’s “elegance and precision;”[56] the “steely lucidity”[57] in Hayek; Ortega’s “tolerance for other people’s ideas and positions;”[58] Popper’s “simplicity and clarity;”[59] Aron’s “fusion of philosophical and political wisdom;”[60] the “tolerance” which Vargas Llosa says is “the defining feature of all Isaiah Berlin’s work;”[61] and Revel’s role, like Orwell’s in the 1930s, in offering “solutions to problems that were both radical and achievable.”[62]

 

X

Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station was a model for Call of the Tribe. Readers of Robert L. Heilbroner’s Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers will readily understand what Vargas Llosa attempts in these seven profiles.

____________________
[1] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, Author’s Introduction, p. 15
[2] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset,” p. 83
[3] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 100
[4] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Adam Smith,” p. 32
[5] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin”, pp. 209-210
[6] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Adam Smith,” p. 38
[7] Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Adam Smith,” p. 45
[8] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset,” p. 73
[9] Meaning, loud; bright; showy; what we used to call “Easter-bunny” colors😊
[10] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “A Fish in the Water,” p. 184
[11] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset”, p. 78
[12] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset,” p. 84
[13] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin,” pp. 213
[14] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, Author’s Introduction, p. 42
[15] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 121
[16] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 107
[17] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” p. 104
[18] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Raymond Aron,” p. 192
[19] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 91
[20] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 86
[21] “In an interview with Clifford Landers (Albuquerque, 5 November 1994), translator Helen Lane mentions that she originally translated the title as A Fish in Water, without the article, and it was changed to A Fish in the Water, thereby losing the parallelism with the English idiom, ‘a fish out of water’.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fish_in_the_Water)
[22] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 250
[23] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “Who Killed Palomino Molero?”, p. 152
[24] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 96
[25] “Cada vez que los teóricos invocan al hombre con H mayúscula hay que ponerse a temblar: o guillotinan a miles de hombres con minúscula o los torturan en campos de concentración.” Widely cited quote invoking both the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution and Argentina’s 1974-1983 Dirty War. Roughly translated, it means, “Anytime theoreticians invoke the term mankind with a capital M one should fear and tremble: either they guillotine thousands of lower-case mankind or torture them in concentration camps.” Ernesto Sabato (June 24, 1911 – April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter, and physicist. Diálogos con Jorge Luis Borges (Dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges) (Edited by Orlando Barone), p. 27.
[26] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Karl Popper,” p. 157
[27] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Karl Popper”, p. 152
[28] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “Raymond Aron,” p. 202
[29] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “Raymond Aron”, p. 203
[30] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “Raymond Aron,” p. 201
[31] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” p. 99
[32] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Raymond Aron,” p. 200
[33] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “Raymond Aron,” p. 200
[34] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Raymond Aron,” p. 197
[35] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset,” p. 64
[36] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin”, pp. 213
[37] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, p. 43
[38] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin,” pp. 214
[39] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, “A Fish in the Water,” p. 169
[40] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin”, pp. 211
[41] Meaning, a collection of writings published in honor of a scholar.
[42] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin,” pp. 212
[43] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin,” p. 212
[44] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, pp. 56-57
[45] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, p. 66
[46] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 252
[47] It should be noted that Mario Vargas Llosa has feuded with several Latin American writers. MVLL does not appear on the Wikipedia page of Bryce Echenique, and vice versa. Echenique’s quote essentially addresses the growing divide between haves and have-notes, long noted in Latin America but metastasizing on the streets of California, where I’ve lived for more than 20 years. “We have a two-tiered system of elite entitlement and mass disenfranchisement, one for those “whose only school was the streets and real-life, as Bryce Echenique says, and another for those “whose only experience of real life was school.
[48] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Sir Isaiah Berlin,” pp. 223
[49] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 275
[50] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 255
[51] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 103
[52] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 254
[53] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 252
[54] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 249
[55] Conversation at Princeton, Mario Vargas Llosa with Rubén Gallo, p. 18
[56] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Adam Smith,” p. 31
[57] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Friedrich August von Hayek,” p. 105
[58] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “José Ortega y Gasset,” p. 78
[59] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Karl Popper,” p. 146
[60] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Raymond Aron”, p. 190
[61] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Karl Popper,” pp. 145
[62] Mario Vargas Llosa, The Call of the Tribe, “Jean-François Revel,” p. 250

 

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Kevin Anthony Brown is author of the forthcoming essay collection Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History (Parlor Press, expected fall 2023) and translated Ocosingo War Diary: Voices from Chiapas, by Efraín Bartolomé (Calypso Editions). At the City University of New York, Kevin double-majored in Spanish and literary translation & technical interpreting (T&I), studying with Gregory Rabassa and other faculty from Spain and Latin America. His articles, essays, interviews and reviews on the art of translation have appeared in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail, The Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, eXchanges, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mayday, Metamorphoses, Rain Taxi, The Threepenny Review and Two Lines, among others.

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