In the 88 years of Mario Vargas Llosa, we reproduce this dialogue between Enrique Krauze and José María Lasalle about the significance of his novel The War at the End of the World.

(Article originally taken from the magazine Letras Libres de México)

By Enrique Krauze
March 28, 2024

Where is Mario Vargas Llosa in the cast of dissidence that he wrote in Vuelta ? Dissident? Critical?

Both things, intensely. I believe that the Russian Revolution was for Paz what the Cuban Revolution was for Mario: a historic advent that attracted not only his sympathy but also his active and passionate support. But Mario’s was even more so, because it was about the Latin American revolution, the revolution in the present tense, made by guerrillas of his own generation. As he has narrated in several texts, from the first moment he devoted himself to her and was faithful to her for a long time. Their breakup was not sudden, but a painful process of disappointment. I think that in both Paz and Vargas Llosa the key word is disenchantment, a disenchantment that, when deepened, leads to fierce criticism, a criticism proportional to the dimension of the previous commitment.

Paz carried a feeling of guilt for having remained silent when he had in front of him irrefutable evidence of the crimes of the Soviet regime.

I do not believe that Vargas Llosa can speak of guilt, perhaps of remorse, because, despite the abuses of all kinds that the Cuban Revolution committed in its first years, there were no purges of the Soviet dimension. Paz would not have tolerated them and maintained discreet support, from a distance, until the end of the sixties. For Vargas Llosa the breaking points were the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and then, clearly, the Padilla case. The process of disappointment was unstoppable and Castro deepened it with his attitude of open contempt for «revisionist intellectuals.» But before the final break, which honors him, Vargas Llosa sent several alarm signals. You remember that even in his note on Persona non grata by Jorge Edwards published in Plural he maintained his adherence to the Revolution, although without any enthusiasm, with sadness and nostalgia, with contained anger, almost waiting for a miracle that did not happen. When the definitive biography of Vargas Llosa is written, one of the most interesting aspects will be to follow that transformation of his convictions which, as Sabato (and Dostoyevsky) said, is always fascinating and instructive. I believe that his revaluation of Camus in Plural in 1974 was a key moment in that process that not only had to do with Cuba but with the deeper issue of means and ends in politics, especially revolutionary politics. And, as Weber said, no «ethics of conviction» withstands moral testing because it subordinates and sacrifices concrete lives to abstract ideals.

Did he remain a socialist?

I think so, and there you have another parallel with Paz. But while Octavio never departed from that faith, or from that possibility, at the end of the seventies Vargas Llosa did, clearly and definitively. Mario was part of Vuelta , the intellectual ship of dissidence. It was always clear to me and even more so in 1983, when he published with us and in The New York Times Magazine his long report «The Massacre of Uchuraccay.» It was a text that shook readers. The following happened. In Ayacucho, the operations center of the Shining Path guerrilla, eight journalists had died. Part of the press blamed the democratic government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who decided to appoint a small investigative commission in which Vargas Llosa participated. They went to the place, collected testimonies and concluded that the journalists had been murdered by the peasants, because they thought they were guerrillas. Vargas Llosa came to the conclusion that the confrontation between the guerrillas and the armed forces was a settlement of accounts between privileged sectors of society, in which the peasant masses were used by those who claimed to want to liberate them. Vargas Llosa spoke of «privileged sectors» , more than university students, but the reality that this report revealed in situ corresponded to the same reality that Zaid was revealing in his analyzes about university students in power or towards power, including university students in the guerrilla. The Peruvian guerrilla is neither worker nor peasant. The Maoist professor Abimael Guzmán, «fourth sword» of Marxism or communism (along with Lenin, Stalin and Mao), did not believe in the autonomy of peasant life. Like his Soviet, Chinese and Cambodian counterparts, he believed that the peasants had to be re-educated, regardless of the violence of the methods, to create the «new man.» And of course, Maoist radicalism provoked the militarist reaction. The tragic Latin American spiral. That experience and the terrible ravages of the Shining Path (seventy thousand deaths attributable to them) led Vargas Llosa to write in the eighties works of great historical and moral tension with respect to the idea of the Revolution, among them his long essay La utopia arcaica and his novel Historia de Mayta . The first is a criticism of indigenism, which, although it produced notable works of social theory and literary imagination that Vargas Llosa admires and values (Mariátegui and especially José María Arguedas), kept alive the flame of an unviable and oppressive economic and social project.

Mayta’s Story recreates the life of a prototypical guerrilla fighter.

I make you note that Mayta (the former Trotskyist guerrilla whom the journalist in the novel meets long after his failed attempt at revolutionary focus in a village, dedicated to a peaceful life, without regrets or nostalgia) was one of those impatient, radicalized young people. not due to material deprivation or social disadvantages, but rather due to a truncated or distorted religious vocation. In his case, it had not been the Jesuits who «indoctrinated» him, like Dalton, but the Salesians. The novel narrates the scale of radicalization: clandestine sects, readings, plans, conspiracies. It was about «assaulting the sky», «we will take the sky down from the sky, we will plant it on the earth,» Mayta said. Its failure was due to technical, logistical, and planning problems. They did not have the unrepeatable genius of Castro. The novel left you with the certainty that the guerrillas (the impatient, the radicals) of future generations would take more care of those details. This historical persistence of the Revolution is what would lead Gabriel Zaid to go back to the origin, and he found the work of Joaquín de Fiore who invented that idea of «bringing heaven down to earth.» Mayta and Dalton were soldiers on the mystical ladder of revolutionary perfection.

From the time in which we are talking, the hinge between the seventies and eighties, dates a fundamental book: The war at the end of the world .

For me it is Vargas Llosa’s most ambitious and extraordinary novel. I read it dazzled because it connected with the theme of messianism. In the fall of 1981, when we received in Vuelta the first chapter with the description of the redeemer Antonio Conselheiro, I immediately felt that I was facing a phenomenon similar to those studied by Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish messianism. The revelation of that reading led me to the history and anthropology of messianic movements, and to understand that, although they were very characteristic of Brazil (there were other redeemers before and after Conselheiro), they appeared at other times and cultures: in Germany medieval, in 19th century Italy.

“Sebastianism” influenced Brazil, the famous Portuguese cult of Sebastian, “the Desired,” that monarch who had died in the seventies of the 16th century in a senseless war against the Moroccan caliphs, but whose return to Portugal was the hope of generations. of «Sebastianists» through the centuries.

Vargas Llosa collects it in his book. And he has explained that he read several books on messianic movements and Christian mystical treatises when preparing his work. But the main reason for that war was the appearance of the Antichrist in the very specific form of the new Brazilian republic, with its liberal values and above all its faith in the positivism of Auguste Comte. In Mexico we also had, in that same period, that is, in the final decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, our positivist fever that went to the extreme of producing catechisms and assembling parallel churches as «scientific» competition to the Catholic Church. But in no country like Brazil did positivism catch on as a state religion professed by the political, military and intellectual elites. That is the heart of the book, based on Os Sertões , the classic work about the rebellion of the Canudos region. Its author, Euclides da Cunha, appears as «the short-sighted journalist» in the novel. I read it then (looking for the messianic theme) and have reread it recently. I think that in biographical terms it was a novel of transition. When writing and rewriting it, in that transition between decades, Vargas Llosa had a change of skin. I think he entered as one and left as another, because he ventured into the darkest and most barbaric areas, the most real, of Latin American life. The war at the end of the world is the war between the true damned of the earth, of our Latin American land, and the elites who seek to impose a rational scheme on them.

Isn’t that the Latin American dilemma par excellence?

Bolívar saw it, in a passage of his «Letter from Jamaica», where he mocks that in our republics we try to copy Sieyès and Hamilton. And Martí says something similar in «Our America.» And yet they were both Republicans. A profound contradiction that Carpentier or García Márquez did not have, who resolutely opted for the Castro dictatorship, even though it erased, much more than the republic, all the magic and mystery of the tribe that they recreated in their works. I speak of «the tribe» in the sense that Vargas Llosa has given it, that of identity collectives of any kind that subsume the individual in a we that includes and exceeds him, that determines him and often enslaves or oppresses him.

In the case of Brazil, the key thinker was not Hamilton or Sieyès but Benjamin Constant, the name of the leader who proclaimed the Brazilian republic. He was the namesake of the great French liberal and his destiny was engraved in his name. Did Vargas Llosa lean towards any side in his novel?

The War at the End of the World is not, at all, a thesis novel, but I believe that Vargas Llosa’s heart (and that of readers like me) was with Conselheiro’s followers in Canudos. A human canvas worthy of Brueghel or Bosch surrounds the messiah: brutal murderers, legendary bandits, implacable cangaceiros , sinful priests, circus dwarfs, prostitutes, blessed men and women, converted merchants. It is a canvas of human misery. How not to be moved? Each character is heartbreaking, even if they speak little, their life and their silence speak for them. And some, like the dwarf, are natural storytellers who actually wandered around Brazil telling medieval tales. Vargas Llosa rescues them. And speaking of writers, there is the invention of the «Lion of Natuba», that cross between a deformed human and a crawling feline, with its immense head and its vocation (dictated by God, by who else?) to be the Boswell of Conselheiro who takes note every phrase, step and gesture of the holy redeemer. I correct: it is not a canvas that we witness, it is a Dantesque parade, but also a march towards redemption.

And yet messianism led to the Apocalypse.

This is precisely how messianism is understood in the Jewish tradition. That is why the rationalist currents in the Jewish religion itself feared his advent and rejected the messiahs. Vargas Llosa very well portrays the «myopic journalist» who, from reason, begins by condemning the fanaticism of Conselheiro’s followers, but little by little, as his direct experience of the events progresses, he understands the internal logic and emotion of the messianic and understands that the categories applied to them are inadequate, false. And then, not only the journalist, but also Vargas Llosa qualifies. More than «fanatics,» these armies of faith are tragic. And finally, Vargas Llosa seems to legitimately ask, who are more fanatical, the fervent followers of Conselheiro or the intellectuals armed with abstract theories such as the very idea of the representative republic, not to mention the positivist doctrine? In any case, they were, as he has said, «reciprocal fanaticisms», universes incomprehensible to each other. That is why the title is perfect: it is the war of the end of the world because that is how its protagonists lived it, but also because such an opposition between the millenarian call of the tribe and the rational and modern precepts can only lead to a total, final conflagration. .

Finally, at horrifying cost, the Republic survived.

And faith survived. This is also what happened in Mexico in the Cristiada, a war between Mexican Catholic peasants and ranchers and a State that was determined to impose the religion of reason. But in Mexico the notable phenomenon of the messianic leader did not exist. Finally, in Brazil and Mexico, reality gave to Caesar what was Caesar’s and to God what was God’s. But tens of thousands died in those religious wars, echoes of the European wars of the 17th century. And harbingers of the religious wars of the early 21st century.

And Vargas Llosa became a liberal.

Yes, like the myopic journalist in his novel, in a way. That’s why I say that The War at the End of the World is a transit novel. No matter how mystical or magical the enchanted world of messianism may be, with its fervent communities and ancestral beliefs, if we believe in freedom we are obliged – as Max Weber explained – to disenchant it . I am not referring, obviously, to repressing or oppressing those who remain in the tribe. I mean building an order where reason prevails, if you want reason with a lowercase letter. The Spinozian reason for clarity, the separation of the sacred and the profane, the freedom to think and publish, tolerance. That is why I believe that the liberal Vargas Llosa emerged from that immersion in the heart of Latin American darkness.

He once said: «In Peru, we have a living Canudo in the Andes.»

Which is true even now and perhaps it will always be true, but I believe that upon concluding that novel, and upon confronting the project that Sendero Luminoso had for the Andes (diabolical work of that atrocious and bloodthirsty imitation of a messiah, of that murderous messiah who was Abimael Guzmán), Vargas Llosa led to the conviction that there was no better option for Canudos or the Andes than the modest republican and liberal utopia with all its «abstractions.» But that order should not and cannot be imposed. How to make it attractive and effective for tribe members? How to ensure that they do not surrender to new messianisms that are not defensive (like those of Conselheiro) but revolutionary? It remains a topic of our time.

Fragment of Spinoza in Mexico Park.

Enrique Krauze
Mexican historian, essayist and editor, director of Letras Libres and Editorial Clío.