Book review: ‘Notes on the Death of Culture’ by Mario Vargas Llosa
In this accessible set of essays, the Nobel laureate argues
that we have reached a time in which there is no culture
Notes On The Death Of Culture
Reviewed by Anne Haverty
We may not be living in the worst of times, although a case
might very well be made for it, but anyone with a thought in their head would
be entitled to say that we’re living in the stupidest. Mario Vargas Llosa, the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist, certainly believes we are. In this series of
coruscating and passionate essays on the state of culture he argues that we
have, en masse, capitulated to idiocy. And it is leading us to melancholy and
despair.
This is a book of mourning. What Vargas Llosa writes is a
lament for how things used to be and how they are now in all aspects of life
from the political to the spiritual. Like TS Eliot in his essayNotes Towards the
Definition of Culture, written in 1948, he takes the concept of culture in
the general sense as a shared sensibility, a way of life.
Eliot too saw culture decaying around him and foresaw a time
in which there would be no culture. This time, Vargas Llosa argues, is ours.
Eliot has since been under attack for what his critics often describe as his
elitist attitudes – as well as much else – and Vargas Llosa will probably also
be tarred with the same brush for his pains.
But we must be grateful to him for describing in a
relatively orderly manner the chaos of hypocrisy and emptiness into which our
globalised culture has plunged and to which we seem to have little option but
to subscribe. It’s not easy, however, to be orderly on such an
all-encompassing and sensitive subject as the way we live now. On some aspects,
such as the art business, Vargas Llosa practically foams at the mouth. The art
world is “rotten to the core”, a world in which artists cynically contrive
“cheap stunts”. Stars like Damien Hirst are purveyors of “con-tricks”, and
their “boring, farcical and bleak” productions are aided by “half-witted critics”.
We have abandoned the former minority culture, which was
truth-seeking, profound, quiet and subtle, in favour of mainstream or mass
entertainment, which has to be accessible – and how brave if foolhardy of
anyone these days to cast aspersions on accessibility – as well as
sensation-loving and frivolous. Value-free, this kind of culture is essentially valueless.
Bread and circuses:
Vargas Llosa adopts a name for this age of ours coined by the French
Marxist theorist Guy Debord. We live in the Society of the Spectacle. A name
that recalls the bread and circuses offered to a debased populace in the
declining Roman empire. Exploited by the blind forces of rampant consumerism,
we are reduced to being spectators of our own lives rather than actors in them. Our sensibilities, indeed our very humanity, is blunted by
those who traditionally saw their role as the guardians of it.
The intellectuals, the supine media, the political class
have abandoned substance and discrimination and with treacherous enthusiasm
adopted the idea of the image as truth. The liberal revolution of the 1960s,
especially the events of 1968 in France, and French theorists such as Michel
Foucault and Jean Baudrillard come in for a lot of invective. They have turned
culture into “an obscurantist game for self-regarding academics and
intellectuals who have turned their backs on society”.
Meanwhile the masses exist, docile and passive, in a world
of appearances, reduced to no more than the audience in a kind of tawdry
theatre where scenes shift from violence to inanity before our bored and
brutalised gaze. Rock stars are given more credence than politicians, comedians
are the new philosophers. Lifestyle merchants such as cooks and gardeners are
revered as writers once were. It’s a sad and hopeless devolution from what we
used to have and used to be.
Vargas Llosa is pessimistic about the survival of
literature, which is to say books that aren’t primarily entertainment or
pragmatic. He’s pessimistic about how a society can live without coherent
religious belief (although he himself can) and not fall into despair, about our
abandonment of the concept of privacy. To put the inner self on public display
in the way we’re expected to do is to revert to barbarism.
And the most cultured countries are the most guilty. We will
decline – like many a civilization before us? – having squandered our
inheritance, “this delicate substance” that has taken millennia to develop and
imparted sense, content and order to our lives. The words “inanity”, “idiocy”
and “banality” appear again and again in Vargas Llosa’s discourse. And when the
extraordinary and wondrous resource of the internet is experienced by so many
people only via the inanities of social media, who can argue with him?
But the internet is only a tool for a shallow acquisition of
knowledge. And knowledge, dazzled though we are by it, is not culture.
Knowledge matters only as an aid to thinking. Which, incidentally, poses a
question: has “thinking” become the new sex, a transgressive and secret
activity?
Elevation of sex: On the subject of sex Vargas Llosa
is at his most pessimistic and most passionate. What has happened to arts,
letters and intellectual life, he grieves, has also destroyed one of
civilization’s “most sublime manifestations and achievements”: eroticism. The elevation of sex to the erotic sublime has played a
vital role in making us human and not merely animal, he argues, quoting Sigmund
Freud and Georges Bataille on its importance in the creation of personhood. And
eroticism requires sex to have a transgressive and secretive dimension. To
bring it into the public sphere, to reduce it to a pastime, a sport or a prophylactic
and to disconnect it from love and reverence can only lead us to anomie.
In a way that seems sadly quaint now, he believes in
concepts such as modesty, ritual, mystery and beauty. And when I say that it’s
a pity he’s the age he is – nearly 80 – I don’t mean it in the ageist sense.
What I mean is that he’s the age at which one is expected to be disenchanted
with the world and the way it’s gone. An age at which the young can smugly say,
“You don’t understand us,” and write you off.
And he’s not a particularly gifted polemicist, in that he
writes with a bluntness that prefers synthesis to the subtleties of thesis and
antithesis. There are moments when he can sound like an opinionated reverend
mother or an old-style pulpit orator.
On the other hand he has the virtue of accessibility –
although he mightn’t thank me for saying that – and clarity. He might, and
should, be read by any thinking person, young or old. Not that he offers any solutions. Deprived of the
mainsprings of our past, the prospects for our future happiness look bleak. And
yet the one thing we can be certain of is that we can’t predict the future. How
much mindlessness can humanity take? That society won’t revolt against the
spectacle before long is by no means sure.
