Notes on the Death of Culture by Mario Vargas Llosa review – are we too amused for our own good?

In a provocative collection of essays, the Peruvian novelist and intellectual argues that the west’s obsession with entertainment has dulled minds and turned politicians into clowns

In his wonderful 1977 novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the Peruvian Nobel prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa invented Pedro Camacho, an exuberant radio-serial writer whose output consisted of ever bleaker and more exhilarating variations on the apocalypse. Reading these essays and articles on what Vargas Llosa sees as the dying gasps of our culture – poisoned by generalised tabloid frivolity when it isn’t being gashed by extreme (religious) seriousness – I was occasionally reminded of Camacho’s dark energy, and at other times of TS Eliot’s or Matthew Arnold’s high moral ground when confronted by the depredations of mass taste.

Vargas Llosa has long been known as a public intellectual as well as a novelist in the Spanish-speaking world – and indeed in the UK, where he lived in the 1980s. One-time contender for his country’s presidency, a cultural liberal who wants value in the arts, ideas and literature to rule over easy relativism, the register of price and the “civilisation of spectacle”, he worries over the dangers to democracy the latter group poses. He’s at home with the giants of French theory, from Guy Debord, inventor of situationism, to Jacques Derrida and his archival fever. Their impact, he notes, has hardly been salutary. Meanwhile, neither artists nor critics, journalists nor politicians value judgment or intelligence.

Continue reading...