Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  It is not possible today to see the bullfight with the same clear conscience with which aficionados went to the bullrings when Botero and I dreamed of donning the bullfighter’s suit and facing up to a fierce Miura bull armed with a red cape. Culture and sensibilities have evolved to such a degree that it is more and more difficult to find arguments that do not seem to ourselves – who have experienced moments of overwhelming intensity watching a good bullfight – fallacious and inconsistent. I know them all, from the one about traditions and customs, national traits and cultural identity to the argument that goes, ‘Will we have to give up steaks and ham as well?’, to say nothing of the idea that ‘animals don’t have feelings like humans’ or the notion of fair play: doesn’t the bull also have a chance to gore the bullfighter? I have used them in thousands of arguments, defending the bullfight to the death against its detractors, but I believe them less and less. Because there is no rational argument that can justify the cruelty behind this beautiful spectacle, the inhumanity that underlies the indescribable grace, elegance, courage and drama that a great bullfight can achieve.

  Because, unlike what happens to the bullfight when Botero turns it into oils, drawings, prints and sculptures and frees it from all moral contingency, reducing it to pure sensation, to healthy pleasure, what in real life attracts and bewitches us in the bullfight is its dirty beauty, the way in which it transgresses certain basic laws, like the law, essential to the survival of the community, which argues for the preservation of life, the defence of life against death in all circumstances. The bullfight is a festival of death, inflicting and accepting death, defying and becoming intoxicated by death, playing with it, with proud contempt for one’s own life and the life of others. The beautiful images that can be displayed when the person executing this terrible dance does it with skill and inspiration, and is aided by the animal – that we then call noble and thoroughbred – does not diminish one iota the violence of the spectacle, or justify it in moral terms. It simply offers an aesthetic alibi to the ferocious pleasure that it gives us, clothing in civilised garb the appetite that, deep within us, links us to our remote ancestors and their savage rites, in which they could unleash their worst instincts, the instincts that need destruction and blood to be sated.

  All this appears in a luminous manner, by contrast, when we put the real bullfight alongside the extraordinary bullfight saga that Botero has been developing over the last ten years. Few artists in the history of painting have worked on a topic with such detail and sympathy as he has done with the bullfight, reconstructing it in all its variety and richness, with its cast of characters, its setting and its myths, its colour, rituals and emblems. Here we find the swords, the picadors, the banderilleros, and the bullfighter’s assistants, the officials, the lowly picador assistants and the lively women in the stands, and the beauties in the enclosures where the matadors go to celebrate their triumphs or to console themselves when they fail. And here are the horses, the blindfolded draught horses bowed under the weight of the picadors, and the bulls charging, going under the cape, or dying with a sword of steel in their entrails.

  They are also very beautiful images, and some of them, like the oil painting from 1988, La cornada (Being Gored), one of the great artistic achievements of Botero’s entire œuvre, almost agonisingly perfect. However, even the most inexperienced spectator can see immediately that an unbridgeable gap separates this bullfighting world from the world that inspires it. This is a fictional world: without deception, malice or instinct, purely sensory and benevolent, which celebrates life, not death, and which lives pleasure with the serene self-confidence of the hedonist. Unlike the disturbing bullfighting visions of Goya, which explore the human depths, or those of Picasso, which are always invaded by the irrationality of desire and the violence of sex, Botero’s bullfight is a civilised celebration of the senses, in which a discreet intelligence and a flawless technique have skilfully remade the world of the bullfight, purifying it, stripping it of all that burden of barbarism and cruelty that links the real bullfight to the most irresponsible and terrifying aspects of human experience.

  It is wrong to think that Botero fattens people and things just to make them more colourful, to give them more substance, to make them more rounded and imposing. In fact the swelling that his brushes impress on reality has an ontological effect: it empties the people and objects of this world of all sentimental, intellectual and moral content. They are reduced to physical presences, to forms that refer in a sensory way to certain models of real life, but which contradict and disown this real life.

  At the same time it removes them from the river of time, from the nightmare of chronology and places them in an eternal immobility, in a fixed and everlasting reality. From that vantage point, splendid in their multicoloured attire, innocent and bovine in their abundance, frozen at some instant in their lives, when they were still part of history – driving in a goad, drawing the bull away, adorning themselves with capes or, most frequently, looking at the world, looking at us, with that stony absorption, with a sort of metaphysical indifference – they pose for us, offering themselves for us to admire.

  The truth is that it is impossible not to envy them. How superior and perfect they seem, compared to us, miserable mortals, who are slowly ravaged and finally obliterated by time. They do not suffer, they do not think, they are not prey to thoughts that hinder or distort their behaviour; they are pure presence, existences without essences, a life that is lived for itself with an enjoyment that is limitless and without remorse.

  Among modern painters, Botero represents as few others the classical tradition, in particular his favourite models, the painters of the Italian Quattrocento, who did not paint to express any disagreement with the world or to protest against life, but rather to perfect the world and life through art, offering certain models and ideal forms that men and women and society should seek to emulate in order to become better and less unhappy. As in the great Renaissance canvases, in Botero’s painting there is a profound acceptance of life as it is, of the world we have been given, and a systematic attempt to translate this reality into the realm of art purged of everything that might sully, impoverish or corrupt it. This might be a chimerical quest, at a time when no one believes any longer that art makes men and women better and happier: the suspicion is, rather, that an acute sensibility is a passport to unhappiness. However, this does not devalue, but rather reinforces the singularity of this tireless artist who, while he has always retained an affable and rather shy Andean demeanour, a provincial circumspection, has, throughout this whole creative career, been able to swim against the tide: being a realist when fashion demanded that painters should be abstract, finding sources of inspiration in regional and local topics when it was obligatory to drink from cosmopolitan wells, daring to be colourful and decorative when these notions seem antithetical to the very meaning of art and, above all, painting to express his love and contentment with life when the greatest artists of his time painted to express its horror and impossibility.

  With Botero we can go to the bullfight to enjoy the blood and the death, without any guilty conscience.

  London, August 1992

  Culture and Politics

  Nationalism and Utopia

  A recurring theme in a book of essays that Sir Isaiah Berlin has just published – The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas41 is very topical: the question of nationalism. With its awareness of history, its passion for region and landscape, its defence of local tradition, language and customs, and the way that it offers an ideological mask for chauvinism, xenophobia, racism and religious dogmatism, nationalism will doubtless, in the next few years, be the great political force that will resist the internationalisation of our social and economic lives brought about by the development of industrial civilisation and democratic culture.

  How and where was this ideology born that vies with religious intolerance and revolutionary extremism in causing the worst wars and social cataclysms in
history? According to the old and wise professor, it came into the world, initially in a benign form, as a response to the utopian dreams of the perfect society – which once existed in a former Golden Age or which will be constructed in the future in accordance with reason and science – that is one of the most constant motifs of Western thought.

  In the eighteenth century, a Neapolitan philosopher and historian revolutionised the belief that Rome and Greece offered a sort of static paradigm of human evolution, which all societies should aspire to. In his Scienza nuova, Giambattista Vico argues that this is simply not true. He states that history is movement and that every age has its unique form of society, thought, beliefs and customs, religion and morality, that can only be understood properly on its own terms by true historians who can combine documentary and archaeological investigation with sympathy and imagination, which he called fantasy. In this way, Vico dealt a severe blow to the ethnocentric view of human evolution and laid the foundations for a relativist and plural conception of evolution in which all cultures, races and societies had the right to the same consideration.

  But the real cradle of nationalism is Germany, and its earliest exponent is Johann Gottfried Herder. The utopia that he was reacting against was not located in a remote past but rather in an overwhelming present: the French Revolution, daughter of the philosophes and the guillotine, whose armies were advancing throughout the entire continent, levelling and integrating the continent under the weight of the same laws, ideas and values, which were proclaimed as superior and universal, standard bearers of a civilisation that would soon encompass the entire planet. Against this threat of a uniform world that would speak French and be organised according to the cold and abstract principles of rationalism, Herder erected his own little citadel that was formed by blood, earth and language: das Volk. His defence of the particular, of local costumes and traditions, of the right of all peoples to have their identity recognised and respected, has a positive aspect. It is not racist or discriminatory – as these same ideas would become in the writings of Fichte, for example – and can be interpreted as a very human and progressive vindication of small and weak societies when faced by powerful societies with imperial designs. Furthermore, Herder’s nationalism is ecumenical; his ideal is a diverse society in which all the linguistic, folk and ethnic expressions of humanity can coexist, without hierarchies or prejudice, in a kind of cultural mosaic.

  But these dispassionate, beneficent ideas can become charged with violence when they fall on a terrain that has been fertilised by resentment and wounded national pride and, above all, by Romantic irrationalism. According to Berlin, Romanticism was a delayed rebellion against the humiliations inflicted on the German people by the armies of Richelieu and Louis XIV, which held back a Protestant renaissance in the north. And the modernising designs of Frederick the Great in Prussia, who imported French staff, also contributed to the pent-up hostility against this disparaging and haughty French nation, which saw itself as the arbiter of intelligence and taste, and it made people reject everything that came from France, in particular the ideas of the Enlightenment.

  With its exaltation of the individual, of history and of local issues as opposed to the universal, timeless philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement gave nationalism a major boost. It swathed it in multicoloured, strident images, supplied it with a heated rhetoric and put it within reach of a general public, through plays and novels and poems that focused on picturesque and emotive local traditions. A positive affirmation of local values later turned into contempt for outsiders. The defence of German singularity soon became an affirmation of the superiority of the German people – and for German, read Russian, or French or Anglo Saxon – which had a historical mission that, for racial, religious or political reasons, it had to carry out on the world stage. Other nations would have to comply or else be punished for their non-compliance. This is the road that led to the great disasters of 1914 and 1939. And also the road that caused Latin America to maintain the absurd balkanisation of the colonial period and fight bloody wars to preserve or alter boundaries which, in any event, were pure inventions, without any ethnic, geographic or traditional basis.

  The thesis of Sir Isaiah Berlin, which is magnificently argued throughout the eight essays brought together in this book (and we must thank Henry Hardy for this: he has made sure that the vast work of the Latvian professor has not remained scattered in myriad academic journals), is that nationalism is a doctrine or a state of mind, or both, that comes about as a reaction to the utopia of a universal and perfect society. We might add that nationalism is also a utopia, no less real or artificial than other utopias that argue for a classless society, the republic of the just, the republic of racial purity or of preordained truth.

  The very idea of nation is fallacious, if we conceive it as an expression of something homogeneous and perennial, in which language, tradition, habits, customs, beliefs and shared values go to make up a collective personality that is clearly differentiated from other groups. In this sense, there are no nations, nor have there ever been nations, in the world. The societies that are closest to this fantasy model are archaic and barbarous societies, which have been kept out of modernity, and almost out of history, by despots and isolation. All other societies offer a sort of framework, in which different ways of being, speaking, believing and thinking can coexist. How we decide to live has more to do with individual choice than with tradition or family or the language we were brought up in. Not even language, perhaps the most genuine marker of social identity, can be said to be synonymous with nation. Because almost all nations speak different languages – even if one is official – and because, with very few exceptions, almost all languages escape national borders and find their own way in the world.

  No nation has evolved from the natural and spontaneous development of a single ethnic group, religion or cultural tradition. They all came about as a result of political arbitrariness, dispossession or imperial intrigue, crude economic interests, brute force combined with good fortune, and they all, even the oldest and most distinguished of them, have erected their borders on a devastated terrain of destroyed or repressed or fragmented cultures, incorporating people who have been thrown together through wars, religious strife or out of a simple survival instinct. Every nation is a lie that time and history have given – as in old myths or classical legends – an appearance of truth.

  But it is the case that the great modern utopias – Marxism and Nazism, that looked to abolish borders and reorder the world – proved to be even more fragile and transitory. We can see this in particular today, with the rapid collapse of Soviet totalitarianism, as nationalism is reborn from the ashes in countries formerly under Soviet rule and threatens to become the great ideological rallying cry for people looking to reclaim their sovereignty.

  It is important, therefore, at the threshold of this new historical period, to remember that nationalism is no more compatible with democratic culture than is totalitarianism. If proof is needed, read the splendid essay that Isaiah Berlin dedicates to Joseph de Maistre, a reactionary par excellence and the father of all nationalisms. Berlin sees him not as he is usually depicted, as a retrograde, a thinker who turned his back on the present, but rather as a terrible visionary and prophet of the obscurantist apocalyptic events that Europe would suffer in the twentieth century.

  Nationalism is the culture of the uncultured, the religion of the demagogue, and a smokescreen behind which prejudice, violence and often racism can be found lurking. Because at the root of all nationalism is the conviction that being part of a specific nation is an attribute, something distinctive, an essence shared by similarly privileged people, a condition that inevitably establishes a difference – a hierarchy – with respect to other people. It is the easiest thing in the world to play the nationalist card to whip up a crowd, especially if that crowd is made up of poor and ignorant people who are looking to vent their bitterness and frustration on something or someone. Nothing better th
an the pyrotechnics of nationalism to distract these people from their real problems, to prevent them from seeing who are their real exploiters, by creating a false illusion of unity. It is not by chance that nationalism is the most solid and widespread ideology in the so-called Third World.

  Despite this, it is true to say that along with the crumbling of the collective utopia, we are also witnessing today the slow decline of the nation, the discreet removal of borders. Not as a result of an ideological offensive, another utopian assault, but rather as a consequence of the growth of trade and commerce that has brought down national barriers. The flexibility of democratic societies has allowed the internationalisation of markets, capital and technology, and the development of the great industrial and financial conglomerates that have spread across countries and continents. And as a result of all this, there have been moves towards economic and political integration, in Europe, Asia and the Americas, which are beginning to transform the face of the planet.