'GOOD BOY' WINS NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

ON MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 

What do you mean when you say someone is a 'bad girl'?

        If she has many lovers at a time or she is not loyal to her husband ?Or if she drinks or smokes? Or if she does not dress well i.e. revealing those parts which are not good to be revealed in your society,for example, a  purdah clad woman showing her face in public?Or if she does not get married even after the age for marriage approved ideal by the society?
        Think of the possible answers by men from different parts of this tiny world of human beings.
       The Nobel laureate in Literature for 2010 has an answer to this question.He ,probably answered it in 2006 or 2007.That is why he gave the title 'Bad Girl' for his novel that year.And there are many reasons to believe that he is the 'good boy' mentioned in the novel,at least partially.
       I have only 3 other novels by Mario Vargas Llosa with me now.They are:1.Conversation in the Cathedral 2.In Praise of the Stepmother and 3.The Feast of the Goat.In most of his novels,bad girls have some thing to tell us about a similar world.

       As the title denotes,Conversation in the Cathedral is a conversation between Santiago,the son of a politician and Ambrossio,the politician's chauffeur.But you cannot expect a bishop in the vicinity because the Cathedral is,actually, a bar.The novel is,in fact, a 32 or 33 year old novelist's(Llosa's) impression of  Peru under Manuel Odría between 1948 and 1957.

        In Praise of the Stepmother is almost a literary erotica.Praising one's stepmother in such an erotic way amounts to incest.The narration,however,deserves comment,especially the shift from erotic fantasies to mythic recreations. The beautiful paintings with which its chapters are interspersed also make the novel different.In some readers' opinion,the novel is nothing less than pornography.The three characters-Don Rigoberto,his son Fonchito and his stepmother Lucrecia make an unusual threesome who love one another in their own way.The boy probably cannot see anybody in place of his own mother.That is why she is subjected to his carnal desires.Parent-child relationship and husband-wife relationship in this novel reflect the inventive imagination and ability of the novelist.Nevertheless the stepmother-son affair is nauseating even though the artistry of the writer as a story teller is of infinite sophistication.

         Compared to this novel,The feast of the Goat is free from excessive erotic descriptions.Its thrust is  the gory fangs of oligarchy.A 14 year old girl is brutally raped-in a peculiar manner-by the tyrant Trujillo.The most unfortunate thing is her father's role in this incident.The rape is revealed only in the last chapter of the novel.The protagonist Urania Cabral's detestation of amorous advances of men around her is the result of this heinous incident.As we read we get a clearer picture of the impact of oligarchy on the minds of Peru.Llosa weaves history into his narration so beautifully.That is his narrative technique without which the novels may not be of much seriousness.
          The 'good boy ' Ricardo Somocuricio is an expatriate except on a few occasions in the novel 'The Bad Girl'.
         The first chapter is set in his own country Peru.The bad girl is Lily while in Peru.She is believed to be a Chilean girl.It is this status that makes the boys glue to the girl.But before long the mysteries related to the 'Chilean' girl are clarified.She was not a Chilean at all ! She was a cheap girl from some neighborhood who passed herself off as a foreigner and slipped in among the decent natives of Peru.

         In the second chapter,we see her as a guerrilla fighter-a comrade who was selected to experience the fever of the Cuban Revolution.Llosa writes that Paris was teeming with young people from the five continents in the early days of the 1960s.Ricardo meets her in Paris.She is Comrade Arlette now.
         Once,as they are having a chat, he tells her about his examination.Then she asks him to cross his fingers and knock a table three times for passing the exam.To provoke her Recardo asks her if those kinds of superstition are compatible with scientific doctrine of Marxism-Leninism."To get what you want,anything goes" was her reply.
         She proves it with her life.She leads her life very cunningly to get what she wants.She is Madame Robert Arnoux next time,the wife of a high-ranking UNESCO official.Nevertheless, we find her going to bed with Ricardo,although she is indifferent.She makes no corresponding movements while being kissed or caressed.'Her body seemed like an iceberg'.She is not loyal to anybody.Next she is Mrs.Richardson.
        A character,a hippy, by name Juan Barreto says,

"The secret to happiness,at least to peace of mind,is knowing how to separate sex from love"

        When Ricardo approaches her this time,she rudely tells him to let go of her calling him a fucking beast.But later she gives in - with her proverbial indifference,without the slightest gesture of reciprocity.Later we find her as the mistress of a Japanese businessman Fukuda.Thus wherever she goes Ricardo happens to be there as usual.
        Finally she becomes his wife.Readers probably learn to differentiate sex and love,to separate sex from life.When she is bed ridden due to chancre he nurses her(before marriage).After waking up from a deep sleep she asks :

"I ruined your night,didn't I,Ricardito?"
Ricardo replies:
"And you'll ruin my day too.Because you're going to stay here in,in bed.No arguments allowed.The time has come for me to impose my authority over you,bad girl"

She is also justified for telling lies:

"Living in the fiction gave her reasons to feel more secure,less threatened than living in the truth than in a lie"

They get married on an autumn in October 1982(They met in 1950) and that same afternoon he had to leave for Rome with a two week contract at Food and Agricultural Organization. But do not think that he wants to lead a typical conjugal life.The novel that is  narrated from the point of view of Ricardito goes on like this:

At times it was difficult for me to see her leading a life that was so normal,enjoying her work and,it seemed to me,happy in, or at least resigned to,our petit bourgeois life,working hard all week,preparing supper at night,going to the movies,the theater,an art show,or a concert,eating out on weekends,almost always by ourselves.....

It tells us a lot about Mario Vargas Llosa's view of life.It also tells us about his profound knowledge of Marxism as well.Even after giving up Marxism,he is not free from its influence.May be that is what made him a  writer whose works are historically significant.
         Mario Vargas Llosa deserves Nobel Prize.(It is said to be a baptism to anti-communist block too.)As some readers opine,  Nobel Prize came too late for Llosa.

THE ELEPHANT'S JOURNEY by Jose Saramago

A 16 th Century Royal Entourage 

into the Heart of Today

         Reading of a novel varies from place to place, from time to time. When a Portuguese novelist involves Indian and Austrian cultures in his novel, it can be reviewed from different angles .The words may have different connotations too.

         The novel The elephants journey by Jose Saramago centres around two names mainly: Solomon, an elephant and Subro, its mahout. Both are of Indian orgin.It is mentioned that Subro and the elephant are black, especially among the white Portuguese, although it has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

         Historically, an Indian elephant travelled on foot from Lisbon to Vienna in the 16^th century. Several parts of India were Portuguese colony then.

         It was in 1551 that the Portuguese king John 3^rd decided to give an Indian elephant as his wedding gift to Maximillian , the Archduke of Vienna. Transporting the gift was obviously a difficult task. There was no other way for the king than to walk the elephant the long distance from Lisbon to Vienna. The unusual gift was 'something valuable and most striking' in the words of the king in Saramago’s novel.

          The real entourage from the Portuguese coast through Spain and over the Alps to Austria must have been tedious as they had to cross such a vast, monotonous land. But Saramago invents history by imagining the details of the real-life journey.

          An Indian elephant was entirely new to the people they passed by. It provides ground for Saramago to skew reality for satiric purposes .The winter himself interrupts the flow of narration by his witty reflections on human nature.

         The elephant becomes an embodiment of many misconceptions. At a point, a character says that god is an elephant, to which the priest who listened to replies 'god is in all creatures but none of them is god'.

         The mahout discusses religion with the fellow travellers. Being a Hindu, he has his own views on Christanity.But  the views from an outsider are not welcomed with ease by the others. When Subro tries to glorify the myth behind the Hindu deity Ganesh , it is

belittled  as fairy tales by a soldier .Subro retorts that it is ‘like the one about the man who , having died rose on the third day’. He also neglects the blasphemous remark that Parvathi /Kali ,one of the Hindu goddesses, could have been called a centipede if she had hundred legs instead of hundred hands. I do not know how a true devotee of Parvathi will take the comment whether it is by the soldier or Saramago himself. Anyway his comments on the trinities in both Christianity and Hindu mythology will not be read by an Indian and a Portuguese  alike. The word elephant itself probably connotes Ganesh in India whereas it is only a pachyderm with amusing proportions of body ('a trunk like that of no other animal in creation the elephant could never be the product of anyone’s imagination'- novel)in many other  countries .The term pachyderm is  used for elephant in many places in the novel. Only the translator knows what the original term used in the Portuguese script is. Mostly, it will be difficult to translate the term pachyderm to Indian languages. In addition to the mahout Subro and two men exclusively to assist him, the convoy constituted the men in charge of food and water supplies, the cavalry troop with its commanding officer responsible for security along the way and a quartermaster in a wagon drawn by two mules. Besides, the ox-carts bearing the water trough and loads of fodder made it unique. It is indeed irrational to expect all the animals to keep up the same pace. The crisis begins there. The rest is fun. The attitude of the people on the way, the probable threat of robbers, adverse climate, availability of water, shelter to spend nights-everything mattered.

         A people’s perception of other peoples is also worth discussing. It refers to the concept of hierarchy in every society. The commanding officer and his soldiers have some preoccupations about the general attitude of Austrians and Spaniards. Certain attitudes can insult human dignity easily. For example, see this excerpt from the novel:

         You never can tell with Spaniards they’ve been very cocky since they’ve had an emperor, and it will be even worse if, instead of the Spaniards, the Austrians appear, Are they bad people ,asked the commanding officer, They think that they’re superior to anyone else, That’s a common sin.

        The episodes in which a priest tries to sprinkle the elephant’s head with ‘holy water’ (in fact, water taken directly from the kitchen without having been touched by the empyrean) and gets kicked, gently though, the elephant forced to kneel in Padua and it raises a girl into air when everyone expects it to trample her etc. are quite natural in the eyes of the people who are familiar to the behaviour of an elephant. But, here, to the onlookers who are totally new to it, the elephant is divine or a wonderful creature.

        The boring journey, however, becomes a delight for the most part in the novel, The idea of writing a long story based on such a journey occurred to Saramago during a dinner arranged at a restaurant called the Elephant in Slazburg. The writer acknowledged his gratitude to Ms. Gilda, a Portuguese leitora at the University of Salzburg for inviting him for a talk to her students without which, he said, he would not have thought of such a plot.

         The novel contains neither sex nor violence. A reader new to his novels will take time to get used to the long sentence with sparingly used full stops and dialogues without quotation marks. We can ascribe it to his being an anarchist communist, a person who snipes at political establishments.

        To Jose Saramago, ‘literature is one of the richest springs from which the spirit can drink’

        History attests that Suleiman, the elephant which was called Solomon in Lisbon died in 1553. Subro, the mahout who was renamed as Fritz, had to leave Vienna on a mule. Suleiman’s body parts were kept as relics. A chair was made out of its bones and kept in the abbey at Kremsmunster. His tough hide was stuffed and later kept in the Old Academy in Munich and then in the Bavarian National Museum until a bombing wiped it off during the Second World War.

        The novel tells us that Solomon and Suleiman or David and Dawood are the regional variants of the same name. Whether you call something using the speech sounds of your language or those of some other language, the thing will remain the same. In course of time, it might take several other names as well. Nevertheless, your insistence on naming something in your own language is indeed a matter to be discussed.