Culture headed for the void? Essays by Mario Vargas Llosa and the role of religion

Although I have seen the film Pantaleón y las visitadoras (fun, and recommended; the novel is known in English as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service), I know little of the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate in literature — the Peruvian writer who took his leave this 13th.

I liked him! Someone once strongly recommended The Green House to me — curiously, an American professor. But this book in the photo, full of essays, reflections and provocations, which I was given in 2013, I read and it made quite an impression on me.

A brainy chat here: since in communication courses one usually studies the Frankfurt School, one learns that the blame, so to speak, for the poetic emptying seen in the arts throughout history, for the aesthetic decline of what is understood as beautiful, and for the end of so-called “high culture,” would be the result of mass production, of the pursuit of profit at scale, of the culture industry: in short, a consequence of capitalism.

To my surprise, this book revealed a different point of view: the issue is political, involving the legacy of a revanchism against the taste of the aristocracy (or the upper classes) since the revolutions.

It is a growing repudiation of traditional society, after the great world wars, and, in its essence, above all: religious in nature — after all, at the origin of all civilizations, in all times, artistic manifestations arose and developed precisely from religious rites.

It starts from the search for the sublime, from mystical experiences, which later formed the bases of what we understand as cultures. A link that became only an echo in contemporary Western life, when it is not totally banished, execrated, in a world that, in his view, is culturally heading toward nothing.

Or, as we have now observed, toward content generated by artificial intelligence.