Latest essay book Mario Vargas Llosa, La civilización del espectáculo (Civilization entertainment or spectacle can also civilization) is riveting, but also menggundahkan. Impressive, but enough to make depressive. Read it feels like gerundelan parents who no longer understand contemporary youth culture, and still dreaming of "high culture" as the ideal over the current cultural decadence.
At the opening (p. 13) says: "Never before in the history of so many treatises, essays, theory, and analysis as much written about the culture of our time. Puisi Cinta And it is increasingly surprising because culture, in the traditional sense of the word, even in this day and age is on the verge of disappearing. And may have disappeared ... "
Vargas Llosa lament how cultural products have become mere entertainment, artwork become banal, eroticism into pornography, journalism became a search sensation, that everything rests on kelarisan. Entertainment civilization is a civilization "where pleasure, to escape from boredom, into a universal desire" (p. 33). Puisi Cinta When the culture is no longer independent (pegged to kelarisan and commercial size, not quality), then the public would lose its foothold in maintaining political freedom and lose their meaning.
This interesting points of an author who previously known to be very liberal politically. You could say this is a sharp criticism of Vargas Llosa in the development of (cultural) current-liberal capitalism, the ideology that he actually uphold and Boost for almost the entire period of authorship. Puisi Cinta When the first he argued with only these people can acquire bases of liberty (not through communism, fascism, or other), he now acknowledges the excesses of capitalism can undermine people's freedom to deflect the notion of "culture" as merely "a fun way to spend time , "no longer the excavation and search deep human existence.
Interestingly, the antithesis of this state for Vargas Llosa is a religion. Not that he recommends to return to the country of religious and other fundamentalism, but he admits that there is depth, search, or certain spiritual moorings obtained in religion, which is a great influence for the high and low art. All the civilized world to uphold the search of this transcendence. Here Vargas Llosa like Walter Benjamin's essay echoes previous decades about how advances in reproductive technology have eliminated the aura that emanated in icons and religious artwork.
Vargas Llosa may be true, but for me he was too pessimistic. Take literature. What we are really battered by the light readings were cursory and did not have the depth? Yes, but that does not mean there are no good writers who persevere literary path. Each generation must have spawned their own good writer. Vargas Llosa himself admits: "I do not intend to denounce the authors of literary entertainment entengnya this because regardless of their writing, some of which are really talented. If in our time are rare literary adventures such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rilke, or Borges, it's not just because of the author; but because of the culture in which we live inhibit rather than encourage the valiant efforts that delivered the papers demanding of the reader the same intellectual intense concentration with which enable the works there. "(p. 36)
I was a bit dubious statement above. Was there ever a time when high literature really popular and read the crowd? I do not think so. Kata-kata bijak Honestly, how many English speakers never read Finnegans Wake, at the time it rises and now? On each of the days of the "clash of cultures" of this kind must have happened. Ever there was a time when jazz was considered as the resistance of high culture, and there was a time when jazz became high culture itself.
Vargas Llosa could be the only middle age and stammer understand the world today that is no longer the world lived like the first. He therefore pessimistic. It may be that he is also being switched from one conservatism conservatism to another. Then the fitting signaled Alberto Manguel many years ago that likens Vargas Llosa as "blind photographer", who can not see what is so aptly captured by the lens. The lenses are literary, and his eyes are his political views. How can someone with the works of such radicals (both form and content) can be so conservative in socio-political views?
