11 years in the past, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote an virtually prophetic guide concerning the common drift of tradition in the direction of ways in which had extra to do with spectacle than with the seriousness that such egregious exercise is assumed to be. That essay was known as The civilization of the spectacle (Alfaguara) and in it the Spanish-Peruvian author picked up the baton from different research on the disaster of tradition, equivalent to these by TS Eliot and George Steiner, and puzzled what we perceive by tradition.
He got here to the conclusion that immediately’s world had adopted as its personal the anthropological definition of tradition, that’s: all of the customs, beliefs, values and norms of a given society, together with all its cultural merchandise (from a Coca-Cola advert to an opera by Puccini). In this fashion, the up to date world marginalized the previous idea of tradition, restricted to high quality artistic endeavors and literature, which encourage moral and aesthetic values in an elite after which “overflow” to the remainder of society.
For the Nobel Prize, this “trivialization” of the idea of tradition (by which every little thing matches, from C. Tangana to El Quixote) has degenerated into an absolute frivolization of political, social and inventive life, the place worth is confused with worth ( solely what it sells is value), the place leisure has climbed to the highest of the worth scale (“escaping boredom is the common ardour”) and the place the mental has virtually disappeared (there may be an over-occupation of couturiers and cooks –says the author- and a Russell, a Sartre or an Ortega are missed).
Isabel Preysler and Mario Vargas Llosa, final October Fernando Sánchez / Europa Press
One of the largest pagans of this common frivolity (the place “the shape issues greater than the content material”) is journalism. For Vargas Llosa, the borders between critical and sensational journalism (previously extra cornered) have been erased. “One of the implications of turning leisure and enjoyable into the supreme worth of an period –he writes- is that, within the subject of knowledge, imperceptibly this additionally produces a hidden dysfunction of priorities: information turns into essential or secondary primarily, and generally completely, not a lot for its financial, political, cultural and social significance as for its novelty, shocking, uncommon, scandalous and spectacular character”.
The creator places Hola journal as an epigone of one of these journalism: “This journal (…) is avidly learn (…) by hundreds of thousands of readers around the globe who (…) have a good time with the information about how The wealthy, profitable and well-known of this valley of tears marry, relaxation, remarry, costume, undress, combat and make pals (…). And he continues: “It will not be an exaggeration to say that Hola and its form are probably the most real journalistic merchandise of the civilization of the present.”
Days after the announcement of their separation, revealed in that very same journal, we noticed the author studying aloud and in French one of many first editions of Madame Bovary in a video recorded by his son Álvaro. It was maybe one of the best ways to shut an eight-year hiatus on the forefront of “the civilization of the present” that he so precisely denounced in his recommendable essay.