Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa discusses newest novel, ‘The Dream of the Celt’

Knighted by the British Crown in 1911 and hanged five years later, the British diplomat made for a “fantastic character for a novel,” said Mario Vargas Llosa, a visiting professor in the Latin American studies and creative writing programs, in his second public lecture on campus since winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature.

From the stage of McCosh 50, which was filled to capacity Monday afternoon, Vargas Llosa discussed Casement’s life and his approach to writing his historical novel. He fielded questions from Paul Muldoon, a creative writing professor and chair of the Fund for Irish Studies.

Vargas Llosa’s new novel, “The Dream of the Celt,” chronicles Casement’s tumultuous journey. While Vargas Llosa said he set out to “try and invent within the limits of the real historical world” in the novel, Monday’s discussion focused on what is known about the figure.

Casement earned his fame over the course of more than 20 years around the turn of the 20th century by exposing the underside of colonialism in the Congo and Peru to the world and reporting harrowing accounts of slavery and abuse.

In doing so, he became a “hero, a traitor and a very efficient British diplomat, and at the same time a national hero for Ireland,” Vargas Llosa said.

The son of a Protestant British officer and a Scottish Anglican convert, Casement was hardly the typical Irishman. He held uncommon political views as well, even advocating the incorporation of Ireland into the British Empire.

Casement held that view until he visited the Congo in 1890 and witnessed the horrors of colonial rule. Rather than bettering native cultures, European empires were systematically destroying them, he found.

“Finally using journalists and religious persons to mobilize public opinion,” Casement worked to expose the atrocities of the Congo to the world, Vargas Llosa said.

Following the publication of his report on the state of the Congo, the British government sent him to the Amazon region to investigate the practices of rubber companies operating under the British aegis, where he found atrocities as terrible as those in the Congo.

In recounting the tale in his novel, Vargas Llosa said that “the atrocities were so much that I could not put them all in the novel; I had to relativize them.”

Casement’s life ended in tragedy. He was captured and executed by the British government for suspicion of treason with Irish nationalists.

In an attempt to discredit him, the British government released a collection of obscene stories supposedly written by Casement called “The Black Diaries,” which detailed his rampant homosexuality and sexual tourism.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Vargas Llosa said he believes that these diaries were not entirely fabricated, but were rather exagerrations of actual encounters. Whatever the case, the diaries did their trick.

Barely remembered in the Congo and Peru, and with perceptions of his native Ireland still unclear, Casement is “imperfection incarnated,” Vargas Llosa said.

Vargas Llosa answered audience questions both in English and his native Spanish. Jessica Christy ’13 said that she wished her Spanish was good enough to take Vargas Llosa’s class, LAS 401: Borges and Fiction, adding that she is a “big fan of his.”

Vargas Llosa first discovered Casement when reading a biography of British author Joseph Conrad. In the late 19th century, Casement and Conrad shared a room in the Congo when the former was working for the Congo Railway Company. Their later friendship informed much of the dark view on the Congo that Conrad took in “Heart of Darkness.”

Conrad was one of five influences Vargas Llosa identified in his writings, along with Gustave Flaubert, William Faulkner, the Catalan novel “Tirant lo Blanc” and Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.”