A provocative essay collection from the Nobel Prize-winning novelist

The belief that the spread of popular culture threatens high art has a long history. Flaubert made his allegiance plain in 1871: “I believe that the mob, the mass, the herd will always be despicable,” he wrote. Early in the 20th century, TS Eliot thought that mass education would lead to barbarism. On the other side of the argument, Arnold Bennett denounced the snobbish notion that any commercially successful work of art was, by definition, lowbrow because it was accessible to a mass audience. 

The apocalyptic title of this collection of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist, firmly signals his own position. Anxieties about the vulnerability of high culture have preoccupied him for decades. (I heard him give a talk on similar themes in what was still West Berlin in 1989, just months before the Wall came down.) Now, at the age of 79, he may not express the same degree of scorn for the masses as Flaubert (one of his literary heroes) does. But in “A Brief Discourse on Culture”, he echoes Eliot’s concern, declaring that the desire to put an end to elites has meant that “everything is culture and nothing is”.

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