Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Washington DC, 23 October 1999

  Literature and Life

  It happens quite often, in book fairs or bookshops, that a man will come up to me with a book of mine in his hand and ask me for an autograph, saying, ‘It’s for my wife or my young daughter, or my sister, or my mother; she or they are great readers and they love literature.’ And I immediately ask: ‘And what about you, don’t you like to read?’ The answer is almost inevitably: ‘Yes, of course I like reading, but I’m very busy, you know.’ Yes, I do know, because I’ve heard this dozens of times: that man, and thousands like him, have so many important things to do, so many obligations and responsibilities in their lives that they cannot waste their precious time spending hours on end absorbed in a novel, a book of poetry or a literary essay. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, a pastime, no doubt lofty and useful for the cultivation of feelings and manners, an adornment for people that have plenty of time for recreation and that has to be fitted in between sports, cinema, and games of bridge or chess. But it is something that can be sacrificed without a second thought when it comes to prioritising what is really important in life.

  It is true that literature has increasingly become a female activity: in bookshops or lectures or readings by writers, and, of course, in university departments and faculties in the humanities, women quite obviously outnumber men. The explanation that has been given for this fact is that, among the middle classes, women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and also that many women tend to consider that time spent on fantasy and illusion is more justifiable than do men. I am somewhat sceptical of interpretations that divide men and women into fixed categories, which attribute collective virtues and shortcomings to each of the sexes, so I don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to these explanations. But it is true that, in general, readers of literature are on the decline and that most of these remaining readers are women. This is true almost everywhere. In Spain, a recent survey organised by the General Society of Spanish Authors came up with the alarming statistic that half of the population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that, of the minority that do read, the number of women who admit to reading is 6.2% higher than the number of men, and the tendency is for this gap to increase. I am sure that these differences apply to many other countries, including my own. And I am happy for those women, of course, but I am sorry for the men and for the millions of people who could read, but have decided not to do so. Not only because they do not know the pleasure they are missing, but, from a less hedonistic perspective, because I am convinced that a society without literature, or in which literature has been relegated, like certain unmentionable vices, to the margins of social life, and has become something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbarous and even to endanger its freedom.

  I would like to argue against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime and in favour of the view that it is one of the most enriching activities of the mind, an indispensable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern, democratic society, a society of free individuals, and, for that reason, it should be instilled in children from an early age by their families and be taught as a basic discipline throughout the education system. We already know that the opposite is true, that literature is shrinking and even disappearing from the school curriculum.

  We live in an era of knowledge specialisation, due to the prodigious development of science and technology, and the fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable paths and compartments, a cultural trend that will only be accentuated in years to come. Of course, specialisation brings great benefits, offering much more detailed research and experimentation; it is the engine of progress. But it also has a negative effect: it elides all those common denominators of culture through which men and women coexist, communicate and feel a sense of solidarity. Specialisation leads to a lack of social communication, to the division of people into cultural ghettoes of technicians and specialists. They share a language, codes and information that are increasingly specialised and specific, which limits them in a way that the old proverb has warned us against: they can’t see the wood for the trees. And knowing that the wood exists is what binds a society together, and prevents it from collapsing into a myriad of solipsistic parts. And solipsism – in nations or in individuals – produces paranoia and delirium, these disfigurements of reality that can cause hatred, wars and genocide. In our day and age, science and technology are increasingly divorced from broader culture, precisely because of the infinite complexity of its knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which has led to specialisation and the use of hermetic language.

  Literature, by contrast, is, has been, and will continue to be for as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human existence, through which human beings recognise themselves and talk to each other, no matter how different their professions or their plans for life, their geographical location, their individual circumstances or the historical moment that they are living in. Those of us who read Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante or Tolstoy understand each other and feel part of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what is common to all of us beneath the wide range of differences that separate us. And there is no better defence against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, xenophobia, religious or political sectarianism or autarkic nationalism than this invariable truth that appears in all great literature: that men and women from across the world are equal, and that it is unjust that they are subject to discrimination, repression and exploitation. Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of our shared heritage, and to prize these differences as a demonstration of our diverse creativity. Reading good literature is enjoyable, of course; but we also learn, in that direct and intense way that we experience life through fictions, what and how we are, our human integrity, our actions and dreams and fantasies, alone or in the dense web of relations that link us to others, in our public persona and in the intimacy of our consciousness, that complex sum of contradictory truths – in the words of Isaiah Berlin – that make up the human condition. Not even other branches of the humanities – like philosophy, psychology, sociology, history or the arts – have managed to preserve this integrating and secular vision. For they too have succumbed to the irresistible pressure of the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical areas of expertise, whose ideas and terminology are beyond the scope of ordinary men and women. This can never happen to literature, even though some critics and theoreticians try to turn it into a science, because fiction does not exist to investigate a particular area of existence. It exists to enrich life through the imagination, all of life, this life that cannot be dismembered, broken up, or reduced to schema or formulas, without disappearing. This is what Marcel Proust meant when he said: ‘True life, life at last clarified and brought to light, the only life, furthermore, that is fully lived, is literature.’ He was not exaggerating, influenced by his love of his own vocation. He merely wished to say that, thanks to literature, we understand and live life better and understanding and living life better means living and sharing it with others.

  The fraternal link that literature forges between human beings, forcing them to speak to each other and making them realise that they have a common origin, that they form part of the same spiritual lineage, transcends the barriers of time. Literature takes us back to the past and links us to those who, in past times, plotted, enjoyed and dreamed through these texts that they have bequeathed us, texts that now give us enjoyment and fuel our dreams. This feeling of belonging to the community of human beings through time and space is the greatest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal with each generation than literature.

  Borges always got annoyed when he was asked: ‘What is the use of literature?’ He thought it a stupid question and would reply: ‘Nobody
thinks of asking what is the use of the song of a canary or the crimson glow of a sunset!’ Indeed, if these beautiful things exist and, thanks to them, life, albeit for a moment, is less ugly and less sad, isn’t it rather small-minded to seek practical justifications? However, unlike birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking on the horizon, a poem or a novel are not simply there, fashioned by chance or by Nature. They are a human creation and it is thus valid to ask how and why they came about, and what they have given to humanity, to understand why literature, that is as old as writing itself, has lasted for so long. They were born, as formless ghosts, in the intimacy of a consciousness, the combination of the unconscious and a writer’s sensibility and feelings. Poets and narrators then grapple with language to give these formless ghosts body, movement, rhythm, harmony and life. This is an artificial life, fashioned by language and the imagination, which has coexisted with the other, the real life, from time immemorial, and men and women seek out this imagined life – some frequently and others only sporadically – because the life that they have is not enough for them, is not able to give them everything that they want. Literature does not begin to exist when it emerges as the work of a single individual, it only really exists when it is adopted by others, and becomes part of social life, when it becomes, through reading, a shared experience.

  One of its first beneficial effects occurs at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less nuance and clarity than another community whose principal mode of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected through literary texts. A humanity without readers, which has not been contaminated by literature, would be like a community of stammerers and aphasiacs, beset by tremendous problems of communication because of its coarse and rudimentary language. The same is true for individuals, of course. People who do not read, or read little or just read rubbish, might talk a great deal, but will say very little because they have a very limited and insufficient repertoire of words with which to express themselves. This is not just a verbal limitation; it is also an intellectual and imaginative limitation. It reveals a poverty of thought and knowledge, because the ideas and concepts through which we apprehend existing reality and the secrets of our condition do not exist outside the words through which our consciousness recognises and defines them. We learn to speak correctly, with depth, precision and subtlety, from good literature and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can supersede literature when it comes to crafting the language through which people communicate. The knowledge transmitted to us by scientific manuals or technical reports is fundamental; but these do not teach us how to use words or express ourselves correctly. Quite the reverse, they are often very badly and confusedly written because their authors, who are often indisputably eminent in their field, are uneducated in literature and do not know how to use language to communicate the conceptual treasures that they possess. To speak well, to have at one’s disposal a rich and varied language, to find the right expression for each idea and emotion that one wishes to express, means that one is better prepared to think, teach, learn and communicate, and also to fantasise, dream and feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all aspects of life, even those that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, achieving a high level of refinement and nuance, then it also increased the possibilities for human pleasure. With respect to love, it sublimated desires and conferred on the sexual act the status of artistic creation. Without literature there would be no eroticism. Love and pleasure would be impoverished, they would lack delicacy and refinement, and would not achieve that same intensity that literary fantasy can encourage. It is not far-fetched to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Góngora and Baudelaire feel greater love and pleasure than an illiterate couple who have become doltish by watching too much television. In a non-literary world, love and pleasure would be indistinguishable from animal desires, the crude satisfaction of basic instincts: copulating and drinking.

  Nor are the audiovisual media in a position to supplant literature when it comes to teaching human beings to make assured and subtle use of the infinite riches of language. On the contrary, audiovisual media naturally tend to give words secondary importance in contrast to images, which is their primordial language, and to limit language to the spoken word, often with a bare minimum of dialogue, rather than the written word. Because if there are too many words, on the small or the large screen, or coming out of loudspeakers, the effect is always soporific. To say that a film or a television programme is ‘literary’ is an elegant way of calling it boring. And that is why literary programmes on the radio or television rarely reach a wide audience: to my knowledge, the only exception to this rule is Bernard Pivot’s programme Apostrophes in France. This leads me to think as well, though I have my doubts, that not only is literature indispensable for a complete knowledge and command of language, but that the fate of literature is indissolubly linked to the fate of the book, that industrial product that many now declare to be obsolete.

  One of these people is a man to whom we all owe so much in terms of developments in communication: Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Mr Gates was in Madrid a few months ago and he visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked on what I hope will become a fruitful collaboration with Microsoft. Among other things, Bill Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the letter ‘ñ‘ would never disappear from computer programmes. This was greeted with a sigh of relief by those four hundred million of us Spanish-speakers across five continents, for whom the loss of that letter in cyberspace would have created problems of Babel-like proportions. Now, immediately after this kind concession to the Spanish language, before he had even left the Royal Academy, Bill Gates declared in a press conference that he had to achieve his greatest goal before he died. And what might that be? To put an end to paper, and, thus, to books themselves which, in his view, are obstinately anachronistic. Mr Gates explained that computer screens can successfully replace paper in every function imaginable and that, as well as being lighter, being more portable and taking up less space than paper, reading information on a screen instead of in magazines and books has the ecological advantage of ending the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that has been caused by the paper industry. People would continue to read, of course, he explained, but on screen, and because of this there would be more chlorophyll in the atmosphere.

  I was not present – I got the story from the press – but if I had been there I would have booed Mr Gates for declaring, quite shamelessly, that he was looking to put me, and so many of my colleagues, who write books, out of a job. Can the screen replace the book in every case, as the creator of Microsoft argues? I am not so sure. I state this in full knowledge that there is a major revolution taking place in the fields of communication and information which has lead to the development of new technologies like the Internet, which is an invaluable help to my own work. But to go from there to admit that the screen can replace paper when it comes to reading literature, is a step too far for me. I simply cannot conceive how any non-pragmatic and non-functional act of reading, that is not looking for information or some useful piece of instantly communicable knowledge, can derive from a computer screen the same feeling of intimacy, the same concentration and the same spiritual isolation that can be achieved by reading a book. This, perhaps, is a prejudice of mine, stemming from a lack of practice and from a lifetime of equating reading literature with reading books. Although I very happily surf the Internet looking for world news, I would never use it to read the poems of Góngora, a novel by Onetti or an essay by Octavio Paz, because I am sure that the effect would never be the same. I am convinced, though I can’t prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a severe, perhaps even mortal blow. The name would not disappear, of course; but it would probably be used to describe a type of text so far removed from what we
understand as literature as soap operas are to the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

  There is another reason to give literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is an engine of political change and the best champion of liberty that we have, would go into irremediable decline. Because all good literature asks radical questions of the world we live in. Every great literary text, often without the writer’s intention, has a tendency towards sedition.

  Literature has nothing to say to those people who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as it is. Literature offers sustenance to rebellious and non-conformist spirits and a refuge to those who have too much or too little in life; it wards off unhappiness and any feelings of lack or want. To ride alongside scrawny Rocinante and his scatterbrained owner across the plains of La Mancha, to sail the seas with Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale, to swallow arsenic with Madame Bovary or turn into an insect with Gregory Samsa is a clever way that we have invented to make up for the wrongs and impositions of this unjust life that forces us always to be the same, when we want to be many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us.

  Literature can only pacify momentarily this dissatisfaction with life, but, in this miraculous interval, in this provisional suspension of life afforded by literary illusion – which seems to transport us out of chronology and history and turn us into citizens of a timeless, immortal country – we do become these others. We become more intense, richer, more complex, happier, more lucid, than in the constrained routine of our real life. When, once the book is closed and the literary fiction is abandoned, we return to real life and compare it to the splendid place that we have just left, what a disappointment it is. We are faced with the awful truth: that the fantasy life of the novel is better – more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect – than the life we lead when we are awake, a life that is weighed down by the limitations and obligations of our existence. In this sense, good literature is always - unintentionally – seditious and rebellious: a challenge to what exists. How could we not feel cheated, after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past, having to return to this world with its inconsequential pettiness, its rules and prohibitions that lie in wait for us and, at every turn, look to spoil our illusions. Even more, perhaps, than the need to maintain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the main contribution of literature to human progress is to remind us (without intending to in the main) that the world is badly made, that those who argue the contrary – for example the powers that be – are lying, and that the world could be better, closer to the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create.