Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  A democratic and free society needs responsible and critical citizens, who are conscious of the need to scrutinise continually the world in which we live, and to try – although this is always a chimera – to make it more like the world that we would like to live in. Out of this stubborn desire to achieve this impossible dream – to marry reality with desire – civilisation was born and has developed, and through it we have defeated many – not all, of course – of the demons that once assailed us. And there is no better way of fostering dissatisfaction with life than good literature. And there is no better way of forming critical and independent citizens, who are difficult to manipulate, who are quick-witted and always questioning, than reading good books.

  Now, to call literature seditious because the best fictions develop in their readers a clear sense of the imperfections of the real world does not mean, of course – as Churches and governments seem to think it means when they impose censorship – that literary texts immediately cause social upheaval or accelerate revolutions. Here we are entering a slippery, subjective terrain, and we need to move carefully. The socio-political effects of a poem, a play or a novel cannot be verified because they are not experienced collectively, but rather individually, which means that they vary enormously from person to person. That is why it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish precise rules. Also, if it is clear that a book has had an effect on society, it might have little to do with its aesthetic quality. For example, a mediocre novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, seems to have played a very important role in raising awareness in the United States about the horrors of slavery. But just because these effects are difficult to identify does not mean that they do not exist. Rather that they can be found indirectly, in so many ways, in the behaviour of people whose personalities have been shaped, in part, by books.

  Good literature both temporarily assuages our human cravings and increases them: by developing a non-conformist, critical spirit towards life, we become more susceptible to unhappiness. To live dissatisfied, at war with existence, is to be constantly looking for trouble, to condemn oneself, like Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude, to fight battles knowing that they will all be lost. That is probably true. But it is also the case that without rebellion against the mediocrity and squalor of life, we humans would still be living in a primitive state, history would have stagnated, the individual would not have been born, science and technology would not have advanced, human rights would not be recognised, nor would freedom exist, because all of this came about through acts of rebellion against life, which was seen to be insufficient and intolerable. Literature has been fundamental in fostering an attitude that scorns life as it is and seeks, with the madness of Alonso Quijano, whose insanity, we should not forget, came about through reading novels of chivalry, to make the dream, the impossible, a reality.

  Let us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction and imagine a world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novels. In this agraphic world, with its miniscule lexicon in which grunts and ape-like gestures would probably prevail over words, there would be no adjectives based on literary creations: Quixotic, Kafkaesque, Pantagruelian, rocambolesque, Orwellian, sadistic and masochistic, among others. There would be madmen, victims of paranoia and persecution complexes and people with colossal and excessive appetites and bipeds who enjoy suffering and inflicting pain, of course. But we would not have learned to see behind this excessive behaviour, which is in conflict with supposed normality, essential aspects of the human condition, that is, of ourselves, that only the creative talent of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, de Sade or Sacher-Masoch can show us. When Don Quixote appeared, the earliest readers made fun of this extravagant dreamer, just like the other characters in the novel. Now we know that the determination of the Knight of the Sorry Countenance to see giants where there are windmills, and to do all the crazy things he does, is the highest form of generosity, a way of protesting against the misery of this world and attempting to change it. The very notions of the ideal and of idealism, which are so imbued with a positive moral value, would not be what they are – clear and respected values – had they not been embodied in that fictional character that Cervantes’s genius made so persuasive. And the same could be said of that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary – bovarism would not exist, of course – who also fought passionately to live that wonderful life of passion and luxury that she knew through novels, and who burned herself in that fire like a butterfly who flies too close to a flame.

  Like those of Cervantes and Flaubert, the inventions of all great literary creators both break down the walls of our realist prison and transport us into realms of fantasy, and also open our eyes to hidden and secret aspects of our condition and equip us to explore and better to understand the depths of human behaviour. When we say ‘Borgesian’, we immediately move out of routine and rational reality into a fantastic, rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine, full of literary references and allusions. This singular world is not strange to us, however, because we recognise in it hidden desires and intimate truths about ourselves that only became apparent thanks to the literary creation of a Jorge Luis Borges. The adjective Kafkaesque comes straight to mind, like the flash gun of one of those old tripod cameras, every time we feel threatened, as defenceless individuals, by those oppressive and destructive institutions that have caused so much pain, abuse and injustice in the modern world: authoritarian regimes, vertical parties, intolerant Churches and stifling bureaucracies. Without the novels and short stories of this tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and was ever watchful, we would not have been able to understand so clearly that feeling of defencelessness and impotence that isolated individuals or persecuted and discriminated minorities experience when faced with all-embracing powers that can annihilate them and wipe them out, without their executioners ever having to show their faces.

  The adjective ‘Orwellian’, a first cousin of ‘Kafkaesque’, alludes to the oppressive anguish and the sensation of extreme absurdity generated by the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most refined, cruel and absolute dictatorships in history, given their control over the actions, thoughts and even dreams of members of society. In his most famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell described in cold and nightmarish tones a humanity under the control of Big Brother, an absolute master who through an efficient combination of terror and modern technology, has eliminated liberty, spontaneity and equality – in this world, some are ‘more equal than others’ – and has turned society into automatons. Not only behaviour is controlled by the dictates of power; the language, as well, ‘Newspeak’, has been cleansed of all individualism, subjectivity and inventiveness, and has become a string of platitudes and clichés that endorse the individual’s slavery to the system. It is true that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come about in reality and that, as happened with fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, Communism disappeared in the USSR and began to lose its grip in China and in the present-day anachronistic societies of Cuba and North Korea. But the term ‘Orwellian’ is still current, a reminder of one of the most devastating political and cultural regimes in the history of civilisation, that the novels of George Orwell helped us to understand in all its complexity.

  So the unreality and the lies of literature are also a precious way of understanding the most profound truths of human reality. These truths are not always flattering; sometimes the reflection of ourselves that appears in the mirror of novels and poems is monstrous. That happens when we read the horrific sexual butchery imagined by the Divine Marquis or the gloomy lacerations and the sacrifices that people the maudit books of a Sacher-Masoch or a Bataille. Sometimes the spectacle is so offensive that it is irresistible. And yet the worst thing about these pages is not the fevered description of blood, humiliation and abject tortures and convulsions. It is the realisation that this violence and excess is not alien to us, but
is the very stuff of humanity. These monsters thirsting for transgressive, excessive behaviour live deep within us, and from the shadows where they live, they wait for an appropriate moment to appear, to impose their rule of unfettered desire which destroys rationality, community and perhaps even existence. It is literature, not science, that has been the first to explore the depths of human behaviour and discover its terrifying destructive and self-destructive potential. So a world without literature would be blind in part to these terrible depths where the reasons for unusual behaviour can frequently be found. Such a world would be unjust towards individuals who are different, in the same way that not long ago people thought that those who were dumb or who stammered were possessed by the devil. It might even continue the practices of certain Amazon tribes that subscribed to the notion of physical perfection to such a horrifying degree that they used to drown newborn children with physical defects.

  Uncivilised, barbarous, devoid of sensitivity and clumsy in speech, ignorant and instinctual, without passion or eroticism, this world without literature in the nightmare that I am describing would mainly be characterised by conformism and a general submissiveness to the established order. It would also be in this sense an animal world. Basic instincts would decide the daily routines in a life determined by the struggle for survival, fear of the unknown and the satisfaction of physical needs. There would be no place for the spirit. And in the stifling monotony of life, a pessimistic feeling would always be casting its shadow: that human life is what it is supposed to be and will always be, without any possibility for change.

  When one imagines a world like this, there is a tendency to identify it immediately with primitive peoples, with small magical-religious communities that live on the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania and Africa. But the truth is that the extraordinary development of audiovisual media in recent times allows us to imagine a possible scenario in a mediated future: a very modern society, bristling with computers, screens and speakers, and without books, or, rather, where books – literature – would have become what alchemy was in the age of physics: an anachronistic curiosity, kept alive in the catacombs of a media society by a neurotic minority. I fear that this cybernetic world, despite its prosperity and power, its high standard of living and scientific achievements, would be profoundly uncivilised, lethargic and lacking in spirit, a resigned, robotic world that would have abdicated its freedom.

  Of course it is highly improbable that this terrifying prospect could ever become a reality. History is not written in advance, there is no predetermined fate that has decided for us what we are going to be. It depends entirely on us as to whether this macabre utopia takes shape or fades away. If we want to prevent literature – this source that powers our imagination and our sense of dissatisfaction, that refines our sensibilities and teaches us to speak with elegance and precision, that makes us free and gives us richer and more intense lives – from disappearing or being relegated to the attic alongside the things we no longer use, then we must act. We have to read good books and to encourage and teach those that follow us – in families and in lecture halls, in the media and in all aspects of our lives – that reading is absolutely essential, for reading pervades and enriches all aspects of our lives.

  Lima, 3 April 2001

  Art

  A Dream Factory

  For some aberrant reason, the idea of a museum is associated in everyday language with notions such as obsolete, anachronistic, in decline and even extinct. To call someone a ‘museum piece’ is a kind way of saying that this person is more dead than alive, a walking corpse, someone who has fallen behind the times and remained stuck in some earlier moment. But conserving certain archaeological, artistic or scientific artefacts of the past as cultural relics is just one, and by no means the most important, function that a museum fulfils. In the concrete case of an art museum, the main function is to enrich our lives with all the vitality and creativity of men and women who came before us, offering a more rounded picture of current concerns by showing how our predecessors dealt with life, the ways they heightened, or protected or intensified their existence.

  A museum of art worthy of its name does not enlighten us as to the achievements, but rather as to the unachievable aspirations of earlier generations, the capacity that cultures, that are forerunners to our own, had for dreaming and desiring: that imaginary rebellion against the limitations of the human condition that takes place in every period and society. Impossible dreams, unsatisfied desires are the stuff out of which the imaginary cities of fiction have been built, that counter-reality fashioned out of great deeds, emotions or delirium which, because they cannot find expression in the real reality of history, achieved citizenship in the illusory lands of fiction, that vast invented land in which literature and art are important provinces.

  A painting by Goya or Velázquez, or a novel by Cervantes, are rooted in a world that their authors lived to the full – suffering and enjoying this life with an extremely fine-tuned sensibility – but these works have transcended their time and their creators and have achieved the timeless status of great art. This is because the richness of their composition and the persuasive power of their imaginary worlds freed them from their models – those kings, bandits, go-betweens, spirited women, rogues and adventurers that they purportedly reproduced from the real world whereas, in fact, they were inventing them – and replaced these models with their own bewitching characters. Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century was not like that; or rather, it was as it appears on these canvases or in these chapters only in the fantasy and imagination of the Spaniards of those times who wanted to see themselves in this way. The artistic and literary genius of Velázquez, Goya and Cervantes was able to intuit this feeling and transform it into painted images or stories that both drew from their contemporaries’ thirst for unreality and also added their own indelible touch. The most important thing about their work is not what they drew from real life, but what they managed to add to it, in such a subtle and convincing way that now there is no way of disentangling these two strands. In Las Meninas, in the unsettling nightmares of Goya that decorated the Quinta del Sordo, and in the adventures of Don Quixote and his squire, fiction ended up prevailing over the reality that inspired it.

  There are people who go to galleries to study a period, find out about customs and important events, get to know the faces of their forebears and the fashions of the women. They are perfectly entitled to do so, of course, and there is no doubt that a museum can also offer (if one takes great care) some lessons in history and sociology. But using museums in this way distorts what they contain, in the same way as someone might read a novel just to list the foreign phrases, idioms and neologisms that were in use at the time it was written. We go to a museum as we go to the cinema or to the opera, to step out of real, pedestrian life and live a sumptuous unreality, to have our fantasies embodied in other people’s fantasies, to travel outside ourselves, to discover the ghosts that are lurking in our innermost being, to change skin and to become other men and women in other times and other places, to flee the precise limitations of the human condition and what is possible so that we can become for some eternal moments or hours many other people while remaining ourselves, ubiquitous, without moving from where we are, eternal, though we are mortal and all-powerful without losing our miserable smallness. Because an art museum is not really a laboratory or an historical archive, it is a dream factory.

  The Prado Museum, along with a handful of similar museums – the Louvre, the Hermitage, the National Gallery, the Uffizi, Pinacoteca Gallery in the Vatican, the Munich art museum and very few others – is one of those places where, thanks to a combination of historical circumstance, chance and the initiative of certain immensely wealthy, powerful, tasteful or far-sighted individuals, an art collection has been put together that is so extraordinarily important and diverse that it far exceeds any attempt to quantify it economically or see it as the property of a single nation. It becomes,
instead, a representative of an entire civilisation and the patrimony of the world. André Malraux put it well in Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence): ‘Above all, a museum is one of those places which shows man at his best.’

  It would be unjust if we were to consider that because the immense majority of the painters and sculptors exhibited there are European, the Prado should not be considered a universal collection and be seen just as representative of the Old World. The art it exhibits is a fine example of the universal reach of this Western culture whose aesthetic ideals, along with its most conspicuous values – freedom, tolerance, human rights – have permeated the whole world, affecting all living cultures, even the most exotic, including men and women of every hue. Because the first message that hits a visitor to the gallery is that the world of artistic imagination, at this level of skill and daring, lacks borders, transcends space and time, and is firmly rooted - beyond the stories that the works tell and the fleeting times that they allude to – to a single common denominator that is the human condition, the tragic fate of men and women to have been given, at once, the ability to fantasise and to desire a richer and more diverse life, and the limitations of having just one destiny, which falls well short of our dreams. Art and literature were born to fill that chasm between reality and desire, and there is no better proof of the extraordinary strength with which humanity has rebelled against its fate, creating another world, another life, another humanity better than, and different to, reality, than the prodigious universe of images confined to the walls of the Prado Museum.