Mario Vargas Llosa
THE CULTURE OF FREEDOM AND
FREEDOM OF CULTURE
Writing is a solitary job. Facing a piece of paper, with pen
in hand, while awaiting the surge of what- for lack of a better name
- we call inspiration, there is no recourse but to pull back from one's
immediate life and plunge into the intimate world of memory, nos–
talgia, secret hungers, intuition, and instinct: the ingredients that
nourish the creative imagination. The process giving birth to a work
of fiction is long, difficult, fascinating. Although I have been through
it many times since writing my first story, I have never come to un–
derstand it fully.
I do not know if this happens to all writers. But, in my own case
at least - even when I make a great effort towards clarity while I write,
and try to maintain rational control of the story, the characters, the
conversations, and the landscapes as they appear with the rhythm of
my words - I can never escape a certain
darkn~ss
which accompanies
the conscious task, like its own shadow, in the moment of creation.
This element, springing spontaneously from hidden depths of
the personality, lends a particular coloring to the story one tells. It
establishes hierarchies among the characters that sometimes, quite
subtly, turn our conscious intentions inside out;
it
tints, or saturates,
what we are telling with a significance or symbolism that in some
cases is not only uncongenial to our own ideas but may indeed radi–
cally contradict them. The truth is that at the moment of creation,
the writer, the artist, is something more than intellect, reason, or
ideas . The creator is also that shadowy zone ofthe personality which
our conscious minds repress or ignore. In the creative process; which
partakes more than a little of magic, this manages to reveal and assert
itself, reestablishing that wholeness ofthe person which, in nearly all
other activities, whether social or private, seems truncated, reduced
to its conscious, obverse side.
Born of the joint effort of reason and unreason, intellect and in–
tuition, of the free flight of fantasy and the dark designs of the un–
conscious - perhaps this is why the products of art and literature have
Editor's Note: This essay first appeared in the December 1985 issue of
Vuelta.
