MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
The Truth of Lies
1
Ever since I wrote my first story, people have asked me
if
what I write is
"true." Although my replies sometimes satisfY the questioners, every time that
I answer that particular enquiry, however sincerely, I am left with the uncom–
fortable feeling of having said something that never gets to the heart of the
matter.
The question as to whether novels are true or false matters as much to
certain people as whether they are good or bad and many readers judge
the latter by the former. The Spanish inquisitors, for example, banned the
publication and importation of novels in the Spanish American colonies
with the argument that these absurd and nonsensical-that is, lying–
works could be bad for the spiritual health of the Indians. For that reason,
the Spanish Americans only read contraband fiction for three hundred
years and the first novel to be published under that name in Spanish
America appeared only after Independence (in Mexico in 1816). By ban–
ning not particular works, but a literary genre in the abstract, the
Inquisition established something that, in its eyes, was a law without
exceptions: that novels always lie, that they all offer a false vision of the
world. Years ago, I wrote a study ridiculing these dogmatic men who were
capable of making such a generalization. Now I think that the Spanish
inquisitors were perhaps the first people to understand-before the critics
and the novelists themselves-the nature of fiction and its seditious ten–
dencies.
In effect, novels lie-they can do nothing else-but that is only part of
the story. The other part is that, by lying, they express a curious truth that
can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised as something
that it is not. Put this way, it seems something of a rigmarole, but, in fact, it
is really very simple. Men are not content with their lot and aLnost all of
them-rich and poor, brilliant and ordinary, famous and unknown-would
like a life different from the one that they are leading. Novels were born to
Editor's Note: From
Making Walles: Essays
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by
John King. Copyright
©
1996 by Mario Vargas Llosa. English translation copy–
right
©
1996 by John King. To be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux, Inc. in
1997. All rights reserved.
