MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
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give refuge and security and also allow the free display of those appetites
and fears that real life provoke but cannot satisfy or exorcize. Fiction is a
temporary substitute for life. The return to reality is always a brutal impov–
erishment: the realization that we are less than what we dream. This means
that just as fictions temporarily placate human insatisfaction, they also fuel
it by stirring up desires and imagination.
The Spanish inquisitors understood the danger. To live lives that one
does not live is a source of anxiety, a disagreement with existence that can
become a rebellion, an insubordinate attitude towards what is established.
It
is understandable, then, why regimes that aspire to control life totally
mistrust novels and subject them to censorship. To go out of oneself, to be
another, in however ill usory a fashion, is a way of becoming less of a slave
and experiencing the risks of freedom.
2
"Things are not how we see them but how we remember them,"
wrote Valle Inclan. He was doubtless referring to how things are in liter–
ature, an unreality on to which the power of persuasion of a good writer
and the credulity of the good reader confer a precarious reality.
For almost every writer, memory is the starting point for fantasy, the
springboard that launches the imagination on its unpredictable flight
towards fiction. Memories and inventions mix in creative literature in an
often inextricable way for the author himself who, although he might pre–
tend the contrary, knows that the recovery of past time to which literature
can lead is always a simulacrum, a fiction in which what is remembered
dissolves into what is dreamed and vice versa.
For that reason literature is the realm of ambiguity
par excellence.
Its
truths are always subjective, half-truths, literary truths which are often fla–
grant inaccuracies or historical lies. Although the cinematic battle of
Waterloo which appears in
Les Miserables
excites us, we know that this was
a contest that Victor Hugo fought and won and not one that Napoleon
lost. Or, to quote a classic medieval Valencian romance, the conquest of
England by the Arabs described in
Tirant
10
Blanc
is totally convincing and
nobody would dare deny its verisimilitude with the petty argument that in
real history an Arab army never crossed the Channel.
The recons truction of the pas t in
Ii
terature is almos t always false in
terms of historical objectivity. Literary truth is one thing, historical
truth another. But although it is full of lies-or rather, because of this
fact-literature recounts the history that the history written by the his–
torians would not know how, or be able, to write, because the
deceptions, tricks and exaggerations of narrative literature are used to
