A Revolutionary Plan: The TFT Review of Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of Reading and Fiction

At first impression, the hardcover translation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel lecture, In Praise of Reading and Fiction, seems best suited to the endcaps of chain bookstores, adjacent to pocket-sized joke books, daily affirmation calendars and coffee mugs printed with quotes from Gandhi. A mere 40 pages, it looks insubstantial, maybe even gimmicky. But the book–part manifesto, part autobiography–makes a compelling case for the enduring importance of literature and writers that is much more forceful and significant than the simple package it arrived in.

In his lecture, Llosa revists an old ideal: the activist-writer, a person who writes his or her novels engaged in, and responding to, the present moment of history. This writer has a sacrosanct duty to stand against bureaucrats, censors, and suicide terrorists, fanatics who “may one day provoke a nuclear cataclysm.” Summarizing his thesis in these terms, though, does a disservice to Llosa, who has laid out his argument by juxtaposing facts and anecdotes to create a complex matrix of logic. Nothing is oversimplified. Such deftness is important, because if Llosa had stated his case bluntly, it would have tipped into absurdity, and turned Llosa’s hero into a caricature: Jack Bauer, novelist. Instead, the type of artist Llosa praises calls to mind Rollo May’s The Courage to Create: “Artists are generally soft-spoken persons concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society.”

Serious novelists, Llosa implies, stand against the power structures that would oppress free thinkers, wherever and however they manifest themselves. Like so much of the lecture, this thread isn’t brusquely stated, but rather harmonically reinforced. The novelists Llosa invokes are both popular and activist. One is Jules Verne, considered by many to be the grandfather of science fiction, a genre that has inspired many outspoken novelists (including Kim Stanley Robinson, Samuel R. Delany, and Octavia Butler). Another is Charles Dickens, legendary for his moral criticism of institutions, and for his championing of the poor. Llosa refuses to examine these forebears in extensive detail, though. As an alternative, he explores the roots of the storytelling impulse, and praises its effect on the history of humanity. “From the time they began to dream collectively, to share their dreams, instigated by storytellers, they ceased to be tied to the treadmill of survival, a vortex of brutalizing tasks, and their life became dream, pleasure, fantasy, and a revolutionary plan: to break out of confinement and change and improve…”

There are echoes of militant rhetoric in Llosa’s lecture, such as when he speaks of “holocausts, genocides, invasions, and wars of extermination.” He goes on: “We have to thwart them, confront them, and defeat them.” This is unsettling, because Llosa is a self-proclaimed “democrat and liberal,” although he seems to have renounced the Marxism of his youth. He is not a right-wing ideologue in the tradition of politicians like George W. Bush. Llosa has great humility, and he tempers his fiery statements with a belief in multiculturalism. Although he is the world’s foremost Peruvian novelist, he is unwilling to set himself as an example of just one nation. He insists France, Spain, and other Latin American countries influenced his writing as much as Peru: “It does not seem to me that my unintentionally becoming a citizen of the world has weakened what are called ‘my roots.’” Llosa also refuses to make his own life an example. He only uses his experiences as a prism to view the tradition of writers as activists, and in doing so focuses on literature and its power to transform. As he oscillates between memoirist and inspirational speaker, Llosa narrowly avoids self-seriousness—which sometimes undermines even the most sincere writers—and keeps his earnestness from becoming ridiculous.

Llosa makes an important argument for literature as a vehicle for self-improvement in a century where books are increasingly marginalized. Fiction, Llosa reminds us, has always been both an entertainment and an instruction. Reading will always exist as a method to improve our world. “Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story,” Llosa writes. “That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.”