Literature is Fire

Lecture given in Caracas on 11 August 1967, on receipt of the Rómulo Gallegos prize.

Approximately thirty years ago, a young man who had read with fervour Breton’s early works died in a charity hospital in the mountains of Seville, driven mad by rage. He bequeathed to the world a coloured shirt and Cinco metros de poemas (‘Five Metres of Poems’), which have an extraordinary visionary delicacy. He had a sonorous, courtly, vice-regal name, but his life had been tenaciously obscure, stubbornly unhappy. In Lima, he was a hungry man from the provinces, a dreamer who lived in the Mercado district, in an unlit cave, and when he travelled to Europe, nobody knows why, he had been taken off the boat in Central America, locked up, tortured and left as a feverish ruin. After his death, his relentless misfortunes did not end, but rather reached their apotheosis: the canons of the Spanish Civil War erased his tomb from the earth and in the intervening years, time has been erasing his memory from the minds of the people who were lucky enough to know him and to read him. It would not surprise me if the rats are giving their attention to the copies of his only book which are buried in libraries that no one visits and that his poems, that now nobody reads, will very soon be transformed ‘into smoke, into wind, into nothing’, like that insolent coloured shirt that he bought to die in. And yet, this compatriot of mine had been a consummate wizard, a sorcerer of the word, a daring architect of images, a shining explorer of dreams, an exact and stubborn creator who had the necessary lucidity and madness to espouse his writer’s vocation as one must: as a daily and furious immolation.

Tonight I summon up his furtive nocturnal shadow to spoil my own party, this party that is taking place thanks to the generosity of Venezuela and in the illustrious name of Rómulo Gallegos, because the award to a novel of mine of this magnificent prize, created by the National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts as a stimulus and a challenge to novelists of the Spanish language and as a homage to a great American creator, not only fills me with gratitude towards Venezuela, but also strengthens my responsibility as a writer. And the writer, as you already know, is the eternal killjoy. The silent shadow of Oquendo de Amat here, at my side, should remind us all – but especially this Peruvian whom you wrenched from Kangaroo Valley, Earls Court in London, brought to Caracas and showered with friendship and honours – the sombre fate that befell, and still so often befalls, creators in Latin America. It is true that not all our writers have been tested in such an extreme way as Oquendo de Amat; some managed to conquer the hostility, the indifference, the contempt of our countries for literature and wrote, published, and were even read. It is true that not everyone could be killed by hunger, indifference or ridicule. But these fortunate ones are the exception. As a general rule, the Latin American writer has lived and written in exceptionally difficult circumstances because our societies have established a cold, almost perfect mechanism for discouraging and killing his vocation. This vocation is beautiful but it is also absorbing and tyrannical and demands of its followers complete dedication. How could these writers, surrounded by a majority of people who could not read or write, or by a minority who did not like reading, have made literature their exclusive destiny and activity? Without publishers, without readers, without a cultural milieu to stimulate him and make demands on him, the Latin American writer has gone into battle knowing from the outset that he would be defeated. His vocation was not accepted by society, scarcely tolerated; society gave him no means to make a living and turned him into a downgraded, ad honorem producer. The writer in our countries has had to turn himself inside out, separate his vocation from his daily work, split himself into a thousand jobs which took up the time needed for writing and were often unpalatable to his conscience and his convictions. Because apart from finding no room in their hearts for literature, our societies have always encouraged a constant feeling of mistrust towards this marginal, rather anomalous, being who has tried, against all logic, to pursue a profession which, in the context of Latin America, seems almost unreal. For that reason, dozens of our writers have become frustrated and have deserted their vocation or betrayed it, acting half-heartedly and furtively, without rigour or resolve.

But it is true that in recent years things have begun to change. Slowly, a more hospitable climate for literature is creeping into our countries. The number of readers is beginning to grow, the bourgeoisie is discovering that books matter, that writers are rather more than gentle fools, that they have a function to fulfil in society. But then, when justice is finally beginning to be done to the Latin American writer or rather, when the injustice that has weighed down on him is finally beginning to lift, another threat can arise, a diabolically subtle danger. Those same societies that once exiled and rejected the writer can now think that it is useful to assimilate him, integrate him, confer on him a kind of official status. For that reason it is important to remind our societies what to expect. Warn them that literature is fire, that it means nonconformity and rebellion, that the raison d’être of a writer is protest, disagreement and criticism. Explain to them that there are no halfway measures: that society must either suppress for ever that human faculty which is artistic creation and eliminate once and for all that unruly social element, the writer, or else embrace literature, in which case it has no alternative but to accept a perpetual torrent of attacks, of irony and of satire aimed at both the transitory and the essential aspects of life, and at all levels of the social pyramid. That is how things are and there is no escape: the writer has been, is, and will continue to be, dissatisfied. No one who is satisfied is capable of writing; no one who is in agreement with, or reconciled to, reality can commit the ambitious folly of inventing verbal realities. The literary vocation is born out of the disagreement between a man and the world, out of his intuition of the deficiencies, disparities and misery that surround him. Literature is a form of permanent insurrection and cannot accept strait-jackets. Any attempt to bend its angry, rebellious nature is doomed to failure. Literature might die but it will never be conformist.

Literature can be useful to society only if it fulfils this condition. It contributes to human improvement, preventing spiritual atrophy, self-satisfaction, stagnation, human paralysis and intellectual or moral decline. Its mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of dissatisfaction with themselves: its function is to stimulate, without respite, the desire for change and improvement even when it is necessary to use the sharpest weapons to accomplish this task. It is essential that everyone understands this once and for all: the more critical the writings of an author against his country, the more intense will be the passion that binds him to that country. Because in the realms of literature, violence is a proof of love.

The American reality, of course, offers the writer a true surfeit of reasons to be rebellious and discontented. Societies where injustice is law, paradises of ignorance, exploitation, blinding inequalities, poverty, economic, cultural and moral alienation, our tumultuous lands offer us exemplary material to reveal in fictions, in a direct or indirect way, through facts, dreams, testimonies, allegories, nightmares or visions that reality is imperfectly made, that life must change. But within ten, twenty or fifty years, the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces that now insult and repress it. And I want this hour to arrive as soon as possible and for Latin America to enter, once and for all, a world of dignity and modernity, and for socialism to free us from our anachronism and our horror. But when social injustices disappear, this will not mean that the hour of consent, subordination and official complicity will have arrived for the writer. His mission will continue, must continue, to be the same: any compromise in this area will be a betrayal. Within the new society, and along the road that our personal ghosts and demons drive us, we will continue as before, as now, saying no, rebelling, demanding recognition for our right to dissent, showing in this living and magical way, as only literature can, that dogma, censorship and arbitrary acts are also mortal enemies of progress and human dignity, affirming that life is not simple and does not fit neatly into patterns, that the road to truth is not always smooth and straight, but often tortuous and rough, showing time and again with our books the essential complexity and diversity of the world and the contradictory ambiguity of human events. As yesterday, as today, if we love our vocation, we will have to continue fighting the thirty two wars of Colonel Aureliano Buendia even though, like him, we lose them all.

Our vocation has made writers the professionals of dissatisfaction, the conscious or unconscious subversives of society, rebels with a cause, the irredeemable insurgents of the world, the insufferable devil’s advocates. I don’t know if this is good or bad, I only know that this is how it is. This is the condition of the writer and we must revindicate it just as it is. In these years when Latin America is beginning to discover, accept and support literature, it must also recognize the threat that is closing in, the high price that it will have to pay for culture. Our societies must be on the alert: for, rejected or accepted, persecuted or rewarded, the writer worthy of his name will continue throwing in people’s faces the not always pleasant spectacle of their miseries and torments.

By giving me this prize, for which I thank you most deeply, and which I have accepted because I consider that it does not demand of me even the slightest trace of ideological, political or aesthetic compromise and which other Latin American writers with more books and more merit than me should have received instead – I’m thinking of the great Onetti, for example, who has not received the recognition that he deserves in Latin America – and by showing me so much affection and warmth since my arrival in this city in mourning after the devastating earthquake, Venezuela has placed me overwhelmingly in her debt. The only way that I can repay this debt is by being, within the limits of my strength, more faithful and more loyal to this writer’s vocation, which I never suspected would give me the satisfaction that I feel today.

Caracas, 11 August 1967