Annotations for Professional Life: Criticism

You write criticism.

Si. Sometimes, yes. Yes, I like it. Yeah. I like it.

Do you have to like something to review it?

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Only in exceptional circumstances I write against books. I write against ideas, but against poems or novels. I usually don't do it. I write when I am enthusiastic about something, you know?

I was curious. In one of your pieces, this was one about literature. You said you were defining words, Borgesian as an entry into a fantastical universe, Kafkaesque as the impetent feeling of the isolated individual, Orwellian, the terrible anguish generated by dictatorships.

Mhm

All very valid. But I was wondering, could you define what Vargas--Llo-Llosean would be?

Oh, well, I can answer with a Borges quotation. Say, when you look yourself at a mirror, you don't know how your face is. You don't know if you are handsome or very ugly. It's very difficult. You don't really know. I would like my books to have the same influence that the great writers that I admire, but I really don't know what my own books are, you know? I don't know. I cannot measure them with the minimal objectivity that I can value, books of others.

Well, could you say what you're trying to do in your...

Oh, yes. Yes.

Oh, I think there is an autobiographical element in all novels.

I think it's impossible to fantasize 100% on a story.

And it's also true of Flaubert and Faulkner

Oh, of Flaubert and Fau-- except it's obvious.

I think all of the, maybe those writers are the writers I prefer because I feel so close to them in the way I create, I build my stories.

What are you reading now as a reader?

At some point you said, in all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present.

Yes.

You said things like that quite a lot. But I was curious about the phrase, without intent, without the authors knowing--

Oh, because there are authors who are not in any way enthusiastic with the idea of changing the world? No. Balzac, for example, he was a real reactionary.

He wanted the world to remain as it was.

He didn't know what he was doing in effect?

Well, he didn't know that he was producing a very explosive image, which was tremendously critical of the real world. It was not his intention at all.

He was for the establishment. But I don't think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is, you know?

I think if you produce a great, great novel, what you are producing is an alternative world, a kind of world that is not the real one because the real one is something that you are rejecting through this alternative world.

But I don't think this is an explicit mechanism which is pushing you, not at all.

And I think that is the richness of literature because these alternative worlds are this devastating criticism of the real world because they embrace all perspectives, all points of views, depending on the personality of authors, of the personal demons of authors, you know?

In some cases, yes. In some cases, you can say, yes, of course,

In some cases, you can say, yes, of course, there is an explicit critical attitude, or political or cultural. But I would say that in most cases, no. A writer is trying to materialize a vision or a dream without knowing that in this vision and in this dream, there is a very deep rejection of life as it is, of the world as it is, of humankind as it is.

For me, this is the great contribution of fiction, of the novel, to human progress.

And I think priests knew it before critical intellectuals. You know that the Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America.

I think they were very lucid. I think they understood very well this seditious consequence that fiction can have in the human spirit.

If you are too much contaminated with the idea of different worlds, perfect worlds, beautiful worlds, coherent worlds, and you are comparing this with the real world, the real world always loses the match, you know?