[In the following interview, Vargas Llosa discusses the influence of history and other authors on his work as well as explaining his personal view of fiction as the “secret reality.”]

[Rebaza-Soraluz]: In García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio (García Márquez: Story of a Deicide), a book whose circulation—if I am not mistaken—you helped minimize, you developed your theories of “inner demons” and the “total novel.” What course have these ideas taken since then? Could you summarize your understanding of these ideas and explain how you see them now in relation to your narrative poetics?

[Vargas Llosa]: I continue to believe that the basic ideas expressed in that book, and in other books or essays I have written about the novel, are valid. They are fairly general ideas that do not explain particular cases but that do explain a certain characteristic akin to the genealogy of novels. The point of departure of the novelistic calling, the vocation of creating with words and with the imagination worlds that are distinct from the real world, is born of a certain conflict, some incompatibility with lived experience, that induces a person, in a generally obscure, nonrational manner, to seek out the alternative offered by fiction. The imagination does not work in a vacuum, it is not a gratuitous movement of the spirit, it operates drawing upon that conflict, trauma, interdict, enmity. … That difficult relationship with reality, such as it is lived, can be called many things. In any case it is from this that the imagination constructs that parallel world that is fiction. I call all of this “demons,” metaphorically. I did not want to use the word trauma so as not to give an orthodox Freudian explanation; nor do I believe that it can be explained as merely stemming from a neurosis. It is a type of conflict that can be infinitely broader than that determined purely pathologically. If there were no basic conflict with reality this vocation would not emerge. This vocation, in my opinion, consists of a rejection of reality and the substitution of another reality re-created in the image of its inventor, drawing from those types of problems or conflicts that I call “demons” because of their obsessive nature. This is a point of departure that establishes an immensely broad common denominator into which practically everything that could create difficulty in adaptation to lived experiences could fit; so you have motives ranging from the most altruistic (the rejection of injustice or social abuse) to the most private or egotistical (not being able to accept an eccentricity or an anomaly) or simply a thirst for the absolute (wanting to live existence more intensely, more fully, going beyond the limits of the human condition). Anyway, that form of rebellion is for me the point of departure for fiction. The originality of a narrative lies not in what it portrays of the real world but rather in what it reforms or adds to it. That is, for me, the specifically literary. The value of fiction is not in its similarity but rather in its dissonance with a reality which it should, nevertheless, represent—in order to obtain recognition, identification with the reader. That is what we call fiction: a reality that, without being reality, being distinct and alternative, asserts itself, in the case of successful narratives, due to its power of persuasion, as the real reality, the authentic, secret reality, reflected in literature. It seems to me that this is a valid explanation for all cases, and yet, of course, a generalization; each particular case represents a distinct method, technique, set of problems, and ambition.

Returning to the idea of the “added element”: in The Perpetual Orgy, speaking of Flaubert, you separate description from the anecdote, considering the latter an obligation of novelistic prose. An anecdote is made up of all kinds of experiences, which the author uses unscrupulously. What is important is its organization and its new form; it is here that the “added elements” make the anecdote a fictitious reality, which appears before the reader as a more conceivable reality than the very same reality he himself experiences. Systematically and impersonally exhibiting and withholding information, according to a previously conceived project, make the narrator disappear, who, impassive before what is narrated, does not absolve or condemn. This system leads him to alienate himself from the anecdote to the point of not intervening as a voice, resulting in a broad command of dialogue. Is this your point of view as a fiction writer? Is this your personal idea of realism?

That is Flaubert's idea, the description of what Flaubert called the impersonality of the narrator: the absolute neutrality that a narrator should maintain with regard to his narrative world. The narrator should be like God, omnipresent and at the same time invisible, an active absence, that is Flaubert's idea. Broadly speaking it is a valid concept, yet not exclusive. There are other versions. There is a very rich narrative in which the narrator is not invisible but rather a domineering, despotic presence, as well as that of an egomaniac. This is the type of narrator most often found in the classic novel. In a novel like Les Miserables, which I admire very much, the main character is a narrator who is constantly interfering, pontificating, judging. He does it from beginning to end with such coherence and congruence that he creates an order that in the end establishes itself as acceptable. But as a writer I feel closer to Flaubert's idea of the narrator than to the classic idea of the tyrannical and exhibitionistic narrator. It is very true, and in this Flaubert was extremely perceptive, that although the narrator may be visible, if the fiction does not gain independence, sovereignty, if it does not truly emancipate itself from the reality that serves as its model and has provided it with materials, it does not begin to live, it is ephemeral. Any fiction that needs to be checked against reality in order to justify itself does not attain the category of fiction—it is a document, a testimony. It may have historical or sociological value, but fiction should find justification in and of itself, disregarding its model. This is where a parasitic literature, such as regionalist literature, for example, or literature based on local customs and manners, fails.

In your article “Los miserables: el ultimo clasico” (“Les Miserables: The Last Classic”), published in the magazine Cielo abierto in 1983, you call Victor Hugo's work a “grandiose lie.” Is the narrator of Les Miserables a liar not because he creates fiction but because he wants to make the reader believe that what he says is true?

That is the ambition of all fiction, to impose itself on the reader as the truth. The raison d'être of all fiction is to be experienced, lived, not as a lie but as truth. Paradoxically, because of its own nature, fiction is and can only be a lie. This lie would never reach recognition, that enthronement as a great literary work, if it did not somehow reveal some truth, if through this lie a truth were not expressed, that can only be expressed through this periphrastic, symbolic, metaphorical path that is the path of fiction. The world is not as Proust, Joyce, or Balzac describes it, because the world is not organized that way, nor does it close up over itself as it does in a novel, where we can follow with absolute clarity the behavior and secret motivations and the reverberations or consequences of conduct. All of this within an order that is not the order of reality, which is fundamentally chaotic. One possible order is that which literature imposes, an artificial, invented reality. There are other orders of course, all of which proceed from culture, religion, and which organize this protoplasmatic chaos that is reality. If in some way it did not reveal something that we identify through our own experience of life, it would be difficult for fiction to gain the approval of the reader.

Let's take a look at an interesting and very explicit example: Kafka. When Kafka writes his stories he has no intention of symbolically re-creating a set of social and historical problems. Absolutely not. He writes stories stemming from a very traumatic and anguished personal experience, stories that he perceives as fantastic, sometimes as pure irreality. He sees this pure irreality as a way of confronting his vital anguish. Kafka's immense prestige has to do with this anguished, absurd world that reflects the instability, insecurity, the orphaning of the individual faced with social forces beyond his control, forces that can destroy him for reasons he cannot fully understand. All of this renders a very graphic expression of a phenomenon that all of Europe and parts of the rest of the world experienced in the era of police states, of totalitarianism—more concretely: Nazism and the persecution and extermination of entire societies. Weighed against this experience, the world of Kafka suddenly takes on symbolic value, and the extraordinary premonitory force of a historic event that the world was to experience. Although it would be completely absurd to say that a novel like The Metamorphosis is written to denounce, premonitorily, what would become Nazism, without a doubt an experience like that of the concentration camps, of the Holocaust, does give The Metamorphosis tremendously persuasive symbolic value. This is true of all great literature, though it may not necessarily have a direct historical or sociological, moral or cultural or psychological bearing. If we did not identify some aspects of our own experience of reality which, until then, had been obscured, clouded to rational knowledge, literature would reveal itself as a pure game of the spirit, as the creation of a parallel but superfluous reality, and it would not have much validity. All great literature, as distant from historical experience as it may seem to us, is always rooted in lived experience, though that can only be expressed through the lie that is the fabrication of a fictional world.

In The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta the protagonist, as a writer, is carried along in an ambiguous flow of realistic information constantly repeating that what he is constructing is a “lie,” a term that is in opposition to the truth. Does he distinguish between lie and falsehood, because it seems to me that he also uses the term falsehood in the framework of the interplay of author-character-fictitious reality. Is it this “added element” that differentiates lie from falsehood?

The theme of that novel, the least understood of all the ones I've written, is precisely the relationship between fiction and reality and between the distinct manifestations of fiction. In this novel there is a political and ideological fiction: that which Mayta experiences, and that experienced by the group of people who, believing they have seen a scientific description of historical reality in ideology, jump into this ludicrous adventure in which they fail. They act, guided by a fiction that is not literary. It is an ideological fiction. The person telling us the story is a narrator who has undertaken an investigation in order to determine all possibly reachable truth as to what occurred, so that he may use it to write a novel, a fiction, a lie, a false re-creation of that reality. What the novel tries to show are two manifestations of fiction: fiction that does not recognize itself as such, that has pretensions of being an objective reading of reality (ideological fiction, which appears very clearly in the novel as a consequence of frustration and violence), and fiction that does not have pretensions of being a scientific description of reality but rather, on the contrary, a visionary, subjective, “lying” re-elaboration of reality. What is surely bothersome is the use of a word that comes with negative religious and moral associations. Nevertheless, lie means something very concrete: contrary to truth. A lie is a false truth, it presents itself disguised as the truth. Literature is a lie that presents itself as such, it is a lie that does not pretend, as is the case of ideology, to be a truthful, objective description of reality. It is true that there are many writers who say, “In my novels I denounce a hidden, secret truth”; but what writers say is not as important as what they do. It may be that some really do describe the world as it is, but these are writers who have failed as creators of fiction. The writers who have been successful have not described the world as it is but rather the world as it is with some additions that revolutionize it, transform it, convert it into something very different, and that is what permits us to recognize its originality, a break not only with literary tradition but with the real world as it is.

And in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, where might one find the intersection between these two spheres: reality studied scientifically and reality … ?

… and reality as it is. Which is of almost infinite complexity because it does not have just one face but rather multiple faces. Even a very demarcated phenomenon can always be approached from another perspective. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an attempt to recount, in its minimum expression, what would be a revolutionary movement: the group is very small and the action lasts only a few hours. It would seem that one could know everything about it, due to its minimal dimensions. Yet, this is not so. If one continues to unravel the ball of yarn, one discovers that it is almost infinite, there are psychological factors, social factors, economic, cultural, and geographical factors. Each one contributes a new element to the explanation, the determination of exactly what happened. Literature is a very special form of knowledge, charged with subjectivity and imagination. It is evident that it is not scientific knowledge, not the type the historian or the sociologist, much less the scientist could aspire to. Which does not keep fiction from profoundly impregnating other disciplines or sciences. I find this topic very fascinating. The realm of fiction is much broader than that of literature, the difference being that literature has no intention of deceiving anyone in that respect. Literature is fiction, it presents itself as fiction, and when one reads a novel one does not read it as one reads a biology or chemistry book, or a history or sociology book, because one is obliged to ask these books for something no novelist would accept: a type of photographic compliance with an exterior model. In the field of literature this is totally unacceptable.

Could you tell us a little about your interest in the historical novel and the historical vision originating from this type of novel? Would it be correct to say that the historical novels that you have written fully express your vision of history? Or is it more a question of a speculative construction as to the most extreme possibilities of a human being in Latin America? The work I have in mind is The War of the End of the World and its apocalyptic and atavistic vision. It would seem that prophets and their followers are destined always to engender violence, brutality, and a lack of communication. Also, some of your commentaries and writings on the historic course of Quechua speakers in Peru indicate that, in your view, they too have a destiny similar to the people of Canudos. Would it be correct to say that your historical novels can be read as archetypal commentaries on history?

I have not written novels in order to spread a conception of history; not in the least. The War of the End of the World, which is the most historical novel of those I have written—because it's based on a very precise historical fact, about which there is a lot of literature—and which broadly speaking, only broadly speaking, does follow what happened in Canudos, is not so much a novel to defend a theory of history but rather to show the fiction that theories of history can represent as well, when they have a strong ideological and political charge. That is what happened in Brazil with the republic, with the republicans and their attitude regarding the movement of the people of Canudos. What fascinated me about this story was seeing how political and ideological prejudices succeeded in blinding an entire country to such an extent to the meaning of the rebellion of Canudos, the intentions of the rebels, and the reality of the danger that Canudos represented to the republic.

Could you also call it intolerance?

But an intolerance totally conditioned by ideology. Many of the republicans were very generous and idealistic people who had fought for the republic because they very sincerely believed that the republic was going to bring justice, the development of Brazil, and that it was good for the poor. So they simply could not understand why the poor would rise up against something that would be beneficial to them. That is why this whole theory of conspiracy emerges, which is a fiction in the most novelistic sense of the word, stretching from England to the monarchists and the military linked to the Empire, which is assumed to be manipulating the strings of the rebellion in Canudos. The only thing that does not appear is reality; that is, the religious fear of these very primitive peasants, very indoctrinated by fanatical monks with respect to the idea of the republic, which was another fiction as well: a conspiracy of the Masons, agents of the Devil, to do away with Christianity, the true religion in Brazil. What fascinated me about the Canudos phenomenon was how these ideologies, which were totally impermeable to direct experience, managed to blind those two sectors of Brazilian society and bring them to the point of killing each other in that fashion. I was so fascinated by this because it was a phenomenon we were experiencing in many places in Latin America at that moment, those absolutely insurmountable divisions among social groups basically due to ideological and political fictions. The novel is not trying to say that this is history; what it is trying to communicate is that this is not a convincing theory as to what history or society is, nor is it the vision of the Yagunzos or of the Consejero as to what true religion is, which is also a very fictitious and imaginary vision, conditioned by all kinds of prejudices, resentments, rage. That is what fascinated me so much in the case of The War of the End of the World. But yes, one could say, in some sense, that it is a novel about the fiction in life, now not only in literature but in history and politics as well. The world of fiction is a protoplasmatic world, it is everywhere; it is in religion without a doubt, and I believe this because, evidently, man cannot live without fiction.

Is there any common ground, for example, with the Andes of your latest novel, Death in the Andes?

The phenomenon of the Shining Path is present because its members, the Senderistas, appear there. Yes, they represent that form of extreme intolerance, a unilateral division of history, reminiscent of a Jacobin, of a Moreira César in The War of the End of the World, and in some way, of a Consejero. But in The War of the End of the World there is something more that is not ideological and not at all political, which is a mythology, a religious vision of the atavistic reality that has survived Westernization and the Christian presence and that is somehow expressed in the old Hellenic mythology; that is why I have also re-created this in the case of Dionysus, the world of the Pishtacos, and the world of Andean mythology. This has to do with structures that seem to me to be more permanent than historical or sociological structures. Mythology also has an order that fictitiously imposes itself on the world; myths are literary explanations of the incomprehensible, of that which proves incomprehensible in reality, in nature, and in the human condition. Myths are not gratuitous, they are fictions that, like great novels and great poems, a community recognizes and makes their own, because in some way they resolve a doubt, they appease some kind of spiritual need. That is what I was interested in showing in that novel: how certain myths are perennial, are always there because evidently the types of questions that brought them about have not been completely resolved (they are questions that reappear under certain circumstances); and also how the idea of modernity and progress is such a precarious idea; and how beneath all this lies an atavistic force belonging to a certain tradition that is not easily uprooted. In the event of any collective crisis or insecurity, it erupts with great force and violence. The story of Lituma had been going back and forth in my head for quite some time, but the actual characteristics of the novel were born of the impression that the news of the invasion of Pishtacos in Ayacucho left upon me a few years ago. It provoked a huge commotion in the shantytowns, in the poorest slums of Ayacucho, where the rumor of an invasion of Pishtacos—that hundreds, thousands of Pishtacos were arriving to wrench the body fat off the people to pay the external debt, to export it abroad, so that the government would turn it over to the United States—provoked a phenomena of mass hysteria and even lynchings. Evidently, this was coming from the sediment that had been stirred about and brought up to date, due, of course, to the very particular political and economic circumstances that the region was experiencing. This struck a vein with me that eventually resulted in Death in the Andes.

You have always been very interested in the work of Arguedas, despite some of your concerns regarding his style. You are the two most distinguished Peruvian novelists of this century. What comparison would you make with regard to the issue of style in each of your cases? And as to the form in which you deal with indigenous characters in the novel? You are currently writing a book on Arguedas; on what specific level does Arguedas continue to interest you after so many years?

I have always had, since I was very young, since the first time I read him, a strong interest in the work of Arguedas, for many reasons. First of all, because his work seems to me to be very rich, very creative, and also because I believe that the world of Arguedas is a world created from a set of problems that any Peruvian writer, so as not to say any Peruvian, has experienced directly (or indirectly) as a central part of his life, because Peru's major problems are the point of departure in Arguedas's work. His case is exceptional because he experienced those problems in his own life: the problem of two cultures; the problem of societies living together without communication under immense tension and violence; the problem of the Indians; the problem of bilingualism; the problem of societies living at different historical levels; the problem of possibilities for the integration of a society with these characteristics; and the problem of the type of literature that could emerge therein. Arguedas took all of this personally, as his own problem. He resolved this creatively in his best moments, in his best books, like Yawar Fiesta or Los ríos profundos. In the books in which he is not as original nor as creative, even in the books in which it could be said that he failed, he always left a powerful dramatic testimony of enormous authenticity, dealing with the type of conflict in which the literary, the historical, and the cultural all meet. Also, I have always been interested in that process in Arguedas by which traumatic personal experience, the “demons,” are raw material for a writer. And how they are used to create a world of fiction. The world of Arguedas is a world of fiction, especially in its better moments, the most creative ones, precisely in the sense of being not a description but an invention of a reality—a reality that he invented based upon a very genuine experience that does not reflect reality as it is, but rather, a reality that has passed through the very delicate, sensitive, and very wounded sieve of a person like Arguedas. That is what interests me about Arguedas, how a person so committed to the idea of justice, to restoring the rights of the peasant, of the Peruvian of the Andes, did, at the moment of creating literature, exactly what good literature does: he invented a world, he did not reflect it, he dismantled it and reassembled it in a very persuasive way, in an absolutely subjective and personal manner. Also, Arguedas is writing within the tradition of the indigenist, regionalist literature which at times conditioned him but which, in some of his better moments, he interrupted. With Arguedas, in some way, indigenism disappeared, despite the indigenist writers who would follow. He creates a kind of literature that puts an end to the characteristics of indigenist literature. The literature of Arguedas is concerned with Andean problems; there are peasants, there are Indians, but it is not indigenist literature.

In your words, the narrator of Les Miserables “judges, excommunicates.” In that same article you say “whoever judges and condemns does not listen, he listens only to himself, there is no dialogue, only monologue.” Who is the narrator of A Fish in the Water? Is he too engaged in a monologue? Is this narrator the most ambiguous, paraphrasing your words, of the characters that Mario Vargas Llosa, the author, creates in the “novel of his life”?

A Fish in the Water is not a novel, it is not fiction; it is an autobiography, it is a book of memoirs. An incomplete autobiography since it covers only two periods of my life. It contains no type of fictitious, literary re-elaboration of reality. It is a document of lived experiences in which there are, of course, very explicit, surely controversial, opinions expressed. In this book there is no fiction, or if there is fiction, it is involuntary fiction, in spite of myself. It is a book in which I wanted to tell what happened and not to use what happened as I do when I write novels: as raw material that I can magnify, add to, or eliminate with complete liberty. The testimony in A Fish in the Water is a reliable, truthful testimony, it is not a fictitious testimony.

Nevertheless, there is a scene in which you reproduce a conversation with your wife about the motives that led you to run for president. At one point you say something to the effect of: well, it is possible that things are not as I present them but rather what I wanted was to create the novel of my life. There are a couple of similar affirmations where you seem to be weighing the possibility of fiction and that of reality.

One can be truthful and reliable with respect to one's acts. With respect to one's deep-seated motivations, there is always a margin of subjectivity, of error. One thinks one knows oneself, but one only knows oneself based on reason, and we know there is a nonrational part of the human personality that, from that shadow the conscious cannot reach, is always exerting pressure, pushing, inducing, in such a way that we cannot know the most secret motivations behind our acts. It was an act of honesty on my part, an ethical necessity, to say that my wife does not entirely share the reasons I believe to be the ones that induced me to present my candidacy in the elections in Peru. She believes there is also a secret, maybe unconscious, literary reason: the ambition to live a great novel in real life. I don't know, but clearly it is not what I believe led me to be a candidate in Peru.

Would this be applicable to the motivations behind writing A Fish in the Water?

No, absolutely not. I am basically a writer, and, naturally, a writer is only able to fully understand his experience insofar as he writes about it. I would not say “insofar as he invents it,” but yes, insofar as he writes about it. It was important for me to leave this testimony precisely because of the proliferation of lies that accompanied all of my political activities in Peru. At least this way my own testimony on the matter will be on record. I always knew the book would be controversial, but it was also a way to close the file on this experience. Once written—this happens to everyone who writes—this experience somehow distances itself, and one somehow bring sit to a close and finishes it off. It is like what happens when one writes a novel, there is always an uneasiness, a restlessness, rooted in those particular experiences that lead one to write a novel. Once the novel is finished, a sort of cathartic effect has been produced; the novelist has expelled that inner “demon.” I can say that with A Fish in the Water, I expelled the demon of politics, at least of Peruvian politics.