[In the following interview—originally conducted in June 2000 and published in the June 24, 2000, edition of El Comercio—Vargas Llosa discusses the implications of the computerization of literature, the most successful novels of the past century, and the Boom period in Latin American literature.]

Since the early 1960s, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) has been regarded as one of Latin America's leading writers, a novelist whose books can be read as a modern-day saga of Peruvian and Latin American society. Among his more notable works are La casa verde (1965; Eng. The Green House), Conversación en la Catedral (1969; Eng. Conversation in the Cathedral), La tía Julia y el escribidor (1979; Eng. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), Historia de Mayta (1984; Eng. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta), and La guerra del fin del mundo (1992; Eng. The War of the End of the World). His most recent novel, La fiesta del chivo (2001; Eng. The Feast of the Goat), re-creates the final days of the dictatorship of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and has been hailed as one his finest literary achievements to date. The following interview took place at the writer's home in Lima in June of 2000 and was first published in the Lima daily El Comercio on 24 June 2000.

—César Ferreira, for WLT

[Chang and Cisneros]: You once told a story about Bill Gates leaving a meeting where he had just promised the members of the Spanish Royal Academy that he wouldn't remove the letter ñ from his keyboards. He confessed that he wanted to accomplish one more grand design before he died: make all books obsolete. How would you respond to the richest man in the world?

[Vargas Llosa]: Bill Gates' idea isn't to end literature as we know it, but he really believes that computers can perform flawlessly all of the functions of a book. I believe that's correct when we're talking about information, but it's false when we're talking about literature, because the act of reading a piece of literature demands a sort of intimacy that disappears when one sits down in front of a computer screen. If books disappear, then literature will be transmitted through computer screens, and that will certainly be less private and less intimate. Much more informative, but less creative. It will suffer the same process of generalization, not to speak of a certain tackiness and impoverishment, that has plagued media which rely on visual images as they have become more popularized. It will never produce a César Vallejo, a T. S. Eliot, or an André Breton, because it will completely do away with any creative experimentation with the language of the text. I still don't believe that this grand design of Gates's will ever come to fruition, but what could happen eventually is that books little by little may become less relevant, until literature expressed with computer images converts itself into the literary diet of a steadily growing majority. In a worst-case scenario, the audience for literature would be limited to a small minority, which would eventually become an important secret society of literary catechists who would keep it going almost as an underground activity.

Borges had such contempt for the novel that he once even dared to say that García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude had fifty years too many. How do you think Borges would feel in today's climate, where editors have a marked distaste for the short story? Do you see the short story as a nineteenth-century genre that is on the verge of extinction in the twenty-first?

No, I think that the short story is still alive and well. Several writers of short stories rank among the twentieth century's most influential authors, and in fact Borges is the best example of this in terms of Latin American literature. But we also have Cortázar, Rulfo, and Onetti. I would say that Borges's attitude toward the novel is more one of disdain than outright rejection, since he always considered it a second-class genre. But within the confines of his own writing, that's perfectly understandable. He was an author who accepted only perfection, and in a novel perfection isn't possible due to its very nature as the expression of the human condition in the midst of social chaos. It clearly demonstrates just how far we are from achieving those absolute ideals of coherence, rationality, and technical perfection that, to a certain extent, are possible in poetry and the short story. Borges managed to obtain that level of perfection in his short stories, that seamless circularity, almost geometric, which constitutes the goal of pure art, free of any flaws either in the plot structure or in the use of language. His instinctive antipathy toward the novel is a further rejection of imperfection.

Which of this century's most critically acclaimed novels do you think will be condemned to the bonfires of obscurity?

I think it's easier to mention those novels that have survived the test of time and are going to be with us in the future. For example, Joyce's Ulysses is a novel that will always be relevant: it introduces a new narrative language that allows the reader to probe the depths of human consciousness. Proust's Remembrance of Times Past will last as long as a cathedral. There are also authors like Faulkner, who is more popular today than when he first wrote his novels: in order to construct different worlds, he created an instrument which mimics reality and which continues to offer fertile ground for the elaboration of depth, ambiguity, mystery, and tension in a work of fiction. We also have writers who are no longer widely read, like Malraux: I think that Man's Fate has to be one of the greatest novels of this century, but nowadays it lacks the wide audience it really should have. Malraux the political figure worked to a certain extent against Malraux the author, and this cost him readers. Sartre is an example of a writer who at one time was widely read but has now been eclipsed by the passage of time: today his novels are hard to read, and anyone who reads them carefully will find that there's nothing really original about them, since they owe so much to precursors like Dos Passos. To writers of the present generation, his views on literature seem idealistic and self-righteous. Very few authors today accept the idea that literature can change history or that it plays a role in transforming everyday politics.

The often-remarked death of ideology has something to do with that. …

Oh yes, and in Sartre's case that's had a big effect, but the incoherence of his work has something to do with it too. What Josep Plà said about Marcuse is also applicable to Sartre: “He contributed as no one had before him to the confusion of our times.” Sartre could make us believe everything that he wrote, because his way of rationalizing things could persuade you to accept the most absurd and contradictory things as a logical function of their fluctuating ideological currents, but that has progressively made his work less meaningful in today's world. This didn't happen to Camus, who was more of an artist and a better writer. In both the literary and the public sphere, his ideas are still very relevant. Today his demand that morality must influence politics seems more valid than ever. On the other hand, the pragmatism that Sartre advocated, even when it conflicted with moral values, seems reprehensible to us because it gave the worst dictatorships a veneer of legitimacy.

In the twentieth century, novels were written that revolutionized literary prose. One thinks of the language found in Joyce's Ulysses, Lezama Lima's Paradiso, or Guimarães Rosa's Gran Sertão: Veredas (Eng. Rebellion in the Backland). However, as this century winds down, novels tend to be more beholden to the tastes of a reading public composed of simple dilettantes or literary tourists. Could it be that authors simply tired of the struggle to achieve the novela total, a work that would seek to explain and reshape the entire universe in which we live and have everlasting significance?

In this age characterized by consumerism and constant change, life seems to revolve around the present moment, and the idea of a novela total, an immortal work of art, is scarcely accepted today. In the past, an author wrote to achieve immortality, so that when he died his work would remain and he would continue to live on through it. The author's ambition was to attain this immortality through a perfect work of art. Nobody believes in immortality today, and such a notion has been replaced everywhere by an obsession with the present. In literary terms, this has given rise to “Literature Lite,” which is more entertainment than a groundbreaking reevaluation of moral values or of how one perceives things. We also can't ignore literature written from a sectarian or group-specific point of view, because it contains attractive elements that reflect a great talent. But one doesn't write this type of fiction with the intention of shattering temporal boundaries in order to live forever, as is the case with the masterpieces of literature. Today's authors think that such a lofty goal is presumptuous, conceited, and utopian. Now they hope that by writing about the present they'll be able to gain a large following of readers to satisfy a much more limited obsession: fame, fortune, and success. To attract the reading and buying public here and now. Who cares about what might happen tomorrow?

Was Kafka perhaps the writer who best expressed the horrible aspects of the situation which confronts modern man?

As a writer, Kafka is inseparable from this modern concept of existential anguish. When we read him, we sense the void that results from being aware of our own finiteness, the brief span of our own existence when compared to eternity, and how helpless we are when we face this vast machine that is society and life itself. Of course, Kafka is one of the writers who best captures this in an original way, relying on parables, stories, and situations that are extraordinarily convincing because they come to us in a language and a fictional structure which fit nicely with this outlook on life. Moreover, the relevance of his work stretches across circumstances, times, and cultures which have little in common on the surface: Kafka's world has been lived in China, in Cuba, in Peru, and in any country where, for certain reasons, human beings come to be nothing more than instruments of a powerful elite over which they have no control and against which they are completely defenseless. People are forced to become the puppets of hidden forces that can be political, ideological, or religious. Along with Joyce and Proust, we have to include Kafka as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

Nineteenth-century writers can seem very boring to us today because back then there wasn't any television and they had to describe everything in their books. Now we've opted for the other extreme: the market makes it impossible for a book to be successful these days unless it's written with the express purpose of being made into a film. How have inventions like film changed literature?

One effect has been in the elaboration of time. The big difference between classical literature and modern works is that, in the latter, time passes quickly, jumps back and forth, and has no place for useless interludes. The influence of a culture based upon the image has been fundamental in this. Film taught us to look at time in a way that before had been inconceivable. We live at a faster pace and therefore construct novels in which time blurs and the plot flows as it would within a concrete space: going backward, going forward, coming and going. Things didn't happen like this in the past, because life itself didn't occur in this way. Nor had there been a revolution in the representation of images which changed how time was used in literature. But it would be naïve to think that the technical and artistic advances of modern literature have done away with the classics. Unlike in the industrial world, where a new product comes along and annihilates the memory of the older one, or in science, where chemistry sounded the death knell of alchemy, the arrival of Proust in no way eliminated Montaigne, and Joyce didn't cause the demise of Cervantes. That is the great thing about literature.

Dostoevsky was one of the most flawed literary models of the nineteenth century in terms of his technique, but ironically he was also one of that era's greatest and most enduring authors. Who are some of the twentieth century's authors whose greatness has not been lessened by the technical flaws of their writing?

Pio Baroja is perhaps the most notable example of this in the Spanish language. He is the author of a huge corpus of work that manifests striking examples of technical imperfection, a pronounced laxness in terms of the formal aspects of writing. The same thing happened to Balzac, who was accused of writing too quickly and without much attention to form. Nevertheless, Balzac's strength has been that his work has endured. Certainly, if one takes indifference to form to an extreme, that destroys the work. But there are works that manifest such a compelling narrative prowess in terms of the elaboration of the humanity of the characters, the settings, and the stories, allowing them to be totally coherent in and of themselves, that they seem to compensate for the shortcomings of the formal prose. Thomas Wolfe is an interesting case in point; so is an effusive writer like Balzac.

Would you include Céline in this category?

Céline is an interesting example of how artistic talent can make us tolerate certain things that, when one sees them from a distance, make one sick: e.g., the most disgusting bigotry, Nazism, anti-Semitism. But no one could ever deny that Céline was a great writer. His world (as we see in Journey to the End of the Night) is primitive, wretched, vile, but it's exquisitely represented by an equally wretched and vile prose. Any other type of narrative would make that world unbearable on account of its very wretchedness and pettiness, and the prejudices that they engender.

The “Boom” in Latin American literature has been dismissed by some as having been contrived by a market dominated by publishing houses. What has been the real contribution to contemporary literature of this trend in the writing of novels?

I don't believe that its significance has been sociological, historical, or geographic. Authors like Borges, García Márquez, and Cortázar were well known because they were great writers who produced works that were both compelling and truly vital at a time when European literature was seeking refuge in formalism and experimentalism. Up to that time, Latin American literature had been for the most part picturesque and had never gained an audience outside the region. Moreover, with the new Latin American literature there was a renewed interest in Latin America itself. However, this fiction was renowned in the wider world because it was creative and original. I don't believe that authors are manufactured. In our time there's been a bifurcation between quality work that has a limited number of readers and the literature of mass consumerism that for the most part is of poor quality, is manufactured in assembly-line fashion in accordance with certain prototypes, and is targeted to a wide audience. It was a tragedy that this happened to fiction. One of the best things about nineteenth-century literature is that this dichotomy didn't exist and the great fiction writers like Dickens were also widely read and popular authors. Great literature and popular, consumer-oriented literature were the same thing. The same people who nowadays read Grisham would have been reading Victor Hugo back in the nineteenth century. What happened afterward was that fiction kept refining itself and became experimental in form, constantly searching for even more complex ways to express itself. That's what distanced it from a buying public which previously had embraced it with open arms.

Did the writers of the “Boom” really try to get closer to the masses?

Not all of them. Perhaps one of the greatest successes of One Hundred Years of Solitude is that, being an example of high-quality literature, it's managed to gain wide acceptance among the public as a whole. It says something fundamental to the layman and at the same time contains all the technical brilliance demanded by the most refined reader. But you can't say the same thing about Rayuela (Eng. Hopscotch) or Paradiso, where the fiction demands a lot of the reader, to the point that the average reader will never be able to appreciate the work. There are other novels that, while displaying a marked refinement in formalistic terms, managed to create a fiction within the reach of the masses. It's possible to read Rulfo while being refined, intellectual, and demanding, or one can choose to be a complete layman and pay attention only to his anecdotes.

In your opinion, what are some of the most outrageous faux pas ever committed by literary critics?

The most glaring occurred with Proust. Gide condemned the first volume of Remembrance of Times Past, even though he was the most perceptive reader ever of French literature. In his defense, this condemnation wasn't based on any prejudice against Proust; it was simply a case of literary myopia. What happened to El Gatopardo (Eng. The Leopard) by Tomasi de Lampedusa was another disgrace. Italian publishing houses, almost without exception, rejected the manuscript of a consummate masterpiece, one of the greatest, most original, most satisfying, and most relevant books of the twentieth century. And those who rejected it weren't mediocre readers, but included such great writers as Elio Vittorini, the Italian Sartre of his day. He dismissed Lampedusa's novel because he felt that it violated the laws of history, since it didn't represent an adequate, correct, and just vision of society. The individual who salvaged the honor of Italian literature was Giorgio Bassani, who said that The Leopard was a masterpiece, but did so only after poor Lampedusa was already dead. The author never got to see his work published, and died convinced that he had failed as a writer.