My thoughts on literature

I could pick up a pen – or my laptop – and write an essay about why people should read. Fortunately, Mario Vargas Llosa freed me from that task already with his extraordinary essay, Why Literature. So instead, I’ll write about what I learned from literature and what I’m still learning. Check this post periodically for more content!

First, a brief summary of how I stumbled upon this essay. I read the essay in my AP Spanish class in high school. Back then, my only intention for reading it was to answer its corresponding multiple-choice questions correctly, but over the past couple years I found myself constantly going back to it and increasingly appreciating what Vargas Llosa wanted to convey.

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Ghosts are real [last update: 12/23/2020]

Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream.

It’s amazing that despite the length and geography of human history, everyone who was born experienced the same set of emotions. Why do we still enjoy Shakespeare? Why bother read literature written when humanity was still waging war with swords and spears? Why do we still deliver lines from dusty love poems on Valentine’s Day? Love and loss and joy and sorrow and forgiveness and betrayal. The cruelty of Cathy Ames, the vengeance of Edmond Dantès, the amorous candor of Shelley – who can’t relate? These characters span centuries and their authors span continents. I haven’t even added Latin American, Asian, and African literature references yet.¹ When we are at a loss for words or when we, perhaps, want to lose ourselves in words, we turn to literature for advice or even a sense of belonging. All because somewhere, some years ago, someone felt the same way we’re feeling in that moment.

Words matter [last update: 12/23/2020]

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

Vargas Llosa’s words are harsh, and I do not agree with everything he writes here. Literature is not the only form of self-expression. I’d argue that visual or audible art is another quite vivid form of self-expression. In addition, there is beauty in the most natural art form – science. Many people communicate via these media though it can be argued that to fully appreciate these art forms, words must be used to “translate” them for the general populace.

I generally agree with Vargas Llosa that the more well-read a person is, the more well-spoken they are. It’s not a coincidence that our high school English teachers encouraged us to read more to score higher on the SAT, right?

Let’s say you don’t buy my argument. Then consider one of everyone’s favorite categories of phrases – insults. Many of our insults today derive from what we see on TV (words) or hear in real life (words). In the 1600s, a talented bard named William Shakespeare almost singlehandedly evolved the English language and its insults, some of which are still familiar to us today. “Villain, I have done thy mother” (Titus Andronicus) and “Thou art unfit for any place but hell” (Richard III), just to name a few, resemble some common curses today.

Much like how our English insults stemmed from the 17th century, our language used to describe our romantic feelings also has old roots.

• “My love is like a red, red rose” (Burns)
• “Had we but world enough and time” (Marvell)

In addition, the Spanish language would not have evolved to its present-day form as well without its romantic poets. To us it’s hard to imagine, but a couple centuries ago love confessions were quite straightforward and brute. Then in the 1520s, Garcilaso de la Vega penned some of the most famous verses in the Spanish language: “While your face is colored like roses and lilies [and] your hair is as mined from a vein of gold…”. Only from then on did people realize they could use metaphors to express their love. Suddenly, love exploded into flowers and colors and precious metals and poetry. Arguably the last great Spanish love poet, Pablo Neruda, expanded the definition of flirting, most notably with his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. “Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets into your oceanic eyes”, he wrote in his Poem VII. I don’t think just anyone could come up with such a metaphor.

Endless lifetimes? [last update: 12/23/2020]

When we close the book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a disappointment awaits us! Yet a tremendous realization also awaits us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is better—more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect—than the life that we live while awake, a life conditioned by the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature, genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge to what exists.

This section is more self-explanatory and more relatable than the previous. We all remember flying with Harry Potter during his first Quidditch match or battling dragons with Bilbo Baggins. The exhilaration, the excitement, and finally the disappointment when the wild chase is over and we close the book catch up to us. Those feelings are universal and will continue to persist as time goes on.

Literature as (un)lawful dissent [last update: 12/23/2020]

And there is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

These lines I didn’t understand until I took Spanish Literature. The picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes illustrated the vices of fifteenth century Spain through the eyes of an orphaned boy. In a devoutly religious society, the Catholic Church was never questioned. As a result, corrupt priests who hoarded from the poor and con men who sold fake religious indulgences to the poor were rampant across the country. The scenes in the novel were so subversive that the author had to publish the novel anonymously and in two parts, each in a different city, to avoid authorities. It’s crazy how far the authorities will go to prevent dissent. It’s even crazier that this still happens today, even in the US.²

I won’t delve into political commentary, but I will say that after taking a literature class, I learned how to critically think, which to me now means being skeptical about every piece of news I hear. Therefore, I agree with Vargas Llosa that through literature we can see the irony of our lives. Books are a mirror in which we can see our own reflections. Only after we read do we have the courage to ask ourselves if what we’re living is real or not – if what we’re given is actually the truth. After all, we don’t want to share the fate of Lazarillo.

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