Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Lecture 2010

"We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal."

"From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalisation, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility."

Read the full Nobel  Lecture here

The End of the Novel of Love

By VIVIAN GORNICK
Beacon Press
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CHAPTER ONE  

In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman--at last--melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one--among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway--where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins. 

The response of these intelligent fictional women--Gwendolen Harleth, Lily Bart, Diana Warwick, Clarissa Dalloway--to the prospect of married love goes against the grain. Not only because we all know that love is the most formative experience a human being can have and marriage, any marriage, at least in its beginnings, reminds one of its promise, but also because the idea that a woman, any woman, could really want anything other than to be safely settled in the world with a husband has, until very recently, been unthinkable.

So what is it with Gwendolen, Lily, Clarissa, and Diana? 

In Daniel Deronda George Eliot pits the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth (shrewd, vain, ambitious, hungry for a place in the world) against Henleigh Grandcourt, the aristocrat who wishes to marry her, apparently setting in motion the classic struggle between a woman and a man who are evenly matched: in this case both cold, smart, and determined. In the bargain, Gwendolen seems malicious: she taunts and manipulates the arrogant lord as if the exercise of sexual power in and of itself is a necessary plesure. But slowly, steadily--it takes Eliot 200 pages to get them married--we are moved deeper inside Gwendolen and we see that her behavior is meant to be off-putting. She is desperate to keep the action going, delay the moment of decision. We see that she is buying time. She dreads marriage. "It was not," Eliot observes of her, "that she wished to damage men, it was only that she wished not to be damaged by them."

Read the rest here

All Time is Unredeemable

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

In the Knowledge Derived from Experience.

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

EAST COKER
(No. 2 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot