*

 


Literature and Exile
Văn chương và Lưu vong

Every time that a Latin American writer resident in Paris is interviewed, one question invariably crops up: 'Why do you live outside your country?' This is not simple curiosity; in the majority of cases, the question conceals either fear or a reproach. For some, the physical exile of a writer is literally dangerous, because the lack of direct contact with the way of being or the way of speaking (which is almost the same thing) of the people of his own country can impoverish his language and weaken or falsify his vision of reality. For others, the matter has an ethical significance: to choose exile is immoral, a betrayal of the fatherland. In countries whose cultural life is limited or nonexistent, the writer - they think - should stay and fight for the development of intellectual and artistic activities to raise the spiritual level of the environment. If instead of doing so, he prefers to go abroad, then he is branded an egotist, an irresponsible person or a coward (or all three at once).
The writers' replies to this inevitable question are often very varied:
I live away from my country because I find the cultural milieu in Paris, London or Rome more stimulating; or because distance gives me a more coherent and faithful perspective on my reality than being immersed in it; or simply because I want to (I'm talking here about literary, not political, exiles). In fact all of these replies can be summed up in one: because I write better in exile. Better in this case should be understood in psychological and not aesthetic terms: it means with 'more tranquility' or 'greater conviction'; no one will ever know if what is written in exile is of better quality than what would have been written in one's own country. In answer to the fear that physical isolation from one's reality might prejudice one's work in the long run, the writer of fantasy might argue that the reality his fictions describe travels the world with him because his two-headed heroes, his carnivorous roses and his glass cities, emerge from his fantasies and dreams, not from any observation of the outside world. And he might add that the lack of daily contact with the language of his compatriots does not alarm him at all; he aspires to express himself in a language free of local color, an abstract, even exotic, unmistakably personal language, which can be developed through reading.
The realist writer must resort to examples. If we take just the case of Peruvian literature, we can come up with a list of important books which describe the face and the soul of Peru faithfully and beautifully, written by men who had spent a number of years in exile, thirty in the case of El Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios reales (Royal Commentaries) and at least twelve in the case of Vallejo's Poemas humanos (Human Poems). In both these examples - perhaps the most admirable in the whole of Peruvian literature - distance in time and space did not diminish or disturb the vision of a concrete reality which is transposed in essence into that chronicle and into those poems. In Latin American literature, the examples are even more numerous. Even if the literary value of Bello's odes might be debatable, his botanical and zoological rigor is not in question and the flora and fauna that he rhymed from memory in London correspond to those of America. Sarmiento wrote his best essays on his country, Facundo and Memorias de provincia (Notes from the Provinces), far from Argentina. No one doubts that the work of Marti is profoundly national, although four-fifths of it was written in exile. And was the costumbrist realism of the final novels of Blest Gana, written several decades after his arrival in Paris, no less faithful to Chilean reality than the books he wrote in Santiago?
This is simply a list of examples and the statistics in this case are there to give an indication rather than to present a rounded argument. Is it an indication that exile does not impair a writer's creativity and that physical absence from his home does not imply a loss, or a deterioration of the view of reality that his books seek to transmit? Any generalization on this theme risks drowning in absurdity. Because it would doubtless not be difficult to give numerous opposing examples to show how, in a great number of cases, when writers left their country, they lost their creativity or wrote books that deformed the world that they were attempting to describe. To these counter-statistics - we are already in the realm of the absurd - one would have to reply with another type of example which would show the countless number of writers who, without ever having touched foreign soil, wrote mediocre or inexact books about their country. And what about the writers of proven talent who, without going into exile, wrote works that do not reflect the reality of their country? Jose Maria Eguren did not need to leave Peru to describe a world populated by Nordic fairies and mysteries (like the Bolivian Jaime Freyres, and Julian del Casal who, while living in Cuba, wrote mainly about France and Japan). They did not go into exile physically, but their literature can be called 'exile' literature for the same reason as the literature of the exiled Garcilaso or Vallejo can be called literature 'rooted in a context'.
The only thing we've proved is that nothing can be proved in this area and that, therefore, in literary terms exile is not a problem in itself. It is an individual problem which takes on different characteristics with each writer and has different results. Physical contact with one's own rational reality means nothing from the point of view of the work; it determines neither a writer's themes, nor his imagination nor the vitality of his language. Exactly the same is true of exile. Physical absence from a country is sometimes translated into works that accurately reflect that reality and at other times into works that distort reality. Whether or not a work is an evasion or a reflection of reality, just as whether or not it is good, has nothing to do with the geographical location of its author.
That still leaves the moral criticism that some level at the writer who goes into exile. Surely the writers who desert their country show an indifference towards their own kind, a lack of solidarity with the dramas and people of that country? The question contains a confused and contemptuous idea of literature. A writer has no better way of serving his country than by writing with as much discipline and honesty as he can. A writer shows his discipline and honesty by placing his vocation above everything else and by organizing his life around his creative work. Literature is his first loyalty, his first responsibility, his primordial obligation. If he writes better in his country, he must stay there; if he writes better in exile, he must leave. It is possible that his absence might deprive his society of someone who might have been an effective journalist, teacher or cultural promoter, but it is equally possible that the journalist, teacher or cultural promoter is depriving society of a writer. It is not a question of knowing which is more important, more useful; a vocation (especially a writer's) cannot be decided in any authentic way by commercial, historical, social or moral criteria. It is possible that a young man who abandons literature to dedicate himself to teaching or fighting the revolution is ethically and socially more worthy of recognition than the other, the egotist, who only thinks about writing. But from the point of view of literature, a generous person is by no means exemplary or, in any event, he sets a bad example because his nobility and heroism are also a betrayal. Those who demand that a writer behave in a certain way (something that they do not demand, for example, of a doctor or an architect) are in effect expressing an essential doubt about the usefulness of his vocation. They judge the writer by his customs, his opinions or the place where he lives and not by the only thing by which he can be judged: his books. They tend to value these books according to the life the author leads and it should be the other way round. Deep down, they do not believe that literature can be useful and they hide, their skepticism by keeping a suspicious (aesthetic, moral or political) watch on the writer's life. The only way to clear up these doubts would be by demonstrating that literature is worth something. The problem remains unresolved, however, since the usefulness of literature, although self-evident, is also unverifiable in practical terms. MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
London, January 1968