In this CIS Occasional Paper, Mario Vargas Llosa highlights the mutually beneficial relationship between literature and freedom. Where freedom does not exist, censorship and self-censorship stifle creativity- literature tends to become conformist and predictable. Colonial Latin America produced scarcely a writer still worth reading in three hundred years, while in Elizabethan England disdain for dramatists same them left in peace, allowing Shakespeare’s genius to flourish. In repressive societies, though, the book is a medium best suited to keeping freedom alive. Audio visual technology is expensive and easily controlled by those in power. Books, buy contrast, can be written, reproduced and circulated by underground cultures. While praising good cinema and television, Vargas Llosa emphasises the book’s unique contribution to culture and freedom.
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Nothing has pushed forward cultural life as much as the invention of printing, nor has anything contributed more to its democratisation. From Gutenberg’s times until today, the book has been the best propeller and depository of knowledge, as well as an irreplaceable source of pleasure.
However, to many, its future is uncertain. I recall a lecture I heard at Cambridge a few years ago. It was entitled ‘Literature is Doomed’ and its thesis was that the alphabetic culture, the one based on writing and books, is perishing. According to the lecturer, audiovisual culture will soon replace it. The written word, and whatever it represents, is already an anachronism, since the more avant-garde and urgent knowledge required for the experience of our time is transmitted and stored not in books but in machines, and has signals and not letters as its tools. The lecturer had spent two weeks in Mexico where he had travelled everywhere, and even in the underground he had no difficulty, though he spoke no Spanish, because the entire system of instructions in the Mexican underground consists of nothing but arrows, lights and figures. This way of communication is more universal, he explained, for it overcomes, for instance, language barriers, a problem congenital to the alphabetic system.
The lecturer drew all the right conclusions, with no fear, from his thesis. He maintained that all Third World countries, instead of persisting in those long and costly campaigns aimed at teaching their illiterate masses how to read and write, should introduce them to what will be the primordial source of knowledge: the handling of machines. The formula that the slender speaker used with a defiant wink still rings in my ears: ‘Not books but gadgets’. And, as a consolation to all those who might be saddened by the prospect of a world in which what was yesterday made and obtained by writing and reading would be done and attained through projectors, screens, speakers and tapes, he reminded us that the alphabetic period in human history had in any case been short-lived. Just as in the past mankind had, for thousands of years, created splendid civilisations without books, so the same
could happen in the future. Why, then, should the underdeveloped countries insist on imposing an obsolete education on their citizens? So as to keep on being underdeveloped? The lecturer did not think the alphabetic culture would totally vanish, nor did he wish it. He forecast that the culture of the book would survive in certain university and intellectual enclaves for the entertainment and benefit of the marginal groups interested in producing and consuming it, as something curious and tangential to the main course of the life of nations.
The exponent of this thesis was not Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian prophet who announced the death of the book for 1980. It was Sir Edmund Leach, eminent British social anthropologist, then Provost of King’s College: that is to say, a distinguished mandarin of the alphabetic culture of our time. We should not take such statements lightly. If Sir Edmund Leach thinks that the alphabet stinks, something in the alphabet must be rotten.
It is true that for many people the written word is becoming more and more dispensable. The most flagrant example is to be found among the children of our time, to whom television programs give what the novels of Karl May, Salgari, Jules Verne and the great Alexandre Dumas gave my generation. Radio and television have taken the place of newspapers and magazines as the main source of information on current affairs, and although the number of readers in the world is growing in absolute terms, there is no doubt that, relatively speaking, the printed word has less influence today than it had in the past. Books are less important to the literate people of today (considering the time they devote to them and the effect they have on their lives) than they were to the literate people of the past. We must be worried about this, because although I doubt that the prophecy of Professor Leach will materialise so soon, if it does come true it will probably be a disaster for humanity.
Literature as a Bastion of Freedom
My pessimism is based on two certainties. First, that the audiovisual culture is more easily controlled, manipulated and degraded by power than the written word. Because of the solitude in which it is born, the speed at which it can be reproduced and circulated, the secrecy with which it conveys its message and the lasting mark on people’s consciousness of literary images, the written word has revealed a stubborn resistance against being enslaved. In all totalitarian and authoritarian societies, if there is dissidence it is through the written word that it manifests and keeps itself alive. In a good number of places, writing is the last bastion of freedom. With its demise, the submission of minds to political power could be total. In the kingdom of the audiovisual, the master of technology and budget is the king of cultural production. And in a closed society, this means always, directly or indirectly, the state. He would decide what men should and should not learn, say, hear and (in the end) dream. There would be no underground culture, no counter-culture, no samizdat. This society, once personal choice and cultural activities are removed, would easily slip into mental slavery.
