1NOVEL THEORY
What is a novel and what role does it play? Our conversation at Princeton began with a review of the most important theories about the novel, from social realism to the nouveau roman, before going deeper into the experience of the Boom and the effect of the great political events of the twentieth century on literature.
RUBÉN GALLO: I’d like to begin this dialogue with a reflection about the novel, that literary genre born in the Renaissance, which flourished in the eighteenth century and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with figures such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens, and Pérez Galdós. Ian Watt and other historians have argued that the novel is a bourgeois genre, a literary form that not only was born with the bourgeoisie but also narrates the adventures of bourgeois characters. Would you agree with this characterization?
* * *
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: That is too schematic a declaration about a genre that is so complex and has so many offshoots. It seems more precise to me to say that the novel is born when life goes from being rural to more urban. The emergence of the novel is linked more to the city than to the bourgeoisie. The rural world produces poetry, but the city foments the development of narrative. That occurs practically the world over. The novel fundamentally describes a city experience, and even the pastoral genre is about an urban perspective. When life is centered around a city, the genre of the novel reaches great development. It is not exactly born with the city, but it is at that moment that narrative becomes popularized and comes to be very widely accepted.
The novel was considered minor within different literary genres. What stood out, of course, was poetry, the creative genre par excellence. Later, through the end of the nineteenth century, what ruled was theater: the performance of works gave an author intellectual prestige. Let’s recall the case of Balzac, who became a novelist when he failed at playwriting. We now consider him one of the greatest narrators ever, but he nonetheless felt enormous frustration because he failed as a dramatist. Theater was what afforded great prestige—think of Shakespeare during the Renaissance—and that genre was considered an intellectually superior category.
Novels, in contrast, were aimed at a much wider audience than poetry or classical theater and were considered a popular genre, for less sophisticated and even less educated people. As a matter of fact, in the Middle Ages, the first novels were written to be read in public, on street corners, and thus reach an illiterate audience. They were read by troubadours and acrobats, who entertained audiences with tales of chivalry. It was a minor genre until the nineteenth century, when it began to gain prominence and importance. One of the key authors who gave great prestige to the genre of the novel was Victor Hugo, who was already a great poet, a great playwright, when he suddenly decided to write novels. Les Misérables gave the genre extraordinary prestige.
I would associate the novel with urban culture more than with the bourgeoisie. The concept of the bourgeoisie is a very limited, very reductive concept, and the origins of the novel are much more working-class. When the bourgeoisie was just coming into being, there were novels written that reached a wide audience, an audience that in many cases was illiterate but that listened to the stories as told by wandering performers.
SARTRE AND THE NOUVEAU ROMAN
RG: When you began writing in the fifties, there were many models for what a novel could be: on the one hand, there was Robbe-Grillet with his idea of the new novel, the nouveau roman, that sought to break with the realist model and experiment with new ways of narration. On the other hand, there was Sartre’s existentialism, which proposed a politicized vision of narration. From a very young age, you identified yourself with Sartre and not with the experimental authors who followed Robbe-Grillet. How did that debate about the novel reach Peru, and why did you choose the Sartrean model?
MVLL: The interwar period yielded literature with a great commitment to politics: there was an enormous politicization in all of Europe. The literature resulting from that general politicization was deeply linked to social problems. Before Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman came about, there were already two trends: on the one hand, socialist realism, which considered literature as a weapon in the social fight against the established order, as an instrument of change, and as a vehicle for revolution. Marxists and communists defended that conception of literature: realism that should politically educate the masses and push them toward socialism and revolutionary action. In the face of that school, another trend emerged, defended by Sartre and other great writers such as Camus, who said yes, but literature cannot be pedagogical, literature cannot be a political propaganda tool because that kills creativity, literature has to go beyond what is purely political and encompass other human experiences. And thus arose Sartre’s thesis, which had enormous influence the world over, from Europe to Latin America. My generation, particularly, was very marked by Sartre’s ideas about the novel.
When I read the second volume of Sartre’s Situations, called What Is Literature?, I was blown away by his ideas. For a young man with a literary vocation in a country as underdeveloped as Peru was in those years, Sartre’s ideas were very stimulating. Many writers from Peru, from Latin America, from the Third World, asked themselves if in their countries—devastated by terrible problems such as a very high rate of illiteracy, enormous economic inequalities—it made sense to make literature. In his essay, Sartre responded that of course it makes sense to create literature, because literature, besides something that produces pleasure, that stimulates imagination, that enriches sensibility, can be a way of raising the consciousness of social problems in the reading public and in the greater public in general.
The issue of social problems can have a much greater impact when it reaches readers through a story that is moving and appeals not only to reason but also to emotion, feelings, instincts, passions, demonstrating in a much more lifelike way than an essay can what poverty, exploitation, marginalization, and social inequality mean. In a novel, a social problem—let’s give the example of someone who, by virtue of belonging to a specific social stratum, has no access to education or economic advancement—can impact a reader without the need for making pure propaganda out of literature, or making it pure political pedagogy. Sartre’s theses turned out to be very stimulating: you came to think that, yes, it made sense to write novels in an underdeveloped country, because the novel was not just a way of materializing a vocation but also a way of contributing to social struggles, to the struggle between good and evil from an ethical point of view.
Sartre’s theses were very popular all over the world. They seemed much more subtle, much better grounded than socialist realism and opened the possibility of incorporating not just writers who were openly political but also those who, by instinct, out of sensitivity, had conveyed social problems in their novels through their own creativity.
Then, in the late fifties, we saw the nouveau roman, a very strong reaction against the notion of socially committed art. Robbe-Grillet said no, the novel does not have to politically educate anyone; the novel is, at its core, an art. Robbe-Grillet opined that “social literature” contained less and less literature and more politics, as proposed in those very entertaining manifestos, which tends to be boring. For a New Novel, in contrast, is a very entertaining book that mocks writers who write social novels. Robbe-Grillet proposed experimental art that plays with narrative structures and point of view, that is very careful about language, and that exploits the possibility to create situations of great uncertainty. In this sense, Robbe-Grillet’s most accomplished novel is Jealousy: there is a narrator, but we do not know exactly what is happening. Someone watches a woman who wanders, and the only thing the reader knows for sure is that there’s an element of jealousy behind that constant, maniacal observation. We never discover the identity of that narrator, who is nothing more than an obsessive, maniacal vision, a character who never speaks, who only moves and follows the woman. It’s a fascinating experiment that breaks with the finest traditions of the novel. Great novels have always tried to encompass multiple facets of reality and multiple experiences: they are great novels not only because of their literary quality but also because they tell many things and narrate many experiences to paint a portrait of the individual mingling with the masses that are society.
Copyright © 2017 by Mario Vargas Llosa and Rubén Gallo
Translation copyright © 2023 by Anna Kushner
