A few weeks ago was my English midterm test, and it was my least favourite style of testing: write a well‐structured and properly referenced essay on blah blah blah… oh, and you have just two hours. Go! And remember—it’s gotta be good and gotta be done in 2 hours…
I loathe being asked to preform creatively (and intellectually for that matter) on-the-spot. It’s not a fair test. It’s not realistic.
I completed my writing just before time was up knowing I didn’t write the essay I knew I could write and generally not being pleased with the conditions of the test. Turns out I wrote an A+ paper that was only criticized for being more of a summery essay than the requested analytical essay, but because it was well‐structured and properly referenced I still got the grade.
School has been challenging. I often feel lost and confused with the material. I sit at my desk with a test in front of me as my mind blanks and my head gets confused: it doesn’t know what it knows it knows and what it thinks its forgotten. I’ll complete the test in misery and then I get an A, but I don’t know if it’s a real A or a lucky A. It’s stressful…
Anyway—what follows is almost word for word what I wrote in the two hours I had to write it. I’ve made minimal corrections just because I repeated a few phrases in the original essay, and even then it still reads a little safer than I normally would write. But it did its job better than I thought it would—so that’s one more lucky A for me.
With a world filled with multimedia undreamed of only ten years ago, in an increasing entertained age, the roll of traditional printed literature is viewed by some as old fashioned, its sole purpose seen as nothing other than time filler for the reader—disposable words to distract while riding a bus. In “With Pens Drawn” Mario Vargas Llosa maintains this trend of thinking about literature risks undermining the freedom taken so for granted in free places in the world. Throughout his essay, Llosa illustrates the changing role of traditional literature today against new forms and sources of both challenging social commentary act pure entertainment. Llosa’s effective use of the compare and contrast rhetorical mode solidifies how important the role of literature is now more than ever in maintaining a free and democratic society.
Llosa first compares the attitudes held by some of the critics that “…literature is already dead” (p.218) or the authors who will not write another novel because “the genre now fills them with disgust” (p.218). These statements, Llosa says, are made in countries where literature can exist as pure entertainment, where books can be a hobby (p.219). However; Llosa also effectively reminds the reader of all the place where the writer is “feared” (p.218) and being a writer is an act against the state and punishable by imprisonment or death. These writers are jailed, Llosa argues, by fulfilling literature’s purpose to not only entertain, but “to address itself to the problems of its time” (p.219).
It is this dual role Llosa suggests literature is at its most disadvantaged. As he states: “If the only point of literature is to entertain, then it cannot compete with the fictions pouring out of our screens, large or small” (p.219). Reading is work, and with today’s TV and movies getting easier and easier to watch each day, Llosa argues this results in viewers who are “allergic to intellectually challenging entertainment” (p.219). It is with this allergy in mind Llosa stresses the importance of literature filling in the intellectual gaps left by new audio and visual media’s role as pure entertainment. As opposed to the immediacy of something on a screen, passively consumed by instant gratification, Llosa states literary fiction “holds us captive for life” (p.219) and goes so far as to claim referring to the works of Mann, Faulkner, Kafka, Joyce, etc… as entertaining would be “to insult them” (p.219). Without literature as a forum for truth, Llosa maintains, our singular consumption of entertaining media “condemns us to a state of passive acceptance, moral insensibility, and psychological inertia” (p.220). This very state, Llosa says, is “the kind of lethargy dictatorships aspire to establish” (p.220).
This precarious balance of entertainment and tyranny is where Llosa believes good, true literature takes on its most important role. In a bold claim Llosa says literature is our best defence of freedom, our greatest weapon in preventing war. He argues wars in the last one hundred years have been fought between dictatorships or by totalitarian regimes against democracies, but not between two democracies (p.221). Llosa states, “the best way to promote peace is to promote democracy” (p.221). And from Llosa’s statement of what good literature taught him, that “in all our diversity of cultures, races, and beliefs, as fellow actors in the human comedy, we deserve equal respect” (p.219), he is also aware of literature’s role of being able to “detect the roots of the cruelty human beings can unleash” (p.219). An awareness of both of these truths is a requirement of democracy and a consequence of literature.
Llosa says his ideas of literature are old fashioned, comparing himself to a “dinosaur in trousers” (p.219), but with the role of intellectually challenging entertainment left vacant by new forms of instant media, literature is facing a role more critical than ever: the responsibility of fuelling the intellectual process so critical in a functioning and free democracy. By contrasting the life or death situations faced by those writers in other places against the luxury of writers in free places to declare literature dead, Llosa clearly demonstrates how intellectual literature must remain in public consumption in order to preserve peace and democracy. Complacency as a threat to democracy is fought by literature’s ability to express “indignation in the face of injustice and demonstrating there is room for hope” (p.221). Despite Llosa’s comparison to both himself and his vocation as something of a relic, his words suggest otherwise—these relics are more important now in our comfortable democracies than ever before.