With his usual eloquence, Mario Vargas Llosa makes it abundantly clear that as far as he is concerned literature is not something separate or distinct from what we like to call "real" life. On the contrary, he feels literature is an indispensable part of life—a rare and essential thing that can "enrich . . . the entirety of human life." (see note 1a) But as well as enrich, he thinks literature can also protect. Echoing George Orwell's 1946 classic "Politics and the English Language" Llosa writes:

Without [literature], the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss.

As central to our notions of liberty and justice as it is to those of art and beauty, Llosa argues that literature is our surest way of understanding—and even remedying—where we go wrong, both psychologically and politically:

A world without literature would be partly blind to [the] terrible depths [within the human psyche] that we urgently need to see. . . . [Literature is] one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals.

If we want a freer and more equable world, says Llosa, then we have two primary tasks: to learn—about ourselves and the experience of others; and to imagine—desirable futures and alternative realities. And we do both of these things best, he insists, through reading.

For Llosa, literature informs life at least as much as it reflects it. He sees literature as central to the fields of both ethics and aesthetics, a point of view that puts reading at the heart of the political process. But citing evidence of declining readership, especially among men, Llosa worries that reading is coming to be regarded as a non-essential, middle-class, and predominantly female pastime—a dangerous state of affairs that threatens a dark future of diminished freedom and even "spiritual barbarity" (worries that concern others too - e.g. see here and here). Reading, in other words, is crucial if we want to prevent the sort of dystopian future he fears, and is therefore a singularly political act. And just in case anyone should miss the point, Llosa drives it home by reminding us that literature—unexpurgated, free literature—is nothing less than:

the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities . . . . the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor.

Casting literature in this protean light—as aesthetic comforter one minute, political agitator the next; here a destroyer of certainties, there a guardian of freedom—has long been one of Llosa’s signature themes. For more than thirty years he has argued that as well as transporting the reader to richer, more beautiful worlds that elevate the spirit, fuel dreams, and ignite hope, literature—the “eternal killjoy”^[2]—also, paradoxically, reveals horror, gives voice to injustice, and foments dissent. According to Llosa we wouldn't—couldn't—be civilized without it.

Thus far we might quibble with Llosa here and there, but no more. The heart of his thesis is something that only a fool or boor would take issue with: a world without books, and the aesthetic-moral sensibilities they foster, would be a barren and brutal place no sane person would want to live in. Llosa is to be cheered for his lifelong defence of this thesis, but unfortunately my cheers for "Why Literature" aren't quite as loud as they might be, because although Llosa's infectious brand of literary evangelism is as appealing as ever, he also makes a number of somewhat contentious and confusing claims.

Take, for instance, the idea of truth in literature—another of Llosa's perennial themes. In 1989, as the Iron Curtain was being torn down across Europe, he wrote:

The novel is an amoral genre, or rather, it has its own particular ethics in which truth and lies are exclusively aesthetic terms."^[3]

He revisits, and re-affirms, this subtle and somewhat slippery view of (literary) truth in "Why Literature?" when he cites his favourite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, who once described the human condition as a "complex sum of contradictory truths". Llosa sees this description not merely as an "integrating vision", but as a "totalizing and living knowledge of a human being [that] may be found only in literature." (emphasis added) Now, leaving aside for a moment the obvious question of whether this apparent discrepancy between literary truth and real-world truth contradicts his more general position that literature and life are inseperable, there are a number of ways we can take this. Most evolutionary psychologists, for instance, would agree with Berlin's claim (that we are a "sum of contradictory truths"), even as they disprove Llosa's (that this knowledge can only be found in literature). It would seem that, as the title of his 1990 essay "The Truth of Lies" suggests, in Llosa's world truth is seldom an absolute quality. (see note 3)

There is also, it must be said, a somewhat awkward philosphical gap between Llosa's literary and political positions. Llosa was a vocal supporter of Fidel Castro in the 1960s, and many of his stories are set against a backdrop of unpleasant right-wing dictatorships. But while his sensitivity to injustice is clearly as deep and sincere as ever, he ran for President in his native Peru in 1990, speaking of his "unreserved admiration" for Margaret Thatcher!^[4]

It is perhaps unfair of me to raise issues like these only to leave them dangling; I mention them merely to introduce Llosa as a man of strident and complex, but not necessarily coherent views. In this essay I want to address three particular problems in "Why Literature?" that get up my nose like a fizzy drink: Llosa's antiquated take on the relationship between language and thought; his fearful view of science and technology; and his seemingly mysterian conception of nature and art.

***

Firstly, on language and thought, Llosa says:

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.^[5]

He continues in this vein, but goes well beyond Mark Twain's old maxim that the man who does not read is no better off than the man who can't, claiming that such textual limitations betray "a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words." (emphasis added).

It would seem that Llosa supports the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis^[6] which holds that thought is only made possible by language—an intuitively appealing position sometimes known as Linguistic Determinism, and an idea long favoured by thinkers of every stripe. George Orwell, for instance, famously took this idea to extraordinary (and prescient) lengths with his invention of Newspeak in 1984, but he was by no means the first to suppose that language is the stuff of thought. More than a century earlier, for example, in Shelley's Romantic drama Prometheus Unbound, Asia says:

He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe. (II.iv.71)

If "man is the measure of all things", as Protagoras famously said, Shelley wonders whether that is only so because we use words. This certainly seems plausible enough; after all, it isn't obvious how else we might think if we didn't have language. But as we shall see, while language undoubtedly expands and extends cognition, a collection of words does not necessarily a thought make. An idea may be described in words, but ideas and words are surely not the same thing.

Nevertheless, as politicians and prelates everywhere have long known, if you can control the vocabulary, you can usually control the debate—at least for a while: are those fought-over lands "occupied" or "disputed"? Are those dead bodies "murdered children" or "collateral damage"? But as history also shows, no ideology yet invented is perfectly watertight. Sooner or later new ideas, or at least new interpretations of old ideas, emerge to sweep existing truths away—sometimes destroying whole scientific, political, or religious systems in the process. Ideas can do this because they are unruly, contagious things. They leap from brain to brain with what seems like a life of their own, and they can only be controlled to a limited extent. Indeed, an entire field of study—memetics—has sprung up that looks at ideas as "viral" entities. As the critic Terry Eagleton describes, any attempt to control ideas—such as by trying to set the meanings of words in stone—is doomed to fail. In a sharp critique of "sacred texts" (what most controlling ideologies rely on), he scotches the idea that words and thoughts could ever be in rigid lockstep:

Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic. . . . Words that could only ever mean one thing would not be words. Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness [of language] is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work.
(Guardian February 22, 2003)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is no longer taken seriously within the cognitive sciences as an explanation for the origins of either thought or language (although it may say much about how certain concepts are valued within a culture), but this is not to say that the relationship between language and thought is any less intimate than Benjamin Whorf (or George Orwell) assumed. On the contrary, evidence from all quarters indicates that they are as intimately connected as our intuition would have us believe.^[7] Nevertheless, a simple cognitive mapping between thoughts and words cannot be the case. The psycho-linguist Steven Pinker explains why:

We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realising that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a "what we meant to say" that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?^[8]

How surprising then, to find that Llosa appears to say much the same thing:

Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writer's consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of the unconscious, and the writer's sensitivity to the world around him, and the writer's emotions; and it is these things to which the poet or the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body, movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. (emphasis added)

"Shapeless ghosts" are not words then. Not yet. They are something else: sensations, images, feelings—constellations of mental and emotional structures that comprise the wavefront of experience—something that comes before words.^[9] The neurologist and philosopher Antonio Damasio suggests something similar when he says that language translates experience^[10]—a view shared by the cognitive anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, who writes:

It seems more accurate to view thought . . . as occurring behind or beneath spoken words, as being something that saying helps to adumbrate and communicate and that writing (or rewriting) falsifies to the extent that it turns the natural products of mentation—fluid, layered, dense, episodic, too deep and rich for words—into something unnaturally hard-edged, linear, precise, and refined. We "think" like logicians primarily on (and because of) paper. If we assume that thought and experience are made wholly of language it is only because, as twentieth-century hyperliterates, we read and write reality more than we live it.^[11]

Dissanayake's insight, as we shall see, is particularly germane to Llosa, for although he is prepared to eschew the strictures of linearity and logic (when he embraces ambivalence in truth, for instance), he also extols the very thing Dissanayake cautions us against: privileging literary versions of "reality" over other, less textual kinds. By these lights Llosa is clearly a "hyperliterate"—in fact he admits as much himself: in a speech he gave in 2000 he said, "My first priority in life since I was very young has been literature" ^[11a] (emphasis added).

2

The second disappointment in Llosa's essay is his pessimistic view of science. Rightly, he warns of the problems that can arise from the "fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels and compartments," but he also sees the increasing complexity of modern science as a dangerous trend that "eliminates those common intellectual and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity." Worse, he fears that the "distortions of reality" caused by this fragmentation of scientific (but not literary) knowledge can lead to "hatred, wars, and even genocide." Strong stuff, but unfortunately he doesn't say which common intellectual traits are eliminated, how science does away with them, nor how these "distortions of reality" (whatever they may be) lead to such disastrous outcomes. Neither, for that matter, does he explain why the similarly "cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge" within the humanities (including, presumably, literature) doesn't eliminate these traits.

Moreover, while Llosa regrets the extent of modern academic specialization, he neglects to mention (much less support) those who would like to see literature, and all the arts, brought under the same academic roof as science, philosophy and everything else—an intellectual goal the scientist E.O. Wilson calls Consilience, and editor John Brockman describes as New Humanism. After all, "the arts" and "the sciences"—or perhaps I should say "artistic cognition" and "scientific cognition"—are surely inextricably bound together (Mithen).

Llosa acknowledges the contribution of science to modern life, but he still worries that the arts—and especially literature—are at risk of atrophy precisely because of the rise of science. Calling for a separate, privileged place for literature within the Academy, he warns: [literature] cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas without disappearing." Well of course it can't! Nor could architecture or medicine or music. This is a nonsensical claim. Even if literature could be understood from a purely scientific or mathematical stance (even reduced to a set of equations!) I don't see why this would necessarily deny the validity of other approaches to "literature" one jot, never mind make it disappear. Indeed, far from destroying one of humanity's greatest achievements, a more holistic and unified intellectual worldview might well offer new creative opportunities for writers. After all, a sunset (for example) is surely just as wonderful if you know how the solar system works, if not more so. And even if it turns out that poetry does have a mathematical explanation, will our affection for poetry (or mathematics) really diminish as a result? Besides, as Llosa admits, the humanities are fast becoming just as "obscure" as the sciences—a point John Brockman makes in the introduction to his 1996 book The Third Culture:

American [literary] intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.^[12]

This is the state of affairs that Paul Gross and Norman Levitt take to task in their unhelpfully titled text Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science,^[13] in which they argue (among other things) that humanities scholars tend to be much more ignorant about the sciences than scientists are about the humanities—a claim some noted literary figures agree with. Harold Fromm, for instance, points out that literary references to some of the great scientific theories, such as Einstein's Relativity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (I would add Darwin's theory of Natural Selection) are often "risible"^[15], and John Carey laments that because science courses are often perceived as "too difficult" by undergraduates, many opt for the supposedly easier humanities options instead.^[14]

Hopefully this tide is now receding, and Llosa is too canny to slip on such obvious banana skins; even so, the somewhat naïve and caricatured view of science that he appears to hold is certainly mirrored in western culture more widely—it is no disgrace to admit to profound scientific or mathematical ignorance, whereas no one brags about never having read a book. I think this intellectual deficit is partly due to the longstanding muddle in the humanities that Brockman and others bemoan, and partly due to the "fragmentation of knowledge" that Llosa claims to oppose. Ironically, this is also exactly the sort of thing many scientists are fighting to correct. As the physicist Peter Coles puts it:

The media don't seem to like representing science the way it actually is, as an arena in which ideas are vigorously debated and each result is presented with caveats and careful analysis of possible error. They prefer instead to portray scientists as priests, laying down the law without equivocation.^[16]

As Gross and Levitt vividly describe, for the last generation or so a veritable parade of postmodernists, textualists, and other fashionable intellectuals have been trying to persuade us that we might as well discard the idea of a rational law-book altogether. According to many of these "Theorists" (what is a theory?) there are no truths, only texts. Indeed, there might not even be any facts—in which case presumably anyone can say anything with equal "validity"—a ridiculous position the philosopher Daniel Dennett wryly describes as "a mug's game if ever there was one".^[17] Among the craziness that has come from this verbose school are calls for a "feminist algebra",^[18] the assertion that an erect human penis is in some way equivalent to the square root of -1,^[18a] and the claim that Newton's laws of mechanics constitute a "rape manual."^[19] (See Dawkins on this here) Again, Llosa is too intelligent to succumb to the worst of this nonsense, but his position is nevertheless ambiguous, which leads me to the third, and perhaps most serious problem I have with his essay: the curse of artistic superstition.

3

Llosa seems to subscribe to the widespread belief that many, if not all, of the aspects of nature and art that we find most meaningful are diminished or vitiated the more we try to understand them. Whatever the origin of this belief, understanding, especially scientific understanding, does seem to reduce the status of previously mysterious phenomena in many people's eyes—sometimes even to the point of grief. This Romantic hostility towards reason was epitomized in 1819 by John Keats in his gloomy poem Lamia (part II), in which he laments Newton's extraordinary achievement in revealing the character of light:

. . . Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven;
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things,     
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow . . .
(See also here)

This is a serious lament! More than a century had passed since Newton had conquered the mystery of light with his famous prism experiment, and Keats was still smarting over the affair. Even more astonishingly, his misology still strikes a popular chord today—another two centuries later! We seem to be natural born mysterophiles—a species that prefers gnosis to knowledge, magic to math, rhetoric to reason. Philosophy—the love of knowledge—remains as cold and dull as ever in the public imagination.

What is it about conscious understanding that threatens to undermine the novelty, charm, or specialness of art and nature? If the cold water of science really does douse the flames of beauty and reverence, as the Romantics felt, then perhaps our enquiries into art and nature should be limited, as religious leaders used to insist (and as some still do). The zoologist Richard Dawkins, one of whose books is entitled Unweaving the Rainbow, will have none of it. In his 1996 Richard Dimbleby Lecture he said:

I wish I could meet Keats . . . to persuade [him] that mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved. Quite the contrary. The solutions often turn out to be more beautiful than the puzzles.^[20]

The stupidity and cruelty of many human activities, such as slavery or genital mutilation, show all too clearly that human brains do not naturally gravitate towards reason and truth any more readily than they drink up nonsense. Clearly, our instincts and intuitions are often wrong, and it seems to me that our mysterophilia (of which we are so fond!) is in large part to do with our more general and persistent failure to think critically—by which I mean the application of skepticism, analysis, and logic to evaluate arguments. Too often we abandon reason and evidence in favour of intuitive, traditional, and above all superstitious explanations, even when we could, or should, know better. Nietzsche called this failing a "lack of intellectual conscience."^[21] Not that this is a shortcoming so-called intellectuals are immune from: Terry Eagleton, again, nicely describes those uncomfortable situations when...

"...one feels that brief, sudden drop in intelligence—as palpable as a sudden fall in room temperature—which occurs when ideology momentarily intervenes to blur the discourse of otherwise enlightened people."^[22]

Llosa seems to drop into one of these zones when he writes:

the fantasized life . . . is better—more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect—than the life that we live while awake (emphasis added).

In a sense he's right: fantasies are often preferable to the slings and arrows of everyday life. But while we can believe whatever pleasant things we like in our imaginary dream-worlds, back in the "misery of this world" (as he puts it) we can't—not if we're honest. It may be inconvenient or unfashionable to admit, but there's a difference between knowing and believing, and those who fail to make the distinction are guilty of precisely the kind of sloppy thinking that Llosa rightly warns against. The knowledge that the earth spins on a wobbly axis and orbits an ordinary star in a very understandable way, may disappoint those who long for a more mythical view of the cosmos, but as we've seen, a sunset is no less wonderful for pondering the astonishing scale of the events involved. Maybe Llosa prefers belief over knowledge—a perfectly understandable temptation given that we know so little—but this will not do; intellectual honesty (if not self respect) demands that we take care to believe only that to which we are entitled. History looks with pity on those who wallow in the warm bath of delusion.

This human tendency—to sentimental obliquity—inevitably spills over into other areas too, such as technology, and Llosa is ardently swept along. Seizing upon a remark made by Bill Gates (that he would like to replace the ancient technology of paper and ink with something better) Llosa flatly declares that reading text in any medium other than ink on paper is not "literary reading." Clearly moved, he says that the idea of reading literature via some electronic medium is not only a prospect he will not stomach—"a chasm that I cannot cross"—but would also "send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line". This is patently absurd. The technologies of paper and ink aren't donnees of nature or Providence, they were invented, by people, just like every other technology. To be sure, very few inventions have proved as durable, but this is hardly evidence of some mystical injunction that books must be made out of paper and It Should Always Be So. Quite why an alternative way of presenting text to readers is unacceptable Llosa does not say. Neither does he explain why, if an alternative (and popular) way should be found, this would put writers out of work. Frankly, Llosa's implacable opposition to Bill Gates's vision of a paper-free world smacks of good old-fashioned Luddism. The fact is, until someone comes up with a better and cheaper alternative we will continue to buy ink printed on paper as our preferred medium of reading,^[23] and unless the world runs out of trees there's nothing anyone—Bill Gates included—can do about it. All sorts of seemingly ominous technological shifts have occurred in human history without the sky falling in, and we should not be surprised, or afraid, if yet another seemingly immortal cultural tool finally yields to a prodigal successor. We do not mourn phonographs and whale oil lamps when iPods and electric lights are available. Paper and ink may well go the same way.

4

Lastly, and in light of all this, I can't resist making a few remarks on Llosa's favourite heroine, Emma Bovary.

Emma first captured Llosa's heart when he moved to Paris in the 1950s, and he has remained faithful to her ever since. (See here for Julian Barnes's NYT review of The Perpetual Orgy, Llosa's rhapsody to Madame Bovary and her creator, Gustave Flaubert. See also Barnes's own superb meditation, Flaubert's Parrot.)

In his defence of idealism—and in particular of idealism that is "redolent with a positive moral connotation"—Llosa describes Emma as:

...that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to know through novels. Like a butterfly [sic], she came too close to the flame and was burned in the fire.

"Positive moral connotation"? Where? Who? Flaubert was put on trial for the alleged immorality of his novel, and even he described his characters—all of them—as "grotesque".^[24] Hardly a ringing moral endorsement. Whatever else Madame Bovary may be, a Disneyesque morality tale it ain't.

To be sure, Emma is a dreamer and her sybaritic nature longs for the glamour, finery, and above all passion that she feels must come with wealth. And like a moth (telling slip—butterflies are colourful, diurnal, and don't fly into flames), like a moth, she is impelled by forces she can't resist towards an end she refuses to face. But while Emma's plight deserves our pity, she fails to win our admiration. And despite Llosa's impassioned exhortations, we can't possibly agree that desire and longing, no matter how beautiful, noble or literary, can justify the suffering of others. Are we to ignore Emma's deceit, or her neglect of Berthe, or the cruelty she shows towards her maids? Emma is a classic egoist—she is self-absorbed and has little or no conscience; she is a woman with a severe empathy deficit. In modern psychiatry this bundle of qualities is rather clumsily known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder—a condition sometimes characterized as having a "moral blind spot". Thus, in spite of her discontent, or rather, because of her obsession with it, Emma fails to appreciate both the hidebound love of her pathetic husband, as well as the more cheerful adoration of her hapless daughter. Even her disastrous, botched suicide only serves to cause distress to others and reveal how distant she is from the needs and feelings of those around her. If the novel really is an "amoral genre", as Llosa suggests, then we should perhaps be careful about the moral lessons we take from their protagonists.

As for Llosa's description of Emma as "quixotic", this strikes me as quite mistaken (although Flaubert, a self-confessed fan of Cervantes, may well have smiled at the comparison). Emma certainly struggles in a non-compliant and deeply unfair world, but the adjective "quixotic" surely implies more than just a sense of swimming against a hostile and unjust tide. The word "quixotic" is typically defined as: "caught up in the romance of noble deeds", and "idealistic without regard to practicality". But more than this, I think a sense of admiration is implied too—even if it is of a somewhat exasperated kind. Modern day Quixotes leave their families to climb mountains in their socks, or row across oceans in dinghies, and it is in this way that we admire Cervantes' extraordinary paladin. We cheer him for his absurd idealism and chivalric commitment, despite his ridiculous obstinacy, delusions, and even cruelty. In contrast, we don't feel much admiration for Flaubert's "quixotic" heroine, however much we may be absorbed by her.

And what about humour? The delusional Don may be a larger-than-life curmudgeon who seeks glory through acts of valour, charity, and the endurance of hardship, but his outrageous assumptions, absurd piety, and overweening egoism also make him hilarious—the Inspector Clouseau of his day—and we forgive him his shortcomings all the more readily because of it. Ultimately, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face enchants us.

Our feelings for Emma could scarcely be more different. She is interesting—compelling even—and beautifully drawn, but we neither admire her nor laugh at her antics. What moral principles or pious tradition—however absurd—does she follow? We want things to come good for her; we want her to reform. Right to the end we hope for a catharsis, for some reason to side with her, for a shred of salvation, anything, but she denies us. Emma prefigures Hedda Gabler, another compelling—and compelled—character who is difficult to like, or forgive. In both cases we love the text and pity the heroine.

Llosa's view of the educational role of literature works perfectly here however, for Emma's is no splendid tragedy of circumstance; rather, like Hedda's, it is the miserable tragedy of egoism,^[25] and one of Flaubert's great achievements in Madame Bovary is the way he maintains our sympathy for Emma despite her moral shortcomings. As he famously put it: "Emma, c'est moi"—her predicament is to some extent ours too. Life should be better—but not at any cost.

Flaubert also reminds us that we're not nearly as free as we like to think either. We're certainly not free to choose our desires—we can't even resist them at their zenith. Like Emma, we too stand ready to tumble into pleasure, or pain, at the next inviting glance or velvet word. What kind of freedom is this? In what sense do we "choose" to be so reckless, so brutal, so absurd? Llosa is much concerned with the preservation of freedom, but it is far from clear how much there is to preserve. Perhaps freedom is a nascent, flickering, emergent property, in which case maybe we should be asking: to what extent are we able to escape or transcend the obligations of both our political and physical environments?

The answer, I suspect, is not much, on either count, because as well as having to conform to the various shifting totems and taboos of human societies, we must also yield to the far more powerful forces of nature. These can take command of us at any moment and direct our every nerve and sinew to their end. "Let nature shrug and all is in ruin" says Camille Paglia.^[25a] And unfortunately nature regularly shrugs in all sorts of devastating ways: it wreaks havoc with viruses and volcanoes, and continually unleashes devastating psychological forces, in the form of irresistible feelings and emotions. One of the strongest of these is the hormonal tsunami we know as sexual desire—a surging tide that can drown almost anything in its path, including our putative freedom.^[26] Some of us may find ourselves in thrall to this force more than others—there is variation in our sensitivity and circumstance—but let there be no doubt: sexual desire, like gravity or electricity (or fear, or hunger), is a force of nature that can have overwhelming effects, and none of us are beyond its reach. Perhaps when the rhythms of nature and culture are consonant we can skip to the beat of freedom, but when they are in counterpoint, make no mistake, we dance to the deeper drum.

Liberty, if it isn't illusory, is a precarious thing that flutters between the great blooms of Nature and Culture. If we care about it, then as Llosa says we should read, but we shouldn't assume that literature alone will save us. Emma Bovary and Don Quixote both read avidly, but in neither case did it set them free. Why should it be any different for the rest of us?

Guardian Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa - here
Andrew Marr on the state of eBooks - here

Notes

[1] Gopnik, Alison. (2005). Response to the Pinker-Spelke debate following the controversy surrounding Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, and his remarks on how polymorphism (evolved differences between males and females) in humans might relate to the relatively low numbers of women in top level science. Published online by Edge.org. URL=http://www.edge.org/discourse/science-gender.html#ag (See here for the story, and here for Helena Cronin's excellent comment.)

[1a] Vargas Llosa, M. (2001). "Why Literature". New Republic. (May 2001).
Reprinted in: Gould, S.J. (Ed). (2003). Best American Essays 2002.  Houghton Mifflin.  
Text online at: URL=http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/vargasVargas Llosa.htm and URL=http://literature.sdsu.edu/WhyLiterature/
Unless otherwise indicated, all MVL quotes come from this essay.

Reading as predominantly female pastime - Let's be charitable and assume that Llosa would be just as concerned if reading were becoming a predominantly male pastime.

[2] Vargas Llosa, M. (1986). "Literature is Fire". In: Making Waves. (1996, ed John King). London: Faber & Faber. p.71. New York Times review of Making Waves here. See also MVL's May 1997 Prospect article "A Literary Engagement" here

[3] Ibid. "The Truth of Lies" p.324

[4] Ibid. Foreword, p.xx

[5] The question of what, for Llosa, constitutes "literature" is a fascinating question I do not pursue here.

[6] Also known as Linguistic Determinism. See:
Sapir, E. (1929). "The Status of Linguistics as a Science". in: D. G. Mandelbaum (Ed.) (1958).
Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. But see also:
New Scientist, Aug 2004, "Language may shape human thought" online at: URL=http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996303

[7] The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark says that language is the "ultimate artefact" in facilitating, assisting, augmenting and multiplying cognition - see his 1998 books Being There (MIT Press), and Natural Born Cyborgs (Oxford, 2003); also his papers on language and cognition, available online at: URL=http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/staff/clark/publications.html#language
See also my links here

[8] Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. Harper Perennial. p58-59 

[9] It might be argued that much of our experience is comprised of words - for instance when we listen to, or read, a poem. Possibly, but these words (even if we speak them) are also inputs - we respond to them as well as utter them. In other words cognition is a recursive process. Words (and thoughts) may form the basis of an experience, but they cannot capture or recreate a complete, felt, "embodied" experience - something Shakespeare understood; Bolingbroke says:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore. (Richard II, I.iii)

For more on this (what philosophers sometimes call the "hard problem" of consciousness), see Thomas Nagel's famous 1974 paper: What is it like to be a bat? (The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4, October 1974 p.435-50), and David Chalmers' 1995 paper: Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3) p.200-219). See also Nicholas Humphrey's excellent book, A History of the Mind, (1992, New York: Simon & Schuster) in which he cites the above passage in his fascinating discussion of the differences between sensation and perception.

[10] Damasio, A. (1999).The Feeling of what Happens. London: Vintage. p107

[11] Dissanayake, E. (1995). Homo Aestheticus. Seattle: University of Washington Press. p218-219

[11a] Llosa, M.V. Cato Policy Report. Vol XXII Jan 2000 URL=http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v22n1/lal-llosa.html

[12] Brockman, J. (1995). The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster. Text online at: http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/f-Introduction.html

[13] Gross, P. & Levitt, N. (1997). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 

[14] Dawkins, R. (1996). Richard Dimbleby Lecture . BBC Television. Text available online: URL=http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge1.html See also David Lodge's review of John Carey's 2005 book What Good Are the Arts? URL= http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1626588,00.html

[15] Fromm, H. (2003). The New Darwinism in the Humanities Part I: From Plato to Pinker. The Hudson Review. Volume LVI, Number 1 URL=http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSpSu03.html

[16] Coles, P. (2001). Einstein and the Birth of Big Science. Icon Books. p64

[17] Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea. London: Allen Lane p153

[18] See Gross & Levitt (note 13), extract online URL= http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/fem/fem-algebra.html

[18a] In his essay "The signification of the phallus," Jacques Lacan wrote:

The erect male organ, not as itself, not even as image, but as the missing piece of the desired image, is thus equal to the square root of -1 of the highest produced meaning.

in: Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink. Savaged by Sokal and Bricmont in their 1997 book: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

[19] An opinion first expressed by Sandra Harding; cited variously, e.g., Dawkins, R. (2003). A Devil's Chaplain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson  p49 

[20] See footnote 14

[21] "Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous city as solitary as in the desert." The Gay Science, aph. 2 (rev. ed. 1887). This was a central Nietzschean theme. In his 1990 introduction to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, Michael Tanner writes:

[Nietzsche's] obsession with moral and intellectual hygiene guranteed that throughout his life he remained aghast at, and incredulous of, the degree of self-deception and willingness to believe what suits that almost everyone routinely practices. (Twilight of the Idols. 1990. Penguin. p17)

[22] New Statesman. 17th May 2004. http://www.newstatesman.com/200405170002

[23] Interestingly however, our preferred medium of writing is no longer pen and paper—the computer surely reigns here. 

[24] Aware of just how ridiculous we often are, Flaubert mocked the characters in his novel, and described them as "grotesque". See Cave, T. Introduction to Madame Bovary, Oxford World Classics, 1998, OUP, p xi.
See also A.S. Byatt (27 July 2002) in The Guardian: URL=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,763030,00.html (part 1)
URL=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,763026,00.html (part 2)

[25] The question of which qualities a woman was (is?) "supposed" to exhibit, was a popular theme in the 19th century. E.g., Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and even George Eliot's Middlemarch - see here and here

[25a] Paglia, C. (1990) Sexual Personae : Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Yale University Press

[26] See e.g.: Miller, G. (2000). The Mating Mind. London: Heinemann;
Otis, L. (Ed.). (2002). Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. OUP;
Carroll, J. (1999). The Deep Structure of Literary Representations. Evolution and Human Behavior 20, p159-173. Available online: URL=http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_D99.html

The literary philosopher Alain De Botton on why we read - here