To lie is to invent; it is to add to real life another fictitious one disguised as reality. Morally abhorrent when practised in everyday life, this strategem seems quite acceptable, even praiseworthy when practised under the pretext of art. We applaud the novelist, artist or dramatist who, through his skill at handling words, images or dialogue, persuades us that these contrivances which set out merely to be a reflection of life are in fact life itself. But are they? Fiction is the life that wasn’t, the life we’d liked to have had but didn’t, the life we’d rather not have had or the one we’d like to relive, without which the life we are actually leading seems incomplete. Because unlike animals, who live out their lives to their full potential from beginning to end, we are only able to realize a small part of ours.
Our hunger for life and our expectations always far exceed our capacity as human beings who have been granted the perverse privilege of being able to dream up a thousand and one adventures while only being capable of realizing ten, at the most. The inevitable gulf between the concrete reality of our human existence and those desires and aspirations which exacerbate it which can never themselves be satisfied, is not merely the origin of man’s unhappiness, dissatisfaction and rebelliousness. It is also the raison d’être of fiction, a deceptive device through which we can compensate artificially for the inadequacies of life, broaden the asphyxiatingly narrow confines of our condition, and gain access to worlds that are richer, sometimes shabbier, often more intense, but always different from the one fate has provided us with. Thanks to the conceits of fiction, we can augment our experience of life — one man may become many different men, a coward may become a hero, a sluggard a man of action, and a virgin a prostitute. Thanks to fiction we discover not only what we are, but also what we are not and what we’d like to be. The lies of fiction enrich our lives by imbuing them with something they’ll never actually have, but once their spell is broken, we are left helpless and defenceless, brutally aware of the unbridgeable gap between reality and fantasy. For the man who doesn’t despair, who despite everything is prepared to throw himself in at the deep end, fiction is there waiting for him, its arms laden with illusions, which have matured out of the leavening of our own sense of emptiness: ‘Come in, come in, come and play a game of lies.’ But sooner or later we discover, like Kathie and Santiago in their ‘little Parisian attic’, that we’re really playing a melancholy little game of deception, in which we assume those roles we long to play in real life or, alternatively, a terrifying game of truth, which in real life we’d do anything to avoid.
Theatre isn’t life, but make-believe, that is to say another life, a life of fiction, a life of lies. No genre demonstrates as splendidly as theatre the equivocal nature of art. The characters we see on stage, as opposed to the ones we find in novels or paintings, are flesh and blood and act out their roles right in front of us. We watch them suffer, enjoy themselves, laugh, get angry. If the show succeeds, we become totally convinced of their authenticity by the way they speak, move, gesture and emote. Are we in fact aware of any difference between them and real life? Not at all, except that we know they are a pretence, a fiction, that they are theatre. Curiously enough, in spite of its blatantly deceptive and fraudulent nature, there have always been (and always will be) those who insist that theatre — and fiction in general — should express and propagate religious, ideological, historical and moral truths. But I don’t agree. The role of the theatre — of fiction in general — is to create illusions, to deceive.
Fiction is not a reproduction of life: it complements it by cutting down on what we have enough of in real life, and adding what is lacking, by bringing order and logic to what we experience as chaotic and absurd, or alternatively injecting an element of mystery, craziness and risk into the balanced, the routine, and the secure. There is evidence of this systematic modification of life throughout the history of humanity: it has been recorded rather like the negative of a photograph — in the long catalogue of adventures, passions, gestures, infamies, manners, excesses, subtleties, which man had to invent because he was incapable of living them himself.
Dreaming, creating works of fiction (the same as reading, going to plays, suspending disbelief) is an oblique way of protesting against the mediocrity of life and it is also an effective, if cursory way of ridiculing it. Fiction, when we find ourselves under its spell, bewitched by its artifice, makes us feel complete, by transforming us momentarily into those great villains, those angelic saints, or those transparent idiots, which we are constantly being incited to become by our desires and aspirations, our cowardice, our inquisitiveness or simply our spirit of contradiction, and when it returns us to our normal state, we find we have changed, that we are more aware of our limitations, more eager for fantasy and less ready to accept the status quo.
This is what happens to the main characters in Kathie and the Hippopotamus, the banker’s wife and the writer in the little attic room where the play is set. When I wrote it, I didn’t even know that its underlying theme was the relationship between life and art; this particular alchemy fascinates me because the more I practise it the less I understand it. My intention was to write a farce, by pushing the characters to the point of unreality (but not beyond because total unreality is boring), taking as a starting point a situation that had been haunting me for some time: a lady employs a writer to help her compose an adventure story. She is, at this point, a pathetic creature in so far as art for her seems to be a last resort against a life of failure; he is unable to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t Victor Hugo whose abundant personality he admires in all its many aspects: the romantic, the literary, the political, and the sexual. During their working sessions and arising from the transformations the story itself undergoes between what Kathie dictates and what her amanuensis writes down, their respective lives, both the real and imaginary sides of them, that is, what they actually were and what they would have liked to have been — are acted out on stage, summoned together by memory, desire, fantasy, association and chance. At some point during my work on the play, I noticed beside the ghosts of Kathie and Santiago, who I was trying to breathe life into, other little ghosts queuing up behind them, waiting to earn their rightful place in the play. Now when I discover them, I recognize them, and am once again quite astounded. Santiago’s and Kathie’s fantasies, quite apart from their real lives, in many ways reveal my own, and the same is no doubt true of anyone who puts on display that crude mass of raw material out of which he fashions his fiction.
Mario Vargas Llosa
CHARACTERS
KATHIE KENNETY
SANTIAGO ZAVALA
ANA DE ZAVALA
JUAN
The action takes place some time in the 1960s in Kathie Kennety’s ‘Parisian attic’.
SET, COSTUME, EFFECTS
Kathie Kennety’s ‘little Parisian attic’ is not a caricature: it has that air of permanence and authenticity about it as if it were a real place.
Kathie, a woman with a sense of taste, has furnished her ‘studio’ in an attractive manner, reminiscent of the sort of artist’s garret one finds in pictures, novels, postcards and films; it also has something of the genuine chambres de bonne where students and impoverished foreigners congregate on the left bank of the Seine.