The famous novelist on politics, and how writing can change the course of history.
BY EMILY PARKER
LIMA, Peru–“This is a story that often repeated itself,” Mario Vargas Llosa says. “If a father was a businessman, he was a man who had to be complicit with the dictatorship. It was the only way to prosper, right? And what happens is that the son discovers it, the son is young, restless, idealistic, believes in justice and liberty, and he finds out that his vile father is serving a dictatorship that assassinates, incarcerates, censors and is corrupted to the bone.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa could have plucked this scenario from his personal recollections of living under dictatorial rule in Peru. But he tells this story to make a more universal point: Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons.
When I meet Mr. Vargas Llosa in his home in Lima, I am not surprised to find that the world-famous novelist is a natural storyteller. He speaks to me in Spanish, gripping his black-rimmed glasses in his hand and occasionally waving them around for emphasis.
Mr. Vargas Llosa’s bold ideas and expressive language may make him one of Latin America’s finest writers–“Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The Time of the Hero” and “Conversation in the Cathedral” are just a few of his classic works–but those same traits didn’t necessarily serve him well at the polls. After running for president of Peru in 1990 and losing to Alberto Fujimori, Mr. Vargas Llosa decided to devote his full attention to writing. He now lives in Lima for about three months of the year, spending the rest of his time in Europe.
“I am not going to participate in professional politics again,” he says. And he doesn’t have to. Mr. Vargas Llosa has found an effective way to expose the destructive nature of dictatorships, while underscoring the importance of individual liberty and free will. He just picks up his pen. “Words are acts,” he says, echoing Jean-Paul Sartre. “Through writing, one can change history.”
During the 1990 presidential campaign Mr. Varga Llosa emphasized the need for a market economy, privatization, free trade, and above all, the dissemination of private property. He didn’t exactly receive a welcome reception. “It was a very different era, because to speak of private property, private enterprise, the market–it was sacrilegious,” he says. “I was fairly vulnerable in that campaign,” he continues, “because I didn’t lie. I said exactly what we were going to do. It was a question of principle and also . . . I thought it would be impossible to do liberal, radical reforms without having the mandate to do them.”
Now, almost 20 years later, the landscape looks very different. Mr. Vargas Llosa explains that he was propelled into politics when then-president Alan García, at the time a socialist and a populist, attempted to nationalize the banks. Today he is running the country again, but “now, the same Alan García is the champion of capitalism in Peru!” Mr. Vargas Llosa laughs merrily. “It’s funny, no?”
not been able to do.
“We have a big problem with Chávez,” Mr. Vargas Llosa admits. “He’s a demagogue and a 19th century socialist. He is a destabilizing force for democracy in Latin America, but what he thought would be so easy hasn’t been so easy. There has been a lot of resistance.”
One of Mr. Chávez’s major errors was his refusal last month to renew the license of popular Radio Caracas Television, or RCTV. “International hostility was enormous,” Mr. Vargas Llosa notes. “For me, most important was that the protests in Venezuela were very strong, in particular the sectors that were once very sympathetic to him, for example the students in the Central University of Venezuela, not only the students in the private universities.”
It is such infringements of free speech that highlight why in places like Latin America, reading a good novel can be much more than just a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. “I think in countries where basic problems are still unresolved, where a society remains so traumatized by deep conflicts–as in Latin America or in Third World countries in general–the novel is not only a form of entertainment, but it substitutes for something that these societies are not accustomed to seeing–information, for example,” Mr. Vargas Llosa says. “If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what’s going on.” Literature can also be a form of resistance, perhaps the only way to express discontent in the absence of political parties.
This all sounds true enough, but in a dictatorship, wouldn’t literature be censored as well? “In undeveloped countries, censorship doesn’t reach that point of subtlety, as it did in Spain for example,” Mr. Vargas Llosa explains. “Because in undeveloped countries, the dictators are, well, functioning illiterates that don’t think that literature can be dangerous.”
To give one example, Mr. Vargas Llosa’s first novel, “The Time of the Hero,” about life at a military school in Lima, was burned publicly in Peru by a military dictatorship in the 1960s. But the authorities apparently didn’t find the book enough of a political threat to ban it outright, and in the end it was Mr. Vargas Llosa who reaped the benefits of the public burning. “It became a best seller!” He exclaims, laughing.
There is another disturbing current in Mr. Vargas Llosa’s work that is less often discussed–mistreatment of women, ranging from disrespect to outright violence. The abuses are particularly horrifying in “The Feast of the Goat,” a novel based on the life of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who terrorized the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Mr. Vargas Llosa describes traveling to the Dominican Republic and being stunned to hear stories of peasants offering their own daughters as “gifts” to the lustful tyrant. Trujillo and his sons, he tells me, could abuse any woman of any social class with absolute impunity. The situation in the Dominican Republic, which he refers to as a “laboratory of horrors,” may have tended toward the extreme, but it underscores a larger trend: “The woman is almost alwys the first victim of a dictatorship.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. “I went to Iraq after the invasion,” he tells me. “When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects. . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions.” He concludes: “Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes.”
Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq? “I was against it at the beginning,” he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. “Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin.” He changed his mind about the invasion: “Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa’s broad, visceral hatred of dictatorships in part stems from personal experience, in particular growing up in 1950s Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. “All the political parties were prohibited, there was strict censorship of radio and the press,” he explains. “The university had many professors in exile and many student prisoners . . . this is the atmosphere in which a boy of my generation entered adulthood.”
This period is the backdrop for “Conversation in the Cathedral,” which Mr. Vargas Llosa said would be the work that he would rescue from a fire. The brilliant, four-volume novel rarely addresses Odría directly, rather zooming in on relationships between ordinary Peruvians from all levels of society. With unembellished prose, Mr. Vargas Llosa plunges you right into the heart of a nation without hope. “It’s a novel in which I wanted to show what I lived through in through in those years, how the dictatorship didn’t limit itself to censorship or prohibiting political life, no!” Mr. Vargas Llosa tells me. “The dictatorship created a system that impregnated every act of life.”
And herein lies the power of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s work: He finds that tyranny takes its toll in places we hadn’t even thought to look. As for the value of freedom, perhaps he puts it best in “The Feast of the Goat”: “It must be nice. Your cup of coffee or glass of rum must taste better, the smoke of your cigar, a swim in the ocean on a hot day, the movie you see on Saturday, the merengue on the radio, everything must leave a more pleasurable sensation in your body and spirit when you had what Trujillo had taken away from Dominicans 31 years ago: free will.”
We begin to wrap up our interview. We both drink red wine. A room nearby houses Mr. Vargas Llosa’s private library–I notice that some of the volumes are bound in leather. He tells me that there are more than 18,000 books. His collection is clearly a point of pride, but it is also a tangible representation of his belief in the power of words. Or as he would say it: “I think that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated.”
Ms. Parker is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
Richard Rorty, 75; Leading U.S. Pragmatist Philosopher
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Richard Rorty, 75, an intellectual whose often deeply unconventional approach to mainstream philosophic thought brought him wide public recognition as one of the leading thinkers of his era, died June 8 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He had pancreatic cancer.
During Dr. Rorty’s long teaching career — at Princeton University, the University of Virginia and, most recently, Stanford University — he championed the application of philosophy beyond academic corridors and hoped to influence public discussions of democracy and liberalism. In 1981, he received one of the first MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
Such books as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” and “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” brought Dr. Rorty broad recognition in his field, and his essays for mainstream newspapers and magazines added to his stature.
His work was read not just in philosophy departments but also in classes on literature and political theory. He once described his career as a 40-year search about “what, if anything, philosophy was good for.”
An heir to William James and John Dewey, Dr. Rorty advocated a philosophy known as pragmatism, which shunned what he considered a fruitless search to answer unknowable questions: What is the meaning of life? Do other people exist? He had rejected the field of analytic philosophy on the ground that it attempts to address those questions, which he largely considered a waste of time, and had created something akin to a hunt for timeless truths, another idea he strongly criticized.
His dismissal of analytic philosophy led some of his harshest critics, including Bernard Williams of Oxford University, to write that Dr. Rorty was a relativist who believed truth was dispensable. Dr. Rorty’s supporters saw an important distinction: that Dr. Rorty was carrying on the pragmatic tradition of seeing truth as something created by humans in their struggle to cope with the world around them and not simply eternal truths suddenly found by them.
Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, “taught the lesson there are no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for hope because it meant we could always do better. . . . He reveled in contingency,” what happens as a result of human progress.
Williams added: “Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature, Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for ourselves — what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy.”
Richard McKay Rorty was born Oct. 4, 1931, in New York City. His parents were writers and activists drawn to the socialist theories of Leon Trotsky, and their social democratic influence pervaded Dr. Rorty’s writings.
Another early influence on his thinking was his maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist clergyman who founded the 19th-century American “social gospel” movement.
As a child, Dr. Rorty was compelled by his parents to read two volumes of the “Dewey Commission of Inquiry Into the Moscow Trials” and othr tomes steeped in tales of social injustice. He said such books were regarded “in the way which other children thought of their family’s Bible: They were books that radiated redemptive truth and moral splendor.”
He also recalled the importance of his childhood interest in wild orchids, which he found near his parents’ property in western New Jersey. He developed a strong aesthetic yearning for such “socially useless flowers,” he later wrote in his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.”
He spoke of hoping to find a way to balance this appreciation of pure beauty with his parents’ emphasis on intellectual purity — and he described philosophy as a way to work through his competing beliefs.
A precocious thinker, Dr. Rorty entered the University of Chicago at 15 after skipping several grades. He told London’s Guardian newspaper, “I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school, bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capitalism had been overcome.”
At Chicago, he immersed himself in the Great Books program that was the school’s signature offering for undergraduates. For a time, he once wrote, he admired Platonic thought because it “had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable.”
By 1952, he had completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in philosophy from Chicago and went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Yale University in 1956.
After Army service, he taught at Wellesley College and then at Princeton from 1961 to 1982. He was the Kenan professor of humanities at the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1998, when he retired for the first time. He accepted a post-retirement teaching assignment at Stanford as a professor of comparative literature and retired again in 2005.
He was a restless intellectual for much of his career. While editing the 1967 book “The Linguistic Turn,” he expressed doubts about the idea that analytic philosophy had made great progress by recasting traditional questions about the relation between thought and reality as questions about how language manages to represent the world.
Dr. Rorty saw such ideas as rephrasing the same old questions that he considered as having outlived their usefulness.
Starting in the early 1970s, he began to break from mainstream analytic philosophy in general, and this isolated him from many of his Princeton colleagues who continued to see analytic streams of thought as vibrant.
His 1979 book, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” advanced many of his controversial beliefs. The book sought to dispense with what he considered the grandiose and fruitless attempts to seek out the foundations of knowledge and ethics — presented over the years as timeless truths. Instead he wanted to focus on what was often called a nonfoundationalist philosophy that combined teachings of Dewey, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In later years, Dr. Rorty’s books “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,” “Achieving Our Country” and “Philosophy and Social Hope” used similar arguments to discuss the nature of liberalism and how democracy can thrive through pragmatic thought. This wound up addressing a spectrum of relevant topics from feminism to human rights and how humans have found new ways to treat one another as needs have arisen.
Regarded in some circles as an intellectual superstar, Dr. Rorty remained a reserved, almost shy figure in person. He was known to reply courteously to nearlyall his mail, from everyone from undergraduates to fellow philosophers who criticized him.
He could be a skeptical, self-deprecating thinker who had a vague sense that his own contribution to modern philosophy might someday be seen as a passing phase, that in the last analysis, there is no last analysis.
In private, he traveled from Australia to the Brazilian rain forest to indulge an interest in bird-watching.
His marriage to philosopher Amelie Oksenberg Rorty ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 34 years, biomedical ethicist Mary Varney Rorty of Palo Alto; a son from his first marriage, Jay Rorty of Santa Cruz, Calif.; two children from his second marriage, Patricia Rorty of Berkeley, Calif., and Kevin Rorty of Richmond; and two grandchildren.
Richard Rorty was a philosopher who hated philosophy — and a lefty who loved his country
By Todd Gitlin
It may seem strange to say we have just lost our national philosopher. Is a philosopher, after all, like a bird or an anthem? It’s the wrong question, Richard Rorty would have answered. Rorty, who died June 8 in Palo Alto, Calif., was for some 30 years the chief conductor of such national philosophical conversation as we have about the nature, meaning, and traps of our collective life.
In the classical sense he was of course a philosopher — a lover of wisdom — and only another philosopher could have denied it.
Rorty was also, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “an anti-philosopher’s philosopher.” He was more widely read and influential among humanists and activists of a left-liberal stripe than in departments of philosophy, two of which (Wellesley and Princeton) he eventually left behind for appointments in the humanities (University of Virginia) and comparative literature (Stanford).
Still, in furtherance of America’s home-grown tradition of pragmatism, he went on publishing philosophical papers — that is, papers that took seriously the arguments made by philosophers. Here, he often challenged the notion that something called Truth was “out there,” luminous, hard, and knowable, in the actual universe, independent of observers and their conversations.
A lifelong man of the left, Rorty thought left-wing academics were wasting their time spinning postmodernist arabesques to justify political positions that didn’t require any vast theoretical justifications in the first place. Reviving an older left-wing tradition, he defended a straightforward patriotic liberalism that outraged academics for whom anti-imperialism and/or identity politics were the first orders of business. His position, deeply controversial when he set it out in his 1998 book “Achieving Our Country,” proved prophetic, especially after Sept. 11, 2001.
Rorty came by his politics — passionately liberal, passionately anti-communist — via family values. His father, James Rorty, was a prolific socialist writer, journalist, and poet. His maternal grandfather was the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. But the pragmatist wasn’t a simple conservator of family traditions. “We should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves,” he wrote, “but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chance for happiness, or about our national character. Our national character is still in the making.”
Rorty liked pragmatism’s messiness and improvisations. What he hated — and this was the hinge that joined his philosophical, literary, and political passions — was the fetish of purity, the Marxists’ no less than George W. Bush’s.
It wasn’t just lefties Rorty provoked. He outraged many philosophers, too, when he declared, not always gently, that it was a waste of time to ask the old questions about how we know what we think we know. They thought he contradicted himself, betraying his early rigor.
Here, he stood squarely in the heretical line of his great 19th and 20th century predecessors, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but with a decidedly American accent and earthiness. He was, like them, a corrupter of youth and age alike, giving many intellectuals (myself included) a swift kick out of our dogmatic slumbers. In his ability to win the respect of those he provoked, he heeded Blake’s edict: “Opposiion is true Friendship.” On hearing of his death, a former student at the University of Virginia went online to comment: “He was so accessible and stimulating, it almost felt like we were at a university.”
His personal grace and generosity did nothing to weaken his influence. In the ’90s and afterward, Rorty did more than anyone else in the academy to articulate a liberal and social-democratic politics that was at once passionate, intellectually respectable, and unimpressed by radical gestures. Though an early importer of theorists like Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, he chopped his way out from the underbrush of what came to be called Theory (with a very capital T) by rendering unto politics what politics was due — straightforwardness.
Talk about a straight-talk express: In “Achieving Our Country,” Rorty savaged the academic left for letting its rancor and fanciness get the better of it. “We now have, among many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country,” he wrote there.
By “achieving our country” — a phrase from James Baldwin — he meant fulfilling its small-d democratic potential by reviving a “reformist left,” exemplified in the New Deal. Though he favored most of what the Sixties’ New Left accomplished, he lashed out at its late, frequent, and tragic anti-American revels. Veterans of that era who remained unreconstructed thought he was too harsh; others, like this writer, thought he was dead on.
“Achieving Our Country” was well-received by writers on the liberal and social-democratic left who had wearied of academic smugness, jargon, and marginality. The political historian Alan Ryan lauded it in The New York Times Book Review for affirming “that national pride is the political equivalent of individual self-respect. Without it, nothing can be achieved.” No matter that unreconstructed partisans of the cultural left sneered at Rorty for insufficient anticapitalism — it went with the territory.
But Rorty’s version of a national pride that refuses to turn a blind eye to America’s sins also outraged conservatives. His attempt to reconnect the American left with the romance of two great small-d democrats — Walt Whitman, the chronicler of American energies, and John Dewey, the philosopher of public conversation — did not impress George Will, who devoted a Newsweek column to trashing “Achieving Our Country” (“a remarkably bad book” that “radiates contempt for the country”). In The Weekly Standard, David Brooks called some of Rorty’s predictions “loopy, paranoid, idiotic,” but his main complaint was that the very risible Rorty was a spotlight hog: “if you strip away Rorty’s grand declarations about the death of God and Truth and get down to the type of public personality that Rorty calls for, he begins to appear instead as the Norman Rockwell for the intellectual bourgeoisie.”
Rorty took pleasure in being read by scholars and activists from Iran to China. He was, in this sense, the consummate cosmopolitan. At the same time, he went on defending militant liberalism in behalf of American values. As this line of argument flourished after 9/11, even on the American liberal-left, he did not become jingoistic or illiberal — far from it. To his last days, he deplored the authoritarianism of the “war on terror.”
The last time I saw him, a couple of years ago, even as he was very dark about the Bush dominion, whose reckless purism offended him both philosophically and politically, he strived to be hopeful about a revival of sensible student liberals, and introduced me to the Stanford activists of the deftly named Roosevelt Institution. It might seem odd that America’s national philosopher shoud have had to struggle for his optimism, rather than inherit it by birthright; but then, it might have been Rorty the American, and not the Italian Antonio Gramsci quoting the Frenchman Romain Rolland, who devised the ever-timely aphorism: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of “The Intellectuals and the Flag.” His next book, “The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals,” will be published in September.
It is rare that the death of a stranger brings a stab of mourning, but I felt one when I heard on Saturday night that the American philosopher Richard Rorty had succumbed to cancer at the age of 75. At the time of his passing Rorty was the single most important living American philosopher and one of the most influential and widely read thinkers in the English-speaking world. He was also the model of a truly engaged public intellectual, writing with verve, humor and insight for a general audience in magazines like the Nation and Dissent. The world in general and the global community of those fighting for a more just, humane and social democratic world are poorer for his loss.
Rorty made his first, and perhaps most famous, major contribution to philosophy in 1979 with the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The book offered a bracing and eloquent critique of the western philosophical tradition, which holds that there is an absolute reality independent of the human mind and that the job of those who seek knowledge is to “mirror” this reality. No, said Rorty. There’s just us – just humans grasping in the darkness, making meaning through argument and consensus, with no Platonic bedrock “out there” to sink our anchors into. In marching back the grandiose truth claims of much of western philosophy, Rorty succeeded in reviving the dormant tradition of pragmatism, an embedded, practical, distinctly American philosophical school pioneered by William James and Charles Peirce and further developed by one of Rorty’s great heroes, John Dewey.
After epistemology, Rorty turned his thoughts to moral and political philosophy, where he wrestled with the fundamental dilemma of post-modernity: if there is no divine law, no universal, capital-T Truth, then how to avoid nihilism and relativism? Is it true, as Ivan Karimazov said, that “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted?”
Fundamentalists, from Pennsylvania avenue to Pakistan, say yes. Without the absolute, unwavering divine law, they argue, there is chaos and cruelty. We cannot deny God, or Allah, or the Infinite Justice of America’s War on Terror, and retain any semblance of moral order. But Rorty disagreed with eloquence and force. Yes, he, said, there is no God, but that doesn’t mean everything is permitted: we need not descend into cruelty and inhumanity. We can, as humans with our limited faculties, hash things out amongst ourselves, and arrive at a just order, one that minimizes cruelty and suffering, and engenders equality and solidarity. How to go about that? No easy answers, said Rorty. “There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons.”
For his critics, this kind of pragmatist shrug could be maddening, but the intellectual humility it embodied seems wise beyond measure in the post-9/11 age. In the wake of that tragedy commentators declared the “death of irony”, and the Bush administration, with much of the nation’s support, rushed into a war convinced utterly of its own righteousness – convinced that there is a Good and Evil out there, that we are the former, and our enemies the latter. Perhaps it was Rorty’s own highly developed ironic sense that led him to vociferously oppose the war, arguing against it in a 2003 cover story for the Nation. For much of his life, Rorty called himself a “liberal ironist”, which is, in every way, the direct opposite of Bush, who is nothing if not an earnest reactionary.
I had the good fortune t meet Richard Rorty once, several years ago in Chicago. He was in town to debate his old friend and sparring partner, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. In person, the two men were quite different from their personas on the page – Habermas was jocular and charming; Rorty, droll and reserved. He seemed to view the world before him with an air of bemusement, and it occurred to me that his ironic sensibility was as much disposition as ideology.
When Rorty addressed the packed hall assembled for his debate with Habermas, he swung his leg at the podium and impishly pushed the crowd’s buttons. “We think of ourselves as having made progress as we grow older, more wise, less capable of doing harm,” he said. “Maybe we’re right and maybe we’re wrong.”
During the Q and A that followed, Rorty casually mentioned that it was “true” that “we are using too many of the world’s resources too quickly and irresponsibly.” Someone shot up their hand to ask him what exactly he meant by the word “true” in that sentence.
He responded: “In a free and open forum everyone would agree we’re using too many resources.”
“But not everyone does agree!” someone shouted from the audience in exasperation.
“I know,” Rorty responded dryly. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
So, too, are we. And it will be a much, much harder task without him.
李翊云：这种观点很正常，对我来说是噪音，不须理会。事实上，所有少数民族的作家都会遇到这样的批评。我的写作启蒙老师，James Alan McPherson是美国历史上第一个获得普利策小说奖的黑人作家，他本民族的部分读者认为他对白人出卖非裔群体；我的一个朋友是从乌克兰移民到美国的犹太作家，另一个朋友是从俄罗斯移民到美国的作家，他们本民族的人也对他们有这样那样的基于民族性而不是基于作品本身文学性的批评。持有这样观点的人不是读文学的人，是搞政治或运动的人，他们同样不是我的写作对象。作为一个作家，如果对这样的噪音没有心理准备是不可能写好作品的。
34岁的旅美华人女作家李翊云，自2003年起在《巴黎评论》、《纽约客》、《纽约时报》和《葛底斯堡评论》等文艺名刊陆续发表英语短篇小说，并以2005年出版的短篇小说集《千年敬祈》》(A Thousand Years of Good Prayers)，先后赢得了爱尔兰的弗兰克·奥康纳国际短篇小说奖、美国笔会海明威奖、怀丁作家奖和英国的《卫报》新人奖，并于今年3月被英国老牌文学杂志《格兰塔》(Granta)杂志评为美国杰出青年小说家奖。亦曾入围过美国的桐山环太平洋文学奖、英国的桔子文学新人奖。
李翊云：这种观点很正常，对我来说是噪音，不须理会。事实上，所有少数民族的作家都会遇到这样的批评。我的写作启蒙老师，James Alan McPherson是美国历史上第一个获得普利策小说奖的黑人作家，他本民族的部分读者认为他对白人出卖非裔群体；我的一个朋友是从乌克兰移民到美国的犹太作家，另一个朋友是从俄罗斯移民到美国的作家，他们本民族的人也对他们有这样那样的基于民族性而不是基于作品本身文学性的批评。持有这样观点的人不是读文学的人，是搞政治或运动的人，他们同样不是我的写作对象。作为一个作家，如果对这样的噪音没有心理准备是不可能写好作品的。
（独立中文笔会新闻）总部设在美国纽约的国际记者组织“保护记者协会”（Committee to Protect Journalists，简称CPJ）在六月二十日世界流亡者日（World Refugee Day）发表《流亡记者报告》（Journalists in Exile），全面介绍2001年以来世界各地媒体记者因政治原因被迫流亡的情况，共记录243个案例，其中有半数来自津巴布韦、埃塞俄比亚、厄里陀里亚、哥伦比亚及阿塞拜疆。平均每三个月就有一名记者因为政治迫害和生命威胁而被迫流亡，所流亡地区与国家包括北美、欧洲与非洲。
报告也介绍了帮助流亡记者和作家的国际组织。其中包括加拿大的记者自由表达协会（Canadian Journalists for Free Expression’s，简称CJFE），其“流亡记者项目”（Journalists in Exile，简称JEX）自2000年开始以来先后一共接待了将近70名来自世界各地的媒体记者和编辑。该项目除提供生活帮助、网络咨询、语言培训等，还尽力帮助流亡记者进入加拿大的媒体工作。该组织和加拿大笔会及其它媒体组织合作，在舍丽丹学院（SheridanCollege）还专为此类流亡记者中的国际专业记者提供一年的媒体课程。
创立于2002年国际新闻自由日（5月3日）的法国巴黎的“记者之家”（Maison des Journalistes）也为流亡记者提供避难所。可以接待十几名流亡记者在此居住半年以上。由于很多流亡者不懂法语，而且法国工会不允许随便雇佣外国人士，进入法国媒体工作非常困难。“记者之家”为流亡记者提供了继续媒体工作的机会。根据其主任、法国广播电台前制作人菲利普·斯皮诺（Philippe Spinau）说，“记者之家的目的是帮助因为政治迫害离开祖国的记者能适应法国的生活，融入法国社会”。“记者之家”每周出版一个网上杂志，发表这些记者的作品和报告。在“记者之家”的流亡记者每天都可以获得一张餐卷、一张公告交通卡和一张电话卡，而且可以在这个由一个废弃工厂改建的“记者之家”有一个房间过夜。自创建以来“记者之家”已经接待来自40多个国家的119名流亡记者。
根据“保护记者协会”的报告，非洲是记者遭受迫害最严重的地区，但这里也成立了组织提供流亡记者保护。“东非及非洲之角人权维护者网络”（the East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Network，简称EHAHRD-Net）提供流亡记者长达六个月的避难场所和服务项目，并在必要时帮助他们移居更安全国家，甚至还能提供一笔生活基金。
During the 1990 presidential campaign Mr. Varga Llosa emphasized the need for a market economy, privatization, free trade, and above all, the dissemination of private property. He didn’t exactly receive a welcome reception. “It was a very different era, because to speak of private property, private enterprise, the market–it was sacrilegious,” he says. “I was fairly vulnerable in that campaign,” he continues, “because I didn’t lie. I said exactly what we were going to do. It was a question of principle and also . . . I thought it would be impossible to do liberal, radical reforms without having the mandate to do them.” 
