Dialogues with Abel Posse

By Edgardo Cora

Translated from the Spanish by Wendell Smith

The following interview with Abel Posse took place in the European summer of 1994. A question follows: is it still current? Yes, it is.

The reader will find in these pages strong opinions on poetry and literature, politics, politicians, authors, intellectuals and so on. A rendition of Posse’s a la carte. The menu is rich. From ex-Presidents Clinton or Menem to Cuban writers as Lezama Lima or Carpentier, Posse distinctively assembles the pieces. From New York to Moscow, from Venice to Rio to Madrid to Buenos Aires, he unobtrusively speaks his mind.

Thanks to a grant by Vanderbilt University, I traveled to Prague in May 1994 to meet the then Ambassador of Argentina to the Czech Republic, Mr. Abel Posse and his elegant wife Sabine. They were gracious, fun, wonderful hosts. Despite a personal history of bereavement, Posse’s family is one of essential optimism and hope. I warmly remember the days we spent together.

No other comments or elucidations are needed. Let us just hear Posse speak.

Edgardo Cora
Atlanta, December 2005

Edgardo Cora (E.C.): The Mexican novelist Fernando del Paso, in a very suggestive turn of phrase, has called for Latin American writers to “take the official history by assault.” Can one rewrite historical discourse through literature?
Abel Posse (A.P.): The problem is not if one can, but rather if one ought to, one wants to, and one needs to. I am a friend of Fernando del Paso and I understand what he says. We, in America, have received a notion of history that came to us deformed, and we have discovered ourselves in—all of the writers of this century—a sick continent. Latin America is, luckily, a sick continent because it is like an adolescent that still has yet to commit the mistakes that other, already mature continents have made. But it is a sick continent, with a lot of pain, with a lot of things delayed, with tremendous cultural conflicts. And so it was that, in that passionate search that writers made, getting ahead of the politicians and the sociologists, they found that history had to be read anew. The same criticism had to be interpreted again, just as the chronicles written from the point of view of the victor about the conflict of the colonization and conquest of Latin America were reinterpreted. Because the writer realized that even the chronicle itself had gaps. And not only in the way it had been interpreted, but rather the chronicle was, in the first place, what the warrior narrator had wanted to tell. So, one of the replies that it was necessary to give to the history that formed us culturally, for the coherence of our past, was through imagination. The novel took on the history in order to imagine that history as it was. I mean, it began to testify against the official history, and that is an extremely important episode in all our literature. It was a visceral necessity that was in the air for all writers. It went towards history following the steps of Euclides da Cunha and Guimarães Rosa in Brazil. García Márquez went towards history, in spite of the fact that his great success and literary force come from his free imagination. Carpentier went towards history, and transformed himself into a master writer. And if we think about it closely, in Argentina, the most salvageable prose of the nineteenth century is born from history, which is Sarmiento talking about Facundo Quiroga. I mean, history was like a necessity for all, because we live and are the product of a great cultural conflict. So, that search for the past was also a search for the future and the present.
E.C.: A journey towards history that has very little to do, certainly, with the one undertaken by the traditional European historical novel.
A.P.: Of course, it was not an aesthetic journey like the one that one could take with the European historical novel with Sir Walter Scott, for example, which was a school for reconstructing the past, and was a literary formula for pleasure used to take the reader on a magical trip toward the past, and situate it in the terminology, the language, the lifestyle, and the description of that past. That aesthetic vision did not exist in the literature of Latin America. The journey toward our history is torn, dramatic. We go in search of a world undermined by lies, by silence, and by injustice; a world fundamentally broken. And I believe the first break is the episode of the clash of cultures; a clash that only had one version, which has been the imperial version, and the imperial Catholic version to boot. So the reply has been a re-creation of the past. In a book we were talking about a moment ago all this is there—Terra nostra—which more than a novel is a proto-novel. In that literary magma of Terra nostra, already there the paths of the writer’s mission are spontaneously indicated.
E.C.: You mentioned the gaps in the chronicle. Could you comment a little further on the concept?
A.P.: The chronicler, at first, was the warrior who knew how to write. Afterwards came the monk who had time. And finally it was the functionary who robbed time from the imperial state, from the colony. Well, men like Cieza de León, Bernal Díaz del Castillo—the greatest chronicle writer—or Oviedo—a man who became a professional chronicler, because he had had a very limited American experience, although later he may have become a great writer of the chronicle of America—were men with a very partial vision of the world, which was the European vision. They could not understand the human being they were dealing with. And what they couldn’t understand—despite the good will of Cieza de León and Bernal, which were spontaneous—was the essence of the civilization they had before them, because they had brought them there telling them that the Other was a being that did not exist. They didn’t even know if they belonged to the race of human beings—because it was decided in councils after the conquest—if it was a man, if that man would one day become a Christian or not; and what they least expected was that he be able to have a civilization like the one the Aztecs had, or the Mayas, or the Incas. And there resides the fundamental clash: he who arrives cannot understand the one he has just found. He denies his existence before setting foot on the ground. Sad, don’t you think?
E.C. In your book El largo atardecer del caminante, Alvar Nuñez says, “We didn’t go to discover, to discover is to know, we went to raze and destroy...we stayed on the surface.”
A.P.: The empire razed automatically; it couldn’t understand the Other. When it realized there was an Other, it was better to ignore the fact than recreate everything again. That was the razing of the pre-Colombian civilizations.
E.C.: One of the things that stands out in all your work is the criticism of Western Culture, of modernity, and of its most persistent myths: the idea that we can write an “objective” history. You attack this notion, but then, what do we do in order to write about history? Or should we renounce that word?
A.P.: No, no. History is what happened. It’s impossible to renounce the “word” history. What we are doing is writing the new chronicle, or completing it, or interpreting it in another way. That can be done, and in fact, all epochs produce a new reading of the past. The richness of our literature is that it doesn’t do it from a purely aesthetic dimension, but rather as a vision of a necessary dimension. Latin American literature has one of those conditions that Rilke praised as valid in a literature: the principle of necessity. Our literature needs to rewrite its history because it can no longer come to terms with its cultural gaps without rewriting its own history and creating coherence. There is a legitimization of American man that was only created in literature, because anthropology only did the same thing much later. You have to look at José Maria Arguedas, at Roberto Arlt, at Rómulo Gallegos to find that American man only begins to be legitimized in the twentieth century. That man with a corporal presence and with a spiritual dimension that is different from the European paradigm and the central societies that dominate him. Literature rescues him from colonial submission during four centuries: American man was a buried man. Well, that creation of a new dignity happens only in the novel, and this is very important, given that we decided how to live in America for a long time without knowing American man. That reclassification of this man, that recognition of mestizaje and its qualities, such as rhythm, eroticism, and grace, is an extremely important episode even, later on, in politics. The adventure of the novel in Latin America is extraordinary; it has a thousand meanings. And if we depart from that Rilkean notion of necessity, in other places it seems to us that literature is an adjective, an episode of society. On our continent, massively read or not, literature is still the construction of society and of man.
E.C.: Yes, the importance that writers have always had as intellectuals in our cultural world, in our global historical perspective, from Sarmiento and Bello to Vargas Llosa. Do you think a similar thing happens in the United States or Europe?
A.P.: No, in Europe there is a great decadence. But it’s temporary, because in Europe culture always occupied a central place. And now we are in a time of cultures; we are leaving the nineteenth-century mindset, which is to conceive and promote society through politics and economics, and we are realizing that the great associations between countries are produced through cultures, and that inside of that, besides, culture is a measure of the quality of life. We are in an era of returning and of revolutions. The countries that are really behind are, often, the countries called superpowers or “the first in the world”, that are crumbling inside.
E.C.: In your novelized version of Alvar Nuñez in El largo atardecer del caminante, his character manages a meditation on the clash of cultures, and a re-learning of himself and his circumstances, by writing.
A.P.: Exactly, because this man who meditates, already old before dying, realizes that he is no longer the original Spaniard that he was, that his gigantic hike through America and the deep treatment of indigenous civilizations that has touched him in his journey changed him, and now he has a different understanding of life. He suffers from a double solitude: he not only suffers from the solitude of the marginalized conqueror, of the old man, of “retirement” we might say, but he also has the existential solitude of the man who is foreign to two worlds. And in that episode, many readers can identify with the dramatic identity—or lack of identity—of American man. In that book, through men like Alvar Nuñez, I try to show the doubly marginal aspect that we have as Latin Americans. At the same time, that defect—as with many defects—gives us great riches compared to the rest of the world such as lucidity, or the vision of good and evil, such as skepticism when faced with triumphalist societies, and above all, about empires.
E.C.: This marginality—a position of privilege in a certain sense, as you say—is a marginality critical of the base of Western Culture.
A.P.: Of course, the base of Western Culture is in the criticism of monotheism. One of the gravest issues of the so-called West as a culture has been the Judeo-Christian impulse to believe that there is one God, one way of life, perfect as a model, that is the life of man in the central society, and that is a good that must be spread throughout the world, particularly to those dominated by empire, without realizing—or caring—that upon doing this it takes away other gods, other ways of life, and sometimes, even the existence of a superior civilization.
E.C.: Has there ever existed an empire that has avoided arrogance upon meeting those “Other” civilizations?
A.P.: All of the empires of the West have had a lamentable arrogance. The same occurred with the British empire in its world-wide expansion: they left behind a heap of incivility, of des-civilization, and of human devaluation. But at least the Spanish had something over the British Empire: they believe in, or better said, they permitted mestizaje. But a British official would never have told a captain or other colonist to have sex with a black African woman, or a Malayan woman, or with a woman from any of the countries that Great Britain imperialized. In contrast, the Spanish had contempt for the souls of the people but not their bodies. And mestizaje is an immediate consequence of the conquest, even in a relationship of equal to equal, because there were marriages with indigenous nobles from the first moment.
Also, about this issue of monotheism, it is important to add that the gods of today are not only the religious ones. Let’s think, for example, about today’s democratic liberalism which some are seeking to impose on the Arab countries. The Arabs, who have their monarchic, feudal, traditional system, have to modify their way of life and create a chamber of senators of the desert, a house of representatives of the neighborhoods...
E.C.: And introduce to them the notion of “progress”?
A.P.: It’s complete nonsense because, on top of that, we are not talking about any kind of “progress.” Western man is a total neurotic, a poor bureaucrat, a North American New Yorker who goes to the psychoanalyst and spends half his salary on “therapy.” The people of Woody Allen’s universe are far below those of a black man in Rio de Janeiro who lives in the favelas in a world of humanity, of rhythm, of sexual power, of divine power, of laughter, and of getting drunk for three days when he feels like it...The North American even has less courage, he’s incapable of grabbing an awl and stabbing someone. He is a civilized man. But, in truth, he’s a poor wretch. It’s necessary to spell it out: he’s a poor wretch in comparison to a Neapolitan. We have created a poor man believing that we had created a civilized man. Well, this notion of castrating civilization has been lamentably spread around the world and it brings all manner of conflicts. In the present moment we are witnessing neo-imperial forms that combat against cultures, like the combat with the Islamic world. The contempt for the Islamic world, the necessity of doing away with Hussein, with Iran...soon enough will do away with all that is Islamic. Put another way, it is a terrible error, a Western disease, and we are at a turning point where these things are already, albeit slowly, becoming part of the political consciousness. We have to create a world where tolerance is real, because based on the idea of equality and democratic tolerance and United Nations, we have created an inferno of contempt. A country like Somalia was invaded, without anyone asking if it should be invaded or not; they take off and do it and take pictures afterwards. So, this “normality” of our life is the final crisis of an attitude that is deeply wrong, that was born and has to do with the ideas we have been talking about. Therefore, I always believed that my novels were not historical, but rather metahistorical, transhistorical. But, essentially, they are an analysis of the cultural world. For this reason they are permanent, modern, in the sense of modernity as contemporaneousness.
E.C.: So, final crisis of a culture. Does it still make sense to ask ourselves where we are, in order to know where we are going to?
A.P.: It’s already gone. What is called the end of modernity is the end of Western culture. It’s flopping around like a fish that won’t die in the bottom of the boat.

It is, I repeat, a sick culture that massively created a sub-man, that in the name of democracy created sophisticated systems of exclusion, that in the name of proletarian redemption created Stalinism. And the countries of Iberoamerican civilization that together compose a great culture have a very important place in the future, as the Arab world—that was also underestimated—has as well.
E.C.: In the West, the cultivators of artificial intelligence, I mean, computers, want to create a thinking machine, with “consciousness.”
A.P.: And they will create it, and what importance will it have; it will just be one more disaster. They created the atom bomb...The discovery of the interior potential of matter and the possibility of guiding it toward destructive forms is an extraordinary, inconceivable technological advance, but that’s how things are. We are in a tremendously deep crisis of civilization and culture, and the formulas that are being thought up are political and economic ones, that come from believing that the world is going to guide itself from that side of things. But, in reality, we are in a greater process of revolution that implies a change in the concept of man, a change in our relationship to nature and its exploitation. That is to say, a new form of consumption, and this implies a new relationship with the “thing”: the car, the house, the sideboard, the lamp, the woman, the cat...with everything that has been transformed into a thing. This is the revolution of our time for which the politicians have no answers, because the politicians are at least a hundred years behind. A man like Clinton, for example, has a mind that is at least a hundred years behind: he still hasn’t even gotten around to discovering Marxist humanism. The politicians don’t rule in the world anymore. Societies are orphaned; they have no leadership, and there is a great uneasiness in the world. The societies that triumphed, like the United States, which just beat the Soviet Union by (pardon the expression) a technical knockout, is not happy with its triumph. Something is happening, something very serious, if Europe enters into a crisis just a few years after the fall of Communism, which was the boogeyman of the last hundred years. They won out over the big hegemonic monster, and society has a complete uneasiness. A youngster doesn’t want the North American society that his father offers him, so what does he do? He becomes a rocker. What do you do if you’re young? Take drugs, become an imbecile—imbecility is a drug—become an idiot. He becomes a man who does not respond to any type of positivism in the world: you can survive legitimately, or be a murderer or a drug addict. Read the crime statistics for the black population in the United States, or the growing statistics on drug use all over the world. This society, then, is pissing on culture. The man who is not busy, who would have to be the most prized person, the head of the class of an industrial, technological society, goes crazy. Instead of telling him: you’re not busy, so now go listen to Bach, go for a bike ride, go fishing, be a poet, love someone...No, the man who is not busy sits there in front of the factory until they give him a job again.
E.C.: I remember those passages in El viajero de Agartha, when the protagonist is confronted by the notions of ser and estar.
A.P.: That’s the key. The idea of being as doing is an idea of Western civilization, that uprooted its men from the peace of being and transformed them into men of doing and having. A process that culminates in the liberal, Anglo-Saxon formula which is the one that is being applied economically to all the world, one that denaturalizes man from all his possibilities. The normal man is no longer going to have peace in his soul. He has nothing; he has no reflection, no poetry, no landscape, no time for love. Everything comes to be conditioned by efficiency.
And efficiency for what? If society is breaking its teeth against ecological limits. This overpopulated society cannot continue without committing a great crime. Without a massive genocide, things cannot be maintained as they are.
E.C.: Do you think of this crime as something that actually is going to happen? As an inevitability?
A.P.: No...but nothing would surprise me from an absolutely amoral society, where humanist thought no longer exists except, perhaps, in the refuge of universities.
E.C.: And up to a certain point. The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, in his book, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, has a very profound criticism of the technocratic type of antihumanism that rules in universities of the prestige of MIT or Harvard. He indicates that everything that does not serve, there as well, some principle of efficiency is declared dispensable, second-class trash.
A.P.: Well, the first step of that resistance is what we are living politically now with some nationalisms. Nationalisms, as interpreted by the Washington Post, are barbarous acts designed to negate progress, and to make the men of the State Department furious. But it’s not like that. What is happening is that there is a reaction of the people that rejects that model of society, and the most curious case of that is Algiers: they created a national, independent, revolution against France. At the same time, that revolution had a modernist criterion, in the sense that it accepted technology. So the fundamentalism in Algiers is the evidence that the Arab world doesn’t want to continue on that path, not even when it is its own path, when it was its own intellectuals who created that option. Everything that is happening in the Arab world is much more important than what is happening in Europe and the United States. It’s there that they are paralyzed in their own convictions, while in the Arab world, the Iberoamerican world and in Asia, unheard-of transformations are happening.
E.C.: Do you attribute an important role to Hispanoamérica in the twenty-first century?
A.P.: In my opinion, yes. For me it is already extremely important in the quality of life. I am much more interested in an Iberoamerican man than a North American one. I say it with all liberty, as one who could say the opposite...In the same way that a Swiss man is less interesting to me than a man from Naples or Venice. I prefer, if I have to choose, to talk with the Venetian. In the same way, I believe that the man of the East, of Iberoamérica—men stuck to ancient religious cultures—have a greater dimension and vision. I don’t want to be prejudiced against anyone—this cannot be expressed in a reverse racialism. I am saying that European civilization, and in particular the Anglo-Saxon one, has betrayed its own humanism, and is creating a true hell with its triumph; they don’t know what to do with it. Examine in detail the North American society that triumphed over Communism after an arm-wrestle that lasted almost fifty years—a hundred in its theoretic implications. It doesn’t know where to take its people. It’s an empty society. There are no more regrets: modernity is already over.
But it’s very difficult that a country as obsessed with its infancy as the United States is should understand that the American Dream already happened. This was in the 50’s and 60’s, with Frank Sinatra dressed as a sailor and General MacArthur parading down Broadway. There cannot be what Clinton calls “a new dream”; dreams don’t repeat themselves because of human will. This cycle is culturally used up. It is not going to live; and if it doesn’t live culturally, it’s useless to conquer the market or to try to repeat the sale of Chrysler cars in Mexico. This is not fixed by a return to nostalgic markets. Now racial dissolution comes, collective rancor, and nothingness as the national goal. In this moment, a great part of Western, liberal, capitalist society—especially in the Anglo-Saxon model—is living a silenced implosion as noticeable, as sudden, and as important as the one that Russia suffered through, when it was destroyed without anyone knowing why, nor what crisis there was, nor what military coup...It was an implosion.
E.C.: The final turn of the screw is Postmodernity?
A.P.: Everything is there. If that’s the question, everything is there. Postmodernity is the consciousness that all the myths of modernity are finished, and that they have been realized. Because it is not that they haven’t been reached: the myth of “equality” was reached, and no one likes to continue being equal in the United States. The black people who are equal are not calm, and the Latino people are not calm, and the white ones aren’t either. That myth has not given the yield of greatness and calm that was hoped. Today, there is still a lack of a religious dimension, a fantastic dimension, a poetic dimension. The man who continues to have a nostalgia for the image of man. I mean, society has triumphed but it can be criticized in the same way as the Soviet Union: it’s a superpower, but below it man is a shadow.
E.C.: I listen to you, and a question keeps occurring to me: what is on the horizon after that implosion? What do you imagine? What next step can be taken? What I am asking is almost esoteric...
A.P.: Yes...I don’t believe anymore in religious answers; I don’t believe more than in the miracle, as Heidegger said before he died. A philosopher who spent forty or fifty years thinking in the most sophisticated lines of abstract thought, ended up saying, in an interview with Spiegel magazine, published after his death: “now only a God can save us.” I think society has lost control, and there is no directing elite who knows where it is stopped and what dangers there are. It’s like a ship where on the bridge there are drunks or idiots; so, unfortunately, one cannot be very optimistic about the fate of the ship. But it could be that a God takes the rudder or that the sea currents avoid carrying it to ruin...I don’t know, it’s difficult to imagine a promising future; we are on the brink of an absolute Nazism called biogenetic transformation; we are on the brink of genocidal indifference toward entire continents, such as Africa.
E.C.: Are your historical novels conceived as a meditation on these themes?
A.P.: My historical novels have to do with the clash of cultures. The arrival of Europeans in America is, for me, an episode like the Big Bang. It’s the moment that puts the superior civilization to the test, the civilization that has a right to everything, that brings the true God. A God that must be universalized, besides. And it brings technology; it has the most sophisticated way of life. It brings the fastest weapon for killing...So, when that society arrives and clashes with the other, a Big Bang is produced with all of those cultural elements that we are still living. I mean, the man of doing against the man of being. The American man of a cosmic location, who has a cosmic vision, and the Other, the man who has to create himself through his Guilt, overcome his Guilt and save himself—because he is not saved, he has to save himself. The “superior” man comes with an inferior idea, and this is one of the most curious episodes of the conquest. The man who comes has a basic metaphysics next to the American man who, among other things, had sexual freedom for example. Those marvelous Indian women that Columbus’s friends raped, the Taíno, very beautiful women—because there were also ugly tribes—well, the liberty that those women had when they offered themselves at first, and these men couldn’t understand: that they walked around naked, without covering themselves up, that they offered themselves, that they smiled, that they gave them fruit...In short, all of the disease of our culture. Therefore when my friend Fernando del Paso says “one must take history by assault,” he says it because for us that is the only way we have of expressing this whole cultural episode; if not we would have to fall into the language of Western European philosophy and make a kind of pastiche, when what we want is to escape reason and to do it through the image, through invention. But our invention, with our men, with our landscape and our language.
It is important to not forget one essential thing: the only literature that broke with the French novel is Spanish American literature. Before Borges, before Lezama Lima, before Carpentier, before García Márquez, everything was the French novel, whether it was long/short, like John Dos Passos, cut up—as Borges said—into little chapters; or whether it was long and unbearable like Thomas Wolfe talking about papa, the uncle and the brother...The only ones that returned the novel to the force of the principle of imagination were the Latin Americans. Then Cervantes rides again. That forgotten Cervantes that swallowed up the French novel, also the Russian novel, who with his enormous depth was copied by the French novel. He returns, I repeat, the principle of imagination, the principle of poetry, and the novel becomes great again. What Joyce couldn’t do, Latin American literature did; because Joyce’s is a realist novel taken apart, torn to pieces, and badly put back together so that it is transformed into a puzzle. But in contrast, in the Latin American novel the true rebellion definitely integrates the spirit of fantasy, or poetry, of poetic rebellion and free religiosity.
E.C.: You mean, the attack against Reason.
A.P.: Exactly. García Márquez breaks down reason; the dead come and go in Rulfo; Borges completes the notion of frightening narrativity...the heaviness of the narrative. He ends that horrible thing of the novel that they sell by the pound in the United States...
E.C.: Almost all of the people in your novels experience some clash of culture. And if we talk more specifically about your novels of the discovery, your position on the world is outlined there clearly: America presents itself as a revelation, as the “different” land, and in that way it manifests itself to your characters.
A.P.: What I always try to say is that beyond the historical episode as material for the novel, the final result I am looking for is always the debate, the meditation on culture on a level that is not purely the aesthetic one of writing the novel, but rather as one of its contents. And in that sense novels have always been constructed departing from the basic question of the encounter of two cultures. I mean, in what measure does that determine our own lives now, in what measure did it determine our past history, our frustrations, our particularities, and in what measure does it determine the immediate future that we can have as a people, as a cultural community in the world. This community is moving, let’s not forget, through large cultural communities: the European one, the Islamic one, the understanding that there is between China and Japan, the uprootedness and the non-answer of a cultural world like the black African, in a total crisis. And Iberoamérica, for its part, has enormous cultural riches in that culture that it still did not know how to exalt, neither politically nor economically. An extremely rare instance, given that culture has been sustaining our peoples more than politics and economics. And now, in this time of cultures, I believe that the answers of our countries are extremely important. So, my novels have to do with the cultural history of the continent with this vision that has, I believe, a great relevance. What is happening is happening in the sphere of culture. And when yesterday we were talking about the uneasiness of the triumphant society, that is a cultural problem In the same way, there is a series of values in Latin American society that are of a cultural character and that offer themselves as answers to that politico-economic structure that makes them feasible.
E.C.: In what way does the basic clash that is found in your novels, between the Western man of doing, and the cosmic man, the man of being, condition how we are in America?
A.P.: We Americans are as we are because we came out of that clash: we are in both worlds. We have one foot in doing and the other in contemplation, in being, in letting oneself be, in laziness, in technical incapacity. It’s both worlds at once.
E.C.: The Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman, in his book La invención de América, sees the Spanish impulse to adventure out into the unknown as a positive thing. And the result, finally called America, as a great conquest of the West.
A.P.: Without a doubt. I have praised that adventure. I did a lot of public activities in Spain during 1992; I was invited to the Casa de Cultura four times. And there was a big conference of writers at the University of Barcelona. There each writer gave a talk, and I spoke about this episode in which the world became the world. Modernity was born, the Renaissance consolidated. America was the most important historical episode for the West after the birth of Christ, more or less, don’t you think?
E.C.: America definitely modifies the image of the world.
A.P.: It changes everything: the idea of the planet, the end of Eurocentrism, the coming together and globalization of the world is produced, the approximation to the East. Then the East was remote, the lands of Africa were remote. They were there, but, the real world was the Eurocentric one. It was not conceivable that the other world could be interesting; it was like knowing that another planet could exist, that it could be inhabited...In an article, I define the voyage and encounter with America as the first interplanetary journey; it’s the only journey where they arrived at another planet, because they were beings from another planet. At first it was thought that they could be Indians—from India—or rather, Orientals, but after it is understood that they are something that was not foreseen in European concepts or experiences, a “new” man appears. In that sense, the episode is totally positive, without a doubt.
E.C.: Apart from the literary reception to your books, how do they react in Spain to what you are explaining here? Because Daimón, like Los perros del paraíso or El largo atardecer del caminante are all very critical...
A.P.: Yes, but I had luck there, in the sense that they saw my love for Spain, and my good faith behind that sharp critique. It’s a sharp critique, but it’s dressed in humor. Even the barbarities that I say about the Catholic Kings, normally Spain doesn’t tolerate them. In my books, all that about the kings has been tolerated and even praised, because they understood that there was not a malicious spirit behind that criticism. It was the destruction of a fact seen from another point of view. Besides, I add other praises—ones that they did not foresee—another exaltation, another apology for those characters. I say of the kings: “they are demigods...products of the Renaissance...creators of the adventure...terrible adolescents...” The book Los perros del paraíso is full of that.
E.C.: How did you think up the erotic episode in that book between Isabel and Fernando?
A.P.: I have always liked Rabelaisian-style eroticism. If you tell it directly, it’s already been done and doesn’t move your audience because the theme is used up. It might have made sense sixty years ago, or in a D.H. Lawrence novel, or in Joyce himself. But describing sex doesn’t make the least sense anymore. I could, however, tease about sex, or elevate it to a Panic level, or give it religious connotations as a joke. I mean, displace all that there is surrounding sex and impose an almost surreal tone in the narration, in order to do something different as the language that it is. And there is one of the jumps: the narration of sexual matters, is sex as one knows that it is, but told with scenes, dialogues, observations or reflections that are surely almost comic, Rabelaisian. However, I believe that one feels that it is a sexual relationship. Columbus’s emotions, for example, are kept exact, answering what they would be if one described them in realistic language. But I escape realism, don’t you think?
E.C.: Clearly. At times, this Rabelaisian manner of confronting sexuality goes well with your own critical posture. This carnival—to use Bakhtin’s word—harmonizes with that posture and a new language is produced. A language, besides, that is atypical within the narrative tradition of Argentina.
A.P.: I think so. Above all regarding the limits we talked about the other day. The limit of the Argentine conceptual novel and our way of thinking, that is very turned inward as a way of dialoguing, of meditating. To approach reality with a series of conceptual elements is extremely dangerous for an artist. Also, as we were saying the other day, all of the Argentinean writers who count destroyed the language: Hernández faking that he had the language of a gaucho, and he was a citizen who didn’t talk that way; Sarmiento with that curious tone of his of a novelized essay; Arlt, Borges, Lugones...all of them escaped that language and created their own independent academy, not the language of the real.
E.C.: How do you see the role of poetry in comparison to the historical novel?
A.P.: Poetry was the first engine. For me the great engine of Latin American prose and novels was poetry. The pioneers who broke with the type of expression that was a little imported, that didn’t respond to the deep ego, the idiosyncrasy, the eroticism, the rhythm, and to the color of the American man were the poets, starting with Darío, a man with an absolutely Spanish education. However, his voice came to be an American voice that came back again to Spain, revealing Spain as well. Immediately from that comes an entire poetic movement in this century: Neruda, who is like Goethe—what Goethe means for the German language. It is the renovation, the approach of poetry to all of the hidden recesses of human life: from the soul, the deep ego, as in Residencia en la tierra, that is a lyric type of poetry, desperate, Baudelarian, to the expansive Goethean vision of poetry in Canto general. And César Vallejo, who is the first great document of the soul of American man. One must remember that during the entire nineteenth century American man painted himself as an interiorly exiled European. He was not seen in his being, in his essence, in his existential nature. Europe didn’t see him either in his particularity, in his reality. He was conceived of rather like an example of a man that we already knew of but who was exiled in a far-off society, in a second-class culture. It was an episode beyond human in the European scheme of things. So, the centrality of that man is produced with the poetry, and Vallejo is one of the pioneers, without mentioning the others.
But the most notable thing for me, seeing it almost from the end of the 20th century, is this Siglo de Oro that literature in the Spanish language lived again, and that is the founder of what is Latin American in the same way that [the first Siglo de Oro] was the founder of the empire and greatness of Spain in the world. In our case, it is united with a regional, racial and cultural explosion. And the admirable thing is that all of the great adventures of these writers that have tried to interpret their true, hidden history by the colonial version for three centuries, and have tried to rediscover it, or those who have undertaken the very important task of rescuing the American man from the silence and non-existence we have referred to, have done it through an aesthetic. I mean, the purpose wasn’t social—impressive social novels weren’t written—this was not a novel that resorted to the concepts and the political realism that predominated throughout the century with concepts of the Left, isn’t that right? Because the humanist, Marxist vision of the Left, and also the sociological and anthropological mediation, would have obligated Latin American artists to be conceptual artists, as French novelists are in general. However, our men believed in the language. Men of an almost Stalinist background, like Manuel Scorza, when he writes a saga referring to the indigenous uprisings of the Andes, does it with an aesthetic and imaginative language that is completely free. Or a man like Rulfo, who upon describing the deep Mexico doesn’t use the language of the sociologists of UNAM, who after thirty years had a vision that was between Marxist and Indigenist, but always conceptual, based on concepts, on reason, on the ideas of European modernity.
E.C.: Neruda is another case of a close link with Stalinism, but his use of language is admirable and doesn’t have anything to do with dreadful social realism.
A.P.: All of them generated, first, a creative language and afterwards went to reality with that language, with the confidence that this reveals reality and not realism. This is a revolution. Because neither a contemporary English writer nor a contemporary French writer understands this.
E.C.: And the North Americans?
A.P.: I don’t know North American literature very well; I know Faulkner, we might say. But with these literatures that I know well because I live in Europe, I realize the extent to which the conceptual pressure destroyed them as artists. Today in France, men like Severo Sarduy or Lezama Lima would be a miracle. They understood Borges’ language game because he came from the same urban, conceptual, absolutely European background; what they still don’t understand is Lezama Lima or Guimarães Rosa. But they have in Borges the idea of what can be done with the creative liberty of the artist. Borges already was that language, and the Europeans lived it like the revelation of this to the extent that they could understand it. There are even more obvious cases than Borges’s, like Huidobro or Lezama...
E.C.: Or Carpentier himself
A.P.: Or Carpentier himself, or Rulfo, they still don’t understand them so well. In contrast Borges was the right starting point for that comprehension because he was raised in their culture, and he played inside of the house of European culture. He made games with the bricks that they already knew. Perhaps they will understand in the future. In reality, that is the importance that Latin American literature gained in the world. In culture there are no coincidences: when a man like Poe, or Melville, or Proust, or Flaubert comes along with such power, there is a deep reason. The same reason that makes other great novelists of the nineteenth century, like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Gogol appear.
E.C.: Since we’re on the question of language, one could say that Los perros del paraíso, gains life and unfolds from that perception of language as a creative possibility of the novelist for embracing the Latin American reality you were speaking of. A moment ago we were mentioning the carnivalesque treatment of eroticism...Another thing that stands out in the novel is the dialogism (in the Bakhtinian sense) to which characters and events are submitted. Dialogism, ambivalence...
A.P.: It’s not ambivalence, it’s the complexity of the human condition. The man who was a saint until yesterday, is a murderer tomorrow; the humanist revolutionary takes power and then creates the Stalinist hell; the Stalin who retires and dedicates himself to raising little lambs and flowers...The human condition is ambivalent. We have a vision of the human condition with principles of good and evil that are dead, that come from Judeo-Christian morals and the modern vision of Man. Therefore my novels, in that sense, would be postmodern, as many critics say. One must completely shake off that idea that he who just did good in one thing, is going to continue doing good for forty-five more years...Those foolishnesses don’t have anything to do with real existence. One of the accomplishments obtained by writers and artists in this so-called post-modernity is the concept—fairly recent—that these complexities, perplexities, should be legitimated. For me Columbus was the character that synthesized all of the extremes of the soul of the West: he had a demoniacal effect but an aspiration to sainthood.
E.C.: Treated by Carpentier in El arpa y la sombra.
A.P.: Yes. Columbus wanted, for example, to look for the Holy Sepulcher; he wanted to spread the Catholic religion, which was one of the great missions for justifying the empire in those times, and at the same time, he sends 400 Indians to Seville to see if they can auction them off in the slave market. And they don’t let him. Or he tortures an Indian in order to know where the pearls are, and in the third voyage he arrives wearing a French sackcloth because of the promises he had made. Well, that man has all of the contradictions of Judeo-Christianity: he comes from a great guilt, from a social ignorance, from a sexual frustration. In sum, all of the diseases of the “normal” man of Western Judeo-Christianity. And at the same time he is a superman who tries to overcome all of that. So, in that sense he was a paradigmatic character. The one who arrived first was a little bit like all of the culture that followed behind, and for that reason I talk of this episode as the Big Bang: behind that man come all the contradictions of Western culture. On the other hand, I also say that that trade of broken glass, cheap mirrors and tin bells for grains of gold prefigured a little what was going to happen in all the economic relationship between the empire, the man of efficacy, the economic trickster, and the victim of that exchange which was Latin America.
E.C.: In Los perros del paraíso the historical lineality is broken: Columbus speaks like an Argentinean; Marx, Nietzsche and Swedenborg join the trip; Carpentier joins the conversation, etcetera. What was your intention in breaking that lineality?
A.P.: The idea was that those faithful renderings of time and place of the traditional novel were not necessary to me at a certain moment, because my novel, I repeat, was more cultural than historical. So, from a cultural point of view, what was happening on an October day in 1493 on the island of Hispaniola had a perfect counterpart in what Lévi-Strauss was thinking in Paris the same day of October, but five centuries later. I mean, the jumps and the use of anachronism is there to say to the reader that what he is reading as the truth, is also true in his own life or in another moment of history not understood as a lineality. Besides, in my novel there is an internal playing with history that refers to the circularity of time—a notion that I introduce with naturalness, without saying anything: time is circular, existences and things are repeated. And this is to escape the obligatory concept that history goes from zero to infinity in a lineal succession.
E.C.: And the participation of the “mercenary” Nietzsche underlines this aspect of the novel.
A.P.: It’s very important because Nietzsche is one of the paradigms of the culture that rebels in the West against the Judeo-Christian notion. So he, in some ways, would have understood the Indians from the point of view that is revealed in my novel.
E.C.: From the point of view of the Other
A.P.: Clearly, of the Other, of being, of the man who denies Judeo-Christian society.
E.C.: And why the inclusion of Swedenborg and Marx?
A.P.: Swedenborg for his delirium with the angels. According to Borges, he is one of the most brilliant lunatics of all history. Swedenborg’s dialogues with the angels interested me, his voyages to the beyond...So my novel has a lot of sarcasm, or pastiche...
E.C.: Of parody.
A.P.: Exactly. Above all the parody in literature: I use elements of the reality of culture and I introduce them in that world for the parody; among others, the notion of the world beyond of a delirious poet but at the same time theologian like Swedenborg. And that helps me to describe what was the white man who had come, what he thought, which were his gods, his weaknesses, and his deliriums, in a man—the European—who is accustomed to accusing the whole world of deliriousness. Because the “delirious ones” were the Indians who made sacrifices, who took hallucinogenic mushrooms, who organized themselves socially like the Incas...That white man comes, then, with an accusatory sense, and one of the functions of the novel is to desacralize the concept of Western man and modernity.
And Marx because he is fundamental. Marx has not even ended yet, or perhaps he still hasn’t begun. Marxism is one of the great impulses for organizing justice in a society. First, Marxism as a school of criticism denounces the productive structure of capitalist society; and as a proposal the guidelines for the creation of a socialist society—however not complete—are born, without appreciation. And this is one of the historical episodes that still doesn’t have a solution, just as the knowledge of the behavior or the interior particles of the atom doesn’t have one either. There are a lot of things left inconclusive in the life of man. We live by rounds; in one round liberalism wins one to nothing, later Marx wins the tie break, then this other thing wins again...In short, one has to understand this as a game, without making the victor sacred nor desacralizing the vanquished. One must have an enormous prudence and remember that man is searching. We are like an intermediate being, and that’s another notion that appears in the novel: the vision of a culture where modernity hasn’t been a goal. We have lived in this culture of modernity that considers that we are always the best: when we discovered the steam engine, the rest of the world converted into barbarians; the blacks, the Indians, the Asians, are all barbarians...There is a moment when even a culturally adolescent people like the United States can be on top and have the power that it has, to “be the best in the world”, capable of teaching us how one can live. I mean, those are moments of terrors, through which I want it to be clear to the reader of my novel that he, too, can be a protagonist of the Middle Ages, that the man of 1990 perhaps is no better than the one of 1490. He lacks so much to reach something that deserves to be praised or considered worthy...And, actually, if we observe the century of the culmination of modernity, we realize that it has been, from the point of view of human cruelty, the most terrible century: the one of the holocaust, or Hiroshima, the century of the massacre of Africa.
E.C.: Okay, I want to bring you around again to that Western tendency to consider oneself superior, to conclude that one can and ought to teach, propagate and impose that which is better.
A.P.: That has directly to do with my novel in the arrival of the Spaniards and their conduct.
E.C.: But also there is that episode of the “summit” between the Incas and the Aztecas in which they reveal their miseries, in which they don’t understand each other.
A.P.: That is a game that I created to demonstrate that in indigenous societies there was no idea of a perfect man, but rather that they also had and repeated, in some form, those tendencies.
E.C.: They were both imperial societies...
A.P.: Yes. There is the socialist society of the almost Stalinist empire of the Incas: also a revolutionary empire. One of the things that most surprised the Spaniards—and that isn’t very well narrated because the clumsiness with which the Iberoamerican world treated itself is unimaginable—happened when they discovered a society where the old, the orphans and the sick were supported by society. I mean, the first system of social security that they saw, apart from Catholic charity, was the one that belonged to the Incas. Another thing, another surprise that unhinged the Spaniards from the point of view of their morals and their idea of the organization of power was the existence of the tapos for provisioning food. The Incas had mastered the crossing of three hundred species of potatoes to feed different regions, different geographies, at different times of the year. Well, when they found those gigantic deposits of food that assured that an entire empire got fed, even the vanquished, that jumped to their attention. That is to say, the European found himself confronted with a civilization, and for that reason I talk about the interplanetary trip. They found themselves on this new planet, fallen into the middle of the ocean, between the Orient to which they thought they had arrived and the West they had departed from. But on this “new” planet they ran into forms of civilization of extraordinary importance. And when they propose to the crown that there is a civilization, they aren’t heard. Then all the details about the importance of the world of the Maya, Aztec or Inca were a literary episode. That’s to say, when literature is used as a marginal episode that doesn’t have any importance in the spheres of power. And this is an extremely important fact in modernity: in America literature comes to be a marginal episode: something a crazy man says but not a sensible one.
E.C.: El Inca Garcilaso writes his Comentarios to defend his father and justify himself before the crown, but he writes, in reality, a stupendous literary book.
A.P.: Some come close—like el Inca, Cieza de León, Bernal Díaz--they are the great ones, but it’s like selling “best-sellers.” And it’s that, in effect, the books about the curiosities of America were a best-seller type of genre for two centuries. They were edited at the big printing houses of Venice, Amsterdam...Books that talked about trips through the Andes, and that there were roads, temples, and people read that as if they were curiosities without importance. But the empire never took charge of a civilization that had to be respected, that could learn, that had gods, and therefore that they shouldn’t demolish and destroy them. We could say that the notion was from zero to infinity: they had an infinity of righteousness, the others zero. An Indian couldn’t suggest that his visions were valid. For his methods for curing people, the Indian was accused of witchcraft. The true cure was the one the Spanish had. In other words, the denial of his existence. To transform the Other into no one is a specific, concrete and absolute task of empire. The king doesn’t want to find out that they make fountains better than the ones made by the Romans.
E.C.: Carlos V hardly left a single written note about America. But now that we’re talking about medicine, this is well treated in El largo atardecer del caminante.
A.P.: This is a concrete case where Alvar Nuñez cannot say it. When he writes Naufragios, he can’t say that in reality he is a “witch doctor.” And he doesn’t say it because they would have burned him in Seville. However, he learned the art of curing through energy, the art of curing with stones and herbs, and lived from that. He walks thousands of kilometers healthy and safe, well fed, to the point where he doesn’t know what to do with the dried deer hearts that they give him as pay for his cures. He continually gives away what he has because each village receives him as a medical practitioner. But when he goes back to Spain, he can’t say he was a “medical practitioner”, he says it in passing, he hints at it...No, Spain and Europe couldn’t tolerate the Other...It comes from an imperial attitude that the Other is “some-thing” that must be negotiated. Of course, one cannot kill; you can shoot a rifle at things, not a human being. But if the Other is still a thing, one can win a war without being to blame.
E.C.: It’s a very interesting case, given that the chronicle and historiography of the Indies permitted legendary, fable-based material from Greco-Latin antiquity, but didn’t tolerate it if the same thing came from another cultural orbit. We know that in the history of the chronicles and narratives what is said is as important as what is omitted, and the case of Alvar is a very good example. Are Latin American writers those who come to fill that empty space, those who come to denounce?
A.P.: That’s it. You will have observed, for example, the extent to which the Jews talk of the Holocaust. There is an economic system that produces movies and books that keep the theme alive. The writers of Latin America, to the extent we have been able, have spoken of our holocaust, not to get revenge and search for the old Nazis of the 16th century; that’s why I play so much with the theme of Nazis in my novels. We had a holocaust and they didn’t permit us to say that there was a holocaust. European culture didn’t take responsibility for it, just like the United States doesn’t take responsibility for the indigenous holocaust that it still continues to cause by denying rebirth to indigenous culture. Well, this idea that cultures cannot be reconstructed forms part of that great cultural genocide that is intrinsic to Western culture. And this isn’t an invention that comes from outside, because Spain is going to do it, the Nazis are going to do it, the Russians in the Gulag, and the North Americans at Hiroshima. Western man doesn’t want to see that he forms part of a sick culture...
E.C.: Are you suggesting that our need in Latin America is the rescue of the American being as a different entity or project?
A.P: If we don’t rescue ourselves, we won’t be. And the issue is that one isn’t going to search for being only as an aesthetic passion, as if it were a search for a unicorn in a garden. The search for being is directly linked to the economic and political answer for our continent, one that is new, that is being born with a different idiosyncrasy, and cannot accommodate itself any more to external schemes. The socialist revolution that was tried in America already failed; liberal capitalism already failed despite its “successes”...that ended in Mexico with Chiapas. Well, those are all illusory schemes, only partially just. It’s evident that a well-realized liberal capitalism can produce a good moment of life in some group of people in Latin America, but what one has to understand is that those are intermediary forms, and what is necessary is to find a form that gells, that is in harmony with our deepest way of being.
E.C.: Is the example of Chiapas one more demonstration of the necessity of rescuing American being?
A.P: Logically. In an article of mine published in ABC in Spain that received some attention—they featured it on the cover—I said that they misunderstood that time: they weren’t guerrillas, communists, Zapatistas that wanted to create another state. No, it wasn’t the same language. This comes from a long-held belief of the man who knows he can’t enter the scheme that NAFTA is proposing. That man knows that in a society of efficiency, planned by a Western mentality, he’s never going to be more than a dishwasher. That is to say, the situation of the 16th century is repeated: that Indian who loves his gods, loves his land, loves the trees, wants the full realization of his being in his culture. So make no mistake, that wasn’t a guerrilla movement paid for by Moscow. I said it, and it caused a certain scandal. Well, the ex president of Argentina, Menem, took that idea and said that Chiapas was a religious movement. And that’s so. It responds to a worldview that no longer wants to renounce itself. It can’t be that you continue telling people that their relationship with nature is illegitimate, when the white man of the triumphant society is a neurotic because he is so distanced from nature. People are sick and tired of that; and the only ones that have said these things are we writers, because the sociologists have been wasting time with this ideology. But the Latin American writer is related to the people, to the imagination, to the reality; because literature comes from that, not from teaching classes or looking at books; literature is pure reality through aesthetics. So the writer had an approach that other genres didn’t have. If we were to talk here to a man like Carlos Fuentes, we would agree with all those things. The one who denies them is the politician, the man who still believes in ideologies.
E.C.: Earth, water, air and fire are the four parts that structure Los perros del paraíso. The idea seems to me not only poetic, but is also, I believe, a commentary on another cosmogony. Why did you use it?
A.P.: Because it’s the classic, original scheme of Greco-Latin cosmogony. And the same thing is repeated in the cosmogony of the independent American man: the idea that man is related to the cosmos and the immediate agents are the earth, the water, the air and fire. That idea unites us more than grand cultural schemes. It’s like two planets that have been in the same place at the same time without knowing it.
(Next session)
E.C.: You said that the philosophical and anthropological essay, given its conceptuality, did not manage to explain the man and circumstances of America. Could you speak a little more about this?
A.P.: The philosophical, anthropological, or sociological essay of Latin America was made with an imported language, a language that did not have that authenticity, that force that poetry had. This means that there was no language that the Latin American owned, but instead an interpretation based on European parameters. So, what happened is that the novel, the eternal junk closet of Western culture, began to be the receptacle of misgivings that transcended the traditional author who sits down to write a novel. Concerns came to him and, above all, the possibility of basic interpretations about the current destiny and circumstances of America.. The “historical” novel was transformed in this way, in an analysis of the present, in a journey to the past to rescue the cultural clashes that have clear validity for the present; and it was called a historical novel because it used history, that’s clear. But what one must understand is that we used history not in order to invite the reader on a placid journey as a nostalgic escapist, but rather we took him to the past in order that he might better see the present, so that he could bury himself in the understanding of a clash that contains, among other things, the American racial problem, which is the indigenous problem, a problem that affects more than half of the population of America, although the groups in the centers of power and the high-culture interpretation may want to believe that it is an exotic episode. But when in America we speak of the Indian, we aren’t talking about the Indian on a reservation in Arizona, but a presence in Peru that is more than half of the population, and in the case of Brazil, comprises practically 30% of the population, without mentioning what it means culturally in Mesoamerica or Mexico.
Therefore, that journey to the past, that search for problems such as that of indigenism—an old problem of the imposition of a culture on top of the old pre-Columbian cultures—has a content absolutely relevant to the present day. No one, not even Carpentier himself, ever believed that he was writing a historical novel in order to describe the way in which some French revolutionaries arrived in the Caribbean, so that people might amuse themselves with the scenery and the magnificent reconstruction of the era. No, that journey called ­El siglo de las luces shows us the arrival of a political culture and its difficult implantation in America, and it has a concrete answer, for example, in the case of Castro. And I commented on this to him, to Alejo Carpentier, who was very bothered when I, privately of course, asked him to what extent there wasn’t a secret criticism of Castro and the destiny of Castro’s revolution in his construction of El siglo de las luces, in Hughes, a man who begins such a revolutionary and ends up such a tyrant. I commented to him whether that wasn’t a devolution that had an analogical meaning...Of course for a man who lived the Cuban state, who was a Cuban revolutionary and loved the political Cuba like the country Cuba, my question wasn’t very welcome, but we all know that in literature there is a double play of hidden meanings, and in the literature of Alejo Carpentier the use of history is an episode that is found in García Márquez, in the origin of Guimarães Rosa, in Rulfo, in the majority of authors. Because if you analyze Fernando del Paso, or my novels, or Vargas Llosa, at some point the presence of history is there to throw light on the present.
E.C.: And this means admitting the value of imagination in the historical reconstruction. The professor and historian Enrique Pupo-Walker, in an admirable book, La vocación literaria del pensamiento histórico en América, teaches us the extent to which writing in America, from the chronicles of the conquest on, bears the mark of the imagination. But I would like you to return to your definition of the novel as the “junk closet” of Western culture.
A.P.: The novel is the genre of our time. Just as poetry is the temple, the novel is the street. And the street is for everyone: it facilitates the possibility of encounter. We have a literary culture that has been asphyxiated since Classicism. And above all in modern times, that asphyxia is repeated by an ideological vision: it’s the case with Rousseau, Diderot, etcetera. So, the novel goes along liberating itself from the temple and going toward the street. The apogee is Balzac—the French novel—Dostoyevsky. In the great Russian authors, one finds the synthesis of all the elements that can preoccupy a generation. It’s for this reason that Gide defined that type of novel as “the dialogue with the possibilities of living.” When the author and the reader find each other in the secret dialogue of writing and reading, both independent, but oriented toward a final confluence, and they dialogue about the possibilities of living in their time, the genre that is right for them is the novel. Poetry tried to do it—just look at the case of the revolution of Pound, of Eliot, of Neruda, but in no case did poetry manage to go beyond and outdo all contemporary art in order to express itself. Because the movies took the street and the façade, but the main street and not the alley, interior life, it didn’t reach totality. The movies stayed in a very exotic parcel of land, and, as we know, it’s almost dying. In contrast the novel continued and continues because at bottom it’s synthesizing all of the impulses. With the revolution of the Latin American novel, with the introspection of the Russian novel, with the literary essay such as the ones that happened in the great North American novel writing, the novel now had open an enormous possibility for integrating almost a panoply of the humanities. I mean, the novel is like a university of the humanities: you can find psychology in its best expression, for example in La conciencia de Seno, where we find, better than in Freud, the psychological episode. Or in the “abysms” of Dostoyevsky. And if we go to the social novel we find applied sociology, or the interpretation of history as in the case of the Latin American novel. It’s in that sense that I defined the novel as a junk closet of the humanities of the West. Everything enters, everything is permitted, and in its liberty is also its danger, because the novelist becomes a type of rigorous commander; he’s the great administrator of a gigantic emporium. And he ought to administer that emporium so as not to wander off into particularity, or become insignificant through generalization. That so-delicate direction is one of the great themes that every novelist knows.
E.C.: Yes, the problem of the poetics of the novel, or the lack of it, because in fact this genre has survived without a specific poetics, although novelists always point out paths in that direction...Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, for example, agree that the reason for being of the novel is precisely to say what is not said in other places.
A.P.: That’s the force it has compared to the movies, and continues to have; the same one that it has compared to theater, and the essay. Because in the novel there is an essayistic wisdom of a residual, or experimental, or popular character that is very important as a contribution to thought, and this is one of the most overlooked points of interpretation of the novel. Only some critics find the will to tease out deeper content.
E.C.: In your novels I believe the critical essay about the state of culture appears, and this works, besides, as a support to the aesthetic part and vice versa.
A.P.: That’s part of the adventure of the novel and narration. Once you’ve launched a language in a certain direction, what the language finds is more important than what the writer consciously or rationally proposed to do upon beginning it. It’s an extremely rare dialectic phenomenon where one takes a first step, but answers and distant echoes of that step are received. And that’s one of the fascinating aspects of the novel that, in an era of almost dead culture, keeps it alive. The West is culturally on its deathbed, and it’s interesting to see to what extent the novel, too, is the receptacle of that struggle, of that agony.
E.C.: The structuralism of the sixties and seventies attempted to be an answer to that crisis. But upon only evaluating the text as only an autonomous system of language relationships, they fell into a reductionism, since they left out important metatextual considerations. A dangerous procedure that maintained, among other things, that the aesthetic should no longer be considered a vision of the world, as a totality that implies a certain perception of the world.
A.P.: Of course, yes, because structuralism is linked to the crisis of France and the French novel, which was a novel without air. The only ones who could open the doors of that novel were crazy people, exotic people, as is the case with Proust, or Celine, or Jean Genet, who were completely abnormal, even in their literary order. Well, those abnormals in the French literary order were the ones who opened the doors. Just look at the book Comedien et Martyr, which Sartre dedicates to Genet. Structuralism encounters a used-up French novel, whose interpretations lack poetry, and life. It’s a dead novel, and the example is the same novel that pretends to be life, which is Sartre’s. Then they pass on to exercises in the essay without knowing the contribution that the Latin American novel was making in those same years. I mean, the phenomenon of structuralism suffers from a tremendous French provincialism. I lived all of that in Paris; I have known Roland Barthes through my friend Severo Sarduy and I lived all that era as a crisis of which they had no awareness. In that same moment the novel was jumping ahead once again—just like every time it’s rumored to be dying—for Alejo Carpentier’s part it had reached a culminating point through the return to Cervantism: the recuperation of poetry and, above all, a free imagination and the Cervantine imaginative journey. The Latin American novel had completely liberated itself from the castrating schema of the French novel.
E.C.: It has been said that the novel appropriates other discourses unto itself through mimesis in order to legitimize itself as such. The critic Robert González Echeverría (Yale University), in his book Myth and Archive, postulates that Latin American narrative develops in relation to three hegemonic discourses: the first, of a “foundational” character as much for the novel as for narrative in general, is the legal discourse of the colonial era. The second instance is scientific discourse—travel narratives—that dominate from the nineteenth century until the decade of the twenties in the 20th century. Finally, the mediation of anthropological discourse during our present century. The critic states that the novel is going to fake not being a novel, imitating these discourses in order to legitimize itself, in order to shape itself as a novel.
A.P.: That comes up in Sarmiento’s Facundo, or in Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha. Sarmiento fakes that he is writing an analysis of the nature of the gaucho, of the man of the wild, or open land, and Facundo emerges as an antihero, against the current, with an extraordinary force. A few years later, Euclides is going to have the same experience when he fakes writing a chronicle of the war of the jagunços. The novelist has to do that...always fake. This is in the essence of the novel. Dostoyevsky fakes that Raskolnikov is a social episode—he’s explained like a social episode—and is, nevertheless, an episode of fiction. In any case there is a crime, there is a psychological motivation, there is a social explanation, etcetera. The nature of the novel is rich and alive, occupying the first place at this moment in the literary world, because it has that possibility of mimesis, of adapting itself.
And this happens also in the historical novel. Many novels apparently are faithful renderings of history that imperceptibly or openly stray towards fiction and literary creativity. The novel approaches that objective furtively, stealthily, like the tiger hunter who imitates the step of the tiger, learns even to roar like the tiger, so that the tiger will believe that the other one in its field is another tiger. This is one of the resources of the novel.
E.C.: I would like to turn now to the Argentinean novel. In a justly famous essay, “The Argentinean writer and the tradition”, Borges said that the Argentines, inheritors of all of the literary tradition of the West, can write about any theme. But in a city like Buenos Aires, cosmopolitan in the European sense, certain themes and certain language are favored. In that context, your literary work represents a break with Argentinean letters: your language, your themes, connect to a Latin American tradition that Argentina lacked (if Borges is, obviously, an “American” author—Perogrullo points out that he was born in Argentina—he has been defined as more European than anything else), now with your novels we recover a reverse debt: Lezama Lima, Carpentier and all of the questioning of language that comes with this literature.
A.P.: Well, I was very conscious...I realized that the true revolution had to be in language, and not only in the theme. It wasn’t enough that I center my novel on a Spanish conquistador and that that conquistador died on the island of Margarita in Venezuela (Daimón) in the climate and habitat of the Caribbean: I also needed to conquer language. And I prepared myself as a counter-language writer; because for me, the danger that was behind the language of Buenos Aires literature was the provincialization that a big capital creates. Although it may seem paradoxical, that’s the way it is. There is a very arrogant, very powerful provincialization that is very castrating for the artist, because language is very determined by preconceived notions, by a solid training, by a good education—in general, in life, the very well educated people are often wretched. Well, in writers this is fatal. The writer has to create his own path of irreverences and so Borges did it, which for me was really the paradigm of how an artist can be with his training. The commonly accepted notions in Argentina when I began to write were very powerful, very determining, and this is still seen in the new generation of writers, where the tendencies toward the use of humor, the presence of the North American novel noir, are almost collective presences with very little linguistic personality, which is what poets usually have. The prose writer doesn’t create himself through language as the poet does, and this is a defect of Buenos Aires. Then I realized that Borges, Pizarnik, Arlt, Lugones, or rather, the people who deserve to be counted, created their own language. Lugones had a creole language like a poet, but linked to a tremendous Spanish root, of a marvelous heritage. And by nature Borges was given to making fun of Argentinean language as he does; he even makes fun of nineteenth-century Spanish because he is a man who goes back to the great geniuses of expression in the Spanish language, but he also liberates himself from that. The same thing happened to me with Arlt: I discovered that one of the enchantments of that supposed resident of Buenos Aires that wrote based on Catalan melodramas is precisely making his villains speak in that way was a kind of parody of the typical resident of Buenos Aires. I realized, then, that one had to flee the conceptually castrating language of Buenos Aires. And the young writers still today speak in terms that range from psychoanalysis to Sartre. By that I mean the neo-Marxist interpretation of Sartre and the psychoanalytic interpretation. And that conceptualism is fatal; it does away with any language. The Argentinean writer has horrible limitations, very burdensome, and all the great Argentinean writers escaped that. The first training that a writer from Buenos Aires has to undertake is to destroy, as far as possible, his native country, his language, and his position. Escape from that hell in all aspects. Above all because they live like a tribe, feeding their own egos in that habitat, and they become really very small...The Argentinean, for example, is too embarrassed to laugh; the man from Buenos Aires is too embarrassed to dance; he’s even embarrassed by the melancholy of the tango. So he is a very limited being. When one has been traveling for many years, as the great Argentinean writers used to do—Borges, Cortázar, and Molina are writers who lived a decisive period of their lives outside of the country—one understands that one has to be very careful to be a writer in Argentina. It’s necessary to destroy all of that boastfulness, that small-mindedness, that too-lucid vision that the Argentinean has...
E.C.: And Argentinean speech...
A.P.: Above all Argentinean speech, which is like a disgrace. Argentinean speech is approximate, ingratiating, explicative, rationalist, abusive of power. The Argentinean implies, he seduces, he continually has an explanation that he uses to dispute, he doesn’t leave space for the other speaker even when it’s God...that’s why there are no mystics in our country. The speech of Argentineans, especially that of people from Buenos Aires, is wretched; besides, they don’t hear creole anymore, nor do they know what the Argentinean Spanish of the field and the land was. And if you have the bad luck to not have family in the country like I had—I grew up with people from the provinces: my grandmother was Tucumán, my mother was Tucumán—it’s not so easy to notice that these people from the interior spoke with a rare discretion that was unknown in Buenos Aires. So this is decisive: if the Argentinean does not realize, when he is a writer, that his language is a mess, that it lacks a lexicon, and everyone talks more or less the same, like in an audition for Neustadt or Mirta Legrand—when they talk about literature...And how they don’t hear, because no one hears each other. When a man speaks it’s very rare that he knows how to hear: he has to be a man trained in a prestigious theater school, where they do teach one to unfold the ear of speech. Well, the Argentinean man, the Argentinean writer, doesn’t know these things. For many years Argentinean writers couldn’t write dialogue for the movies, for example. I am a witness to it because I was raised on Argentinean movies: there was no way to learn to write a normal dialogue, and this is one of the things about our movie industry that delayed us for 20 or 30 years.
E.C.: I remember Borges’ essay against Américo Castro and his defense of a Spanish that could be spoken outside of the [Iberian] peninsula. At the same time, the Argentinean speech of today functions, as you say, as a great cultural conditioning.
A.P.: Yes, anti-cultural.
E.C.: And when did you find that other language? At what point in your career did you realize you had it?
A.P.: I always had the suspicion that language was the center of everything. To such an extent that I started publishing when I was thirty years old: my style embarrassed me. And the necessity of creating a language is central. If you analyze what Sarmiento is...if you read those passages of Facundo, or any work of Borges opened at random, or any passage of Enrique Molina, you immediately realize the difference that there is between the language of a real writer and normal Argentinean speech. And the transpositions of speech, when practiced by minor writers, are deadly.
E.C.: It’s good to point out, as well, that a lot of newspaper journalism participates in this Argentinean speech that’s so poor...
A.P.: Sure, it forms a part of that. It’s a cheapening, with a notable lack of quality of lexicon. The Argentinean doesn’t know, either, how to name things; there is a lot more lexicon in daily speech in other countries I have known, like Peru and Colombia, than in Argentina, without mentioning Spain. No...the Argentinean is linguistically a dwarf, an idiot. Clearly this produces great writers: from where the defect is comes forth the extraordinary will to surpass others of creating your own language. Analyze Pizarnik, that stupendous writer who created a language that was absolutely her own.
E.C.: One of these afternoons I have heard you use the following image: “Language is like a wheel.”
A.P.: I think language is a wheel that one gets on in the process of writing, in the creation of one’s own language. The fact of being immersed in a creative, literary language gave me the sensation that there is something like a wheel turning that I shouldn’t get too far away from; I had to grab onto that half world and stay there, sheltered under that pillar, being very careful to not fall again into daily, used-up, artless speech. I was trying to conquer the expression that the angel has, the force, and that has, as well, a background of silence—very important so that the angel has something. Because it has to do with a final silence, the reader receives it—as a space he should fill. Well, I believe that that conquest is one of the most difficult secrets or tricks. One has to write a lot to be a writer. Write great quantities in order to dominate the exterior of the expression, and later to be able to fall a little more into the interior.
I have spoken extensively of this theme with Borges, on some very pretty days that we spent in Venice. And since we didn’t do anything else besides walk and eat, on one occasion when we spoke of language, he showed me how the writer knows those secret tricks by intuition; there isn’t anyone who can teach them to you. We were walking, at that point, around Venice and—one of those incredible Borges things—he remembered an old Uruguayan poet, Delmira Augustini, and recited me a verse that was transformed into a vulgarity if you didn’t add one simple word—the vulgarity of the verse ruined not only the verse but the whole poem, according to him. And so it was, because in that erotic poem where—if I remember correctly—a penis was compared to a key, the transference was blunt, mediocre. And Borges said (imitating his voice): “Look, Abel, what Augustini does, instead of saying key, she says ‘a golden key.’” Of course, upon adding gold to the key, the whole poem was brought alive, and was a little thing...but in that little thing is the truth of literature. At no moment did Borges quit living that central concern for language. It’s not important to recount things. All of the things that one tells, someone else already lived with more intensity. What can a man tell about a more or less normal life? That he bathed, shaved, ate, took the bus? What can he tell beside the monsters who have lived the greatest horrors of existence? What can a writer tell who is only searching for an editor to publish a book and give a speech? What can he tell that’s exciting, compared to a commander (and there were some) who has ordered 20,000 soldiers to death on the battlefront? Or a man who has lived the horrors of suicide? What a writer tells is very relative, and what surprises the human condition is also very relative. Human life is very repetitive. And another element is that the human condition much more deserves contempt. Man is not the most praiseworthy animal; for example, one could talk a lot more about a tiger...the private life of a Bengal tiger is more exciting than that of a man. That horrible modernist notion, that boastfulness that comes from Judeo-Christianity and the modernist exaggeration that man is the center of life, the owner of the universe, is more nonsense. The poem, the literature, are always siding more with the cosmic. In the Homeric games, man is linked to the gods, and is very interesting as man. No one is interested in Homer because they identify with his marital problems; Homer interests us because he presents us with a battle with the gods.
E.C.: I remember that failed Malraux novel, The Human Condition...Yes, perhaps to return some dignity to the human condition in this exhausted postmodernity of the end of the 20th century, it’s necessary to put it in harmony with the rest of the cosmos.
A.P.: Without a doubt. At another time the human condition interested me. Now it doesn’t interest me so much. Man knows he is a murderer, he knows he’s a miserable wretch, he knows that in almost all cases he is a cuckold...No, man doesn’t interest me so much anymore, there isn’t so much devotion. That idea of analyzing the human condition unto its ultimate consequences, as Sábato said once, or of talking about “the abysms of the human condition”, they’re always grabbing a hatchet, like Raskolnikov, and killing a poor old lady. The abysm is afterwards: the fear of the police or that they’ll send him to Siberia; Sonia breaks up with him and sends him a Bible...That’s all a little pathetic and ridiculous, isn’t it? What’s more interesting than the human condition is the cosmos, the gods, man as a part of the cosmos. There for sure, when man is located in the cosmos, as with the great German lyric poems, as happens in Dante, then there is a distinct culture. We are in the forming stages of a great classicism; we are writers and men fallen from the classical epoch. We are in a type of miserable backwater of consciousness, or reason, of modernity. Luckily the infected creature that is called modernity is dying: the good, democracy, liberty, quality of life, the human condition, psychoanalysis...all of that isn’t interesting anymore. And Nietzsche is marvelous at burying modernity. One era ended and a better man—we hope—is being born: a man whom we cannot know. For now we are like the grandparents of the unborn man, we are like the imbecile grandparents who play chess in the little village and tell stories all day...No, the giant that is within us still hasn’t been born, and that giant is going to be born from a cultural mutation that this technological, industrial civilization is only incubating. But the outline of this man has been seen: today we were speaking of some passages of Trotsky; well, in some passages of Trotsky, in some passages of Nietzsche, of Rimbaud, one can see the intuition of the true man.
E.C.: And in Hölderling.
A.P.: Of course, Hölderling...Well, that new man hasn’t been born yet.
E.C.: I’d like to talk about Nazism and your novels El viajero de Agartha and Los demonios ocultos, to find out what you were trying to do there. The experimentation with language, although it doesn’t reach, for example, the level of Los perros del paraíso, is also present in these texts.
A.P.: Yes, that’s true.
E.C.: El viajero de Agartha, for me a stupendous novel, begins as an adventure story and ends as an almost metaphysical reflection, or better said, in a true journey of initiation for the protagonist (and the reader). And, again, the encounter between two worlds: with each step that the protagonist, the Nazi superman Walther Werner, goes deeper into Asia, he gets smaller. At one point Werner finds himself thinking about what literature he would offer to a Taoist monk if he had the opportunity or if they asked him, and he asks himself: “Schopenhauer, Nietzsche?” It’s a moment in which, fascinated by the venerable silence of those monasteries, all of our culture is revealed as a scandalous world, as a “culture of choleric whores.” What did you intend to do in this novel?
A.P.: My purpose was to do what you just described in your extraordinary summary. Or rather, from the paroxysm of power, of one of the most terrible movements of power that Western culture has ever known, Nazism, I wanted to put it to the test using what that movement claimed as its origins: Asia. When the Nazi is sent on a mission to Asia, he understands that in reality he was making a journey of initiation; beyond going to the sources, he realizes that he is descending his own abysm, before the sources. The source is the mirror of his abysm, of his indecorous break, of his crime. So the novel, since it’s narrated in the first person by a Nazi sympathizer, ends in perplexity, in a dream: the dream of a badly wounded culture that puts itself to the test, I repeat, in the mirror of Asia.
I like that novel. It’s complex, difficult to understand. I wrote it with a lot of passion in Israel and, as you have mentioned, it’s an adventure novel that culminates in a journey of initiation, an initiation that belongs to all of us: to know that we are at the foot of the fountain and we are not worthy of the fountain. This is desperate; we feel that we are at the foot of the slope and we can’t drink that sacred water. And when we open the door to the most sublime, to the greater force that is religion, we realize that that God doesn’t bring us back to life. We are sterile at this moment in civilization, and our effort is to arrive at the rebirth, at the nativity. That will be the great adventure of our culture, to recreate a nativity. And we are going to do it, because I believe that man isn’t dead yet. Man has a final fiber of his being that will unite him once again with the tiger, the plant, the sea, and the universe. That is the return that we must live.
E.C.: Good. What were your intentions for La reina del Plata?
A.P.: Uhh...La reina is a very complicated attempt. First, it’s a postmodern novel; but I wrote it, I confess, before knowing what the word meant according to the latest fashion. So, the novel is about the rebellion against the ideas of good and bad in the construction of society; patient skepticism when faced with what we call the human condition. It’s also an homage to Buenos Aires as a valid cosmos, not picturesque nor national. I mean, if Buenos Aires were in Brussels, Paris or New York, it would be worth just as much, because there would be truth and facts that one doesn’t defend because they belong to one’s homeland or because they are picturesque. It’s a serious defense of the city as a moving universe, where humanity presents itself in a valid and interesting form. Afterwards, it’s a satire of the political passions of our age, which for Argentineans have had dramatic consequences. And all of that narrated, lived like a novel. It’s also an analysis of woman, of the phenomenon of the feminine and the masculine. It’s a text that points in a lot of directions. I loved that novel a lot. I took notes for many years. I wrote it as well in Israel and I wonder about whether it does or doesn’t have a guardian angel...I don’t know. I can’t talk about my own children so easily.
E.C.: La reina has a soul of tango. In the best of senses: the tango as a celebration. The novel starts off from the recent “historical”, painful past towards a future shot through with irony, vitality and optimism. I think all of your literature has a great dose of optimism. To put our culture against the wall or in front of the mirror doesn’t mean the same thing.
A.P.: No, it demonstrates what is bad about our culture, and, at the same time, indicates the nostalgia of the great culture. I always play with the classic source; my literature is linked to the classics. In all of my novels the universe of Dante, the Greek universe, and the universe of the great poets is present. Continually, as if to say: let’s not forget that here is the return ladder.
E.C.: In your unpublished article about Kafka and Borges you affirm something that is not often said about Borges: you say that he believed in a literature of optimism and of happiness. I remember that passage of Borges: “One of the most beautiful sentences that the exercise of letters has provided me is one from Hudson, who said that many times he had undertaken the study of metaphysics, but happiness always interrupted him.” A marvelous sentence, don’t you think?
A.P.: That’s the greatness of Borges. Borges was a pagan, he always refused to accept the Western literature of sickness.
E.C.: Kafka would never have pronounced that sentence.
A.P.: Clearly not. Borges had great reservations about Kafka, despite what is said. He didn’t love Kafka, he knew that he was a sick man. In the same way that Borges or Nabokov—who were very close in aesthetic sublimation—didn’t love Dostoyevsky. The reservation of Borges against those writers, such as Sartre, such as the literature of nihilism, is his reservation against that cult of sickness. It’s the cult of tobacco and eggheads, Malraux’s cult...the cult of the sickness of the wan, urban writer, not Baudelarian, a dandy. A dandy of evil, of perversity, whose only exercise is with poor, corrupted women. Well, all of that is like the adolescence of a romantic, poorly-raised boy, a boy who is a product of the terrible bourgeoisie and its worst example, which is the negation of the bourgeoisie by itself: l’enfant terrible. The spoiled brat that rebels against the father but never breaks the mold of the bourgeoisie. The worst episode of the bourgeois novel had been dandyism, a type of literary expression that with Sartre reaches its culmination: be bad with the bourgeoisie, with the parents, with the nation, rebel against everything. But when Stalin calls him to say “Let’s kill together,” he jumps, he gets frightened. Hitler appears with the order of the SS and a skull on their foreheads, and all of the dandies of evil get scared...they don’t go any further than taking out their sedition on the poor urban network.
E.C.: And with a type of tragicomic self-satisfaction.
A.P.: That was tried in Argentinean literature. Almost as a whole the Argentinean literature for juveniles of all eras has taken pleasure in a perverse romanticism. Even poor Sábato; there are entire passages of Sábato ruined by the cult of achieving evil. For Sábato evil was in the basement of a church in Belgrano...Pretty modest his idea of Infernos. In sum, all of that seems an extravagance to scare ladies from good families. But literature is something much more serious. Literature touches something sacred. You can’t make literature with those minor ideas, ideas of easy seduction. Literary art demands a merciless journey where all of those things are left behind. If not what’s left is only Lamartinian romanticism and its degenerations.
E.C.: You say that literature touches on the sacred. In a culture like ours, that includes a true disagreeable subculture, full of noise, drugs and rock and roll, a subculture of video clips where instant information is taken for culture, ¿where is the value of literature?
A.P.: Well, you just said it yourself. Your questions contain a big load. In this case it contains almost all of the answer because, in reality, what remains after your enumeration is the silence of reflection. The force of literature at this moment in time is like the space of silence in a house where you can no longer stand the fight with your wife, your aunt, the noise of the ill-mannered kids, the loud television with the game on, and to top it off, a construction worker repairing the street. At that point literature is like a still pool of water in the noise: the pool of reflection. Very few men today can reach that still pool through philosophy, which should accomplish that function, or poetry, but they have not been made accessible. Prose, literature in general—and here I’m including everything, without distinguishing between essay, novel, or theater—gives us that space of truth that is at the edge of the tumult. We are in a society where the public I lives and not the deep I, according to Bergson’s classification. Our interior I is sometimes received. Space is made for it: in high school, in family relations, in the university, in my profession. My public I opens spaces, more or less. But the private I is more and more isolated. There is less and less dialogue—for this reason we speak of a society in tumult—and it is an indigestible society because of its own media. The indigestion of a medium with extraordinary cultural possibilities that we still don’t know how to dominate: the audiovisual. So like everyone else, everywhere, one complains that the television is an idiot—we all know it—we also notice that it’s a medium created by us. We don’t know how to manage it. It’s like having gotten the atomic bomb without having a peace treaty: we would be finished. Well, audiovisuality is like the bomb without a peace agreement; it’s a threat to our very life. We’re giving it all our space and it’s destroying everything, from politics and democracy up unto our image of the world, of sex...etcetera. So, in these decades of indigestion, literature is a field of life, of reflection, where one finds the only true words about our time. A man can still be reflecting with a little serenity, risking errors, risking truths.
E.C.: That image of literature as a still pool in the noise of the world, or at least the search for that still pool, reminds me of Alejo Carpentier’s novel Los pasos perdidos. The protagonist searches for an open space in the middle of the South American jungle, outside of the modern world and its civilization, so that he can write a musical poem—a poem that he never finishes—and he ends up making “literature.”
A.P.: For me it is one of the most profound and exquisite novels that have been written in Latin America. It is, also, a lesson for all of those who don’t want to know America, those who underestimated our America believing that there is a first world before which we are practically nothing, and that we wouldn’t be anything more than a transition point towards that imitation. Those characters who come from the “first world” from Paris, who come from a refined civilization and encounter the race, the integral primitive who is capable of essential reactions, reactions that have been almost forgotten by the transvestitism and mimesis of “civilization” who confront in the land an originary cosmos, where man has to know how to survive...It seemed to me a magnificent lesson, a test and judgment about the human condition in modern society. Besides, it’s a criticism of modernity and of power itself. We are going to have to use Los pasos perdidos as a denouncement. It’s a magnificently written book, with an extraordinary synthesis of profound themes. In sum, I have complete admiration for Carpentier...I can’t say more.
E.C.: Literature is made of influences, and the influence of Carpentier and Lezama Lima, two stupendous writers, is clear in yours.
A.P.: The best Latin American literature is Cuban.
E.C.: The plenitude, the celebration of language, the break with all of the molds has come from them, hasn’t it?
A.P.: Of course, as you always say it...(laughs) the question says it all: it’s the celebration of language. It’s like the rumba had gone from dancing to words and had liberated us, just like the rumba liberates the poor European who gets in line and dances and sets himself free. In the same way, Cuban narrative liberated us from the conceptual prison, the hardness that came from the Spanish literature of the nineteenth century and the Generation of ’98, that was very hard...terrible. Because they were passionate writers but bad in the language sense. I mean, we love Baroja a lot, but what’s Baroja beside Carpentier?
E.C.: Yes, or Unamuno...I remember that terrible passage in El sentimiento trágico de la vida: “If consciousness is no more than a lightning flash between two eternities in darkness, life is execrable and is not worth living...” I mean, his disgrace, as a writer, is to remain faithful to the traps that his own concepts laid for him.
A.P.: That’s curious. Unamuno was a Spanish Basque, very rough, a great man, with integrity, and of an almost Biblical force and human quality, but he preferred to be a Protestant shepherd. Well, he wasn’t a Catholic either, because Catholicism is Roman, it’s been around for centuries, it’s been worn smooth by the centuries. However, in him there’s this terrible thing of being a shepherd and, at the same time, that nostalgia of being a Basque pagan, lifting boulders...the type of guy who splits a tree with his hatchet. Unamuno is a man who is full of contradictions; you love him, but he’s also a great sick one. Admirable, but sick. He would never have understood Lezama Lima. Reading Paradiso would have horrified him, for example, with its legitimation of sex, of the body, of celebration, of light...the type of Proustianism where the pain is integrated into the humor. It would have cost a Spaniard a lot of effort to get to that point.
E.C.: Is that the same as imagining, then, a problem in part with the Spanish prose of the twentieth century?
A.P.: It’s a very minor literature. Borges was right there. He infuriated the Spanish when he used to tell an anecdote from Lugones: Borges went to see Lugones once, and Lugones asked him: “What are you reading young man?,” to which Borges responded, in order to get along well with Lugones—he was very young and Lugones was very hard, rigorous, surly—that he was reading Quevedo and Valle-Inclán...Then Lugones answered: “But young man, you have to understand...that’s like if you told me your were reading Bulgarian literature; there is nothing worthwhile from those people. You have to read the Germans, the French, the English...” Well, Spanish literature is very poor. It has great heights of mysticism and fundamental greatness of language. But afterwards, all of the great literature of Spain gets weak and is going to be produced in America, except for the poets of the Generation of ’27, that are so interesting and intense, also softened by Darío.
E.C.: But Valle-Inclán is a master, don’t you think?
A.P.: Valle-Inclán is a genius of language, but also a very limited man. Although, I repeat, a great creator of language, and of an expressionist force that has no comparison. Really he is one of the great ones in that sense, and he joins the great American school, with the same right to join as Rulfo or Carpentier. But notice that, if you think about the great adventure of literature in the twentieth century, and you take Neruda, Joyce, Nietzsche, all of the writers of the Generation of ’98 are very poor as an interior adventure. Borges said it was a vacuous literature. If you read the—very admirable—Camilo José Cela, you admire his great creation of language, but behind that there is a basic hollowness. It’s very difficult for the Spaniard to arrive at an expression of the sacred, or the profound, of intensity that might make the literature interesting.
E.C.: And in the Latin American narrative, when is the great departure produced?
A.P.: With the creation of language that there is in El Señor Presidente by Asturias; in the first chapters there is a revolution. Our great literature is very recent, but already in Sarmiento there are glimpses of genius prose. If you take passages of Facundo and you read them normally—without knowing that they are from Sarmiento—you find an absolutely modern prose, contemporary, and of a vital force that is worthy of Valle-Inclán. So, I was saying that it exploded very recently: it’s set in motion in the nineteenth century with Darío and the modernist poets, who free our imagination. Once the mechanism of poetic imagination is liberated, the prose writers knew how to take up the challenge, although it took them a long time because the influence of the French novel was monstrous. In Argentina, for example, until 1940 when Marechal came out, there was no novel; novels didn’t exist. The best was that thing by Güiraldes, very well done, but it’s a gaucho...who gives moral advice. He seems like a Protestant gaucho or a gaucho from the Salvation Army. A gaucho who never stabs anyone...it’s impossible to believe it.
E.C.: He’s a gaucho who lacks “evil”, isn’t he?
A.P.: Yes, he lacks evil; besides, he recommends things, he teaches the boy, there’s not even any homosexualism...no, it’s a terrible thing. Well, it’s a good novel, but in any case it’s very late, from 1926, Don Segundo Sombra. Afterwards Rómulo Gallegos, Asturias...there’s a whole series of founding fathers. And afterwards come, of course, the greatest novels, by Carpentier, that come out late, the prose of Borges, Guimarães Rosa, which is very late—I think that he was publishing books in the 50’s. And then the genius of García Márquez, of Rulfo...All of it comes together very late and when it first appears it comprises the most alive literature of this century. Not even the North American literature until the Second World War—because afterwards it falls into great decadence—nor the German literature of the first decades of this century with Mann and Herman Brock, none of those come close to the tremendous force of Latin American literature, the creativity of the open workshop of language, the vital and devastating imagination. If you analyze Faulkner, he seems a great Latin American. A little hard, but a great Latin American. But when you read Caldwell or Thomas Wolfe, the thing is not there...Although they may be creators, they have been obscured by these Latin American presences that have a fuller metaphysical dimension. The Catholic religion gave our writers universality: Catholic means universal. And that Catholicism in religion had given them, besides, their idea of acting against the norm, their evidently free eroticism, an eroticism much freer than the one a Protestant universe could create. I don’t want to indulge in easy praise here; I’m only putting things in their place. It’s time someone said it, because since we are always underneath someone else’s power, we’re always last--the bottom of the jar...Latin American literature is a subject that’s studied as exotic, after studying the serious literature like Mr. Lenz, the terrible German, or Mr. Bell, or Mr. Bolnow, that North American trafficker from New York.
E.C.: The English critics consider you an exotic, a great writer in the realm of creation of language, but they keep trying to classify you inside of their literary canons.
A.P.: That’s how it is. It’s so enormously difficult for them to believe that behind an open poetics there can be a serious content. It’s the idea that serious things are said like poor Wittgenstein, castrating words, because he thought that only by eliminating language would he be able to say things. It was a great drama, that of a man so sad as Wittgenstein, the cyclist—because he went around on a bicycle all day but he didn’t have fun...he went around in an overcoat in the rain—this poor guy who grabbed onto words without realizing that the word is the water of God; there has to be an erotic, a sensual relationship to it. How can there be a castrating relationship, of holding it in, of imprisoning it?—“Let’s see, what do you mean by this? And this other thing?”—The castration is fatal. So, what was left in European criticism was all of the rationalist condemnation of the French novel. They couldn’t accept delirium.
I would like to add something as well about what we were saying about a North American or English critic who cannot understand or love the type of literature that is found in Daimón or Los perros del paraíso: there was a lot of criticism in favor of them, but the most interesting ones were the ones where, above all, they can neither understand nor tolerate that type of imagination. The type of imagination that isn’t showing off nor a mere external game nor an infantile one-upsmanship, but rather corresponds, as we know, to another poetic order. I was very calmed in my wanderings around New York when I found in the old bookstores, among the books that hadn’t sold, first, a copy of Rayuela, and, secondly, a copy of Paradiso in an edition that I don’t know who had the idea of editing and then abandoned...I don’t know how. And as for Guimarães Rosa don’t even think about it. I realized, then, above all with the failure of Rayuela—and Héctor Murena said this to me many years ago: he told me that they had published an edition with a large press run and in the end it had sold very badly—that there was a great difficulty in the Puritan Anglo-Saxon world in tolerating our imagination. Afterwards, traveling, learning, talking with people who live there, I realized how much a man, in order to be in the United States or England, has to hide his imagination a little bit. But when he is among Latin Americans, that same man who is controlled goes crazy and activates the most brilliant part of his personality. This is an experience that I have lived in critics, in writers, in people who have commented on it to me. Since then I was reassured because it would have worried me a lot if the imagination of Los perros del paraíso had been clearly tolerated.
I think we have a superiority, and I say it without boasting. In the same way that they are superior in other parts of life: in order, in technology, in computers, I have to say, without arrogance, that in the field of imagination, ours is more alive. We are people who have a more open dimension than theirs: in eroticism, in dance, in religion, in humor, I think we have a superiority. And I say this—I repeat, without boasting—after having lived thirty five years in different countries, the majority of them not Latino, like now. This issue came about because of the Mediterranean, Greco-Latin culture we inherited. We have to be proud if sometimes Rayuela can’t be understood in some countries. Of course we hope it happens in the future, but for right now, we have to know that that happens because we preserve an almost infantile gift: we haven’t killed the child, as Goethe wanted. He said that man is alive to the extent to which he keeps his adolescence, and all of Iberoamerican culture keeps its adolescent alive. We are a zone of hope for the world. Really, to our politicians who say that we should imitate other countries and be like the Swiss, I tell them that the Swiss should be like the Brazilians. And I say it without embarrassment, because what’s normal is for a Swiss person to tell people when he goes to Africa: “you have to be like the people in Bern,” and everywhere he says that. A presumption that comes from an almost racial attitude about culture. So the hour has come for us to speak about our gifts without shame. You have to say: “I, as a Latino, am better than you in this...I dance salsa better than you...”
E.C.: Another characteristic of Latin American literature is the fact that it is able to offer a valid vision of the world. The characters in your books are so Western: Alvar Nuñez, Columbus, Lope de Aguirre, Walther Werner, and they all receive an injection of another culture—America, Asia—and understand or try to understand...
A.P.: One, in the last instance, becomes a Communist because he believes in Communism, becomes a Nazi because he believes in Nazism, etcetera. So, I am a Latin Americanist, Iberoamericanist. I believe, really, that our culture is better at many things. I believe it viscerally. And I say it without any boasting—there is no English, North American or German present—I believe we have an extraordinary gift. A new era is being born in the world and we have an important part in this creation, a great contribution to make that is going to have to be heard; a contribution of human warmth, of depth, of equilibrium, of grace, of rhythm. Great values that come from aesthetics. We have rescued the Mediterranean world, the world of Latin-ness, to which we have added a new rhythm.
E.C.: Not only the Mediterranean legacy but, besides, the old wisdom that resides in Pre-Columbian cultures, sometimes called “not civilized.” Perhaps there too one finds an important part of Iberoamerican wisdom.
A.P.: That wisdom, as you say, I believe is a very important word. If we think that we haven’t had any wars during a century, that there are not memorable acts of cruelty among us—we haven’t bombarded Dresden, nor Hiroshima, nor the massacre of the Jews, nor the racism against blacks—this is very concrete. In Brazil you find a racial integration that comes from a Mediterranean humanism that’s very ancient and very deep, that the United States unfortunately did not have. Today, the black community of the United States is a community that is sick from exclusion, in a state of hatred, at war, which is unfortunate for that great people. But that’s not happening in Brazil. What this means is that in the human sense, we have tolerance; we have been a people of immigration, and we have tolerated everything foreign with admiration in the majority of cases. In sum, this is a contribution others don’t have, it’s not the other way around. Besides, it would never occur to an Argentinean, for example, to go out and kill Brazilians...(laughter) Of course not! We love them. And we have seen the hatred between French and Germans, the extermination in the ovens...these are the things of crazy people. That wouldn’t occur to anyone in Latin America; it can’t happen there. A little while ago in Germany six drunk teenagers set fire during the night to a house full of Turkish families. What happened? There were four or five deaths. This couldn’t happen in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela or Mexico; drunk adolescents making a pact to kill for racial reasons. It’s unimaginable. Let’s say it like that; it’s not that it happened or could happen, it’s unimaginable, it’s absurd. There might be a death because Boca Juniors lost and then they shot from a truck while crazy with fury, but to kill for racial reasons, premeditatedly, as is happening in various cities in Germany, or the contempt in Belgium between Flemish and Walloons, or the contempt for Africans...
E.C.: The resurgence of nationalism in Europe has a different aspect, it seems, from the case of Algiers that you mentioned before.
A.P.: Nationalism in Europe is a rejection. It denies the Other a place in the world. In this, and again this must be said clearly, we are superior. And this is a very deep source of morality; if you add to this a quality of life like you can have in some of these countries...One must remember that, in the end, we aren’t the most backward countries in the world. Argentina was the sixth biggest economic power in 1930; Brazil now occupies the eighth place among the industrial powers of the world; I mean, if you analyze it a little bit, it’s not that we have been denied technology.
E.C.: Have we achieved relatively stable democracies? What is the road to follow now?
A.P.: Democracy is a basic, fundamental element. We have the Iberian proclivity of not believing so much in democracy. And the man who believes in truth, or is in a moment of historical truth, doesn’t have much tolerance for the errors of the majority. Therefore, regarding democracy in Latin America, although it has been a fantastic conquest, we have to highlight its value. There have to be politicians who don’t make democracy into a stupid future, without direction and without union, but instead to transform it into an attractive power, oriented toward creativity, toward unity, so that democracy doesn’t mean a routine, a municipal daily grind. Well, that’s the challenge for everyone, not only in Latin America. But we’re on the right road. For the first time the Latin American presidents are in contact, and the integration of Argentina and Brazil is a truly important possibility.
E.C.: In various articles for many different newspapers you have questioned the role of the state today, especially in advanced liberal democracies, as something that represents the vacuum of power, culture and morality. Do you believe that there is a function for the state in that possible democracy?
A.P.: Yes, I believe in the state. Above all in the countries of Latin America that are developing. It’s only possible to substitute the notion of a people for the state. When there is an old people as in Spain, the community—Catalonia, Castile, the Basque Country—that is so strong in its historical tradition, limits and frames the task of the state. In young countries, developing ones like Brazil, Argentina, or the United States, the state has a very important function as a conformer of the nation: it takes care, it directs, it orients. The drama comes when the political class is under the state. It’s like a person who doesn’t know how to drive and they give him a twelve-cylinder Ferrari...then, that man is in a bad situation. And this is what happens with political elites: they don’t have a philosophy of the state, nor a political philosophy, nor the generosity to imagine what can be done with power. That is the drama of the political class of today that is underneath the reality. It comes forth with democracy, but once it gets in power it can’t exercise it because it doesn’t know the instruments for driving the state, nor the objectives of power: philosophy, orientation, unity, generosity, a sense of the good, support for culture because they know it...That is the crisis of our time.
E.C.: So how do we educate the political class and produce the cultural revolution?
A.P.: I don’t know. How do we produce artists? Who comes up with an artist like Picasso? I don’t know. The sociologists used to have answers, but I have realized that they speak when things have already passed them by; they don’t know how to see them coming.
E.C.: Besides, in many cases, sociology has been dangerously close to vulgar, dull journalism, and an agent of a state that hasn’t responded to the needs of our time and our culture. And—a curious fact as well—when writers, artists, and poets speak of the end of modernity, I don’t know politicians who mention that. Do you know any?
A.P.: No, they never say anything. Perhaps only Havel, who is a more interesting person and isn’t a normal politician, but who also unfortunately is no longer governing. However, in general, the discourse of all politicians is beneath that of creative consciousness; it’s beneath the quality of ideological refinement, and, above all, it’s beneath that of the necessities of the world. They are only practicing the art of seduction in order to gain or conserve power, but they don’t know that power is a vacuum because they don’t know how to give it content. Disappointment with politics comes because it doesn’t reach its maximum potential. A dangerous drama this one of the end of the twentieth century.