Dialogues with Abel Posse

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 fi nd 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.

Dialogues with Abel Posse
By Edgardo Cora
Translated from the Spanish by Wendell Smith

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...