An illustrious rationality runs through the essay
American Delirium
(Taurus), by Carlos Granés.
Although the author points out something not so obvious: that the influence of creators, artists and intellectuals has been responsible for many of the excesses that have caused catastrophes almost exclusively on the continent where this Colombian was born (Bogotá, 48 years old).
The truth is that both the positive influence and the evil side of creation in political action have existed since the beginning of time throughout the world.
From Greece to the post-truth era.
But few had approached it with such skill in the Latin American case, where Granés, a resident of Madrid since he settled to study Anthropology and obtain his doctorate with studies at Berkeley, has established that multitude of communicating vessels from the 20th century to today, eternally opening various debates. Unfinished with your essay.
Since its publication in 2022,
The invisible fist, Savages of a new era
or
The invention of paradise.
Granés vindicates impurities.
What's more, he believes that the aspiration to paradise lost has been the downfall of a Latin America more devoted to poets than to statistics.
I wanted to reassure him.
Why?
Well, because what you consider a delirium typical of Latin America, that messianism that has inspired horrors left and right, is not a trauma exclusive to you.
It has happened in the world since the pre-Socratics.
Nothing new... Perhaps what has happened in the American continent is that it keeps getting a little out of hand?
Yes, perhaps in Latin America there is a certain chaos in terms of fantasy.
It is a place of ideas, where these have been quite important, but many times we were not aware of the consequences of certain approaches taken to extremes, which led to cataclysms.
And that is seen, above all, in the twenties, when poets, intellectuals and journalists met in cafes to flirt with what were then extremist ideas: fascism and communism in Europe.
Well, that's what I perhaps miss in your book.
The relationship between Wagner and Hitler or Mussolini and the poet D'Annunzio.
Perhaps he should have cited these creators more as precursors of ideas than tyrants?
I quote Marinetti more because he had a lot of influence in Latin America through Futurism: from the Caribbean to the Andes.
That promise of novelty, of building a new man with different horizons, is a treat for poets.
Have you written this book to warn from that part of the world that polarization is a global problem, engendered by poets?
One of the theses of this book is that we, in this sense, have not left the 20th century, that we are still tied to it.
And yet, what has happened in Europe with the invasion of Ukraine?
That Putin has suddenly led us back to the invasion of the Sudetenland or Poland with a pre-Cold War logic, that is, that Europe is also forcibly returning to the past?
Exactly.
See how it is not an exclusive problem of Latin America...
Well yes, because that scenario is typical of the 20th century.
I thought it was almost exclusively Latin American, that it was related to inspirations like Cuba.
And it turns out that no, that there is Russia, China...
The United States… Is that country in a hiatus with Biden or do you think they will be able to resolve their attraction to the abyss?
Trump turned the United States into an unpredictable country.
His policy was isolationist, he was in tune with nationalist leaders worldwide, who share power in areas of influence.
He didn't give a damn what Putin did in his zone or China in his.
"I doubt the spirit of those who call themselves revolutionaries. Castro was more of a nationalist, like Chávez or Maduro, than a leftist," says Carlos Granes.
Gianfranco Tripodo
What if we thought of Trump as a good employee of
Putin
?
He was about to destroy
NATO
and leave him free track.
It seemed like an assignment in the middle of a strategy with a useful fool.
Could be.
With America in the hands of Trump and Putin unopposed, we would be scared to death.
we are.
Yes, but with Trump, even more.
How will this return to the dynamics of the Cold War affect Latin America?
It places these governments that call themselves leftist in Latin America not as such, but as anti-Yankee or anti-Western, because what does Putin have as a leftist?
Nothing.
How are they alike?
In nationalism and authoritarianism, which in the case of Putin connects with Stalinism and Tsarism, not with the left.
In that, his speech fighting against liberal cosmopolitanism, one of the great enemies of Latin American nationalism, apart from the communists, comes in handy.
There is nothing they hate more than a Jew, a communist or a liberal.
Always for the same reason: because they bring foreign ideas that dilute national values.
That is why I always doubt the spirit of those who call themselves revolutionaries.
Castro was more of a nationalist, like Chávez or Maduro, than a leftist.
Was communism an opportunism for them?
A strategic trade-off.
By allying themselves with a world power they felt protected.
What happens is that all these phenomena are produced in a reality that needs to be transformed.
The problem in Latin America continues to be inequality.
Thats the big problem.
The liberals have done some things well: purge the institutions, that the law is respected, it is important.
But, of course, it is necessary to include the marginalized sectors of the population, which on the continent are many and have become the great bet of populism.
Populism seizes that banner, degenerates into disastrous experiences like Venezuela, but that is not why all the left should fall into the same bag.
What about Lula's first stage in Brazil or Mujica's?
Doesn't it generalize?
You claim the role of Allende in Chile in this spectrum.
Little more.
Yes, even Lula, in his first stage, lifted a lot of people out of poverty, he didn't confront international institutions, he was a pragmatic guy.
His problem began with corruption, it was his weak point, to which was added the economic crisis.
His option fell apart and was replaced by another much more worrying one with Bolsonaro: militarist, evangelical, denialist, messianic...
Even in the era of the avant-garde there is an attitude of disdain towards the United States from Latin American creators, and not towards Europe.
What does the change in attitude of the writers of the
boom
mean when, without prejudice, they vindicate Faulkner or Hemingway together with the European avant-garde and a Latin singularity?
That is the key that gives rise to the great impact of the
boom
.
Their great innovation is based on the fact that they are not afraid of technical influences.
Notice that, in the avant-garde, someone like Huidobro, known to everyone in Paris, from Picasso to the surrealists, confessed to knowing only one North American author: Edgar Allan Poe.
The writers of the
boom
open their cosmopolitanism and accept influences, that their work is nourished, contaminated...
It is filled with bastards...
Exactly, I really like the term "contamination", inasmuch as I believe that Latin America is an impure place and the search for purity has been its downfall.
I claim all that: impurity, syncretism, influence, hybridization.
I claim all this because, simply, without those elements it is an idealized place that will never exist.
To what extent did the
boom
traumatize later generations and give rise to other currents like crack and McOndo?
Later generations stop carrying their environment on their shoulders as if it were a burden or a curse.
That had its run, it made noise, but it didn't last long.
I claim that a Latin American does not have the obligation to talk about his world and not address others, about any topic.
He doesn't have to be a slave to them.
This condemnation of the Latin American to talk about his own has reduced our voice to face global issues.
Has there been a generational agreement there?
I think so.
It is provided by Roberto Bolaño, with a brutal return of Latin America to territories that the
boom
had not explored.
The space in which, during the avant-garde, creators were fascinated with evil, fascism and totalitarianism rescues those presences that walked around in a somewhat enigmatic way and turns them into characters in their novels.
In
Nocturno de Chile,
Bolaño shows that civilization and barbarism coexisted in that territory.
History proves him right, many of those who promoted violence on the continent were educated, well-read people.
Through culture, an arrangement of our societies was not achieved, as many believed.
I calm him down again, this is what happened in Europe with the Nazis and with certain left-wing intellectuals who supported Stalin.
You do not represent a rarity in that sense.
It was always believed that our problem was one of education or cultural influence.
That myth explodes in some of Bolaño's novels.
We believed that a poet could not be bad, that he could not represent more than an angel, a saint.
And what's up, what's up... The myth of healing through art is a story, or are we not in a trade where we know the people we work with?
What a hobby, using culture to whiten.
Well!
Beginning with the Mexican revolution, there it was seen in a brutal way.
When the cannons stop rumbling and the caudillos have to become politicians, they use the vehicle of culture.
And that is entrusted to Vasconcelos.
What do you think of this fashion for political scientists that has spread to politicians and later to journalists who fall into the trap of using the term
culture war
instead of what it is, an ideological issue?
Don't they thus misrepresent the meaning?
They are ideological wars, true.
I don't know if a politician can give culture wars.
Something like this is waged from civil society to promote changes in values.
The fact is that you can start it and you don't know where it takes you.
A cultural war, for me, is the one that Dadaism waged against nationalism.
If a politician calls a current cultural war, he fills it with connotations in his field, you already know what he is after.
And there it loses its value.
"This Latin American obsession with being victims is a curse that has not helped us at all," says Carlos Granes.
Gianfranco Tripodo
Allow me a twist, let's go to Perón.
Specifically, Evita.
How was it possible that someone with a mink and a pearl necklace on the balcony became queen of the shirtless?
It is that Eva Duarte could be a mediocre actress in her career, but great in life and on the balconies.
She to the point of turning her, in collusion with Perón, public life into a melodrama.
She made them believe that he was going to care about them.
Thus began that drift, that fiction with one foot in the reality that they would protect the people against the agents of foreign powers and the country-sellers.
It must be pointed out that they had a very clear social vocation.
Millions of dollars were invested in programs, but it is that fascism also had it.
The state broke.
They did not follow the guidelines of economic rationality, but of that fiction that they themselves built from redeeming.
The story, that is, another word very similar to political scientists, which only speaks of the construction of the lie as opposed to the facts.
Perón, in that, is it the brain, the one that writes the work?
Apart from the fact that he has continued in his country as a solution to the left and right, isn't Chavismo an invention inspired by him more than others?
Indeed, Chavismo is much more Peronist than Castroist.
Just as in Mexico the PRI was also, but it's over and I don't think it will return, Peronism is very much alive.
This reinforces my thesis that in Latin America we have not materialized leftist options, but rather nationalists disguised as leftists.
Where that nationalism predominates, populism is fertile.
It has two sides: one vertical, elitist, patriotic and virile, but also horizontal, emancipatory, and they play both cards at the same time.
Once again I have to calm you down: I can give you an infinite number of current examples in Europe.
But it started there, in Latin America.
No man, no.
Well, not populism, but a certain form of it.
A reconversion of the philofascist into a populist with the appearance of a democrat.
With Perón, precisely.
He is the first who insists on changing the uniform for a suit and tie, for calling elections, and not knocking down the gate of the palace with the tanks and, from within, start demolishing the institutions.
The three bases of power starting with changing the Constitution.
That was invented by Perón.
And it has been replicated.
Well, you have convinced me almost completely.
Another aspect that you highlight and about which you make a fantastic reading is stubbornness, something very present in the life and work of
García Márquez.
It is that stubbornness is like delirium.
In the hands of an artist it makes for great things, and in the hands of a tyrant, downright hair-raising.
It is fundamental in García Márquez, almost all of his characters are stubborn.
He poeticizes stubbornness from
The colonel has no one to write
to
Love in the time of cholera.
He is passionate about it as a character quality that enables people to achieve their goals.
The problem is that he also admired her in politics.
For example, as she described Torrijos, stubborn as a mule and bold as a tiger.
Like Fidel Castro, the most stubborn in Latin America, willing to lead his country even to ruin in order to insist on a failed project.
That fascinated her about him.
Like the colonel who waits, he waits and won't sell the cock until he's done eating shit.
Let's talk about Ernesto Laclau, guru of populism.
Beyond his theories, what he has provided is a somewhat burdensome ideologization of language.
Has it been effective or does it mess us up?
The important thing in it is to establish a social division between allies and enemies, people and anti-people.
That is already a linguistic construction and beginning to intervene in the social field around concepts.
Casta, pitiyanqui, worm, are operations of resignification.
That's where it starts.
It is also successful on the extreme right.
But it leads to a dogmatic and dangerous puritanism.
Frightening.
That Latin American obsession with being victims, a curse that has not helped us at all, has even spread to the north and to Trump's speech.
He has turned the white man from a victimizer into a victim, by technological revolutions and those who come to take their jobs.
And it works great.
He gives the right to storm the Capitol.
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