“What defines power is its ability to present its story as the only possible one”

2023-05-08 23:09:52

How does one become an American writer? There is no plan, beyond writing in English and having been impregnated with the masterpieces of the American literary canon. Despite his name, Hernan Diaz (Buenos Aires, 1973) he has ended up being perceived there as one of his own. It doesn’t matter that he was born in Argentina, that his Spanish is completely Buenos Aires and that the exile of his parents made him grow up in Sweden. This professor of literature at Columbia became known with the extraordinary ‘A Far Away’, a metaphysical ‘western’, and has redoubled the bet with ‘Fortuna‘ (Anagram / Periscope) who opted for the Booker y has won the pulitzer. The novel is built as a kind of literary Rubik’s cube that brings together four different versions, and sometimes opposite, of the same story, the portrait of a powerful financial magnate who knew how to weather and profit from the Crack of 29. A ‘ Citizen Kane’ who in the eyes of the readers has just become a kind of Wizard of Oz.

This is a novel that is narratively based on the subject of money. Why were you interested?

The spur was trying to deal with this theme, omnipresent in the entire tradition of 19th century realism, capable of reaching the present. It interested me because it always appears in a sublimated way. Most of the time we see more of the consequences, the effects of money, than its production, and that is because it has become a great social taboo.

It was about making something visible that hasn’t been talked about, right?

Studying on the subject allowed me to delve into issues that for me ended up being essential. Basically, what kind of narrative does money generate, what kind of voices are excluded from that discourse, and how do those narratives affect our daily lives.

One of the things that this novel reveals is that power has its own way of narrating events.

I would still say more. What defines power is its ability to present one of several stories as the only possible one. In general we think that literature has a servile function with respect to political power that can control it based on patronage or patronage. But you also have to think that political power needs stories to be able to stay on its feet. It is this back and forth that interests me.

Historians teach us that facts that seemed to be indisputable turn out, after critical work, to be mere discursive effects.

Is telling the same event through four types of stories with very different narrators a mistrust of the truth?

Truth is always a construction and is mutable. Historians teach us this all the time, facts that seemed to be absolutely true and indisputable turn out, after critical work, mere discursive effects. Until not too many decades ago we all believed that there was an objective truth to our past and now we discover that perhaps that needs to be re-examined. In general terms, I distrust those who say that the truth does not exist, but also those who believe they are in possession of it. I would say that the truth lies in some discomfort between these two places.

That discomfort is a path for unofficial narrations and that in the case of this novel has to do with the history of women.

For me it was very important to highlight that women have been completely excluded, at least in the United States, which is the part I know the most, from these processes of capital accumulation. The world of finance is a very masculine world. The archives of the wives of the great magnates are totally relegated to the Libraries. They are unopened. Nobody consults them. To this day they remain silent. This was so because historically women were only assigned the role of wife or victim. Until the secretaries showed up.

Secretaries are the ones who keep secrets… from men. One of them, Ida Partenza, is the narrator of one of these stories.

That of secretaries is a new phenomenon that was born in the 20s of the last century when women could join the workforce. They are employees who can aspire to a middle-class life on their own without having to marry. It is an important phenomenon.

I needed the patriarchy to be embodied in a man of the left to see how deeply misogynistic politics cut across the ideological and class spectrum.

Ida feels excluded as a woman both from the discourse of power and from the discourse of her father, a man linked to anarchism and Marxism.

This is a novel about patriarchy and therefore for me it was key that the patriarch also incarnate as a man of the left to see how this deeply misogynistic politics crosses the entire ideological and class spectrum. There is a left-wing machismo with a particular perfume that I know very well.

I guess you will have really enjoyed writing this novel that works like a construction game and whose true figure is not seen until the end.

It was fun, I am interested in novels that ask questions about their own form. One of my favorite moments in world literature is when Don Quixote, in the second part of the book, holds the first part of ‘Don Quixote’ in his hand. That is something that in my adolescence blew my mind and my novel is full of this type of detail. I could also feel the pleasure of doing a novel à la Henry James or Edith Wharton in the first part, something that would be impossible to do without inventing a framework to justify it.

This novel will end up being a series in whose project Kate Winslet has been involved. The adaptation will not be easy.

It won’t be, but a series does fit somewhat into the book format, with all these different parts that will allow the different tones and textures to be translated into different film genres. So the first part could be a King Vidor movie and the second, something similar to a documentary.

I see you’ve gotten involved in the project.

I am not going to write it but I have been part of the selection process of who is going to be the scriptwriter and I will be able to work very closely with the director, Kate and the producers. Everyone deliberately uses the word ‘great’ when talking about this project, so yeah, I’m expecting a lot.