From his columns, every week, he actively intervenes in the debate on the National reality and is one of the most heard voices. She has fervent admirers and fierce detractors, who flood the networks to applaud or attack her, after each of her statements. Beatriz Sarlo, at 80 years old (just completed on March 31), is one of the intellectuals known in Argentina, able to read in social and political key any everyday situation, from the pandemic to inclusive language.
What few know is that Sarlo is also one of the specialists in Argentine literature most important in the country. He was not only in charge of the chair corresponding to this matter in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBAfor 20 years, but also was a fundamental reference in the intellectual formation of many Argentines.
with the titleor “Argentine literature classes”the Siglo XXI publishing house has just published a book that brings together the classes that Sarlo taught between 1984 and 1988, when the UBA entered one of its brightest moments, after the night of the dictatorship. This book was the starting point for a long talk with NOTICIAS, in which we delved into the lesser-known area of Beatriz Sarlo’s thought; in her history, her training, her favorite authors and the reasons why the media beat academic activity in her job preferences.
NEWS: How was the context in which you taught these classes that are published today, as head of Argentine Literature?
Beatrice Sarlo: I went back to college exactly 18 years after I left. I had graduated in 1966, I was a first class assistant in Latin. The coup d’état came (which overthrew Arturo Illia) and for people like me the university was closed. He didn’t even go into the library. I came back in ’83, as a professor. Like me, many of us went straight from assistants to professors. I usually laugh with my American or English friends because they see that mine is an unlikely curriculum, which can only happen in countries that have lived through the Argentine experience. What I remember perfectly is that the first day we went back to teaching we were terrified.
NEWS: How was your training in those years, outside the university?
sarlo: Reading the bibliography. My background is a tripod of Roland Barthes, Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. And I grew up alone. Or in dialogue with those who were my students in the study groups of the dictatorship. And the people from the magazine “Punto de Vista” (which Beatriz Sarlo created and directed), which was very important in my life. Carlos Altamirano, Teresa Gramuglio and Hugo Vezzetti. “Punto de vista” began to come out in 1978 because we thought that a period had passed in which we could already take risks. I distributed it with a bag. We had financial aid that came from another pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist party, which was the Communist Vanguard. But, materially, we did it ourselves.
NEWS: Where were you active at the time of the coup?
sarlo: In the Revolutionary Communist Party, but was thinking of leaving it due to strong political disagreements. And I gave it up after a few months. Having been a militant is something that marks you.
NEWS: Where did you work for a living?
sarlo: In the Editorial Center of Latin America. Boris Spivakow (owner of the publishing house) made an effort to employ all of us who couldn’t find a job elsewhere. He gave us collections to run. And, although he paid little, he paid and defended his employees. And it was a place where we were all friends.
NEWS: Going back to your classes, what place did Borges occupy in Argentine literature at that time and what was the situation of international readings of his work.
sarlo: At the beginning of the ’80s, Borges was the only Argentine who was in European bookstores. In Paris, an important French magazine, he had already dedicated a special number to her. But he was not yet the Argentine flag of literature.
NEWS: And what does Borges represent for current authors?
sarlo: I don’t feel its aesthetic presence in current writers. There has been an emergence of a more referential, more representative literature that does not need Borges to write itself. I take it for granted, and I could swear to it, that everyone who writes in Argentina has read Borges, but he is not the figure that marks a path.
NEWS: Is Rodolfo Walsh the author who best communicates with the present?
sarlo: Without a doubt, Walsh did something for the first time and without intending it, because that was where his talent lay. A cross between journalism and representation, which touches on some fictional, narrative and character-building procedures. He did it in “Operation Massacre”. The new Argentine journalism is born in “Operation Massacre”.
NEWS: And Juan José Saer?
sarlo: Saer is central to writers and critics, I don’t know if it’s central to a large audience. He would have loved to sell many copies, but it seems to me that he did not sell them.
NEWS: Maybe because he’s a difficult writer.
sarlo: There are several types of readers. There is a type of reader who, once he crosses the first obstacle, realizes that he is entering into a relationship with a subject that he is not going to find anywhere else. If he goes through Saer’s novel “Nobody, nothing, never” or starts with the simplest, “Responso”, he meets a great writer. For me, he is the greatest writer after Borges, in the second half of the 20th century. It is like the first effort of a sports training. The issue is how much time are you willing to put into establishing a relationship with the page of a book. The bestseller does not ask you for anything, it is very generous. I have a lot of respect for those who write and read bestsellers. But, how much time are you willing to give to read Borges’s “Theme of the traitor and the hero”? In that story, if you are not willing to give it a lot of time, to think, to think about it, to see if you understood, to explore all the contradictory relationships, you do not manage to establish a relationship.
NEWS: What objections have you made as a literary critic?
sarlo: I have been criticized for setting up the “Saer operation”. Put in evidence, in the magazine “Punto de Vista”, that we had a great writer who had been overlooked by educated academic critics and by the market. I pride myself on that.
NEWS: Why did you decide to abandon your professorship?
sarlo: I decided when I turned 20. I entered in ’83 and I left in 2003.
NEWS: And when did you begin to work with more continuity in the media?
sarlo: I was always pulled; for politics, for literature, for cinema and, without a doubt, for journalism, for writing in a way that would reach more people than a book of literary criticism. I tell you an anecdote of someone who saw it before me. In 1983 I received a surprising call from Jacobo Timerman. Until that moment I had only written a little note in Clarín, after the dictatorship ended, and I did “Punto de Vista”. He asked me what I was doing and I told him that he was very happy because he had entered the University of Buenos Aires. He replied: “I agree with Delich that you don’t go anymore and you come to work with me” (Francisco Delich was then rector of the UBA). That was the moment when my destiny could have taken a somersault. I told him no.
NEWS: Does it affect you that many people ignore how important your academic career is?
sarlo: No. I receive so many insults since social networks were installed, that if someone tells me that they like my shoes it makes my day. When you become a public figure you have to shield yourself. Sometime we should cross that daily insult that I receive for the ideology that they attribute to me, with my character as a woman. And of a woman who does not claim that character. That was a very forgotten form of feminism, from the decade in which I began my adult life, the ’60s. I would not have claimed or accepted any quota law.
NEWS: Even today, the participation of women in universities is still very low once they enter postgraduate studies and research.
sarlo: This is true because the reproduction of the human species is still basically in charge of women, even if you belong to the middle classes. This situation forces you to choose if you are going to have children or not. I decided not to have them because I realized very early that this applied to my class, unless you were a multimillionaire.
NEWS: One of his books where those two worlds in which he moves clearly appear is “Passion and the exception”, where Borges is present but also Evita and Montoneros.
sarlo: This is me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t finish doing anything right. My head works, I wouldn’t say chaotic, but it is binary, intertwining thoughts and information. There are many people like me and I could attribute it to the conditions of the dictatorship in which we live.
NEWS: In relation to the cracks of the past and the present, and not only to the political cracks, are you surprised by the level of ferocity that the confrontations have today?
sarlo: That’s social media. It is played with white chips and black chips. Little is thought and much is qualified. My experience is that the dialogue with Peronist intellectuals was always different. With Horacio González, the last time we shared a round table at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, we went together; although a while before we had argued hard. If social media crashes all the time, I have to think about what that device is like. But in addition, today there is a great crisis that begins with education.
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