Ficción y Política

In “Ficción y Política”, the Argentinian writer Vicente Batista and the Northern Irish writer Glenn Patterson discuss the relationship between fiction and politics in their countries of origin.Andrew Graham-Yooll, acting as moderator, introduces the topic by referring to some similarities between both countries. According to him, these differ greatly in their racial stock and in the roots oftheir conflicts, but there are, however, points in common -the most significant one being the domestic conflicts referred to as “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the dictatorship in Argentina.Patterson opens the panel by expanding on the problem of wording already mentioned by Graham-yooll. He refers to the lack of agreement about what to call the events and even the country. In turn, inthe period from 1969 to 1994, words such as “unity” or “union” were appropriated by one party to the conflict or the other and became politically loaded. The act of writing literature in thosecircumstances, thus, was both a way of gaining access to those words and a political act. Batista presents a definition of “fiction” as a synonym for “lie”. This connects fiction and politics, since theyare both related to the act of lying or seducing. Paradoxically, in spite of their fictitious nature, books are seen as dangerous elements by those who want to subdue a people. In response toPatterson, Batista concedes the fact that every text is essentially fictitious but, he argues, there are also choices on the part of both the author and the reader of the text. Argentinian literature beganwith deeply political and violent works, such as Maritn Fierro, Matadero and Facundo. More than a decade after the dictatorship, however, there are few literary works on that conflict due to the needto detach in time and to the apprehension about creating a fictional work after the tortured ones have given their testimony. In answering this last argument, Patterson adds the concept of...