Edgardo Scott (writer, translator, psychologist) is in the Paris apartment where he spends part of the week. He awaits the arrival from Argentina of his partner, the writer Ariana Harwicz, and their son, Elliot, to go to the house they rent in the countryside, two hundred kilometers from the French capital, because the boy has to start classes. there.
Scott (46) emigrated almost eight years ago and something of that leap that took him from Lanús to Europe is already beginning to permeate his literature. For now, four of the stories of Imaginarythe delicious book that has just been published in Argentina, has French characters and settings.
But others don’t. In others they persist the climate, conflicts and landscapes of the suburban geography you know best. And, of course, the symbols of his small homeland also persist, such as the plane installed on the boulevard of Remedios de Escalada Avenue that pays tribute to the heroes of the Malvinas and that always intrigued him.
In a few hours he has to attend the office. 90% of his patients are French. A symptom of adaptation. But the day the owner of the corner bar, knowing he was Argentine and believing him to be alone, invited him to watch the World Cup final in Qatar at his business, he said no.
“I thanked him, of course, but inside I was thinking: ‘Tomorrow I want to break your head,’” Scott confesses, laughing. The thing is that distance deepens some cultural traits. Like the football passion, which although it always existed in him (he is an Independiente fan) was triggered by his foreignness.
The epic match on December 18, 2022 saw him at his Parisian home with friends and family, but He refused to let it be on television with a French story. She threatened to lock herself in the bathroom and watch the final on her cell phone with Argentine audio. It was not necessary: they gave her the pleasure and she enjoyed – through a pirate connection – the triumph of the Scaloneta with Creole poetics.
While the tales of Imaginary They make their journey in Argentina, the translation of their essay Walkers is something to talk about in France, where it was glowingly reviewed by the newspaper Liberation and by the cultural magazine Waiting for Nadeau. Scott, today, is an author who balances two countries, two realities, two cultures.
-Why did you go to live in France?
-For two things that came together. On the one hand, I felt that in many ways I had closed a cycle in Argentina. I had just moved to an apartment in Remedios de Escalada, I had changed the car, I had taken out large loans, I had gone to Ireland, because at that time I was already working on the translation of Dublineses of Joyce and, approaching 40, I wanted to experience living abroad. I always imagined it would be in London.
-A little because of the language and another little because it is my idealized city in the world. The plan was to go through a scholarship or an artistic residency, and I was planning that when I met Ari, who was already living in France. We began to have a long-distance relationship that lasted almost a year, and after that year and seeing that things could move forward, I decided to travel there myself. I wanted to go to London and ended up in Paris. I hit the stick. In 2018 Elliot was born and, as they say, I put down roots.
-Today there is a kind of idealization of the Argentine who emigrates: abroad he is going to fulfill the dream that is not given to him here. Aren’t we exaggerating?
-Surely. I would say: we Argentines are exaggerated, for better or worse. Exaggeration is our nature to address everything from a football match to a political, economic or vital situation. I agree that there is a glorification of the emigrant that, of course, does not coincide at all with the real life that awaits you here, having said this after having lived almost eight years in France and in Paris no less. I say “nothing less” because Paris is a place highly fantasized by our culture. Having met a lot of emigrants who have lived here for ten, twenty, thirty years, including artists, like Marilú Marini or Edgardo Cozarinsky, I think that Fantasy does not coincide at all with the reality of being a foreigner, of being a foreigner in a large European city and of being a foreigner, specifically, in Paris.
-What is the hardest side of that reality?
-Today there is no moment of welcoming foreigners anywhere in the world and, without a doubt, not in Europe either. In movement there is a general resistance. Also, a resistance I would say psychological, type Dogvillethe film by Lars von Trier: every stranger is considered suspicious. You have to see what he does, what he wants, how he behaves. It’s not easy. Of course, one finds in the country of arrival people who may be friendlier, more loving, and people who are not, not at all. No one who has gone through this experience can understand it. It’s like fatherhood or motherhood: a non-transferable experience. And when you go to live in another country, which on top of that has another language and another culture, it is worse, it is harder.
-For a French person, first you are a Latino as long as you speak Spanish. And second, you are part of the same imaginary continent, Latin America, where everything is mixed. The typical French anecdote that confuses Brazil with Argentina and Argentina with Chile. In that sense there is a great asymmetry between what we know about European culture and what Europeans, particularly the French, know about ours. It has happened to me: a patient who knows that I am Argentine and that I always visit Buenos Aires in August, asks me: “Is it hot there?” Either he doesn’t know which hemisphere Argentina is in or he assumes we are in the tropics. The Paris-Buenos Aires bridge is not double-lane.
-In addition, taking into account the new soccer rivalry, an Argentine in France may seem like a soldier lost behind enemy lines.
-More or less (laughs). The specialized press, such as The team o So Footgives importance to the scandal that arose from the World Cup final, to the small scandals, to the whistles at Dibu Martínez in Lyon, but French culture does not feel so much about football. Among other things, because as some Frenchman once explained to me, football is a lower class sport. The national sport is rugby. You see more mobilization on the street and in bars when the rugby World Cup is played than when the soccer World Cup is played. Of course, the place of football has been growing in the heat of the successes obtained in the last thirty years, but in France it still does not have the tradition and weight that it does have in Argentina.
-How does the experience of living in France filter into your literature?
-In the least imposed way possible. All the fiction he had published until now had been written and set in Argentina. The problems of adapting to France, having had a child, the need to learn another language, led me, perhaps, to write essays, criticism and non-fiction. That’s why, for me, Imaginario is important because half of those stories are new and there are four whose stories take place here. But there was never any deliberation. I was letting the thing come.
-I always write with life. Life moves, experiences change and end up impacting you. That’s why I say that Imaginary It is my most Cortazarian book, in the sense that if there is something that happened to Cortazar, and that did not happen to Copi or Saer, it is that his life in France began to appear in his characters and in his landscapes.
-Anyway, there is always Lanús. You have it in stories like Bentley o History of the airplane…
-It is always there and it will be very difficult for it to disappear, because I do not have the professional writer’s intention of going international either. That is, that my fictions and my writing can fit everywhere. Another facet that does not interest me is becoming an ambassador of some exoticism. I follow a process closely linked to my own literary tradition and, later, to life. At that intersection it is very difficult to deliberately change the landscape just like that. In fact, for example, I fantasize about writing a chronicle book about two crimes. One occurred a year or so ago on the outskirts of Paris, when some police officers killed a boy who did not stop at a checkpoint, a typical trigger-happy case that moved me and that occurred just before my penultimate trip to Argentina. The other crime happened later, in Lanús, when at seven in the morning they killed a girl to steal her cell phone on the way to school. It was in Villa Diamante, ten blocks from my house. The intention is to do something half Walsh with both facts. As you will see, There is a tradition and certain interests that are readjusted to the new place, but that also continue to have traces of where one comes from.
The ignoring
Last year, Scott published professional writeran essay that read like a drop of acid in the Argentine literary scene. From the title, He characterized a type of author more concerned with fame, invitations to festivals and travel than with literature. A courtier, at last, of the circuits that ensure “visibility.” A tilingo, if you will, that is worth it because of its poses and that does not make waves: it only splashes the flag on the topics of the moment. Scott quotes Elías Canetti to define the three characteristics that a great writer should have: “Be original, summarize his time, criticize his time.”
-Did you fight with many colleagues over that essay?
-(Series). Unfortunately no. I would have liked… But in the book I already anticipated that something like that was going to happen. A tactic of the professional writer and the circuit is to ignore him. Invisibility is the best way to treat badly. My previous books were reviewed by almost all the major media and I was very struck by the fact that Professional Writer went unnoticed. Since I, precisely, dedicate myself to reading those things, it seems symptomatic to me. What there was was a lot of private messages from writers that I knew more or knew less, but who told me: “You don’t know how I’m laughing” or “it’s great that you wrote this.” But on a public level, I gave more interviews for the Stevie Wonder book.
-Does today’s writer have another option other than also worrying about his own marketing on the networks? In other words: living today is not living in the networks?
-I guess you don’t have it. That is also true. It’s hard for me to think of a professional writer who doesn’t fall into that category. But It depends on where you fit in the industry. It was one thing when we didn’t know where they lived or what face authors like Thomas Pynchon or Salinger, who occupied a central place in the industry, had…
-I think that from my generation onwards the conviction spread that this was the only way to establish oneself in the literary industry. The professionalization of the artist, because this is not exclusive to literature, has a bit of the sign of becoming a celebrity. It is seen in the plastic arts, in music, in cinema, not to mention. It is a spectacularization of culture, which denaturalizes that more personal, more intimate relationship with art, and becomes an absolutely public relationship, where what the authors want to be seen of them is permanently displayed. Life is complex and multiple, but you see that there is a policy in these authors to demonstrate on networks different issues of their life that are articulated with their work. That is what is now almost inescapable.
-You are on the networks.
-Yeah. It is a way of not preventing people from knowing what we do, even getting closer to readers, but with a behavior, let’s say, more linked to literature. That does not have the impact of artists who campaign for a way of life, an ideology, a cultural-ideological consumption that is what the times demand for them to start cutting tickets.