Ainda a propósito de Robert Penn Warren

deixo-vos este site onde podereis ler uma entrevista por ele concedida a Eugene Walter:

http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4868

Curiosamente, esta entrevista decorreu em Roma, no apartamento de Ralph Ellison, um dos escritores sobre os quais iremos falar em breve. Corria o ano de 1957.

"Mr. Warren, who might be described as a sandy man with a twinkle in his eye, is ensconced in an armchair while the interviewers, manning tape recorder and notebook, are perched on straight-back chairs. Mrs. Ellison, ice-bowl tinkling, comes into the room occasionally to replenish the glasses: all drink pastis."

Lembrai-vos das linhas iniciais de All the King's Men?
Do ponto de vista do narrador, qual road movie, numa vertigem de percepção e de enunciação do espaço?

Confrontai, então, essas linhas com aquilo que refere Warren, nesta entrevista, a propósito da Geografia:

"Thing that interested me about Buckle was that he had the one big answer to everything: geography. History is all explained by geography." (itálico meu)

Uma derradeira citação, desta feita em torno da dimensão mítica da História, evocando o seu poema desse relevantérrimo ano de 1956, "Founding Fathers...":

"INTERVIEWER
In this connection, do you feel that there are certain themes which are basic to the American experience, even though a body of writing in a given period might ignore or evade them?

WARREN
First thing, without being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying about it, would be that America was based on a big promise—a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that’s quite a problem—particularly when you’ve got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America—you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks. There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious kind of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what we stood for in one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In fact, one man did it—one man in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson."

E agora boas leituras!