In an interview on Psychoanalysing Argentina

X-ray of the Pampa by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada.

Argentina has a strong history of historical essentialism, books that try to find the essence of a country. I suppose England is doing it a bit now too, with Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr. This one is about what we do with the infinite empty space that we have inherited as a country. Most of the population of Argentina is concentrated in Buenos Aires and the second city, Córdoba, and there is too much emptiness, wildness and emptiness, wilderness in a Biblical sense. It’s a place to go to question things, to return from. Estrada is thinking about roads, canals, railways – how do we penetrate the great interior. In South America there is a continuous plain of emptiness from the Pampas to Patagonia, and in Argentina this huge expanse failed to get populated and no great riches came from large expanses of it. Since the 1920s Argentina has gone from, I think, the eighth richest country in the world to the 22nd or 23rd, and that statistic hides all sorts of social divides and poverty. It has all this land but that raises the question – what do we do with it if we don’t exploit it? How will this nothingness, this nada affect us? It’s a beautiful word in Spanish, nada, nothingness. The great unknown, the great empty space. Abroad we think of Argentinians as gauchos but in Buenos Aires they’re always really keen to remind you that theirs is a world city. The mistake of Buenos Aires in a way is that it is an island in empty plains with no connection to its heartland. In an infinite horizon there is nowhere to put your goals. There aren’t even any trees in the Pampas. Someone said to me that the infinite horizon gives you an infinite reach and vision, but it hasn’t really done that in Argentina.

I suppose Melanie Klein would say that Argentinians have perhaps failed to internalise a good object and are projecting the potential of menacing emptiness, or an internalised bad object, on to the Pampas so that the Pampas represent a fear of annihilation, of not being held or fed by a loving parent.

That could be right. But don’t get me on to Argentinians and parents… and, of course, the irony is that the pampas do feed the city-dwellers. They just prefer to distance themselves from the wide-open horizon.