Brazilian Literature as World Literature 9781501323263, 9781501323294, 9781501323287

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Translator Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira, and Gregório
3. Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil
4. Indigenism and the Search for Brazilian Identity: European Influences and National Roots
5. The Multifaceted Works of Machado de Assis
6. Naturalism in Brazil and its European Connections
7. Brazilian Modernism and the Modern Art Week: The Influence of the European Twentieth-Century Vanguards
8. The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century
9. Jorge Amado: The International Projection of the Brazilian Writer
10. Regionalism vs. World Literature in João Guimarães Rosa
11. Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism
12. The Brazilian Theater in the World: From Modern Dramaturgy to the Contemporary Post-Dramatic Scene
13. Postmodern Brazilian Literature on the World Stage
14. Comparative Literature and Supranational Community Relations: The Administration of Difference, the Ways of Articulation, and the Hegemonies of Cultural Flows
Index

Citation preview

Literatures as World Literature Literatures as World Literature takes a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations—according to language, nation, form, or theme—of literary texts and authors in their world-­literary dimensions. World literature has been mapped and theorized in the abstract, but the majority of critical work, the filling in of what has been traced, lies ahead of us. Literatures as World Literature begins the task of filling in the devilish details by allowing scholars to move outward from their own area of specialization. The hope is to foster scholarly writing that approaches more closely the polyphonic, multiperspectival nature of the world literature we wish to explore.

Series Editor: Thomas O. Beebee Editorial Board: Eduardo Coutinho, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hsinya Huang, National Sun-­yat Sen University, Taiwan Meg Samuelson, University of Cape Town, South Africa Ken Seigneurie, Simon Fraser University, Canada Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Aarhus University, Denmark

Literatures as World Literature German Literature as World Literature Edited by Thomas O. Beebee Roberto Bolaño as World Literature Edited by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. De Castro Crime Fiction as World Literature Edited by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and Louise Nilsson Danish Literature as World Literature Edited by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen From Paris to Tlön: Surrealism as World Literature Delia Ungureanu American Literature as World Literature Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Romanian Literature as World Literature Edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian Brazilian Literature as World Literature Eduardo F. Coutinho Modern Indian Literature as World Literature (forthcoming) Bhavya Tiwari

Brazilian Literature as World Literature Edited by Eduardo F. Coutinho

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Eduardo F. Coutinho and Contributors, 2018 Eduardo F. Coutinho has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Simon Levy/Levy Associates All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2326-3 PB: 978-1-5013-5734-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2328-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-2327-0 Series: Literatures as World Literature Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Notes on Contributors Translator Acknowledgments

vii xii

1

Introduction  Eduardo F. Coutinho

2

Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira, and Gregório  Dalma Nascimento

21

Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil  Gustavo Bernardo Krause

43

Indigenism and the Search for Brazilian Identity: European Influences and National Roots  Roberto Acízelo de Souza

71

5

The Multifaceted Works of Machado de Assis  José Luís Jobim

97

6

Naturalism in Brazil and its European Connections  Ligia Vassallo

115

7

Brazilian Modernism and the Modern Art Week: The Influence of the European Twentieth-Century Vanguards  Lucia Helena

137

The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century  Jorge Fernandes da Silveira

165

Jorge Amado: The International Projection of the Brazilian Writer  Márcia Rios da Silva

199

3 4

8 9

1

10 Regionalism vs. World Literature in João Guimarães Rosa  Eduardo F. Coutinho

221

11 Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism  Rita Terezinha Schmidt

243

12 The Brazilian Theater in the World: From Modern Dramaturgy to the Contemporary Post-­Dramatic Scene  Beatriz Resende

265

13 Postmodern Brazilian Literature on the World Stage  Luiza Lobo

291

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14 Comparative Literature and Supranational Community Relations: The Administration of Difference, the Ways of Articulation, and the Hegemonies of Cultural Flows  Benjamin Abdala Junior

317

Index

339

Notes on Contributors Beatriz Resende is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Scientific Councilor for several agencies devoted to supporting education in Brazil. She was also a Professor of Theater at the University of Rio de Janeiro. Her publications include Lima Barreto e o Rio de Janeiro em fragmentos (2006), Contemporâneos, expressões da Literatura Brasileira no século XXI (2008), Apontamentos de crítica cultural (2000), and Possibilidades da nova escrita literária no Brasil, ed. with Ettore Finazzi-Agrò (2015). Benjamin Abdala Junior is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of São Paulo and a researcher at the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq). He is a former President of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association, and of the African Studies Association, and a former Vice President of the Board of International Cooperation of the University of São Paulo. He has been a coordinator of several editorial series, and has published a number of books and essays in specialized journals and periodicals. Some of his most recent publications are: Literatura Comparada e reflexões comunitárias, hoje (2012), Estudos comparados: teoria, crítica e metodologia (2014), and Graciliano Ramos: muros sociais e aberturas artísticas (2016). Dalma Nascimento is Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a researcher at the National Council of Research (CNPq). She has published extensively in journals and periodicals. Her book publications include: Fabiano: heroi trágico na tentativa de ser (1980), Manuel Bandeira 1886–1986 (1990), Ecologia e literatura (1992), Estudos universitários de língua e literatura (1993), Poder e política (2000), A literatura em linguagem de jornal (2003), Antígonas da modernidade (2013), Dos teares literários às páginas dos periódicos (2014), Memórias em jornais (2014), Idade Média: contexto, celtas, mulher (2015), O Velho, a Mulher, O imigrante: três vozes na dinâmica atual (2014), Carmina Burana e ressurgências atuais (2015), Nélida Piñon nos labirintos da memória (2015), Aventuras narrativas de Nélida Piñon (2016) and Carmina Burana em três tempos (2017).

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Eduardo F. Coutinho (PhD-U.C.Berkeley, 1983) is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has been Visiting Professor at several universities both in Brazil and abroad and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a founding member and a former President of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association, a former Vice President of the ICLA, and a Researcher at the National Council of Research (CNPq). His publications include: The Synthesis Novel in Latin America, 1991; Em busca da terceira margem, 1993; Literatura Comparada: textos fundadores, 1994, ed. with T. Carvalhal; Cânones e contextos, ed. 3 vols., 1997–98; Fronteiras imaginadas, ed. 2001; Literatura Comparada na América Latina: ensaios, 2003; Beyond Binarisms, ed. 3 vols., 2009; Literatura Comparada: reflexões, 2013; Grande sertão: veredas. Travessias, 2013; Rompendo barreiras; ensaios de literatura brasileira e hispano-­americana, 2014. Gustavo Bernardo Krause is Professor of Literary Theory and Chair of the Department of Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published several essays, including A dúvida de Flusser (2002), A ficção cética (2004), O livro da metaficção (2010), and O problema do realismo de Machado de Assis (2011), and the award-­winning book A ficção de Deus (2014). As a prose-­ writer, he has published the following novels: Reviravolta (2007), A filha do escritor (2008), Monte Verità (2009), O gosto do Apfelstrudel (2010) and Nanook (2016). Jorge Fernandes da Silveira is Professor of Portuguese Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He wrote his PhD dissertation on Poesia 61 (1982) and his MA thesis on Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (1974). He is a senior researcher for the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq). He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown University (where he was also a postdoctoral researcher), University of California (Santa Barbara), University of Minnesota, and University of Salamanca (Spain). He was the coordinator of the Brazilian team of the project “New Portuguese Letters: 40 Years Later.” Prof. Silveira has published widely on Portuguese poetry, fiction, and essay. Some of his publications are: Portugal Maio de Poesia 61 (Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, Lisbon, 1986), Verso com verso (Angelus Novus, Coimbra, 2003). José Luís Jobim is Professor of Literature and Chair of the Graduate Program in Literary Studies at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. He was President

Notes on Contributors

ix

of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association and has authored sixteen books and numerous articles in Brazilian and international journals. His recent publications in books and journals include “Le dialogue Europe-Brésil dans l’oeuvre de Machado de Assis” (2016, with Olinda Kleiman and M. E. Chaves de Melo), “Literatura e cultura: do nacional ao transnacional” (2013), “Literary and Cultural Circulation: Machado de Assis and Théodule-Armand Ribot” (2015), “Ways of Seeing the Past in Literary History” (2014). He has been Visiting Scholar at Stanford Unversity and the Universidad de la República (Uruguay), among others. He is researcher at the CNPq. More can be found at http://lattes. cnpq.br/2864489503546804. Ligia Maria Pondé Vassallo is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Paris III, Sorbonne, France (1976–80 and 1990–92), La Habana, Cuba (1993 and 1996) and Mérida, Venezuela (1998 and 2001). Her publications include O sertão medieval (1993), Teatro sempre (ed. 1983), Poesia ontem e hoje (1984), Narrativa sempre (1986), Poéticas e manifestos que abalaram o mundo (1993), and the translation of La chanson de Roland into Portuguese. She has also contributed to Larousse Encyclopedia and to works at PUF, Robert Laffont and Laffont-Bompiani. Lucia Helena is Professor of Literary Theory and Brazilian and Comparative Literature at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and a retired Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is also a researcher of the National Council of Research (CNPq). Her publications include the awarded book Totens e tabus da modernidade brasileira (1985), Modernismo brasileiro e vanguarda (1996), Nem musa nem medusa: itinierários da escrita em Clarice Lispector (3rd ed. 2010), A solidão tropical (2006), Ficções do desassossego (2010), Uma literatura inquieta (2016), and Náufragos da esperança (2nd ed. 2016). She has been lecturing both in Brazil and abroad, and was a Research Scholar at Brown University. Luiza Lobo is an essayist, translator, fiction writer and university professor of Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has published extensively and lectured widely in Europe, Asia, the United States and South America. In 2013 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Massachussets in Amherst; in 2001, a Senior Researcher at the University of

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Nantes; in 2000 at the Center for Brazilian Studies of the University of Oxford; and, in 1995, she taught and had a DAAD scholarship at the Free University of Berlin. In 2009–2010, she was a Professor of Letters at the University of Poitiers. Her publications include Guia de escritoras da literature brasileira (2006), Segredos públicos: os blogs de mulheres no Brasil (2007), Crítica sem juízo (2007) and O Guesa de Joaquim de Sousândrade (2012). Marcia Rios da Silva is Professor at the State University of Bahia, Brazil. She has an MA in Literary Theory and a PhD. in the same area from the Federal University of Bahia. She is the coordinator of a research project in association with the Catholic University of Goiás, and has been the organizer of several conferences in association with the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. Her publications include several essays and articles on Jorge Amado, and the book O rumor das cartas: um estudo da recepção de Jorge Amado (2006). Rita Terezinha Schmidt is Professor of Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and a researcher of the National Council of Research (CNPq) since 1994. She was a founding member of the task force group “Woman and Literature” of the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistics, and organized reeditions of literary works by several nineteenth century Brazilian women writers, co-­organized six collections of essays on comparative literature and published many chapters as well as articles in Brazil and abroad. She is currently a member elect of the Gender Committee, a standing committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). Her publications include Mulheres e literatura, ed. (1996), A ficção de Clarice Lispector, ed. (2003) and Zonas francas: territórios comparatistas (2011). The book Decentering/Convergences: Essays in Feminist Criticism is due to be released this year. Roberto Acízelo de Souza is Professor of Brazilian Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has a PhD. from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and has been a Post-Doctorate researcher at the University of São Paulo. His publications include Teoria da literatura (1986), Formação da teoria da literatura (1987), O império da eloquência (1999), Iniciação aos estudos literários (2006), Introdução à historiografia da literatura brasileira (2007), Uma ideia

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moderna de literatura (2011), Historiografia da literatura brasileira: textos fundadores (1825–1888) (ed. 2014), Do mito das musas à razão das letras: textos seminais para os estudos literários (século VIII AC—século XVIII) (ed. 2014), and Na aurora da literatura brasileira: olhares portugueses e estrangeiros sobre o cânone nacional em formação (1805–1885).

Translator Acknowledgments Thomas O. Beebee translated the essay by Lucia Helena. Jizelda Ferreira Galväo translated the essays by Nascimento, Krause, Acizelo, Vassallo, Resende, Rios, Lobo, and Abdala. Dr. Lisa Shaw translated the essay by Jobim.

1

Introduction Eduardo F. Coutinho

As the result of a long process of colonization that lasted over three centuries, Brazilian literature has always been marked by a tension between the mere incorporation of a European tradition and the attempt to create a new one of a local or native coinage. These two trends have oscillated throughout the history of the country’s literary production; yet, with a look at the cadre of Brazilian literature, from its first manifestations to the present times, it is not difficult to observe that it has gradually moved away from the influence of European writings and has begun to deal with the native themes and types, and to express itself in the new Brazilian idiom. This search for a proper profile does not mean, however, that Brazilian literature has broken completely with European literary tradition and that it has enclosed itself in a kind of ivory tower. Rather, it has never ceased to receive contributions from European literature and to incorporate them into its own local tradition. The difference lies in the fact that now these contributions, instead of being blindly accepted, are critically filtered and blended together with the local elements, often producing new aesthetic forms. Thus, rather than being simply influenced by European production, Brazilian literature has now turned to establish a dialogue with it, and it is precisely this dialogue that has projected the country’s literature in international terms. Brazilian literature has constituted a proper tradition throughout the centuries, but it is obviously also a part of Western tradition, and its connections with what is produced in other nations of the West, particularly in the European countries and the USA, are increasingly evident. New trends and movements appear in different parts of the world and are spread out rapidly in times of globalization. Yet, their voyage to other contexts is no longer a one-­way itinerary, nor are they merely imported without taking into account the cultural and historical differences of the context of reception. The fact that this context is now considered is at the basis of the dialogue mentioned above, which conquered a

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wide space in Brazilian modernism, and is now perhaps one of the main traits of this literature. Brazilian Literature as World Literature is an attempt to draw a picture of the relationship between Brazilian and world literature from the time of colonization to the present, focusing on some of its most significant moments. The chapters have been designed to offer a view of these moments, starting from one or more of its representative figures and moving outwards to the period as a whole. In this movement, topics and questions of world literature will appear and be treated from their local cultural, ideological and historical perspectives. Brazilian literature will be focused on, then, from a wide variety of aspects, and will be approached in a way that includes its relationship with African literatures in the Portuguese language. As such, the book is meant to offer a contribution not only to the study of Brazilian and world literature, but also to comparative literature as a whole, as well as to Literary Theory and history. At the beginning of colonization, the literary manifestations which appeared in Brazil were seen as extensions of Portuguese literature. Such is the case with Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter of discovery—the first document written about the new land—and of the reports which followed: accounts of the first travelers, descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, and the chronicles of missionaries and soldiers. It was the literature of Portugal that generated the nascent Brazilian literary spirit. It served as a vehicle for the inheritance of European, Western and Christian ideas that laid the foundations of Brazilian consciousness. It brought about classical values, literary techniques, and aesthetic models that were adapted to the new environment. Yet, it also gave rise, from the very beginning, to a yearning to create something endowed with a Brazilian sense. Portuguese literature brought to Brazil the medieval and Renaissance heritage. From the Middle Ages came Brazil’s old poetic yardstick, in the form of popular lyrics and courtly versions of troubadour ballads, traditional dramatic forms that had grown up in the plays of Gil Vicente and the Jesuit theater, whose legacy can be seen in the voice of José de Anchieta and his colleagues, particularly Manuel da Nóbrega. And to the Renaissance atmosphere Brazilian literature owes the boastful lyricism of the exaltation of local things and countryside, the cycle of the literature of expansion and the prestige of the classical languages, especially Latin, through the first three centuries of colonization, and also of Greco-Roman culture. But if the first great influence exercised on the nascent literature of Brazil was that of the Portuguese, whose great authors—Camões, Gil Vicente, Sá de Miranda, the chroniclers, the poets of the cancioneiros, and the prose writers of

Introduction

3

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—constituted a constant presence in the Brazilian psyche, the baroque period opened up a new and important source of influence: the Spanish. The baroque movement was introduced into Brazil by the first Jesuit writers, but it penetrated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appearing in the prose and poetry of ufanismo (a logical exaltation of the land and countryside), in the native poetry of Gregório de Matos, in the exhortations of Father Antônio Vieira and his successors, and in the poetry and prose of the literary academies. In spite of the fact that the major manifestations of baroque art in Brazil are to be found in the plastic arts—in painting, sculpture and architecture—particularly in the works of Aleijadinho and in the extraordinary art forms and collections of Bahia and Minas Gerais churches, it was under the aegis of the baroque, defined not only as an artistic style, but also as a cultural complex, that Brazilian literature was actually born. The literary genres mostly cultivated at the time were the dialogue, lyric and epic poetry, and the theater, along with historiography and pedagogical meditation. In most cases, literature was used to serve the religious and pedagogical ideal of conversion and catechism; the theater, for example, was an extraordinary vehicle in the process of expanding Catholicism. What mainly characterizes baroque art in general is the fusion of opposites, such as natural and supernatural, light and shadow, good and evil, etc., and the contradictions emerging from these opposing terms found a fertile ground in Brazil, due to the tension already existing between the European and the nascent native traditions. As a result of this, the baroque style became a kind of a modus vivendi in the country and was at the basis of the long process of interbreeding, which came to be one of the most significant traits of Brazilian culture. At the time baroque art reached its zenith in Brazilian literature, the seventeenth century, two figures deserve particular mention: Father Antônio Vieira (1608– 97), whose sermons had a great impact on the colonizing process, contributing, among other things, to protest and in some cases preventing the slavery of the Indians; and Gregório de Matos (1623–96), whose poetry constitutes a formidable satire on every single aspect of the colony’s way of life. Matos’ poetry was dominated by baroque dualism: a mixture of religiosity and sensualism, mysticism and eroticism, earthly values and spiritual aspirations. He is a good example of the baroque soul, in his polar situation, his state of conflict and spiritual contradictions. By focusing most especially on the work of these two figures, but also referring frequently to other writers of the same period, Dalma Nascimento offers in her

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“Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira and Gregório” an accurate cadre of the role and importance of the baroque style in the constitution of Brazilian literature. The author starts her essay with a discussion about the differences between mannerism and baroque to affirm, in consonance with other Brazilian critics, that Brazilian literature was born under the sign of the baroque, and since this style was brought to the New World by the Spanish Jesuits, she takes some time to analyze the poetry of José de Anchieta, considered by many as the “father of Brazilian literature.” Anchieta’s poetry is simple and naïve, though highly lyrical at times, but his theater, crammed with images and devices employed to impress its audience—mostly composed of Indians—played a relevant role in the process of their catechization. His theater, as well as that of his companions—among whom was Manuel da Nóbrega—regardless of its aesthetic value, was, above all, a strong ideological weapon. Dalma Nascimento’s analysis of Father Antônio Vieira’s work, which is composed of sermons, reveals a high-­quality production, built up in the most distinguished baroque style—characterized by a conglomeration of images and a highly contorted syntax—and committed to the problems of his time, such as the Dutch invasion of the country and the enslavement of the Indians. With a highly eloquent tone, Vieira raises his voice against such issues, as well as against others of a social, political, religious or economic character, and this fact grants him a special position in this phase of Brazilian literature. Yet the most significant figure of the time, in the author’s view, and the one that best expresses the baroque spirit, is that of Gregório de Matos, the “accursed” poet, whose vicious tongue did not spare any of his fellowmen, particularly governors, priests, politicians and members of the wealthy classes, who lived at the expense of others. Gregório de Matos’s formidable satire constitutes the sharpest criticism of the country’s colonizing society and it anticipates, according to Dalma Nascimento, the anthropophagic banquet of twentieth-­century Brazilian modernism. He was, in her words, “the most authentic native base of Brazilian literary formation”. In the eighteenth century, the baroque taste for hyperbole, for ostentation and the outsized, was followed in Europe by a search for the classical qualities of measure, convenience, discipline, simplicity and delicacy. This constituted the rococo or Arcadian, or, to use a more general term, Neoclassicism. In Brazil, the eighteenth century was a moment of great importance for it constituted a phase of transition and preparation for independence. From the discovery and

Introduction

5

possession of the land, from the deeds of the bandeirantes as they pushed back the Western frontiers, from the defense against the invader, there came naturally the formation of a common consciousness, a national feeling, which replaced the nativist description of nature and the Indian. The lyrical sentiment of the previous century was replaced by a kind of national pride. There emerged the figure of the “Brazilian” half-­breed in blood and soul: the local type, a product of miscegenation, who spoke a language that differed considerably from peninsular Portuguese in accent, intonation, lexicon, and syntax. The literary product of this cultural complex was the Arcadian movement, which flourished among the poets of the so-­called Minas School—Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Basílio da Gama, Santa Rita Durão, Alvarenga Peixoto, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, and Silva Alvarenga—and its beginning was marked by the publication of Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s Obras poéticas (1768). It was a movement of European origin, but marked by a strong nationalist feeling that inspired a group of poets who used to call themselves shepherds and who lived in direct contact with nature. Among these, Gonzaga achieved the highest expression. In a clear intertextual dialogue with the ideas of European Enlightenment, Gustavo Bernardo Krause offers in his text “Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil” an accurate view of the Arcadian movement that flourished in Minas Gerais in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was strictly associated with a political movement of independence— the Inconfidência Mineira—aborted in 1789 as a result of Portuguese repression, a few months before the French Revolution. The writers who formed the Arcadian movement were mostly, if not all, engaged in the political insurrection and their work, though mainly of a lyrical sort, was also highly critical at moments, as in the case of Basílio da Gama’s epic poem O Uraguai (1769), a strong denouncement of the Jesuits by a former member of the Order, and the Cartas Chilenas, a fierce satire against Portuguese dominance that was only published much later, in 1845, and usually attributed to Gonzaga. Gama’s poem, one of the few epics of Brazilian literature, has been appreciated by critics due, among other qualities, to the fact that its protagonists are Indians, rather than Portuguese, and that the drama’s main focus falls upon these Indians. Twelve years after the publication of O Uraguai, another epic is published by Frei José de Santa Rita Durão—the poem Caramuru—but of a lesser quality than the former, and more conservative in political terms. Among the lyric poets of the Arcadian movement, Gustavo Krause centers his attention on the two most relevant:

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

Cláudio Manuel da Costa and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, in particular the latter, who took pastoral poetry to its peak in Brazilian literature with his poems dedicated to Marília, a fictitious creation based on a girl with whom he fell in love, but could never marry. His lyrics to her, which anticipate Romanticism, are considered to be the first love myth of Brazilian literature. Romanticism, the movement which followed the Arcadian in European literature, assumed in Brazil a particular makeup, with special traits and characteristics of its own, along with the broad elements that linked it to the European movement. Besides, it is a movement of extraordinary relevance, for the country owes to Romanticism an acceleration of the evolution of the literary process as never before. The period between 1800 and 1850 shows a great leap forward in Brazilian literature as it passed from a mixture of decadent neoclassicism and nativist exaltation into an artistic manifestation by which a whole group of lofty poets and prose writers was brought together. Some critics even state that this period consolidates in Brazilian literature the autonomy of its national tonality and of its forms and themes, as well as the technical and critical self-­awareness of that autonomy. Here, in prose writing, José de Alencar can be pointed to as the symbol of the literary changes that have taken place. In poetry, Gonçalves Dias and Castro Alves followed the same revolutionary process. The task of introducing Romanticism into Brazil fell, though, to Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, in whose manifesto, with which he launched the magazine Niterói (1836), his revolutionary attitude for the renovation of the country’s literature was expressed. Having started in the decade which followed the independence of the country, Brazilian Romanticism inherited from the European movement a strong political and social coloration which took a different form in the new context: in Brazil, the writer was not only a man of letters but also an intellectual who had a role in social and political reform, an educative function, something that can be clearly felt both in the nationalism of José de Alencar and Gonçalves Dias: present for example in their idealization of the Indian, and in Castro Alves’ struggle for the abolition of slavery in his poetry. Along with this came a break with obligations to the tradition of the language and a yearning to create a new sensibility, represented by the search for different aesthetic forms. Literary genres acquired a distinct makeup: lyrical poetry predominated over the epic or the bucolic and the novel was established, having been widely successful from its first manifestations. The genre favored an atmosphere of sentimentalism, idealism, and sense of the picturesque, as well as historical and social preoccupations, and

Introduction

7

as such it conquered the sensibility of the bourgeois society that was being developed, especially in the cities. Summing up, Romanticism adjusted itself perfectly to the spirit of the people; hence the importance it had in Brazilian literature and culture. Aware of the importance that Romanticism had for the consolidation of Brazilian literature, and of the extension of the production which appeared in the Romantic period, Roberto Acízelo de Souza has chosen to concentrate his essay “Indigenism and the Search for Brazilian Identity: European Influences and National Roots” on the texts centered upon the figure of the Indian, considered a symbol of the new land as opposed to Europe. He begins his study by questioning the idea, present in the majority of Brazilian literary histories, that the Indianist movement has come exclusively from European sources, and proceeds to show its antecedents in the literature and culture of the country. The Indianist movement is the result of two trends, he affirms—an external, coming from Chateaubriand and other, especially French, writers, and an internal trend, coming from the country’s own tradition—and it reached a unique expression in Brazilian literature in the period 1846–1875, particularly in lyrical poetry with Gonçalves Dias being the most representative, and in the novel with José de Alencar. In their work, the author discerns two distinct attitudes regarding the issue of colonization: a critical one, present, for example, in Dias’s “Canto do Piaga,” in which the Indian forebodes the arrival of the Europeans as the destruction of their civilization; and a naïve view, present in Alencar’s novel O Guarani, in which the country’s discovery by the Europeans is seen as a productive encounter. The focus of Acízelo de Souza’s essays falls, however, on the figure of Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva (1820–91), a figure he considers emblematic of the whole period, and concludes with a report on the legacy of Indianism in later periods of Brazilian literature. After Romanticism, three great literary movements in prose and poetry flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in France—the country which exerted the major cultural influence upon Brazil after its independence from Portugal—and reached into the twentieth century: realism, naturalism, and Parnassianism. These currents occupy a cultural period of great relevance in Brazil, in which national and international historical circumstances coincided with the advent of bourgeois, democratic, industrial and mechanical civilization. In Brazil, three important questions agitated people,concerning slavery, religion, and the military, and in all of them one could

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

feel the influence of those ideas that formed the spirit of the time: laicization, materialism, rationalism, anticlericalism, and naturalism. Realism, naturalism and Parnassianism, as revolts against Romantic subjectivism, shared the same spirit of precision and scientific objectivity, of exactness in description, of an attention to detail, and of the cult of the fact. Fiction evolved in Brazil towards realism and naturalism, and around 1880 the first fruits began to appear. Afterwards, it is sometimes the line of realism, sometimes that of naturalism, by which the short story or novel is written. Poetry, at this time, is under the aegis of Parnassianism: it is a descriptive type of poetry with exactness and economy of image and metaphor. Two directions marked the evolution of realism in Brazil: the social current, attracting social problems, urban and contemporary themes, the common material of everyday life; and the regionalist movement that brings to the fore local color and the importance of the land, which is the real protagonist of this literature. Ever since Romanticism, the growing importance of regionalism was a fact of great significance in Brazil, but whereas in the former movement the region was portrayed from a picturesque and idealized perspective, in the Realist and naturalist periods Romantic nostalgia and escapism were replaced by a picture of contemporary existence and its environment. Realism taught the Brazilian writer to deal aesthetically rather than sentimentally with native material, and with this change literature put roots down into the native soil and attained what modernism was able to ratify once and for all. As far as the genres are concerned, prose fiction constituted the best means of literary realization, and the great figure representative of the whole period was undoubtedly Machado de Assis, followed in the case of naturalism by Aluísio Azevedo, and in that of Parnassianism by Olavo Bilac, Raimundo Magalhães and Alberto de Oliveira. As the most significant figure of nineteenth-­century Brazilian literature and one of the country’s most appreciated writers in the West, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) constitutes the core of José Luis Jobim’s essay “The Multi-­faceted Works of Machado de Assis.” The author starts his text with a few comments about the historical context in which Machado produced his works and proceeds to a discussion about his precursory character, both as a fictionist and as a critic. Machado wrote the majority of his work in the second half of the nineteenth century but his literary output anticipates that of the twentieth century in a considerable number of aspects. Insofar as his criticism is concerned, he raised his voice against the nationalist theories then in vogue by refusing to treat only

Introduction

9

national creations as “authentic” or “original,” but at the same time he rejected the uncritical adoption of European concepts presented as “universal” or as universally valid. The issue of appropriation, which later became one of the banners of the modernist movement, is present in his work in the “sauce theory,” according to which one can “go and get someone else’s spices, but he will season it with his own homemade sauce.” For Machado, there is no generic, universally valid truth, but a kind of contextual relativity, dependent on the place in question, or, in other words, in accordance with the “law of acclimatization,” and his narratives are often an expression of that. Jobim studies some of his narratives and concludes that they are in perfect harmony with the critical principles he defends, above all his idea that what one should expect of the writer . . . “is a certain intimate feeling that renders him a man of his time or space.” In “Naturalism in Brazil and its European Connections,” Lígia Vassallo offers a broad view of the naturalist movement in Brazil in contrast with the imported European model, and focuses on three of its most representative figures: Aluísio Azevedo, Inglês de Sousa and Domingos Olímpio. The second half of the nineteenth century was the period of greatest relevance of French influence in Brazil. The recently independent nation, in its search for affirmation, refused the Iberian model but adopted another one—the French—which, in addition to being distinct from that of its colonizers, was also identified with the ideas of modernity. Yet, in Brazilian naturalism, some aspects of the European movement were left aside and replaced by others, proper to the local social and cultural environment. Determinism, for instance, was maintained, but the movement’s scientific vein was abandoned and replaced by a strong social criticism centered upon two poles: the issue of race, according to which miscegenation was seen from a negative perspective, and that of the milieu, which placed a negative influence upon the tropical climate. In addition, the urban environment that constituted the central nucleus in European naturalism frequently gave way to a regionalist perspective, represented by the Amazonian jungles or the Northeastern backlands. At the end of her essay, Lígia Vassallo affirms that naturalism never disappeared completely in Brazilian narrative, having met a revival in the modernist novelists of the 1930s and later in the “romance reportage” of the 1970s. Finally, it also had an important presence in the movies, particularly in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazilian literature plunged into a phase of transition and syncretism in which elements of Parnassianism, and two other currents also imported from Europe—symbolism and

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

Impressionism—were blended together. But the importance of this period is undeniable, for it brought about the transformation that resulted in modernism. The period witnessed, among other things, the integration of intellectual life, of culture, arts, and letters into Brazilian reality. By this time, the mission statement of Brazilian literature had become to think about the country, to interpret it, to emphasize the values of Brazilian civilization and the regional qualities of the country’s ethnical, social and cultural traits. A feeling of Brazilianess became a central theme at that time and came to be one of the highlights of the modernist movement. This movement, though prepared long before, had its breakout moment in 1922 with the realization of the Modern Art Week in São Paulo, and was characterized by its revolutionary tone. The Week, a suggestion of the painter Di Cavalcanti to Paulo Prado, was a destructive blow against the old order. Mário de Andrade, one of its most active participants, outlined, twenty years later, what he thought the initial directions of the movement had been: the break with academic subordination; the destruction of the conservative and conformist spirit; the demolition of taboos and prejudices; and the permanent adherence to three basic principles, e.g. the right to aesthetic investigation, the updating of Brazilian artistic intelligence and the stabilization of a national creative consciousness. Although Brazilian modernism was also influenced by some of the basic ideas of the European vanguards, there is a significant difference between this movement and the previous movements of Brazilian literature and arts. Whereas the latter ones imported European ideas and artistic practices and merely adapted them to the new environment, the modernist writers appropriated some of the basic principles of the European vanguards of the early twentieth century—especially futurism, cubism, Dadaism, expressionism and surrealism— blended them all together and produced a movement which was not only a result of this mixture, but also a dialogue between this new product and the previous Brazilian tradition, particularly of the Romantic period. Hence the central image of the modernist movement: that of anthropophagy,1 an image extracted from Gonçalves Dias’ poem “I-Juca Pirama.” The modernist writers accomplished a critical filter of both the imported material and that of previous The term “anthropophagy” refers in Brazilian literature to a process of appropriation according to which the imported European literature is blended together with local elements, producing as a result a new literary form which maintains aspects of both previous contributions. The term comes from the Tupi Indian sacred ritual of ingesting the flesh of brave enemies in order to assimilate their courage. It is a process of selective appropriation.

1

Introduction

11

Brazilian literature and produced a movement with its own profile, which was a clear expression of the country’s situation in the first half of the twentieth century. It is true that Brazilian modernism has many aspects in common with other contemporary movements of world literature that were also designated as modernist. But it also presents important differences in regard to them. If we take as an example the Anglo-Saxon modernism, two differences immediately come to mind: the relationship between the aesthetic and the political elements, and that between the erudite and the popular vein. Whereas in Anglo-Saxon modernism there is a dichotomy between the aesthetic and the political discourses, with the former not supposed to express any type of political commitment, in Brazilian literature the two elements not only coexist but also complement each other. And the same can be said as far as the erudite and the popular elements are concerned. The hermetic character, so frequent in AngloSaxon modernism, and which found perhaps its highest expression in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, did not find a fertile ground in Brazil. In this country, that which prevailed was, on the contrary, a struggle against the formal sophistication of previous literary movements, such as the Parnassian and symbolism, which turned into a real apology of a colloquial and regional type of language and of popular forms and genres, marked by specific tones. As regards SpanishAmerican modernism, it is worth remembering that this is a nineteenth-­century movement, equivalent in chronological terms to Parnassianism and symbolism in Brazil. The movement in Spanish-America that can be approximated to Brazilian modernism both chronologically and in their affinity is the vanguards (Borges’ Ultraismo and Huidobro’s Creacionismo, for example). A few years after its irruption, the modernist movement began to divide into groups and divergent currents, and several manifestos, program-­articles, prefaces and even books of doctrine-­poetry were published. But the movement lasted until the mid-­twentieth century and is usually subdivided into three main generations, those of 1922, 1930, and 1945. The first was a revolutionary generation both in art and in politics. Its objective was the demolition of a fictitious social and political order and of a type of art and literature produced by imitation of foreign models. It was predominantly a “poetical” phase in which the main formal and aesthetic conquests of the movement in the field of poetry were established. The second generation reaped the results of the preceding one, replacing the destructive nature with a constructive intent for the recomposition of values and the configuration of the new aesthetic order. Poetry followed the

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

task of purification of means and forms that had been earlier initiated, and prose broadened its area of interest to include new preoccupations of a political, social, economic, human and spiritual nature. It was mainly in prose that its greatest effect resided, from 1928, with the publication of A bagaceira, by José Américo de Almeida, of Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, and later of the so-­called Northeastern novel, represented by figures like Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, José Lins do Rego and Rachel de Queirós, among others. The third generation is known especially for a greater precision in form, an effort at disciplinary recuperation, emotional containment and severity of language. In prose, there is an attempt to revitalize the short story by means of new experiments on the level of language. The great names in this phase are those of João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector. The critical conscience that Brazil’s modernism developed was undoubtedly one of the movement’s major contributions to Brazilian cultural life. Having arisen under the sign of a national consciousness, modernism continued in this direction and produced a true rediscovery of Brazil, creating a powerful awareness of the country’s particularities. Formerly, Brazilian intellectuals had lived with their eyes turned towards Europe. With modernism, this mentality changed, encouraging artists to experience their native land and give it artistic representation. European contributions continued to be appreciated, but came to be approached with a critical gaze and to be selected rather than blindly imported as before. Furthermore, these European elements were not the only ones appropriated by the movement. Brazil’s modernist writers also looked back at their nation’s literary tradition with a similar critical filter, as exemplified by the image of “anthropophagy,” referred to above, which stands out as an emblem of the movement. This attention to Brazilian land and environment brought a new preoccupation with regionalism, traditionalism, and folklore. Indian and African traditions, regional legends, and popular language with Indian and African contributions quickly became common in literature, both in poetry and in fiction. There was also a deep investigation into the country’s life, not only in literature, but also in its historical, social, ethnographic and linguistic aspects. Brazilian music and plastic arts were given special value, for example, and there arose a strong preoccupation with what has been called a “Brazilian language” as opposed to peninsular Portuguese. By focusing on the heroic phase of the modernist movement in Brazil, the period between 1922—when the Modern Art Week took place in São Paulo— and 1930, Lucia Helena establishes in her essay “Brazilian Modernism and the

Introduction

13

Modern Art Week: the Influence of the European Twentieth-Century Vanguards” an intense dialogue between the first manifestations of the Brazilian movement and the European vanguards which dominated the artistic scene in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The vanguards, initiated in different parts of Europe, reached Brazil in the second decade of the twentieth century, and found therein a fertile ground due to the questioning of the old aesthetic principles that was taking place, represented by naturalism and Parnassianism. However, the differences existing among the vanguards themselves, and the way they were seen and incorporated into Brazilian reality gave birth to a movement of a multifaceted sort, consensual only in its common objective: the renovation of the arts. The author studies in detail the five main vanguards that influenced the modernist movement—futurism, cubism, expressionism, Dadaism and surrealism—by stressing their points in common with examples from both Brazilian and the European literature of different countries. It concludes that the Brazilian modernism of the heroic phase, as well as the European vanguards, left an important lesson for posterity: that the history of a people is better accomplished by means of an open and free dialogue of trends seen from a comparative and globalized perspective. In “The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century,” Jorge Fernandes da Silveira draws, in a very poetic manner in perfect compatibility with the object of his text, a constant dialogue between the distinct voices of poets, both from Brazil and abroad, and between these poets and their critics, in a truly metalinguistic exercise of great aesthetic sensibility. In the case of Brazilian poets, his main focus falls upon the modernist poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Cecília Meireles, and, among the foreign voices, in spite of a wide variety that embraces poets from many different nations, a special place is granted to the Portuguese representatives. In his thematic spectrum, there is an emphasis on the themes that deal with the relation between the particular and the universal, the local and the global, the region, the nation and the world, as well as on the language particularities in each one of these instances. His essay embraces the three generations of modernist poets in Brazil and offers an overview of the poetic production of this movement, as much as the interrelations between them. The second generation of modernists is here represented by Jorge Amado due especially to the impact he had on the international scenery. Recognizing this fact, Márcia Rios da Silva begins her essay “Jorge Amado: the International Projection of the Brazilian Writer”, by affirming that in order to understand the

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

reach that the novelist’s work had outside of Brazil, it is important to consider two moments of his intellectual trajectory: his affiliation to the Communist Party at the beginning of his career, and the role that the visual media, particularly television, played in the adaptations and dissemination of his books. To these factors, which she considers fundamental, there can also be added his repeated invocations of mass culture and his adherence to everyday reality, as well as the low importance he gave to linguistic experiments. Jorge Amado has always expressed a strong preoccupation with the social and political issues of his time, even after he abandoned the Communist Party, and his interest in the cultural values of his people led him to produce a highly inclusive type of literature that incorporated contributions coming from all social classes and ethnic groups of Brazilian society, especially the Afro-Brazilian culture. Márcia Rios examines all these aspects in her essay, and, after discussing some of the adaptations of his works, she concludes that the author’s role in projecting Brazilian culture is more important than ever. The essay “Regionalism vs. World Literature in João Guimarães Rosa,” by Eduardo F. Coutinho, is a study of the writer’s masterpiece Grande sertão: veredas, a paradigm of Brazilian fiction of that time, focusing on the novel’s narrative structure and on two fundamental elements of its construction: character and space. Known as the greatest linguistic innovator of twentieth-­century Brazilian literature both in regard to language stricto sensu and to the structure of the novel —he produced a novel that is entirely constructed under the form of a question and in which ambiguity is the main structural element—Guimarães Rosa is also highly appreciated for transcending traditional regionalism in Brazilian literature by effecting a shift in the novel’s center of gravity from nature to man, according to which the regional elements, though still significant, no longer form by themselves the core of the work. This wider regionalist perspective is part of a concept of reality as something multiple and constantly changing, which is represented in his fiction by means of a form that tries to apprehend it in as many of its aspects as possible. Myth and fantasy, for example, are a part of it, as well as rationalistic logic, and all these elements are dealt with on equal footing in his narrative, where the Cartesian opposition “either/or” gives way to the paradox “Everything is and is not.” Rosa’s literature is at the same time regional and universal, i.e. turned to its own context but simultaneously connected to world literature (often present intertextually in his work), mimetic and self-­conscious, and committed to both its aesthetic principles and to the social, political and cultural context from where it springs.

Introduction

15

Rita Terezinha Schmidt’s “Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism” is a study of Clarice Lispector’s reception both in Brazil and abroad and a discussion of the main insights of feminist criticism of her work. Starting with a reaction against a statement made by Benjamin Moser, author of a biography of Lispector published in the US—that the writer was unknown outside of the Brazilian context, little known in Latin America and not known at all in France, and that she remained virtually untranslated—Rita Schmidt sets out to prove the contrary, first by citing her reception nationwide, and then by drawing a map of Lispector’s translations into several different languages and contexts, followed by reviews and critical essays published in magazines and academic journals. The author proceeds to comment on Lispector’s reception in the Brazilian intellectual milieu, and finally delves into the sphere of feminist criticism, particularly in France and the US, where the writer has been highly appreciated, and raises a discussion of the relationship between the author’s poetic style and the alterity of women’s writing under patriarchal societies. To conclude, she returns to the impact of Lispector’s texts in international terms and affirms that they have provoked a series of discoveries compatible with their magnitude. As well as literature in general, theater in Brazil began with the Jesuit priests, playing an important role in the process of conversion and catechism, and, after a period of hibernation, it reappeared in Romanticism under the form of the drama. Later on, in the period of realism and naturalism, it experienced an important development, but it was only around 1920, when the modernist movement began to dominate the scene, that theater went through a new flourishing period, establishing its prestige among the public. The innovations introduced by modernism were seen not only in the aspects of dramatic creation itself, but also of set designing, staging, and the training of actors. New techniques were explored, new light and sound devices were used, and several schools for the formation of actors appeared, endowing the theater with a professional stamp it had never enjoyed before. Many groups and companies were formed, a number of new theater houses were built all over the country, and a constellation of good actors came to hold the public’s admiration. Among the playwrights of the time, the main tendency was towards a confluence of foreign experiences with Brazilian themes, be these of a social, historical or cultural order. The greatest expression of this new moment of Brazilian theater was Nelson Rodrigues, who broke with traditional conventions and indulged in themes hitherto forbidden, such as that of sexual relations. Also significant, though

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

representing different trends, are names like those of Juracy Camargo, Henrique Pongetti, Dias Gomes, Ariano Suassuna, Jorge Andrade, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, Oduvaldo Viana Filho, Augusto Boal and, in the case of the theater for children, Maria Clara Machado. In “The Brazilian Theater in the World: From Modern Dramaturgy to the Contemporary Post-Dramatic Scene,” Beatriz Resende begins discussing the contemporary theater as post-­dramatic, i.e. as a kind of theater in which the text is given the same importance as the other theatrical devices, and which establishes a constant dialogue with other forms of art, including with the oral character of the performance. She then proceeds to relate this type of theater to the plurality of contemporary art in general. At this point, she mentions Nelson Rodrigues, whose works are a significant example of this relationship, and, after focusing on the role of Brazilian theater in the international scene, she centers her attention on the works of this playwright, considered to be the most innovative of Brazilian theater in the twentieth century. The projection of Brazilian theater worldwide— its translations, adaptations and staging in different countries—occurred after the appearance of Rodrigues’s Vestido de noiva (1943), but from that time on it has been gradually increasing, as is evidenced by the growing interest and attention that both this playwright and his Brazilian contemporaries have received, especially in the European and North American academy. Among these, the author refers to Augusto Boal, who has created in Paris a center of studies of the type of theater he developed, which has become known as the “Theater of the Subaltern.” In conclusion, she mentions the contributions that Brazilian theater may bring to the international advances of the genre. As a consequence of the conquests achieved by modernism, in terms both of the density and depth of Brazilian productions and of the pursuit of new technical devices, literature reached a position that showed the degree of conscious integration of the country’s mind and soul. From the second half of the twentieth century to the present, the Brazilian literary scene has been characterized by a plurality of trends which on the one hand follow the lines established by the modernist movement and on the other hand express the multiple set, based on micro-­narratives, that has been often designated by critics as postmodern. In both cases, however, foreign imports are now combined with a consciousness of Brazilian cultural aspects, and the result has been the emergence of different currents, all marked by a kind of dialogue between a foreign influence and a local touch. Such is the case in poetry of movements like concretism, neoconcretism, praxis poetry, postal art, and tropicalism, just to cite

Introduction

17

the most well known, and, in prose writing, of journalistic fiction, testimonio, the excursions into the fantastic, and the self-­conscious, particularly feminine line of narrative. All these currents—to which can be added more recently the production of the so-­called minority groups, like the Indian, the African and those resulting from nineteenth and twentieth-­century European and Asian immigration—crammed with aspects like the constant presence of the media, the fragmentation of the text, the abundant use of a polyphony of voices, an emphasis on stylistic eclecticism, a strong intertextuality, parody and the frequent use of metalanguage, are efforts to represent the new lifestyle of a country where sophisticated computers are found together with a high measure of misery and illiteracy. Luiza Lobo’s text “Postmodern Brazilian Literature on the World Stage,” is a mapping of postmodern manifestations in Brazilian literature. She begins with a reflection of the differences between modernism and the postmodern condition, by citing some of the most well-­known theories on the topic, and then sets up a series of comparisons between Brazilian and world literature to show how postmodernism is manifested in different ways in these productions. She mentions writers who often dialogue with the roman noir and who question the function of art (Sérgio Sant’Anna, Rubem Fonseca), who place an emphasis on violence and use as settings the slum areas of the big cities (Paulo Lins, Patrícia Melo), who put into check the traditional detective story by means of parody (Sonia Coutinho), who produce works of the type that Linda Hutcheon has designated as “historiographical metafiction” (Ana Miranda, Antônio Torres, Márcio Souza), and who attempt a revival of the epic by means of a politically committed sort of fiction (Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Ivan Ângelo). She then calls attention to the importance that postmodernism had in breaking with the genre categories, and especially for allowing the development of the literary production of minority groups, both ethnic and sexual. In the case of poetry, she mentions the Tropicália movement of the 1970s, the “mimeo generation,” the more recent group Quilombhoje, and in the case of prose, figures coming from the Afro-Brazilian and other groups and communities. In conclusion, the author stresses the fragmentation that has occurred from the 1990s to the present, and refers to the role of the Internet in this sense. Aware of the fact that Brazilian literary production has always been in a constant intercourse with European literature and culture, and that this phenomenon has evolved from a one-­way perspective, characteristic of any process of colonization, to a true dialogue, according to which it has also

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

contributed to aspects of the European production, Benjamin Abadala Jr., in his essay “Comparative Literature and supranational community relations: the administration of the differences, the ways of articulation and the hegemonies of cultural streams,” presents a discussion of the literary relations between Brazil and the African nations where Portuguese is spoken, and defends the idea that here too there must be a dialogue on equal footing. Referring to the studies of comparative literature between these countries’ productions, he states that the scholar must never lose track of his locus of enunciation, but at the same time must be open to accept alterity, and that the dialogue between them must be one between two subjects and not between a subject and an object. Besides, he adds, Comparativism must have a prospective gaze, a political interface; it must look ahead in order to move scholars to a cooperative interchange. He ends his text by calling attention to the need for using counter-­ hegemonic strategies in comparative studies and concludes with a metaphor extracted from Saramago that may indicate the importance of South/South studies in this field—the Iberian land that is placed between Africa and the Latin American continent. As we can see from the texts that compose this book, literary manifestations in Brazil began at the time of colonization and developed throughout the centuries from a one-­way perspective, according to which its expressions were mostly an adaptation of European models, to a true and effective dialogue with imported literary productions, a dialogue on equal footing, in which, in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, “no one has the last word, where no voice reduces another to the status of mere object, and where advantage may be taken from one’s exteriority to the other.”2 The tension which characterized Brazilian literature between the mere incorporation of a European tradition and the will to create a new tradition of a local sort, has been very often present in the country’s productions and reached a special moment in Romanticism, the style that dominated right after political independence. But after modernism it gave way to the dialogue mentioned above that now prevails in the country’s literary production. From the second half of the twentieth century to the present, there has emerged a plurality of trends, some of them in close accord with aspects of the current that has been designated in Western literature as a whole as postmodern, and others which differ fundamentally from these. In all these cases, though, they have come to be seen, from a comparativist perspective, in all Tzvetan Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 377.

2

Introduction

19

their similarities and differences, and the writers of this period have marked their position both as citizens of the world and as voices for a culture that is now reading the world with its own eyes, or rather, from its own locus of enunciation. Eduardo F. Coutinho Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

2

Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira, and Gregório Dalma Nascimento

This essay focuses on the beginnings of Brazilian literature under the sign of the baroque, with the writings of the Jesuit Jose de Anchieta (1534, Spain- 1597, Brazil), the sermons of the priest Antonio Vieira (1608, Portugal- 1697, Brazil) and the national poetry of Gregório de Matos e Guerra (1636–1696). However, to accomplish this objective, one must clarify a few points. The first one concerns the word “primordial” in reference to the concept of Brazilian literature. A certain number of critics question whether in Brazil, a Portuguese colony (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century), one could already refer to a “Brazilian” literature founded on the literary works of the foreign writers Anchieta and Vieira, and the native Gregório. This theoretical tendency advocates that the autochthonous Brazilian literature began with the Arcadia movement (1768– 1836), or even later, with Romanticism (1836–1881), after the political independence of Brazil from Portugal in 1822. This proposition subordinates the literary to the historic, diminishing the autonomy of literature. Moreover, there are controversies regarding Anchieta’s literary worth, questioning whether he, with his rudimentary poetry, should be placed among the founders of the national literature. The second point concerns mannerism, an aesthetic that appeared in Western Europe in the sixteenth century with the Renaissance crisis, antedating the baroque but intermingling with the latter, when Brazil—then called Vera Cruz Island—began to be colonized. Although our country did not have a Renaissance, the European Renaissance influenced our literary origins. For these reasons, this analysis begins with the Renaissance, because after the great material conquests, the Renaissance man felt divided between new values that did not fulfill his

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature

expectations, and medieval dogmas that could no longer be sustained. And he ended up in crisis. Since art is the mirror and the prism of social-­cultural situations—even though it trespasses its historic moment—the sixteenth-­century context reflected the antinomies of the convulsive, distorted aesthetic of mannerism; a style that, for certain theorists, preceded and united with the baroque. Hence, two axes interlace in this study: the specialists in mannerism, between 1520–1560, according to Gustav Hocke; and the ones affiliated with the baroque, who encompass all the aesthetic expressions of the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth. Afrânio Coutinho contributes to this argument with three magnificent works, a foundation which guides this essay. Dissipating doubts, Coutinho affirms that baroque art is conceived broadly, with varied and different manifestations, known as Conceptism and Culteranism (in Spain and Portugal), Marinism (in Italy), Eufuism (in England), Preciosism (in France), and Silesianism (in Germany). Coutinho does not accept mannerism. When referring to the Renaissancist crisis in Of the Baroque (Coutinho, 1994: 215–216), he postulates that the artists, after the pillage of Rome in 1527, “began (1994: 215–216) to express themselves, not in a style, but in a maniera, giving birth to a phase manieirista or maneiremos, that would mark the rest of the sixteenth century” and that “Baroque would be born of transformations operating in this period, and would dominate the seventeenth century.” Moreover (273–283), he problematizes mannerism, ratifying that he considers baroque to be all the aesthetic manifestations from 1580 to 1680. However, he notes that they vary, earlier or later, according to each country. However, as mannerism and the baroque are so intertwined with each other and in our literary formation, A. Coutinho explains: “Brazilian mentality was birthed by the Baroque hand of the Jesuits” (285). Indeed, the baroque, coming along with the Jesuits on the caravels, found fertile soil in Brazil, fashioning national features in the art. It suffices to remember the magnificence of the Bahian and Minas churches, the sculptures of Aleijadinho (Antonio Francisco Lisboa) and other emblematic expressions of our cultural complex. Engendered in Italy and Spain during the Counter-Reformation (sixteenth century), the baroque was decisive for the flourishing of Brazilian art in the creative symbiosis of baroque-­mestizo culture. A similar phenomenon occurred in the Spanish-American colonies, where each one presented its own particular characteristics (1994: 223). On this matter, he underscores that Lezama Lima, in The American Expression, presents reflections from the American

Baroque Voices

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perspective, that is, “from inside” the conquered region, and not from under the Eurocentric focus of the old historiography.1

The disenchantment of the Renaissance, the mannerist dilemma, and the baroque sensorial explosion After the splendor and the glory of Western Europe, the Renaissance man realized that the glories that were conquered did not fulfill his essential, existential needs. The horizons were expanded. New lands were discovered. The national states strengthened with the ideology of expansion. Perspectivism was created with variations in the point of view, conferring to the subject a new status. Scientists investigated the heavens, and Ptolemy’s geocentrism transmuted to Galileo’s heliocentrism. The system of production changed: from feudalism to modern capitalism. Royal and ecclesiastical ideologies allied themselves economically and religiously. Philosophies were reintroduced with new foci. Classical antiquity returned to the European proscenium with the concept of universal Man, the measure of all things (Protagoras). Believing himself to be the subject of history, the Renaissance man removed God from His throne and, anthropocentrically, placed himself on it. After Martin Luther and John Calvin, religious conflicts caused schism among the clergy. The dogmas of the Catholic Church were losing force under the reformists’ advancements. Instabilities and crises became widespread. And now? What to do with so many mundane glories? What were they worth? Losing its center of reference, the sixteenth century disintegrated and the thinkers—above all the artists—dove into fanciful doubts and reflected their psychological tensions in Art. The latter, at first, translated into sculpting and painting the tensional pathos with figures, contorted and troubled, like in the second phase of Michelangelo’s works; beings marked by interior anguish; profiles that expanded to the metaphysical poets. The old vitalism of the new Prometheus-Renaissance in the theft of the creative spark and in the domain of “never-­before-sailed seas” became the

Also Eduardo F. Coutinho in Rompendo barreiras: ensaios de literatura brasileira e hispanoamericana, with the presuppositions of current comparativism, focuses on the origins of the Latin American mestizo-­baroque foundation in Lezama Lima, in the chapter “The Poetic Americanism of José Lezama Lima: Notes on The American Expression” (pp. 49–55).

1

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disequilibrium of the mannerist individual, fallen into the solitude of the universe. An Icarus with wings burned by the Renaissance Sun, he is now helpless before burning doubts. Psychological tensions were reflected into art, which, at first, translated into statuary and painting the tensional pathos with contorted, troubled figures; traits that expanded to the metaphysical poets. Mannerism, the grammar of the antinomies, aesthetics that lived the experience of doubt and disintegration (Eduardo Portella) came on the scene, while the baroque reintegrated the lacerating mannerist tensions. In order to recover those who had strayed from Catholicism and to obtain new proselytes, Ignacio de Loyola, in 1534, founded the Society of Jesus, approved in 1540 as part of the Counter-Reformation. With engaging visual, plastic, and literary spectacles, the explosive, playful, vital baroque absorbed the ambivalences of the troubled moment. It confronted the post-Renaissance crisis and favored the sensorial, vitalist side of an aesthetic which, for his defenders, constituted the dawn of modern art. Counter-Reformist iconography emphasized the senses to achieve popular emotion. Carnal appeals, enhancing the forces of life, have been transmuted into mystical pleasures. Spiritual erotic effusions masked bodily desires. Artistic expressions were mixed for catechetical purposes. The Jesuits, in their theater and sermons, expressed the tension between Heaven and Earth. Art now exalted the divine in a morbid eroticism, moving from subjective immanence to metaphysical transcendence. In opening itself to the earthly clarity of the luxury of ornaments, the baroque multiplied in folds and more folds (the plis referred to by Deleuze). Postulating its style, A. Coutinho affirms that, in its symbolic manifestations, the baroque, “full of divinity, must employ representative forms of majesty and magnificence” (Coutinho, 1994: 79). With a singular physiognomy, baroque art denotes, “Heroism, asceticism, mysticism, eroticism, cruelty” in a rational and irrational way (Weisbach, Apud Coutinho, 1968: 142). A. Coutinho still states that the baroque was “the spirit of conciliation and of the fusion of contraries, mixing God and the devil, evil and good, earth and sky, the real and the imaginary. It is baroque fusionism.” (Coutinho, 1994: 233). While mannerism is contemplative, static, the baroque leads to ecstasy with glittering images, plays of light and shadow, musicality and brilliance in words. Art for the senses, it intoxicates with monumental religious architecture, images covered with gold, volutes and voluptuousness in the ornaments, broad phrases in the sermons in which phanopeias, melopeias and logos manifest themselves in the baroque plurivalencies. The mannerist mask, contorted and distressed, is

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transformed into performative attitudes, appealing to the color, the glow of the verb, the wealth of statuary and ecclesiastical constructions. Citing the greatest scholars (Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlit, Hatzfeld and other cultural historians), A. Coutinho deepens the multifaceted European baroque, specifies artists from various countries, and values the Spanish baroque Golden Age (Lope de Vega, Calderón de La Barca, Quevedo, Gôngora), showing that each place and each artist have their own grammar to express it. In fact, the baroque does not have a single center. Its “ex-­centric” “de-­centered” aesthetic is marked by the unforeseen and urgent. Coutinho emphasizes that baroque texts use “prismatic verbs” (example: “seeing”), radiating meanings through refractions or multiplications of plans, leading the reader/spectator to see and remember “things never described. Common places, in the process of evocation, have the function of a clash in the baroque.” (Coutinho, 1994: 82). Such artifice, used in sermons in the twilight of the churches, provides abstractions and evocative processes, allied to hearing and smell by incense in the churches. Thus, chiaroscuro fusionism was widely used in CounterReformation painting. The baroque landscapes are effervescent, there is a vocabulary of chromaticism, aggressive dynamism, and impetuosity in words, sounds in echoes, superabundance of figures of speech and intense sets of lights. Gilles Deleuze, in The Fold-Leibniz and the Baroque, claims that this style is “inseparable from a new regime of light and colors. Initially, light and darkness can be considered as 1 and 0, like the two floors of the world, separated by a thin line of water: the Blessed and the Damned. However, it is not an opposition” (Deleuze, 2015: 61). And he quotes Leibniz in Profession de foi du philosophe on the light: “it slides as if by a cleft in the midst of darkness” (p. 61). In effect, the baroque is an unfolding of senses (the folds, the plis according to Deleuze), “com-­pli-cating”, “re-­pli-cating” in pyrotechnics of illumination and colors. Images of the saints gained “the spurt of celestial light,” and the spectator, overjoyed, there captured the divine. Through the darkness over the image he felt the presence of death, and by such sensuous artifices the individual was led to conversion. The texts, the painting, the scenic art, the oratory witnessed the overwhelming pathos of the creature’s dependence on the eternal powers. In addition to bringing faith by color, luxury, the fineness of the concepts, and “witches” of the spirit, the baroque also infused terror with the flames of hell. Therefore, the baroque dominated the post-Renaissance period, although, for certain theorists, mannerism existed. And even for those who welcomed it, the two styles in certain regions interpenetrate so much that it is difficult to perceive

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where one ends and the other begins. Therefore, it is reckless to demarcate with precision the dividing lines between them. There is no unanimity among scholars. There are writers—and Gregório de Matos is an example—who, in their own poetic productions, present at times mannerist features, at other times baroque ones. There are also cases where the same text is analyzed by a researcher in the light of mannerism, and, on the other hand, with baroque foundations. Hamlet, with the aporetic structure of “To be, or not to be” is testimony of this. Thus, it is up to the scholar to position himself with the theory he deems most coherent. Here, the baroque as understood in the three works of Afrânio Coutinho was prioritized, but without rejecting mannerism.

Anchieta in the literary origins of the colony In the sixteenth century, the then Island of Vera Cruz and later the Land of Santa Cruz, became known to European civilization. From the “letter” of Pero Vaz de Caminha to D. Manuel, King of Portugal, the newly announced region became the utopia of dreams and riches. Chroniclers and foreign travelers’ “overseas land news” formed the collection of “information narratives” or “testimonial literature.” The El Dorado, where “in planting everything happens,” led Portugal to colonize it as nations and privateer ships were already hinting it should. The Europe of the Five Hundred, formerly splendorous, entered into the disenchantment of the world, even with the expansion of Protestantism. A Spaniard from the Canary Islands, José de Anchieta was born in 1534 and died in 1597 (in Brazil), and although he looked at Brazil “from outside,” critics agree as to his nativist feelings and his successful performance in the conversion of the natives. Sensitive to the soul of the aborigines, active in the Portuguese colony for 44 years, he penetrated into the primitive universe of this Other so diverse from his former world. “Working in the Tupi code” and mixing cultures, “he made the angels and saints of the medieval Catholicism sing and pray in this language, through the theater that he performed to the little Indians.” (Bosi, 1993:31). He learned Tupi, leaving as his legacy The Grammar of the Most Used Language on the Coast of Brazil. In that book and in his other productions— poems, plays, letters—are found the bases for the study of this idiom, uses and costumes of the Aborigines’ ethnology and of the colonial period. Anchieta used simple artifices to compose and stage his plays; pieces of similar structures to the medieval representations. To attract the cathecumens,

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he used elements of the fauna, of the flora, of pagan entities mixed with Christian symbols, accompanied with hymns in praise of Catholic saints and autochthonous beings. He created “a strange, synchretic imaginary, neither purely Catholic nor only Tupi-Guarani, when he forged mythical figures called Karaibebe, flying prophets, with whom the natives identified the announcers of the Land Without Evil, and the Christians recognized the angels, winged messengers from the Bible” (Bosi, 1993: 31). The plays were sometimes bilingual, when they mixed Portuguese with Tupi; sometimes trilingual, when Spanish was added. Anchieta transported natives to pedagogical theatrical scenes in a ludic manner, according to the Latin distich by Horace, docere cum delectare (to teach with delight). The performances took place in the villages, in the churches of the villages or outside, with stages set up on raised platforms and “artists” moving through nature’s exuberance. The sessions finished with retinues or in sumptuous processions, with the characters dialoguing with the public, in ecstasy with the sensorial baroque stimuli, although the model was medieval. Taking into consideration the presence of the hybrid aspects, Anchieta was “a writer in transition,” according to Eduardo Portella and, among his drama, there are the Auto of Santiago; Auto of Saint Lawrence; and Auto of Universal Preaching. As to the lyric poetry, his verses bring the old medieval measured stanza with positive results by the simplicity of expression. These are poems of popular flavor in heptasyllabic verses or pentasyllabic ones with refrains to facilitate memorization. They exalt saints and bless the Virgin Mary with the didactic hymn competition. Inspired by Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry and by the medieval legal processions of an edifyingly moral nature, Anchieta had made his way following that tradition and become singular in it, although theorists question the value of his unadorned verses. This is correct, but one needs to take into consideration the context from which his poetry emerged, and its purpose. The environment was adverse, the catechism absorbed him, the language constituted an obstacle. Despite all that, Anchieta overcame impasses and stamped his work with originality. Eduardo Portella, in the preface of New Classics, stresses that Anchieta’s verses have the merit of being “clearly impressed with Brazilianness, written to a Brazilian audience or for Brazilians, forcing them into an attitude, into a cosmovision, into a style that was rather Brazilian and, in any manner, Portuguese or Castellian” (Portella, 1966:6). Thus, his name was carved into literary history, among the initiators of our aesthetic and cultural formation, and such was his interest in the problems of the future nation that he received the epithet “The apostle of Brazil.”

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The exhortatory eloquence of Vieira A magician of thoughts, a combative and dialectic genius, the Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608-1697) is considered the legitimate representative of the seventeenth-­ century baroque oratory. A contemporary to Descartes, Calderón, Pascal, Bossuet, and Leibnitz, Antonio Vieira, with dizzying sermons, stands among the greatest of the 1600s, honoring Brazilian letters, despite his Portuguese birth. Having arrived in Brazil in 1614, when he was six years old, he remained in Brazil for 51 years, despite the frequent voyages to Europe and his imprisonment by the Inquisition in 1665 in Coimbra. In his long life, he exercised many functions: “advisor to kings, confessor of queens, preceptor of princes, a diplomat in European courts [. . .] and, with equal zeal, a missionary in Maranhão and Pará (states in Brazil)” (Bosi, 1993: 119). He witnessed the liberation of Portugal from the domain of Spain in 1640, lived through the Restoration period and the empire of the horrific Inquisition. He died in Brazil (in the state of Bahia), leaving as his legacy a catalytic logos of the great narrative of the 1600s. His polyphonic eloquence was built on the intertextuality of the social, political, religious, economical and prophetic discourses, bringing concepts into conjunction and dialogue with each other in his speeches, an eloquence which is today preserved in the printed texts of the sermons, in exegetic texts, prophecies, letters, public accounts, carefully preserved by him. Aware of the value and appreciation of his writings by future generations, he spent the final years of his life in Bahia, polishing his productions, faithful to the Latin proverb: Verba volant, scripta manent (Oral words vanish, written words remain). Representing some of the greatest oratory of his time, his composition is “a rhetorical treatise, not only sacred rhetoric, but Rhetoric in its original sense of the literary” (Martins, 1976:177) with persuasive ideas of potent beauty. Under the mask of figures of speech of a plastic and visual baroque, he wove “concepts” and metaphors from which sprang allegories, a rhetorical artifice emblematic of the baroque, according to Walter Benjamin. Allegory, which means, etymologically, “to say one thing to mean another,” does not name the object directly, but it involves it, spreading itself by means of acuteness and verbal twists. Thus, his winged verbal forms spilled over into the sermons, the epistolography, the philosophical and theological works with Conceptist and Culteranist volutes. His oral speeches, orchestrated with visual and auditive stimuli as well, involved the audience, and the Church of Christ penetrated into the collective soul through

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features associated with the already cited phanopeia, melopeia and logopeia. The discourse, full of ekphrasis, reproduced pictorial scenes through poetical, verbal signs, a technique that was part of good oratory since ancient Greece. This persuasive, rhetorical recourse suggested mental images to the public and depended on the involvement of the orator, of the energy of his logos to conduct his listener to his internal world. And there to see and remember situations lived or imagined by the plastic effect of the words of the speaker. In this manner, the public was led to “see” the “spoken” image as if they were in front of the verbalized painting/picture. It created between the sermonist and the audience the fictional pictorial illusion through the joining of two arts that were reviving the simile of the Latin poet Horace, Ut pictura poesis (poetry is similar to painting). The baroque style utilized this evocative artifice. And Vieira, through the conjuring tricks of his descriptions, was similarly endowed with such evocative power. The priest André de Barros, who spent long years with Vieira, left a probatory account: “When this great man preached, such was the energy that it looked as if we could see the voices.” Moreover: “these voices now in writing have such vitality they seem to be heard” (Apud Coutinho, 1968:220). This explanation is coherent because one of the characteristics of the baroque is its pictorial character. With this added element, his theatrical performances enchanted and, among the various elements, the visual was the most significant. He did not lack any of the others, though. In convergence, all of them amalgamated. However, he was, above all, the great writer of Cultism and Conceptism, although he denied such verbal flourishing in the Sexagesima Sermon. His collection of sermons is extensive but perhaps the most expressive was the Sexagesima Sermon, given at the Royal Chapel of Lisbon, in 1655. It is a metalinguistic piece of writing, in which Vieira offers the key to the art of preaching. His persuasive oratory—flexible and expansive—left traces and references about our country at its birth. His Portuguese-Brazilian voice implicitly announced our cultural formation, because he felt himself a participant, given his active participation in the problems between settlers and Indians. As a young man, he had traveled through the Sertão of Bahia, arriving in Maranhão and Pará, to learn about native issues. It was, therefore, Brazil that pulsated within him, and entered into the sermons that spoke of the future of the proclaimed homeland. And for these and other signs of Brazilianness in the sermons and acts of his life, Afrânio Coutinho and most of the theorists rightly consider Vieira, although Portuguese, “half Brazilian,” one of the founders of national literature.

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Nativist traces in the poetry of Gregório de Mattos In the state of Bahia of the 1600s, then the seat of the central government of the Portuguese colony in Brazil—a region impregnated with legends and social tensions—Gregório de Mattos Guerra was born, the first autochthonous voice of Brazilian literature. As with the rhythm of complex enigmas and situations of the Bahian land, the life and work of the writer of our literary origins represent, to the scholars, one of the most fascinating mysteries. Information about his birth is vague and problematic. There are apocryphal texts circulating as his. He is accused of plagiarizing Gongora, although, at that time, this accusation did not diminish him because it was seen as a homage to reproduce canonical models. Whatever is known of his biography comes from two strange sources with opposite approaches: one that praises, signed by the university bachelor Manuel Pereira Rabello; and another that is virulent and satirical, attributed to Padre Lourenco Ribeiro. Intrigued by this enigma that survived through centuries, the Brazilian poet and theorist Adriano Espinola, studying the sources, hypothesized that the nominated figures—the “bachelors” and the “priests”—never existed. Espinola concluded that they are personae, characters, “masks,” invented by Gregório de Matos himself. What is staged here is one more trick by the Bahian poet; a master’s trick, trouvailles of the contumacious jester, founder of our literature. Upon leaving a mystery and the possible discovery of his secret only after death, Gregório de Mattos demonstrates a creative dimension, ludic and perceptive, of his anticipatory look beyond time. He gave literary life to two fictitious writers who, being opposites, composed his biography according to Espinola’s research. Through this technique, Gregório antecipated the writing of the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who “becomes others” through heteronyms. Such an artifice, besides translating the real Gregório—a joker and a hooligan, unfolding himself in a bunch of fake “Others”—also represents the elastic dynamics of the baroque with its propulsive folds expanding theatrically in the “arts of deceiving.” In fact, this was an aesthetic known by the Bahian poet since a very young age, because, due to his privileged family situation, at age 16 he went to study in Europe: a fashion among the sons of the rich landowners, after their education in the Jesuit colleges. Overseas, the intelligence and the precocity of the youth that were geared towards a sense of sharp criticism, verbal caricature, and the picaresque anecdote, expanded during his life in Coimbra.

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Popular among the students, the Brazilian became notable for his singing with the guitar, for his jokes, and for his feverish intellect. He read a lot. The library of the university attracted him. The Solitudes by Góngora was his favorite reading, from which he absorbed cultism. He immersed himself in the picaresque novel, a genre which was, in part, developed later in the fictional quilt of the pseudo-­author, Rabello. Satirical poetry facinated him equally and Portuguese literature seduced him, mixed with Spanish texts. Camões’s lyrics filled his mind, as did the medieval writers: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Gil Vicente and Fernão Lopes. At that time, Portugal was under the dominion of Spain and certain Portuguese authors were bilingual. Hence, the influence of mannerism/the baroque in his later writing. According to certain critics, among them Eduardo Portella, there is, in the work of the Bahian poet, a confluence of mannerism with the baroque. However, the mannerist Gregório of the “Instabilities of the Worldly Things;” of the atemporal dilemmas of humankind; of the Tridentine lesson that everything is dust; of love and religious poetry under the sign of death; of the anxiety for God; will not be the focus here. The objective of the present essay will be restricted to the traces of our cultural formation in the plastic, baroque gestures; with nativist scenes of Bahia in his poetics after returning to Brazil. Upon returning to Bahia, his effulgent intellect, impregnated with European culture, surely clashed with the differences between the Metropolis and the Colony. Oscillating, with a free pass, between these disparate ideological and cultural discourses, Gregório knew from up-­close the greatnesses and the turpitudes of two spaces temporally synchronic, but with distinct living experiences. On the one hand, Portugal: with its sortileges of a glorious past revealed to Gregório during his stay and his studies in Coimbra, brought him the lights of the 1600s, the Spanish Golden Age, the fascination for Góngora and Quevedo, but also the perception of a humanist Europe at the same time reactionary, coercive, and contradictory—concerning its codes imposed on the colonies. On the other hand, Bahia: a lyric fief from his childhood, starred with legends, superstitions, African rhythms; the Bahia of luxurious tropical scenery, of the mixture of races, languages and cultures; colorful Bahia, a cauldron of antinomies, exoticism; primal Bahia, baroque shop of miracles, with corruptions, crooks, prevaricators—a gallery of types that remind us of the narrative panels of Balzac. In Gregório’s hand, the words also create the scene, gain life, colors, movement, and, in the manner of ekphrasis, they paint scenes of the effervescent colonial cauldron. We can see the adulators of the king, the ridiculous nobility,

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the debased clergy, the unbridled sexuality, the concupiscence of the mulatto women, the libido of the race, the underworld in burlesque themes, checkmating the instituted power. And everything sprouts with force from his “poetry of circumstance,” a primal source for the analysis of Brazilian culture. While transfiguring his times into poetry, he bursts into violent public accusations about ambitious plots linked to money, social status, the catechism— the form of imperialism of the Company of Jesus—salted with obscenities. Overlapping with criticism of the Bahian trinomial—religion, sexuality and greed—other data of that Brazilian moment emerge: typical dishes, native feasts, entertainments, exotic landscape, local dialects. This “Hellmouth” exposes the sores of the social body in denunciatory verses. Despite persistently strong domination from overseas, his writing continued to subvert the norms imposed by Portugal and exhibited a transcultural Brazil, when “Baroque became a way of life,” in the words of Afrânio Coutinho (1994:215). Thus, more and more colors and nativist traces began to come alive and to reflect our artistic-­cultural “difference.” This was born under the aegis of the baroque, which had been brought in the caravels of the Company of Jesus, and flourished in a land with which its style harmonized with in a perfect fit (206).

Bahia in the verses of Gregório Because of the difficulty in the work of textual criticism in the writings of Gregório de Matos—since none of his texts were printed during his lifetime— this study centers on the Selected Poems,2 edited by José Miguel Wisnik. It opens with a poem with a long title, written in block letters, announcing the diseases of the social body of the land: ANATOMICAL TREATISE ON THE AILMENTS THAT THE BODY OF THE REPUBLIC SUFFERED, IN ALL ITS MEMBERS, AND AN ENTIRE DEFINITION OF WHAT BAHIA IS IN ALL TIMES. The titles of the poems by Gregório de Matos, long on informative details, function like instructions, like those rubrics that head theatrical texts: informative subtitles, also called paratext (Espínola, 2000: 23). So, the title above works as For this research two editions were compared: Chronicle of Bahian Life, by James Amado, and Selected Poems, selected by José Miguel Wisnik.

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instructions, offering situational details of the text. It announces that Matos’s critical scalpel will cut through the skin of the facts when it performs the anatomy of the city, dissecting the social body of Bahia of that time: What is missing in this city?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Truth. What else for its dishonor?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Honor. Anything else need to be added?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Shame. Let the living devil expose himself, No matter how much fame exalts it, In a city that lacks Truth, honor, shame. [Que falta nesta cidade?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Verdade. Que mais por sua desonra?. . . . . . . . . . . . . Honra. Falta mais que se lhe ponha?. . . . . . . . . . Vergonha. O demo a viver se exponha, Por mais que a fama a exalta, Numa cidade onde falta Verdade, honra, vergonha.] Mattos, 1976: 37

The allusion to miscegenation is explicit: What are its sweet objects?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Blacks. Are there any others more solid?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mestizos. Which of these are more thankful?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Mullatoes. I give to the devil the insensible, I give to the devil the asses Who value as possessions Blacks, mestizos, mulattos [Quais são os seus doces objetos?. . . . . . . . .  . . Pretos. Tem outros bem mais maciços?. . . . . . . . . . . . . Mestiços. Quais destes lhe são mais gratos?. . . . . . . . . . Mulatos. Dou ao demo os insensatos, Dou ao demo a gente asnal, Que estima por cabedal Pratos, mestiços, mulatos.] Mattos, 1976: 37

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His mordancy is more voracious towards the soldiers and law enforcers: Who makes the meager tapers?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bailiffs. Who makes the flours delayed?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Guards. Who has them in their rooms?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergeants. [Quem faz os círios mesquinhos?. . . . . . . . .  . . Meirinhos. Quem faz as farinhas tardas?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Guardas. Quem as tem nos aposentos?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Sargentos.] Ibid.: 38

Justice is anathematized in the passages: And what justice does protect it?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Bastard. Is it distributed freely?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Sold. What about it that frightens everyone?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Unfair. [E que justiça a resguarda?. . . . . . . . .  . . Bastarda. É grátis distribuída?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vendida. Que tem, que a todos assusta?. . .  . . Injusta.] Ibid.: 38

The clergy receives sharp criticism from his “Hellmouth”: What is going on among the clergy?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Simony. And among the parishioners in the Church?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Envy. What else did they pinch it with?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Fingernail. [Que vai pela cleresia?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Simonia. E pelos membros da Igreja?. . . . . . . . .  . . Inveja. Cuidei que mais se lhe punha?. . . . . . . Unha] Ibid.: 38

The licentiousness of the clergy drives Matos to his most obscene descriptions: And among the priests, are there flaws?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Nuns. What are the evening meetings about?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Sermons. Do they occupy themselves in disputes?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . Whores. With wicked words I conclude in truth, That all the dealings of a priest Are nuns, sermons and whores. [E nos frades há manqueiras?. . . . . . . . . Freiras. Em que ocupam os serões?. . . . . . . . .  . . Sermões. Não se ocupam em disputas?. . . . . .  . . Putas.

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Com palavras dissolutas Me concluo na verdade, Que as lidas todas de um frade São freiras, sermões e putas.] Ibid.: 38

Physical pleasures, ethnic values, political powers, luxuries mix with carnivalesque confusion to picture the organic cloth that constituted Bahia. The bohemian and carefree spirit of the poet blends with the racial mixture, takes part in the code of the underworld, but also explodes in criticism against the sugar commerce: Is the sugar finished?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . It dropped. And did the money run out?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .It rose. So is it convalescing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .It died. To Bahia, it happened. What happens to a patient, it falls ill, the evil grows, it dropped, it rose, it died. Doesn’t the city council help?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .It cannot. Because it does not have enough power?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It doesn’t want. Is it that the government can convince it?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .It doesn’t win. Who would think that Such a noble council, For finding itself in such misery and poverty, Cannot, wants not, wins not. [O açúcar já acabou?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baixou. E o dinheiro se extinguiu?. . . . . .  . . Subiu. Logo já convalesceu?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morreu. À Bahia aconteceu O que a um doente acontece, Cai na cama, o mal cresce, Baixou, subiu e morreu. A Câmara não acode?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Não pode. Pois não tem todo o poder?. . . . . . . . . Não quer. É que o Governo a convence?. . . . . Não vence.

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature Quem haverá que tal pense, Que uma Câmara tão nobre, Por ver-­se mísera e pobre, Não pode, não quer, não vence.] Ibid.: 39

The poem “To the City of Bahia” is very well known and was set to music by Caetano Veloso. In it, there is the critical lament of the poet in describing his homeland: Sad Bahia! Oh, how changed Are you and I from our old state! I see you so poor, you that were placed under my care, Once I saw you rich, and so abundant to me. [Triste Bahia! ó quão dessemelhante Estás e estou do nosso antigo estado! Pobre te vejo a ti, tu a mim empenhado, Rica te vi eu já, tu a mim abundante.] Ibid.: 40

In the guise of burlesque farce and satire, there is the lampoon against the “brichote,” a pejorative designation of the foreigner. The poet alludes to the sugar industry, usurped by the imperialist allurements, ratifying aspects of Brazilianess. Another well-­known sonnet is from the series entitled “The Borough”: At every corner a great advisor, That desires to govern our shelter and livelihood; They can’t even govern their own kitchen, And are let to govern the entire world. In every door a frequent meddler, Who investigates the neighbor’s life, Listens to, pries into, scrutinizes, to carry it to the plaza or the yard. Many shameless mulattos, That have brought under their feet the noble men, Have placed on their palms all the knavery. Great usury in the markets, All the ones that do not steal are very poor: And here it is the city of Bahia.

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[A cada canto um grande conselheiro, Que nos quer governar cabana e vinha; Não sabem governar sua cozinha, E podem governar o mundo inteiro. Em cada porta um frequente olheiro, Que a vida do vizinho e da vizinha Pesquisa, escuta, espreita, e esquadrinha, Para o levar à praça e ao terreiro. Muitos mulatos desavergonhados, Trazidos sob os pés os homens nobres, Posta nas palmas toda a picardia, Estupendas usuras nos mercados, Todos os que não furtam muito pobres: E eis aqui a cidade da Bahia.] Ibid.: 41

Taking as his theme the degenerate existence in Bahia, he treats with irony those who are in power (“They do not know how to govern”) (“And are let to govern the entire world”), exposing the incompetence of the constituted power. Ridiculous and atrocious, he touches lightly on the meddling of the neighbors, among the criticism against the “shameful mulattos,” mixed fruits of the tumultuous imbrication of races. He also exposes the underbelly of thievery into which the city transformed, ratifying the basic scheme of his satires: ambition, power, money, pleasures of the flesh. Bahia comes up, once again, on page 44, redoubling hopelessness and laments about foreign speculation. There is an unequivocal demonstration of nativist feelings, attested by the tone of nostalgia in the sonnet below: To Bahia Sad successes, lamenting cases, Disgraces never seen, neither spoken, They are, oh Bahia, lamenting eves of other strangers that are at the brink of coming: We feel confused and stubborn, Since we do not cure the disgraces already passed, Neither do we foresee the expected ones, As if we were desiring them.

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Bad fortune took away our money, Left us broke, without a penny. Nobody sees, nobody talks, nobody contests, And it is that those who pluck money out of us, Pluck our hands, our tongue, our eyes. À BAHIA Tristes sucessos, casos lastimosos, Desgraças nunca vistas, nem faladas, São, ó Bahia, vésperas choradas De outros que estão por vir estranhos: Sentimo-­nos confusos, e teimosos, Pois não damos remédios às já passadas, Nem prevemos tampouco as esperadas, Como que estamos delas desejosos. Levou-­me o dinheiro a má fortuna, Ficamos sem tostão, real nem branca, Mucatas, correão, novelos, molhos: Ninguém vê, ninguém fala, nem impugna, E é que, quem o dinheiro nos arranca, Nos arrancam as mãos, a língua, os olhos. Ibid.: 44

Reproaching the abuses of power and the climate of oppression, his poetry of circumstance constitutes a testimony to the social and administrative reality of the colony, at a historical moment in which printing was prohibited. It became a courageous cultural documentary in which our national conscience laid its foundation in allusions to customs, to the crucible of vices, to luxuries. There are landscape references, recollections of the demographics of the city, mention of the “quilombos” (maroon settlements), of the slaves, of the worthless salaries, of the bobbins of the lacemakers, of the popular beliefs, of voodoo ceremonies, of the union between sexuality and the festivities of the seventeenth century, of the licentious dances to the sound of guitars and drums. The compositions oscillate between pagan eroticism and purifying Christianity; an allegorical baroque metaphor of the cosmopolitanism of the capital. It is the Bahia of the 1600s—of races and idioms in turbulence, of cupidity and of Jesuitical repression—liberating itself in the poetic discourse of the author. It is the

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autochthone atmosphere in the local food, in the fruits of the Bahian table, in the riches of the gold, of the silver and of the sugar revealing Brazilian scenes. In the poem “Letters” (60), the poet crosses himself before actions observed in the country. The already well-­known composition of the two “ff ” (94) is an obscene criticism of the social moment. Gregório defines his city with the disenchantments of the two “ff,” including theft and other obscenities as the causes of degradation. In the poem “Reproaches,” he criticizes the Jew (new-Christian), a relevant act at this socio-­economical-political moment, an era of the domination of the Company of Jesus. In the text, homosexuals, thieves, counterfeiters, the frightened ones, the bashful ones, skinny ones, fat ones, the diabolical, the tyrant, the unjust, and the hardworking all parade. This gallery, for all its critical dimensions, assumes atemporal characteristics. There are satires on spurious, false nobilities and about the origins of the Brazilian people. In “To the Movers and Shakers of Bahia, who are called the Caramurus,” he writes the chronicle of life in Bahia, playing with Tupi vocabulary to demystify and deconstruct the ‘noble’ origins of the locals. It rests on the caricature of the “migrating birds” of the sedentary parvenus in Bahia. Satire on original and native ‘sap’ unfold in other sonnets on the same theme, bringing to the compositions the color of Indigenous legends, the presence of palm trees, and the splendor of macaws in ekphrastic scenes. We can almost see the pictures described with nativist traits. Sometimes Gregório falls into the tragicomic grotesque, with picaresque masks. Satire also appears in the portrait of Governor Antônio Luís da Câmara Cascudo (pp.110–111), and in the romance of Pedro Álvares da Neiva, when he embarked for Portugal (pp.114–117). A striking denunciation of the foreign can be found in “Marinícolas.” In the traditional festivities of entrudo with the reigning confusion and the procession of Ash Wednesday, one can see the confused folk aspect of the carnival festival in Bahia mixed with religious ritual. The poem “Song” portrays a colonial residence of the 1600s, with the black women loaded with clothes; decorations; visits among friends; the big porches; the honest laughter, flirtation, jokes and sarcasm: remembrances of the picturesque Brazil of that time. The contextual chronicle reappears in the composition about the comet that appeared in Bahia in 1680. The sonnet about Recife (164) attests, by the description of the village, the identity between Bahia and Pernanbuco, both possessing basic common principles of our cultural history.

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Colonial Brazil is present in the sonnets on pages 166–167. In the first sonnet, the poet arrives at the village of Saint Francis and describes his entertainments. He mentions the scenery: “Is there anything like being in Saint Francis?/See how we go to the pastures to cool off. [. . .]” He alludes to the black women and their licentiousness: “The black women pass by, they speak the burlesque/all are called, all of them are enticed.” In another sonnet, he narrates the suffering on a winter morning and mentions the “mangará,” the flowering extremity of a banana stalk. Suddenly, in the sentence structure appear nets and rafts (172–73), lizards and chameleons (173), horses, dogfish, “mazombos” and “mazumbaias” (174)—terms related to European descendents born in Brazil—and parrots (270). It is a Brazil speckled with nativist connotations, configuring the mosaic of the colonial chronicle of Bahia, the foundation of our literary formation. Gregório de Matos’s poetry of circumstance offers plastic images of the epoch, expresses his ideological view and nativist aesthetic, forged at a difficult moment: with a metropolitan system impeding its effusions; with the prohibition of the press; with mishaps inherent to Brazilian culture in its place of birth. But, despite the obstacles, the grotesqueness of the caricatures, the accusing and obscene tone of the satires translated, in the seventeenth century, a native literature emerges. As an “Antenna of the race,” (Ezra Pound), Gregório de Matos brought to the rising national poetry disturbing reflections of our formation, a fruit of the syncretism between allochthonism and autochthonism. In his poetics, the desire for Brazilianness and the liberation of our literature from the domain of the metropolis are born. In the effervescent cauldron of colonization, he consummated the spirit of the baroque feast. Located at cultural frontiers, he provoked the established, re/moved the center to the periphery. Although a bachelor in law, in Coimbra, Matos played, in the carnivalesque fantasy of the transgressive discourse, the “ex-­centric,” one who was outside the center, skidding through popular phrases in discourses of protest and denunciation. In his poems one finds a love exchange between the European traveler and the popular bohemian, guitar player, lundu singer. Synthesizer of worlds, Gregório de Matos demonstrated the possibility of surmising the here and the beyond of the walls of the village, in time and space. Capable of a wide perspective, he used satire as a weapon of protest, opening himself up to greater objectives than being a mere product of circumstances. When he talks about the Bahian city, it is Brazil that becomes wider in the chronological space of its historic moment, reaching the dimension of atemporality.

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General conclusion Although synthesized, the present essay has tried to fulfill the propositions announced in the introduction. According to what was revealed, before the analysis of works by Anchieta, Vieira and Gregório, quick strokes painted the disenchanted panorama of the Renaissance, followed by the mannerist aesthetic, accepted by some theorists as an autonomous style, and not by others (among them, Afrânio Coutinho, who considers all post-Renaissance manifestations as belonging to the baroque until the beginning of the seventeenth century). Even with Coutinho as a guide, the article lingered on the identities and differences between mannerism and baroque, to better clarify the issues. The introduction said that there would be three foci in this study: the role of the Jesuits; the emphasis on the baroque; and the polemic of the independence of our literature from the Portuguese. As to the first item, there is consensus on the importance of the representatives of the Company of Jesus in the intellectual hubbub of the future Brazil, as well as the relevance of the baroque to the foundation of Brazilian culture. In relation to the formation of Brazilian literature, we ratify here the affirmation by Afrânio Coutinho already cited above: “Brazilian literature was born by the baroque hands of the Jesuits.” It was demonstrated that the lyric poetry of Anchieta is naive and unpolished, although his role as an evangelist has been of true importance, especially in the theatrical texts in which the native discourse was already present. Furthermore, it was shown that Vieira was a Luso-Brazilian voice who, with magnificent sermons and genuine interest “for our things,” became one of the legitimate founders of the national literature. However, Gregório de Matos is the towering starting point of our literary and cultural formation. Alluding to mansions, processions, parrots, macaws, the Island of Itaparica, to the outpouring of the sweat of the black men, to the shrewd undulations of the mulatto women, to the lust of the race, he announced the latent tropicalism of Brazil that ends up exploding in the ‘cannibal’ banquet from 1922 to 1930. The critical positioning that was emerging in it, of a childish Brazil: playful, a party-­lover, showed the way to the modernist discourse. What are the poems by this Bahian man other than the seeds for Macunaima and other modernist works? The poetic phrase of the Andrades, Mario and Oswald, is already delineated in the rhythmic mixing of the sonnets by de Matos like the one about the false Caramurus. In different historical and chronological contexts, the three authors—de Matos, Mario de Andrade and Oswald de

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Andrade—in dialogical philia they leaned over the depths of Brazil to map its anatomy, critically and creatively. Thus, Brazilian literature comes to be, ardently, in the autochthonous manifestation of modernism, thanks to the cultural/ ideological sap sedimented by the “Hellmouth,” undoubtedly the greatest and the most authentic native cornerstone of our literary formation.

Works cited Bosi, Alfredo. Dialética da colonização. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. Coutinho, Afrânio. Introdução à literatura no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1966. Coutinho, Afrânio. A literatura no Brasil: Volume 1 Introduções: Barroco, Neoclassicismo, Arcadismo”. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Coutinho, Afrânio. Do Barroco. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ; Tempo Brasileiro, 1994. Coutinho, Eduardo F. “O americanismo poético de José Lezama Lima: notas sobre A expressão americana” In: Rompendo Barreiras: ensaios de literatura brasileira e hispano-­americana. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2014. Deleuze, Gilles. A dobra: Leibniz e o barroco. Trans. Luiz B. L. Orlandi. Campinas: Papirus, 1991. Espínola, Adriano. As artes de enganar: um estudo das máscaras poéticas e biográficas de Gregório de Mattos. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks Editora, 2000. Martins, Wilson. História da inteligência brasileira, vol. I. São Paulo: Editora Cultrix; Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1976. Matos, Gregório de. Obras completas (7 vols.): sacra, lírica, satírica, burlesca; vol. I e VI. Ed. James Amado. Salvador: Editora Janaína, 1968. Matos, Gregório de. Poemas Escolhidos. Seleção, introdução e notas de José Miguel Wisnik. São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1976. Portella, Eduardo. “José de Anchieta Poesia”. Prefácio e seleção. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Agir Editora, Coleção Nossos Clássicos, 1966. Portella, Eduardo. A linha do horizonte renascentista. In: O pensamento. A História. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, 1975, p. 15 (Tempo brasileiro, n° 47). Portella, Eduardo. Gregório de Matos (Maneirismo e Barroco). Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 45/46: 9, abril-­setembro, 1976. Portella, Eduardo. “Renascimento e contra-­renascimento no Brasil”. In: Literatura Brasileira: Vertentes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Tempo Brasileiro, 1977, p.3–20 (Tempo Brasileiro, n° 48).

3

Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil Gustavo Bernardo Krause

The historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) has already said somewhere that “the smoke of the events clouds the eyes of the coevals.” In this poetic formula, he called our attention to the difficulty of telling a history when one is living that history simultaneously. However, if I distance myself from the present, I trade one fog for another; perhaps even denser. It will no longer be the mist of the events that will cloud my view, but rather the clouds of the different discourses that overlap in time. As Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) points out, “to write History is so difficult that the majority of the historians feels forced to make concessions to the technique of the legend” [1987:17]. Luckily, I have as my object the foundational poems of the literature in Brazil and, to a certain extent, poems that founded Brazil itself. While investigating how they relate to Western literature, in truth/reality, and with Western philosophy, at the same time, I investigate how the mentality that gave them form remains, somehow, in contemporary discourse. Let us see, then, what Enlightenment fountains (or more or less enlightened ones) Brazilian Neoclassicism (referred to in Brazil as Arcadismo) sipped from to spin its verses.

The light Enlightenment thinking begins to form with the philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) and the mathematician Isaac Newton (1643–1727). In political terms, the entire movement converged for the relative success (and later retrogression) of the French Revolution that took place between 1789 and 1799. In the eighteenth

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century, there developed in Europe an intellectual and philosophical movement that became known as the Enlightenment: in French Le Siècle des Lumières, in German Aufklärung. The movement is also called by the terms, Illustration, Clarity, Knowledge, and Philosophy of Light—or the Century of the Lights, following the French denomination. All the expressions above originate from the ideas of light and clarity, illustration included, which comes from the Latin form lustrare, that is, “to lighten” or “to clear.” One supposes then the need to cast light upon whatever was found to be in the dark, bringing light to what was in darkness. The self-­ denominations follow the constant of the cultural and political movements: to affirm the new they deny everything that came before and gave them their origin. The Enlightenment also suggests, from its name and variations, that all the ideas about the world previously found themselves lost in darkness. The self-­ designation wants to avoid the fetishism of the word, that is, that we take for granted what we have yet to investigate. The Philosophical Dictionary by Regina Schöpke, says that “the Enlightenment had as its highest principle the unshakeable conviction in the powers of reason (referred to as natural light) and of science in the process of human’s moral improvement” [2010:133]. The presupposition, then, was that the world was in darkness, without light and without philosophy. Well, this suggestion denies all the thinking as well as all the philosophy that had preceded the Enlightenment. Denial of this sort is not a minor aspect of the movement. The “unshakeability” of the conviction in the powers of reason will foster, a little later, the positivist creed of scientism, and much later, the dogmatic convictions of fascism. In the millennial confrontation between skeptical doubt and categorical certainty, they try to defeat Philosophy itself under the inverted allegation of defending it at any cost. Thus, according to Arnold Hauser, Enlightenment, in the fight against the Church and Absolutism, ends up losing “the sensitivity to all that was related with religion and the power of the irrational in History” (1972: 762). In metaphorical terms: the light of the Enlightenment produces its own shadow. In less metaphorical terms: the presuppositions and convictions of the Enlightenment generate its own contradictions. The concept of Enlightenment still helps to create and strengthen the myth that certain people can illuminate the way for others: for example, the intellectuals, leftist or right-­winged, ascribe to themselves the task of guiding the uneducated masses out of darkness. There is a difference, not always easily identifiable, between those who teach, like a teacher, and those who dazzle, like a messianic

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leader. Because of that, the Brazilian historian Francisco Calazans Falcon comments that “we are today, in fact, in one way or another, heirs to Enlightenment” (1988: 7). This legacy pertains to the political and intellectual planes. In the political plane, we are left with “the authoritarian tendency of the Enlightenment, always distant and hostile to the participation of the masses, as elitist today as our so familiar enlightened despots were at their time” (Falcon, 1988: 7). On the intellectual plane, “Enlightenment converted itself into this paradigmatic model of the only incontestable truth, beyond any doubt, that we recognize simply by the word science. Underneath its shade, technocracy and bureaucracy thrive” (Falcon, 1988: 7). To warn against the internal contradictions of the movement, however, does not imply either disqualifying its historical importance, or saying that its targets did not deserve to be hit. The battle of the partisans/disciples of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century came to pass against the forms of obscurantism and dogmatism in political and religious fields. Their battle was a necessary one and, happily or unhappily, it continues to be so.

Those who turned on the light The movement found its greatest strength in pre-­revolutionary France, with remarkable names like François Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694– 1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In Germany, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is also considered a philosopher of the Enlightenment. When asked was ist Aufklärung?, he answers that: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-­incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-­incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! Sapere aude! Have the courage to avail yourself of your own understanding! Kant, 1970: 54

Kant makes explicit, as the foundation of Enlightenment, the necessity to think by oneself and the daring of doing it. The Latin maxim sapere aude

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translates into the imperative: “dare to think.” The German philosopher does not put himself, then, in the place of the one who is going to illumine others, but, on the contrary, he demands that all and each lights his own lights. In this manner, his philosophy is based on the critique of reason rather than on the enthronement of reason. Hence, ironically, Kant becomes the Enlightenment philosopher responsible for “limiting the powers of reason—although even more sovereign and legislating than for the French, it is not capable of handling the world as it is.” The world as it is, or as the realists (legitimate orphans of the Enlightenment) would like it to be, “disappears in the Kantian perspective and transforms into the world as it appears to us” (Schöpke, 2010: 133). However, German philosophy lets itself be influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau rather than by Voltaire. Kant himself saw in Rousseau “the modern world Newton,” while Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) called him no less than “saint” and “prophet” (Hauser, 1972: 767). In Brazil, as well, the presence of Rousseau and his “noble savage,” valuing nature and the natural condition as paradigms of reason, is much more influential than Voltaire’s, especially for literature. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau wrote, in the beginning of his Social Contract. The revolutionaries, like Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), repeated these words by heart (Warburton, 2013: 118). They are, undoubtedly, inspiring words but, because idealized, are based on an equivocated premise. In truth, men and women are not born free because they do not choose: firstly, if they want to be born or to exist; next, how to be born: whether man or woman, white, black or Indigenous; then, where to be born: in what country, family, class and social condition; finally, when to be born: in what time of the year, of the century or of history. In Kantian terms, liberty is one of our best regulating ideas, but it is neither a fact nor a reality. Rousseau would have been inspired by Horace’s maxim—fugere urbem—to flee the city. According to Rousseau, we are all naturally good as long as we remain in a natural state. If we do not leave nature we will remain savage, hence good—more specifically, we will continue to be “noble savages.” However, since the option of remaining in nature was not available to Rousseau’s contemporaries—and to us much less so, when there are no more jungles or forests—the French philosopher’s solution resumed in the redaction of a contract that defined the general will, such a will that should superimpose the will of each individual. Only the social contract would allow for the maintenance of the

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original state of liberty. In case somebody did not desire to undersign this contract and, hence, not go along with it, he or she would no longer be a free person. The persons that refused freedom should be forced, in one way or another, to obey the contract, thus they should be forced into freedom. Well, the contradiction seems evident but for Rousseau it did not show itself as a contradiction. In fact, it continued not to bother the different reformers of the world very much.

Those who doubted the light The case of Voltaire is very diverse, because he did not seem to share either the Enlightenment belief in the absolute power of reason, nor the unconditional trust of Kant and Rousseau in the discernment of the individual, especially when the latter is ostracized from society. A legitimate heir to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who, in his Essays, had rescued skepticism from limbo, Voltaire constructed a philosophical fiction so ironical that it made its interlocutors and readers suspend judgment in order to question, even if only slightly, their own certainties. Voltaire deeply suspected “the philosophical systems and the type of thinker that believed himself to possess the answer to every question” (Warburton, 2013: 105). People say that the mantra about freedom of thought and expression came from his pen: “I do not agree with even one word of what you have said, but I defend till death your right to say them.” Contrary to his coevals, principally the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Voltaire did not view the world as the best of all possible worlds. Consequently, he did not stop questioning the world and its people. Pope and Leibniz understood that, “if we could get away and see the universe from where God is, we’d recognize the perfection that it is, how everything fits and everything that appears bad is, in truth, part of a bigger plan” (Warburton, 2013: 104). Voltaire caricatured this type of thinking in Candide, a philosophical novel that was published in 1759. The young Candide believed, very candidly, as his name indicates, in that greater plan of God. His tutor, Dr. Pangloss, justified to him how each disaster, torture, war, rape, religious persecution or slavery was an evident proof that they lived, and we live, in the best of all possible worlds. It was obviously meant by the

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philosopher as ironic. The irony proved to be devastating when Candide witnessed the devastation caused by the war. The narrator placed the massacre in opposition with positive adjectives, creating disturbing antitheses, such as “heroic slaughter,” and philosophical expressions like “of the best of the worlds” and “sufficient cause”: Nothing was so beautiful, so agile, so brilliant, so well organized like those two armies. The trumpets, the fifes, the oboes, the drums, the cannons formed a harmony as it had never before been heard in hell. First, the cannons shredded near six thousand men from each side; afterwards, the shotguns swept from the best of the worlds about nine or ten thousand swindlers that contaminated the surface. The bayonets were also the sufficient cause of the death of some thousands of soldiers. All this added up to about thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself the best he could, during that heroic carnage. Voltaire, 2000: 6

In “The Ignorant Philosopher,” a title linked to the skeptical tradition of philosophy, Voltaire contested the religious dogma that affirms that everything in this universe, as well as on Earth, including all the animals, was created for man: But, since the tiny globe of the Earth turns along with the other planets around the Sun; since the regular and proportional movements of the astral bodies can subsist eternally without man’s hand/presence; since there exist on our tiny planet a number infinitely greater of animals than my own species, I thought that Mr. Prior had a certain excess of self-­esteem when he boasted that everything had been made for him; I saw that man, during his lifetime, is devoured by all animals, when he is without defense, and that all will devour him even after his death. Thus, it was difficult for me to conceive that the Mr. Prior and Mr. Knight were the kings of nature. Slave to everything that is around me, instead of being king, isolated to a point and surrounded by the immensity, I begin by investigating myself. Voltaire, 2001: 220

It was the same Voltaire, in the same book, that said he was “ashamed of having sought so many truths and found so many chimeras” (2001: 131), reinforcing the peremptory necessity of reason to establish limits for reason itself. It was the same Voltaire who made his character Zadik realize “that self-­ esteem/love is a balloon full of wind, whence come storms when poked” (2012: 5). In the tale of Zadig, the character tried to represent men “as they really are, insects devouring one another in a small mud atom” (Voltaire, 2012: 35).

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Despite the fact that he formulated these opinions about 250 years ago, Voltaire’s critics remain relevant and pertinent. Everywhere, and in Brazil in particular, the moment at which I write these lines, we see the return of positions that would surely be considered “of the dark ages” by members of the Enlightenment in bygone eras themselves. Now, as before, it is necessary to react to them with the same virulence used by the Enlightenment philosophers of the past, as long as we do not consider ourselves, at the same time, the only “enlightened” ones, that retain truth and that dedicate ourselves “to educate” the so-­called ignorant masses.

How the New World received the light How did the New World receive the Enlightenment ideals? In the British colonies that would form the future United States of America, these ideas were imported from the English metropolis, naturally, but they gained their own features. These new features influenced the thinking and the political practice of the so-­called founding fathers of the United States, among them Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). The famous Declaration of Independence, that till now is the foundation of the American Constitution, was admittedly inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Heading down to the south of the new continent, we ask: how did Brazil at that time receive the ideas of the Enlightenment? How did these ideas affect the verses of our poets? The territory “discovered” by the Portuguese in 1500, was named “Brasil” in 1527, probably due to the abundant presence of the Brazil-­wood tree, with its red bark the color of burning coal (“brasa,” in Portuguese). Brazil remained a Portuguese colony until the year of its independence, in 1822. The proclamation of its independence, however, was contradictory because it was declared by a Portuguese, the son of King Dom João VI. That Portuguese prince became the first Brazilian Emperor, under the title Dom Pedro I. Therefore, in the eighteenth century, Brazil was still, strictly speaking, just a colony of Portugal. To speak of a “Brazilian Literature” at that time implies a certain anachronism. The majority of historians, however, accept speaking of a Brazilian literature of that moment, understanding it as the formation of Brazilian literature. In political-­cultural terms, the solution is pertinent, if we

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remember that the Enlightenment ideas nourished the will towards the independence of the South American colony.

The presence of the light in Brazil The most important poets of the period, for example—Cláudio Manuel da Costa (1729–1789), Tomás Antônio Gonzaga (1744–1810), Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–1792), Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga (1749–1814), José Basílio da Gama (1740–1795), José de Santa Rita Durão (1722–1784), Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1739–1800) António Pereira de Sousa Caldas (1762–1814), Francisco de São Carlos (1768–1829) and José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1763–1838) are frequently associated with the hapless movement of independence known as Minas Conspiracy. Antonio Candido observes, with reason, that “ours was a Century of the Lights dominantly pious, scholastic, inquisitorial” (2009:67). The intellectuals and the administrators certainly did not ignore the ideas of Enlightenment, but adjusted them to the narrow-­minded molding of the colony. Such ideas still suffered the censoring filter of the despotism, relatively enlightened, of the Marquis of Pombal. Therefore, Candido also refers to the Brazilian “Arcadismo” as “literary Pombalism,” considering as its culminant points the poem The Uraguay by Basílio da Gama, in the anti-Jesuit field; The Deserter by Silva Alvarenga, in the intellectual-­reform sector; and The Kingdom of Stupidity by Francisco de Melo Franco (1757–1822), in protest against the reactionary period of D. Maria I (Queen of Portugal). These works “constitute the Brazilian echo, or Luso-Brazilian, of the modern ideas. Among us, they materialized more and more in Nativism, in the advertisement of knowledge, in the aspiration to good government, that would mark the attitude and the activity of the publicists and politicians up to the proclamation and consolidation of the Independence” (Candido, 2009: 68). In his best synthesis, Antonio Candido shows that the way in which Brazilian culture incorporated and transformed the Enlightenment ideals ended up creating a paradigm that still guides us, in a certain way, today: “Dream and reality, in a country where the magnitude of the tasks and the poverty of resources could only equate in a plea to utopia, to a salvific plan, which have been, since then, one of the most constant ways our intellectuals adjust to the situation” (Candido, 2009: 68).

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Professor Candido confirms, however, that the true Brazilian “century of the lights,” even on its modest scale, took place very late, already in the nineteenth century, with the forced departure of D. João VI, King of Portugal, to Brazil, in 1808, escaping from Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops. According to Candido, “if the poetry of this time is of inferior quality, the essay and journalism are excellent, carrying to a logical consequence the didactical tendencies of the Enlightenment; they take their place in the spirit of the best ones and contribute to create an atmosphere, out of which would come the beginnings of literary independence” (2009: 69). In prose, we could venture to say that our Voltaire would be the mulatto Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908). This descendent of slaves will cast the brightest light on the Brazilian slavery patriarchy. His novels are true philosophical essays, without leaving the shelf of the best Brazilian literature. His way of thinking, radically skeptical like Montaigne’s, was also profoundly ironical. It is his lapidary phrase, in bold print in the article “The New Generation,” till now badly absorbed by the academy, by the school, and by the national intellectuals, that placed under suspicion the entire established thinking of the time: “reality is good, realism is what is not worth a thing” (Assis, 1938: 23).

Light and revolt Let’s return, however, to the eighteenth century and the relationship of the poets with the movement known as Minas Gerais Conspiracy. In reality, only three of the “Arcadian” poets resided in Vila Rica (Rich Village)—today the city of Ouro Preto (Black Gold) in the state of Minas Gerais, the place of the deflagration of the movement—between the years 1782 and 1789. They were Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto. It was Alvarenga Peixoto who proposed the motto for both versions of the flag of the conspiring movement. In the first version, they wrote, around a triangle, the words libertas quae sera tamen (freedom, even though late). The motto, which remains till today on the flag of the state of Minas Gerais, derived from a verse by Virgilio: libertas quae sera tamen respexit inertem—or, “liberty, which, though late, yet cast an eye upon me in my inactive time of life.” In the second version of the flag, under the motto libertas quae sera tamen, Rousseau’s noble savage was shown, in the design of an Indian breaking the chains around his wrists.

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Among the best-­known verses of Alvarenga Peixoto, one can find the stanza that was a direct praise of the ideals of Enlightenment, thus to the primacy of reason and nature: Beloved daughter, the day is upon us, In which the light of reason, like a burning torch, Guides simple nature, It is today that your world begins Amada filha, é já chegado o dia, Em que a luz da razão, qual tocha acesa, Vem conduzir a simples natureza, É hoje que o teu mundo principia. Proença Filho, 2006: 94

Despite its defeat, however, it is interesting to point out that the Brazilian movement for independence, centered in Vila Rica, is aborted by Portuguese repression in 1789—exactly the year of the beginning of the French Revolution, the latter turning victorious ten years later. This means that the Brazilian revolutionary movement is prior to, or at least concomitant with, the European movement that changed Western history. In any case, from the meetings of the above-­mentioned poets, the Minas Conspiracy was born, and, according to João Ribeiro, “the considerable number of poets that figure among the leaders of the conspiracy lends to it a certain character of intellectual and theoretical elevation” (Ribeiro apud Nejar, 2011: 73).

Light in the Brazilian Arcadia As we can see, discussions of the Enlightenment members, in aesthetic as well as philosophical and political terms, arrived in Portugal late, in the middle of the eighteenth century—and even later in the Brazilian colony, as would be expected. Some say that there never was in Brazilian lands (or in the metropolis, or in the other European countries) a true academy of intellectuals and poets that could be named “Arcadia.” Others, like Carlos Nejar, understand that Cláudio Manuel da Costa really founded, in 1768, in the same year in which he published his Poetic Works, a Brazilian Arcadia, with the purpose of “imitating, through poetry the idyllic mounts, trees, rivers, sheep, in a return to the Greek shepherds” (Nejar, 2011: 73). In any case, the movement ended up being known as Arcadismo. It manifests itself in all the Brazilian poets of that time:

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. . . a sincere desire for the renovation of life, the renovation of man and the coherent renovation of art; a desire that is translated not only to the courageous affirmation of new truths about the moral and sentimental life, as one can verify in the lyric-­romantic poetry and the moral reflection of Cláudio, Gonzaga, Silva Alvarenga, Sousa Caldas, José Bonifácio, but even in the declaredly revolutionary attitude that is expressed in invectives and satires, as it is the case, only to mention works related to Brazil, of the Chilean Letters, by Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, and to some extent, the case of The Uruguay, by Basílio da Gama, a declared lampoon against the Company of Jesus (Amora, in Coutinho, 1968: 314).

As in the German case, the greater influence is Rousseau rather than Voltaire. The ideal man for these poets is always the one “in a natural state”: one who has a pure heart like Dirceu of Marília, idealized by Gonzaga; the enlightened hero, like Diogo Álvares Correia, the Caramuru of the homonymous poem, an epic in ten cantos written by Santa Rita Durão; the noble savage, finally, of the “Ode to the savage,” by Sousa Caldas, from 1783: What an August image of lofty splendor Before me stands! Nude; but robed in grace and valor The natural man does not fear The tough, ugly hand of Fate: On his face, Liberty is stamped Surrounded by its serious pleasures. [Que Augusta imagem de esplendor subido Ante mim se figura! Nu; mas de graça e de valor vestido O homem natural não teme a dura Feia mão da Ventura: No rosto a Liberdade traz pintada De seus sérios prazeres rodeada.] Brayner, 1981: 147

The above verses are from the fourth stanza of Sousa Caldas’s ode. The third verse, in particular, seems emblematic: the man of the Rousseaunian and Arcadian’s ideal is nude, but different from the king, grace and valor dresses him, and not the shame of arrogance. He faces fate without fear because, in the manner of the Brazilian Indians, he carries liberty painted on his face. As in Rousseau, the praising of the savage did not imply the refusal of civilization. The civilized man “could also build a golden age, a state of urban

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happiness, as long as he sought the common wellbeing and progress” (Amora, in Coutinho, 1968: 316), for better re-­conducting society to the principles of the Natural State. It is not a coincidence that several of the poets of Arcadismo were graduates from law school and that one of the greatest poets, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, had written his thesis precisely on “A Treatise on Natural Rights”, around 1768, as a condition of being accepted as a student at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. In this manner, the line that links the myth of the noble savage to the even greater myth of the enlightened despot is established, the myth being a contradiction in terms. If he is a despot, then he cannot be civilized, that is, enlightened by questions of philosophy, according to the Voltairean model. If he is well-­educated, then he cannot be a despot, a condition that implies the refusal of doubt, of thought, and of the other. In the Arcadian poetry, Rousseau’s savage disguises himself as a shepherd among sheep, in order to remain in a natural state. Afrânio Coutinho reminds us that the notion of nature “had no rivals as the universal, guiding idea in the eighteenth century: Nature and its laws had incontestable authority, playing a significant role in all domains, being expected to introduce, in art and in literature, order, unity, proportion” (2001: 262). Under the terms of the Arcadian poetry, nature would find itself naturally tamed and controlled by the shepherd of all the sheep, that is, by the poet himself. That bucolic poetry, however, had a few problems. Even in Europe, “too much fidelity could go against good taste, against the nobility of language, for a pastoral life is uncouth and the shepherds are simple, primitive folks” (Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 325). As António Diniz da Cruz e Silva (1731–1799), a Portuguese Arcadian poet who acted as the magistrate in the Minas Conspiracy wrote, “the fields almost always will be the most fertile, the air, the most pure, the rivers, the most serene, the birds, the most harmonious, moreover, on the same hills will grow abundant flowers” (See Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 325). Such precepts are intended to bridle all the excess and forbid the expression of feelings, emotions and opinions in order to reinforce the objectivity in descriptions. However, the objectivity became hampered, as nature itself was not always the most fertile, in the same way that the air was not the most pure, neither were the rivers the most serene nor the birds the most harmonious. Likewise, abundant flowers could not always bloom, and always the same, from the same hills. In Brazil, still veiled by dense and enclosing tropical forests, the loss of objectivity was even greater because nature showed itself to be much less serene

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and orderly. Despite that, a great part of the scholars who study this poetry insist that “the principle of imitation imposed realism, including the use of biographical elements, in opposition to the baroque poetry,” because “the poet was a painter of situations, not of emotions” (Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 326). As in the following century, what one supposed was meant by “realism” was always a certain idealization of reality.

Light and critique However, some echo of the critical conceptions of the Enlightenment, in the manner of Voltaire and Kant, reverberated in the verses of the Brazilian Arcadian poets. In the 27th lyric of Marília de Dirceu, the best known by Tomás Antonio Gonzaga, for example, we find a criticism of war, especially of the war in which the poor die for the rich when pursuing an absurd ideal of heroism: To be a hero, Marília, does not imply burning empires: the bad tyrant also incites war, spills human blood, and depopulates the earth To be a hero consists in living justly: And the poor man can be a hero, as well as the greatest Augustus. A hero I am, beautiful Marília, Walking the honorable road of virtue: I won, I won a throne Ah! Without staining the sword, Without robbing the owner! [O ser herói, Marília, não consiste em queimar os impérios: mover a guerra, espalha o sangue humano, e despovoa a terra também o mau tirano. Consiste o ser herói em viver justo: e tanto pode ser herói o pobre, como o maior Augusto.

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature Eu é que sou herói, Marília bela, seguindo da virtude a honrosa estrada: ganhei, ganhei um trono ah! não manchei a espada, não o roubei ao dono!] Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 327

The idea of the hero as “just,” rather than “brave” (in both connotations of the latter term, “courageous” and “ferocious”) reflected the Kantian conception of the man, whose acts are just if and only if they can represent paradigms for a universal law, that is, for a rule that can be applied to all, without any contradiction and without any exception. The priest António Pereira de Sousa Caldas, in his “Ode to the Savage,” revealed his longings for the “sweet years” of primitive life, in opposition to the bitter years of coeval life, but he did not blame original sin, as one would expect. On the contrary, he cultivated the doubt, even the religious doubt, when he said: My inconstant soul Believes, assumes, vacillates, uncertain trembles, And in cruel doubts, in affliction, wails. [A minha alma inconstante Crê, presume, vacila, incerta treme, E em dúvidas cruéis aflita geme.] Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 339

Since he cultivated doubt, a condition that brought upon him, while still a student, punishment by the Inquisition, Sousa Caldas used to contemplate. So he attributed the bitterness to the social structure and questioned the Portuguese domination, acting like a proto-­nationalist: Yonder, the earth with perennial life From the liberal bosom sets free A thousand riches, which the miserly Lusitan Either hardly knows it, or dissipating it, With jealousy, hides it from the world. Yonder, oh pain . . . Oh, loved land! Ignorance has set firmly And with a sluggish breath ruins everything, Dispersing misdoings, and obfuscating the bright light of truth.

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Yonder, servile dread, and timidity The brave hearts lessen. [Ali a terra com perene vida Do seio liberal desaferrolha Riquezas mil, que o Lusitano avaro Ou mal conhece, ou mal aproveitando, Esconde com ciúme ao mundo inteiro. Ali, ó dor! . . . ó minha Pátria amada! A Ignorância firmou seu rude assento E com hálito inerte tudo dana, Os erros difundindo, e da verdade O clarão ofuscando luminoso. Ali servil temor, e abatimento Os corações briosos amortece.] apud Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 339

Like all the best Enlightenment poets, Sousa Caldas associated Portuguese dominion not just with ignorance, but also with the dissemination of it to generate more fear and, consequently, more submissive and benumbed vassals.

The epic light In the line of Sousa Caldas, José Basílio da Gama composed one of the few epic poems in the history of Brazilian Literature: The Uruguay. In this poem, Basílio da Gama anticipated, by more than a century, the historiographic perspective that would consider the drama of the defeated, rather than the glory of the winner. By doing so, it valued and enriched the most generous aspects of the Enlightenment that formed it: the same that formulated the triple motto of the French Revolution—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—and promoted the composition of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by the revolutionaries. This declaration was the precursor of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations Organization in 1948, after the Second World War. The historical episode that motivated da Gama’s poem is best known for its representation in the British film production The Mission, in 1986 (under the direction of Roland Joffé, with music by Ennio Morricone and the participation of Robert de Niro, as a slave merchant, and Jeremy Irons, as the priest Gabriel).

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After the signing of the Madrid Treaty, on January 13, 1750, the Portuguese empire became sovereign over the territories of Jesuitical missions situated east of the Uruguay River. The conflict took place because, while in the Spanish empire, all the Indians were subjects of the Spanish king and thus they could not be enslaved, but the Portuguese empire permitted it. The Guarani Indians, from the region of the Seven Peoples of the Missions, refused to transfer to the other side of the Uruguay River, into Portuguese domain. The Indigenous, hunted down and forced to serve as slaves in the plantations, sometimes hid away in the Jesuitical missions. Even in Portuguese territory, the Indians that converted to the Christian faith were saved from slavery. However, the Enlightenment courts of Europe opposed the teachings and the influence of the Company of Jesus, preparing the terrain for the future formation of the secular State, free from the management of the institutions. The contradictions of this time, however, meant that a just and liberating conception would allow, in practice, injustice and slavery. The Portuguese authorities took advantage of the situation to get rid of the Jesuits, not so much to defend the secular state, but much more to better enslave the Indigenous communities sheltering in the missions.

The Uruguay The Uruguay is a poem in five cantos, comprising free verses stanzas. It narrates the end of the expedition undertaken by the Spanish and Portuguese against the Indians and Jesuits of the colony of the Seven Peoples of the Missions. The infamous combat lasted four years, from 1752 to 1756. In the first canto, the Portuguese troops unite with the Spanish ones. Gomes Freire de Andrada, the commander of the Portuguese, describes the motive for the war. In the second canto, the most epic section of the poem is developed: that is, the battle between the Indians and the conquerors, with the predictable defeat of the Indians. In the third canto, the ghost of one of the Indian chiefs, killed in combat, appears to the chief Cacambo, and asks him to set fire to the white men’s encampment. Cacambo does so and runs back to his village, but he is poisoned. A sorceress causes Lindoia, the wife of Cacambo, to have visions of Lisbon being destroyed by an earthquake: a catastrophe that indeed took place, on November 1, 1755. Canto four gathers the Indians for the ceremony

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of Lindoia’s (now a widow) wedding to another Indian. However, the Guarany Indian, Lindoia, commits suicide, allowing herself to be bitten by a poisonous snake. This is perhaps the most beautiful passage of the poem. The last canto describes the final battle, the defeat of the Indigenous people and the imprisonment of the Jesuits. Like the Enlightenment itself and many of its representatives, the poem oscillates and hesitates strongly: sometimes it praises the protection the Jesuits gave to the Indians, and sometimes it condemns them as criminals. At some moments, the plot goes through changes to adapt to the shuffling in the politics of the Portuguese metropolis. The ascension of Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782), the representative of the educated despotism in Portugal and a notorious enemy of the Company of Jesus, probably explains the poet’s hesitance. Despite the poet’s hesitance and the inverisimilitudes resulting from it, da Gama’s poem surprises positively because “the epic moments of The Uruguay belong to the Indians and not to the Portuguese figures that it intended to exalt. The hero is not the Portuguese Andrada but Cacambo, the Indian persecuted by the Portuguese and deceived by the Jesuits; the chief usurped of his land and destroyed by the weight of two great empires—the only symbolic figure, of intrinsic greatness” (Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 345). The most elaborate characters are really the Indians, in particular Cacambo and Lindoia. In the scene in which the poet describes the death of Lindoia, he excels in the rhetorical effects of gradation, that take the reader to one of the very few similes of the poem, comparing death to sleep “on the smooth grass, and on the beautiful flowers”: A cold fright runs through the veins Of Caititu, who’s left his family in the field. And her sister, among the shades of the trees, She searches with her sight, afraid of finding her. They enter, finally, the most remote, And internal part of the old, dark, black woods, Where, by the side of a cavernous rock, Jasmines and roses, in abundance, cover The murmur of a hoarse fountain. This leisurely place, and sad, Tired of living, she had picked To die, the miserable Lindoia.

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature Reclined, as if in sleep, On the smooth grass and tender flowers, She had her face in hand, and the hand on the trunk Of a mournful cypress, that spread A melancholic shadow. Up-­close, they saw a serpent, green, Entwined, it crawled and embraced Neck and arms, licking her breast. [Um frio susto corre pelas veias De Caititu, que deixa os seus no campo. E a irmã por entre as sombras do arvoredo Busca com a vista, e teme de encontrá-­la. Entram enfim na mais remota, e interna Parte de antigo bosque, escuro, e negro, Onde, ao pé de uma lapa cavernosa Cobre uma rouca fonte, que murmura, Curva latada de jasmins, e rosas. Este lugar delicioso, e triste, Cansada de viver, tinha escolhido Para morrer a mísera Lindoia. Lá reclinada, como que dormia, Na branda relva, e nas mimosas flores, Tinha a face na mão, e a mão no tronco De um fúnebre cipreste, que espalhava Melancólica sombra. Mais de perto Descobrem que se enrola no seu corpo Verde serpente, e lhe passeia e cinge Pescoço e braços, e lhe lambe o seio. Proença Filho, 2006: 124

The religious theme of the serpent that seduces the beautiful and innocent lass, always licking her breast, will reappear in the next century, in the beginning of the novel by Bernardo Guimarães (1825–1884), entitled The Seminarist, published in 1872. As Antonio Candido has already alerted us, this poem, disguised as ironic, will affect, eventually, the most radical of the Enlightenment ideas, showing to be, in the end, profoundly anticlerical, as the final scene confirms. In the final scene of the novel, the novice seminarist of the title steps up to the altar to officiate his first mass, in the town where he was born and in front of his own family. However,

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desperate over the death of the love of his childhood and by the discovery of so many lies heard from his parents and from the priests of the seminary, he pulls off his clerical vestments, the frock and all his clothes and, like a madman, he abandons the Church, staggering completely naked through the faithful. In the poem of da Gama, while the adjectives of the syntagmas, like “cold fright,” “dark, black woods,” “cavernous rock,” reinforce the foreboding approach of the worst, at the moment in which Caititu finds her sister, the adjectives become soft and sweet, like “reclined,” “smooth” and “tender.” Facing the inexorable, one confirms the “melancholic shadow,” which represents the death of the Indian woman as well as Death itself, humankind’s final destiny, whether for whites, Blacks or Indians, Portuguese, Spanish or Brazilian.

Caramuru The Friar José de Santa Rita Durão published, twelve years after The Uruguay, his poem, also an epic, entitled Caramuru. Its theme is better known than that of the poem of da Gama, but the poem itself seems to be much less resolved, in the construction of the verses as well as of the characters. It is a curious case of the inversion of the theme of the “noble savage,” proposing, on the contrary, the “noble civilized,” or at least the civilized impressing the supposed savages. The work tells of the legend of the Portuguese adventurer Diogo Álvares Correia, who was shipwrecked on the coast of Bahia state and, saved by the Indians, impressed them with the “thunder” of his shotgun. So strongly did he impress them that he went on to enjoy great authority among them up to the point of marrying the Indian Paraguaçu, the daughter of the chief: Of a respectable man, troubled by a thousand mishaps, troubled Wandering on the beaches of the New World He came upon the famous inlet Of the potent capital of Brazil; Son of the thunder, so denoted Whose courage knew to tame the savage mob, His value, I will sing, of his adverse fortune, For I only know him as hero, who in fortune is strong. [De um varão em mil casos agitados, Que as praias discorrendo do ocidente Descobriu o recôncavo afamado

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature Da capital brasílica potente; Do filho do trovão denominado Que o peito domar soube à fera gente, O valor cantarei na adversa sorte, Pois só conheço herói quem nela é forte.] Proença Filho, 2006: 134

If he narrated the Indigenous customs in greater detail than Basílio da Gama, Santa Rita stylized his protagonists, representing them almost like Europeans dressed in feathers. In the following century, our first great novelist, José de Alencar (1829–1877), would do something similar, designing Peri, the Indigenous protagonist of The Guarany, published in 1857, as a kind of medieval knight in the middle of the Atlantic Forest, at the banks of the Paquequer River. In Santa Rita Durão’s poem, Paraguaçu resembles the white beauties: Of a color as white as the white snow; And where she is not snow, she was a rose: The natural nose, a tiny mouth Eyes were beautiful lights, a spacious forehead. [De cor tão alva como a branca neve; E donde não é neve, era de rosa: O nariz natural, boca mui breve Olhos de bela luz, testa espaçosa.] Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 351

In contrast, the description of the other natives corroborate all the racist prejudices of his time, making references to “the brutal countenance, horrid and ugly,” to “the dropped lower lip,” to the “lower lips ornamented with worthless stones,” complaining of their “flat face and nose, stiff hair” (Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 350). Despite all this, or because of this, critics like Sílvio Romero (1851– 1914) saw in Durão’s poem “the most Brazilian that we possess” (Romero apud Dutra, in Coutinho, 1968: 351).

The metaphysics of the stone Cláudio Manuel da Costa was one of the best poets of the group, especially when it came to sonnets. According to Carlos Nejar, “the brilliancy that da Costa bequeathed to us—in the lyrics—was that of a rough and hard stone. An outcry

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from inside the stone, so often spellbinding and lightened, other times so dark, as if it were a night of the soul—but the soul has night so that the day is raised— or there were many souls under prison of a torpid love” (2011: 76). The above-­mentioned “outcry from inside the stone,” or from the grottoes of Minas, is shown in one of the best-­known sonnets of the poet, the one that desperately looks for Nise, but never finds her: Nise? Nise? Where are you? Where a soul, that sighs for you, hopes to find you; If, so my eyes dilate and turn, So much more, upon meeting you, they’ll despair! Ah, if I could at least hear your name Within this soft aura that breathes! Nise, I think you say it; but it’s a lie. Nise, I thought I heard it; and it was not. Grottoes, trunks, thick cliffs, If my wellbeing, if my soul hide in you, Show me, show me all your beauty. Not even the echo answers to me! Ah, how certain my ill fortune! Nise? Nise? Where are you? Where? Where? [Nise? Nise? Onde estás? Aonde espera Achar-­te uma alma, que por ti suspira; Se quanto a vista se dilata, e gira, Tanto mais de encontrar-­te, desespera! Ah se ao menos teu nome ouvir pudera Entre esta aura suave que respira! Nise, cuido que diz; mas é mentira. Nise, cuidei que ouvia; e tal não era. Grutas, troncos, penhascos da espessura, Se o meu bem, se a minha alma em vós se esconde, Mostrai, mostrai-­me a sua formosura. Nem ao menos o eco me responde! Ah como é certa a minha desventura! Nise? Nise? Onde estás? Aonde? Aonde?] Nejar, 2011: 75

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It is as if the poetry of Cláudio Manuel da Costa inaugurated the “metaphysics of the stone,” so successful in Brazilian poetry. This metaphysics, that had as the greatest representatives in the twentieth century, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto, gathers its best metaphors from the mineral world, that is from the realm whose existence exceeds by far, in terms of time, the limitations of our own animal existence. Different from the others that we have shown, da Costa’s poem seems to be a lyric of perpetual motion, building a far superior musicality. When he rhymes “desespera!” (despair) and “respira!” (breathe) with “mentira” (a lie), “espessura” (thickness) and “formosura” (beauty) with “desventura” (ill fate), or “esconde” (hide) and “responde!” with “Aonde?” (where), the sonnet does not only become more fluent, but also unfolds richer meanings, because they become paradoxical. This superior poet was, nevertheless, one of the few fatal victims of the Minas Conspiracy. While the others were expelled from Brazil and rebuilt their lives and their careers in other parts of the Portuguese empire, Cláudio Manuel da Costa ended up in prison, in the Casa dos Contos (Accounting House), in Vila Rica (Rich Village), where he died by hanging. The official version is suicide, but the historians consider assassination to be much more probable.

The Poet of the Enlightenment Tomás Antônio Gonzaga is considered by Adelto Gonçalves to be “the Poet of the Enlightenment” par excellence. Portuguese by birth, he spent his childhood in Brazil. He went back to Portugal to study law, in Coimbra, but from 1782 he took up the position of special magistrate in Vila Rica. At age 40, he fell in love with the maiden Maria Doroteia Joaquina de Seixas, only 16 years of age. When the family’s resistance was finally overcome and a date was set for the wedding, he was imprisoned and sent to the Ilha das Cobras (Snake Island), in Rio de Janeiro, for having participated in the Minas Conspiracy. Exiled to Mozambique (a Portuguese colony at the time), he married the daughter of a slave merchant, a rich woman, but of little education. He never saw the lass from Vila Rica again, but he transformed that passion into the first great romantic “myth” of Brazilian literature: the Liras (Lyrics), popularly known as Marília de Dirceu. Part One of Marília de Dirceu gathers the poems written before Gonzaga’s imprisonment, when the character Dirceu, the Arcadian name of the poet, contemplates the beauty of the shepherdess Marília, in short odes. In some of the

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verses, the poet does not disguise his passionate confessions, showing himself to be enamored with such a young girl: Upon first glance at your perfect face, I sighed and It knew that It had tamed my heart. Placing upon me your eyes, when I thought you had not looked, Seeing that I saw, then Casting your chaste eyes to the ground. [Mal vi seu rosto perfeito, Dei logo um suspiro, e ele Conheceu haver-­me feito Estrago no coração. Punha em mim os olhos, quando Entendia eu não olhava; Vendo que o via, baixava A modesta vista ao chão.] Proença Filho, 2006: 19

The second part was written in the prison of Snake Island, revealing Dirceu’s loneliness and longing for Marília. His verses are considered to be of the best quality. A certain confessional pessimism preannounces the later Romantic emotionalism, making use of Marília as a pretext to talk about his own suffering: There may be still a bright day, In which these wretched fetters, these chains Change into a prison of relief In your tender arms. [Mas pode ainda vir um claro dia, Em que estas vis algemas, estes laços, Se mudem em prisões de alívio cheias Nos teus mimosos braços.] Proença Filho, 2006: 30

Tomás Antônio Gonzaga shaped his ideas in the secret societies organized by the Enlightenment members of the Coimbra University, in Portugal, where he studied law. These groups constituted a type of crypto-­masonry, communicating

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among themselves through signs, touches, gestures and, of course, verses. They read mainly Voltaire, Locke, Montesquieu (1689–1755), Alexander Pope (1688– 1744) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) (Gonçalves, 1999: 61). After Coimbra, Gonzaga went to the court, in Lisbon, where he established his law practice. At that time, Portugal did not seem to be part of Europe. In October, 1770, Gonzaga was in Lisbon when, in a great fire in the Palace’s Terrace, works by Voltaire, Bayle, Rousseau, abbot Raynal, Boulanger and La Mettrie were burnt for being considered the most nefarious by the Censorial Royal Table, that saw in their atheism and materialism a great threat to religion” (Gonçalves, 1999: 72). Nominated general-­magistrate of the province of Brazil, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga arrived in Vila Rica on December 12, 1782, after riding a horse for 15 days. Inspired less by revolutionary impulses than by grave dissensions with the governor and other powerful people of the region, Gonzaga wrote a set of satirical verses entitled Cartas Chilenas (Chilean Letters). Reading the poem The Henriade, by Voltaire, the Persian Letters, by Montesquieu and El Criticón, by Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), lent him the elements to create his Critilo, which ridiculed the nearby oppressors, but ended up smearing the Portuguese monarchy: “Because of that, the Chilean Letters, to the exhausted royal system, could acquire a power of destruction greater than a thousand kegs of gun powder” (Gonçalves, 1999: 213). Gonzaga’s caustic satire was publicized, however, anonymously. If the judges that exiled him to Africa had known of the authorship of verses like “no, there is no disturbance in this land/which has as author a military hand” (apud Gonçalves, 1999: 214), they would have executed the poet-­magistrate, in the same way that they did the second-­lieutenant Tiradentes. The spark that caused the uprising was the order of the Portuguese queen, Maria I, to collect, by force, late tributes that were owed, but not only from the very poor populace, but also from the richer population of the province. Exploiting the poor would not generate revolts, since that commonly took place, but to charge the rich tributes and demand late taxation? “Absurd repression!” they all cried, deeply indignant. The second-­lieutenant Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (1746–1789), known as Tiradentes (tooth-­puller), gathered the military and called for a decisive meeting on December 26, 1788, on Rua Direita (Right Street) at the present day Ouro Preto (then Vila Rica). Reluctantly, Gonzaga participated in this meeting. “A conservative in politics, contrary to the ascension of the inferior classes and a monarchist up to his neck” (Gonçalves, 1999: 232), our Enlightenment poet saw

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the opportunity to govern the new nation in the next years, since he was, without a doubt, the best prepared of all those men, especially when it concerned the law. Cláudio Manuel da Costa and Inácio de Alvarenga were also at that meeting. One of the “disloyals,” however, was particularly “disloyal” and betrayed his companions, in exchange for favors from the court. On March 15, 1789, Joaquim Silvério dos Reis (1756–1819) achieved villainy when he went to the governor and denounced the conspiracy, pointing Tomás Antônio Gonzaga as the leader of the conspirators. The governor immediately suspended the order for the “derrama” (pouring out), the demand of payment of all the late taxes, because it would be the secret password for the deflagration of the movement. With that, he gained time to dismantle the plan of the rebels. It was only on May 10th that Tiradentes was detained and, along with him, the betrayer of the conspiracy himself, Joaquim Silvério dos Reis. On May 17, a hooded man went to Gonzaga’s home to warn him of his imminent imprisonment, recommending the destruction of compromising documents. Quickly, the poet destroyed parts and copies of the Cartas Chilenas, causing the loss of a great number of verses. On May 23 he was imprisoned and taken, by horse, to a prison in Rio de Janeiro, to the Fort of Saint Joseph on Snake Island. Abandoned in a cell, unable to communicate, for more than five months, they interrogated him only at the end of the year. This process means that the authorities considered him the mentor of the movement, so they needed to break his spirit to evaluate the extent of the power of his mind. Gonzaga, as a good lawyer, had as his motto never to confess, and, in fact, he sustained till the end of the process, the story that he had not participated in the conspiracy at all. However, he eventually weakened so much, to the point of writing in his cell—turning a branch into a quill, and turning into the oil of a lamp into ink—a poem that oscillated between the denial of his companions, whom he called “base traitors,” and the suggestion of a confession of guilt, admitting that the rebels would place him on the throne of the future Brazilian empire: I would never join the worthless traitors, if there were any; it is not gold that I want from this world; I want only my loves to take with me. I, oh blind one, do not possess a great fortune inherited from my parents;

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature nor have I received one from my work; I have not even been trained as a good soldier. Would the rebels have made me the head of the empire, erected at the cost of their blood and treasure? [Não me uniria, se os houvesse, aos vis traidores; daqui nem ouro quero; quero levar somente os meus amores. Eu, ó cega, não tenho um grosso cabedal dos pais herdado; não o recebi no emprego; nem tenho as instruções dum bom soldado. Far-­me-iam os rebeldes o primeiro no império, que se erguia à custa de seu sangue e seu dinheiro?] Gonçalves, 1999: 264

Gonzaga ended up profiting from the deposition of Tiradentes himself, who denied Gonzaga’s sedition. Despite strong indications, there were no decisive proofs of the participation of the poet in the conspiracy. Thus, on April 17, 1792, Tiradentes and nine other conspirators were condemned to hang, while Gonzaga was condemned to perpetual exile in Africa, specifically to the island of Mozambique. However, only Tiradentes was actually hanged and, afterwards, his body was cut into pieces, in the center of Vila Rica.

By way of conclusion The case of Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, the Enlightenment poet, illustrates well, in our opinion, how Enlightenment questions entered the Brazilian literature of that time and defined it. Thus, he is one of the few poets of that generation who deserved a biography of his own, written by Adelto Gonçalves at the end of the twentieth century. For that same reason, we chose to scrutinize his case. The poet was Portuguese by birth, but he was always recognized as a Brazilian poet, less for having spent his childhood in the colony than for having written his poems in the midst of Brazilian circumstances; to put it better: in the center of the episode that marked Brazilian history, even though for the short period of only seven years.

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Tomás Antônio Gonzaga came from Portugal to Brazil already carrying Enlightenment readings, obviously filtered by Portuguese circumstances, relatively subaltern in relation to the European one. In Brazil, he transformed them, not only into verses, but also into gestures, sometimes dreaming of leading Brazilians to the lights of progress, like a new Marquis of Pombal of the tropics. In the entire process he revealed in the poems as well as in his discharges as a general-­magistrate of Vila Rica; in the lyric as well as in the conspiracy with the Brazilian-­born, in favor of the liberation of Brazil, generosity as well as opportunism, intelligence as well as pusillanimity, truth as well as contradiction. In a more ample sense, we can consider him as not only the true “Poet of the Enlightenment”, but can also repeat proudly, loudly and clearly, that the “Poet of the Enlightenment” is Brazilian.

Works cited Amora, Antônio Soares (1955). “A literatura do Setecentos”. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume I. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de (1879). “A nova geração”. In: Machado, Critica litteraria. Rio de Janeiro: W. M. Jackson Editores, 1938. Auerbach, Erich (1946). Mimesis: a representação da realidade na literatura ocidental. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1987. Brayner, Sônia (ed.) Poesia no Brasil: das origens até 1920. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1981. Candido, Antonio (1959). Formação da literatura brasileira: momentos decisivos 1750–1880. Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2009. Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume I. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. —— (1990). “Arcadismo”. In: Coutinho, Afrânio and Galante De Sousa, José (eds) (1990). Enciclopédia de Literatura Brasileira 2nd ed. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Global/ Fundação Biblioteca Nacional/Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2001. Dutra, Waltensir (1955). “O Arcadismo na poesia lírica, épica e satírica”. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume I. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Falcon, Francisco José Calazans. Iluminismo. São Paulo: Ática, 1988. Gonçalves, Adelto. Gonzaga, um poeta do Iluminismo. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999. Hauser, Arnold (1951). História social da literatura e da arte—Volume II. Trans. Walter Geenen. São Paulo: Mestre Jou, 1972.

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Jucá Filho, Cândido (1955). “Prosadores neoclássicos”. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume I. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” Trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edn, ed. H. S. Reiss. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lima, Luiz Costa (1955). “Do neoclassicismo ao romantismo”. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume I. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Lobato, Moteiro. Paranoia ou mistificação? O Estado de São Paulo, 20. Dec. 1917. Nejar, Carlos. História da literatura brasileira: da carta de Caminha aos contemporâneos. São Paulo: Leya, 2011. Proença Filho, Domício (seleção). Arcadismo: roteiro da poesia brasileira. São Paulo: Global & Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, 2006 Schöpke, Regina. Dicionário Filosófico: conceitos fundamentais. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2010. Voltaire (1736–1768). Contos. Trans. Roberto Domênico Proença. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 2002. —— (1747). Zadig, ou: do destino. Trans. Márcia Valéria Martinez de Aguiar. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2012. —— (1766). O filósofo ignorante. Trans. Antonio de Pádua Danesi. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001. ——. “The Ignorant Philosopher.” In: The Works of Voltaire, vol. 35. London: E. R. Dumont, 1901. ——. Candide. Trans. David Wooten. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000. Warburton, Nigel (2011). Uma breve história da filosofia. Trans. Rogério Bettoni. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2013.

4

Indigenism and the Search for Brazilian Identity: European Influences and National Roots1 Roberto Acízelo de Souza

1 Although literary historiography usually credits European Romantic sources as the stimuli for the development of the so-­called Indigenist tendency in the Brazilian Romantic Movement—and indeed, citations of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Ferdinand Denis, and also of the North American James Fenimore Cooper are necessary—the fact is that the choice of the aborigine as the symbol of Brazilian difference in regard to Europe presents antecedents that seem to result from internal impulses within the country itself; antecedents that, according to the hypothesis developed here, will have been much more decisive for the affirmation of indianismo (Indigenism) as an important vector of Brazilian literature. Let us consider this hypothesis. On the one hand, the practice of adopting Indigenous names as nativist ostentations is already noticeable in the eighteenth century. The Franciscan friar, author of the well-­known poem “Descrição da Ilha de Itaparica” (“Description of the Itaparica Island”—located in the state of Bahia, Brazil) (1769), signed his works as Manuel de Santa Maria Itaparica, embracing in his religious name the Indigenous word (Itaparica) that designated his birth place; the Jesuit Francisco de Faria and a certain Dr. Manuel Tavares de Siqueira e Sá in their turn adopted

A portion of this essay, which has been presented here duly revised and retouched, appeared in two previous publications; in volume 21, n.2 in the journal O Eixo e a Roda (The Axis and the Wheel) (UFMG- Federal University of Minas Gerias, Belo Horizonte, 2012) and in the book Variações sobre o mesmo tema (Variations on the same theme) (Editor Argos, Chapecó, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 2015).

1

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the pseudonyms Cové Xenheenga and Anhé Pai Abaré, respectively, being names of Indigenous inspiration under which they directed the academic ceremony known as “The Academy of the Select,” celebrated in 1752 in honor of the General-Captain Gomes Freire de Andrada (cf. Silva, 2002: 272). On the other hand, in the political ceremonies during the reign of the Portuguese king Don John VI, who governed Brazil from 1808 to 1821, the aboriginal appears representing the country (Candido,2 1971, v.2:18) and, with Brazil’s political independence from Portugal (1822), this nativist celebration amplified into symbols of diverse manifestations: in panels and statues that decorated noblemen’s residences; in the names of political newspapers of the time—The Tamoio (1823), The Caramuru (1832), The Carijó (1832),3 The Brazilian Indian (1833), The Constitutional Tamoio (1833); in pseudonyms among masons (The Brazilian Emperor, Don Pedro I, was Guatimozim (“a creative counterpart to the regal Aztecan Montezuma”) and José Bonifácio (José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1763—1838, a Brazilian statesman, naturalist, professor and poet, who played a key role in Brazil’s attainment of its independence from Portugal) was Tibiriçá (“the watchman of the land”4); in the battalion of “caboclos” (Brazilian half-­breed of white and Indian descent) who, since 1826, reenacted the Brazilian victory over the Portuguese in the celebrated “Battle of July 2nd”, in the commemorative parades traditionally promoted by the state of Bahia (Calmon, 2002: 221–23). Moreover, in the period of Brazilian independence, it became frequent to reject traditional Portuguese surnames in favor of the more exotic sounds taken from the Indigenous vocabulary, as nationalist affirmations in a time of patriotic enthusiasm due to the political sovereignty recently won. The lawyer Francisco Gomes Brandão, for example, who would come to be an outstanding figure in the political and intellectual life of Brazil—a congressman, a minister of state, a cabinet member of the empire, a state advisor, a senator, a founding member of the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute—from 1823 onward signed his name “Francisco Jê Acaiaba Montezuma,” inscribing into his own name, full

Antonio Cândido de Mello e Souza is a very well-­known Brazilian writer, professor, sociologist and literary critic. 3 Tamoio and Carijó are names of Brazilian Indigenous tribes. “Caramuru” (Moray) (c. 1475–1557) was the Tupi name of the Portuguese colonist Diogo Álvares Correia, who after a shipwrecking on the coast of Brazil, lived the rest of his life among the Indians. He played an important role as a go-­between in the European conquest and colonization of Brazil. 4 O Tupi na Geografia Nacional, Teodoro Sampaio, p. 329. 2

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of pride, the self-­attributed Indigenous identity,5 a widespread gesture among Brazilians of his time. Regarding the so-­called proto-Indigenist literary manifestations, perhaps we should rather link them to this cultural atmosphere receptive of the symbolism of the Indigenous, present in the Brazilian life since the mid-­eighteenth century than to overseas influx. Among them are the epic poems by Basílio da Gama—O Uraguai (The Uraguay) (1769), by Santa Rita Durão—O Caramuru (The Caramuru) (1781), as well as the “Metamorfoses” (the Metamorphoses) by António Dinis da Cruz e Silva (1731–1799)6 and also a cantata by [Inácio José de] Alvarenga Peixoto, which is very representative of these first appropriations of the aboriginal as symbol of Brazil: Oh, what a dream, oh, what a dream I had In this happy, fortunate, restful nap! I saw Sugar Loaf Mountain7 rise, And in the middle of the waves change Into the figure of the Indian most genteel, He alone standing for Brazil.

More than thirty years later, when the Emperor bestows on him a noble title (1854), Montezuma remains faithful to the Indigenous onomastic, so much so that he becomes the Viscount of Jequitinhonha (a valley in the state of Minas Gerais). The Empire, in fact, had a special preference for Indigenous toponyms to name its nobility: out of the 990 members of the cabinet, almost half (430) bore Indigenous names (Cândido, 2000: 175). 6 It is a series of 12 poems that confer mythical treatment on “Brazilian” themes—tropical nature and the Indian—certainly motivated by the 20 years that the poet, born in Portugal, lived in Brazil in two long residencies (1776–1789 and 1791–1799). In spite of his evident insertion of protoIndianist productions of the 18th century into this body of work, Brazilian literary historiography simply does not recognize “Brazilianness” in Dinis’s “Metamorphoses,” claiming that, even though “they are full of Indigenous vocabulary and [. . .] were written in Brazil, [they are] far from constituting even a hint of Indianism” (Ricardo, in Coutinho, 1969: 71). However, such a peremptory as well as generalized judgement does not find a basis in the analytical consideration of the poems, but in António Diniz da Cruz e Silva’s position in finding himself as the judge in the judicial proceedings of the Minas Gerais Conspiracy [an unsuccessful Brazilian separatist movement of 1789, in which many intellectuals were directly involved] and of the literary society [of Rio] founded by [Manuel Inácio da] Silva Alvarenga [in 1786] (Ricardo, in Coutinho, 1969: 71). In this manner, the literary historiography, according to a so-­called patriotic criterion, excluded him from the Brazilian literary scene, not so much because he was born in Portugal ([Tomás Antônio] Gonzaga, his coeval, was also Portuguese, which, as is known, was never an obstacle for the full recognition of his Brazilian literary citizenship), but because of the circumstance of having served as part of the colonizers’ repression [of the conspiracy], passing condemning sentences against his colleagues- since they were also poets and bachelors in Law who fought for Brazil’s interest: [Tomás Antônio] Gonzaga, [Inácio José de] Alvarenga Peixoto, [Manuel Inácio da] Silva Alvarenga. 7 Sugarloaf Mountain is a peak in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, one of the best known views of Rio worldwide. 5

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature [Oh, que sonho, oh, que sonho eu tive nesta Feliz, ditosa, sossegada sesta! Eu vi o Pão d’Açúcar levantar-­se, E no meio das ondas transformar-­se Na figura do Índio mais gentil, Representando só todo o Brasil.] Lapa, 1960: 44

[João] Capistrano de Abreu (1853—1927), a Brazilian historian, in fact, maintained that Indianism had profound popular roots, having emerged from folklore: The true meaning of the Indianism is revealed through folk tales. [. . .] These tales, having as the eternal hero the “caboclo” and the sailor, are the most important documents for our history. [. . .] In the satirical tales one can easily recognize three layers. In the first layer, the sailor struggles against Brazilian Nature [. . .]; in the second, the “caboclo” appears fighting against civilization [. . .]. In these two antagonistic tendencies one can see symptoms and residues of struggles and rivalries. [. . .] In the third layer, the hero is still the “caboclo”; but the ridicule is as though blurred, and through it one feels not only the fraternity, but also the pride. It is to these last tales that one links Indianism, whose spirit the oppressed adopted, boasting of the name that they [the colonizers] tried to stigmatize them with. Abreu, 1931: 93–95

It seems acceptable to us, in view of this, that the hypothesis that the election of the Indian as heroic symbol of the nation preceded—and it seems to have even prepared—the literary consecration of this idea by the mediation of the Indigenist tendency within the Brazilian Romantic movement. Consequently, it would be more accurate to relativize the idea according to which the Indian would have gained space in the country’s literature exclusively through the exhortation of foreign voices, the most explicit probably being the voice of the Brazilianist avant la lettre, Jean-Ferdinand Denis (1798 –1890), French historian, traveler and writer. The New World cannot pass away without respectable traditions [. . .]. The age of its mysterious, poetic fables would be the centuries in which lived the people whom we exterminated, who surprise us with their courage and who add new flavor perhaps to the nations who came from the Old World [. . .]. The sense of wonder, so necessary to poetry, will be found in the ancient customs of these peoples, likewise in the incomprehensible strength of an ever-­mutable nature in its phenomena [. . .] (Denis, 1978: 36).

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The formula then would be simple, according to Denis’ recommendation: in their effort of constructing a genuine national literature, Brazilian writers would have to exert themselves in describing the so-­called local color, producing literary works that would emphasize the more representative traits of Brazilianness, which would be a pair of elements perfectly integrated: the tropical nature and the primitive inhabitants of the land, the so-­called Indians, due to the historical, equivocal naming that we all know. However, although in a relatively distinct conceptual frame, we have already found the marriage of these elements in the cited passage by Alvarenga Peixoto, who draws parallels between nature and the Indian to the point at which the former (Sugarloaf Mountain) transmutes into the latter, who finally becomes the representative par excellence of “the entire Brazil.” Indianism then, in our view, would not simply be a product of the influx of conceptions from the European Romantic movement—particularly French—in the social, cultural Brazilian milieu of the beginning of the nineteenth century. If such influxes indeed took place, the fact is that they found in Brazil an environment that favored their reception, prepared by the transformation of the Indian, from the mid-­eighteenth century, into a true allegory of the country.

2 As a result of the convergence of these two vectors—the internal and the external—Indianism would constitute itself as one of the main branches embraced by the Brazilian version of the Romantic movement. It is true that the idea of raising the aborigine to the status of a lyric and epic symbol of the nation collided with the resisting opinion of those who proposed an opposite strategy for the correlative consolidation of a nation and a national literature: not to regress to a supposed primitive fountain of the nationality but, on the contrary, reinforce its bonds with the European matrix. With this intention, the prestigious historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen asserted: Let us have a glance at our Brazil. [. . .] May God favor it equally well, so that here the Letters will serve as refuge to talent, the latter being tired of the hopeful misgivings of politics! May God favor it well for the poets, that they, instead of imitating what they read, inspire themselves on the poetry that blossoms with so much profusion from the bosom of the country itself, and be above all original, American. Nevertheless, as for this Americanism, one should not understand

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature [. . .] a revolution in the principles, a complete insubordination to all the classical Greco-Roman precepts and the classics of the old mother country. No. America [. . .] should have a poetry, mainly descriptive, daughter of only new and virgin nature; however, one would be in error if one judged that, to be an original poet, one would have to retrograde to the rudiments of Art, instead of adopting and having full claim of the precepts of the Beautiful, those that Europe received from antiquity. Varnhagen, 2014: 309–310

Indianism, however, was destined to prevail, a circumstance that perhaps validates the hypothesis previously suggested, that it had a more disseminated foundation in Brazilian life. We can already track down its prefiguration in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as in the first half of the 1840s. At the level of academic research, Borges de Barros sketches the first characterization of Brazilian Portuguese in its differences in relation to Portugal’s Portuguese, recording words of Indigenous origin used only in the Brazilian variant of the Portuguese language (1826),8 while Gonçalves de Magalhães and Joaquim Norberto, respectively in the “Essay about the History of Brazilian Literature” (1836) and in the “General Considerations about Brazilian Literature” (1844), underscore the decisive role that the Amerindian element should represent, in Brazil, in the constitution of a literary culture that is truly national. In the field of poetry, these compositions are recorded: Niterói, metamorphosis of Rio de Janeiro (1822) by Januário da Cunha Barbosa; “Original Metamorphosis: Moema and Camarogi” and Paraguaçu (1833)9 by Ladislau dos Santos Titara; “Nênia . . .” (1837) by Firmino Rodrigues Silva; “The son of the Prisoner” (1844) by Joaquim Norberto; “The Song of the Tupi,” “The curse of the Indian” and “Indian, the Prisoner” (1844) by Cardoso de Meneses. It is also important to mention the contribution of the group that Antonio Candido (1971, v. 1: 279–286) characterized as being representative of a French-Brazilian pre-Romanticism, constituted of works dedicated to or related to the question of the Brazilian Indian by French authors who influenced our first Romantics: It is a summarized statement made by Domingos Borges de Barros, the Baron—afterwards Viscount—of the White Stone, by request of Adrien Balbi, intended to appear in the introductory volume of his Atlas etnographique du globe, ou Classification des peoples anciens et modernes d’après leur langues (1826). The passage extends from page 172 to 175, being referred to individually in the index of the volume as follows: “Observation de M. le Baron de Pedra Branca, ambassadeur de l’empereur du Brésil après de la cour de la France, sur la langue portugaise et sur les différences offertes par le dialecte brésilien comparé au dialecte du Portugal”. 9 Paraguaçu, the daughter of Tupinamba’s chief Morubixaba Taparica who becomes wife of Caramuru. Moema was supposedly her sister. 8

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Élegies brésiliennes (1823) by Édouard Corbière; Les Machacalis, a novel inserted in the Scènes de la nature sous les tropiques et de leur influence sur la poésie (1824) by Ferdinand Denis; “Résumé de l’histoire littéraire du Brésil” by Ferdinand Denis; Caramuru, ou La découverte de Bahia, roman-­poème brésilien (1829), a translation into French of Santa Rita Durão’s poem of the same name (Caramuru, poema épico do descobrimento da Bahia, 1781), by Eugène de Monglave; JakaréOuassou, ou Les Tupinambas (1830), a novel by Daniel Gavet and Philippe Boucher.

3 Only from 1846 onward, however, with the publication of Primeiros Cantos (First Songs) by Gonçalves Dias, does Indianism consolidate, maintaining its vigor until around 1865 (the year of the publication of Iracema, a novel by José de Alencar), when it starts to decline: a process that extends till around 1875, the year in which one of the last works created in this line appears, being the volume of poetry Americanas (Americans) by Machado de Assis. In the range of epic poetry, the only project truly concluded was the poem A Confederação dos Tamoios (The Confederation of the Tamoios) by Gonçalves de Magalhães; published in its entirety in 1856. The work, however, became a target for harsh criticism from the then young José de Alencar. Among the arguments criticizing its conception was emphasized the idea that the epic, a classical European genre, would be totally inappropriate within the corpus of a literature that intended to constitute itself under the sign of national originality.10 By chance or not, the fact is that the later attempts to create Indigenist epic poems failed; all of them apparently abandoned by their authors, having yielded the publication of only the simple fragments that had been produced. A case in point is Os Timbiras (The Timbiras) by Gonçalves Dias, of which only four cantos were published in 1857 and, ironically, even a work by José de Alencar

The critique was published in the year of the poem’s publication (1856) in the newspaper Diário do Rio de Janeiro in the form of a series of articles simulating letters addressed to a friend, collected into a small volume, in the same year, under the title Cartas sobre “A confederação dos Tamoios” (Letters about “The Confederation of the Tamoios.”) The “cartas,” due to the harshness of their criticism, gave rise to energetic responses from defenders of the poet, which generated a noisy polemic in which even the Emperor Pedro II intervened, writing under a pseudonym, in defense of the poet, for he had himself sponsored the luxurious first edition of Magalhães’ work.

10

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himself—Os filhos de Tupã (The Sons of the God Tupã), dated 1863 and published posthumously (1910 –1911 and 1960); and yet there remains the singular case of Joaquim de Sousândrade’s poem Guesa errante (The Wandering Guesa).11 It was, then, with lyric poetry that Indianism initially came to fullness, in a more particular way, in the work of Gonçalves Dias, in compositions that the author individualized in his Primeiros Cantos (First Cantos) (1846) as well as in the Últimos (Last Ones) (1851) under the rubric “poesias americanas” (American poetry). Among them are consecrated poems, true masterpieces, like “Canção do Exílio” (Song of the Exile), “O canto do Piaga” (The Shaman Song), “Leito de folhas verdes” (“The bed of green leaves”), “I-Juca-Pirama” (He who must be killed),12 “Marabá” (Half-­breed). As it passed through Brazilian letters, Indianism also left its mark on the novel and an outstanding work in this genre is the Indigenist trilogy by José de Alencar (1829–1877): O Guarani (The Guarani, 1857), Iracema (1865) and Ubirajara (1874). Having manifested itself in a diversity of literary genres, Indianism would differ in its interpretation of the impact of colonization upon the Amerindian populations. Looked at from this perspective, one can see that it was presented in two different versions. One of these would reveal itself as a minority view and is documented, for example, in Gonçalves Dias, whose poems picture the European conquest as a true catastrophe. In this manner, the poem “O canto do Piaga” (The Shaman Song) consists of a narrative, by an Indian Shaman, of a nightmare that he had in which a vision of a bad omen appears to him to prophesize the foreign invasion of his land. His reaction is one of horror and fright and the landscape, Guesa errante or The Guesa—this title appearing in the last edition during the author’s lifetime—is a poem in 13 cantos, of which numbers VII, XII and XIII remained incomplete. Composed between 1858 and 1884, and published in a chaotic manner between 1868 (or 1866) and 1888, it revolves around the titular hero’s pilgrimage: his crossing from the Andes into the Amazon, to Maranhão (a Brazilian northeastern state), and then to the Iberian Peninsula and Africa, till the return to his homeland—through the Amazon once again, to the Antilles and the east coast of the United States up to New York, returning through the Pacific Ocean and crossing through South America all the way to the Strait of Magellan; and finally the return to his country of origin, in the Andes region. About the poem, the poet declared: “I have already heard twice that ‘the Guesa errante will be read fifty years from now’; I was saddened—the disappointment of someone who writes fifty years before” (in Campos, 1982: 168). It was prophetic because, in fact, this work, due to the general daring of its conception, remained almost entirely forgotten until the 1960s, when the author finally became the object of critical attention within the criticism dedicted to the creation of the literary precursors, conceived by the Concrete Poetry Movement (which, in Brazil, was initiated by the poets Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari in the 1950s). Its following rediscovery was due not to its Indianist qualities but for the harmony of its poetic language with the conceptions of concrete poetry. 12 This is a poem of very special textuality, in which lyrical, heroic and dramatic elements are harmoniously woven together in a metric and narrative virtuosity that always enchanted readers and won praise from critics. 11

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far from the imperial historiography described with the graceful expression “discovery of Brazil,” much rather reads as a tragic shock between civilizations. Do you not know what the monster is seeking? Do you not know why he comes, his desires? He comes to kill your bravest warriors, Comes to steal your daughter, your wife. Comes to bring you cruelty, impiety— Cruel trades of the cruel Anhangá13; Comes to break your valiant mace, To profane your deities and their songs. Comes to tie heavy fetters on you, And will cause the Tupis great wailing. And the Elderly will serve as slaves, Even Piaga will become a slave! [Não sabeis o que o monstro procura? Não sabeis a que vem, o que quer? Vem matar vossos bravos guerreiros, Vem roubar-­vos a filha, a mulher! Vem trazer-­vos crueza, impiedade— Dons cruéis do cruel Anhangá; Vem quebrar-­vos a maça valente, Profanar Manitôs, Maracás. Vem trazer-­vos algemas pesadas, Com que a tribo tupi vai gemer; Hão de os velhos servirem de escravos, Mesmo o Piaga inda escravo há de ser!]14 Dias, 1959: 107–108

The other perspective, on the contrary, interpreted the “discovery” as a happy encounter of civilizations, characterized by a ready acceptance by the “savages” of white supremacy. One can see, in this sense, an emblematic scene in O Guarani: the Indian hero has just saved the life of Cecília, the daughter of the Portuguese aristocrat Don Antônio:

Devil, in the Tupi language. The god of Thunder in the Tupi pantheon.

13 14

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Brazilian Literature as World Literature At last, Don Antônio, curving his left arm around his daughter’s waist, walked towards the savage and extended his hand to him with a noble and affable gesture; the Indian bowed and kissed the nobleman’s hand. —What nation are you from? The gentleman asked him in Guarani. —Goitacá, the savage, answered raising his head with pride. —What is your name? —Peri, son of Ararê, first of his tribe. —I am a Portuguese aristocrat, a white man enemy of your race, a conqueror of your land; but you saved my daughter; I offer you my friendship. —Peri accepts; you are already a friend. [Por fim D. Antônio passando o braço esquerdo pela cintura de sua filha, caminhou para o selvagem e estendeu-­lhe a mão com gesto nobre e afável; o índio curvou-­se e beijou a mão do fidalgo. —De que nação és? perguntou-­lhe o cavalheiro em guarani. —Goitacá, respondeu o selvagem erguendo a cabeça com altivez. —Como te chamas? —Peri, filho de Ararê, primeiro de sua tribo. —Eu sou um fidalgo português, um branco inimigo de tua raça, um conquistador de tua terra; mas tu salvaste minha filha; ofereço-­te a minha amizade. —Peri aceita; tu já eras amigo.] Alencar, 1958: 136

What follows is the Indian’s narrative of how and why he decided to consecrate his life to the protection of the white maiden Cecília, and the final segment of this chapter ends as follows: The Indian finished his narrative. As he spoke, a trace of savage pride, of strength and courage shone in his black eyes, and lent to his gesture a certain nobility. Although ignorant, a son of the forests, he was a king: he had the nobility of strength. As soon as he concluded his speech, his lordliness disappeared; he became shy and modest; he was again no more than a barbarian before civilized creatures, whose superiority in education his instinct recognized.   [O índio terminou aqui sua narração.   Enquanto falava, um assomo de orgulho selvagem da força e da coragem lhe brilhava nos olhos negros, e dava certa nobreza ao seu gesto. Embora ignorante, filho das florestas, era um rei: tinha a realeza da força. Apenas concluiu, a altivez do guerreiro desapareceu; ficou tímido e modesto; já não era mais do que um bárbaro em face de criaturas civilizadas, cuja superioridade de educação o seu instinto reconhecia.] Alencar, 1958: 139

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4 As we have seen, then, the Indigenist current within the Brazilian Romantic movement, although there were signs of its existence from the 1820s on, only shows signs of strength around the middle of the 1840s, remaining vigorous till around 1870 when it ends its cycle. Since these almost 30 years of unfolding of the Indigenist movement coincide in good part with the literary trajectory of João Norberto de Sousa Silva (1820–1891), one of the most productive and eclectic writers of Brazil’s 1800s (and as such he did not fail to contribute to this movement), we propose to paint an image of this literary current through the analysis of his work. We opt not for an abstract description of the Indigenist achievements within Romanticism, nor for the attention to authors consensually more distinguished within this literary tendency— Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar—but rather for the study of a concrete case that we believe capable of illuminating several angles of the question that occupies us.

5 Joaquim Norberto worked with all the literary genres stricto sensu, being the author of extensive lyric, dramatic and narrative works, and in spite of this, was never appreciated by his contemporaries, let alone by posterity. However, he stands out in the fields of historiography and literary studies, certainly less for the refinement of his theoretical-­analytical tools and critical insights than for his pioneering work, application and rigor in documental research. He is one of the youngest among our first generation of Romantics15 and professed with enthusiasm the political and literary nationalism characteristic of his time. Suffice it to say that he adopted in his writings, from time to time, the pseudonym Fluviano (from fluvius: river, alluding to his birthplace, Rio de Janeiro), and joined the list of names with Indigenous or nativist appeal on the occasion of the baptism of his four sons when he named them: Artur Niteroíno, Oscar Guanabarino, Armando Fluviano and João Sapucaíno. He could not, then, stay indifferent to the seduction of the literary Indigenist current, practicing it as literary critic, historian and poet. Let us examine his Indigenist productions in each of these genres. He was born in 1820, in comparison to Gonçalves de Magalhães, for example, who is from 1811.

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5.1 In 1844, in an epoch when Brazilian literature was far from experiencing its first systematic history, Norberto enrolled himself among the pioneers of this effort, publishing in a Romantic journal in Rio de Janeiro: the Brazilian Minerva, his essay entitled “General Considerations about Brazilian Literature.” The entire first paragraph of the text, wrought with the sonorous exoticism of words of Tupi origin (muremurés, membis, tabas, pajés, Anhangá, Juruparis, Tupaberaba, Tupaçununga, etc.), is dedicated to a characterization of the natives as—“a heroic people that deserve to be sung” (Silva, 2002: 331)—basing himself on the colonial chroniclers with a Romantic reinterpretation. Next, he proposes a periodization, which is not particularly clear, that establishes three phases for the country’s history and literature: the pre-Cabral phase;16 the colonial phase; and the contemporary post-­independence phase, the last one characterized as “poor and insignificant, [. . .] transitory,” promising, however, a “future [. . .] rich and infinite just like the idea of God” (Silva, 2002: 337). On the other hand, the essayist values the Indigenous culture as a source to be explored by the emergent Brazilian literature: The Indians represented, in the middle of the forests, the primordial times of innocence and simplicity [. . .]. Their customs, their uses, their beliefs, supplied the wonder so necessary for poetry. [. . .] We do not have [feudal castles, jousts, tournaments, dealings and combats of rich men], but we will have the age of these primitive peoples [the Indians] with all its traditions, costumes, uses and beliefs full of a wonder truly poetic [. . .]. We do indeed have our own Middle Age [. . .] Silva, 2002: 332, 334–335

Years later, at a moment when Indianism had already established itself fully, in both stances—the one that deplored the tragedy of the conquest (Gonçalves Dias) as well as that which celebrated it as the dawn of Brazilian civilization (Alencar)—Norberto would return to the theme in texts published in the year 1859. Besides a mention in the first chapter of the long theoretical preface of his História da Literatura Brasileira17—“Historical Introduction about Brazilian In reference to Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese nobleman, military commander, navigator and explorer, regarded as the discoverer of Brazil in 1500. 17 In fact, the work would have been the first in its genre, if it had not been for the aborting of the project for unknown reasons. He only came to publish the chapters corresponding roughly to the theoretical preface, all of them in the Revista Popular (Popular Magazine), from 1859 to 1862. Only at the beginning of the 21st century were these chapters compiled into volumes and published in the editions mentioned in the bibliographic references: respectively 2001 and 2002. 16

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Literature”—he dedicated two entire chapters to the theme of Indianism in this same preface. The first chapter, following the same line as the study of 1844, and entitled “Propensity of the Brazilian Savage to Poetry,” can be summarized thus: “Tribes that most developed the cultivation of poetry. The poetry of Brazilian savages.” In addition to long passages transcribed from the colonial chroniclers, which intended to summarize myths and Indigenous traditions, Norberto defends a thesis that is—let us say—“quite simplistic,” and which proposes, as in the title of the essay, that the savages of Brazil, especially the Tamoios, would have had a pronounced “propensity” for poetry: The Tamoios were, among all the primitive peoples of Brazil, those that most distinguished themselves in the cultivation of poetry and they were, perhaps the ones who inhabited the most poetic of all the country’s sites. Beneath the pompous and magnificent sky of Rio de Janeiro, before the awe-­inspiring natural scenario, at the sight of their splendid, picturesque and pleasant bay, only a brute people, totally destitute of intelligence, would not be a poet. Silva, 2002: 170

However, at the same moment that he exalts the poetic ability of the Indigenous peoples, the author contradicts himself when he comments on the supposed merits of the savages’ poetry. So, if at one moment he praises its quality: These uses, these customs, these traditions, these beliefs, these myths should concur with the wonder of their poetry and bring to it the mark of originality. The Tupi’s language, for its immense poeticism, should contribute to the harmony of their verses and variety of rhymes. Silva, 2002: 193

at another, he criticizes its monotony and primitivism: [T]hese people, because of their uses and customs, could not celebrate in their verses anything else other than their victories and, if at all, those would not go beyond licentious odes; at least the elderly men, in their morning harangues, recommended only two things to them: vigilance against the enemies and love to their women. Silva, 2002: 176

On the other hand, for a scrupulous researcher (a “friend of documents” as Norberto was), it should have been disconcerting that there was a clear obstacle to demonstrating beyond doubt the thesis he defended: after all, where were the

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texts that should prove it? The author realized this inconsistency quite clearly and tried to reason it thus: the texts that could confirm the “propensity of the Brazilian savages towards poetry” had simply not been saved due to the negligence of the colonizers, especially the Jesuits: Unfortunately, there was the greatest disregard in collecting these songs and translating them into our tongue; they were lost in the middle of the forests, like a mysterious cry, and the few fragments that remain do not satisfy our thirst, they do not reveal if they belonged to a decrepit people, as Martius18 claims, or have just been handed down by God himself, as Montaigne asserts. [. . .] The Jesuits [. . .], who substituted these war songs, these traditional epic and love poems for religious chants poetry, either they forgot to preserve the earlier ones or, if they were preserved, they are forgotten underneath the dust of libraries in monasteries, that is if they have not already lost their ways altogether. Silva, 2002: 169, 193

Thus, this alleged Brazilian proto-­literature constituted by the Indigenous chants, whose richness is disproportionate to the documents that could testify as to its existence, would have suffered the same illness that assailed the colonial production: vigorous and diversified; however, mostly lost. So many originals were presumably lost on their way to press in Europe: to the plunder of pirates, fires, shipwrecks, that—and here is the author’s fantastic conclusion—we would have a literature whose “catalogue of lost manuscripts [is] more extensive than that of the existent ones” (Silva, 2002: 42). The second chapter of his História da literatura brasileira dedicated to the question of the Indian is entitled “Catechism and instruction of the Brazilian savages by the Jesuits.” His summary synthesizes the content well enough: “Cultivation of the language by the Jesuits. Compositions made by the priests. Introduction of the theater as a civilizing tool: comedies, pastoral dramas, tragicomedies and dramatic allegories” (Silva, 2002: 207). Norberto describes and exalts the missionary work of the priests during the colonial period, and insists on the idea of the loss or disappearance of the texts representative of such an enormous and meritorious enterprise: “Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, (1794—1868) was a German botanist and explorer. In 1817, he and Johann Baptist von Spix were sent to Brazil by Maximilian I Joseph, the king of Bavaria. They travelled from Rio de Janeiro through several of the southern and eastern provinces of Brazil and travelled up the Amazon River to Tabatinga, as well as exploring some of its larger tributaries” (Wikipedia).

18

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These sermons, these compendia, these comedies, these pastoral dramas that, together as a corpus, would constitute an appropriate literature to these semi-­ civilized tribes, but still living surrounded by the memories of their barbaric existence, unfortunately they either disappeared along with the abduction of the properties of the Society of Jesus19 at the time of its extinction, or they still exist, but under the dust of the years in archives that have been rummaged through and through; only a couple of compositions have reached our days to attest the efforts of these missionaries, their dedication and instruction (Silva, 2002: 228).

Still, in 1859, in the same Revista Popular, but no longer as part of The History of Brazilian Literature, but as an independent article, Norberto published a fifth text in the field of literary criticism about the Indigenist theme. It is a brief commentary on fragments of Indian poetry revealed by the German naturalists Johann Baptiste von Spix e Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius as fruits of their researches in expeditions throughout Brazil. The collected poems constitute a very small corpus: no more than two poems, with only two stanzas each. Norberto reproduces the texts in the Indigenous language and the translation in German, adding Portuguese versions, supposedly his own; versions made apparently from the original language, since there is no record that he knew any German. His commentary is minimal and full of praise, considering the poems “interesting” and “original.” Naturally—what the author might have regretted deeply—the corpus is too excessively scanty to offer an alternative to the theory of the disappearance of the sources that would allow complete access to the savages’ poetry.

5.2 In the field of history, Norberto dedicated an extensive monograph on the question of the Indians and their participation in the life of the nation. It is entitled “Historical and Documented Memory of the Indian Villages in the Rio de Janeiro Province,” published in 1854 in the Journal of the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute.20 With this work, he attests his collaboration, in a lineage The Society of Jesus is a male religious congregation of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits. It began in Brazil with the arrival of the Jesuits in Bahia, in 1549. In the second half of the XVIII century, they were expelled from Portugal and all its colonies by the Marquees of Pombal. 20 Although published in 1854, the “Memory” had been previously presented by the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute: its preface, indicating the occasion of the public reading, is dated February 16, 1850 and, as the subtitle informs, it was awarded, in a “sessão magna,” on December 15, 1852 the Imperial Prize. 19

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of similar works that the Journal of the Historical and Geographical Institute of Brazil had been publishing since its inaugural volume in 1839. Among these works is “Brazil and Oceania,” a comparative study entrusted to the poet Gonçalves Dias by the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II, which was read by the poet himself in sessions of the Institute, from August 1852 to June 1853, and printed in volume XVII of the journal in 1867.21 The monograph consists of two sections, respectively named “Historical part” and “Documented part.” The historical section is composed of twelve chapters, preceded by a standard preface. The first chapter, as the title indicates, deals lengthily with “General considerations,” and the last presents itself as a summarized “Conclusion”. Each of the other ten chapters, in turn, is dedicated to the particular history of a determined Indian village of Rio de Janeiro state. The documented (or documental) section, as the title declares, consists of the transcription of a series of documents, most of them official documents—legal writs, lawsuits, official letters, governmental decrees, certificates, formal petitions, etc.—all judged pertinent to the historical reconstruction undertaken by the author. It impresses us by its sheer volume: 100 pieces in all, totaling 251 pages, compared to the 191 pages occupied by the historical section. In the preface, he explains the objective of the work: based on the Ciceronian conception of history as the master of life, it aims to contribute to the contemporary debates about colonization and catechism, considered to be “the only two means to promote the increase in the deficient settlement of the vast American empire—either for the superabundance of population in Europe succumbing to hunger, —or for the demonstrations that manifest our Indigenous population to settle into villages” (Silva, 1854: 109). In order to reach such an objective, the author outlines the procedure that he will adopt, having in view the diagnosis that he undertakes of the sources used in the research: The uncertainty that prevails in the old chronicles, the doubts that modern travelers suffered, the ambiguities existing in the documents [. . .] cause a lot of confusion. In order to get to know all these wandering tribes, that changed their dwellings, either by their own will, or expelled by force by their enemies, or compelled by the devastations caused by the European, it is necessary to walk Norberto joins the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute in 1841, as an affiliated contributor; in 1869 he becomes an honorary member of the institution; finally, in 1887, he is elected as its permanent president, a position that he would occupy until the end of his life in 1891.

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with the conquerors, following along the bandeiras22 that penetrated the backlands for the fatal discoveries or expeditions, marching hand in hand with the civilization that was settling them. In this case, the geography and the chronology [. . .] will better show the sites that they dominated, when they narrate the peculiar establishment of each hamlet. Silva, 1854: 128–129

One cannot say, however, that the effort to reduce the “confusion” that he found in the records about the theme has been successful. On the contrary, the general information that occupies him in the first chapter is no more than a sequence of disorderly information, in which the author is not capable of clarifying anything, for example, about the ethnic and historic relations among the various Indigenous groups mentioned. In order to give an idea of the imprecisions that he indulges in, let us take as an illustration the section in which he tries to characterize these groups. It starts on page 122 and continues to page 127. He begins by talking about the Tamois, whom he says descend from the Tupis; next, he mentions the Goianases, Goitacases or Guarulhos, who in turn would be allies of the Tupinambás. The latter would have arrived in Rio de Janeiro before the Tupiniquins. He proceeds, referring to the Tuminós or Tupiminós, and afterwards he introduces the Coropós, the Coroados and the Puris, introduced as the probable descendents from the Goitacases. He follows by citing the Tapanases, the enemies of the Goitacases and adds that the latter divided into three family groups: Goitacamopi, Goitacaguaçu and Goitacajacoritó. He does not forget the Sacurus and, then, when the more patient and tolerant reader is already lost, he finishes up by adding the Aimborés or Aimorés, aka Boticudos or Gamelas. On an impulse of self-­criticism, meanwhile, he recognizes that his “General considerations” did no more than reduplicate the confusion criticized: It is time to conclude this long and badly sketched introduction: its development belongs to the history and only there will I be able to expose in an orderly manner and method what here seems confusing and without sense. It is time now to enter the history of the settlement of the Indians of the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Silva, 1854: 158 “Bandeiras” means “flags” in Portuguese, a reference to the 17th-­century expeditions led by the “bandeirantes,” Portuguese settlers in Brazil and fortune hunters who penetrated the interior of Brazil far south and west of the Tordesillas Line of 1494, which officially divided the Castilian, later Spanish, (west) domain from the Portuguese (east) domain in South America.

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One should note that, in this passage, the author reiterates his conviction that the “narrative”, if it is of any value, will be much more geared to the factual expositions of the chapters dedicated to each village23 than to the reflective strength and the capacity to propose critical concepts. As a matter of fact, to put it mildly, the “ideas” that one can extract from the work are very simple. Let us make an effort to identify them and describe them. Firstly, we come across a type of measured sentimental defense of the aborigines against their detractors: “despite the ferocity attributed to them by the historians, they were not, and are not, destitute of the most beautiful intelligence (Silva, 1854: 128)”; “With exaggerated colors they are painted by some chroniclers as ungrateful, deceitful and perfidious” (Silva, 1854: 133). On the contrary—he argues—the Indians—“extremely jovial, [. . .] notable for the firmness of their character, for the candidness of their soul” (Silva, 1854: 128)—had such favorable dispositions [that] it was not difficult to bring them to join Christianity, changing them from rude and savage to civilized and industrious men (Silva, 1854, p. 133). And then, to explain why all this did not take place with the naturalness that one expected, he pleads to categories that might be labeled as psychological and moral: the acts of the colonizers would have been tainted by “greed” or “avidity” and by “imprudence,” which did not let them cohabit with the sense of essential “freedom” in the Indian and, in this way, the drama of the conquest is reduced to a kind of misunderstanding: I wish the greed of the conquerors [. . .] had not been so fatal to the freedom of the Indians! From the cultivation of the land, the need for arms was born and the Indians, who’d give themselves to it only by force, were enslaved. [. . .] [T]he difficulties [. . .] that arose, that roughened, with stumbling blocks, the track that seemed sown with flowers, were caused neither by the Indians nor by those who so bravely undertook the mission of their conversion and catechism: —they were born of the conqueror’s imprudence! Silva, 1854: 115–133

Secondly, we have a thesis on the reason for the decadence of the Indian villages and the proposal of a policy that would finally regulate the full integration of the Aboriginal to national life. Initially, the Jesuits’ catechist mission had yielded exemplary results, generally neutralizing the colonizers’ efforts in the pure and simple slavery of the natives: “As in the Golden Age, days of peace, happiness and tranquility reigned in their villages” (Silva, 1854: 138). Afterwards, And—we add—for its “Documented part.”

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with the expelling of the Jesuits, their settlements were turned into “a nursery for slaves where the settlers would go to hand pick their laborers” (Silva, 1854: 149). And finally, with the harshening of the colonial legislation against the slavery of the native, and the subsequent recourse to the market in African slaves, the villages were abandoned to their own fate, initiating a process of decline and degeneration still in course at the moment in which the author writes his study. The solution to the problem would be perfectly viable, implying the restoration of—this is implicit in the proposition—the supposed “Golden Age” of the villages resulting from the action of the first Jesuits: Since the regulation about the settlements [. . .] allows for the joining of two or more [. . .] into just one, it would be easy to establish a great settlement formed by all the relics of these villages that are here in extinction before our eyes. Then, one would be able to proceed with the instruction of these miserable sons of the forests, and equally, to familiarize them with the sweet yoke of labor, to make them useful to themselves and to their country; this great village would be the rehearsal and soon the school for the perfect civilization of its inhabitants and the catechization of many tribes. [. . .] Humanity, civilization, can thus await from the enlightened province of Rio de Janeiro the creation of a settlement that is for the catechization of the Indians that which Petrópolis24 is for the colonization: a nucleus. Silva, 1854: 263

As we can see, in the conclusion, the author shows himself to be congruent with the objective that he had stated, establishing a link between the Indian question and the question of foreign migration to Brazil. After all, according to his point of view, one as well as the other constituted essential dimensions of the first and foremost national urgency: to provide a people that would fill in the great demographic vacuum of the “vast American empire” (Silva, 1854: 109).

5.3 Unless we overlooked something in our survey of this extensive, disperse and difficult-­to-access opus, Joaquim Norberto produced, in the field of literature stricto sensu, only two texts on the theme of Indianism: a lyric poem and a drama. Petrópolis, also known as The Imperial City, is a municipality located 42 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro. The city was the summer residence of the Brazilian Emperors and aristocrats in the 19th century, and was the official capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro during the First Brazilian Republic, between 1894 and 1902.

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The poem is entitled “The Song of the Prisoner,” and is part of a set of autonomous compositions published in the Minerva Brasiliense25 in 1843 and 1844: a set in which the author tried to acclimatize the lyric-­narrative form of the ballad of German origins to the Portuguese language. The text contains eighteen stanzas of alternate decasyllabic and hexasyllabic verses and alternate rhymes. As the title itself partly reveals, it tells the story of a Carijó warrior who falls prisoner to the Tapuia Indian nation, together with his “young son.” One day, through means that the summarized and confusing plot does not explain well, the prisoner and the son escape. At this point, the narrative is suddenly interrupted: another narrative, that of the scene of the siege of Goiana by the Dutch begins, and we find out that the Pernambuco resistance is commanded by a valorous Indian, the son of the prisoner whose escape we had learned about earlier in the previous stanza. Obviously, the fellow citizens defeat the Dutch and the last stanza proclaims the identity of the hero, who turns out to be no other than Felipe Camarão, the Indian representative of the celebrated triumvirate, who commanded and won, in the seventeenth century, the war against the Dutch apostates:26 Bow down before the victorious horror, Oh, Dutch nation! Salute the prisoner’s honorable son, The invictus Camarão! [Curvai-­vos ante o horror vitorioso,   Ó batava nação! Saudai do prisioneiro o filho honroso,   O invicto Camarão! Silva, 1844: 371

The poem belongs to 1844. It would be bad faith—and also forced—to consider it an anticipation, although extremely colorless, of the masterpiece “I-Juca-Pirama” (1851, by Gonçalves Dias), because of the coincidence that both compositions involve the figure of an Indian, his son, tribal wars, and imprisonment. Let us limit our attention to the date of publication: aesthetically A literary journal founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1843 and extinct in 1845. The First Battle of Guararapes was a battle in a conflict called the Pernambucana Insurrection, between Dutch and Portuguese forces in Pernambuco, in a dispute for the dominion of that part of the Portuguese colony of Brazil. It began on April 18, 1648. The Portuguese forces were divided into five “terços;” each had about 2,000 men, formed into eight companies. One of “terços” was commanded by Filipe Camarão (c. 1580—August 24, 1648).

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disastrous, the poem has, however—in fact like several other productions by Norberto—the meager merit of being pioneering. In the panorama of the Indigenist Romantic poetry, it is preceded only by contributions from Santos Titara27 and Firmino Rodrigues28, of 1833 and 1837 respectively, and it appears in the same year in which Cardoso de Menezes launched his poems associated with Indianism.29 Gonçalves Dias in his turn would only enter the scene with his Primeiros Cantos in 1846; two years later. Regarding the drama—Lindoia or The Jesuits in Uruguai—it is a play that remained unpublished and was never performed on stage. Its manuscript, dated October 30, 1875, lies in the archives of the Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute. It stands as an unexpected return of the author to the Indigenist theme, since his last incursion into this field—after the essay and the poem in 1844 and the historical study in 1854—had happened in 1859, with his studies on Indigenous poetry and its claimed importance to Brazilian literature. It is not surprising then that the general anachronism that affects the work, starting with the title—the infallible conjunction “or,” following the fashion of the novels in the 1700s, and of the old “feuilleton” (novels printed in installments) and tragedies of the first half of the nineteenth century—and including the long subtitle that reveals its general physiognomy: “Historical drama, on a national matter, in 5 acts and thirteen scenes embellished with chorus, recitations, war dances, combats, etc., etc., based on the plot of Basílio da Gama’s immortal poem.”30 Consequently, it is not surprising that it was doomed to virtual inexistence: it was after all the year 1875, when the long cycle of the Romantic Indigenist movement, already in clear decline for some time, received what we can consider its symbolical final breath. This was the publication of Americanas, a collection of poems in which a still-Romantic Machado de Assis31 attempted a last effort to revitalize the literary current, despite the new generations Ladislau dos Santos Titara (1801–1861), poet, historian and military man. He authored the epic poem Paraguaçu (1837) (www.literaturabrasileira.ufsc.br/autores/?id=11425). His work tells the history of the struggle for the Independence of Bahia (http://mundoafro.atarde.uol.com.br/tag/ ladislau-­dos-santos-­titara). 28 Firmino Rodrigues Silva (1816–1879), lawyer, judge, senator, journalist, poet. 29 See segment 2 above. 30 Basílio da Gama (1740–1795), was a Portuguese poet and member of the Society of Jesus, born in the colony of Brazil, famous for the epic poem O Uraguai (1769), the story of the Guaranitic Wars, more exactly its end, and has a focus on the slavery of the Guarani people imposed by the Society of Jesus. 31 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short-­ story writer, regarded by many as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. Americanas (American Women) is a collection of poems that focuses on the romantic portrayal of feminine figures in search of identity (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanas_(Machado_de_Assis)). 27

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deprecating the Romantic tendency as an out-­of-date poetry of “tacapes [a cudgel for human sacrifices used by the Indians] and borés [an Indian trumpet],” according to the expression that Fagundes Varela32 uses to disqualify it, ever since 1861.33

P.S. But, might there be in Brazilian literature a post-Romantic Indianism? In the sense of a clearly discernable current, certainly not; however, the fact remains that the figure of the Indian continues to attract national poets and novelists, from the end of the nineteenth century all the way to the beginning of the twenty-­first century. Without major analytical rigor, we present here a summarized outline of the literary productions that illustrate this assertion. During the Parnassian period, despite the authority of a Sílvio Romero34 (2001: 747) having written, in 1888, that “the Indigenist school in its pure form is [was] totally discredited,” and that “the best poets of the country are [were] already heading, for a long time, towards a different direction,” the Indigenist style still has some space in poetry. It is present, for example, in Olavo Bilac’s book (Poesias; 1888),35 represented by the poem “The Death of Tapir,” which in fact, in the arrangement of the volume, is given an outstanding place, constituting in a way the opening: it is preceded only by a kind of versified preface, the

Luís Nicolau Fagundes Varela (1841–1875) was a Brazilian Romantic poet, adept of the “UltraRomanticism” movement, a Portuguese literary movement that took place during the second half of the 19th century and later arrived in Brazil. Aesthetically similar to (but not exactly the same as) the German- and British-­originated Dark Romanticism, it was typified by a tendency to exaggerate, at times to a ridiculous degree, the norms and ideals of Romanticism, namely the value of subjectivity, individualism, amorous idealism, nature and the medieval world (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Ultra-Romanticism). 33 Cf. “Very few will enjoy the productions that appear today. The men of letters, divided between the disbelief of Álvares de Azevedo and Casimiro de Abreu, the die-­young school, and the tacapes and borés of Mr. Gonçalves Dias, will feel nauseated by this tasteless doggerel. The critics do not need to criticize it, the verses do not deserve any attention” (Varela, 1962: 92). The passage is extracted from a book of poems by Varela (Voices from America); it dates from 1861, at a moment in which Indianism was still in vigor—Gonçalves Dias was still alive and Iracema (José de Alencar’s famous novel) would only come out 4 years later—Varela was already announcing its decadence. 34 Sílvio Vasconcelos da Silveira Ramos Romero (1851–1914) was a Brazilian poet, essayist, literary critic, professor, journalist, historian and politician. He is considered one of the greatest names in Brazilian literary criticism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. 35 Olavo Brás Martins dos Guimarães Bilac (1865–1918) was a journalist, a short ­story writer, a chronicler and poet of the Parnassian period. The publication of his book of poems Poesias celebrated him. He was elected Prince of the Brazilian Poets by the literary magazine Fon-Fon in 1907. 32

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well-­known “Profession of faith.” No less significant as a document of this belated valorization of Indianism is the subsequent poem of the book, the sonnet-­ homage “To Gonçalves Dias.” With modernism, however, Indigenist motifs come back to the front line of Brazilian literature projects. It is enough to remember the reverent words that Mario de Andrade36 (1972: 247) uses to refer to the author of O Guarani in his essay “The Modernist Movement” (1942)—“friend José de Alencar, my brother”—as well as the points of convergence in the iconic works of these two authors, as M. Cavalcanti Proença37 correctly points out (1969: 44): “It is a comparison that demands to be made, between Iracema and Macunaíma.” Let us call to mind as well, to abbreviate the need for exemplifications, the synchronization with Indianism present in the modernist manifestos of Oswald de Andrade, the “Pau-Brasil Poetry Manifesto” (1924) and, above all, the “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928).38 However, the end of the modernist cycle did not cause the disappearance of the Indian in the national fiction. He is present in a beautiful novel of 1938— Grandpa Morungaba—by the unjustly forgotten Galeão Coutinho, as well as in narratives in which imaginary plots are tangential to anthropological concepts of our time. Cases in point are Quarup (1967) by Antônio Callado, Maíra (1976) by Darcy Ribeiro and Nine Nights (2002) by Bernardo Carvalho. Finally, at the present moment, we have a radically new facet of Brazilian editorial output related to the Indigenous question: it concerns works produced by Indigenous authors in which, as a consequence, the Amerindian, no longer the motivation for or object of the work, takes control of the enunciations, speaking in his own name. It would be the end of the era in which Indigenous alterity would remain dependent on the white man’s literature to express itself in the national community, always suffering the inevitable deformations determined by such a dependency. Thus, we’d have reached the moment in which the natives’ Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (1893–1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. He was the driving force behind the Week of Modern Art, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil. He virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. 37 Manuel Cavalcanti Proença (1905–1966) was a novelist and a critic of Brazilian Literature. 38 José Oswald de Souza Andrade (1890–1954) was a Brazilian poet and polemicist. The argument of his “Cannibalist Manifesto” is that Brazil’s history of “cannibalizing” other cultures is its greatest strength. Cannibalism becomes a way for Brazil to assert itself against European post-­colonial cultural domination. The Manifesto’s iconic line is “Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question.” The line is simultaneously a celebration of the Tupi, who practiced certain forms of ritual cannibalism, and a metaphorical instance of cannibalism: it eats Shakespeare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Manifesto_Antropófago). 36

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literature reaches autonomy, becoming concrete in textual productions from the pens of Indigenous writers such as, for example, Kaká Jekupé, Eliane Potiguara, and Daniel Munduruku. Such works, whose production and diffusion enjoy the benefits of today’s political and pedagogical environment, marked as it is by multiculturalism, insert into the field of literary studies several important problems and their correlatives. Among these being: the relationship between orality and writing, differences between myth and authorial fiction, limits between aesthetic value and politico-­ethical functionality, as well as, and above all, the question of how and under what conditions the practice of literature, common in Western history, can be converted into instruments for other stories.

Works cited Abreu, Capistrano de. A literatura brasileira contemporânea. In: ______Ensaios e estudos: crítica e história—1a série. Rio de Janeiro: Sociedade Capistrano de Abreu; Briguiet, 1931. p. 61–107. Alencar, José de. Obra completa. Introdução geral por M. Cavalcanti Proença. Rio de Janeiro: J. Aguilar, V. 2 (Romance histórico), 1958. Alencar, Heron de. Indianismo. In: Coelho, Jacinto do Prado (Ed.). Dicionário de literatura brasileira, portuguesa, galega, estilística literária. 3. ed. Porto: Figueirinhas, 1973. V. 1, p. 462–464. ——José de Alencar e a ficção romântica. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (Ed.). A literatura no Brasil. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Sul Americana, 1969. V. 2, p. 217–300. Almeida, Carlos Eduardo de. Entre o próprio e o alheio: a construção literária da nação brasileira. São Paulo: Ômega, 2007. Andrade, Mário. O movimento modernista. In: ______Aspectos da literatura brasileira. 4. ed. São Paulo: Martins; Brasília: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1972. p. 231–255. Barreto, Dalmo. Centenário da morte de Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, v. 15, n. 373, p. 937–941, out./dez, 1991. Bastos, Alcmeno. O índio antes do romantismo. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras/FAPERJ, 2011. Calmon, Pedro. História social do Brasil. 3. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, V. 2 (Espírito da sociedade imperial), 2002. Campos, Augusto e Haroldo. ReVisão de Sousândrade: textos críticos, antologia, glossário, bibliografia. Com a colaboração especial de Erthos A. de Souza e Luiz Costa Lima. 2. ed. revista e aumentada. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982. Candido, Antonio. Formação da literatura brasileira: momentos decisivos. 4. ed. São Paulo: Martins, 2 v, 1971. ——Literatura de dois gumes. In: ______A educação pela noite: e outros ensaios. 3. ed. São Paulo: Ática, 2000. p. 163–180.

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Carvalho, Fábio Almeida de. Makunaima/Macunaíma: contribuições para o estudo de um herói transcultural. Rio de Janeiro: e-­papers, 2015. Denis, Ferdinand. Resumo da história literária do Brasil. In César, Guilhermino, ed. Historiadores e críticos do romantismo: 1 – A contribuição europeia: crítica e história literária. Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Científicos; São Paulo: EdUSP, 1978, p. 35–82. Dias, Gonçalves. Primeiros cantos. In: ___. Poesia completa e prosa escolhida. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1959, p. 99–206. Jobim, José Luís. Indianismo, nacionalismo e raça na cultura do romantismo. In: ______As formas da teoria: sentidos, conceitos, políticas e campos de força nos estudos literários. Rio de Janeiro: Caetés, 2002. p. 87–116. Lapa, M. Rodrigues. Vida e obra de Alvarenga Peixoto. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1960. Marques, Wilton José. Gonçalves Dias: o poeta na contramão (literatura e escravidão no romantismo brasileiro). São Carlos, SP: Edufscar, 2010. ——O poeta sem livro e a “pietà” indígena. Campinas, SP: Ed. da Unicamp, 2015. Matraga: revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da UERJ. Rio de Janeiro: Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Letras, v. 20, n. 33, jul./dez. de 2013. Miranda, José Américo. Origens do conceito de literatura brasileira: o papel de Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva e seu Bosquejo da história da poesia brasileira. C. M. H. L. B. Caravelle, Toulouse, n. 70, p. 135–150, 1998. Moreira, Maria Eunice. Na rede do tempo; história da literatura e fontes primárias: a contribuição de Joaquim Norberto. In: Zilberman, Regina et alii. As pedras e o arco: fontes primárias, teoria e história da literatura. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2004. p. 119–198. ——Um rato de arquivo: Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva e a história da literatura brasileira. Cadernos do Centro de Pesquisas Literárias da PUCRS, Porto Alegre, v. 1, n. 2, p. 21–27, jun. 1995. ——(Ed.). Falas diversas: quatro estudos sobre Joaquim Norberto. Porto Alegre: Centro de Pesquisas Literárias da PUCRS, 2001. O Eixo e a Roda: revista de literatura brasileira. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da UFMG, v. 21, n. 2 (Nativismo e indianismo na literatura brasileira), jul./dez. de 2012. Peixoto, Almir Câmara de Matos. Direção em crítica literária: Joaquim Norberto de Sousa Silva e seus críticos. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério de Educação e Saúde, 1951. Pinto, Edith Pimentel (Sel. e apres.). Introdução. In: ______O português do Brasil: textos críticos e teóricos—1 –1820/1920: fontes para a teoria e a história. Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Científicos; São Paulo: Edusp, 1978. p. XV–LVIII. Proença, M. Cavalcanti. Iracema e Macunaíma. In: ______Roteiro de Macunaíma. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969. p. 44–48. Ramos, Péricles Eugênio da Silva (Introd., sel. e notas). Joaquim Norberto. In: ______Poesia romântica: antologia. São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1965. p. 52–55.

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Ricardo, Cassiano. Gonçalves Dias e o indianismo. In: Coutinho, Afrânio (Dir.). A literatura no Brasil. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Sul Americana, V. 2, p. 65–129, 1969. Romero, Sílvio. Poesia: segunda fase do romantismo. In: —. História da literatura brasileira. [6. ed.] Rio de Janeiro: Imago; Aracaju: Universidade Federal de Sergipe, V. 2, p. 739–769, 2001. Silva, Joaquim Norberto de Sousa. O filho do prisioneiro; balata. Minerva Brasiliense: jornal de ciências, letras e artes publicado por uma associação de literatos, Rio de Janeiro, v. 12, n. 1, p. 370–371, 15 abr. 1844. ——Memória histórica e documentada das aldeias de índios da província do Rio de Janeiro. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, v. 17, n. 14–15, p. 109–552, 2°/3° semestres 1854. ——Lindoia ou Os jesuítas no Uruguai. 1875. Manuscrito inédito, pertencente ao acervo do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. ——Bosquejo da história da poesia brasileira. Edição, apresentação e notas de José Américo Miranda. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 1997. ——Capítulos de história da literatura brasileira: e outros estudos. Edição e notas de José Américo Miranda e Maria Cecília Boechat. Belo Horizonte: Faculdade de Letras da UFMG, 2001. ——História da literatura brasileira: e outros ensaios. Organização, apresentação e notas de Roberto Acízelo de Souza. Rio de Janeiro: Zé Mário Ed./Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, 2002. ——Romances e novelas. [2. ed.] Organização, apresentação e notas de Sílvia Maria Azevedo. São Paulo: Landy, 2002. ——Crítica reunida; 1850–1892. Organização, introdução e notas de José Américo Miranda, Maria Eunice Moreira e Roberto Acízelo de Souza. Porto Alegre: Nova Prova, 2005. Sodré, Nélson Werneck. As razões do indianismo. In: ______História da literatura brasileira: seus fundamentos econômicos. 5. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969. p. 255–271. ——O indianismo e a sociedade brasileira. In: ______História da literatura brasileira: seus fundamentos econômicos. 5. Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969. p. 272–294. Souza, Roberto Acízelo de. Joaquim Norberto e sua contribuição à edição de textos e à crítica literária. Revista de Letras, São Paulo, n. 48, p. 9–26, jan./jun. 2008. Treece, David. Exilados, aliados, rebeldes: o movimento indianista, a política indigenista e o estado-­nação imperial. Trans. by Fábio Fonseca de Melo. São Paulo: Nankin/ Edusp, 2008. Varela, Fagundes. Poesias completas. Introdução de Edgard Cavalheiro. Organização, revisão e notas de Frederico José da Silva Ramos. São Paulo: Saraiva, 1962. Varnhagen, Francisco Adolfo de. Ensaio histórico sobre as letras do Brasil. In: SOUZA, Roberto Acízelo de (Ed.). Historiografia da literatura brasileira: textos fundadores (1825–1888). Rio de Janeiro: Caetés; FAPERJ, 2014. V. 1, p. 302–332.

5

The Multifaceted Works of Machado de Assis José Luís Jobim

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a multifaceted writer who produced poetry, short stories, novels, plays and works of criticism, and it is thus impossible to summarize in a few lines the key issues in his work. I will therefore begin with a few brief comments about the historical context he was writing in, and will then deal with his work as a critic and as a forerunner of the idea of world literature. Finally I will present an example of how literary and cultural circulation features in his work. In the Rio de Janeiro of his time, Machado faced pre-­existing agendas that he implicitly or explicitly engaged with in his writing. Among other things, demands were made of writers: the result of a certain literary nationalism that emerged post-­independence. Thus literary production was required to have a mark of authenticity that corresponded to an imagined notion of Brazilian origins. In defiance of such demands, throughout his career Machado developed arguments in favor of not only being familiar with the literature of the former colonial power, but also with other European literatures, treating them as shared heritage. In fact, he refused to treat only national creations as “authentic” or “original”, and rejected the uncritical adoption of European concepts presented as “universal” or universally valid. Machado did not accept the theory that a writer was only “original” if he was able to have a supposedly self-­determined freedom to write and was the exclusive source of the form and content of the work he produced. Conversely, he did not believe in solipsistic definitions of the literary process, but in critical contact with the most significant aspects of European culture, contending that drawing on a common heritage was not the same as repeating it. Thus, in 1879, on the subject of the Jewish playwright Antônio José, born in Brazil and burned by the Inquisition in Portugal on 18 October 1739, Machado wrote a very interesting essay in which he discusses what that dramatist “imitated

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from existing models and what was of his own invention” (Assis, 1942: 307). Commenting on Antônio José’s work, Machado at the same time identifies the similarities and differences between the playwright and his predecessors, and European models, concluding with his famous sauce theory: “The Jew remains faithful to his literary physiognomy; he can go and get someone else’s spices, but he will season it with his own homemade sauce” (Assis, 1942: 313). In Machado de Assis’s work, the creative appropriation of elements from the work of other writers did not result in a reiteration of pre-­existing European models, but rather in the creation of literary texts in which he establishes a critical engagement, thus giving rise to a finished product which has marked differences in relation to the text and authors it engaged with (Rocha, 2015). Machado was a voracious reader of a wide range of works, as evidenced by what remains of his private library, today housed in the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The cataloging of this archive, conducted by the French professor JeanMichel Massa in 1961, listed 718 items (Massa, 2001), and the re-­cataloging carried out by Glória Vianna in the 1990s, noted the absence of 65 works, adding a further fifteen that were scattered across other collections and were then incorporated into the archive; as a result, the total number of works was then fixed at 668. However, the most important characteristic is the diversity of the volumes that make up the library. In percentage terms, Glória Vianna (2001) informed us that 19% were works of French literature; 18% works of general history; 15% works of literary criticism and philosophy; 13% English literature; 6% magazines and periodicals; 4% German literature; 3% Brazilian literature; 2% Portuguese literature; 2% international relations; 1.9% natural history; 1.7% linguistics and grammar books; 1.7% annuals and periodicals from the National Library; 1.6% Italian literature; 1.3% Latin literature; 1.3% biographies; 1.2% Spanish literature; 1.0% politics; 1.0% theology; 1.0% Greek literature; 0.9% American literature. His library encompasses authors that undoubtedly would be listed among the most prestigious in world literature. The following are just a few of those who did not write in Portuguese: Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Horace, Virgil, Petronius, Dante, Ariosto, Leopardi, Cervantes, Calderón, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Sterne, Byron, Dickens, Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Racine, Diderot, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo. Literary works of diverse origins compose approximately 50% of Machado’s library, and the predominant language is French (231 volumes), with Portuguese in second place (141 volumes), followed by English (88 volumes), German (27 volumes) and Spanish (5 volumes) (Vianna, 2001).

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It should be added that Machado was not only interested in literature. Noteworthy, for example, is the presence of “scientific” works of the era relating to the emerging sciences of the mind, such as the French translations of the German works of Dr Louis Büchner (La vie psychique des bêtes. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1881, 499; L’Hommeselon la science. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1872, 438) or of the work of Pierre Siciliani (Prolégomenes a la psychogéniemoderne. Paris: GernerBaillière et cie. 1880, 176), among others. In Ribot’s book (Les maladies de la mémoire. Paris: Germer Baillière et cie. 1881, 169), page 7 of the chapter “The memory as a biological fact” is annotated in red and blue, and the chapter on amnesia is marked with a reading ribbon. It is therefore no coincidence that two of the most important books by Machado include the words “memórias”—memories or memoirs in Portuguese—or “memorial” in their titles, but as I have demonstrated in detail elsewhere (Jobim, 2016), Machado uses Ribot’s work to criticize the Frenchman’s ideas, since he did not accept the way that Ribot characterized mental illnesses. The result of the appropriation of Les maladies de la mémoire is a short story entitled “O lapso” (“The Lapse”), in which Ribot’s theories are humorously deconstructed. And that is by no means an isolated case in Machado’s literary production, in which the appropriations of literary and cultural elements are not predominantly determined by the meaning that they had in their original context, but rather by the new meaning that they acquire in relation to other elements that were not present in their original context (Jobim, 2015: 406–20). I will now briefly consider Machado’s work as a critic and his role as a precursor or forerunner not only of issues that would resurface in his subsequent works but also of comparative literature in the 1800s.

Machado and criticism Machado, as we know, was a critic before he became a novelist. His first major critical essay (“The past, the present and the future of Brazilian literature”) dates from 1858, but his first novel, Ressurreição (Resurrection), only appeared in 1872. Consequently, tracing the evolution of Machado’s critical thinking is more important for understanding how the choices made by the writer in his own work were reached (in dialogue with his critical thinking), than for reaching conclusions about the validity of his opinions. As I have already illustrated in more detail elsewhere (Jobim, 2012), Machado, instead of producing manifestos that would explain his stance in relation to literary

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production—encouraging other authors to follow suit, in a role that he himself would classify as “chefe de escola” or leader of a literary movement—expressed his views on the subject in critical writings about other authors: what he praised in their work was what he would go on to adopt in his own; what he condemned was what he would go on to avoid in his own work. And, curiously, although he did not produce any manifestos about literature, he published a kind of manifesto about literary criticism in 1865, “O ideal do crítico” (“The critic’s ideal”); the text that would provide the initial framework for the overriding principles of his work as a literary critic, and one that can also help us understand some of the ideas about literary writing that he would subsequently reiterate and develop. But his most famous essay, which is still an indisputable landmark in literary criticism, was only published years later. It was published in 1873 under the title “Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment; The National Instinct”, and in it Machado maintains a certain coherence in relation to opinions formulated in his critical essay of 1858, but he adds a new line of argument, defending the idea that “. . . everything is material for poetry, provided that it fulfills the conditions of the beautiful or the elements that make up the latter” (Assis, 1979: 802). In his view, the dominant idea is that there are no limits to literary production, and it can incorporate whatever subject it likes, with the only restriction that it must be beautifully developed. With this stance Machado establishes a new benchmark in terms both of literary criticism and literary writing, since it does not necessarily require the adoption or the rejection of the literary practices of the day. It can also offer arguments of a different nature than those elaborated by the writers who adopted the precepts of the Romantic or realist/naturalist schools in nineteenth-­century Brazil. With regard to Romanticism, the thesis that texts should have local color was widespread, because that literary movement in Brazil emerged in the midst of post-­independence nationalism, within which to some extent it was assumed that talking about aspects of the country (landscapes, flora, fauna, population groups, etc.) was a kind of patriotic duty. Machado would go on to create arguments that, although they accept themes of local color as a possibility, consider that it is not a necessary condition, nor sufficient for a writer to be seen as Brazilian, that he write about aspects of his country. Much less, in Machado’s view, was the writer obliged to produce descriptions of national locations, their inhabitants, and the natural world: “A poet is not national only because he includes in his verses lots of names of his country’s flowers or birds, which can add a national vocabulary and nothing more” (Assis, 1979: 807).

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It is precisely in his essay “Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment—the National Instinct”, of 1873, that Machado gets closer to the principles that will be fundamental for the founder of the first European periodical on comparative literature (Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum [1877–1888]): Hugo Meltzl. As you will have realized by now from the chronology of the dates, Machado was the forerunner. Hugo Meltzl (1846–1908), as I have already written (Jobim & Rocha, 2016), founded the first comparative literature periodical, in an era when he himself declared that comparative literature was “nevertheless by no means a fully defined and established academic discipline” (Meltzl, 2014: 35). Meltzl wanted his periodical to be dedicated at the same time to the art of translation and to Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, distancing himself from the nationalist project of literary history championed by Georg Gottfried Gervinus (1805— 1871) (Meltzl, 2014: 35). With regard to literary history, a field in which many battles were then being waged, Meltzl defended a comparative perspective that could mitigate the use of political and nationalist criteria, which were so present in his era that he lamented that “modern literary history, as generally practiced today, is nothing but an ancilla historiae politicae, or even an ancilla nationis” (Meltzl, 2014: 35). In Latin America the essay “Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment—the National Instinct” remains a fundamental reference point for debates about world literature. It is also interesting to note that it was first published in the USA in 1873, in the Portuguese language, and that its English translation, competently executed by Robert Patrick Newcomb, was only published in 2013 (see Assis, 2013). The title of the essay can of course be misleading, since “National Instinct” seems to hark back to the nationalist discourse of the nineteenth century, but in this essay Machado actually creates a critique of the exclusivist and exclusionary principles that those words evoked in that era. Machado did not think that literature should be an ancilla nationis [handmaiden to the nation], and rejected the doctrine that “the only Works of true national spirit are those that describe local subjects, a belief that if correct, would greatly limit the resources available to our literature” (Assis, 2013: 134), aligning himself with what Hugo Meltzl would go on to write four years later. When choosing the key words for the title of his essay, Machado grabbed the attention of contemporary authors and critics, who believed in the mission of expressing literarily the local color of the recently independent nation, via the description of its landscapes, inhabitants, customs, flora, fauna, and so on.

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Without dismissing the validity of this type of literature, Machado calls into question, however, its claim to be the only acceptable literary project for postcolonial Brazil. In fact he argued that not only was it very restrictive for writers to talk only about what were considered “national topics”, but also unnecessary because even when they dealt with subjects that apparently had nothing to do with the nation, for Machado the authors would inevitably tackle them in a way that would pay tribute to their national origins. Perhaps because he was publishing in the United States, Machado exemplifies his thesis with examples of works by authors from the Anglophone world: . . . I would simply ask if the author of the Song of Hiawatha did not also write the Golden Legend, which has nothing to do with the land that gave birth to it, nor with its admirable composer. And I would ask further if Hamlet, Othello, Julius Cesar, and Romeo and Juliet have anything to do with English history or take place on British soil, and if Shakespeare is not, in addition to being a universal genius, also an essentially English poet. Assis, 2013: 135

Consequently, if the place of origin is still evident in a work, even when the subject matter is geographically or temporally distant, what standpoint should the author take? Since Machado de Assis believed that the presence of “local color” was only superficial, for him what should be expected of a writer was not the exclusive adoption of national themes, but something else: What we should expect of the writer above all is a certain intimate feeling that renders him a man of his time or space. Some time ago, a notable French critic analyzed Masson, a Scottish writer, and said that just as one could be Breton without constantly speaking of the broom, a shrub, so could Masson be a good Scot without ever mentioning the thistle, and he added that there was in Masson a certain inner Scottishness, which was distinct and superior for not being merely superficial Assis, 2013: 135

Today we know that the geographical location and the historical moment in which a text is produced are important factors, principally as regards the circulation of works in the realm of what is known as world literature, which also involves a consideration of the reception of these texts, not only in their original place and time of publication, but also in the various and successive places and times in which they are read and interpreted, from the starting point of other reception contexts.

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I will now provide examples of how, in two of Machado’s novels, literary elements with various different origins circulate.

Quincas Borba and Memórias Póstumas De Brás Cubas Quincas Borba was first published in the periodical A estação between 1886 and 1891, and the action of the narrative takes place between 1867 and 1871. The title of the novel could lead the reader to suppose that it is about the character of Quincas Borba, when, in fact, the focus is on another character: Rubião. The name Quincas Borba refers both to the dog inherited by Rubião, as part of the legacy of the “philosopher” Quincas Borba, and to the character in the novel Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas). In Machado de Assis’s era it was nothing new to have a character that had already appeared in a previous novel. Balzac had adopted this device in his Comédie Humaine, and Machado was a reader of Balzac, even citing him by name in several texts. The narrator makes clear to the reader the reference to the character of Quincas Borba, who had already appeared in the previous novel, as follows: This Quincas Borba, in case you have done me the favor of reading The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is that very same castaway from existence who appeared there, a beggar, an unexpected heir, and the inventor of a philosophy. Here you have him in Barbacena now. No sooner had he arrived than he fell in love with a widow, a lady of middle-­class station and with scarce means of livelihood, but so bashful that the sighs of her lover found no echo. Her name was Maria da Piedade. A brother of hers, who is the Rubião here present, did everything possible to get them married. (Assis, 1997)

The character of Quincas Borba has been identified as a humorous incarnation of the ideas of scientism that were circulating in Brazil in Machado’s time.1

John Gledson says that, with Humanitism, the philosophy created by Quincas Borba, “Machado is attacking the great optimistic systems, like those of Hegel or Comte, which expound the belief in some form of inevitable progress, and, alongside them, the naive belief in the goodness of existence. Machado has an obvious predecessor in Voltaire: in fact, Quincas Borba on several occasions defends the absurd Pangloss, saying that he “was not stupid like Voltaire depicted him’ ”. In Gledson, 1991: 146. Ronaldes de Melo e Souza adds new aspects to Machado de Assis’s dialogue with the philosophical ideas of the time in O romance tragicômico de Machado de Assis. (Rio de Janeiro: EDUERJ, 2006.) Cf. Especially Chapter 6 (“O drama tragicômico de Quincas Borba”).

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Attention has already been drawn to the relationship between this “philosopher” and the thinking of Auguste Comte or Charles Darwin and their acolytes. Alfredo Bosi has pointed out that Machado’s humor “parodies the century’s doctrines, positivism and evolutionism, and puts them in the mouth of a crazy beggar [Quincas Borba],” (Bosi, 2006: 29–30) something which first appears in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. In the latter novel, Quincas Borba is first presented as a schoolfriend of Brás Cubas, who is the narrator and the main character in the story. Quincas is described as having been a funny, inventive, and mischievous little boy, spoiled by his mother, and who always went around “with a striking houseboy following”, the sign of his membership of the dominant class. In his games he only liked playing the role of a member of that class.2 Years go by and Brás Cubas meets Quincas Borba again, now “a man between thirty-­eight and forty, tall, slim and pale”, wearing old, baggy and ripped clothes. Brás Cubas “couldn’t come to believe that this filthy figure, this beard tinted with white, this aging tatterdemalion, all that ruination was Quincas Borba. But it was” (Assis, 1997, ch. LIX). Brás Cubas tells him he will help him to find a job, but Borba dismisses the possibility of working and asks for money to buy food. After Brás Cubas gives him the money, when they say goodbye, the beggar steals his watch. Some time later, Quincas Borba writes to him, telling him that he has become rich (“he’d inherited a few braces of contos from an old uncle in Barbacena”), returning his watch and telling him about “a new philosophical system”. The “philosopher”, then, whose ideas were collated in “four handwritten volumes, a hundred pages each, in a cramped hand and with Latin quotations (Assis, 1997)”, explains his thinking: a mixture of the scientism ideas of the age, expressed in a humorous way to amuse the reader. The creation of mechanical determinist schemes or universal laws that supposedly would explain life or social relations was not uncommon in the nineteenth century. The Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest was one of the products of that century, and even though this was not exactly the author’s intention, it actually served to justify the installation and the effects of capitalism in that era. It was a rationalization of inequalities: the “fittest” would inevitably Cf. Machado de Assis. Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas. Chapter XIII: “It was a pleasure to see Quincas Borba play the emperor during the festival of the Holy Spirit. In our children’s games he would always choose the role of king, minister, general, someone supreme, whoever he might be. The rascal had poise and gravity, certain magnificence in his stance, in his walk.”

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have better rewards from the system, ignoring the enormous differences between members of the same society—due to circumstances of social class, access to education and health services etc.—, which in fact constituted the foundations of the supposed greater “fitness” of some people as opposed to others. The verbalization of Quincas Borba’s “philosophical” system highlights the alleged qualities of his parody of Darwinism. If the survival of the fittest is always justifiable, then even war can be understood as a “necessity”: —(. . .) Imagine a field of potatoes and two starving tribes. There are only enough potatoes to feed one of the tribes, who in that way will get the strength to cross the mountain and reach the other slope, where there are potatoes in abundance. But, if the two tribes peacefully divide up the potatoes from the field, they won’t derive sufficient nourishment and will die of starvation. Peace, in this case, is destruction; war is preservation. One of the tribes will exterminate the other and collect the spoils. This explains the joy of victory, anthems, cheers, public recompense, and all the other results of warlike action. If the nature of war were different, those demonstrations would never take place, for the real reason that man only commemorates and loves what he finds pleasant and advantageous, and for the reasonable motive that no person can canonize an action that actually destroys him. To the conquered, hate or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes (Assis, 1998).

This passage is an explicit reference to Darwin, a writer whom Machado cites in his short stories, columns and works of criticism, and whose works feature in what is left of his library.3 In the third chapter of On the Origin of Species, Darwin states that the fight for existence inevitably derives from the high rate of reproduction among organic beings, and that every being must suffer destruction for some period of its life, in order to avoid the unlimited growth of the population becoming so great that no country can support it: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to

Cf. José Luís Jobim, org. A biblioteca de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks/Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2001. p.  67. It contained three works by Darwin in French translation: La descendance de l’homme et la selection sexuelle par Ch. Darwin. Traduit de L’anglais par J. M. Moulinié. Tome premier et Tome second. Deuxième edition sur la dernière edition anglaise. Préface par Carl Vogt. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1873.; L’origine des espèces au moyen de la selection naturelle ou la lutte pour l’existence dans la nature par Ch. Darwin. Traduit sur la sixième edition anglaise par Ed. Barbier. Paris: C. Reinwald, 1876.

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itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. Darwin, 2007: 3

Darwin was following in the wake of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), who believed that human populations grew in geometrical progression, while the means of subsistence grew in arithmetical progression. That would mean that, if there was no “destruction” of part of this contingent of the population (due to wars or poverty, for example), the result could be the disappearance of the human race, due to insufficient means to ensure everyone’s survival. It should be added that Quincas Borba can be seen as a caricature of Brazilian society’s dominant class in the 1800s, a class which, in the words of Roberto Schwarz, consumed quickly and summarily: viewpoints, ideas, convictions, and literary styles, abandoning them for others on a whim (Schwarz, 1990: 40). However, since the members of the dominant class are “deluded”, they believe that these ideas are entirely their own, and seize hold of them like only those who believed so would. Another character from the dominant class humorously presented by Machado is the deceased narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a contemporary of other narrators of famous memoirs explicitly cited in Machado’s works, such as Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-­tombe (1848), whose title may have been parodied by Machado, and François Guizot’s4 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (1858–68). In the case of Chateaubriand, the narrator declares that there is a “unity” in his Memoirs, linking the cradle to the grave. Although he says that he does not know whether his Memoirs are the work of a white-or brown-­haired man, his contemporary readers knew perfectly well that these were the memoirs of a white-­haired individual, not least because the narrator-­character makes a point of mentioning that he has one foot in the grave.5 Of course there is a difference Cited in Chapter CXLVI of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. “Les Mémoires, divisés en livres et en parties, sont écrits à différentes dates et en différents lieux: ces sections amènent naturellement des espèces de prologues qui rappellent les accidents survenus depuis les dernières dates, et peignent les lieux où je reprends le fil de ma narration. Les événements variés et les formes changeantes de ma vie entrent ainsi les uns dans les autres: il arrive que, dans les instants de mes prospérités, j’ai à parler du temps de mes misères, et que dans mes jours de tribulation, je retrace mes jours de bonheur. Les divers sentiments de mes âges divers, ma jeunesse pénétrant dans ma vieillesse, la gravité de mes années d’expérience attristant mes années légères, les rayons de mon soleil, depuis son aurore jusqu’à son couchant, se croisant et se confondant comme les reflets épars de mon existence, donnent une sorte d’unité indéfinissable à mon travail; mon berceau a de ma tombe, ma tombe a de mon berceau; mes souffrances deviennent des plaisirs, mes plaisirs des douleurs, et l’on ne sait si ces Mémoires sont l’ouvrage d’une tête brune ou chenue” (Assis, 1998: XLIX).

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between this “serious” narrator of Mémoires d’outre-­tombe and the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the “dead man who is a writer, for whom the grave was a second cradle” (Chapter I). It is therefore worth remembering that, if Chateubriand and Guizot serve to exemplify the “serious” side of the memoir genre, there are also humorous Brazilian appropriations from the same period: Memórias de um sargento de milícias, by Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1852–1853), and Memórias do sobrinho de meu tio (1868), by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, the latter with an interesting interface in relation to Brás Cubas, since the humor is constructed on the basis of a character who wants to climb the social ladder by adopting the corrupt practices found in Brazilian society at the time. Chateaubriand, who wrote his Mémoires d’outre-­tombe when he was still alive, refers to Saint Bonaventure, who was thought to have obtained permission from heaven to continue his memoirs after death. The French author thus states that he would like to be resurrected to at least be able to correct the proofs of his own memoirs (Chateaubriand, 1904: LIV–LV). In some ways it would seem that the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas resolved this issue: he is dead, but he talks to the living, with a freedom of opinion that he would probably not have had were he alive. Taking a wider view, the creation in these two novels of characters from the dominant classes in Brazil with questionable morals or ideas is also to be found in the columns written by Machado de Assis and published in the newspaper Gazeta de Notícias in the 1880s, which are representative of some attitudes and views that the writer would go on to put forward with regard to social life in Brazil. I will now consider this topic.

“Balas de Estalo” and “Bons Dias!” The section “Balas de Estalo” was published in the Gazeta, between 1883 and 1886, under the pseudonym of Lelio,6 whereas the column entitled “Bons Dias!” was published between 1888 and 1889, under the pseudonym of Boas Noites. The two series have a lot in common, and Machado drew on material from “Balas de Estalo” in order to write his column “Bons Dias!” They also share the Galante de Sousa informs us that Antônio Simões Reis, in his Pseudônimos brasileiros (1941) stated that the pseudonym Lelio was also used by José Ferreira de Souza Araujo, but that there is no factual proof of this claim.

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characteristic of including descriptions and comments about people, facts and social practices of the time. In some ways the columnist imagined that he knew what would be familiar to his target public, or how to provide that public with something as yet unknown to them. Today, because of the distance between those columns and the present day, it would be more than understandable if the present-­day reader had the occasional difficulty in understanding some of the references they contain. It is thus surprising that it is still possible to easily identify a good number of those references, which probably means that many of the things that he wrote about in the nineteenth century are still relevant today, as we will now see. In their columns in the Gazeta de Notícias, Lelio and Boas Noites did not restrict themselves to the spheres of politics or the economy, although they did also deal with those themes to a great extent—even doing so with a lightness of touch that would seem strange to today’s columnists working in these two areas. Anything could be included, from the most mundane (such as the sale of fake wine), to the display of human bones in a shop window in Rio de Janeiro. The mixing together of subjects seen as very “important” at the time with other more “secondary” ones is, furthermore, superbly executed. In fact, as narrators of newspaper columns, Lelio and Boas Noites not only tell stories and talk about contemporary journalistic topics, facts and people; they also reveal their viewpoint to the reader. Machado thus presents both of them to us as narrator-­characters of dubious morality, narcissistic, and with a desire to do well for themselves at any price. Boas Noites, for example, uses the first-­person plural to include the reader as a potential accomplice in his scams to earn money: The words “cow” and “money”, as we know, can have the same meaning in Portuguese; we say ”budget cow”; we also say: the rogue put his mouth to the udder—meaning someone fiddled some money, when we want to belittle someone, who seized an opportunity before we did, etc., etc. Assis, 1990: 47

Previously, Lelio had described his own state of mind regarding such scams, such as in the column of 10 October 1883: “I woke up today with a desire to embezzle someone or some institution” (Assis, 1998: 65). The literary construction of both is similar to that of Brás Cubas, to the extent that it also allows the reader to have access to the forms of consciousness of the “dead man who is a writer”, given that they all share a certain dubious morality.

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In the narrator-­characters of his columns in the Gazeta de Notícias Machado draws on a skill that he would also go on to develop in his mature novels: that of bringing to the fore the burning issues of the day—such as political representation, slavery or the juridical and economic structure of the country—without allowing his text to turn into blatant denunciation or protest. He manages to do this by drawing on various strategies. These include: changing the subject immediately after introducing a controversial topic, leaving the question open, or providing a humorous solution for the given problem. On the subject of appropriations, I will first draw attention to the allusions made by the narrator-­character Lelio, who quotes profusely from foreign literary works and gives center stage to the words and opinions of political and literary figures from outside Brazil, but also stresses that we should treat such allusions with caution: “[Taunay and Lafaiete] heard that in France a few deputies read the classics, and they had the idea of importing this habit over here. They did not caution that not all things from one country acclimatize in another” (Assis, 1998: 160). According to Lelio, even those things that in Brazil seem to be the same as in their place of origin can be transformed into something else, as a consequence of “acclimatization”: You should note that everything has its own name; but this same name may not always correspond to similar things or people. Kiosk, for example. Abroad a kiosk is occupied by a woman selling newspapers. Here it is a place where a gentleman sells lottery tickets and Brazilian straw cigarettes. Assis, 1998: 228

Consequently, he argues that there is no generic, universally valid truth, but a kind of contextual relativity, dependent on the place in question, in other words, in accordance with the “law of acclimatization”: “Truth in Sorocaba, error in Limeira” (Assis, 1998: 275). It should be noted that subsequently Boas Noites also produced a line of argument similar to that of Lelio.7 Boas Noites also includes a similar commentary, in a column on 13 February 1889 (“. . . truth here, error elsewhere. The balls can also be switched: truth elsewhere, error here.”), attributing the opinion to Pascal. In the column of 6 October 1888: “The Gazeta appears to have forgotten the theory of means, has not studied well climatology, and finally has not consulted me, because I would tell it that nothing degenerates and everything is transformed. There are places where the kiosk is occupied by a woman who sells newspapers; here it is occupied by a man who sells good coffee, fine cachaça and a lucky lottery ticket.” (Assis, 1990, p. 120)

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John Gledson believes that it is an adaptation of the original from Pensées: “Plaisante justice qu’une rivière borne: verité au deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà!” (apud Assis, 1990: 163–164) The relativization of things also appears in other forms, as can be seen in the first column in the series “Bons dias!”, in which the narrator Boas Noites states the following: I am a poor clock repairer who, tired of seeing that the world’s clocks and watches do not keep the same time, lost faith in my trade. The only rationale for having clocks is that they are all exactly the same, without any discrepancies; when they differ, we don’t know anything any more, because my watch might be correct but so might that of my barber. Assis, 1990: 35

It is not only a question of absolute relativization, however, since Boas Noites, in the column of 19 April 1888, broaches the subject of a shareholder from the Banco Predial bank, who traded in slave mortgages. This shareholder, José Luís Fernandes Vilela, in a meeting to trade in mortgages, stated: “. . . all this is a meaningless discussion, since there are no longer any slaves”. However the narrator declares that he has received a message signed by around 600,000 people, saying that they are slaves, and making the following observation, which does not relate to relativism, but to a socially referenced perspectivism, clearly derived from the interests of those who produce and listen to discourses in context: Mr. Fernandes Vilela’s words can be understood in two ways, depending on whether the listener or reader is carrying a hoe on his back, or an umbrella under his arm. Seeing things, with your umbrella, you are left with one impression; with your hoe, the impression is different. Assis, 1990: 47–48

Thus, we can see that the persona of Boas Noites is also used to discuss the most burning issue of that decade: slavery. Although the intention of the owner of the Gazeta de Notícias was initially to publish more aggressive and more direct texts in the section “Balas de Estalo”, Lelio wrote a type of column in which, without failing to talk about “important” things, such as politics and economics, he presented them alongside other more “secondary” topics, drawing everything together with a general ironic or humorous touch. Perhaps for that reason, in the column of 29 March 1885 he called his text a “playful column” (Assis, 1998: 240). Of course this is not just meaningless humor. In fact Lelio produces ironic critiques of contemporary Brazilian society, and explains to

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the reader of his articles that, if he peels off the skin of laughter to see what lies beneath, he will understand that he is laughing so as not to cry, like the character of Figaro, in the first act of The Barber of Seville by Beaumarchais: There are people who do not know, or who do not remember to peel off the skin of laughter to see what lies beneath. Hence the accusation that a friend recently directed at me, relating to a few of these articles, in which the language was a little more jovial. You laugh at everything, he said to me. And I replied that I did, that I laughed at everything, like the famous barber in the play, for peur d’être obligé d’en pleurer [fear of being obliged to cry about it all]. Assis, 1998: 2098

The technique used to present issues also varies. Sometimes he transforms abstract entities into characters that enter into dialogue with Lelio, as in the case of the unconstitutional taxes of Pernambuco (that Lelio did not recognize in the street, because they were fatter), or creates allegorical characters, like the sheep that is a shareholder and wants to receive its dividends. In the series “Bons Dias!”, the Bendengó meteorite appears to dialogue with the character Carvalho, who mentions the political question of federalism and the proposed laws of the time, supporting the adoption in Brazil of the American constitution. The Bendengó meteorite makes the following ironic observation: “Carvalho, (. . .) I am not an expert in matters of the constitution or anything else, but I can honestly say that I don’t really understand the idea of the United States Constitution with an emperor . . .” (Assis, 1998: 72). When the conversation turns to the Republic—an article published in the Gazeta Nacional previously said that, if the Republic were already established, slavery would have ended years ago—the meteorite declares that he had previously been a general in the United States of America: And a general in the South, at the time of the war of secession, and remember that the Confederate States, when they drew up their constitution, declared in the preamble: “Slavery is the basis of the Constitution of the Confederate States”. It should also be remembered that Lincoln himself, when he took power, declared right away that he would not be abolishing slavery. Assis, 1998

Lelio makes this even clearer in the column of 3 April 1885: “I don’t know if I have already told the reader that ideas, for me, are like nuts, and that to this very day I still haven’t discovered the best way of finding out what is inside some of them—other than by cracking them open” (Assis, 1998: 241).

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Many people prefer to see in the humor that permeates Machado’s prose a melancholy skepticism in relation to the society in which he found himself but I believe that, in a subtle way, Lelio and Boas Noites often show us in which direction to orient our thoughts on the narrated events, or open windows through which the reader of his time and the reader today can see with different perspectives. By transforming opinions, actions and events into columns, via the narrator-­characters Lelio and Boas Noites, Machado configures the shape of the narrative that molds them and informs the reader. Of course the subjects dealt with could compose a narrative of a different nature, depending on the structure chosen to organize them in an understandable way for his public, because what are being presented are not facts and actions in a raw state, so to speak. Instead, they are processed and organized through the optic of the narrator-­character. One of Machado’s skills in his columns in “Balas de Estalo” and “Bons Dias!” is giving, via Lelio and Boas Noites, a playful air to issues that provoked fistfights and stabbings at the time. The narrator explains this in a succinct way: “When a principle divides men, and passions are inflamed, the consequences have one of two names, depending on the point of view of the narrator: tragedy or brawl (Assis, 1998: 283).” Far from expressing seriously and radically their support for one or other of the major issues of their age, the narrator-­characters appear to be striving to present possible forms that different situations or opinions can take, in the context of references that they form part of and which give them meaning. Until the overarching context changed, the issues would be resolved in accordance with the general logic of the society of the day, which, however, could be shown humorously in all its incoherence and injustice. It is because Machado de Assis understands what is at stake for the public of his time that he can create narrators who derive humor from this. —Translated by Dr. Lisa Shaw, freelance translator and Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, University of Liverpool.

Works cited Assis, Machado de. Quincas Borba. Trans. John Gledson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Assis, Machado de. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Trans. John Gledson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Assis, Machado de. Antonio José. In: Assis. Crítica teatral. Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1942, 299–320. ——. Quincas Borba. Appendix. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro/Comissão Machado de Assis, 1970. ——. Notícia da atual literatura brasileira: instinto de nacionalidade. In: Assis. Obra completa, 3rd edn. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1973. ——. Bons dias! Introdução e notas de de John Gledson. São Paulo: Edunicamp, 1990. ——. Balas de estalo. Edição organizada e comentada por Heloisa H. Paiva de Luca. São Paulo: Annablume, 1998. ——. Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. Alfragide: Dom Quixote, 2010. Available at: http//:machado.mec.gov.br/images/stories/pdf/romance/marm05 ——. “Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment: The National Instinct.” Trans. Robert Patrick Newcomb. Brasil/Brazil, 26(47) (2013): 85–101. Bosi, Alfredo. Brás Cubas em três versões; estudos machadianos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006. Chateaubriand, François René de. Mémoires d’outre-­tombe. Introduction, notes and appendices by M. Ed. Biré. In: Chateaubriand. OEuvres completes. Annotées par Sainte-Beuve. 1st edition. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1904. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Gledson, John. Machado de Assis—impostura e realismo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991. Jobim, José Luis. Literary and Cultural Circulation: Machado de Assis and Théodule Armand Ribot. European Review 23 (2015): 406–420. @ 2015 Academia Europea doi:10.11017/S1062798715000083 ——. A biblioteca de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks/Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2001. ——. A crítica literária e os críticos criadores no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UERJ/ Ed. Caetés, 2012. —— and Castro Rocha. From Europe to Latin America: Ways of Reframing Literary Circulation. Journal of World Literature 1 (2016): 52–62. Massa, Jean-Michel. “A biblioteca de Machado de Assis”. In: Jobim, José Luis (ed.). A biblioteca de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras/ Topbooks Editora, 2001, 21–90. Meltzl, Hugo. “Present Tasks of Comparative Literature”. In: World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch. Oxford: Blackwell, 2014, 35–41 (Kindle Edition). Rocha, João Cezar de Castro. Machado de Assis. Toward a Poetics of Emulation. Trans. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015. Schwarz, Roberto. Um mestre na periferia do capitalismo—Machado de Assis. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1990.

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Souza, Ronaldes de Melo e. O romance tragicômico de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2006. Vianna, Glória. Revendo a biblioteca de Machado de Assis. In: Jobim, José Luís (ed.). A biblioteca de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras/ Topbooks Editora, 2001, 99–274.

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Naturalism in Brazil and its European Connections Ligia Vassallo

Le lion est fait de mouton assimilé Paul Valéry1 To address the history of the naturalist movement in Brazil means to enter the most relevant period of the French presence in the country. Incidentally, the great acceptance of the naturalist novel, especially in its canonical form established by Emile Zola (1840–1902), represented for the North American critic Frederick Jameson (Jameson, 1995: 99) one of the most successful cultural, technological and commercial exports of modern history. But this situation did not happen only in Brazil, because, as the French Brazilianist Pierre Rivas (Rivas, 1993: 99–114) argues, in the nineteenth century Paris was the literary capital of Latin America. In the search for the construction of a national identity, the young nations, recently emancipated from their Iberian tutors, needed to reject the previous models, which required them to adopt another, necessarily close to the abandoned one, but different from it in its foundations as well as in its imagery. Hence, the choice of the French model. Since then, a ritualistic journey to Paris became, to the Latin American youth, an initiation into the discovery of his own origins, as it continues today with so many artists of the continent. In this respect, the confession of the modernist Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) is well known; he affirms, in his autobiography, to have discovered Brazil in Paris, in the Clichy neighborhood, where he lived in the second decade of the twentieth century. It is fitting to remember that the Latin America literature boom of the 1970s began its diffusion from criticism that had its epicenter in Paris. This practice has been continuing Cited in Santiago, 1978: 21.

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throughout the decades. With regard to this point, let’s evoke the Argentinian Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) who, besides having lived for many years in the French capital, locates his iconic novel Rayuela (1963) there and transposes to the Quartier Latin the wanderings of his Latin American characters in their existential searches. In the 1800s, the French presence in Brazil was especially influential at two crucial moments. The first, during the initial decades, soon after independence from Portugal, took place when political exiles, students and intellectuals residing in Paris gathered around the administrator of the Sainte Genevieve library, then Jean-Ferdinand Denis (Crt. by Rouanet, 1991)—a reliable interlocutor because he had lived in Brazil. Thus, in the dawn of the Romantic age, around the 1830s, he oriented them towards focusing on the legacy of the national American past, resulting in the birth, in Paris, of Brazilian Indigenism. This phase of Romanticism had great prominence and durability, with masterpieces published for decades, up to the point where it began to eclipse the perception of the first great works of realist tendencies that appeared then in France. Most surely, the success of the Romantic novel The Guarani (O Guarani, 1857), a masterpiece written by one of the founders of Brazilian literature, José de Alencar (1829–1877), kindled a tremendous interest in the autochthone: so much that it overshadowed the launch of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) in the same year, but that seemed very distant in terms of place and interest. Consequently, Brazilian literature practically jumped from Romanticism to naturalism and, because of that, it not only dripped melodramatic tints into the works of the new school, but also it continued to place emphasis on tropical nature, despite the scientism of the time and the crudeness of all the accusations leveled by that scientism, especially those related to social inequalities. The second most crucial moment of the French presence in Brazil was around the second half of the nineteenth century. It is closely related to the Positivism of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and caused profound changes in Brazilian society. This set of precepts was introduced in the country by students returning from Paris, a few of them students of the idealizer himself. The positivist ideas were diffused above all through military schools and among intellectuals and politicians, fomenting the need to modernize the country. Such precepts did not only bring political consequences—the abolition of slavery, the exchange of empire for Republic, the separation of powers, the option for laicity—but

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ideological and literary ones as well: scientism, the valorization of exact observation, determinism; that is, everything pointing towards the introduction of naturalism. The presence and the importance of Positivism in Brazil were so influential at that moment that its maxim, “Order and Progress” was imprinted on the Republican flag. In the reinterpretation of the matrix (the model) of the European proposal, they added specific aspects of the local social-­cultural reality of the moment, constituting above all a very rich differentiation from the first model. As a result of this diversion, the determinism was maintained but the scientism, however, was assuaged, creating space for sharp social criticism that turned around two main axes: race and environment. That is, in the transposition from one continent to another, the theories of the French critic and historian Hyppolite Taine (1828– 1893)—race, milieu and historic moment—were turned towards the tropical. In the slave-­holding society of that historical moment, the issues of race and heredity turned to racial mixing and its social denial because those who worked were considered to be in a servile position and all types of manual laborers were despised: damned to the bottom ranks of society, without skin-­color distinction. That is, a rich mestizo “whitened,” while a poor mestizo or even a poor white man was automatically projected to the lower chambers of society. Thus, social ascension and “whitening” constituted one and the same standard. Putting it in other terms, to be white is less a racial question than it is a social question; properly, it is a symbol of ascension and money. Thereby, the lazy members of the high classes are white by definition, while the category of workers congregates all the types of color of the rising proletariat, formed from freed slaves of all hues of skin color, and European immigrants. This is the view of Antonio Cândido (1918–2017) (Candido, 1993: 132–152), one of the most respected literary critics in Brazil. In reference to the reading of the “milieu,” social contrasts and distances are evident especially in the rural world, due in great part to the anachronism of the social structures. At the same time, the catastrophic effects of inclement tropical nature are emphasized. This topos, that was discovered by the Romantics, cultivated by the naturalists, and was able to aggregate a certain number of works under the rubric of “social novel” of the 1930s, has been well explored by the rich regional branch of Brazilian literature, from the first half of the nineteenth century on: so much so that it constitutes a leitmotiv in literature, in cinema, in folklore, and even in the fine arts, and linked to the popular arts. One could ask whether this trait might be a sign of the omnipresence of Romanticism and its

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focus on local color. It is, most certainly, one of the typical traits of naturalism in Brazil. This peculiarity is a mark of the Latin American literature that, according to the Brazilian critic Silviano Santiago, institutes its place in Western civilization. It is a defiance to the canon of the matrix, the “deviation from the norm, an active and destructive deflection that transfigures the established and immutable elements that the Europeans exported to the New World” (Santiago, 1978: 18), reinforcing, at the same time, its difference. It is what he qualifies as place in-­between, half way between the assimilation of the original model and its confrontation. Assimilation or, to use another term, deglutition if we bring to mind Oswald de Andrade’s theoretical reflections on anthropophagy that send us to Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and the phrase used as epigraph above: “The lion is created out of an assimilated sheep”. The adaptations of the literary matrix to Brazilian society expanded the initial field of vision of the European school, stressing the tone of the local society with its peculiarities and, in the case of naturalism, attributing to it a space no longer only urban, like in the prototype, but rather extending it to the Amazonian and the Northeastern interior, as we will see. Thus, we will analyze the Brazilian version of this aesthetic school, concentrating on the following points: naturalism and reinterpretation of the canon—Aluisio de Azevedo’s project; naturalism and the inclusion of the forest—Inglês de Souza; naturalism and the backlands—Domingos Olympio; and naturalism at the present time—the remaking and the cinema.

Naturalism and reinterpretation of the canon: Aluisio Azevedo’s project The novel that is considered to have introduced naturalism in Brazil is The Mulatto (O Mulato, 1881) by Aluisio Azevedo (1854–1913), the main writer of the new aesthetic. This novel, closer to the stories of swashbucklers than to scientific preoccupations, provoked as many tears as scandals, especially because it is founded on a factual case that took place in the provincial town where the plot is located: São Luis do Maranhão, birthplace of the author. In this tale, a couple in love cannot get married because the groom, despite being rich, well-­ educated and well-­positioned socially, carries an insurmountable genetic flaw: his visible mulatto condition. The prejudice against Afro-Brazilians and their

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descendents constituted an incandescent issue at that moment, primarily because “racial whitening” was then a universal ambition. The same problematic reappears in The Slum (Azevedo, 1983) (O Cortiço, 1890) by the same Aluisio Azevedo; a novel considered to be the masterpiece of Brazilian naturalism. The narrative evokes the series by Emile Zola (1840–1902) known as Les Rougon-Macquart, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, with twenty independent titles (1871–1893). Azevedo intended to complete a homologous series to be entitled Ancient and Modern Brazilians (Brasileiros antigos e modernos), as it appears in the article “New Writings,” (“Obras novas”) published in the newspaper A Semana (The Week), in Rio de Janeiro, number 31 of October, 1885 (Mérian, 1988: 132–152). This article, evoked by the critic Pardal Mallet in the newspaper News Gazette (Gazeta de Notícias), on May 15 1890, on the occasion of the publication of the novel The Slum is, by the way, one of the rare mentions of Azevedo’s project, in contrast with the numerous plans, projects and drafts left by Emile Zola. The globalizing vision of both authors consisted, in Azevedo’s case, in summarizing into one manuscript all the Brazilian types, condensing into a novel form all the facts of public life. The text of 1890, incidentally, constitutes the only volume of a set initially planned for five volumes. The other four volumes, The Brazilian Family (A Família Brasileira), The Lucky Fellow (O Felizardo), The Seductress (A Loureira), and The Black Ball (A Bola Preta), would supposedly paint a panorama of Brazilian society in five stages: from the time of the court of the first emperor, Pedro I, immediately after independence (around 1820s) until the end of the empire period (around 1887). The collection of works into a novelistic series obeys European models, although it contradicts the tendency of contemporary Brazilian literature, which would only adopt this procedure from the twentieth century on. Undoubtedly, the Rougon-Macquart series is echoed in Azevedo’s conception, in the debt concerning the literary genealogy, and the theoretical precepts imbued with scientific determinism as well as, equally, in the choice of themes, of leitmotif, and of technical procedures like: the animalization and hypersexuality of the characters; the preponderance of the collective in detriment of the individual; the interest in the proletariat; and the employment of free indirect style, among other procedures. Regarding fidelity to the matrices, The Slum maintains visible traces that bring it close to the various themes of Zola’s L’Assommoir (1887), such as the

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misery of the workers, the collective housing, laundrywomen, the degradation resulting from promiscuity, alcoholism, urban changes, the love triangle and family destruction . . . However, the critic Antonio Candido (1993: 126) comments that, in The Slum, there is much more thematic variety than in Zola’s work, because Azevedo amassed into a single book so many problems and much more audacity whereas Zola spread this among several volumes. For this reason, the Brazilian counterpart is viewed by the critic as a much more ambitious project than L’Assommoir because Azevedo is equally inspired by Nana, by La Joie de Vivre, perhaps by La Curée and, undoubtedly, by Pot Bouille, which in some measure propitiates the description of the neighboring mansion with its baseness, just like L’Assommoir provides in its description of collective housing. One can suppose that it is due to this concentration that the fact that the only novel written in the spirit of the series planned by Azevedo is The Slum. Perhaps this is the reason why the remainder of the initial project of five volumes can be found either in this work or, mainly, in The Man (O Homem, 1887), which precedes The Slum and would have been entitled The Brazilian Family (A Família Brasileira) if it had been included in the series: a fact that never happened. It is this first novel (The Man) that foreshadows the following (The Slum), according to the brilliant study by Jean-Yves Mérian, a French Brazilianist specializing in Aluisio Azevedo (Mérian, 2013). Its axis turns around the behavior of the hysteric character Magda and her father, the counselor Pinto Marques, who managed everything. The three spaces that reappear in the 1890 novel are already in The Man: the enclosed bourgeois universe of the building where the girl isolates herself, parallel to which two opposite worlds coexist; the stone quarry; and the laborers’ shacks. In such a context, common to both books, they all parade the rich Portuguese, the immigrant workers, and the everyday life of a poor man’s house, visited by poor Brazilians of all races. In The Slum, the action is advanced through contrasts: of races, of social positions, of fortunes, of destinies, of entertainments, of means of transports, of origins, of love ties, of deaths, etc., establishing an ample landscape of the city at a moment of transformation—physical (due to the geographic expansion), as well as social (brought by the abolitionist propaganda and immigration). The protagonists are two Portuguese businessmen: one, Miranda, is a future baron, resident of a two-­story house, who is already at the peak of his social position at the start of the novel. He lives with his adulterous wife, his submissive daughter, the servants, and the indolent social life of the family. On the other side of the wall that divides the properties, and still needing to climb numerous rungs on

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the social ladder to equal his neighbor, lives the storekeeper João Romão: a future owner of slum housing and the stone quarry, who works in his store with his concubine Bertoleza, a former slave, whom he abandons despicably at the end of his social ascension when he intends to associate himself with his ennobling neighbor by arranging, among other implicit negotiations, a marriage of convenience, indifferent to the feelings of the rich and innocent bride. This novel, however, adds true-­to-life elements to the plot: some of them addressed for the first time in Brazilian literature, such as the participation of capoeira players in the election campaigns; the workers and their working environment; the immigrants (specially the Italians); proletariats of all provenance, and the universe of popular collective housing (the tenement houses, whose exploitation by the proprietors from the high class of Rio de Janeiro, constituted a scandal denounced in the newspapers). From a more properly human perspective, we follow along the peripeteia of the Portuguese family destroyed by the presence of the seductive neighbor: the mulatto laundress Rita Baiana, an allegory of the force of American nature. It is the Sun of the tropics, equally, that “hypersexualizes” everything, finally bringing to Pombinha her late puberty. An attempt to interpret the reality of the habitat, so dear to the intellectuals of the nineteenth century, must have driven Azevedo to review certain aspects of the imported model and to rethink determinism more in accordance with the tropics. In the present case, the social environment superposes heredity, acting through a kind of “social contamination,” as it is seen in the succession of prostitutes and cocottes, which could be interpreted as a process of substitution in the assembly line. On the other hand, instead of “hereditary deformations,” like the ones of the monstrous Jeanlin, in Zola’s Germinal, it is the racial problem that drives the incandescent social questions of the time, such as the question of the intensification of the whitening of the population and slavery-­abolition being succeeded by foreign labor. For this reason, both the ex-­slave Bertoleza and the mulatto laundress Rita Baiana choose white men as sexual partners because the latter belong to the “superior race,” evidence that attests to a more racial than social opposition within Brazilian society of the time. Besides placing in evidence the great social controversies at the time of publication of the work, the historical moment is much more present and concrete in Azevedo than in Zola because the Brazilian adopts and explores a real and concrete background: historical as well as geographical. The action in the text takes place in Rio de Janeiro soon after the Paraguayan War (1856–1860)

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and up to the moment of the last demonstrations for the freedom of slavery (1880s). Its location is the capital of the empire with its urban transformations and, above all, the extension of the old downtown area towards the south of the city, with the occupation of new areas like the Botafogo borough where the commercial establishment that acts as the epicenter of the novel is located. The urban space of the new borough is described in such realistic tones that still today one can retrace the steps of the characters through streets and references that, most of the time, keep their original denominations. Azevedo follows the scheme inaugurated by Zola when reproducing the urban space, but adds to it the dynamism of Rio’s society at a moment of searching for new physical spaces. In doing so, for Antonio Cândido, the Brazilian writer goes beyond the flatness of Zola’s so-­called “experimental novel,” in that he changes the contours of the naturalist canon and imprints upon The Slum a perception of another level of significance, in which collective housing stands for a portrait of Brazil in miniature; an allegory of the country as a whole. In this sense, Aluisio’s masterpiece has not lost its vigor and continues to be up-­to-date. Here resides, for Cândido, the originality of Azevedo, whose reading of the Rougon-Macquart, squeezed between the requirements imposed by the “central” countries and the imperial demands of the immediate natural and social reality of a “peripheral” country, Azevedo realizes that the peculiar conditions of the tropical Brazilian environment impose themselves on the literary models of the center. Hence, he transforms the French example into a formula capable of free adaptation to different circumstances. In other words, it is the space in-­between referred to above.

Naturalism and insertion into the forest: Inglês de Souza Besides the strong presence of the local reality, naturalism in Brazil expanded its geographical horizons, as has already been mentioned. According to the critic Lucia Miguel-Pereira (1903–1959) (Miguel-Pereira, 1973), the movement headed by Emile Zola penetrated into the literature of the country through the plume of writers that, although they resided and operated in the then capital of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, had as their place of origin what was called the north of the country, with the immense Amazon region included, but what today is divided into the Northeast and the North. A few names that stand out among these writers are: Inglês de Souza (Óbidos, 1853—Rio de Janeiro, 1918), Rodolfo Teófilo (Salvador,

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1853—Fortaleza, 1932), Aluisio Azevedo (São Luis, 1857—Buenos Aires, 1913), José Veríssimo (Óbidos, 1857—Rio de Janeiro, 1916). One of these outstanding names, Inglês de Souza, from Pará State, situates in his birthplace, the Amazonian region, a few of the first naturalist novels in Brazil. Even if he is the author of The Missionary (Souza, 1998) (O Missionário, 1888), one of the best-­known works of the naturalist aesthetic, which has its action taking place in the Amazon, there are also other writers who explored the same surroundings, such as José Veríssimo (Scenes of the Amazonian Life, Cenas da Vida Amazônica, 1888) and Rodolfo Teófilo (The Paroara, O Paroara, 1899). In these works, life and local customs are minutely represented and the narratives fully demonstrate the conditioning of the characters to the physical and social, green and spacious, habitat, fitting into the “scientific” purposes of Zola’s experimental novel. Although it falls to the novel The Mulatto, by Aluisio Azevedo, to be the official introduction of Zola’s aesthetic to Brazil, it is the works produced by the young Inglês de Souza, published under the pseudonym of Luis Dolzani, (Cit. by Montello, in Coutinho, 1969, v.3: 7–52), that place him first in the history of the naturalist novel.2 Let’s discuss The Cocoa Grower (O Cacaulista) and Stories of a Fisherman (Histórias de um pescador), both from 1876, followed by the interesting The Sangrado Coronel (O Coronel Sangrado, 1877) and, later, Amazon Tales (Contos Amazônicos, 1892). The titles from 1876 maintain a unity of principle conceived from the beginning of the author’s literary career, around 1875, and which escaped from the Romantic creed that predominated at that time. His works situate themselves in the regional environment of provincial mediocrity and present independent narratives that link to and cross one another in such a way that these “Scenes of the Amazonian Life” point us to the structure of Balzac’s Human Comedy, in particular to “Scenes of Provincial Life.” These first writings by Inglês de Souza were disregarded for a long time, except for The Missionary, a mature work that brought him deserved recognition. It is set in the small town of Silves, in the state of Amazonas, in the heart of the Amazonian jungle. In fact, this immense forest that is part of the Western Imaginary had attracted the attention of the European public since the nineteenth century, so much so that Jules Verne (1828–1905) published The Raft

It is equally important to remember that Zola owes Balzac a “paternity of the naturalism,” in the expression by David Baguley, in the article “Balzac, Zola et la paternité du naturalism” in Vachon, 1966: 383–395.

2

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(La Jangada, 1883), an adventure narrative that develops along the great river in the north of South America. The original naturalism presents a strong urban component, however, in Brazil the intense geographic, historic and literary relationships between this aesthetic and the forest environment are undeniable. Once again, this is a particularity of Brazilian naturalism that sends it to the space in-­between, as has been seen. The plot of The Missionary offers a few interesting peculiarities, with thematic sources that range widely, belonging to hagiography, and to high and popular cultures. From the latter comes the topos of the priest in love; from the erudite literature, Souza builds upon the plots of two other novels: The Crime of Priest Amaro (Queirós, 2002) (O Crime do Padre Amaro, 1874) by the Portuguese Eça de Queirós (1845–1900), and La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret (Zola, 2001) (1875) by Emile Zola. Through time, this topic has been treated sometimes from a serious point of view, and other times from a satirical one, since its protagonist is a young priest who commits the sin of luxury. The topos of the priest in love constitutes one of the possible representations within sacerdotal behavior but it was exacerbated during the nineteenth century and was present in many novels of other literatures, probably due to the fierce anticlerical feelings of the time. In France, even Emile Zola twice became interested in such a character type, in La Conquête de Plassans (1874) and in La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875), without the account that in Le Rêve (1888), Monsignior Hautecoeur, a variant of the priest-­in-love characterization, commits himself to a religious order after the death of his beloved.3 In Portugal equally one finds the same exacerbated criticism of the conservative positions of the Church, partly coming from the ideology of a group of writers united under the rubric “Portuguese Generation of 1870,” a group which Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) was part of, and whose visceral anticlericalism transpires in The Crime of Priest Amaro (1874). Biographical data becomes part of it, since Eça lived for some time in the tiny provincial town of Leiria where the novel is situated, and it was there that he had the opportunity to observe a particular atmosphere, marked by clerical influence, of local intrigues, and of a monotonous quotidianness with no prospects. In the origin of the work one should not neglect to observe the reception of the realist-­naturalist style by the Francophilic Eça de Queirós and his close relations with Flaubert, Balzac and Zola. (Guermès, 2001: 7–52). In this introductory analysis of the book, the researcher not only cites several contemporary texts by Zola, but also signals those that he reviewed for the press, besides his commentaries on La Tentation de Saint Antoine, by Flaubert.

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In Brazil, by coincidence, a considerable political crisis known as “the religious question” was shaking the last decades of the empire, when the Church prohibited its clergymen to be Freemasons: an organization that was quite widespread then. In this crisis, the bishop of Pará, one of the states of the Amazon region, played a relevant role, and consequently its echoes reverberate in the epicenter of the novel, the small town of Silves, mainly through the protagonist. Following a current practice in the nineteenth-­century Brazilian context, The Missionary recovers, following the naturalist tendency, two themes proper to the Romantics: the conflict between man and his environment and the motif of Mother Nature. Thus, the narrator emphasizes the collision of the superior man against a meager, harsh environment; and the priest’s dismay before his parishioners’ indifference, his isolation, his consolation in benevolent nature near which he had lived a carefree childhood in freedom. Thus, suffocated by life in society, the protagonist, priest Antonio de Morais, pressed by the desire to escape, decides suddenly, without any planning, to head for the forest to evangelize the savages. Nevertheless, the desired nature is only accessible when it has already been bridled and polished by man, because in its native state it causes disasters, human and telluric, that the young priest did not expect. The farther he gets from the so-­called “civilized” places, the more a victim of these places he becomes. He suffers important material losses: the rowers and the canoe disappear, torrential rains immobilize him, mosquitoes attack without truce, and finally savages pursue him, in a series of events that cause him great fear of the forest. The priest’s defeat is handled in a very satirical tone: a frequent approach in popular literature. Moreover, it emphasizes his lack of professional preparation for exercising his functions at the same time that the author embeds a criticism of the behavior and attitudes of the clergy. The climax of the desecration of the practice of catechism happens when the priest encounters two individuals in the forest. In panic, and contrary to his combative behavior, he adopts an unexpected attitude: he kneels down, petrified, supposing that he would be immediately immolated or pierced through by arrows like a new Saint Sebastian, bringing back an image from his mystical divagations. Saved just in time by the converted Indian João Pimenta, the priest recovers, physically and morally, at the small farm of his new protector. Then, thanks to his encounter with the mixed-­breed Clarinha, he uncovers a sensuality that all his years in the seminary were not able to quench.

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It means that amiable nature, far from civilization, creates a new Eden, which becomes a new space for the Fall. Symbolically, the protagonist adheres to nature and to his new state when he changes his cassock for the clothes of an old resident of the place. The latter, also a priest, according to all indications, is Clarinha’s own father. In this mise-­en-abyme, it becomes evident and understandable that the daughter of a priest becomes the lover of another priest. Such a situation is clearly in dialogue with the novel The Crime of Priest Amaro, when the latter deals with the promiscuity of the relationships of mother and daughter with the clergy members. Thus, in successive generations, the social conventions are ruptured by nature, which hides the sacrilegious affairs of two generations of clergymen. Such a circumstance expresses the determinism of the environment upon the characters, to which is added the determinism of race, since the young priest, touched by eroticism, lets himself be led by the “strong blood” inherited from a father who is a womanizer. In this manner it becomes evident that The Missionary conforms to the naturalist canon by situating itself in Amazonian nature. According to the critic Marcelo Bulhões (Bulhões, 2003: 220), Inglês de Souza’s novel, in the context of Brazilian naturalism, organizes, in an exemplary manner, the dichotomy between the primitive and the civilized, suggesting the possibility of transition from one sphere to the other. This dichotomy is itself the essence of the conflict of the protagonist, since his fall is effected exactly by the substitution of the civilized setting by savage nature. The comparison of the Brazilian novel with the Portuguese creation and the French work clarifies the dialogue among the three novels, with its resemblances and differences. Let’s remember that the point in common among them rests on the character of the young priest in crisis, living in a small provincial locality, in the middle of manifestations of sexuality and determinism. The most visible similarities between the two novels in the Portuguese language, The Crime of Father Amaro and The Missionary, repose in their anticlericalism, in the youth of the clergymen, in the little provincial town with its intrigues and mediocrity, as well as an empty day-­to-day experience focused on immediate satisfactions. The differences are present in the handling of the main episode of each narrative. On the one hand, in the Portuguese book (the first to be published) the protagonist does not go through any spiritual crisis, any excessive mysticism; he needs only to resolve concrete problems. Once his desires are satisfied, it suffices to hide the woman’s pregnancy (she dies during labor) and to get rid of the child, who also dies soon afterwards, to bring relief to

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the concupiscent priest. As an outcome of this experience, when he is transferred to another parish, he cynically decides that, from then on, he will give confession only to married women. On the other hand, in the Brazilian novel there is no mention of a pregnancy and the narrative generates certain transpositions. The connection between Inglês de Souza and Emile Zola are pointed out by the critic and writer Josué Montello (Montello, in Coutinho, 1968, v.III: 75) (1917–2006), although Souza never mentioned the French author in his writings. Be that as it may, we can establish that the young protagonists of The Missionary and of La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret dedicate themselves to faithfully fulfill the tasks of their profession, suffer a crisis of mysticism and awaken to sensuality and to the discovery of women only around the age of twenty, in an isolated place in the middle of a virginal jungle, disconnected from a social life in time and space. This locus amoenus is, in some ways, a representation of paradise on Earth before the Fall of Man, constituting for both protagonists the symbolic space where they will meet the woman that will lead them to pleasure and happiness. Under these conditions Doctor Pascal takes Serge Mouret to Paradou, to cure him of a mystical crisis that was approaching delirium, while it was the converted Indigenous who shelters Antonio Morais in his shed, so that the latter could recover from the physical and mental exhaustion caused by the distressing adventures in the name of evangelization, in the forest. In this sanctuary, outside time, the protagonists live in an idyll that will be interrupted because: Serge remains chaste, as long as he refuses to give himself to Albine, an allegory of perfection; and as for Antonio, he gives up this isolation to return to his parish, bringing along Clarinha, the feminine figure that could stand for American nature, a recurrent image in Brazilian literature, as we have seen in these analyses. One sees that, going from the French to the Brazilian novel, Paradou was transported to the Amazon, which was promoted to one of the spaces in which naturalism is located in the Brazilian version.

Naturalism and the backlands: Domingos Olympio It is interesting to underscore one more case of transposition of location in the naturalist Brazilian narrative as it occurs in Luzia, Man (Luzia Homem), a work written in 1890 but published only in 1903 (Olympio, n.d.). Its author, the journalist and congressman from Ceará state, Domingos Olympio (1850–1906), has the singular merit of moving away from the urban context common in the

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first naturalist works, and favoring the rural universe of the Brazilian Northeast: a socially archaic and economically miserable space, with little presence of official institutions, in contrast with a rich popular tradition. Some of the practices explored in the novel, either religious or medicinal, even though not very orthodox, were introduced in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of European colonization. They were still alive at the time of Olympio’s creation and they survive until today in isolated places, usually rural areas. In transposing naturalism from urban areas to the wilderness, Domingos Olympio is one of the first authors to adopt as a setting the sphere of Northeastern regionalism, which will reappear with great importance in the so-­called social narratives of the 1930s. Besides this, the writer faithfully adopts the technique of free indirect speech, parallel with the use of a rich vocabulary and to the manipulation of collective scenes in a firmly structured novel in which the description of the environment in a catastrophic situation precedes the presentation of the characters. The writer introduces a recurrent phenomenon, peculiar to the immense semi-­arid territory of the interior of the Northeast region, called “sertão” (the backlands): it is the presence of the drought migrant, that is, the miserable farm hands who migrate, trying to escape from the periodical droughts that raze the region. Such an exodus causes numerous disturbances to the families as well as to social structures, generating anomie or social breakdown (Duvignaud, 1973), through which all the wretched are leveled, since riches are worth nothing when the drought exterminates all living creatures: human, vegetable or animal. It is in this context that the narrative unravels. Luzia is one of these migrants who runs away from the burnt soil, accompanied by her sick mother, during the drought of 1878: heading to the locale of the novel, the town of Sobral, in Ceará state. She is hired to work there, comes in contact with characters of all types and takes part in a series of situations, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes violent, that allow her to demonstrate generosity and solidarity towards the victims. Moreover, she conducts a chaste affair and suffers the persecution of the villain. The latter ends up killing her at the end of a fierce fight in which, at the moment that she is recomposing her clothing to preserve her “honor” she is caught in an unguarded moment and murdered. In this context, the importance of the determinism of the environment manifests itself, geographical as well as socially, acting upon the protagonist. It is Luzia Man, exceptional maiden, modest and generous, healthy and

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notable for her vigorous physical body, that in a certain way symbolizes a telluric element: the strength of the Earth, impassive on the surface but capable of concealing subterranean germination. This is an observation of the critic Lucia Miguel-Pereira (Miguel-Pereira, 1973) (1903–1959), one of the first to study the novel. One observes here a case of androgyny and of social exclusion accompanied by typical aspects of situations of violence, as they occur in relation to the scapegoat. This is because, being innocent and without being openly incriminated, the young maiden is discriminated against and rejected by the community in which she finds herself: a group that does not accept her difference and which drives the protagonist to a self-­isolation that is parallel to hetero-­isolation. What happens is that Luzia’s profile conjoins two opposite aspects, masculine and feminine; hence her exceptional character, discriminated against by her social surroundings. What is recovered here is the topos of the individual inaptness to his or her ambiance, an aspect that can be considered as a certain resilience from Romanticism, mixed in with naturalism, as it has already been noticed. The nickname “Man” attributed to Luzia, comes from a social anomaly. She was brought up carefree on a rural property, always robed in men’s clothes, a more fitting attire to help her cowboy father in his tasks; consequently she developed extraordinary physical capacities added to a lot of strength. Moreover, along with the typically female skills of household tasks, she also learned to mount horses like a man, causing scandal among other women, because of behavior that was so incompatible with rigid local customs. The physical appearance of this metiza from the wilderness reinforces the ambiguity that surrounds her by consolidating exuberant health and steely muscles with beautiful and graceful forms accompanied by delicate manners. However, what distinguishes her most from the other women is not only her physical nimbleness and aptitude for work; it is, mainly, a thick pilosity, a black furriness covering parts of the feminine body where there is usually none: the arms, the legs and, above all, the upper lip that was so furry that it resembled a true mustache. Besides, she was equally graced with an abundant head of curly hair that came to her knees; an asset to her pride. The association of pilosity and strength, well known since Samson’s Biblical story, provokes suspicions about her sexuality. At the same time, that long hair links her with the image of a legendary water creature, a type of naiad or siren from Brazilian Indigenous mythology. The accumulation of legendary features

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reinforces the magical or supernatural aspect of one who had been born under a bad astral sign. The vigorous Luzia, her father’s pride and right arm, inherited his example, which makes her “a daughter worthy of her father” or “a virgin warrior,” as the essayist Flora Sussekind proposes (Sussekind, 1984). Without a doubt, we are confronted with images linked to myth and to the collective imaginary, because the cycle of the “lady warrior” or “a woman’s cross-­dressing” is recorded around the world, and was equally reclaimed, in Brazil, by João Guimarães Rosa (1908– 1967) in the saga of the protagonist Riobaldo, in The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande sertão: veredas,1956). The narrative by Domingos Olympio allows us yet another interpretation. For professor Vilma Arêas, Luzia’s double gendering does not constitute sophistication on the part of the author in an attempt to create a new type of woman indifferent to social conventions, in the composition of the feminine. The scholar suggests that the character Luzia would have been the result of a “technical ineptitude due to tone-­deafness” (Arêas, 1990: 92), because perhaps the writer has not been able to render and adequately resolve the question of concealed gender. Or better yet, the author was not able to depict the problem of homosexuality more deeply, perhaps fearing the possible prejudiced clamor that the theme could attract. Dealing with a work under the aegis of naturalism, one can assign to the novel yet another reading. In this case, it would be a timid equivalence belonging to the lineage of novels about aberrations, pathological cases and problems of sexual identity or ambiguity so frequent in the Belle Epoque aesthetic. It will suffice to evoke a few titles of the epoch, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), or Monsieur Venus (1884) and Madame Adonis (1888), both by Rachilde (a pseudonym for Marguerite Eymery Valette, 1860– 1953). In a peripheral literature, however, the phenomenon appears in an attenuated form. It seems to us (Vassallo, in Gural-Migdal & Snipes-Hoyt, 2006: 267–281), though, that beyond thematizing sexual anomalies, Luzia Man makes evident greater preoccupations: prejudice against the education of women according to a patriarchal ideology that forces on them an inadequate fragility and dependence in an adverse environment; an extremely rigid sexual code that favors men, giving them all types of freedom in detriment to women who are circumscribed to the universe of the home and to procreation exclusively inside marriage, and under penalty of rigid recriminations and social exclusion.

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Although Luzia Man is not properly a masterpiece, it has the merit of exploring a critical situation in a geographical context up to then little explored by literature. It also deals with a gender problematic avant la lettre, and because of that, perhaps, it is approached timidly.

Naturalism at the present time: The revival and the cinema The favorable reception that naturalist works received from the Brazilian audience at the time of their publications shows that they corresponded to the organic conditions of society at the end of the nineteenth century. This aesthetic persisted with vitality until the first decades of the twentieth century, having been eclipsed later by the iconoclastic fire of the modernist movement of 1922. However, it never completely disappeared, for it is recovered cyclically. Thus one can observe the occurrence of naturalism in distinct periods relatively distant from one another. That is: firstly, at the time of its appearance at the end of the nineteenth century, with “psychological studies” and “clinical cases”; later, its recovery as “Neonaturalism” in the 1930s, under the heading of the “social novel,” particularly from the northeast, in which it adopts the form of the memorialist cycle; finally, in the 1970s, in the vein of the “newspaper report” novels which came into sight, features of which approach the coarseness and focus similar to newspaper production. In all these cases, we have the privilege of observation, of objectivity, of the close relations between fiction and science, sometimes approaching the text to the study of a fait divers. Fortunately, now at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, the old trend of the rejection of naturalism has changed, thanks to university researches that have revealed a good reception for the work of the main French authors (The Experimental Novel (Zola, 2006), 1880, by Emile Zola, among others) by Brazilians, as well as of Portuguese authors, especially Cousin Basilio (O Primo Basilio, 1878) and The Maias (1888), by Eça de Queiros: works that provoked heated debates. In fact, these two works by the Portuguese writer have lately received many successful adaptations in the cinema and on television. A case in particular is the transposition of The Maias (Os Maias, 1888) to the big screen by João Botelho and its transformation into a successful TV series by Luiz Fernando Carvalho, in 2001. The recovery of this aesthetic style has been happening not only in relation to literature, but also in the theater, television and cinema.

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Reinterpretations made for the theater caused the critic João Roberto Faria (Faria, 2001) to rediscover the stage of the 1800s. The research in the papers of the epoch has resulted in very rich discoveries, as one can read in the study by professor Pedro Paulo Catharina (Catharina, 2015), which includes references to even the first films (still silent ones) equally directed at the naturalist problematic. The reclaiming also permitted the recovery of works that had great success with the public at the time but were later forgotten. This is the case with a naturalist novel, The Abortion (Pimentel, 2015) (O Aborto, 1893), which received a new facsimile edition in 2015. It was written by Figueiredo Pimentel (1869–1914), known as “the Zola from Praia Grande,” the name of the neighborhood where he lived in the city of Niterói in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In fact, more than a century after the publication of the book, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy continues to be a debate that continues not only in Brazil but in other countries. From the institutional point of view, the re-­valorization of naturalism in Western literature has been achieved, in good part, through research, publications and coloquia by AIZEN—Association Internationale Zola et le Naturalisme3— with a center at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, responsible for the edition of the journal Excavatio. Another publication worthy of mention is Les Cahiers naturalistes, edited in Paris by Alain Pagès. In recent decades, a new and urgent awareness has directed Brazilian cinema towards films with social themes and strong tendencies toward naturalist precepts (social exploitation; intense and extreme sexuality; diverse sexual and social pathologies; a bas-­fond environment). Independently of the naturalist treatment, a few of the neonaturalist novels of the 1930s were also turned into films. But, among the various possible examples with naturalist connotations stricto sensu, we undescore: the shocking Pixote, The Law of the Weakest (Pixote, a lei do mais fraco, 1981) by Hector Babenco, about juvenile delinquency; the visceral Central Station (Central do Brasil, 1998) by Walter Salles, selected to compete for the Oscar, the story of a bitter woman who writes letters dictated by illiterate migrants to their families from whom she charges postage without ever mailing them; City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002) by Fernando Meireles, which exposes all the violence of the marginalized; Madame Satan (Madame Satã, 2002) by Karim Ainouz, which focuses on the biography of a brave homosexual

AIZEN: http://www.ualberta.ca/~aizen.

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rogue in the 1930s who was literally active in a decadent, bohemian neighborhood with marginalized people of all sorts. It would be convenient to update these reflections about naturalism and expand them to the full range of the continent, because despite local variants, the continent faces the same disturbances. Hence, the Latin American cinema of the last decades should be included in this discussion, because, in a way, it is the seventh art form that in many cases assimilates from literature the function of the interpreter of society. This can be confirmed as much in Brazil as in Argentina and in Mexico: locations in which the film industry is more developed. This last country, in fact, is the one that draws our attention because of the movie The Crime of Priest Amaro, winner of the Oscar in the category of best foreign movie (2002). This second adaptation into film of Eça de Queiros’s novel in America had the merit of being produced by Carlos Carrera, one of the leaders of the new Mexican cinema industry. The Mexican version of the Portuguese novel remained very close to the original and it concentrates mainly on two aspects: on the one hand, the romantic episodes, that is, the two couples, formed respectively by the love affairs of mother and daughter with the two priests; and on the other, the political facet, made up of the diatribes of the local clergy, that are translated as the different answers of the Church in the face of present-­day questions and problems, which contrast with its dogmas. The young cleric is as selfish and inconsequential as his Portuguese homonymic but the producer makes a pertinent adaptation of the intrigue to the actuality of the present day because he not only emphasizes the socio-­political question in Mexico—an aspect outside the source text—he makes a very pertinent adaptation, since the female protagonist does not die in labor, but rather in consequence of a clandestine abortion. The great discovery of Carlos Carrera, in our view, consists in the transposition of the surroundings, which move from the monotonous Leiria to a very complex Mexican province—Chiapas—where the Indigenous farmers, in conditions of economic precariousness, recently engaged in armed rebellion. In that region, the state is absent because of the cowardice of its representatives; the drug dealers make the law; and the clergy connive with the power and money owners. The discontentment of the populace grows and the Church dissolves into several distinct positions. Hypocrisy infests the clerical environment, which bends to the demands of the powerful drug dealers while it excommunicates the free-­ thinking priest that adopts the party of the farmers and the guerrilla. Thus, the

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script is updated to our times, in a peripheral environment that, nonetheless, stands for any other Latin America country. The analysis of these conditions justifies the focus on the function of priests, especially if we take into consideration the role of Liberation Theology in this Catholic continent, in which many clergymen held arms, openly adopted leftist positions, and engaged in the so-­called popular governments; being punished later by the obliging silence imposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Moreover, at a time of struggle with AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, of pedophilia in the clergy, of overpopulation and hunger, it seems pertinent to denounce the retrograde positions of the Church concerning chastity, clerical celibacy, contraception, and the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. All the exigencies cited above support the view that the original scheme of the naturalist opus continues to be a valid reading up to today, at least in Latin America, as the pertinence and maintenance of the adaptations of the European canon confirm, and as has occurred since the first moments of the reception of this European aesthetic. If in the nineteenth century one denounced the conservatism of the clergy through the aesthetic of mimesis in the name of progress and science, in the twenty-­first century the denunciation persists; this time, however, in the name of the social and political. It seems that the naturalist aesthetic, centered on referentiality and verisimilitude, has not yet said its last word in Latin America. Strictly speaking, it is actually indispensable, because the social conditions in this immense territory in many instances resemble Europe at the time of the birth of naturalism, thus requiring the altruistic voice of intellectuals and artists to combat the inequalities and militate in favor of human rights in the manner of a new Zola, multiplied and unfolded. It seems pertinent then to suppose that, as long as we have not surpassed a certain social stage in Latin America, this aesthetic will remain valid in all the artistic modalities that it might sprout.

Works cited Arêas, Vilma. “Figurações do Feminino em Luzia Homem”. Revista Tempo Brasileiro, 101 (April–June, 1990): 92. Azevedo, Aluisio. O Cortiço. São Paulo: Editora Moderna, 1983. Bulhões, Marcelo. Leituras do desejo. O erotismo no romance naturalista brasileiro. São Paulo: EDUSP, 2003.

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Candido, Antonio. “De cortiço a cortiço”. O discurso e a cidade. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1993, 132–152. Catharina, Pedro Paulo. “Da literatura ao cinema: a estética naturalista francesa na cultura brasileira oitocentista.” Gragoatá, Niterói, n. 39: 409–429, 2015. Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume III. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Duvignaud, Jean. L’Anomie. Hérésies et subversion. Paris: Anthropos, 1973. Faria, João Roberto. Ideias teatrais; o século XIX no Brasil. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2001. Guermes, Sophie. “Zola et la question religieuse,” in Zola, Emile. La faute de l’Abbé Mouret. Paris: Fasquelle, 2001. Jameson, Frederick. “Sobre a substituição de importações literárias e culturais no Terceiro Mundo: o caso da obra testemunhal”. Espaço e imagem. Teorias de pós-­ moderno e outros ensaios. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1995. Mérian, Jean-Yves. Aluisio Azevedo. Vida e obra [Life and Works] (1857–1913). Rio de Janeiro: Espaço e Tempo, 1988. ——. Aluisio Azevedo. Vida e obra (1857–1913). 2nd edn. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2013. Miguel-Pereira, Lucia. História da literatura brasileira. Prosa de ficção: 1870 a 1920. 3rd edn. Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympio, 1973. Montello, Josué. “Manuel Antônio de Almeida”. In Coutinho, Afrânio (ed.) (1955). A literatura no Brasil: Volume III. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1968. Olympio, Domingos. Luzia Homem. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, n.d. Pimentel, Figueiredo. O Aborto. Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2015. Queirós, Eça de. O crime do Padre Amaro. Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 2002. Rivas, Pierre. “Paris como a capital literária da América Latina”. Chiappini, Ligia and Aguiar, Flavio (eds). Literatura e História na América Latina. São Paulo: Edusp, 1993, 99–114. Rouanet, Maria Helena. Eternamente em berço esplêndido: a fundação de uma literatura nacional. Rio de Janeiro: Siciliano, 1991. Santiago, Silviano. “O entre-­lugar do discurso latino-­americano”. Uma literatura nos trópicos. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1978. Souza, H. Inglês de. O missionário. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998. Sussekind, Flora. Tal Brasil, qual romance? Uma ideologia estética e sua história: o Naturalismo brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Achiame, 1984. Vachon, Stéphane. Une poétique du roman. Montréal. Montreal: Ed XYZ/Paris, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1966, 383–395. Vassallo, Ligia. “Le Naturalisme et la jungle au Brésil”. In: Gural-Migdal, Anna and Snipes-Hoyt, Carolyn. Zola et le texte naturaliste en Europe et aux Amériques. New York: The Edwin Melen Press, 2006, 267–281. Zola, Emile. La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret. Paris: Fasquelle, 2001. ——. Le Roman experimental. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 2006.

7

Brazilian Modernism and the Modern Art Week: The Influence of the European Twentieth-Century Vanguards Lucia Helena

The beginning of the twentieth century was characterized, both in Europe and in Brazil, by the attempt to renew artistic and cultural values in a world marked by a violent crisis that unleashed not only two great World Wars but also profound changes in the political and economic life of societies. A long passage of time separates us from the European vanguards of the early twentieth century. If in their time they were revolutionary, their works are nowadays in the galleries of museums of the whole world, although one of the famous slogans of the futurists was: “Down with the museums!” The period between the events that generated the explosion of the First (1914–1918) and the Second (1939–1945) World Wars saw the rise of the artistic movements called collectively the avant-­garde. In a relatively short interval, a number of “-isms” succeeded each other, each one of them being responsible for expressing, in its themes and procedures, the “atmosphere” of intense ebullition with which they interacted. The vanguards, now “historical,” were highly radical movements that shook the direction of literature, other arts, and the relationship between the arts and society. Futurism (1909), expressionism (1910), cubism (1913), Dadaism (1916) and surrealism (1924) were the main results of this attitude of artistic and cultural contestation in the face of a turbulent world. Despite their great differences, all these movements had in common the questioning of the received cultural inheritance. It is true that some of them did more to emphasize the warlike and destructive character of the task that they wished to carry out in the face of the old order which was beginning to crumble, while others also emphasized the necessarily constructive aspect of their undertaking. But they all agreed that the academic and conservative models of

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an aging, crystallized art were flawed. In this sense, the “-isms” of the early twentieth century would intensify, to the extreme limits, a process that was already under way since the nineteenth century, coming from the subterranean and revolutionary currents of Romanticism or the experiments of symbolism or of the amalgamation of styles that characterized the Belle Époque. The movements enjoyed a rapid radiance beyond their original borders. Thus, Brazil in the 1920s saw an atmosphere of effervescence and discussion of those procedures, allied to the debate of internal artistic and cultural problems. This phase, which gives rise to Brazilian modernism, is called heroic, because of its warrior and explorer character, and it occurs around 1920–1930, during which time the well-­known Modern Art Week of 1922 takes place. With the avant-­gardes, historical themes come to the forefront of what Mário de Andrade, one of the exponents of Brazilian modernism in its São Paulo version, called, in a happy expression, “a permanent right to aesthetic research.” That is, to promote the valorization of language as the theme and object of art itself, the creator’s dissatisfaction with the already established procedures, and the search to penetrate the domains of the unconscious. Seen from the twenty-­first century, the 1922 Week has lost its contemporaneity, as early modernism is now considered an Old Master, and futurism has become an object of nostalgia whose works occupy the same libraries and museums that they intended to destroy. Nevertheless, something valuable and perennial was transmitted to us by those avant-­garde movements: their cultural attitude of permanent criticism solidified and impregnated later literary and artistic manifestations. The texts through which the European vanguards and the early stage of Brazilian modernism proclaimed their programs and basic intentions are often referred to as “manifestos.” With this term, a new way of disseminating artistic projects is indicated, although this same function was also performed in that period by other types of texts, such as editorials of literary magazines and newspapers, prefaces and poems of a “Word of order.” The renewal that came to Brazil through the impact of the avant-­gardes represents the “green years” of a new type of production. Controversial and invigorating, their happenings were far more than the simple jokes they might seem to be. Furthermore, out of its core were produced works that are still fundamental today and that were dedicated to rethinking both Brazilian cultural dependency and the complex relations between art and society in a country colonized by Europe.

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The “Modern Art Week” of 1922 In the Brazil of the second decade of the twentieth century, there is also a movement for the renewal of the arts. As the influences of the European vanguard entered Brazil, they took on a different aspect, adapted to the cultural, economic and political conditions that were peculiar to local conditions. If in Europe the vanguards coexisted with a rationalized society at a stage of more advanced industrialization, with a well-­established high bourgeoisie since the middle of the nineteenth century and amidst the convulsions of war, the echoes that penetrate Brazil interact with a country of colonialist tradition, of large landholdings, of incipient industrialization, uneven development, and high cultural hybridity. There will therefore be several correlations and effects. Antonio Cândido considers that many of the transgressions of the European vanguard were more coherent with Brazilian cultural tradition than with their own: The customs we had of African fetishisms, calungas, ex-­votos, folk poetry, predisposed us to accept and assimilate artistic processes that in Europe represented a profound break with the social environment and spiritual traditions. Our modernists [. . .] shaped a type that was both local and universal in expression, rediscovering the European influence by diving into Brazilian detail. Candido, 1965: 145

But Brazilian renovators were also within a society highly resistant to change. And within the modernist group itself there were several factions interpreting the meaning of modernism, which is easily verified in the examination of the various aspects announced in the manifestos and magazines through which they spread their project. Moreover, the tradition of the cultural islands (that is, a divided Brazil between urbanized parts that communicate easily and others, remote, that constitute a Brazil difficult to update, coming from the predatory colonization) remains in the middle of modernism and will cause the intensification of the differences, perspectives and the unequal penetration of the avant-­garde renewal message. Given this panorama, it is natural that the transformation of the vanguard into the first phase of Brazilian modernism initially reached areas in which the relations between the old landed society and the bourgeoisie were pronounced more strongly. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro will form the initial nucleus of this exchange, since they present propitiating characteristics. Next, Minas Gerais and some coastal strips of the Northeast. In

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this way, modernism will only affect Brazil more broadly in the 1930s, after the so-­called heroic phase, with the valorization of a social narrative that is responsible for denouncing the problematic conditions of life of Brazilian society and its stigmas of poverty and underdevelopment, without attachment to a more intense formal renovation, such as the one that modernism from the 1920s to 1930s took. If in the heroic phase the behavior of implantation, aggressiveness, and experimentation in new artistic forms is distinguished, the later phase was characterized, as we have said, by an emphasis on social-­based content, and the nationalism of the clash between regionalism and universalism. By the time the Modern Art Week of 1922 opened, an itinerary had already been covered by the young modernists. From this preview, the most striking aspects are the clash between official academic standards and the attempt to place Brazilian art in tandem with the world artistic clock. One of the episodes that registers the divergence in the reception of the first signs of modern art between us is the controversy provoked by the exhibition of the painter Anita Malfatti, in São Paulo, in 1917. Monteiro Lobato publishes an article (about the exhibition in Estado de São Paulo, Dec. 20, 1917) in which he strongly rejects Anita’s modernist pretension. A newcomer from Germany, and also having studied in the United States, Malfatti presented in her works features of expressionism and cubism, which modified the old “portrait art” and the description of nature. Outraged by the daring of Anita’s paintings, Lobato states: “Modern art, this is the shield, the supreme justification. In poetry there are also sometimes boils of this order, coming from the creamy blindness of certain elegant poets, though fat, and the justification is always the same: modern art.” Ahead of the innovations, Lobato’s text also impelled Oswald de Andrade (the “fat” poet), who nevertheless responds to the provocation, in an article in Jornal do Comércio (São Paulo, January 11, 1918). Political issues explode during this period: the general strike in São Paulo, the formation of nuclei of anarchist action, the impact of the Russian Revolution and the problems of Brazilian domestic politics. A nationalist cultural effervescence fights Brazilian cultural and economic dependence and rekindles the flame of nationalism, as can be seen in Menotti del Picchia’s poem Juca Mulato (1917). By 1920, the consumption of the word “futurism” was already great, in the press and in the salons of São Paulo. Futurists are what they came to call the young artists, like Victor Brecheret, a sculptor. The article by Oswald de Andrade (“My Futurist Poet,” Jornal do Comércio, São Paulo, May 27, 1921) launches the moniker at Mário de Andrade, who replies, saying he is futurist, but not Marinetti. In a letter to Prudente de

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Morais’ grandson, on May 31, 1926, Mário returns to the subject, reaffirming his disagreement with Marinetti, on the occasion of his visit to Brazil: I’ve only been with the guy twice and he made the dumbest of impressions on me. Boring and chatíssimo, talking all the time and, what is much, much worse: giving the impression of someone who speaks by rote; he could, because since 1909 he has been repeating the same things! . . . I did not like it, I spoke my mind and he did not cool off. He’s still hounding me and now he wants me to translate L’ Alcova d’ Acciaio into the Portuguese. The hell I will! [Só estive com o tipo duas vezes e me fez a mais idiota das impressões. Chato e chatíssimo, falando o tempo todo e o que é muito, mas muito pior, dando a impressão de sujeito que fala de cor, pudera, desde 1909 vive repetindo a mesma coisa! . . . Não gostei não, falei-­lhe as minhas verdades e ele não esfriou: continua me caceteando e agora quer que eu traduza pro portuga L’ Alcova d’ Acciaio, tó! Uma banana é que eu traduzo.] Koifman

As we can see even in the São Paulo group, which played a significant role in the eruption of the Modern Art Week of 1922, there was a consensus about the meaning of the European vanguards and their adaptation in Brazil. In 1921, the Brazilian modernist group is formed and, although trends have already been announced which will be consolidated in controversial disagreements, they initially unite around a common goal: the general renovation of the arts. Oswald de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia exert in the press the defense and dissemination of the new art. Mário de Andrade worries about producing a poetry that surpasses the immature work, still influenced by the past, and produces the delirious Pauliceia desvairada (1921), in an attempt to demonstrate that the group, despite its diffuse program, also has works, although in process. For Mário da Silva Brito in his excellent History of Brazilian Modernism: Antecedents of the Week of Modern Art, História do modernismo brasileiro: antecedentes da Semana de Arte Moderna the text known as the Trianon Manifesto, Oswald’s Menotti homage functions as a test balloon for the Week, becoming the fuse that opens the way for the accomplishment of the Week of 1922. (Cf. Brito, 1971) Due to the influence of Graça Aranha, the State of São Paulo publishes, on January 22, 1922, a friendly note announcing for February of that year a Week of Modern Art. The Week’s intention was to shock, in a confrontation, the taste of the São Paulo bourgeoisie, although the modernists like Mário and Oswald frequented the aristocratic halls of Olivia Penteado and Paulo Prado. René Thiollier, writer and coffee planter, played the role of entrepreneur for the week, which was open from

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February 11 to February 18, at the Municipal Theater of São Paulo that hosted art exhibitions every day. On February 13, 15 and 17, 1922, the events of the Modern Art Week were held, the first manifestation of the general impact of Brazilian modernism. On February 13, a Tuesday, the opening presentation (“Aesthetic Emotion in Modern Art”) is given by Graça Aranha, a name that causes some amazement as a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Later testimonies of the modernists themselves reveal that the presence of Graça Aranha was due to their need for safe conduct. The well known and respected scholar with modernizing aspirations suited them as a guarantor against a prejudiced society. On the same day, there was also a lecture by Ronald de Carvalho: “Painting and modern sculpture in Brazil.” On the second night, the opening lecture was by Menotti del Picchia, and between the public and booing, Oswald de Andrade read fragments of pau-­brasil poetry and criticized the rhetoric of Castro Alves, in addition to presenting some excerpts from his novel The Condemned. Guilherme de Almeida obtained some success with his lyrical poems that suited the public’s taste. Mário de Andrade recites some passages from his Pauliceia and Ronald de Carvalho reads “The Frogs,” by Manuel Bandeira in absentia. Menotti del Picchia announces the Hector Villa-Lobos concert, which provoked a scandal for incorporating into the traditional instruments of the orchestra others that were totally unexpected: congada material, drums, and a vibratory sheet of zinc. Catcalls from the audience stopped the orchestra. On this day full of events, there was still an exhibition of modern paintings, drawings, engravings and sculptures, bringing together works by Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Goeldi, Zina Aita, Martins Ribeiro, Yan de Almeida Prado, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Victor Brecheret and others. Plínio Salgado reads excerpts from his novel The Alien, reads poems and, in the staircases of the theater, Mário de Andrade presents fragments of his still-­ unpublished work, The Slave who is Not Isaura. On the third and final night, Villa-Lobos reappears, with a program less daring and more accepted by the audience. The week found echoes in the press and paved the way for the diffusion of the three fundamental principles of Brazilian modernism, according to Mário de Andrade: the permanent right to aesthetic research; the updating of Brazilian artistic intelligence; and the stabilization of a national creative consciousness.

Limits and reach of futurism Futurism was the first movement of the European vanguard. Very broad, it was not restricted to art alone. In fact, it covered various fields of human experience,

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having participated in literature, the plastic arts, music, customs and politics. The movement reached its apogee between 1909 and 1920. As its name indicates, it starts from a desire to start all over again and to reformulate themes and techniques of art. It is said that its history is divided into three phases: 1) from 1905 to 1909, in which it defends the principle of free verse (the one that does not have fixed meter or rhyme); 2) from 1909 to 1919, in which “wireless imagination” (a delusion of images associated with each other) and “words in freedom” (the words no longer rigidly subordinated to the rules of grammar and syntax as in traditional poetry); and finally 3) from 1919 onwards, when it was linked to fascism (the Italian authoritarian movement of the early twentieth century led by Mussolini and later associated with Hitler’s German Nazism). The leader of the futurists was the French-Italian poet Felippo Tommaso Marinetti, better known as Marinetti. On 2 February 1909 he published in Paris, in the newspaper Le Figaro, the first manifesto of this vanguard. And in 1912, he published in Milan the “Technical Manifesto.” Below we will see some important fragments of these two texts. The 1909 Futurist Manifesto strikingly proposes its bellicose and radical principles: 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt. 3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. Marinetti. Paris, Le Figaro, 20/2/1909. (Cited in Teles, 1993: 85–86)

The muse of the futurists is the modern city, with its sounds, noise, progress, machines. They propose that there is no more boundary between the beautiful and the grotesque and, as you can see, literary art and other arts are presented as a form of shock, struggle and violent rupture. This demonstrates the warlike aggressive character, the praise of war made by the movement and the future adherence of Mussolini to Fascism. Despite its title, futurism cannot overcome the bonds of patriarchy and contempt for women, which it openly preaches in the manifesto. Some fragments of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) are highlighted below: 1. We must destroy syntax by placing nouns at random as they are born. [. . .] 5. Every noun should have its double—that is, a noun should be followed, without any conjunctive phrase, by the noun to which it is tied by analogy.

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Example: man-­torpedo boat, woman-­harbor, square-­funnel, door-­faucet.1 [. . .] Together we will invent what I call wireless imagination. Marinetti, Milan, 11.5.1912 (Cited in Teles: 95–99)

The whole manifesto will revolve around this struggle against traditional syntax. Written in fragments (although preceded by a little plot, in which a plane propeller speaks to the poet Marinetti), the manifesto adopts an imperative tone, indicating, in the form of prescriptions (that is, determining what is owed and what is not to be done), the new syntax to be adopted by the futurist writer. In tune with the theme of war, futurism seeks to break away from nineteenth-­ century art and from museums, antique dealers and libraries: all seen by futurists as places of storage of outdated knowledge. Through this impulse of rupture with the past, the futurist movement values: 1) the attitude of irreverence against the way in which art had hitherto been focused, as an object made to be worshipped respectfully and distantly (“We want to sing Danger, habit to energy and eternity,” Futurist Manifesto 1909); 2) the systematic destruction of already crystallized codes and values, in favor of an aggressive art (“The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt” and “There is no beauty but in the struggle, no masterpiece without an aggressive character,” Futurist Manifesto 1909); 3) the cutting of the links with the past, which is indicated even in the naming of the movement—futurism (“We do not want the museums, the libraries,” Futurist Manifesto 1909); 4) the words in freedom, a principle through which they turn against the usual patterns of grammatical syntax (“Syntax must be destroyed, nouns arranged at random, as they are born,” Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature 1912). As for themes, futurism praises the urban world, modern life, and technology. Its “muse” (that is, the source where it seeks its basic themes and techniques) is the dynamic and fast city with its machines, noises and crowds, capable of suggesting the image of progress in the modern world. Their principles are known and they stand out: 1) the valorization of a new concept of beautiful, in which beauty and ugliness can be reunited, or what is considered grotesque and excluded from the poetry of the past. In this regard, the futurists said that one should carefully create the ugly in literature; 2) the desacralization of art, using irreverent elements, contrary to classic beauty. This is a result of the use of the Using the futuristic feature of the use of double nouns, Mário de Andrade in “Ode ao bourgeois” (in Paulicéia frenzied) created: the “bourgeois-­nickel”, the “bourgeois-­nádegas”, the “bourgeois­bourgeois.”

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ugly, the horrible and the grotesque in literature, which thus loses its value as a production made exclusively to shelter beauty, and to include the elements of daily life, common living, and the presence of various social classes. This was one of the most important characteristics of futurism in order to free the discourse of literature from its links with the world view of the richer social classes; 3) radicalization of extremist positions, such as the vision of “war as the only hygiene in the world.” This is a dangerous feature of futurism. On the one hand, it reflects the warlike and courageous character of the movement, which attempted to overturn the prohibitions so that art could be renewed and could open new paths; on the other, it reflects an authoritarian, bellicose vision that came to connect futurism with the Italian fascist movement. As for the literary technique, futurism is basically characterized: 1) by the struggle for free verse (without rhyme and without meter), against the use of traditional forms; 2) by the conception of “words in freedom,” that is the destruction of the use of the usual syntax, in which the subject follows the predicate, replaced by all sorts of associations whose logic is not clear, and obtained, for example, through the use of the repeating noun. In the poem “Ode ao bourgeois,” by Mário de Andrade (poet of São Paulo and intellectual modernist who contributed to the accomplishment of the Modern Art Week of 1922), one can observe this particularity. I insult the bourgeois! The bourgeois-­nickel, The bourgeois–bourgeois! The well-­turned digestion of São Paulo! The man-­curve! The man-­buttocks! The man who, being French, Brazilian, Italian, Is perpetually a cautious little-­by-little. [Eu insulto o burguês! O burguês-­níquel, O burguês-­burguês! A digestão bem feita de São Paulo! O homem–curva! o homem-­nádegas! O homem que sendo francês, brasileiro, italiano, É sempre um cauteloso pouco-­a-pouco!] Andrade: 1987: 88

In the poem, Mário de Andrade refers to the “bourgeois-­nickel,” the “man-­ buttocks.” Wanting to suggest that the bourgeoisie is always interested in money and leads a still, boring life, Mário de Andrade created expressions using two

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nouns (bourgeois + nickel and man + buttocks), in which nickel and buttocks, in the resulting compound, are equivalent to one synthetic definition of what would take verses to be described or suggested; 3) by the disordered sequence of elements—also called “chaotic enumeration.” We see this in a poem by Mário de Andrade, which reads: “Towers, clods, torrinhas and nonsense” (Andrade: 1987: 179) in which the selected elements bind to each other, in a succession of nouns placed in the augmentative, in the diminutive and followed by a substantive (“tolices”) whose only connection with the chosen noun (“towers”) is to start with “t,” not having much logic in connecting the meaning of the word “towers” to the word “tolices”; 4) by the use of attractive, suggestive images that are associated suggesting the approximation of ideas, values, images and sounds, as can be seen, in Mário de Andrade, at the beginning of the poem “Nocturno de Belo Horizonte,” where Poet suggests to the reader the arrival of the train to the capital of Minas Gerais: “Marvel of thousands of glittering glasses/Calm of the nocturnal of Belo Horizonte [Maravilha de milhares de brilhos vidrilhos/Calma do noturno de Belo Horizonte . . .]” (Andrade: 1987: 179). Of course, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade were not futurist poets but since they were sensitive artists, they captured in their works the trends of the times in which they lived and dialogued with the European vanguards, among them futurism, whose “words in freedom” fueled and acclimated their spirit of rebellion against the academic past that was still in force in the early twentieth century in Brazil. Their works are much later—1920s—at the beginning of futurism, but they present beautiful examples of some of the innovations proposed by this European vanguard and acclimated, by the Brazilian poets, to their vision of art and of Brazil. In addition to its repercussions in Brazil, futurism will find literary expression in Portugal in the modern generation of Mário de Sá Carneiro, Almada Negreiros and Fernando Pessoa, who in 1915 meet around the magazine Orpheu. The connection of the Portuguese modernist group with futurism is made by Santa Rita Pintor, Mário de Sá Carneiro and Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, who lived in Paris, where Santa Rita meets Marinetti and joins the movement. Returning to Portugal in 1914, Santa Rita Pintor announces the movement, of which he will be an adept until the end of his life. Amadeo de Souza Cardoso also adheres to futurism, but in a less radical way, always saying that he does not follow any school, while Sá Carneiro adopts a reluctant position vis-à-­vis the vanguard movements, not showing any commitment to divulge futuristic texts in Portugal. In Intimate Pages, Pessoa says that the influences received from the modern

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movement that includes cubism and futurism are more due to suggestions than to the substance of his works (Cf. Pessoa: 136–37). Almada Negreiros is the one that can be viewed as closer to futurism, being the greatest part of the performance at the Futurist Conference in Portugal, on 14.5.1917. In December of this same year, the first and last issue of the magazine Portugal Futurista was published, which wanted to be a decisive step for the affirmation of the movement in that country. In short, [. . .] Futurist or Futurist texts appear between 1915 and 1917 isolated and somewhat scattered, and are few in number [. . .]. Until 1917, therefore, futurism “concretely does not see itself,” as Neves rightly writes, because the manifestations that exist there are neither sufficient nor sufficiently organized to affirm it as a group. In 1917 it tries to modify this state of things, giving rise to futurism as an organized movement. The futuristic conference of 14.5.1917 at Teatro República is its first official public manifestation. As was to be expected and to some extent intended, it was received with some scandal and the repercussion in the press were not slow in forthcoming. Cf. Portugal Futurista, 1980: XXXII

Among the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa (the other “selves” that Pessoa created and in whose name he also wrote), Álvaro de Campos is regarded as the futurist poet. Of its production, the following passage of the “triumphant Ode” stands out: By the mournful light of the big electric factory lamps I am feverish and write. I write while grinding my teeth, wild about the beauty of this, About the beauty of this totally unknown to my friends. Oh, wheels, oh gears, eternal rrrrrrrrr! Strong retained spasm of the machinations in a fury! In a fury inside and outside of me. [. . .] And my head burns with wanting to sing you with an excess Of expression about all my sensations, With a contemporaneous excess of you, oh machines! [À dolorosa luz das grandes lâmpadas elétricas da fábrica Tenho febre e escrevo. Escrevo rangendo os dentes, fera para a beleza disto, Para a beleza disto totalmente desconhecida dos antigos. Ó rodas, ó engrenagem, r-­r-­r-­r-r-r-r eterno! Forte espasmo retido dos maquinismos em fúria! Em fúria dentro e fora de mim. [. . .]

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E arde-­me a cabeça de vos querer cantar com um excesso De expressão de todas as minhas sensações, Com um excesso contemporâneo de vós, ó máquinas!] Excerpted from the journal Orpheu, vol. 1 . . Lisboa: Ática [n.d.]: 101

In this poem, from which we extracted only the first two stanzas, Álvaro de Campos gives an ingenious snapshot of futuristic literary art. Here we find the main themes of futurism and its techniques, which highlight: the presence of the contemporary world with its noises, machines and modern technology, and its influence on the psyche of the human being, since who writes in the light of strong lamps of the factory is as frantic, nervous and agitated as the rhythm of modern cities. . In the fragment, the technique of words in freedom, of interconnected images, without much logic also appear, as in the verse: “O wheels, O gear, eternal rrrrrrr,” in which the repetition of r, appearing both in wheels and in gear, suggests, in addition to the strong visual effect, an impression at the same time of an aggressive thing as well as speed, noise and roughness. In Brazil, futurism did not constitute a movement, nor did it even generate the publication of a magazine, although a fragment of the first Futurist Manifesto of 1909 was published in the newspaper A República, Natal, in the edition of Saturday, 5.7.1909, though without great repercussions. Only in the 1920s do we see the growing use of the term “Futurist,” having little to do with the meaning of the Italian movement. By 1920, the “consumption” of the expression “futurism” was already great in São Paulo (Brito, 1971: 247–248). It was Oswald de Andrade who publicized the term in São Paulo, with the article “My Poet Futurist” on Mário de Andrade, published in Jornal do Comércio on 27.5.1921. Mário spoke, responding with another article (“Futurism?”) published in the same newspaper on 6.6.1921, and then reaffirmed his disagreement in the “most interesting Preface” of the book of poems Paulicéia, in which he reports: I’m not a Futurist (of Marinetti). I said and I repeat it. I have points of contact with Futurismo. Oswald de Andrade, calling me a Futurist, missed the mark. The fault is mine. I knew about the article and let it out. So great was the scandal that I desired the death of the world. [Não sou futurista (de Marinetti). Disse e repito-­o. Tenho pontos de contato com o Futurismo. Oswald de Andrade, chamando-­me de futurista, errou. A culpa é minha. Sabia da existência do artigo e deixei que saísse. Tal foi o escândalo, que desejei a morte do mundo.] Andrade, 1987: 16

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Futurism did not take root in Brazil, even if it left a trail in the strategy of destruction, refusal of the past, and search for words in freedom found in the works of Mário and Oswald de Andrade, the greatest representatives of the implantation phase (1922–1928) of Brazilian modernism, as can be seen in the extracts explaining some of the characteristics of the movement. In Russia, the influence of futurism was preceded by a number of “new schools,” emerging from Russian art itself, made up of pre-­futurist poets. One of them, Khlebnikov, had even created an ultranational poetry, in an invented language, the zaum. But Mayakovsky is the main poet of Russian futurism, for the quality of his text, for the cultivation of free rhythms, onomatopoeias and exclamations, but mainly for the role of renewal that he plays. In December 1912, Mayakovsky, with a group of poets, signed a rather controversial manifesto called “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in which the Russian “Cubism-Futurism” is announced, thus known by the articulation of futurism’s proposals vis-à-­vis those of cubism.

Cubic caprices: Cubism When the autumn salon (Paris, 1908) exhibited a few pictures by Georges Braque, in which roofs merged with trees, giving the impression of cubes, the painter Henri Matisse, who was part of the jury, described them as “cubic whims.” From that was said to derive the denomination of cubism, applied initially to the painting and, later, to literature. Cubism in painting is the art of decomposing and recomposing reality, and its main representatives are Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. It is in the Hall of the Independents (Paris, 1911) that the cubists make their first collective appearance, and the theoretical book on the subject was Cubism, written by Gleizes and Metzinger, in 1912. In his Vanguarda europeia e modernismo brasileiro, Gilberto Mendonça Teles tells us that “In 1905 Picasso met with Apollinaire, painters and poets—among them Max Jacob, André Salmon, Cendrars, Reverdy and Cocteau—began to integrate a united front: the avant-­garde that in 1909 was already known by the name of cubism, in painting, and from 1917 also in literature.” (Teles, 1993: 116) Synthesizing the chronology of the cubist avant-­garde, one can propose that it has three distinct phases: 1) 1905–1907; the origins of cubism in painting, with Picasso and Braque; 2) 1905–1913; the origins of literary cubism, with Apollinaire; 3) 1917–1920; the consolidation of literary cubism, with the most significant magazines of the period, such as North-South and Literature; 4) 1920 onwards;

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works by followers and by other authors who were soon to be incorporated into surrealism, and others of the avant-­garde to be commented on later. There were no actual manifestos of cubism, but a text by Apollinaire was famous for marking the passage from futurism to cubism, promoting a kind of synthesis of the two movements. It’s called “The Futurist Anti-Tradition.” Apollinaire’s text, as a whole, is a clever use of futurist principles, blending them with the cubist technique of decomposition/recomposition, which can be seen in the interesting assembly of the fragments. Unlike futurism, Apollinaire’s text is not content to accentuate the character of destruction but adds that of construction, a key word for cubists who descend from Cézanne’s constructivism (work on superimposed planes). The abolition of mimesis in art is a fundamental principle for cubists who are interested in a reality that is beyond the visible, although without anything mystical, but a reality derived from the change of planes, of points of view, of perspectives, of the geometric decomposition of objects and the criticism of classical tri-­dimensionality cultivated since the art of the Renaissance (sixteenth-­century style). As in the texts of the futurists, Apollinaire’s text pays attention to technique, machinery, the great city (the Paris of the Eiffel Tower and the great skyscrapers), linking to the urban world. In cubism, reality is presented from geometric forms, not obeying the classical principles of the transcription of objects as they would be seen. Straight angles, geometric planes, discontinuous shapes are some of the most important techniques explored by cubist painters. From the technical point of view, cubism fragments the three-­dimensional space, spreading objects on different planes. In a cubist framework, things exist from relationships. And their appearance changes according to the point of view by which they are looked at. In this way cubists intend to suggest that “the world is a structure of variable relationships and multiple appearances” (Sypher, 1981: 201). In this there is a “philosophy of perspective.” It all depends on perspective and relationships. The idea of things in themselves, of something absolute, falls apart in the way cubists see and represent the world. The cubist destroys the belief in “portraiture” art, which captures “facts,” or “things as they are.” The object painted by the cubist is the result of a recomposition and originates in a process of construction in which fact and fiction are mixed. In its most authentic manifestations, cubism is a painting about the methods of painting. Max Jacob, one of the most important poets of cubism, said that a work of art is worth itself and not by the comparison that can be made between it and reality. And this holds true for both literature and cubist painting. Cubist painting presents an

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instantaneous, dynamic vision, influenced by the speed of the planes and cuts of the cinematographic art. There were no obvious manifestos of cubism, either in painting or in literature (if we have accepted the term “manifesto” in the sense given to it by futurism). Cubist theories and proposals in painting and literature have been set out in books such as the one by Gleizes and Metzinger. From Apollinaire, in 1913, the text “The Anti-Traditional Futurist” appears, which “although it is not a cubist manifesto, reveals the repercussion of the Futurist theories in the spirit of the French intelligentsia” (Teles, 1993: 116) already impregnated with the achievements of plastic cubism. A good example of cubist literary art is the play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1912) by the Italian Luigi Pirandello. The play seeks to show how reality and identity are multiple things. While a company of actors rehearses a play, six members of a family (father, mother, legitimate and illegitimate children) enter the stage and ask to represent the story of their lives. In this way, Pirandello points out how delicate are the links between representation and life, between illusion and reality. He writes a play on “how to write a play,” very close to what has already been said here about cubist painting, that is, that it turns to the very techniques of painting. If art is no longer a window to the other world, but an aspect of reality, the work of André Gide well records this issue put into relief by cubists. Much of Gide’s work is a record of facts seen from a certain angle and thus transformed. According to Gide, all representation is a simulacrum. It is an act of challenge in which the artist risks his ability to execute an idea of reality. Fakery becomes a creative act (Sypher, 1981: 219). For this reason, the cubist narratives end up sacrificing the “good subject” for dismantling the plot, abandoning linear structures and relations of cause and effect. In this way cubist texts seem to be dispersed and disintegrated. An example of this, in the Brazilian narrative, is the novel of Oswald de Andrade, Sentimental Memories of João Miramar (1925; Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar). In it, as in a collage, the various literary genres (the lyrical, the epic and the dramatic), usually separated, are mixed in a text whose borders are very fluid. The dynamism of time and space also appears, decomposing the notion of linear time. The basis of this work is the fragmentation of time, plot, literary genres, and the phrase itself, which appears to be interrupted, recomposing elements, as in a famous example highlighted by the writer, critic and translator from São Paulo, Haroldo de Campos, in a study on the work of Oswald de Andrade. He cites an excerpt from the novel, which reads: “a dog

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barked at the bearded door in shirt sleeves,” in which the man at the door is not described by the narrator, but is suggested by his decomposition into parts that are contaminated with door, which is “bearded” and in “shirt sleeves.” In this new door-­man, obtained by the collage of decomposed and recombined elements, is an excellent example of the cubist capacity to extract from reality its motives, but without repeating it as such. As in theater and narrative, there was also a cubist poetry, of which, in France, Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars were great artificers. In Brazil, Oswald de Andrade with his pau-­brasil poetry most closely approximates the tendency to use the technique of cut-­and-paste and joke-­poems.

The expressionists It has already been stated that expressionists are only painters whose main objective is to give shocking expression to their feelings and ideas through the distortion of visible reality. Therefore, one of the greatest characteristics of expressionism, in painting and literature, is the fact that there is a distinct atmosphere in these works: they reflect a state of dissatisfaction, nostalgia, melancholy, and passion. Except for the painter Picasso,2 expressionists were not primarily interested in formal renewal but in recording the negative impacts of modern society on individuals. Unlike other vanguards, which optimistically reflect on technique and progress—such as the futurists—expressionists are more affected by human suffering than by triumph. Many of the expressionists were Germans and were stimulated by various forms of exoticism, such as primitive and popular art, which only found worldwide dissemination in the early twentieth century: masks and statuary in Oceania, sculptures in Africa and in pre-Columbian America. It can be said that there were no true expressionist manifestos. But two texts can be presented as kinds of flags of expressionism: Franz Marc’s “savages” of Germany, the group The Blue Rider, edited in Munich in 1912, and Kasimir Edschmid’s “Expressionism in Poetry,” 1918. Due to its very complex character, I will only tell you about some main characteristics, leaving the analysis of the Picasso went through various styles of painting; size was his talent, and intellectual curiosity. In a period of his life he linked his painting to expressionism, and his Guernica painting (in which he painted the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s when Generalissimo Franco was in power) became famous.

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movement to be done through the observation of the poetry of a representative of expressionism in lyric. From the text of Kasimir Edschmid, the following characteristics are worthy of note: 1) the deformation of reality, which is not represented as it appears, but is subjectively (that is, internally and personally) interpreted by expressionists. Reality appears deformed, shown in its heinous, terrible, and painful aspects; 2) the character of expressionism is supranational, since, despite the strong German presence, there was not a deliberate national cohesion between the representatives of expressionism, contrary to, for example, futurism, which was a movement that emerged as basically Italian and patriotic, although it later branched out into other countries; 3) the valorization of subjective contents, which acquire greater importance than technical experimentation, in which the expressionism of cubism and futurism is very different. Expressionist poetry presents the other face of progress, so praised by futurism in its aspect of glory and praise. Here the metropolis is feverish— agitated—but at the same time peopled with misery and prostitution. Klem focuses on the noblest and most beautiful side of the great metropolis, where flow and wealth join the most painful face of the penury and pain of the marginalized. In view of this panorama, for the poet, as seen in the last verse of the second stanza, “Art is dead.” That is to say, art does not have the capacity to change, through its practice, the reality of social misery. At most, it can reveal it and make itself sympathetic to the suffering of those who suffer. In this sense, expressionist poetry makes itself the bearer of an agonized lament for the lack of sense with which, sometimes, the human being is confronted. Unlike futurism, optimistic about the world and the transformations of the present as a way to open up a better world, expressionism becomes the singer of a world in decadence, of perishability, lamentation, and pain. It was in Germany that expressionism showed more vigor, forming two groups before 1914: 1) the first was The Bridge (Die Brücke), 1905, in Dresden, composed of students of architecture, to which belonged, among others, E. L. Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl and Erich Heckel; 2) the second, The Blue Knight (Der Blaue Reiter), was formed in Munich in 1911, and included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and August Macke, among others. The first group was definitely expressionist. Its members met regularly, both to discuss and to work together. By the violence of their colors, and by the angular hardness of their forms, they adopted a work of primitive traits, with a strong contrast of tones. The second group was the most influential in the history of contemporary art, although its

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components outstripped the tendencies of expressionism. Besides these groups, there were artists who worked in isolation. The first group was extinguished in 1913 and the second in 1914. But that did not mean the end of expressionism. On the contrary, World War I (1914–1918), with its destruction, exacerbated the climate of anxiety and pain which fueled expressionism. But expressionism can not be explained only by war, for even in times of peace the movement manifested itself, although a third expressionist wave occurred during World War II (1939– 1945). Another expressionist group emerged after the war, in 1948, called COBRA, a name formed by Co(penhagen), Br(ussels) and A(msterdam), proving that expressionism was a strong and widely developed trend. Experts say that the whole new German generation between 1910 and 1933 was either expressionist or influenced by expressionism. Despite the breadth and fecundity of expressionism, it is difficult to establish a coherent doctrinal body for this movement which, in literature, has extended to poetry, theater, romance and the essay. Generally speaking, there are innumerable poems inspired by the catastrophe of war, which express feelings of horror, suffering and human solidarity. Georg Trakl was one of the most important writers of this movement (he committed suicide in 1914, driven over the edge by horrors of the war). Other writers were Gottfried Benn and Georg Heym. In general, the main themes addressed by expressionists in literature were: the overthrow of the bourgeois and capitalist world; denouncing a universe in crisis; the feeling of helplessness before a “world without a soul”; apocalytic and negative views; the emphasis on the interior, on the self, on feelings; the world’s grotesque deformation; the craving for the “absolute”; the revolt of children against parents; the shock of the generations. As for their technical principles, the expressionists accept the lessons of Marinetti, although they also innovate with their own forms, in proposing that the lyric must be beyond verse, without rhyme or stanzas, renouncing musicality, having the word as an end in itself, they are taken only by rhythm, affirming that the form of poetry results from the fragmentation of sentences into their grammatical components, which are juxtaposed as independent verses, with a preference for isolated words, ellipse and incomplete phrases. By using a purely nominal (as opposed to verbal) elitist style, as well as cultivating the freedom of improvisation, for a poetry whose words, verses and images are not connected by the laws of logic, but by those of expression. It can be said that there was an expressionist decade in German literature (1910–1920) which, in the theater, cinema and dance, lasted throughout the 1920s. The so-­called German

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expressionist poetry covers a turbulent and decisive historical period, encompassing the imperialist period under William II (pre-­war), World War I, the Russian Revolution, and attempts to establish a socialist republic in Germany (with the workers and military movements and revolutions of November 1918 and April 1933). In their diversity, the expressionist authors’ poetry reflects, directly or transposed, the historical process of their contemporaries (Barrento: 12). A Brazilian poet of the beginning of the century, the Paraiban Augusto dos Anjos, author of a single book, Eu, published in 1912, is in many ways close to expressionism. The poetry of Augusto dos Anjos presents this climate of universal agony so dear to expressionists. The psychological density of pain and destruction are in many of his texts and characterize a way of apprehending reality deformed by subjective feeling. One finds in the poetry of Augusto dos Anjos (See Helena, A cosmo-­agonia de Augusto dos Anjos) many of the characteristics previously mentioned as expressionist. As an example, it is important to remember the Brazilian poet’s use of the word as an end in itself: what is striking in Augustus’s lyric is the use of scientific words, which comes mixed with adjectives and their context (i.e. the phrase in which they are found) are entirely new, for example, the expressions: “cosmopolitanism of chimeras,” “very small and plebeian zooplasm,” which are valid not for the “scientism” they contain (since they do not actually propose a truth or scientific knowledge), but for the effect they cause upon the reader, creating poignant poetry. In the same way, Augusto dos Anjos cultivates with his sonnets the freedom of improvisation, with the creation of verbal images of strong visual interest, as in a fragment of the poem “Uma noite em Cairo”: “Sometimes, the pyramids’ tranquil/and sinister profile, exposed to the moonlight, seems/a somber interjection of fear” [Às vezes, das pirâmides o quedo/E atro perfil, exposto ao luar, parece/Uma sombria interjeição de medo] (Anjos, 1965: 114–115). In this fragment, the “interjection of fear” is the result of the image of the pyramid, projected by the moon, which lies in the night of Egypt, steeped in mystery, silence and fear. That is, the pyramid “seems,” in the poem, to be an interjection.

Dadaism Founded in Switzerland in 1916, Dadaism was the most radical of the avant-­ garde movements of the beginning of the century. This is because of its character

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of denial, that is, because of its emphasis on the destruction and anarchy of values and forms. The very denomination of the movement and the form by which it was chosen indicate the character of anarchic destruction since according to Tristan Tzara, leader of the Dadaists, “Dada means nothing,” and this “nothing” is its fundamental word (its “keyword”). Tzara reveals that he found this denomination in a very interesting way: one day, when he put a spatula in one of the leaves of the Petit Larousse dictionary of French, a page was opened at random, and in this one the word “dada” was highlighted. If Tristan Tzara’s statement is true, then the name Dadaism seems to be random. In any case, true or not, the history of the group demonstrates the playful and enjoyable character of improvisation in art, as well as demonstrating that the Dadaists also want to repudiate the appreciation for common sense and for seriousness. After futurism, this is the avant-­garde movement with the largest number of manifestos, seven of them being well known. Dadaism presents itself as an internationalist movement where other avant-­garde tendencies converge, to such an extent that the critic Guillermo de Torre calls it the “vertex of the avant-­garde,” although Tristan Tzara affirmed that he did not want to have anything in common with the futurists and the cubists. In practice and in manifestos, it is evident that Dadaism has points of contact with the vanguards hitherto studied. In February 1916, German writer Hugo Ball and his wife (the actress Emmy Hennings) founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. This café only worked for six months, developing literary and musical nights that used to attract interesting intellectuals and artists who went there to have fun, drink and exchange ideas. In Cabaret Voltaire the group that started Dadaism was formed: Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsemback (German), Hans Arp (Alsatian), Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara (Romanian). These were later joined by Francis Picabia (French) and Vicente Huidobro (Chilean). In this small café, innovative happenings (shows that were different, creative) were put on, almost always for a minimal audience. Also through the Cabaret Voltaire the only issue of the magazine Cabaret Voltaire, was published and released. This was the organ of the vanguards born there and in which the “Manifesto of the Lord Antipyrine” was published. The literary activities developed in the small café consisted of readings of the poems of the cubists Apollinaire and Max Jacob, discussions about futurism, besides reciting in several voices poems of tendencies simultaneously pacifist, futurist, and expressionist. From the musical point of view, it was also at Cabaret Voltaire that the first jazz bands performed, with sessions of African-American music. This Dada state of mind arose almost

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simultaneously in New York around the same time. In the American city there were at the time two European painters of Dadaist ideas—Marcel Duchamps and Francis Picabia—friends of the experimental American photographer, Man Ray. In the nineteenth century a phenomenon completely unknown to Brazilians occurred in Europe: café life. It is said that in the days of Eça de Queirós, around 1870, novelists used to write their books in cafés. These cafés became famous and became meeting places for intellectuals and people interested in getting to know them or, at least, being able to see them more closely. When you go to Europe, in Paris, for example, there is always a café to be visited because this writer or that writer used to stay there for long hours, writing, thinking, drinking only coffee, and being harassed by waiters to hurry up and vacate the table for other customers. In short, the artists brought fame to the cafés, making them a world apart, something very attractive. What happens at Cabaret Voltaire is something similar, but intensified. At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the avant-­garde period, this cabaret served the important function of bringing people together around an idea, providing artists and intellectuals with a propitious place to meet and advertise their cultural innovations. On July 14, 1916, the first Dada demonstration was held in Zurich, with the reading of the “Manifesto of the Lord Antipyrine.” In 1918, the “Dada Manifesto,” the main manifesto of Dadaism was published, which deserves more detailed attention. The Dadaists begin their manifesto by ironizing the very act of making a manifesto. The name Dada can mean so many things that it eventually means nothing through the accumulation and exaggeration of possibilities. This is one of the interpretations that gives rise to the manifesto. On the other hand, one can also imagine that Dadaists seek to show the relativity of the meaning of words and things. Although they value negativity and the destruction of values, shocking and attacking on the basis of nihilism, the reference to the circus is very meaningful to them: their joyful side—enjoying the circus, which has, in the clown, its force of attraction, accompanied by acrobatics of all kinds. This makes them pioneers in the inclusion of the circus as an art to be honored, because until then the circus had only been regarded as a popular distraction. In the last manifesto of Dadaism—“Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love”— read in Paris, December 12, 1920, Tristan Tzara proposes a recipe for making poetry, cutting words out of a newspaper, putting them into a sack, and sorting them randomly, “writing” a poem with the fragments that emerge by chance

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(Teles, 1993: 132). The procedure mentioned in this “poem recipe” demonstrates that Dadaists proposed a technique based on the reuse of existing materials and words. In this case, the creation of a new poem—new, since it did not exist before— will be the fruit of the use of words that were already written in the article of the newspaper that you choose. This technique, which became known by its English name, we call “ready-­made” (the “ready” is that which will be reused). In their quest to start all over again and to break with common sense, logic, and easily understood meaning, the Dadaists were also repudiating everything from the realm of consciousness. That is, they were opening the way for the unconscious to be valued, favoring the relationship of art with elements of which we do not have a domain but which exist, latently, within us. This feature will be much used by the surrealist vanguard, which we will study next. One might even say that Dadaism was the most radical of the movements of the European avant-­ garde at the beginning of the century and agree with André Gide that: “Dadaism is like a flood, after which everything begins again from scratch.” Dadaism itself covers the historical period between 1916 and 1921, when interest in the movement begins to decline. Having consolidated between 1916 and 1920, this movement reaches its apogee in the period between March and June of 1920, when the “season of maximum agitation” takes place. In this period many magazines propagating Tzara’s ideas are published, to the point that each writer of the group owns his own magazine. In 1920 the headquarters of the movement is Paris but it spreads into several other countries: the cities of Berlin (Germany), Geneva (Swiss city where French is spoken), Madrid (Spain), Rome (Italy), New York (United States) and Zurich (German-­speaking Swiss city) all being considered Dadaist branches. In all these places, Dadaism scandalizes with its rebellious daring. About this, Tristan Tzara, the leader of the group, comments years later that the gestures of the Dadaists were intended to disconcert people, and that their actions were marked by a very lively controversial feeling, through which they wanted to confront the public. In Brazil, around the end of the 1920s—more precisely in 1928—a literary manifesto emerges (the Anthropophagist Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade, published in São Paulo in 1928) and a controversial journal, Revista de antropofagia, which both have traits of a Dadaist influence. The Journal of Anthropophagy had two phases: the first, from May 1928 to February 1929, called the “teething”3; the The word “dentição”, appropriate to the idea of anthropophagy (which refers here only symbolically to the act of eating human flesh), was used as a form of joking aimed at shocking the Brazilian pubic.

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second, from March to August 1929, called “second teething”. In the first phase, it is directed by Antônio de Alcântara Machado and managed by Raul Bopp. In the second, it is directed by Geraldo Ferraz, the so-­called “perpetual secretary” and “butcher.”4 The two phases are quite distinct. In the first, there is a great mixture of everything, since the “cannibals” say: “The Anthropophagic Magazine has no direction or thought of any kind: it only has stomach.”5 And there is a stomach to kill the hunger of the “anthropologists” who published it, for in the first phase of the magazine a little bit of everything was mixed together, from the radical and innovative Manifesto Anthropófago of Oswald de Andrade, to the explanations of Plínio Salgado on the origins of the Tupi language, spoken by the Brazilian Indians. In the second phase (for further clarification on the subject, see Helena, Modernismo brasileiro e vanguarda), the “cannibals” sharpened their teeth on the controversial tone and unified their vocation as radicals, clearly exposing the fights they maintain with other groups and artists of Brazilian modernism. In this phase, the magazine was published in the Diário de São Paulo, assigned to the group by Rubens do Amaral, who was then the editor of that newspaper. Beginning on 17.3.1929 and extending until 1.8.1929, the publication was largely ignored. Compared to other Brazilian magazines that divulged modernist ideas, the Revista de Antropofagia is the most violent of all, and is the one that is linked to Dadaism. The Anthropophagist Manifesto was published by Oswald de Andrade in the first issue of the Revista de Antropofagia, São Paulo, 1.5.1928. This manifesto maintains a fruitful dialogue with Dadaism and aims to “zero” the colonized inheritance, proposing to “swallow”, “eat”, finally to “anthropophage” inherited customs, to digest them and thus to promote a Brazilian assimilation of new values in which Brazilian cultural tradition was also present.

Surrealism: Dada’s rib Dadaism and surrealism had points of contact between their themes and techniques, and many artists—such as Francis Picabia and André Breton— participated in both. So much so that, during the years 1921 and 1924—the year of the first surrealist manifesto—the two movements appeared to be The denomination “butcher” follows the same line of humor and scandal of the reference to anthropophagy and dentition, mentioned in the previous note. 5 As can be seen, the magazine has the same anarchistic and mocking tone that characterizes Dadaism. 4

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interconnected. The Dada leader himself, Tristan Tzara, confirms this hypothesis, saying that “Surrealism was born of the ashes of Dadaism.” It is from Dadaism that the surrealists will extract some of their characteristics: the love of protest, the valorization of improvisation, and spontaneity in the management of language. However, the surrealists brought about a change in the conception of group work, introducing discipline and cohesion, and in this being very different from the total individuality preached by the Dada group. The total individual freedom of Dada disappears in favor of a strong sense of group adhesion. Since the strength of Dadaism derives from denial, scandal, freedom, and improvisation, little by little some of its members, such as Breton and Picabia, became disinterested in the extreme character of these strategies, seeking new directions for reflection and creation. According to Guilhermo de Torre, another cause of the separation between Breton and the Dadaists was his personal incompatibility with Tristan Tzara, head of the latter group. The Dadaists left an almost untouched lode, which the surrealists came to explore: that of the relations of language and art to the unconscious, to dreams, and to the technique of automatic writing (writing without thinking, under the flow of an impulse of extreme spontaneity and inner surrender to the process of linking language and conscious forces). This, in a sense, proceeded to the futuristic idea of a “wireless imagination.” Regarding dreams, the surrealists have a double and simultaneous tendency. On the one hand, their interest in the subject derives from Sigmund Freud and from the theoretical researches of psychoanalysis, seen as a new and very important area of human knowledge which emerged in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, their interest in the dream and the unconscious appears as a revaluation of Romanticism: a literary current that was implanted in the early-­nineteenth century but for which there was no longer any theoretical interest. The formal break of the surrealists with the Dadaists took place in the “Congress for the Establishment of Modern Spirit Guidelines” in 1922, due to the intensification of the antagonism between André Breton and Tristan Tzara. Surrealism is seen by its proponents, especially by Breton, not as an artistic movement but as a medium of knowledge that wanted to systematically explore the unconscious, the supernatural, the dream, madness, and hallucinatory states: whatever was the reverse of logic and escaped the control of consciousness. Between 1922 and 1924, the surrealists were organized around Francis Picabia, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Elouard, Benjamin Péret and Max Ernest, many of whom had already been involved in other avant-­garde movements. The

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group’s main dissemination body in this period is Literature (Littérature). Surrealism also penetrated painting and literature with equal strength. In 1924, the group was officially founded and Breton published the first manifesto in which he set out his ideas. In the same year, in December, the group had an office in Paris, and an organ of publicity: the magazine The Surrealist Revolution. In this period, the surrealists establish a program based on the valuation of the unconscious and research into the subject. From 1925 to 1930 is the period in which surrealism is interested in relating research on the unconscious with adherence to the social revolution. It is a tense moment within the group with dissidences, departures by some (Antonin Artaud, a theatrical artist) and new joiners (Luís Buñuel, filmmaker and Salvador Dalí, painter). Some surrealists join the Communist Party, including Breton who publishes a new manifesto in which he specifies his political position. In 1930, two fundamental works of surrealism are published: The Treatise on Style, by Aragon, and Nadja, by Breton. From 1930 to 1939, surrealism became an autonomous movement. In this period, it has repercussions outside France, reaching other countries, opening exhibitions, for example in Prague (former Czechoslovakia), Tokyo (Japan) and Copenhagen (Denmark). Two paths are now open to the surrealists: that of the emphasis on the political revolution, followed by Aragon; and the deepening of research into the unconscious, assumed by Breton. But this attempt to reconcile two angles, each so exaltedly defended, will prove impossible. As a result, Aragon breaks with the surrealists, opting for communism. And Breton will be expelled from the Communist Party, traveling to Mexico and then launching, with the painter Diego Rivera, the manifesto “Revolutionary Independent Art.” The Second World War then explodes and the group disperses. During the war, in the 1940s and while exiled in the United States, Breton continues to publicize surrealism. In 1946, after the war, Breton returned to France, where he reissued his manifestos and published his Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not, written in 1942. In the years of World War II, several surrealists engaged in the resistance to Nazism, collaborating on a collective anthology of resistance poetry. Also in this period, several countries in Latin America became aware of surrealism and valued it, for example in Peru (César Moro), Mexico (Carlos Mérida, M. Álvarez Bravo and Octávio Paz), Argentina (Enrique Molina), Chile (Mata Echaurren) and Cuba (Wilfredo Lam). Even during the 1950s and 1960s the surrealists are in evidence (Cf. Durozol & Lecherbonnier, 1972), with the Venice Biennale (1954) devoted to the influence

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of surrealist painting in the world, the surrealist exhibitions in Milan (1959) and New York (1961). Breton died on September 28, 1966, a few weeks after a university conference on surrealism was held in France (from 10 to 18 July, in Cérisy-­la-Salle). Surrealism is not interested only in literature, because it also values Freud’s discoveries about the unconscious and the studies of psychoanalysis on the mechanisms of the dream and its relations with reality and art. In this sense, the surrealists are reunited with some proposals of Romanticism, especially: the valuation of the mystery of imagination against logic; with the mastery of consciousness and the search for incongruent, provocative images; with the marvelous, the mysterious and the supernatural seen as a potential source of art, and thus becoming linked to the psychic automatism (writing spontaneously, without thinking, permitting the flow of the unconscious). From the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), one can extract important formulations that give an account of the yearnings and the theoretical-­artistic perspective of the movement. In it, André Breton highlights the struggle of the surrealists against the dominance of logic and rationality—of the great tradition in European philosophy—over the human spirit. Breton wants more elements to be valued, such as intuition, the sense of mystery, material usually seen as “hidden.” Furthermore, Breton refers to the discoveries relating to the unconscious, to mental work that is outside the realm of logic as we normally value it. But Breton is mistaken in saying that this was by chance. On the contrary, it was no accident that Freud made a great contribution. It cost him much study and dedication to the task he was charged with—to study the mechanisms that make up the mind and human feelings—and which he carried forth with brilliance and perseverance. There was no group of surrealists in Brazil in its phase of heroic modernism, which was built around a cohesive movement. Even so, one can find the resonance of surrealism in the work of some authors around 1940–1941. One of them, who later left surrealism completely, is João Cabral de Melo Neto. Although the whole of this poet’s work points to a more cerebral and constructivist line of poetry, his first book, The Stone of Sleep, of 1942, maintains an interesting dialogue with some tendencies of the European movement. The title itself—The Stone of Sleep—reveals the duplicity of paths that João Cabral faced at the beginning of his work. On the one hand, the image of the stone, which was consolidated throughout his poetry, shows us the aptitude of the poet to work with the word-­ thing, concreteness, repudiating the domain of inspiration. On the other, the

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stone is called “sleep”, suggesting the initial commitment to a more hidden, less vigilant, less awakened dimension. This dimension, in the book, points to the dream, to the images that connect the concrete to the abstract, creating the collision of two realities: an apparent one and another occult, unconscious one, propitious to dream and illogicalism. The poem “Nocturne,” from the same work, is a fine example of the relationship between Cabral de Melo Neto and surrealism. In the poem, elements of surrealism appear: 1) in the strange relationship between the subject of verses and the action they practice, such as: “the sea blew bells/bells dried flowers/the portrait of the dead made desperate efforts to flee”; 2) in the unforeseen comparisons, as seen in: “flowers are heads of saints/ thoughts flew like telegrams”; 3) in the selection of words, noting that many nouns of the poem point to a field of meaning related to sleep, dream, the unconscious, for example: thoughts/ghosts/nightmare/dawn; 4) in the creation of several other fields of meaning that are unrelated to each other, since elements of nature (sea, flowers), or forms of communication (telegram), or objects of a varied nature, with nothing apparently in common (bells, portraits, windows), breaking the apparent harmony of the field linked to sleep, to the dream, to the unconscious, coming to clash with it, creating an atmosphere of super-­reality (or of a reality beyond what is visible). On the whole, Brazilian heroic modernism and the European historical avant-­ garde bequeathed an important lesson and an arduous and difficult task. The lesson is that the history of a people is best fulfilled when done so through the free, nuanced and open dialogue of tendencies, often in a declared conflict and put into a comparative and globalized perspective. This brings with it the task of pursuing and deepening artistic research and criticism of the surrounding world: indispensable work for its value to societies and other generations to come.

Works cited Andrade, Mário. Poesias completas. São Paulo: Martins, 1966. —— Poesias completas. Edição Crítica de Diléa Zanotto Manfio. São Paulo: Itatiaia; EDUSP, 1987. Anjos, Augusto dos. Eu e outras poesias e poemas esquecidos. 30. ed. Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1965. Barrento, João. Expressionismo alemão: antologia poética. Lisboa: Ática [s. d.]. Brito, Mario da Silva. História do modernismo brasileiro: antecedentes da Semana de Arte Moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira; INL, 1971.

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Cândido, Antonio. Literatura e sociedade. São Paulo: Nacional, 1965. Durozol, G. e Lecherbonnnier, B. O surrealismo. Coimbra: Almedina, 1972. Helena, Lucia. A cosmo-­agonia de Augusto dos Anjos. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro; João Pessoa, PB: Secretaria de Educação e Cultura, 1984. —— Modernismo brasileiro e vanguarda. São Paulo: Ática, 1986. (Princípios, 40). Mello Neto, João Cabral de. Poesias completas. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1975. Orpheu. Vol. 1. 2. Reimpressão. Lisboa: Ática [s. d.]. Pessoa, Fernando. Páginas íntimas e de auto-­interpretação. Lisboa [s. ed.], [s. d.]. Portugal Futurista. Lisboa: Contexto; INL, 1980 (edição fac-­similada). Sypher, Wilie. Do cubismo ao rococó. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1981. (Stylus, 4). Teles, Gilberto Mendonça. Vanguarda europeia e modernismo brasileiro. 8. ed. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1993.

8

The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century Jorge Fernandes da Silveira

The universe is not my idea. My idea of the Universe is what is mine. Alberto Caeiro

The stele and the example Considering the dialogue between Brazilian poetry and world poetry in the twentieth century, with emphasis on Portuguese poetry, this essay collects an expressive corpus of poems, to be read, attentively and rigorously, as the main object of interest, taking into consideration the contemporary principles that question the literary as “stele and example,” that is, as the absolute agent in a system of reception of the literary text, since its reading implies, necessarily, the interlocution between texts of other literatures and different discourses of knowledge. In the pages that follow, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Cecília Meireles—now classic poets of Brazilian modernism—and their younger colleagues, e.g. Angélica Freitas, through their dialogue with Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Herberto Helder, Fernando Pessoa, and Carlos de Oliveira (not necessarily in this order), animate the connection between Brazilian Poetry and Poetry of the World. These are poets who, through their main works, written after 1922—that is, after the Week of Modern Art, São Paulo, 1922— reconsider the national social and political ideals, especially the modern revolutionary programs that since the nineteenth century have claimed a solidarity between the public mission to give reading material to the masses, and the cultural manifestos that demand attention and respect for a subjective

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writing, equally modern and avant-­garde, with a high index of formation in literature and of information of the universal arts, to be taught at schools.

The “Inner Space of the World” I wrote a few lines as stele and as example, but it lacked somewhere a line of silence to bind them all, and then I opened my whole hand and, upon the hand, my mouth I opened, and then I shut my eyes to my surroundings, and then the earth? shook, and then I shook in its middle, blind deaf and dumb and unmoving: although I knew that I had not created the elements of the world. [escrevi umas poucas linhas como estela e como exemplo, mas faltava algures uma linha de silêncio que as ligasse todas, e então abri a mão inteira e sobre a mão abri a boca, e depois fechei os olhos a toda a volta, e depois a terra estremeceu, e depois eu estremeci no meio dela, mudo cego e surdo e imóvel: mas soube que não tinha criado os elementos do mundo. Helder, 2016: 40

Concerning these verses by Herberto Helder (1930–2015), the Portuguese poet of the world, in a recent though posthumous book, The Open Letter (2016), António Guerreiro, a Portuguese critic, writes: the word “world” (fundamental in the Herbertian vocabulary) and the two forms of the verb “to shake,” offer subject matter of a poetic nature for a reading of his poetic oeuvre. Perhaps the “trembling” in its many occurrences is a way of saying that the poem is an action and this action is an agitation of the language. (. . .) And regarding the “world,” that reappears with some frequency in this book, is a zone that we enter, from where we behold what is latent in the poetry of Herberto Helder. There is the question of the “world” in modern poetry (about which there are very important studies), it can be inaugurated with a phrase that we can read in the epistolary novel Hyperion, by Hölderlin. It is when Diotima says: “You want a world. That is why you have everything and nothing.” But to dive into the question of the world in Herberto Helder, we also cannot ignore that his poetry advocates an archaic dimension that allows it to traverse time from time’s origin. In the same way that we cannot forget a concept by Rainer Maria Rilke, the “inner space of the world” (Weltinnenraum): in very basic terms, it is a world

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internalized and an “I” externalized, where the frontiers between the inside and the outside are abolished (Guerreiro, 30/03/16, online).

The Rilkean concept of “inner space of the world” occurs in verses that are often (re)cited: World-­inner-space. Through us, tranquilly, birds fly unswerving. O, I who would grow look outward and within me grows the tree. I am unquiet, and in me stands the house am on my guard, and something in me shelters. [Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will, ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum. Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus. Ich hüte mich, und in mir ist die Hut.] Rilke, 2011: 116–17.

And this concept is also in the first of the letters to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus, as if to underscore the verses: “The creator, for sure, must have a world to himself and find everything in himself and in this nature to which he allied himself ” (Rilke, 2013: 24). Moreover, it is in the “Elegy” that Cecília Meireles (1901–1964) dedicates in memory of her grandmother, born in Açores, Portugal, with an epigraph of the poet of the Duino Elegies, cited in French: “le sang de nos ancêtres qui forme avec le notre cette chose sans équivalence qui d’ailleurs ne se répétera pas . . .”, R. M. Rilke: Lettres à un jeune poète (Meireles, 1994: 361). Prefacing the volume that gathers, in a Brazilian edition, the Letters to a Young Poet and translating The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christopher Rilke, Meireles, the most Portuguese of the Brazilian poets—and this almost always is not meant as praise—she stresses, at the same time, the presence of Rilke in her poetry and points to his readership in Brazil.1 For Antonio Candido and José Aderaldo Castello: “There is no thematic investigative impulse in it. At most a vague feeling of longing, lost or unattended love, and loneliness. (. . .) Sometimes he is seduced by medievalism and seeks suggestions in troubadour lyricism, thus incurring a false virtuosity” (Candido and Castello, 1964: 113). On the “formation of Brazilian literature” the Candido judgment is as famous as it is polemical: “If this is already unthinkable in the case of a Portuguese [see the things of the world through his literature], what will be said of a Brazilian? Our literature is a secondary branch of the Portuguese, second-­order shrub in the garden of the Muses . . . “(Candido, 1993, p.9). For a critical view of the subject, see Baptista.

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Another fundamental concept of Rilke’s, for the understanding of the “inner space of the world,” in the unfolding of the sentiment of the world created “in me,” is the Open. Returning to the verses cited by Guerreiro, in what is currently the most recent title of the prodigious Herberto Helder, the open letter among “a few lines”—among the verses, of course—allows us to read what is proper of human subjectivity, the language, the trajectory between reading and writing of the world, between the speech and silence in the world. It refers to a question that is humanely objective. That is to say, it objectifies by choosing a single territory between limit-­ ations. This territory is (its) subjectivity, in which, after the initial shudder, the astonishment at the act of creation (the Greek philosophical thaumadzein). The written book that closes is what now opens to the reading, to the reception “in the middle of the quaking earth.” The earth is quaking with the wisdom of the classic creators of worlds on the basis of this world, that is, of the philosophers and poets. Surely what is missing to the lines in concert—the poem—is the risk of “a line of silence”, the imaginary master-­line, the singular one, between the “elements of the world” already created (“an archaic dimension that makes it cross time from the beginning”) and the elements of the world to be created. And this line, in an external space of the world (“algures”/somewhere), is the absence that exists, is the verse that insists, dialectically, on giving meaning to the “inner space of the world,” to the sentiment of the world inside me, like a communal task, reaching all humanity, where all recognize one another mutually, “because then they are like sparks, shining with more brilliance, even ceasing its invisibility, alternating into a constant movement. The sparks see one another, and each one radiates ever brighter, since each sees the others and expects the others to see it” (Arendt, 2010: 89). “This atemporal totality receives the denomination of the Open [das Offene] in the Rilkean idiolect. We can only glance at it at the time of death, which annuls temporality; lovers do also have a fleeting glance of it” (Rilke, 2013a: 42). “[A]nd then I opened my whole hand and, upon the hand, my mouth I opened.” In short, between his first book, Love on a Visit (1958), and the last, The Open Letter (2016), Herberto Helder stands right at the entrance of the opening verses of the “Eighth Elegy”: “With all eyes the creature/sees the Open. (. . .)” (Opus cit.: 157). Herberto sees the Open: If they ask: of the arts of the world? Of the arts of the world I choose seeing comets to fall headlong in the huge masses of water: afterwards, the cinders about,

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a bog among them. I want, in the darkness revolved by lights, to receive baptism, the rite. Burnt, on the banks of fire of the mire. That is my name. And the days go across the nights to the other days, the nights fall inside the days—and I contemplate collapsed heavenly bodies, springs, the secret. [Se perguntarem: das artes do mundo? Das artes do mundo escolho a de ver cometas despenharem-­se nas grandes massas de água: depois, as brasas pelos recantos, charcos entre elas. Quero na escuridão revolvida pelas luzes ganhar baptismo, ofício. Queimado nas orlas de fogo das poças. O meu nome é esse. E os dias atravessam as noites até aos outros dias, as noites caem dentro dos dias—e eu estudo astros desmoronados, mananciais, o segredo.] Helder, 2004: 524

“[A]nd then the land shook.” Of the trembling of the land with the subject inside it, the poet declares: “That is my name.” From the lines just cited, in the universe of the overlapping images, it could be, for example, Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema or Vaghe Stelle dell’Orsa. For the subject poet, the name is the choice for a praxis through which he introduces himself in time and a manner of displacing himself (“comets,” “heavenly bodies”), in transit, in a world condensed into fragments (“bogs,” “mires,” “cinders”). When asked (about the arts of the world)—like an ancient astronomer who, conscious, complains to himself or to the contemporary cartographer who, ‘plurivoyant’, questions the discourses of the world—he answers that “of the arts of the world,” the subject of study that holds the most interest to his ars poetica is the one that, in revolutionary fashion, teaches ways of placing into suspension the linearity and the finitude of human life, when confronting the extremes of a universe in which everything moves eternally in circles, in a discursive revolution in which the knowledge of the “secret” of the subject of study requires rigorous assistance as to the course of the concept of beauty in classicism, to the concept of the sublime from romanticism to modernity.

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José Paulo Paes, in the introduction to his translation of Rilke’s Gedichte, “The Fight with the Angel,” tells us that on a certain morning of January 1912, Rilke, during his morning stroll, thought he heard in the bellowing of the wind a voice that called out to him in interrogation: “Who, if I called, would listen to me, among the hierarchies of the angels?” He dotted down these words and a few verses that came to him; by night, First Duino Elegy was ready; and a few days later, the Second. Paes, in Rilke, 2013a: 32

It is important to notice, in the development of this essay, that up to now two situations are mentioned in which the subject questions, or sees questioned, or better yet, hears placed into question, his faculty of a being endowed with language. In the first, Helder, identified as Rilke’s reader, answers to the supposed interlocutor that, “of the arts of the world,” he chooses fire, appropriate for the sorcerer’s apprentice; for the Messenger of the Stars, Sidereus Nuncius; in the tutelary person of Galileo Galilei, the inventor of star games; as Carlos de Oliveira, a Portuguese author and poet, in fact, author of a poem entitled “A Collage with the verses of Desnos, Mayakovski and Rilke”; would say, and of another one, fundamental to this essay, simply called “Carlos Drummond de Andrade.” The second situation gives meaning to the imaginary question asked of the poet who, from his “inner space of the world,” listens to it, or rather, who hears it in the voice of the wind: he, the ideal interlocutor to put into words the order of the angels in a divided world—“Every angel is terrible. Despite that, poor me, I invoke you, almost-­mortal birds of the soul,/for knowing who you are. (. . .)” (“Second Elegy,” Rilke 2013a: 131). “Every angel is terrible,” undoubtedly, a wicked one. If associated with the image cited in the previous phrase, the gripping image of the “Second Elegy,” in which invocation to the wind and evocation of the angel are heard in concert, it composes the desired figure of someone who, chaste and modernly eternal, in his own manner, has been “talking to angels whom no one else talks to” (Drummond, 1967: 96). The verse of the poem “Chastity,” no matter how ironic (or precisely for that reason), is the image of the conversion of the language of the angels into human speech through the labor of the conversation among poets. For example, as with the encounter between Drummond and Helder; or rather, between their images in the poem of António Franco Alexandre (1944). At the time a young Portuguese poet, Alexandre seems to place in the reading of a verse by Drummond, more specifically the much-­anthologized “in the middle

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of the road there was a rock,” the stellar quality, the exemplary touch, of being the agent that sees himself in the figure of Helder transformed into a stone figure, literally a garden bust, “a head that speaks,” elevated onto the celestial plane: drummond/helder a man has a body stump at the entrance to his garden and a head that speaks/a talking head perfectly blue this rock I found [um homem tem um toco de corpo à entrada do jardim e uma cabeça que fala azul perfeitamente esta pedra encontrei] Alexandre, 1996:142

“Perfectly Blue”: de l’éternel azur la sereine ironie2 to the “blue chimera of transmigration.” In a text about the dialogue between Brazilian poetry and world poetry, the voices of Mallarmé (“L’Azur”) and Cesário Verde (“The Sentiment of an Occidental”), join together, arbitrarily as well as coherently, with the poetic conversation, which is bilingual, among Alexandre, Drummond, and Herberto. Let Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) be introduced in this manner, as someone “between Germanophile and disbeliever” (Santiago, 2013:8), well-­born into a patriarchal family, in Itabira, in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. A main character, examplary, of the third situation in which the poet raises the question or hears the question being raised, or placed under suspicion, concerning the property of being linguistically of the world and the singularity (choice) of being meta-­poetically in the world. From the beginning and throughout this essay, the verse of Herberto on poets in dialogue (“If they ask: of the arts of the world?”) is repeated, so that it is given closer attention, because it is fundamental to a text that calls itself The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century, an interlocution between the poems of Drummond and Rilke: —“If I were named Raimundo” —“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of the angels?” www.poetes.com/mallarme/azur.htm.

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The “Sentiment of the World” Sentiment of the World I have only two hands and the sentiment of the world, but I have lots of slaves, my memories spill out and the body yields in the confluence of love. [Tenho apenas duas mãos e o sentimento do mundo, mas estou cheio de escravos, minhas lembranças escorrem e o corpo transige na confluência do amor.] (Andrade, 1967: 101) The Seven-Faced Poem When I was born, a wicked angel the kind that lives in the shadows said: Go, Carlos! Be awkward in life. [Quando nasci, um anjo torto desses que vivem na sombra disse: Vai, Carlos! ser gauche na vida.] Ibid.: 53

When read in sequence, the first stanzas of two fundamental poems of Drummond fill with meaning the “question of the world” in modern poetry. The first stanza, from “Sentiment of the World,” opens the third book, of the same title, published in 1940; the second, from “The Seven-Faced Poem,” is the already celebrated triplet that opens Some Poetry (1930), the first book by Rio’s poet from Minas Gerais state. Thus, with The Bog of Souls in-­between (1934), ten years pass during which the poetic labor reiterates the profession (the profession of faith) that to write, more than small property and restrict to human condition (“I have only two hands”), is an investment of value in something much greater that goes beyond the externalization in written language, since it implies a discourse on the . . . the “inner space of the world,” to precisely the objective of the title and of the book’s opening poem, “Sentiment of the World”, with a meaning as conscious as it is contradictory (“but I have lots of slaves”), lovely

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and cordially confluent (lines 4, 5, 6), a current expression of a cosmovision where past and present both fit. In the first stanza of “The Seven-Faced Poem,” one needs to underscore the return to the original elegiac scene that announces the image of the “terrible angel,” now the “wicked angel,” who dictates, and hierarchically commands, the sinister fate of the creatures that are named upon the Earth. Hannah Arendt originally wrote Between Past and Future (1954) in English. In the second chapter, significantly entitled “The Concept of History—Ancient and Modern,” upon considering the “distinction between the mortality of men and the immortality of nature” from the ancient Greeks to the present time, she uses as an example four verses by Rilke, and she “keeps them in their original language, for their perfection seems to challenge any translation” (Arendt, 2013: 73). The “debate over the ‘aura’ of the original text”—the speaker here is Eduardo F. Coutinho—“has been widely discussed by many authors, whose contributions to translation studies have been seen today as fundamental” (Coutinho, 2013: 111). In a note, the political theorist Arendt (German Jewish, expatriated in France, and citizen of North America) cites the English translation of the verses by Denver Lindley: Mountains rest beneath a splendor of stars, but even in them time flickers. Ah, unsheltered in my wild, darkling heart lies immortality. In her interpretation, this is the passage that begins the dialogue between the German poet, born in Prague (Rilke) and the Portuguese poets: Looking at these lines with the eyes of a Greek, it is as if the poet had tried conscientiously to invert the Greek relations: everything became perishable, except perhaps the human heart; immortality is no longer the environment in which mortals move about, but it sought shelter, shelterless, in the heart of mortality; immortal things, works and deeds, events and even words, although men can still be able to externalize and reify remembrances in their hearts, lost their shelter in the world; since nature is perishable, and since man-­made things, once they have acquired existence, they share fate with every being, they begin to perish at the instant that they come into existence. Arendt, 2013: 73

In the mortal human heart, the eternal poetic sentiment of the world pulsates. What strikes one is the similarity between Arendt’s words and another equally celebrated stanza of the “Seven-Faced Poem”: World, world, wide world if I were named Earl

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it would be a rhyme, not a solution. World, world, vast world, even wider is my heart. [Mundo mundo vasto mundo se eu me chamasse Raimundo seria uma rima, não seria uma solução. Mundo mundo vasto mundo, mais vasto é meu coração.]

It is worth remembering two previous sentences. The first one, by António Guerreiro, about “the inner space of the world”, a Rilkean image of “an internalized world and an externalized I, where the frontiers between the inside and the outside are abolished”; the second one by Rilke, about the Open as the atemporal totality, which can only be grasped in two extraordinary situations: near death and when visited by love. Hand in hand, personal and poetic experiences are present in the seven faces of the poem. In aesthetic terms, it is a true poetic art, literally a poiesis of creation, in one word: metapoiesis. In ethical terms, pondering his own Christian name—“that is my name”: “Carlos!”—, to be called Carlos and to be fated to be “awkward” in life, is not a question that might interest the people in general, but it does interest the poetic canon of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘Drummond’ for short. And since then, it also interests Brazilian poetry and, certainly, poetry in Portuguese. “I got the entire discourse of my years wrong,” is a verse by Camões that no one ever forgets. Go on, Carlos, be transgressive and awkward in the world. If Carlos were named “Earl,” it would be a solution that could be said to be an edifying and poetic accident, since for the verse it is in, it rhymes with the “world” that is above it. But it does not rhyme with “heart” which follows below. And this interests us very much. At the rate in which the ethical and the aesthetic intercross, what is under discussion, in discourse: literal and literarily, is the sense of world and the sentiment of the world. The linguistic existence of the name can be, then, an experience in the language, that is, a journey between metalanguage and metapoetics. Extended to their limit, of the seven faces of the poem, the one that interests the most, taking into consideration the critical reading of the poem, is that which records the baptismal name as the original beginning, that is, the origin. Condemned as “awkward” by the “evil angel,” hence to the left of the image of the Creator, Drummond gets close to the Book of Genesis, with an “amorous-­humorous” mood (Correia, 2015: 151).

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About the “origin” of the “wicked angel” in the repertoire of modern poetic imagery, Marlene de Castro Correia informs us, in a note that, because of the humor and the parody, the figure “loses the sublimity of the tragic fall, the drama of Romantic predestination and the magnitude of the descent of Baudelaire’s albatross to slip into the mediocrity of a disdainful prophecy ‘Go, Carlos! to be awkward in life’ ” (Ibid.: 171). According to the note: in the poem “L’Albatros,” by Baudelaire, the term “gauche” awkward, in the verses “Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!/Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!” (. . .), related to the bird brought down by the sailors and placed on the planks of the ships, does not affect the magnitude of the fall, which is inserted in a verbal context marked by exalted images, solemn hyperboles and eloquent contrasts, creating, in the text, the juxtaposition and fusion of the grotesque with the sublime, proposed by Victor Hugo in the preface to Cromwell, cornerstone of French Romanticism.

A reader of Baudelaire, Drummond has commented well on “Seven-Faced Poem,” translated as “Seven-Sided Poem” by Elizabeth Bishop. Keeping in mind what Hannah Arendt said about the untranslatable in the verses of Rilke, and Eduardo F. Coutinho’s considerations, it is important to note, still in the company of the extraordinary poetry reader Marlene de Castro Correia, that “[i]f there is a variant between Carlos and Earl—the name of one does not rhyme with ‘world,’ the other’s name does—an invariant, however, approximates them: both are brothers in the irresolution of the world” (Ibid.: 117). Universe, vast universe, if I had been named Eugene that would not be what I mean but it would go into verse Universe, vast universe, my heart is vaster. Bishop, 1983: 243

In English, Carlos is not called Charles, Drummond de Andrade, of course, already has an identity and is seen in his own time—When I was born, one of the crooked/angels who live in shadow, said:/Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life. But the Earl that rhymes with world is now called Eugene. He is named Eugene, however, not to rhyme with universe, but rather, by an agile re-­distribution of the verses, now seven in the stanza, to better pair with mean. This makes sense: it signifies that translation is, in fact, a refined work of metapoetic creation in which the metalinguistic

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knowledge counts less, and the choice of a unique variant counts more: a significant echo in the repertoire of the mother tongue. “Only the mother tongue remains,” Hannah Arendt affirms in a well-­known interview (Arendt, 2009: 123). That said, the verses of the “Universe vast Universe”, among the other translated poems, are the only ones transcribed into Portuguese in a footnote. Gauche, bien sûr, for the North American reading public, has neither translation nor note. In the other few notes, there is simply data of an informative character about some word, expression or local custom. There are, as well, translations by Manuel Bandeira, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Joaquim Cardozo, Vinicius de Moraes, and the North American poet Bishop who lived in Brazil for 20 years, between Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais state. About Bandeira’s presence (1886–1968) among the Brazilian poets translated by an English writer, it is worth mentioning what Otto Maria Carpeaux says about his poetry in the prologue to the Mexican edition of Panorama de la poesía brasileña, 1951, citing Blake, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/And Eternity in an hour”: “Esos versos de Blake podrían servir de epígrafe a la poesía definitiva de Bandeira. Cuando derribaron su vieja casa en el barrio sombrío de Lapa, en Río de Janeiro, el poeta elegíaco escribió este poema que aún no se ha recogido en libro.” (These verses by Blake could serve as epigraph to Bandeira’s definitive poetry. When his old house, in the shadowy neighborhood of Lapa, in Rio de Janeiro, was brought down, the elegiac poet wrote this poem, which has not yet been collected into book).” Citing the poem “Last Song of the Alley,” he concludes: “Creo que este poema responde a la definición wordsworthiana de la poesía: Emotion recollected in tranquility.” (I believe this poem responds to the Wordsworthean definition of poetry: “Emotion recollected in tranquility” (Bandeira, 1951: IX). Carpeaux, an Austrian-­born, naturalized Brazilian, literary critic, essayist, journalist, author of an Olympian History of Western Literature, recognizes, in the “elegiac” Bandeira, a humanist of equal value, due to his love of the universal language of poetry. Surely for this same reason, another great poet of the language, Ruy Belo, pays a moving homage to Bandeira: All years are years of death. But 1968 is a most particular one for Portuguese poetry or, what means the same to me, to all poetry in the Portuguese language. Manuel Bandeira died: our Dean, the best, our patron saint. For two years we had been celebrating his birthday in Portugal. This year that we didn’t do it, he is gone. He wanted to die, and he did. Belo, 2002: 257

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Returning to the maintenance and to the meaning of gauche in the original French, a space opens for a more serious question, very much of interest to the progress of the topic in discussion, formulated by José Guilherme Merquior in Reason for the Poem, 1965, in an essay with a significant title, “Modernist Poetry”: A great part of the assault on Modernism was maintained with the attempt of depreciating its revolution by denouncing its use of foreign expressions. Modernism was said to have been as foreign as our other cultural fads. Modernism was yet one more mimetic “monkey see, monkey do.” But it is above all here that it is necessary to judge it, not for its agenda (sometimes disastrous), but rather for its works, that were by far superior to the mistakes and even also to the successes of its programs: what this achievement tells us allows us to affirm serenely the nationality of 1922, because it gives us much less futurism, much less any kind of passing “experimentalism”—than healthy Brazilian interpenetration, attachment to the land and togetherness of the people. In contrast, the import was almost nothing; the conquest of Brazil became one of the glories of this poetry. Merquior, 1965:24

To read “modernist poetry” today (the essay of 1962, still current, calls for re-­reading), according to Merquior’s choice, clearly exposed in the first citation, implies, on the one hand, the understanding of a work (in the singular) still in progress and, on the other hand, not the judgment of the programs (in the plural) of the so-­called “heroic phase” dictated in a programmatic form in the “Anthropofagist Manifesto” by Oswald de Andrade in 1928, and in the same year, told in the fictional-­mythical form in Macunaíma by Mario de Andrade. It implies an aesthetic less interested in the “assault” on the modernist-­isms manifestos and an ethic more attentive to the responsible reading of modern Brazilian literature. And the implicit reference, suspended by the ellipses, a sign of its almost public-­domain status, of a verse-­manifesto of Manuel Bandeira’s that sends us to another one equally emblematic, only underlines the critic’s option for a vision of Brazil via literature. Through the elliptical image, “monkey see, monkey do” already mentioned, and the Shakespearean buffoonery, about to be mentioned, the dialogue with the revolutionary Bandeira of the “Poetics” is maintained firmly, in tense, even polemical terms: I am fed up with the lyricism that interrupts and goes to the dictionary to check on the national character of a word. Down with the purists

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[Estou farto do lirismo que para e vai averiguar no dicionário o cunho vernáculo de um vocábulo. Abaixo os puristas Todas as palavras sobretudo os barbarismos universais Todas as construções sobretudo as sintaxes de exceção Todos os ritmos sobretudo os inumeráveis Estou farto do lirismo namorador (. . .) Quero antes o lirismo dos loucos O lirismo dos bêbedos O lirismo difícil e pungente dos bêbedos O lirismo dos clowns de Shakespeare]

and the memorialist Bandeira of the “Evocation of Recife”: Life did not reach me through newspapers or books It came through the people’s mouth in the people’s tongue The correct Portuguese of the people Because they are able to speak the smooth Portuguese of Brazil As to us What we do Is to be monkeys Of the syntax of Portugal [A vida não me chegava pelos jornais nem pelos livros Vinha da boca do povo na língua errada do povo Língua certa do povo Porque ele é que fala gostoso o português do Brasil Ao passo que nós O que fazemos É macaquear A sintaxe lusíada.] Bandeira, 1983: 207 and 213

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Down with the epic history of the heroes of Camões.3 Hooray for the lyricism of Shakespeare’s fools.4 The bibliography of the “monkeys” is favored against the language of the colonizer in the name of the “Brazilian,” the “correct Portuguese spoken by the people.” Bandeira’s verses are an eloquent manifesto. Books that are considered classic today, on the history (Coutinho, A., 1964) and the formation (Candido, 1993) of Brazilian literature, would fill pages of notes in academic dissertations about the meaning of, or what one understands by “modernism,” “futurism,” “experimentalism,” “humorism,” “formalism.” Merquior’s citations grant these considerations. In this essay, critical verses by Bandeira encourage present-­day reflections on polemical issues and concepts that are as contradictory as ‘national’ and ‘importation’. What could it mean, the desire to have the lyricism above all lyricisms: the lyricism of Shakespeare’s fools? For far too long there has been an open parenthesis on the presence of French in Drummond’s poetry. Is it the import of foreignism? A work of assembling, a game of cutting and collage animated by the kinetic arts, like the cinema, in the beginning of the twentieth century? This is a more coherent question. Ettore Finazzi-Agrò, an Italian researcher and professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of Rome (“La Sapienza”) has the perspective of an outsider looking in. This is ideal when attempting to answer questions about “cultural differences and exchanges,” “relationship, appropriation or distancing of the European culture,” and for revisiting the cosmopolitan Brazilian modernism project, in which, concerning political-­cultural negotiations, the cannibalistic emulation of the other (or “importation”—Melquior) is substituted for an exchange between symbolic social identities in a globalized era. In the volume Between Times: Mapping the History of the Brazilian Culture, 2013, in which he practices with rigor and sensibility the links between critical methodology and textual reading (which is rare), in the chapter “Economy in Modernity: prodigality and poverty” and section “Corrupter of words,” Finazzi-Agrò interprets Bandeira’s attraction to the masses: In Twelfth Night (III.i, ll. 32–37), to a question intended only to verify his identity (“Are not thou the Lady Olivia’s fool”?), the fool Feste answers in this On the condemnation of the Portuguese colonization of Brazil, see Holanda, Santiago, Silveira. On Shakespeare’s superiority to Camões, cf. the judgment of António José Saraiva: “Camões is one of the greatest lyric poets of the West, but not a great dramatist, nor a great narrator. He is at the level of a Petrarch, but not of a Fernão Lopes or a Shakespeare.” Saraiva, 1992: 69. Estudos, 1992, p. 69.

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manner: “I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words”)—and this is, in my opinion, the lyricism of the Shakespearean fool that Bandeira takes as model: it is this activity of corruption of the word and meaning, it is this action of tearing apart the established linguistic and logic reasonings that the poet practices in his poetry. Finazzi-Agrò, 2013: 282

With the information in this chapter, in the section “Love, the poetry of the angels,” with verses from the Ninth Duino Elegy as epigraph, there is a sharp analysis of Bandeira’s angels—yes, there is: some of them even drive the possessed to screaming, in French, “Je vois des anges! Je vois des anges!”—, it is important to reiterate the name as a question of metapoetic character. Taking Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the protagonist of the most dramatic play on the problem of identity for the modern subject in world literature—“To be or not to be, that is the question”—one can watch, by the feet of the crooked angel, the extraordinary spectacle of, and about, this crisis in modernity. In the Portuguese tongue, this means, on the one hand, to have spent the beginning of the twentieth century in the company of the parodic, modernist version of Oswald de Andrade—Tupy or not tupy, that is the question—; of the self-­portrait of Mario de Sá-Carneiro—“I am not me, neither am I the other,/I am something in between./The pillar of the bridge of tedium/that travels from me to the other” (2015:63)—and of the poetic persona (the “drama within us”) of Fernando Pessoa—“The poet is a faker” (1965: 164). However, it also means to be still on the road, carrying one’s belongings, in sum, the weight of the dialectical tension between the concept of national identity (modernists versus Romantics) and the idea of belonging to Portuguese culture (cosmopolitanism versus provincialism).7 A lot of experts affirm Luís Vaz de Camões to be the greatest poet of the Portuguese language. In a light and lively conversation going on, suddenly, so very suddenly, one could hear among the interlocutors the most devastating question ever asked to a person about his or her identity in the Western world. And this question was asked in Portuguese. So great is his deed that, in a single flash of insight, not like the Greek hero Ulysses, since he does not exterminate the monster that he faces, but rather transforms him into a figure not belonging to Classic rhetoric, but into the most elevated image, into the most beautiful Boaventura de Sousa Santos states in “Modernity, Identity and Frontier Culture”: “In such a zone, the possibilities of identification and cultural creation are all immense, equally superficial, and equally subvertible: the anthropophagy that Oswald de Andrade attributed to Brazilian culture and that I think also characterizes Portuguese culture in its entirety” (Santos, 1995: 153)

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homage to the power of the dialogue between adversaries in which, responsibly, in the modernity that dawns, brute force does not triumph. It concerns the question that Vasco da Gama, the captain of the Portuguese armada, asks the allegorical figure of the Cape of Good Hope, in the figure of Adamastor in the epic poem The Lusiads. As the monster responds to the question, he is pierced, not by the sword, but by Gama’s speech, which repels him. It is, in sum, the humanist allegory of the discovery of the maritime route to India by the Portuguese. Since that day, history changed and so did geography (Silveira, 2008: 50–51). Like all great history, this one has many more tangles than this summary reveals about the encounter between Vasco da Gama the hero of The Lusiads by Camões, and the Cape, the “rock in the middle of the road, as Dantesque as Drummondean. Especially nowadays, when the frontiers between the Orient and the Occident are cleaving. Without ignoring Eurocentric ideology (the idea of Europe as superior to the rest of the world, in Camões’s poem) but pointing to it, in fact, in order to keep alive the focus of interest of the essay on the interlocution between texts; it is pertinent to imagine that the presentation, on stage, of a character extracted from the tragic pages of the Portuguese colonization in the Brazilian Northeast, is, even though chronologically removed, an answer to Gama, to colonialism in its tragic-­comic phonetic variant, Coronelism8. And its self-­presentation comes by the hand of the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–1999), whose bio-­ bibliography, that is, the man and his oeuvre, reveals a long experience of living in Spain and Portugal, and a passionate reading experience of the medieval Iberian collection of poems and songs: I asked him:—“Who are you?” For this stupendous Body, has certainly amazed me! [Lhe disse eu:—“Quem és tu?” Que este estupendo Corpo, certo me tem maravilhado!] Os Lusíadas: V, 49: 3 —my name is Severino I got no other in baptism. [— o meu nome é Severino Não tenho outro de pia.] Melo Neto, 1995: 171

Landowners in the Brazilian Northeast used to be called ‘colonels’.

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There is a question of and about the name in modern poetry. And this essay, image pulling image with no apparent intention, goes ahead with its research. Perhaps to a young reader it appears to be ethically incorrect to say that one is enchanted by the appearance of the body of one of those who claims to be one of the severe, barren lives:   And if we are Severines Equal in everything in life, we die an equal death, the same severe death: which is a death that one dies of old age before one is twenty, of hunger, a bit every day (of weakness and of disease because the severe death attacks at any age, attacks even the unborn) [E se somos Severinos iguais em tudo na vida, morremos de morte igual, mesma morte severina: que é a morte de que se morre de velhice antes dos vinte, de fome um pouco por dia (de fraqueza e de doença é que a morte severina ataca em qualquer idade, e até gente não nascida)] Ibid.: 172

It is either scorn or curse. The informed reader finds in the body of the migrant the sarcastic spirit of a good connoisseur of Galician-Portuguese medieval poetry. Or, for this reason, perhaps it is a synchronic encounter between Camões’s Gama and Cabral’s Severino in the labyrinth of the Babelian library of Borges’s Fictions (1944): Jorge Luís, of Portuguese ancestry, in the reading room where the Book, by the magic of Mallarméan strategy—Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre9—and by the production of the dialectical image of Walter Benjamin—“the read image, that is, the image at the moment of www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/personnage/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9/131354.

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cognoscibility, carries, at the highest level, the mark of the critical and dangerous moment, subjacent to all reading” (Benjamin, 2006, 505 [N3,1]); an encounter in which the precursor becomes an epigone and the epigone becomes the precursor, in a metamorfic-­performatic-chiastic game which is, after all, the modern manner of keeping the tradition alive. The tradition of Why Read the Classic (Calvino); Camões, reader of Severino; Cabral, author of Adamastor: in the same sense in which Ruy Belo says that the Drummond of “The Machine of the World” “can very well be the introduction to Camões” (Belo, 2002: 289). Thus, to the veteran reader, accustomed to education by the stone, in terms aesthetically coherent, a classic that is marveled at, admired, even in the etymological sense, by those who know how to read in this body, the extraordinary corpus of personal experience, metalinguistic, and of cultural experience, metapoetics, in which inventiveness (Northeastern) and art (Iberian) intercross. “As there are many Severinos,” destined by a common ancestry (familiar: “Severino of Maria”) or by a communitarian, political destination (“on account of a coronel/that was called Zacarias”), the migrant Severino, of many names and from different places along the crossing/journey—from “[w]here the backlands are even drier” all the way to “Recife, where the river disappears”—decides to explain “to the reader who he is for what purpose he is going.” As the Brazilian critic Luiz Costa Lima says, “the commonly used process in Cabral, of an internal unfolding of the image, here it is transposed to the name of the character” (Lima, 1995:267) who introduces himself to himself in a linguistic gesture in which he says to be expressively adversarial and, thus, creating another name (Gastâo Cruz), unique among so many severe people: So that Your Highnesses get to know me better and can better accompany the history of my life, I become now the Severine a migrant, in your presence. [Mas, para que me conheçam melhor Vossas Senhorias e melhor possam seguir a história de minha vida, passo a ser o Severino que em vossa presença emigra.] Melo Neto, 1995: 172

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Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão (1938–2007), a notable Portuguese poet among the world’s poets, reader of João Cabral de Melo Neto in her first books—in Barcas Novas (New Boats) (1967), for example (This morning is a name (. . .)/ Not the sun’s/but of whoever names it”), keeps the flame alive of the image in progress, in “Of Names,” at the same time a dialogue with the poet of “Weaving a morning” and with the others in interlocution here: We name names and never the creatures or the things. Those receive just an echo. Despite that, they become unique and are seen at their own moment [Nomeamos os nomes e nunca as criaturas ou as coisas. Essas recebem apenas o eco. Todavia tornam-­se únicas e são vistas no seu próprio tempo.] Brandão, 2006:715

Rainer Maria Rilke, Herberto Helder, Carlos Drummond de Andrade are question-­poets, that is, they are curious, and animate this dialogue between Brazilian poetry and world poetry. Elizabeth Bishop, equally a question-­poet, rejoins again her own kin-­group. And it is interesting to return to her Translations, in which, of Cabral’s poems, the choice is Death and Severe Life, and of its sections, the first, the one in which, of the verses just transcribed above, the name requires again a refined work of metapoetic solution, that is, of creation upon creation, with no metalinguistic disregard, however. For example: “because of a certain colonel.*” And in a note: * “Colonel” means any big land owner, not necessarily a real colonel (ibid.: 233). “To ask ‘who am I’ is a slave’s question; to ask ‘who calls for me’ is a free man’s question” (Llansol, 1985:129–130). Extracted from the Hegelian dialectics of the master and the slave, this maxim of another great Portuguese writer, Maria Gabriel Llansol (1931–2008), brings us back to the topic of Drummond, suspended by the question (or parenthesis) concerning the use of French in his poems, through an intervention of Silviano Santiago, the author of the Borgesian “Eça, author of Madame Bovary,” and A Literature in the Tropics (1978): titles doubly meaningful, in a volume that contains the deconstructive “The Space in-Between of the Latin-American discourse.” If there is a contradiction between what is said and Santiago’s intervention, it is because the reading of the links

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between the question of the name in modern poetry and the “introduction” of the name Severino, originating from the peninsular medieval play, but equally articulated within the poetics of modernity, does not seem to oppose the “Mallarmean aesthetic then in force.” That is, the one in One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin without any “remains of subjectivity” between the composition of the work and the syntax of the world. Bandeira argues in the Itinerary of Pasárgada—via Marcella Lopes Guimarães10—with Mallarmé’s words saying that “in literature the poetry is in the words, it is made with words and not ideas or feelings”, however, that “it is through the force of feeling or through the tension of the spirit that the combinations of words where there is a poetic charge rescue the poet” (Bandeira, 1984: 30–31). Santiago says: In the 1950s, Drummond passes the baton, in the relay of social criticism, to João Cabral de Melo Neto. The latter, upon abandoning the aesthetic of Mallarmé, then in force, he seeks a poetry of greater political efficiency. Uneasy about the ethical and ideological engagement that the subject of the poem might maintain with the topic addressed, João Cabral resolves to withdraw, from the poetic discourse, all reminiscences of subjectivity, as happens in the dramatic poem “Death and Severe Life of Severino.” As the good phenomenologist that he is, if one takes into consideration the discussion on poetic theory that is on the sign “Psychology of Composition,” Cabral exposes Northeastern misery as it is, and not how the diplomat or the poet sees it. Santiago, 2013:12

Rosa Martelo, Portuguese essayist, agrees with what is said by Santiago: “the posterior texts are the densification of this project [the abandonment of the ‘inner space of the world’]. In Agrestes (Wilderness), João Cabral attributes to Marianne Moore a similar preoccupation (or the same?): ‘And then she showed, (. . .)/that poetry isn’t from inside,/that it is like a house, from the outside;/that although one lives inside/it needs to be built (. . .)”. Martelo, 1990:41

Of the dialogue between both, Costa Lima’s affirmation is accentuated: that “Cabral’s betrayal of Mallarmé is not explainable by the mere desire of differentiating himself stylistically,” that he desires and proposes himself as a builder who rejects nothing, but rather, makes use of everything used by the other builders” (Lima, 1995: 213). Finally, concerning the conversation (explicit or not) between readers with a rigorous university upbringing, it is agreed that www.literistorias.org.

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the progressive radicalization of the process of writing of this author—a violent opposer of the poetry of expression, ‘anti-­lyric’—is marked by successive syntheses, resulting from the analysis of numerous lines of force that conditioned the poetic evolution of Symbolism up to our days, still passing through a more traditional style, origins of which we can locate in the medieval Hispanic collections. Martelo, 1990:3011

With this said, finally closing the open parenthesis, Drummond is a poet that maintains a permanent state of conversation about the political responsibility of being in the world as a subject of language, and of being in the world as a poet, a subject of the language about language. “Speaking to Angels who speak to no one,” Mario was an Anglo-Germanic humanist with a strong taste for French, the declining language of culture in the last century. He produced ironic pointers such as “La possession du monde” in which, in Rio de Janeiro, Georges Duhamel, “the” eminent neurologist, “instead of visiting the tourist places,” spent the whole morning in my backyard./Or rather, in the neighboring yard to my yard” [passou a manhã inteira no meu quintal./Ou antes, no quintal vizinho do meu quintal] and in another gesture of a similarly surprising nature, “amidst the erudite scientific dissertation” [em meio à erudita dissertação científica] rises up, points out, and, instead of “entrusting the message of Europe/to the captive hearts of young America . . .” [confiar a mensagem da Europa/aos corações cativos da jovem América. . .], points out and asks for “ce cocasse fruit Jaune”. (Ibid.: 1967: 108) The desire to eat from the neighbor’s yard where every planted seed grows, or rather, where if you point at the other’s fruit, it becomes yours, sounds like a parody of the letter on the discovery of Brazil to the Portuguese king by Pero Vaz de Caminha, in 1500.12 And the dimension of the yard in the space of the culture in the Portuguese language can be configured in the imaginary distance between a few verses of Alberto Caeiro to others of Manuel Bandeira. And the verses of the heteronym of Fernando Pessoa even seem to have been written because For Antônio Carlos Secchin, the network of resonances launched by the poet is projected clearly beyond the scope of Brazilian literature; his great interlocutors are English-­language writers: Marianne Moore, George Crabbe, Thomas Hardy, William Empson, W. H. Auden, Denton Welch. On a much more modest scale, French literature is present with Mallarmé and Valéry (the latter as an essayist, not a poet (Secchin 2014: 344). According to Luiz Costa Lima: “At the end of this tour, we have just defined the basic foreign third party—Mallarmé, Valéry, Guillén—that is projected and rectified in Cabral” (1995: 246). 12 “This land, Sir [. . .] is so delightful that we wish to make use of it, everything here is in abundance due to the waters” [Esta terra Senhor (. . .) em tal maneira he graciosa que querendoa aproueitar darsea neela tudo per bem das agoas que tem (. . .) (Caminha, 1990: 109–110) 11

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Bandeira’s were read in Borges’s Library of Babel, where “every present is determined by those images that are synchronic to it: each ‘now’ is the now of a determined cognoscibility. Thus, while the relation of the present with the past is purely temporal, the one happening now is dialectic—not of temporal nature, but imagerial” (Benjamin, 2006: 505 [N3,1]). When I fell asleep yesterday It was Saint John’s night There was delight and rumor Blasting of fireworks sparklers Voices, singing and laughs By the side of the blazing fires. [Quando ontem adormeci Na noite de São João Havia alegria e rumor Estrondos de bombas luzes de Bengala Vozes, cantigas e risos Ao pé das fogueiras acesas.] Bandeira, 1983:217 It’s Saint John’s night beyond the wall of my yard. By me, I remain without the Saint John’s night. Because it only happens where it’s celebrated. For me, there is a shadow of light of fires in the night, The noise of laughs, the tapping of heels. And a casual cry unaware of me. [Noite de S. João para além do muro do meu quintal. Do lado de cá, eu sem noite de S. João. Porque há S. João onde o festejam. Para mim há uma sombra de luz de fogueiras na noite, Um ruído de gargalhadas, os baques dos saltos. E um grito casual de quem não sabe que eu existo.] Pessoa, 1965:232

Still today, the chapter about the visit is a good motif for poetic fictions of the relations between the Portuguese house and the Brazilian house: “That which seems sometimes/a sign on the face/is the house of the world” (Jorge, 2008:65). In the next section, we have news of a very special encounter, “[o]n the fourth new part,” in Brazil: the only reference, without a name in fact, to Pedro Álvares Cabral’s discovery of Brazil in The Lusiads. And so it is written:

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From this small Lusitan house:   (. . .) In the fourth part, he plows the fields: And, were there more world, he’d arrive there. [Desta pequena casa Lusitana: (. . .) Na quarta parte nova os campos ara: E, se mais mundo houvera, lá chegara.] Lusíadas, VII: 14, 4, 7, 8

“World world vast world” of the other, at which they arrive empty and they return to theirs filled with everything in the come-­and-go of the little boat that goes loaded with “A of Adventures” to “H of Hollanders” and that returns filled to the brim with “Indians, exiled and redwood,” in the plunder of the “Country’s History” (title of the poem), the delightful parody by Oswald de Andrade about the colonization of Brazil (Andrade, 1966: 148).

The house of the world Going through the 1900s, attentive to the classic and modernist contexts, where he weaves his textuality, Carlos de Oliveira (1921–1981) is a poet who distinguishes himself by his refinement in composing permanently changing verses. “Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” one of his poems from On the Left Side (1968), is a good portrait in verse of the Brazilian poet of the twentieth century. It is a single solid stanza of fourteen lines, a sonnet, in the manner of Oliveira, who, to parody the celebrated verses of the one portrayed, fed up with being modern, he will be “Eternal” (Andrade, 1967: 284). Carlos Drummond de Andrade He knows how to sow the wind where prosper his corn, his cattle, a farmer of the air used to the written archetype of the crop, my onomastic pride left

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on the other bank of the sea when I left to tend the crops on this side and syllabically got lost. [Sabe lavrar o vento onde prosperam o seu milho, o seu gado, fazendeiro do ar habituado ao arquétipo escrito da lavoura, meu orgulho onomástico deixado na outra margem do mar quando parti para cuidar das lavras deste lado e silabicamente me perdi.] Oliveira, 2003: 188

In the first seven lines, a perfect half of the following seven ones that complete the poem, which resparks our curiosity about “The Seven-Faced Poem,” Drummond, the “farmer of the air,” is introduced to us, in his time (line four), like an already radical (meaning of the root) figuration of the other, in his time, his (Andrade’s) and his (Oliveira’s), mine (“my onomastic pride”). His at his time, equally mine (as if he had said), our time, since the same name identifies us, since our poetic work unites us, in the so-­dreamed harmony between the prosperity of the “goods” and the property of the “blood.” Aware, thus, of the archetypal image of the Farmer of the Air Carlos Drummond de Andrade perhaps there isn’t a portrait as impressive as the recording of the eight sections of “The Wealth/Goods/and the Blood” (Clear Enigma, 1951). It seems, equally, that the image of the portrayed, according to Carlos de Oliveira, fits well with his own, while the “farmer of the air,” that is, the poetic laborer, as one reads in the quartet of The Pocket Guitar (1952), under the title “To Oneself ”: The farmers of the air. . . they sow crops of pure absence, and the strange cattle

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that into the night graze search for a recollection of the future already past. [Os fazendeiros do ar . . . eles semeiam roças de pura ausência, e o estranho gado que pela noite a dentro anda campeiam é um lembrar do futuro já passado.] Andrade, 1967: 393

Curiously coincidental with the prologue of The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, by Eric Hobsbawm, entitled “The Century: Aerial View,” what draws our attention here is that, in the first poem of the first book by Oliveira, Tourism, 1942, “Infancy,” one reads “[a]nd the land, the infancy,/grow/ in their garden/aerial” [Infância”, se leia, “[e] a terra, a infância,/crescem/no seu jardim/aéreo] (2003: 10). Coincidentally, in Drummond’s bio-­bibliographic terms, this name-­image of himself, “farmer of the air,” keeps gathering meaning from the second poem of his first book, “Infancy,” Some Poetry, 1930. In the formative years, in which the father works the field, but does not work in the field—there are slaves for that—the mother sews (cose) with an “s,” the old black woman sizzles (coze) with a “z,” the son educates himself by the “air” of the new times, the Book, he is a Reader, gets accustomed to the “written archetype of the crop” through the endless reading of the wonderful world of the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: Over yonder my father toiled in the fields without end of the farm. I had no idea that my history was more beautiful than Robinson Crusoe’s. [Lá longe meu pai campeava no mato sem fim da fazenda. E eu não sabia que minha história era mais bonita do que a de Robinson Crusoé. Andrade, 1967: 54

Later on, in a book from his mature period, which implies that he knows politics but thinks in poetry, The Rose of the People, set during the post-­war years from1945, the discord between the subject and the times, where the present “is a remembrance of the future already past,” causes awe of another nature.Compared to the reading of Defoe, the wonderful world of the past is strange now. “A Portrait of the Family,” for example:

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This family portrait is a bit dusty One can no longer see on the father’s face how much money he made. (. . .) the relatives, dead or alive. I cannot make out those already gone from those that remained. The only thing I perceive Is the strange idea of a family traveling through the flesh. [Este retrato de família está um tanto empoeirado. Já não se vê no rosto do pai quanto dinheiro ele ganhou. (. . .) os parentes mortos e vivos. Já não distingo os que se foram dos que restaram. Percebo apenas A estranha ideia de família viajando através da carne.] Andrade, 1967:181

Between the field and the city, to talk about “traveling through flesh” in a geminated Portuguese house, is like talking about a lasso in a hanged man’s house, and takes the spirit back to the seven lines that complete the fourteen-­line stanza of the poem “Carlos Drummond de Andrade” by Carlos de Oliveira. Between the banks of the Atlantic, Oliveira (Olea europaea) and Andrade (Persea venosa, native of Brazil) are names of trees. “On the other bank of the ocean” and “in the field at this side,” through sea or through land, they meet. The third bank of the ocean is yet to be invented. So, with “double dentures,” there appears, in its entirety, the ethically fair figure of the poet Carlos de Oliveira: a “wayfarer,” in former times a voyager, born in the North of Brazil: Belém in Pará state, and taken back by his emigrant parents to his Portuguese house at the age of two. He says of himself now lost, because in search of the just time, in the fitness of language of the poetic work: “I belong to a genus of Portuguese/that after the discovery of the Indies/ ended up without jobs” [Pertenço a um género de portugueses/Que depois de estar a Índia descoberta/Ficaram sem trabalho]. In these lines from the collection “Opiary,” by Álvaro de Campos (a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa)—published

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in the programmatic journal of Portuguese modernism, Orpheus 1, 1915— desolate images of a lost generation evoke the Waste Land of Eliot, and tell us about the voyager and the wayfarer in Portuguese literature and, through crossed roads, of the wayfarer and of the migrant in Brazilian literature: in a sense, of the Carlos and Severinos that emigrate in both literatures. The verses of the poet of “Salute to Walt Whitman” (Álvaro de Campos) (“I do not know if my true place is in the world or in your verses” [Não sei se o meu lugar real é no mundo ou nos teus versos]), if compared to the titles of the collected poems of Carlos de Oliveira, Poetic Work, and to the ones of Herberto Helder, The Singing Craft, they would urgently inform of the Portuguese cultural economy, of the poet’s unemployment before the bankruptcy of the sea in the cartography of the structuring metaphor of the glorious Portuguese destiny. Were we to link the verses of de Campos to the opening line of Drummond’s “Elegy”—“I gained (lost) my day”—then they would also alert us to the “Irritated Workshop” of the contract, or rather of the contradiction without agreement between what is the property of poetic production and what is imposed as the prosperity of public affairs (Drummond was a civil servant), human affairs, capitalist society, peripheral economies such as Portuguese and Brazilian, victims of violent contemporary dictatorships and constant blows to democracy. Dark times, of refugees, as with Brazil at the moment, are the right time to remember the lines of the Romanceiro da Inconfidencia (Poems of the Conspiracy 1953) by Cecília Meireles, lines that come back to the streets, among voices and posters, with the sole purpose of keeping alive the lesson of Liberty, of Liberté, taught by the well-­known lines (1942) by Paul Eluard: lines against the wars that he fought and lived through, lines learned in the verses of Meireles, along with the wisdom of Walter Benjamin that says that “the historical manifestation of the images says, thus, not only that they belong to a certain epoch, but above all, that they only become legible in a specific epoch.” These are, once more, Benjamin’s words, that tell us even more: “only the dialectic images are authentically historic, that is, non-­archaic images.” These are images that require, by the manifesting legibility in the present— the re-­reading of the Minas Conspiracy of the eighteenth century, in the Republican Brazil of the twenty-­first century—fairness in judgment and a sense of responsibility. They are images that move, when read in dialogues, in the name of Liberty and in attention to the meaning of the Name, in this essay: Et par le pouvoir d’un mot/Je recommence ma vie/Je suis né pour te connaître/

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Pour te nommer/Liberté13—“(Liberty- this word,/that is fed by human dreams:/ that none can explain,/and none that does not understand it!)” (Meireles, 1994:528). About the bureaucracy of/in the totalitarian regimes, Hannah Arendt wrote the formidable Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). In another classic on this subject, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt says that the trick used by Himmler to resolve problems of conscience caused by the extermination of the Jews, “consisted in inverting the direction of these instincts, making them point to the individuals themselves. Thus, instead of saying ‘What terrible things I did to people!’, the assassins could say ‘What terrible things I had to see while executing my duties, how this task weighs upon my shoulders!’ ” (Arendt, 2013: 122). This phrase of tragic effect belonging to the Minister of the Interior of the Third Reich, according to the ethic of responsibility between writing and reading in the context of the dialogue between Brazilian poetry and world poetry in the twentieth century, would test the verses of Carlos de Oliveira—“The farmers (. . .) pass by on the sand and their tracks disappear quite fast, ‘but they carry upon their shoulder the stone for my home (the child thinks obscurely) and my future tombstone’ ” [Os camponeses (. . .) passam por sobre a areia e as pègadas somem-­se depressa, ‘mas carregam aos ombros a pedra do meu lar (pensa a criança obscuramente) e a minha lápide future] (2003: 190). Also, these celebrated lines by Carlos Drummond de Andrade: “Your shoulders bear the world/and it weighs no more than the hand of a child” [Teus ombros suportam o mundo/e ele não pesa mais que a mão de uma criança] (1967: 111). Putting them to the test, pushing them to the limit of political consciousness (thinking the world and weighing their forces from childhood to old age), coupled with what Hannah Arendt says about the Nazi officer, may result in a dangerous exercise, a test of fire to know and think the discontent, the restlessness, in “dark times,” between the metaphor and the commonplace, between irony and scorn, between the Name and the World, between the experience of Poetry and existence in the world. We mustn’t forget that 189 years ago, in 1827, Goethe said that: “National literature is now rather a meaningless term: the epoch of World literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach” (Goethe, 1998: 165).

www.poetica.fr/poeme-279/liberte-­paul-eluard.

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Elegy, allegro Mallarmé’s importance for Brazilian criticism can be measured by the attention that two scholars dedicate to him. One should compare the titles of Silviano Santiago and Luiz Costa Lima. Of the latter, “The consequent betrayal [of Mallarmé] or the poetry of Cabral,” Lira and Antilira; and the former, “The assassination of Mallarmé,” A Literature in the Tropics: Santiago’s title becomes even more significant when one of the assassins is another critic and poet—a reader of Drummond—Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna (cf. Sant’anna, 1980: 39), and the reason for the crime is the desertion of the “inner space of the world,” the discrediting in the culture and in books: “I know that one does not do everything pour aboutir à un livre,/I’d rather have life. Life/that is out there” (Santiago, 2000: 198). Rilke’s importance for Brazilian poetry can be measured by means of two extreme examples of celebration, interestingly enough at the hands of two female poets. The renowned Cecília Meireles, in “Elegy” (food for the dead, in the classical manner) with an epigraph from the Letters to a Young Poet; and Angélica Freitas, an irreverent young poet, extremely contemporaneous, with her “Rilke Shake,” an up-­to-date cannibalistic annotation with a fast-­food flavor: “one Rilke Shake coming up” (Freitas, 2007: 39). “He saw in a different way” (Rilke, 2013: 123). Robert Musilno observes in “A speech at the death of Rainer Maria Rilke.” It is very important, in the conclusion of the essay, to keep one’s eyes open to the joy in which Angélica(!) blends her rilkeshake and the irony with which Sant’Anna(!), 27 years ago, rebounds, now against the Rilkean “angelicism,”14 in “Rainer Maria Rilke and I,” in a book whose title is still awaiting answers, What Country is This? Amidst the urban barbarity contemporary to him, he says, already fed up, that he cannot go on “talking about things that the European talks about” (Sant’Anna, 1980:39), in a clear veto to Drummond’s verse in “Chastity.” In such an arrangement between seriousness and the irreverence of an amorous intimation, one hears the parody of the (Mallarmean) musician Antonio Maria of his great success “Nobody Loves Me,” of which the first phrase of the lyrics, “Nobody loves me, nobody cares,” has a new rhyme,“nobody calls me Baudelaire,” which, in the Portuguese of Brazil, is a “solution” that is in tune.

On this theme in Portuguese literature see: Ana Hatherly, Rilkeana, 1999, variações poéticas sobre as Elegias de Duíno; Eduardo Lourenço, “Angelismo e Poesia”. Tempo e Poesia. Porto: Inova, 1974. pp. 149–163.

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Parodying Caeiro: a World Poetry is not my idea; my idea of World Poetry is what is my idea. Mallarmé, Rilke, Baudelaire are not up to the dialogue between Drummond, Bandeira, Cabral, Cecília and World Poetry in the twentieth century. The former represent, image after image, through the reading of the critics presented here and the de-­reading of the angelicism by a veteran poet and by a younger female poet: he from 1937, she from 1973 (funny the inversion of the numbers, isn’t it?), what there is of most interesting in the globalized Brazil, that is still worth reading in order to believe.

Works cited Alexandre, António Franco. Poemas. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim. 1996. Amoroso, Maria Betânia. Murilo Mendes: o poeta brasileiro de Roma. Juiz de Fora/São Paulo: UNESP, 2013. Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. Obra completa. 2ed. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1967. Andrade, Oswald de. Poesias reunidas. São Paulo: Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1966. Arendt, Hannah. Entre o passado e o futuro. 7ed. Trans. by Mauro W. Barbosa. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013. ——. Eichmann em Jerusalém: um relato sobre a banalidade do mal. 13° reprint. Trans. José Rubens Siqueira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013. ——. Homens em tempos sombrios. Trans. Denise Bottmann. São Paulo: Companhia de Bolso, 2010. ——. A dignidade da política. Trans. Helena Martins et al. Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2009. Bandeira, Manuel. Itinerário de Pasárgada. 4ed. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984. ——. Poesia completa e prosa. 4ed. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1983. ——. Panorama de la poesía brasileña. Trans. Ernestina de Champourcín. MéxicoBuenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951. Belo, Ruy. Na senda da poesia. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. Passagens. Trans. Irene Aron e Cleonice Mourão. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2006. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems 1927–1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficções. São Paulo: Globo, 1998. Brandão, Fiama Hasse Pais. Obra breve. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2006. Caminha. A Carta De Pero Vaz De Caminha. Ed. Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva 4ed. Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1990. Camões, Luís de. Os Lusíadas. Manuel Paulo Ramos. Ed. Porto: Porto Editora, s/d.

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Candido, Antonio. Formação da literatura brasileira: Momentos decisivos. 7th ed. Belo Horizonte-Rio de Janeiro: Itatiaia. 1993. —— & Castello, José Aderaldo. Presença da literatura brasileira: Modernismo. São Paulo: Difusão Europeia do Livro, 1964. Correia, Marlene de Castro. Drummond: jogo e confissão. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Sales, 2015. Coutinho, Afrânio. Introdução à literatura no Brasil. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1964. Coutinho, Eduardo F. Literatura comparada: reflexões. São Paulo: Annablume, 2013. Finazzi-Agrò, Ettore. Entretempos. São Paulo: UNESP, 2013. Freitas, Angélica. Rilke Shake. Rio de Janeiro: Cosac Naify–7 Letras, 2007. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Conversations with Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. Boston: Da Capo, 1998. Guerreiro, António. “A acção do poema”. Lisboa: Público/Ípsilon. 30/03/16. Online Helder, Herberto. A letra aberta. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2016. ——. Do mundo. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2004. Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de. Raízes do Brasil. 26 ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006. Jorge, Luiza Neto. 19 recantos e outros poemas. Ed. Jorge Fernandes da Silveira e Mauricio Matos Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2008. Lima, Luiz Costa. Lira e antilira: Mário, Drummond, Cabral. 2ed. Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1995. Llansol, Maria Gabriela. Um falcão no punho. Lisboa: Rolim, 1985. Lourenço, Eduardo. Tempo e Poesia. Porto: Inova, 1974. Martelo, Rosa Maria. Estrutura e transposição: invenção poética e reflexão metapoética na obra de João Cabral de Melo Neto. Porto: Fundação Eng. António de Almeida, 1990. Meireles, Cecília. Poesia completa. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1994. Melo Neto, João Cabral de. Obra completa. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1995. Merquior, José Guilherme. Razão do poema. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1965. Mourão, Nara Chaves. ReVeLe—n° 3—Agosto/201, p. 5. Oliveira, Carlos de. Trabalho poético. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2003. Pessoa, Fernando. 2ed. Obra poética. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1965. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Cartas a um jovem poeta e A canção de amor e de morte do porta-­estandarte Cristóvão Rilke. Trans. Paulo Rónai e Cecília Meireles. São Paulo: Biblioteca Azul, 2013. ——. Poemas. Trans. José Paulo Paes. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013a. ——. “Es winkt zu Fühling fast aus allen Dingen.” Trans. Susan Ranson & Marielle Sutherland, in Selected Poems, ed. Robert Vilain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sá-Carneiro, Mário de. Antologia. Ed. Cleonice Berardinelli. Rio de Janeiro: Janeiro, 2015. Sant’Anna, Affonso Romano. Que país é este? Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1980.

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——. Drummond: o gauche no tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1992. Santiago, Silviano. Drummond. Suplemento de Cultura da Secretaria de Estado de Cultura/MG Belo Horizonte, Jan/fev. 2013, ed. n° 1. 346. ——. As raízes e o labirinto da América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2006. ——. Uma literatura nos trópicos. 2ed. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2000. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Pela mão de Alice: o social e o político na pós-­modernidade. São Paulo: Cortez, 1995. Saraiva, António José. Estudos sobre a arte d’ Os Lusíadas. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1992. Secchin, Antônio Carlos. João Cabral: Uma faca só lâmina. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2014. Silveira, Jorge Fernandes da. O Tejo é um rio controverso: António José Saraiva contra Luís Vaz de Camões. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2008. Verde, Cesário. Todos os poemas. Ed. Jorge Fernandes da Silveira. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 1995.

9

Jorge Amado: The International Projection of the Brazilian Writer Márcia Rios da Silva

It is Summer in Bahia (Brazil), the year is 2015. A young tourist lady arrives at the Jorge Amado’s House Foundation looking for the writer Myriam Fraga, executive director of the House at that time, to hand her a copy of the novel Seara Vermelha (Red Field), translated into Slovene.1 This reader, from a small country in Eastern Europe, Slovenia—a land that has lived through communism—speaking Portuguese well, and moved by emotion, says she is proud to donate to the Foundation’s archive because Jorge Amado was translated into her language. With this gesture, the reader shows the value given to Jorge Amado’s literature, for having recognized the existence of a language and a people, the Slovene, at the same time giving witness to the strength of a literary work that secured a place for Brazilian literature overseas and contributed to a representation of the cultural identity of Brazil abroad. In order to understand the reach of Amado’s literature overseas, and the way his dissemination took place, one needs consider two moments or events that were decisive and significant in his literary trajectory. First, his affiliation to the Communist Party, right at the beginning of his career—an affiliation which demands his vigorous participation in the public sphere as he writes his novels of commitment to the Party’s doctrines—and second the migration of his narratives, through television adaptations from the 1970s onward: a fact relevant enough to help sustain his position as the most read or best-­known writer in Brazil and the best-­known Brazilian writer to the rest of the world. In both cases, Amado was fiercely criticized for writing under a partisan doctrine: the defenders

A scene witnessed by the author of this text in January, 2015. Jorge Leal Amado de Faria had his novels translated into more than 40 languages and at least 55 countries according to data from the site of the Jorge Amado’s House Foundation.

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of autonomy in art accused him of turning literature into an instrument of propaganda. And for establishing bonds with television, he became a target for criticism from the cultural world of the intellectual elite and leftists who had already criticized him for the publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Cinnamon and Clove) in 1958. In the extensive period during which he published—from 1931 with O país do carnaval (The Country of Carnival) until 1994 with A descoberta da América pelos turcos (The Discovery of America by the Turks)—the writer used diverse media and surprising mediations compared to more traditional forms of literary reception; he ended up establishing widely differentiated relations and ties. In this long trajectory he accumulated symbolic capital, in the Bourdieu sense (1996), acquired by experiences, means and diverse circumstances, by intellectual and friendly relations in different political contexts in Brazil and abroad. This allowed for the exceptional promotion of his novels, resulting in an extraordinary increase in public awareness. Within this group of factors, one cannot ignore his choice of an aesthetic distinguished by features of popular culture with narratives notable for a high level of adherence to reality and a low level of language experimentation: the latter being highly valued by the modern aesthetic. As a modern intellectual, a leftist, and a militant for the Communist Party (PC) embroiled in social questions of his time, Amado turns literature into a revolutionary flag and becomes an obligatory reference in Brazil in defense of democracy and against dictatorial regimes, not only in Latin America, but abroad as well. The writer firmly commits himself to an engagé art that is revolutionary, in synchrony with the guidelines outlined by the Communist Party internationally and in consonance with the preoccupations of the modernist movement. This brings up the debate on the cultural identity of Brazil, seeking, in this manner, answers to a series of questions of political and social concern. This commitment demands the positioning of artists in regard to the function of their art. In Latin America, where the Enlightenment project of modernity was, according to the revolutionaries, yet to take place, it fell upon the leftist intellectuals, incarnating the figure of the organic intellectual in the sense utilized by Gramsci (1982), to raise the flags of democracy, of justice, and of human rights to transform society. The organic intellectuals emerge from historic circumstances or precise contingencies and Gramsci links their emergence to a class situation (in economic terms), not limiting it, however, to the economic

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sphere.2 The intellectual is the organizer of culture, who can act, because of his high moral conscience, for a change of the infrastructure. The pedagogical dimension of his task becomes incontestable. Embracing the causes of the proletariat, he has before him the great enterprise of transforming society to change its manner of thinking (Gruppi, 1980:4). Thus, the notion of conscience, a valuable notion to the organic intellectual—and a class conscience—as well as the concept of hegemony, are decisive in understanding his role.3 With this understanding, the Communist Party adopted, although without absolute guarantee as to the desired performance and fidelity, according to Rubim (1995), the model of organic intellectual outlined by Gramsci, not only in Europe but also in Latin American countries, in the context of totalitarian regimes, during the twentieth century. In the 1920s, Jorge Amado affiliates himself to the PC. Leaving Bahia in 1930, he moves to Rio de Janeiro, where he is admitted to law school and works at José Olympio publishing house at a moment in which a book market is opening up in Brazil. Situated at Ouvidor Street, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, this publishing house was a meeting place for intellectuals of the time and published a good part of the productions of new writers, particularly of the “Northeast novelists.” Outstanding Brazilian writers like Rachel de Queiroz, José Lins do Rego, Marques Rebelo, Graciliano Ramos and many other intellectuals were published by them, or worked there. In the José Olympio publishing house, Amado handles the publication of Latin American writers, such as Enrique Amorim, Ciro Alegría, Jorge Icaza and Rómulo Gallegos. The experience with the editorial market at the beginning of his career enables him to become a writer, receiving copyright and remuneration that, according to Amado, was already common among writers from Europe, North America and Japan. Besides editorial activity, he also collaborates on newspapers, writing articles or working in the editorial department, which exposes him to public and professional performances early on, placing him in the role of a cultural mediator in the country. Amado’s writings carry a strong mark of involvement with the Party’s ideals, which confers on him the position of an intellectual highly engaged with the tasks and roles that expressed the greater aspirations of the PC in Brazil—the “Each social group, being born in the original field of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates for itself, at the same time, in an organic manner, one or more layers of intellectuals that give to it homogeneity and awareness of its own function, not only in the economic field, but also in the social and political ones(. . .)” (Gramsci, 1982: 3). 3 Gruppi affiliates Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” to that of Lenin’s (1980:3). 2

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people and the nation—recurrent themes of a political and aesthetic program, shaping a national-­popular conception of culture. In an interview with Alice Raillard, the translator of his novels in France, Amado clarifies his participation in the PC: I was not the leader of the Party; I exercised the functions of director, but not functions to which I had been elected. I was not a member of any committee. I was a member of the base. The only difference was that I did not belong to any cell, that I worked directly in relation with the high-­level direction of the Party. Raillard, 1992: 276

For his militancy during the government of Getúlio Vargas, Amado is accused of subversion and participation in the Intentona Comunista (The Brazilian Uprising of 1935). He was sent to prison in 1936 and again in 1937, soon after the coup d’etat by Getúlio Vargas, known as Estado Novo (the New State). With the recrudescence of the Vargas dictatorship, Amado lived in exile in Argentina and Uruguay between 1941 and 1942. During this period, as part of a strategy for a campaign to win the amnesty of Luís Carlos Prestes (imprisoned on the order of Vargas), he conducted research with the intention of “collecting material” in order to write a book about this communist leader. In 1942, the book was published in Buenos Aires, in Spanish, entitled A vida de Luís Carlos Prestes (The Life of Luís Carlos Prestes), and sold clandestinely in Brazil. Separate from the state apparatuses, Amado engaged in the fight to build national unity, an ideal that was a consensus, despite “ideological” divergences, to the community of intellectuals of the country, originating from various currents. Many intellectuals worked, in fact, for the state as public officials during the Vargas dictatorship: an adherence that Sérgio Miceli (2001) will denominate “cooptation.” Upon taking up the obligations of the social and cultural questions of the country, Amado has the firm intention of blending an aesthetic with a political project: that of the Communist Party. Thus, with the aim of creating awareness among readers, he turns literature into an art committed to the understanding of Brazilian reality: a society of classes marked by inequality and oppression as the fruits of capitalism. Upon embracing such a project, one that will continue throughout the next decades, Amado will become part of the so-­called “geração de trinta” (the 1930s generation)—as it became known in the literary historiography—formed by a considerable number of writers from the northeast, a poor region of Brazil. This generation breaks with a regionalist model of

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landscape. As Eduardo Coutinho (2014) states, when commenting on the novel Fogo Morto (Dead Fire) by José Lins do Rego, 1943, it abandons “the exotic or patriotic perspective still very prevalent among the regionalists of the beginning of the century in exchange for a more mature critical vision in which the region is problematized” (2014: 84). That is, this generation substitutes the natural landscape for the historical and social context, a perspective that will be the guideline for Brazilian literature until 1960, as Silviano Santiago, in his commentary on the remaking of the agenda of the national literature post–1964 states. Until this decade one had: as the most important and dominant theme, the exploitation of man by man, (theme) in general dramatized by the process of political-­partisan awareness of characters belonging to field hands and the proletariat, accompanied by disguised (sympathetic) or open (radical) criticism of the rural oligarchy and the urban entrepreneurs. The dispute between the two opposing social forces often pilfered the middle and urban layers of society and was composed in a way to anticipate, dramatically and without obstacles, an optimist evolution from capitalism to communism in Brazil. Optimism and utopia allied to each other to show the definite victory of the leftist forces. Santiago, 1989: 11–12

With this rhetoric, the intellectuals make themselves the mouthpieces of the minorities. In Amado’s narratives that adhere to this purpose, a universe of characters who experience processes of exclusion and privation is brought to light, and the author takes their side, thus turning literature into an instrument of the denunciation of social ills. The protagonists of his novels are field and industrial workers, women, Blacks, migrants, “captains of the sands,” “vagabonds,” the “lumpen” of the proletariat, aliens to the culture of letters—“victims” of the logic of capital, of white society: landowning, patriarchal and bourgeois. In some ways, such characters are able to overcome the contingencies through struggles, “determination” and courage, and ultimately through the capacity to reinvent everyday life. During the militant period, the revolutionary ideals expressed in the productions of this writer, particularly in work that antecedes the novel Gabriela, cravo a canela (Gabriela, clove and cinnamon) of 1958, translate the catechetical desire of a significant parcel of the intellectuals of the left: for the battle proposed through words in the Marxist view of transformation of the world. As a further sign of solidarity, Jorge Amado joins the political front of the leftists in the Liberating National Alliance, created in 1935 under the leadership

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of the Brazilian Communist Party—and composed of communists, socialists and leftists of the tenant movement—in order to combat fascism and imperialism. The LNA was declared illegal by Vargas in 1935, however a few of its affiliated members continued the political struggle. According to José Nilo Tavares (1995), the LNA “plays a catalyzing role of the most importance and awakens, in this new syndicalism, in this new working class that is formed after 1930, the political fight” (1991: 75). Such Alliance “goes beyond the corporative, homo economicus positions, and delineates a program of profound social transformation” (1991: 75).4 In the middle of facing political questions, Amado maintains the constancy of his writing in this decade, getting involved with the cultural politics of the Party and with an intense editorial activity, thus expanding his professional and personal relations with other writers, artists and intellectuals, at the same time managing the translations of his books. In 1935, Cacau (Cocoa) will be translated into Russian, along with a translation into Spanish, in Buenos Aires, by the Claridad publishing house, under the title of Cacao: la vida de los trabajadores en las fazendas y cacahuales del Brasil (Cocoa: the Life of Workers in the Farms and Cocoa Plantations of Brazil). And in 1937, also in Buenos Aires, Jubiabá: epopeya del negro brasileño (Jubiaba: the epic of the Brazilian Negro), is published by Iman publishing company. In 1938, Jubiabá will be translated by New America, from New York, a small publishing company, and by Gallimard, in France. In A ronda das Américas (Around the Americas) (2001), the young Jorge Amado brings accounts of a voyage through Latin America, in 1937, on the Japanese ship Rakuyo Maru, in which he sketches a cultural “portrait” of the countries which he passed through: Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Mexico. Without declaring the motive for the excursion, he simply indicates that the information about the trip arrived at the moment in which he found himself in the small and peaceful town of Estância in the state of Sergipe (Brazil), when he was starting the writing of the novel Capitães da areia (Captains of the Sand), which concludes in Mexico City. Upon returning to Brazil, the novelist is sent to prison, in November 1937, soon after the coup d’état by Vargas. According to Tavares (1991), this program “is susceptible to much criticism because it is extremely radical, despite its reformist rhetoric; it is a program that tries to found itself in the power of the field workers who, at the moment, were unstructured and disorganized. It is a program of anti-­ imperialist action, before there were, in Brazil, conditions for the actuation of an anti-­imperialist bourgeois class and, besides it was beaten by the unhappy and sectarian pronouncements of a few leaders, such as Luís Carlos Prestes” (75).

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While voyaging through these countries, Amado records his observations about the book markets in each. He shows himself attentive to the editorial production of Brazil and the other countries of the Americas, which leads him to draw comparisons and make reflections, intermingling accounts, about the professionalization of the writer, the editorial market, and the reading public. Concerning Argentina and Chile, he praises the good publishing companies, noting that in those countries the translated European writers bring more profit to the editors and that a book is low cost, different than occurs in Brazil and in Europe, where 10 per cent of rights are secured for the writers. At that time, only Jorge Amado and Monteiro Lobato are known to the public. In Around, distinction is awarded to many of the magazines published in Argentina and in Chile. The writer makes salient the intense cultural life in Buenos Aires, due to the advancement of the Argentinian press, not only in the newspapers, but also in the magazines, which satisfy all tastes from the genres of mass culture to those of high culture. In the capital of Argentina, Amado discovers that there are innumerable popular magazines, novels and short stories addressed to the great public, and, at the same time, laments the great difficulty of maintaining literary and cultural journals in Brazil. The attentive observations of the literary productions of these countries does not let him lose sight of the richness of the visual arts, such as those he finds in Mexico City and with which he closes the account of his journey. The novelist reveals his impressions when he disembarks “at the cinematographic port of Manzanilla on the Pacific coast” and at the “heroic port of Vera Cruz on the Atlantic coast” (Amado, 2001: 161). Here he exalts their numerous painters—among them Diego Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros—and admits to being seduced by the painting and the music of this place: “Everywhere, from one corner to the other of this country, everything seems to be an immense mural, where all the colors are cast with perfect technique” (161). He continues: “Sounds and colors, the most beautiful sounds, the most beautiful colors. Mexico all picturesque” (162). In his study of the involvement and obligation of the leftist intellectual in Brazil to the Brazilian Communist Party, Albino Rubim (1995) affirms that this political-­partisan institution developed a complex of political-­cultural apparatuses in consonance with the guidelines of the party in its international scope. To this researcher, Jorge Amado’s political engagement is demarcated by his adhesion to the cultural politics of the Communist Party, which included intellectuals on its board. Moreover:

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The cultural network of PC, complemented by the exchange with the apparatuses of the international communist movement, works as a captivating place—in the most ambiguous sense of the word—and simultaneously as a delineator of intellectual careers. The international dimension of a Jorge Amado seems to find here one of his fountains of energy. Rubim, 1995: 79

Founded in 1922 in Brazil, the PC had, according to Rubim, a considerable political-­ cultural presence, even during the moments of secrecy, through “complex and immense networks of organization, production and diffusion of culture: party schools, recording studios, art workshops, institutions and cultural encounters, bookstores, magazines, publishing houses, etc. The imbrication politics-­ideology leads to a continuous and conscientious preoccupation with the production and diffusion of culture and with the necessary means for its effectiveness and efficacy” (Rubim, 1995:65). In the selection of political-­cultural apparatuses to develop its political-­ ideological action, the PC makes its political-­cultural intervention, attracting intellectuals to itself in a relationship that is not always harmonious, crossed by political and ideological forces, and aggravated by the exigencies of the Party that inhibited the freedom of thought, of creation, of the expression of intellectual ideas. To Alice Raillard, Amado weaves his commentaries about such divergencies: I myself and several friends I have already mentioned, Oscar Niemeyer, James [Amado Jorge’s younger brother—1922–2013, also a writer] Moacyr Werneck and Alberto Passos Guimarães—had set the basis of a cultural publication in which already appeared a divergence in line. For example, at the moment of the events that took place in Hungary. When the liberal positions were suppressed by the Soviet Union, we evidently adopted a posture that did not coincide with the Party’s, which were of a narrow sectarianism and lined to suffocate all the attempts of democratization in Hungary. Raillard, 1992: 276–277

The diverse forms of organization of the intellectuals created by the Party, following the example of the “general entities of the intellectuals”—such as the Command of the Intellectual Workers, which Amado participated in—confirm the importance of the category. Thus, according to Rubim, there are moments of absolute adherence as well as of fragile involvement, and this migration “as well as of other segments; for example: the ‘tenents’—occurs, as paradoxical as it seems, at the moment that the party becomes ‘Bolshevist,’ submitting itself to the orders and rules of the III International (Communist), and starts to suffer a traumatic process of ‘proletarization’ ” (Rubim, 1995: 64).

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The commitment, the attention to the people and specifications of their life and culture, the national character—a realistic attitude from the aesthetic point of view—are aspects that delineate the model of culture and art of the Communist Party, educating its militants and delimitating the contours of their cultural universe, Rubim concludes. The great preoccupation with the “popular,” manifested in the “proletarian novel,” to which thesis Jorge Amado resorts when he writes Cacau (Cocoa), in 1933, and Suor (Sweat), in 1934, is due to the MarxistLeninist orientation of the Party that takes socialist realism as its model: the official aesthetic of Stalinism, conceived by Andrei Zdanov, who was responsible for cultural production and propaganda. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazil initiated its industrialization, and the capitalist production mode began to define a new class, the worker’s class, that did not have yet a syndicate that gave it visibility. The proletarian novel would contribute to that “awareness,” in the formation of a class, which explains the role of literature, understood as a social institution. Jorge Amado justifies his aesthetic orientation: To write a proletarian novel was, evidently, a pretension from my part. The proletarian conscience was still in formation in a country that had just begun to industrialize itself and in which did not exist, properly speaking, a working class. Raillard, 1992: 56

The publication of Cacau, which explores the universe of the field worker, and the story of workers exploited in the cocoa plantation region of the south of Bahia, is a table commercial hit for the time and for a beginner author. Two thousand copies of the first edition were sold quickly, a success also attributed by the novelist to the book’s illustrations. This publication arrives in Portugal in the 1930s, like Jubiabá and Capitães da areia (Captains of the Sands). According to Edvaldo Bergamo (2014), such novels will be appreciated and compared—by critics and Portuguese writers—to Portuguese neorealism in journals like The Devil (1934–1940) and Rising Sun (1937–1940), in which themes of social denunciation are particularly underscored. Among critical texts in the journals, there is an appreciation by Ferreira de Castro, author of A selva (The Jungle), 1930, whom Amado befriends. Other neorealist novels appearing at this time are books like Gaibéus (Field Hands) by Alves Redol, Esteiros (Estuaries) by Joaquim Soeiro, Casa de Malta (House in Malta) by Fernando Namora, and Cerromaior by Manuel da Fonseca. The circulation of Amado’s novels in Portugal reaches the young African students of the Portuguese colonies. Residing in the Students’ House of the Empire in Lisbon, founded in 1944, and active until 1965, these young students,

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in the universities, form a chain of solidarity, cultivating a feeling of nationality that catalyzes them into political activism, which is decisive in the struggles for independence. In such residences, created under the Salazar regime with the intention of controlling the colonies, there lived Joaquim Chissano, Pascoal Mocumbi, and Sérgio Vieira from Mozambique; Amílcar Cabral from Cape Verde, and Pepetela and Agostinho Neto from Angola. While passing through Portugal, Jorge Amado establishes friendships with African intellectuals, artists and writers, some of them from the Students’ House of the Empire, like Agostinho Neto and the Mozambican poet Noémia de Souza: both militant in the Communist Party. It will also form part of the web of intellectuals around the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, a leftist militant whose poetry is marked by its accent on racial issues, exposing prejudices and discrimination. The commentaries of writers from Portuguese-­speaking African countries about the importance of modernist Brazilian authors in the construction of a national literature on the African continent are well known; for example those of Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos. Noémia de Souza exalts the narratives of Amado (Sousa, 2015) in the “Poema a Jorge Amado” (Poem to Jorge Amado), published in her book Sangue Negro (Black Blood), in which she gathers poems written between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. In this context of re-­vindications, Black artists and intellectuals, from different nations, gather together as brothers in the struggle for decolonization, and they have as inspiration the political and aesthetic force of the Black Renaissance, or Harlem Renaissance, when the songs of the poet Langston Hughes circulated through the Americas and crossed the Atlantic. In North America, Alfred A. Knopf publishes in New York, Terras do sem fim (The Violent Land) in 1945, in a translation by the communist intellectual Samuel Putman. But Amado will have his entrance, and that of his books, prohibited in the United States due to the US governmental anti-­communist sanctions of 1952. Analyzing the chains of influence in the translation and publication of novels of Amado overseas, Marly Tooge notes that Terras do sem fim, published by Alfred Knopf happened due to the intervention of Érico Veríssimo (Tooge, 2009) who had already been invited by the State Department.5 Amado, on the In 1941, Veríssimo comes to the United States, by invitation of the American State Department, to speak in conferences about Brazilian literature. In 1943, the invitation is renewed so that he can teach classes, and the writer moves, with his family, to the United States. During this period, he has a few novels published in the United States. In 1953, he is invited to Washington by the Ministry of Foreign Relations to be director of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Pan-American Union in the Secretariat of the American States Organization.

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other hand, tells a different version, as Tooge notes: one that such a publication was suggested by Samuel Putman and the Bahian literary critic Afrânio Coutinho, who lived in the United States. According to the researcher, in the 1940s the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Pan-American Union maintained, as part of the Good Neighbors policy of President Roosevelt, a program of cultural exchange with Latin American countries. According to Tooge, this department created a project of translations of Brazilian books in the United States that would contribute to an understanding of the history of the country. Broadening our understanding, the researcher affirms that, with World War Two, the European editorial market shut itself off to the United States, and Latin America became a “fountain of interesting foreign literature” for Blanche Knopf (Tooge, 2009: 65), the wife of Alfred Knopf, to whom fell the task of traveling to Brazil in 1942 to take care of the selection of works to be translated. Names like Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos and Gilberto Freire were selected, and according to Tooge, the novelist Amado, despite his leftist position, became a bestseller in North America with Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon). When the Cold War abated, during the 1960s, the novels Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), Os velhos marinheiros (Home is the Sailor), Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands) and Tenda dos milagres (Tent of Miracles), were translated for United States readers, most of them published by Alfred A. Knopf who also re-­edited Terras do sem fim. These translations brought extraordinary symbolic prestige to the writer, in a country that promoted fierce combat against communism. In 1961, the North American enterprise Metro Goldwyn Mayer bought the rights to the adaptation of Gabriela, cravo e canela for the movies but the production of the film did not happen. It is interesting to note that, before the publication of Terras do sem fim in the United States in 1945, some North American intellectuals were already part of Amado’s friendship circle in the 1930s, for example the anthropologist Ruth Landes and the sociologist Donald Pierson. At this time, Amado participated in a group of communist, Black intellectuals from the city of Salvador in Bahia, including Edison Carneiro, writer and ethnographer; and Artur Ramos, anthropologist and psychiatrist, as well as leaders from religious communities of the African matrix. Ruth Landes arrived in Bahia, Brazil in 1938 to research her doctorate from Columbia University about the lives of Blacks. Donald Pierson, working on his doctorate at the University of Chicago, arrived in Salvador in

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1935, remaining until 1937 to develop a study on racial relations. According to Livio Sansone (2012), “between 1941 and 1943, the city of Salvador, in Bahia, became a field of battle between two different understandings about racial integration in the United States and the place of Africa in this process” with the presence of many anthropologists and sociologists. It was a moment when, in Sansone’s evaluation (2012), they discussed the constitution of these fields of knowledge and their disciplinary boundaries, as “the construction of the African Studies and of the Afro-Brazilian Studies as fields of academic research”.6 Amado’s deep involvement with the questions and demands of peoples from the African matrix was a determining factor in driving him to present a project on freedom of worship for African cults in Brazil when he was elected as a congressman for the Communist Party in 1946. Such a project, sanctioned by law and presented to the Constitution drafted at the time, reveals the active participation of the intellectual in practical life, fighting for the legitimation of the practices of Black culture in Brazil. There is no doubt about Amado’s engagement, outside the literary field, with the causes of the working class of other social segments who were historically excluded in the country, such as the Afro-­descendent, whose cultural practices were targets of racial intolerance. With the revoking of his term in 1948, in consequence of renouncing his membership of the Communist Party, Amado goes into voluntary exile in Paris. During this time he builds new friendships, mainly with artists, writers and intellectuals in a group of communist intellectuals, among them Ana Seghers, Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. In this period, Amado takes trips with Zélia Gattai, Nicolás Guillén and Pablo Neruda (already a friend; they both knew Brazil), to countries in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. Living within the context of the Cold War, in 1950 the writer is expelled from Paris by the French government when the repression against communists is intensified, many of them being from Latin American countries, seeking refuge in France. Sansone underscores the presence of these intellectuals in Bahia in the period: “Franklin Frazier, well-­known North-American, Black sociologist, keeping up a debate with the equally famous anthropologist, white and Jewish, Melville Herskovits, about the ‘origins’ of the so called ‘Black family’ and the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner.” According to Sansone (2012), “they came to Bahia to test the results of researches conducted in other places, as well as to corroborate hypotheses about the African origin of the Negro culture.” Sansone points out “that none of them made of Brazil and of Bahia the keystone of their studies, as they had proposed when they became candidates for the scholarships to do these researches here. None of them ever wrote the book about Bahia as they had planned.”

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According to Marcelo Ridenti (2011), during this period of exile between the end of the 1940s and the mid-1950s, the cultural, communist, French press hosts many Latin American intellectuals and publishes their writings. That is when, according to Ridenti, there is an insertion of these intellectuals into the international communist movement, in an alignment with the Soviet Union, having as their leader Stalin and forming a network of communist solidarity. It is a decade in which the writers of this circle of intellectuals receive prizes and badges of honor in different countries, particularly in countries with socialist regimes. In 1951, in Moscow, Jorge Amado, who was a member of the Bureau of the World Peace Counsel, receives the International Stalin Peace Prize: the “Nobel” of socialist countries. In 1953, it is Pablo Neruda’s turn, and Nicolás Guillén receives the same prize in 1954. In the context of the Cold War, communist intellectuals promote many world conferences for peace in European, Latin American and Soviet Bloc countries, in many of which the writer’s novels had been translated. There were also frequent international encounters between writers, along with the creation of associations and syndicates of writers and artists. In the many trips taken during this time, Amado became acquainted with the literary production of different countries, especially of Soviet writers. And, as fruit of the cultural politics of the PC, in 1953 Amado participated in the creation of the collection “Romances do povo” (Novels for the People), directed by Alberto P. Guimarães. It was the novelist’s job to choose books and translators of up to twenty works7 to be published between 1954 and 1956 by the Victoria Press, belonging to the Party. Among the chosen names, a few were known within the writer’s circle of friends: Ferreira de Castro, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alina Paim and Anna Seghers. According to Amado, the Communist Party that had also sponsored the translations of his novels overseas did not pay him for the copyright of the numerous editions by this press of O Mundo da Paz (The World of Peace) and O cavaleiro da Esperança (The Knight of Hope) (Cf. Amado, op. cit.: 321–322).

According to Carmo (2007), in such a collection, with authors of different nationalities, there is a selection of socialist realist narratives and only the Brazilian writer Aline Paim is present. Prominence is given to Soviet writers: Bóris Polevói, Nikolai Ostrowski, Ferreira de Castro, Tikhon Siomúchkin, Jacques Roumain, Tchapáiev Dmitri Furmanov, Galina Nikolaieva, Ilya Ehrenburg, Howard Fast, Alina Paim, PiotrPavlenko, Volokolansk AlexandrBek, Howard Fast, Konstantin Fédin, Alexandre Serafimovitch, Ting Ling, Mulk Raj Anand, Anna Seghers, and Mikhail Cholokov. According to Carmo, Amado simply lent his name but the Central Committee was truly responsible for the choice of material.

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Marcel Vejmelka points out that the translation of Amado’s novels into German takes place from the 1950s on, in the socialist East Germany, through Ana Seghers’s translations from the French translations. Still unknown in East Germany, Seghers compares Amado to Balzac, introducing him as “a political militant and the biographer of Luís Carlos Prestes, the latter being connected to Germany through his wife Olga Benário, a German Jew imprisoned by Vargas’s Estado Novo (New State) and delivered to Nazi Germany and eventually killed in prison in Berlin” (Segheres, 1949, apud Vejmelka, 2014). According to Vejmelka, Amado will become known in West Germany one decade later, where he had been published before only by small presses, including publications of translations licensed by the GDR. Gabriela, cravo e canela will be the first published book, in 1963: precisely the novel considered to be a landmark in Amado’s rupture with socialist realism. It is a publication by a West German editor of a translation from an East German editor. Vejmelka points out that Meyer-Clason used to present the writer as “a story teller,” “a representative of a ‘happy and exotic’ people,” distancing him from the image of a militant and combative Jorge Amado. It is in this decade, in 1953, that Amado cuts his ties with the PC. According to Rubim, besides internal issues, the dictatorships of the Estado Novo (New State) that would have made many intellectuals join the Party, and the repercussions of Stalin’s crimes and the crisis in the Party—brought about by “Stalin’s death”— contributed to his decision: “the slow distension occurred, the small and paradoxical changes that happened in the ‘fair line’ of the party and, mainly, the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (Rubim, 1995: 69). After leaving behind the position of an “engaged intellectual,” Amado publishes Gabriela, cravo e canela in 1958. In this narrative he abandons the pamphletist, doctrinal tone: the utopian vestiges that marked previous productions. This achievement dramatizes the power relations constructed by the logic of capital, however it makes room for the ludic, eliminating the gravity that characterizes the sectarian role of the leftist intellectual. The change in his aesthetic brought him severe criticism, which was rejected by him. The writer defends himself by saying that there is a new element to his narrative: humor, which expressed his position vis-à-­vis life at that moment: “They attacked me as were attacked in the USSR, in Pravda; all the writers who did not follow exactly the official line” (Raillard, 1992: 277). The negative criticism was accentuated when the author of Gabriela, cravo e canela established ideological ties already quite distant from the PC ideals,

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would occur from the 1970s onward, when the narrative of the book became a TV soap opera in a political context marked by the military dictatorship in Latin America. Amado was accused of having sold-­out to the “system,” of having given-­in to television, the medium that became a national network in Brazil in the Seventies, under the control of the military regime and at the service of the broadcasting of a certain “popular-­national” dear to the regime. Subsequent to this decade, other strategies would secure his access to a reading public, which began to be guided by the television medium, at the same time as the publication of literary works in Brazil was tied, through well-­defined negotiations, to the laws of the marketplace determining print publication. From then on, adaptations of his novels entered the spotlight, expanding his audience who started to consume Amado’s narratives through television. It should be said that such adaptations were frequent, in different languages and media, and revealed the tuning-­in of the writer to new opportunities and technologies, relevant to the expansion of the public audience, especially from the 1940s on. In this decade, Mar morto (Dead Sea) was adapted as a radio soap opera by the National Radio of Rio de Janeiro. Other adaptations followed, radio being at that time the greatest means of mass communication in the country: in 1941, Mar morto, through El Mundo Radio from Buenos Aires; in 1945, the radio plays Mar Morto and Terras do sem fim (The Violent Lands); in the following year, Jubiabá and São Jorge dos Ilhéus, each by São Paulo Radio. In 1950, the Radiodiffusion Française de Paris transmitted Terras do sem fim and in 1951, in Prague, it was the turn of The Knight of Hope, a biography of Luís Carlos Prestes. In this year, the French government expelled the writer from French soil, and he lived instead in Dobris, Czechoslovakia, in the Castle of the Union of Writers, where he wrote the trilogy Subterrâneos da Liberdade (The Bowels of Liberty). In 1948, it was the turn of Terras do sem fim to appear in the cinema, with the title of Violent Lands, being a production of the Brazilian Cinematographic Company Atlântida. In 1957, this story gained a comics version, published in “Coleção Maravilhosa” (“Marvelous Collection”) by the Brazil-America publishing house. São Jorge dos Ilhéus (1958), Mar Morto (1960) and Gabriela, cravo e canela (1961) were also part of the collection. In 1966, the now extinct Tupi TV transmitted the soap opera Gabriela. Tupi TV also adapted Terras do Sem Fim (1966) and A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro d’Água (1968). The number of adaptations went on rising, successively, in the cinema and, above all, on television. With the impact of TV media in Brazil, Jorge Amado’s reception grew in a cultural context where artistic practices and symbolic exchanges gained new

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contours, and while the translations of the novels continued alongside. From 1970, the Globo Television Network began to invest in soap operas, guaranteeing the consolidation and consecration of the genre, with the intention of increasing the spectators, besides turning its TV drama into products for export. Works by Jorge Amado, which had been vetoed by the political regime before, and accused of being subversive, were converted into TV dramas when the media beted on the soap opera as a strategic product in the market, submitted to its rules, to its profit, and to the costs necessary to its production, all of which resulted in productions designed in accord with the tastes of spectators. Taking advantage of the novelist’s prestige and the reception to his publications, Globo TV exhibited, in 1975, the soap opera Gabriela, adapted by Walter George Durst and directed by Walter Avancini. This work brought an extraordinary audience to the Globo TV attracting the public to a production that was beginning to be a great success for the network. Many more productions of Amado’s works were brought to TV. In 1978, it was the turn of A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro d’Água (The Death and the Death of Quincas Wateryell), which was produced as a short series; between 1981 and 1982, Terras do sem fim was produced by Globo TV; between 1989 and 1990, the soap opera Tieta; and between 1995 and 1996, the Manchete TV network produced the soap Tocaia Grande (Showdown). In the list of miniseries, there were Tenda dos Milagres (Tent of Miracles) in 1985; Tereza Batista in 1992; and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos in 1998: all produced by Globo TV. In 1989, Bandeirantes TV transmitted Capitães da areia (Captains of the Sands). The number of cinema adaptations was considerable. Despite not attracting a public as numerous as that for the soaps—with the exception of Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands), whose production brought twelve million people to the movie theaters—films inspired by Amado’s works helped to maintain the presence of literature in Brazil and overseas. In 1983, the novel Gabriela was adapted for the cinema, under the direction of Bruno Barreto; the protagonists were Sônia Braga and Marcello Mastroianni, and it was distributed by Warner Bros. As an attempt in commercializing this product overseas, Gabriela would be the first Brazilian soap opera to be exhibited to the Portuguese public, in 1977, with the end of the Salazar regime. Three years later, it reached Angolan TV viewers. In Navegação de cabotagem (Coasting), Amado tells us about an episode in Luanda when he was there in 1979 at the invitation of Angola’s President, Agostinho Neto. Amado tells that he was taken by the Angolan “comrades” to a proletarian neighborhood to meet with Party members and militants. He affirms

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that he was already prepared to answer questions about socialism, to discuss politics, to speak about social injustices and Brazil. There were only three questions on these subjects, which came from the leaders, the organizers of the debate. The rest of the questions, asked by mainly youthful men and women concerned the soap opera Gabriela, being broadcast at that moment by the only official network. The lack of interest from the public on the theme of socialism, perhaps presented in an unfashionable way, revealed the emptying of a discourse distanced from reality that ignored the demands of the audience, evidenced especially by the orientations imparted in Communist Party workshops and aimed at controlling reception through the Party’s “classes.” Here is a section of Amado’s talk with the organizers of the encounter: They tell me that in order to maintain the ideological purity of the masses, the broadcast of each chapter was preceded and followed by a commentary in the charge of a theorist of the central committee, alerting audiences to the misguidance and the errors concerning the content of the viewing. The commentary that followed lasted only a short while; they abandoned it upon the confirmation that, at the end of the chapter, the audience turned off their TV sets. The preceding ones lasted till the last episode, denouncing the impurities of the work: the spectators, afraid of missing out on the beginning of the chapter, put up with the class on Marxism-Leninism: the price they had to pay. Amado, 1993: 212–13

A domestic apparatus indicating social distinction, television, when it arrived in Brazil during the 1950s, was restricted to a social class with greater buying power. At this time, such an apparatus did not have a developed entrepreneurial structure, it did not depend on institutions that polled audience preferences, nor did it rely on powerful sponsors. Its initial public, being of a high cultural level, was open to experimental works. Besides, its professionals did not yet have the technical know-­how of television, ending up therefore having to improvise (Klagsbrunn, 1995: 88–90). This precarious situation was gradually replaced by one where technology dominated the quests for a public and for a generic definition of television drama, especially after videotape became common. Media producers did not ignore the success of Jorge Amado and indeed took advantage of his prestige and power: the “phenomenon” of his public success, which guaranteed a return on their investment on the adaptations of his works. This guarantee was strengthened still further in the 1980s, when the sale of the soap opera as a commercial product to various countries was planned.

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In the soap-­opera industry, the charismatic feminine protagonists of Amadean narratives have been immeasurably inspirational through the adaptations of his novels into TV soaps. The eight o’clock evening soap, inaugurated by Globo TV, became the main leisure hour for a mainly female domestic public, bringing back family soirèes organized by the female readers of the feuilleton novels of the nineteenth century in Brazil. The successive reprints, translations and adaptations of Amado’s novels constituted a milestone in the history of the reception of Jorge Amado in the way they expanded, significantly, his consumers, the sale of his books, and promoted him as a figure of cultural mediation, each time more exposed in the media. Although he admits his dissatisfaction with such adaptations, because of how they usually adulterated the originals, Amado grants them great value, with the justification that while the “written work reaches a few thousand readers, the printing of ten thousand copies is quite considerable, (. . .) the films, the soap operas and the TV series are seen by millions of spectators, including thousands and thousands of illiterates without the possibility of accessing the book.” On referring to the success of Gabriela on TV, he comments: especially when it comes to a means of communication like the television, which takes a work to an immense public: hundreds of thousands of people that had never read my book and would never read it because the majority, either do not know how to read or cannot buy the book. . . Raillard, 1992: 294

The success of the adaptations demonstrated the reach of TV as a medium, mainly in countries in which, because of historically produced inequalities, there was a belated democratization of the process of schooling, opening up a space for oral culture to thrive. Amado’s success with an admiring public was confirmed by the sheer volume of letters from fans and anonymous readers, from Brazil and overseas, who would write to him. These letters are filed as part of his personal archive, in the Jorge Amado House Foundation, demonstrating the care given by the novelist to his readers, and continuously feeding the circuit of reception (Silva, 2006). In the interview with Alice Raillard, Amado comments on the attention he routinely gave to such correspondence: When we are here it is impossible, being intimate is impossible in this life totally invaded by the things that need to be done. For example, I receive an enormous quantity of mail. Regretfully, I learned in Europe, during the years I lived there, from 1948 to 1952, that one needs to answer the letters; like all Brazilians, I did

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not answer them: did it arrive? Is it the mailman’s fault? Today, I cannot use this excuse because the mail service works relatively well in Brazil; perhaps it is not perfect, but much better than before, when it was totally random. Today, no more. I learned this, it is terrible, I receive an enormous mass of correspondence every day, letters from all social classes and many are from readers; when I am travelling, piles of postcards accumulate. Raillard, 1992: 19–20

Public success also yields recognition from the part of legitimating jurisdictions and, from the 1970s on, public recognition intensified, exposing the relations of the writer, and his prestige, in extra-­literary spheres. Already in the previous decade, Adamo’s name had been sent by the Brazilian Writers’ Union as the formal candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the media, Jorge Amado won a recognition previously limited to the academies, to the literary salons and book launches. The new process of legitimation, by the TV media public, occurred in parallel with titles and prizes granted by institutions with distinct ideological tendencies. The author received important homages like the Dimotrov Prize (Sofia 1986), the Pablo Neruda Prize (Moscow 1989), as well as receiving from the French government the Legion of Honor in 1984. In Brazil, as well as abroad, such honors originated from the literary sphere, but also from the “official world” of politics and from the entrepreneurial environment, especially in Brazil, from the 1980s onward. One concludes then that, in his literary projects, Amado always appeared to be a writer in sync with his times, declaring his beliefs, ambiguities and alliances. Such a consecration culminated in maximum institutionalization with the creation of the Jorge Amado House Foundation in 1986, the inauguration of which, in 1987, attracted a huge gathering never seen before for another writer, due to his huge fame and public following. In order for one to get an idea of the institutionalization of this writer, Amado reveals in Navegação de cabotagem that an American university once declared the intention of buying his collection: a negotiation that was frustrated by family interference. The financial speculation over this asset was in fact a contest for symbolic capital, at the very moment that the transitional government in Brazil was welcoming intellectuals and artists into its ministries and other institutions, counting on their prestige to give their administration a democratic face. At the time of his death, in 2001, an event exploited by the mass media—a typical strategy where the death of a celebrity is concerned—Globo TV was broadcasting the soap opera Porto dos Milagres (Port of Miracles), a free

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adaptation of his works Mar Morto (Dead Sea, 1936) and A descoberta da América pelos turcos (The Discovery of America by the Turks, 1994). It was a public hit but criticized by some readers and specialized critics for a “loss of characterization” in respect of the two novels. The ample coverage by the press and TV of the funeral—very intense for almost a whole week—brought to the surface the force of his reception beyond the literary field. Newspapers, magazines, radios and TV broadcasts covered the event and its repercussions in Brazil and abroad. This caused a great number of Brazilians to focus on the affair, triggering a series of events in his honor, starting from various social segments, including from the field of institutional power. Present at the funeral were anonymous admirers, representatives of the federal and state governments, personalities from the political world—from the right and the left—some artists and writers, and the Brazilian President even declared three days of mourning in the country. Open to the public, the funeral was held in the Salão Nobre do Palácio da Aclamação, the former seat of the Bahia government. The Brazilian Academy of Letters honored him in their “Remembrance Session” and, according to the writer Myriam Fraga, the director of the Jorge Amado’s House Foundation, the number of daily visitors to the institution doubled.8 Among the greetings, the national news highlighted the religious reverences of various creeds. Such manifestations, pointed out by the media as an act of syncretism, reflect the “fruits” of the writer’s strong links—as the author of Jubiabá, Pastores da noite (Shepherds of the Night), Tenda dos milagres (Tent of Miracles)—with the African and Afro-Bahian cultures, and of his defense, as a representative to the Constitutional Assembly of 1946, of African religious practices in Brazil and of religious freedoms. Hence, the deep mourning reached the Candomblé sites, for example the Ilê Axé Apo Afonjá, under the guidance of the priestess Mother Stella of Oxóssi who closed down her doors for three days in honor of the deceased. The wake was distinguished by its serenity, in some ways frustrating the media, which drew attention to the absence of many “illustrious” people and to the fact that the public presence was smaller than the expected. The diverse homages reflect the various beliefs, alliances, engagements and commitments that defined the career of the Bahian writer. The long literary and intellectual trajectory of Jorge Amado demonstrated the taking up of diverse positions: in his transit and dialogue with the Communist Party; in the media of Cf. Folha de S. Paulo, 08/08/2001.

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mass communication—above all in TV; in the legitimating institutions of the literary field; in the “official world” of politics; among editors and editorial markets; with foreign diplomatic representatives; and with for-­profit enterprises. Such relations, in which we may be surprised by the very distinct interests, ideological positions and demands, reveal the dimensions of Jorge Amado’s literature, which projected itself internationally, carrying with it Brazilian culture. With him, literary practice becomes a broad cultural fact, because he did not enclose himself in an idealized vision of art. By promoting the dialogue of literature with other practices or cultural institutions, Jorge Amado liberated himself from the hegemonic vision of literature constructed by modernity, which reclaims the aesthetic as the exclusive field of the value of art.

Works cited Amado, Jorge. Navegação de cabotagem: apontamentos para um livro de memórias que jamais escreverei. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Record, 1993. Amado, Jorge. A ronda das Américas. Estabelecimento de texto, introdução e notas de Rául Antelo. Salvador: Casa de Palavras. Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, 2001. Bergamo, Edvaldo A. “A nova descoberta do Brasil: a recepção crítica da obra de Jorge Amado na imprensa periódica neo-­realista portuguesa.” In: Amerika: memories, identités, territoires. LIRA. Number 10/2014. Available at https://amerika.revues. org/4552. Access: em 01/11/2016. Bourdieu, Pierre.Razões práticas; sobre a teoria da ação. São Paulo: Papirus, 1996. Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira—Jorge Amado. Instituto Moreira Salles, n° 3, March/1997. Carmo, Rodrigo Reis do. Romances do povo: a política cultural do PCB e a negação da esfera pública popular (Monografia). ECO-UFRJ. 2007. B. A. Thesis. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Escola de Comunicação, 2007. Coutinho, Eduardo. Rompendo barreiras: ensaios de literatura brasileira e hispano-­ americana. Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2014. Fraga, Myriam. ‘Uma Casa de Palavras: a construção da memória—10 anos’. Salvador: Casa de Palavras, 1997. Gramsci, Antonio. Os intelectuais e a organização da cultura. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1982. Gruppi, Luciano. O conceito de hegemonia em Gramsci. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1980. Klagsbrunn, Marta Maria. A telenovela ao vivo. In. Sousa, Mauro Wilton (ed.) Sujeito, o lado oculto do receptor. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1995. Miceli, Sérgio. Intelectuais e classe dirigente no Brasil (1920–1945). In: Intelectuais à brasileira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2001.

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Raillard, Alice. Jorge Amado; conversaciones com Alice Raillard. Buenos Aires, Emecê, 1992. Ridenti, Marcelo. “Jorge Amado e seus camaradas no círculo comunista internacional.” Revista Sociologia & Antropologia. Rio de Janeiro, 2011. Vol. 01.02: 165–194. Available at http://revistappgsa.ifcs.ufrj.br/wp-­content/uploads/2015/03/8-ano1v2_ artigo_marcelo-­ridenti.pdf. Access: em 18/12/2015. Rubim, Albino Canelas. Marxismo, cultura e intelectuais no Brasil. Salvador: Centro Editorial e Didático da UFBA, 1995. Sansone, Livio. “Estados Unidos e Brasil no Gantois: o poder e a origem transnacional dos estudos Afro-­brasileiros.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais. vol.27 no.79. São Paulo, June 2012. Available at www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid= S0102-69092012000200002. Date of access: 30/10/2016. Santiago, Silviano. “Poder e alegria; a literatura brasileira pós–64.” In: Nas malhas da letra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. p. 11–2. Silva, Márcia Rios da. O rumor das cartas: um estudo da recepção de Jorge Amado. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2006. Silva, Márcia Rios da. N’A ronda das Américas, as terras gaúchas por Jorge Amado. Revista Letras de Hoje, Porto Alegre, v. 46, n. 4, p. 60–67, out./dez. 2011. Sousa, Carla Maria Ferreira. Sob o signo da resistência: a poética de Noémia de Sousa no período de 1948–1951 em Moçambique. (2014). M. A. Thesis. UNEB, Salvador, 2014. Tavares, José Nilo. Getúlio Vargas e o Estado Novo. In. Silva, José Luiz Werneck (ed.). O feixe e o prisma: uma revisão do Estado Novo. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1991, 2 v. Tooge, Marly D’Amaro Blasques. Traduzindo o Brazil: o país mestiço de Jorge Amado. (2009). M. A. Thesis. USP, São Paulo, 2009. Vejmelka, Marcel. “Entre o exótico e o político: características da recepção e tradução de Jorge Amado na Alemanha.” In. Amerika [Enligne], 10 | 2014, misenligne le 30 juin 2014. Available at http://amerika.revues.org/4522. Accessed 03/11/2016.

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Regionalism vs. World Literature in João Guimarães Rosa Eduardo F. Coutinho

João Guimarães Rosa is usually considered by critics as an author of the third generation of the modernist movement in Brazil, a generation often characterized by its preoccupation with the means of literary expression and by its consciousness of the fictitious character of literature. He took this preoccupation to such an extreme that he accomplished throughout his works a real revolution of narrative language that stands out as a landmark in twentieth-­century Brazilian prose fiction. Yet, the rupture that Guimarães Rosa accomplished in this fiction, far from constituting a mere formal obsession, as some critics have believed, is rather an aesthetic and political proposal of a wider sort, based on the idea he himself expressed in an interview given to Günter Lorenz, that “it is only by renewing language that one can renew the world.” (Lorenz, in Coutinho, 1991: 88). At the time Guimarães Rosa wrote his first narratives (the short stories of Sagarana, 1946), the type of fiction that predominated in the Brazilian intellectual milieu was the novel of protest, with its epic vein, based on a descriptive and conventional sort of language which, in spite of its more colloquial touch, was not very different from that used by the Realist and naturalist writers of the late nineteenth century. Aware of the contradictory character of this fiction, which expressed revolutionary ideas by means of a conventional type of language, Guimarães Rosa set himself the task of revitalizing literary language in order to make it recover its original energy and, as such, to be able to induce the reader to reflection. He thus came to constantly subvert the use of his language by replacing the commonplace with the unique, and by dedicating himself to a search for the unexplored. In this sense, he has been often compared with James Joyce, who constantly infringed the use of the English language. Yet, in Rosa’s case, he never went so far as to transgress the linguistic system of Portuguese.

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The procedures employed by Guimarães Rosa for the revitalization of literary language are many and varied, and they range from the level of language stricto sensu to that of narrative discourse. In the first case, one can mention words that had lost their primitive energy and had acquired new fixed meanings associated with one specific context (for example, the words “jungle” or “backlands” in the regionalist novel); also expressions which had become vague and weakened, clouded with connotations that concealed their original strength; and finally, syntax, which had abandoned its infinite possibilities and had limited itself to ready-­made sentences and clichés. In the second case, reference could be made to the breaking with traditional linearity and causal coherence of the narrative; the fusion of narrative devices such as the monologue and the dialogue, or of the epic, lyrical and dramatic genres; and the frequent use of a metalanguage that constantly indicates the narrator’s consciousness of the fictitious character of the novel. In all these cases, though, the idea that lies at its base is the same: the elimination of any connotations worn out by usage, and the exploration of language potentialities. This breaking with common usage accomplished by Guimarães Rosa in his works and his consequent exploration of the potentialities of both the linguistic system and narrative discourse are evidence of the committed attitude of an author who sees the reader’s participation as an indispensable element of his own creative process. For Rosa, language is a powerful instrument of action because it may bring the reader to reflection. But since this power of language is weakened whenever its forms are worn out and conditioned to a specific world view, it becomes necessary to renew it constantly, and this act of renewing is endowed with an ethical sense, which he believes every writer should have. Everyday language is, for him, worn out by usage; it expresses clichés rather than ideas. Thus, it is the writer’s duty to explore the potentialities of linguistic expression, so that it may recover its original strength and be able to act upon the reader’s mind. Hence his remark in his interview with Lorenz that every writer is also a revolutionary (Lorenz, in Coutinho, 1991: 92) because, by restoring language’s power of action, a writer is also spreading the seeds of possible transformations. For Guimarães Rosa, it is not enough to criticize a certain reality in his works if this criticism is not accompanied by a restructuring of the language through which this criticism is expressed. The revolution of literature must start from within, from the literary form itself, if it is meant to attain the reader, and this is for him the ultimate sense of the aesthetic revolution he accomplishes.

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But in spite of the role that the search for new expression plays in the works of Guimarães Rosa and of the importance of his linguistic revolution in the cadre of twentieth-­century Brazilian literature, this is not the only aspect of his work that has perplexed critics. A regionalist writer in the sense that he utilizes the Brazilian backlands as the setting of his stories and the inhabitants of this region as his characters, the author transcends the paradigm of traditional regionalism when he replaces the emphasis put on language by the importance given to humankind as the pivot of his fictional universe. Whereas in the traditional regionalist narrative the landscape occupies the core of the work, and humankind is relegated to a secondary level, as a mere representative of the region, in Rosa’s fiction he holds the center of interest, and the landscape is seen through him. Humankind is no longer portrayed in its typical aspects alone (like the gaucho, the llanero, or the backlands person), but is rather presented as an individual, with as many facets as possible. The backlands as well is no longer depicted as the mere recreation of a specific geographical area—either in its physical or in its sociocultural aspects—but rather as the representation of a human, existential area, present and alive within the minds of its characters: a region that can be seen as a microcosm of the world. The characters that compose Guimarães Rosa’s fictional universe—from the stories of Sagarana to the condensed narratives of Tutaméia—all come from the Minas Gerais backlands, where the author was born and raised. Yet in no way whatsoever can they be seen as mere types or representatives of this region. The regional marks are present in them and are reflected in the way they relate to the world, in their own way of being, but they never go so far as to determine the scope of their actions. The deterministic perspective, responsible for the one-­sided quality or condition around which the heroes of previous novels were constructed—that is, their embodiment of the condition of specific types alone—no longer finds room in his fiction. Here, humankind and nature do not form two distinct entities frequently set into conflict; they are rather the two sides of a totality that complement one another. Guimarães Rosa’s heroes continue to be types in the sense that they express their collective character— their region or society and the function they have in that structure—in every act, but they transcend their typicality by means of the human dimension with which they are endowed. As well as the new treatment of characters, the landscape present in the narratives of Guimarães Rosa is not the accurate description of a physical reality—the Brazilian backlands—but rather the recreation of a reality with no

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borders. It is undoubtedly a specific area of the Brazilian backlands, as can be evidenced by the number of precise geographic references made throughout the narrative, but it is also, and most especially, the existential space of the characters, and the reconstruction, through fiction, of a human and universal region. While in the traditional regionalist fiction the region was usually approached from a one-­sided perspective, either as an exotic or picturesque shelter or as an inhospitable land that destroys and swallows up man, in Guimarães Rosa it is painted as a dynamic, deep and contradictory reality that is revealed to the reader through the eyes of and through the existential experiences of its inhabitants. In addition to being a physical or geographic location, it is also a universal type of region, and, more than that, a region which surpasses the pure referent and imposes itself as a space of creation. This wider regionalist perspective, based sometimes on apparently opposing terms, is not, however, an isolated phenomenon in Rosa’s works. Rather, it is part of a concept of reality—also present in twentieth-­century Western literature—as something multiple and constantly changing, which is represented in his fiction by means of a form that tries to apprehend it in as many of its facets as possible. Guimarães Rosa’s fictional universe is certainly not static, nor is it ever built up on one level alone. Myth and fantasy, for example, are a part of it, as well as rationalistic logic, and all these elements are dealt with on an equal footing in his narratives. A man from the Brazilian backlands—a region marked by mystery and mystical beliefs—but at the same time endowed with great erudition from his formal education, the author breaks up the hierarchy that usually exists between the logos and the mythos, and places these two elements side by side, yet in constant tension, in his fiction. Myth and fantasy, as well as the other levels of reality that transcend rationalistic, Cartesian logic, are present in Guimarães Rosa’s works in different forms: superstitions and premonitions, a belief in apparitions and a devotion to healers and fortune-­tellers, mysticism and religious fear, and a certain admiration for mystery and the unknown. These elements are an integral part of the mental complex of the backlands man, and they cannot be absent from his narratives, for, as he himself states in his interview with Günter Lorenz, “in order to understand the Brazilian way of life, it is important to recognize that knowledge is distinct from logic” (Lorenz, in Coutinho, 1991:92). Yet, at no point whatsoever is the rationalistic world view, inherited from European tradition, set aside. Guimarães Rosa is conscious of the fact that the backlands man is an individual split between two worlds of a different order—a mythical-­sacred world and a

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logical-­rational one—and what he does is to question the tyranny of rationalism that has prevailed in Western literature since Descartes, by condemning its supremacy over the other levels of reality. He sees rationalism as one among other possibilities of apprehending reality but he relativizes the hegemonic and dogmatic character it has acquired in the Western tradition. Thus, he questions traditional realism in his works by calling attention to myth but he does not adopt a mythical perspective. Rather, every time he reports something that may signal the existence of myth, he also brings about a questioning and does not exclude the possibility of a rational explanation. The questioning of rationalistic logic is one of the most significant aspects of Guimarães Rosa’s works and it is also expressed by the affinity he devotes to all those characters, abundant in his narratives, who are usually placed at the margins of common sense. It is so in the case of madmen, the blind or otherwise disabled, criminals, sorcerers, and particularly children and aged people, who do not share the pragmatic view of average adults and are therefore endowed with a special sensibility and an accurate perception. This gallery of intuitive beings, to which can also be added those who are dominated by temporary states of unreason, such as drunkenness and passion, are often protagonists of his stories, and the narrative is frequently told from their perspectives. Lucid in their madness, or judicious in their apparent senselessness, these characters, who affirm themselves precisely by their difference, strongly contribute to this putting into check of the dichotomies of rationalism. With such a universe, where these people’s voices are also heard, Rosa accomplishes a real deconstruction of the hegemonic discourse of Western logic and delves into a deep search for other possibilities that can be represented by the image in the title of one of his best-­ known stories: the “third bank of the river” (Rosa, 1968). The criticism Guimarães Rosa raises against the excluding, rationalistic logic of Cartesian tradition in favor of the search for a plurality of ways, is one of the main aspects of his fiction and it is present in every one of its elements, from the characters, the plot and the space, right up to the language he employs. Rosa’s narratives are a plural, hybrid and inquiring type of work, marked by a strong ambiguity, and by the idea of a search: it is a constellation of elements that is frequently oppositional and contradictory. At the same time regional and universal, mimetic and self-­conscious, realist and anti-­realist, it is a product of the twentieth century—an art of tensions and relativity—and a clear expression of the context from where it comes: a land that can be understood only when seen as a great amalgam of cultures. In this kind of “critical summa,” there are no

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absolute values or pontifical statements, but rather paths to be traced and a wide range of possibilities. Guimarães Rosa’s Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) is not only the author’s masterpiece, but also one of the major achievements of Brazilian literature in the twentieth century, and the book’s success can be measured both by the number of editions, which come out with great frequency, and by its translations into the most diverse languages as well as being adapted into different media, such as the movies and television. The work’s publication, in 1956, immediately brought about a considerable number of reviews, of either an apologetic or a critical sort, along with a similar number of substantial studies, both from Brazil and abroad, that have approached the novel in depth. Although these studies are very distinct in their nature and methodology, they all coincide in pointing out certain aspects, among them the author’s preoccupation with language and the fact that both the language stricto sensu of the novel and its narrative structure are characterized by the confluence of elements so far seen as opposing but which coexist in a constant tension in the work. This latter aspect is responsible for the questioning of Cartesian logic, based on the excluding binarism represented by the alternative construction “either/or,” and for its substitution with an inclusive kind of logic, present in the paradox, “Everything is and is not” repeated throughout the entire novel by the narrator-­protagonist. This questioning character of the novel, which has ambiguity as its basic structural principle, is what has driven many critics to see it as a critical synthesis of Guimarães Rosa’s works. Leaving aside the issue of language stricto sensu, already highly explored by critics, and focusing our attention on the novel’s narrative structure, one of the most significant innovations introduced by Guimarães Rosa lies in the fact that the entire novel is constructed in the form of a question. Riobaldo, the narrator-­protagonist, is a man tormented by the idea that he had sold his soul to the devil, but he is not entirely sure the devil actually exists; thus, he decides to narrate his life to an interlocutor (an educated urban citizen who is travelling through the backlands) in order to pose this question to him at the end. This aim of the narrative is made explicit in several passages, as when he says: “I won’t talk about everything. I have no intention of relating every detail of my life . . . . What I want is to bring out a certain fact, and then to ask your advice. For that reason, I want you to listen carefully to these passages in the life of Riobaldo, the jagunço” (Rosa, 1963: 181), or when he states: “What I tell you is what I know and you don’t know, but the main things I want to talk about are those which I do not know if I know, but

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which you perhaps do” (Rosa, 1963: 192). Riobaldo feels guilty for having contracted a pact with the devil and blames himself for the death of Diadorim (his great passion), which he considers a consequence of this, and he sets himself the task of reporting the events of his life that preceded and followed the pact, in the hope of finding some kind of relief for his conscience, some kind of judgment or even pardon. And everything in his narrative converges toward the final question which, not finding a convincing answer, is left open for the reader to reflect upon. If Riobaldo’s narrative is all directed toward a central question—the query about the existence or not of the devil—such a narrative is also in and of itself a question in the sense that it is constructed in a sort of language defined precisely by its searching nature, by its speculative aspect. Riobaldo is a representation of man in a state of doubt, of uncertainty, who wants to “decipher the things that matter” (Rosa, 1963: 83); thus, his narrative, instead of being a mere report of past facts or events, is a speculation about those facts, a constant attempt to interpret or find a meaning for them. His speculations are never definitive, because the answers he comes up with carry a series of new questions. For this reason, his entire narrative is, more than anything else, a posing of problems that he invites his interlocutor to discuss. To see how this posing of problems operates in Grande sertão: veredas, originating a kind of narrative that inquires more than it affirms, we will show how its various levels are combined to produce this effect. At the beginning of the long narrative about his former life as a jagunço,1 and the consequences of that experience, Riobaldo—by this time an aged farmer—says: “In my early days, I tried my hand at this and that, but as for thinking, I just didn’t. Didn’t have time. I was like a live fish on a griddle—when you’re hard-­pressed you waste no time in daydreams. But now, with time on my hands and no special worries, I can lie in my hammock and speculate” (Rosa, 1963: 5–6). In this passage, which constitutes a kind of summary of the structure of Grande sertão: veredas, the reader can clearly see that the narrative which Riobaldo has just begun to recount is constructed around two basic lines, or levels, associated with two different moments of his life and which are marked by two different attitudes on his part—namely, a past time during which he experienced the facts he is narrating now, predominantly marked by his action The term jagunço is applied in Brazilian Portuguese to a member of a group of outlaws: inhabitants of the backlands, who form a sort of bodyguard to defend either their own interests or those of the landowners that support them.

1

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in the backlands; and a present time, characterized by a speculative attitude, in which he is reporting those past events to his interlocutor and is experiencing them again in the very act of narration. Although these two lines cannot be separated—they are interwoven on every level of the narrative, and its total effect comes precisely from their integration—we will here focus on each of them in turn and show how they are combined in the corpus of the novel. The first of these two lines, the past, corresponds to the story Riobaldo set out to tell—that is, the story of his life as a jagunço—and it is composed of those episodes that occurred at that time. However, since these episodes are of two entirely distinct kinds, we can easily distinguish here the presence of two sub-­ lines: an objective one, formed by the succession of external facts and events with which the narrator-­protagonist is involved in the backlands, e.g. his battles and toils; and a subjective one, constituted by the inner conflicts he had at that time, e.g. his hesitation between the love of Otacília (the pure maid of chivalric romances) and that of Nhorinhá (the prostitute); his simultaneous attraction and repulsion for Diadorim (a maiden disguised as a man in order to revenge her father’s murder); and his fear of assuming command of his troops. These two sub-­lines, different though they may be—because of the nature of their component episodes and conflicts and of the aims pursued by the protagonist in each—are nevertheless very similar in their structure and their movement, alternating throughout the entire narrative, is revealed as convergent at the end, when they merge into a single climax—a final battle which results in the death of Diadorim and the revelation of his/her true sex. The second of these lines—the time of the narration—is composed of the experiences that the narrator-­protagonist is going through at the very moment in which he is reporting his past life to his interlocutor—that is, his speculations about those facts or events and his attempt to organize them into narrative terms. Here again we can clearly distinguish the presence of two subplots; one basically speculative and the other critical and metalinguistic. In the former the narrator is preoccupied with deciphering those things he could not understand until then, and with dissipating the doubts that continue to torment him; in the latter he is concerned with suitable expressions for transmitting them with a maximum degree of faithfulness. These two subplots differ fundamentally from those of the past in that they exist only in the act of narration—they are exclusively a verbal experience—but they also differ from one another because in the first case language is an object per se: it is itself a means and an end; in the second it is the object of another language, that is, a metalanguage.

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But if these two lines around which the narrative is constructed can be clearly distinguished because they correspond to two different moments in the life of the narrator-­protagonist and to two different attitudes on his part—in the first case he experiences that which he will later narrate, and in the second he narrates that which he has formerly experienced—they are mutually dependent in the novel. This is because if the narrator’s present speculations are a consequence of his actions in the past, the latter are important only insofar as they are still alive within the present, in the form of questions which torment him now. Riobaldo’s narrative is neither a mere report of past facts and events nor a simple accumulation of a number of present speculations, but rather a fusion of these two modalities or genres; and precisely in this fusion lies its basic tension: a will on the part of the narrator to reconstruct with some exactness the events of his past life in order to dissipate his present doubts and anxieties, and a consciousness of the impossibility of doing so (at least in the terms desired) owing to the time gap between one moment and the other, and the difficulty of molding living experiences into the medium of language. Although the first one of these factors—the time gap between one moment and the other—constitutes a relevant preoccupation for Riobaldo, driving him to a constant process of self-­questioning; the second factor—the consciousness of the difficulty of molding living experiences into the medium of language—is not only one of the central elements in the entire narrative but also one of the main preoccupations of the author himself, the search for new expression. The narrator is aware that the act of narrating implies some distortion but he is also aware that it is the only way he has to re-­experience his past; thus his preoccupation lies with the degree of such a distortion, and he will look for a type of language which seems most appropriate to express those facts. The language of Brazilian narrative of the 1920s and 1930s has become associated with a one-­sided view of the world, and since the reality Riobaldo wants to express is one which transcends such a view, he has set himself the task of looking for a new type of expression, and has established a kind of isomorphic relationship between his world view and the way of expressing it by building his report into a poetic language that is being created at the very moment of narration. However, the great success which the narrator of Grande sertão: veredas has achieved in terms of the representation of reality is not exclusively related to the type of language used, but also and most especially to the identification he has established between his language and his world view, by representing the search which characterizes the latter through the quest for new

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expression. Riobaldo is a man in a constant state of uncertainty and quest —, and he uses his narration to accomplish his search (it is in itself a process of search). But since this process can be accomplished only if he finds a new type of language that inquires more than it affirms, there occurs an identification between living and narrating, and his existential quest is represented through the search for a new expression. Thus, in addition to representing his world view through a type of language which, by its inquisitive character, best suits such a function, the narrator does so by using a process similar to that which characterizes his view, and constructs his entire report under the sign of the search. Taking as our basic references the structural ambiguity of Grande sertão: veredas and the questioning undertaken by the narrator-­protagonist throughout the entire work, we will now examine two elements that are basic in any type of fiction—character and space—but which acquire special relevance in Guimarães Rosa’s novel due to the innovative treatment the author has given them. As we have seen, one of the aspects which best characterizes Rosa’s work is its condition of being at the same time regional and universal as a result of a shift in the novel’s center of gravity from nature to man, or, in other words, from a purely regionalist to a more nearly universal perspective, according to which the regional elements, though still highly significant, no longer form by themselves the core of the work. This shift—which consists above all in a humanization of the landscape in the sense that man rather than the landscape now is the pivotal element, and which reflects a new maturity on the part of the novelist who no longer sees his land as a special, isolated case but as a part of a wider complex that can be named the Western world—led to the emergence of a new kind of hero who replaces the mere “type” of the regionalist novel, and the universalization of the region. Reading Grande sertão: veredas for the first time, one is immediately struck by the ambiguity of the narrator-­protagonist, who is, and at the same time is not, a jagunço. The narrative of Grande sertão: veredas is the report of his former life as a jagunço made by Riobaldo, now an old farmer, to a cultivated urban citizen traveling through the Brazilian backlands. Yet throughout the entire narrative the reader clearly feels that the protagonist, though having led for a long time the life of a jagunço, has never completely identified with the model of the jagunço, at least as it is presented by the other jagunços in the novel. The consciousness that he was different from his companions has always given Riobaldo a feeling that he was an outsider among them; that he did not belong in that world. Riobaldo is aware that he is not like the other jagunços, yet he enters the jagunços’ world and shares their life experience to such an extent that he finally becomes

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not only his group’s leader but also the only man capable of restoring to that group the equilibrium upset by the treacherous murder of its first charismatic leader, Joca Ramiro. But during his entire life as a jagunço Riobaldo has never completely adapted to his companions’ way of life, and has always maintained a distance from them. The typical jagunços were pure men of action, men who merely obeyed the orders of a leader and never even wondered about the reasons for their acts. Riobaldo, in contrast, is a speculative being, and it is this very quality which confers individuality upon him and accounts for his transcendence of the jagunço type. Whereas the other jagunços simply accept their status as puppets manipulated by wealthy and powerful landowners who offer them support in exchange for their services, he is always questioning his condition as a jagunço and constantly seeking a meaning to his actions. Thus, by questioning the necessity to obey the orders of his superior and the validity of the latter’s decisions he is contravening the very code that rules that world. It is true that he fulfills his duty as a jagunço by participating in the combat as much as his companions, but by his questioning he transcends the pure type and places himself in a position far beyond the limitations imposed by that world. It is important to note that Riobaldo’s speculative nature by no means excludes his status as a man of action. The protagonist of Grande sertão: veredas is at the same time a man of action and a man of thought, and it is precisely this duplicity that defines his character. It is true that by his questioning Riobaldo transcends the type and becomes a complex character, endowed with wide human dimensions, but in so doing he does not entirely lose track of his condition as a type, for his speculations cannot be dissociated from this life as a jagunço. Since his adolescence, when he had his first contact with a group of jagunços that had spent a day at his godfather’s farm, he felt enormously attracted to their way of life and nourished the hope of joining them one day. Yet a moral consciousness, deriving from his earlier life with his mother and his experience in the little town where he had been sent to receive some education, among other things, always worked as an opposing force and prevented his dream from coming true. But chance plays a trick on him and he eventually runs into exactly that from which he was trying to escape: he accepts a job as a private instructor to a man who happened to be fighting the jagunços, and through him is introduced to their nomadic life. At this point the character’s inner conflict is intensified: Riobaldo admires the jagunços, but takes part in a group whose aim is to exterminate them; he does

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not want to lead the life of a jagunço, yet his life in the adversary group does not differ much from it. Conscious of these contradictions, he deserts his group, only to fall once more into the hands of destiny: he comes across a young man who years before had exerted a strange fascination over him and who now, as a jagunço, leads him to join his group. At this moment, Riobaldo’s life as a jagunço starts. Now he belongs to a group, receives orders from a leader, and will kill or die according to fixed precepts. And Riobaldo’s career as a jagunço does not stop there. His ability as a great shooter is immediately noticed by his companions and his capacity for being their leader is recognized even by the leaders themselves. But as the war develops among the jagunços and the moments of risk become more frequent and tougher, that which seemed to him merely incidental is revealed as a heavy moral duty. Riobaldo is divided between his dedication to the jagunços’ cause and his own moral principles, according to which the position of jagunço chief implies a great amount of evil, and while conscious that he can no longer turn back, he feels weak and hesitates. To find the strength to take on that which he now sees as his doom, Riobaldo makes a pact with the devil one midnight at a certain crossroads. But this Faustian episode—a turning point in the character’s existential itinerary—rather than eliminating his conflict, replaces it with another of a different kind. Having confronted the forces of evil, Riobaldo feels capable of assuming the leadership of his group and as a leader commits himself so fully to his role that he brings the war to a decisive battle which ends in the group’s victory. Yet, though victorious, he is far from feeling satisfied or fulfilled; a strong feeling of guilt, resulting from the belief that he had sold his soul to the devil, will torment him for the rest of his life. This guilty feeling constitutes the basis of Riobaldo’s later metaphysical speculations, which in turn motivates the narration of his life to his interlocutor. Riobaldo is tormented by the idea that he has sold his soul to the devil and wants to find out whether the latter actually exists. Thus, he begins his narrative by reporting the episode of a strange appearance which people believe was the devil, and finishes it with a conclusion that, if not totally convincing from the point of view of the character’s process of self-­justification, at least provides his conscience with some kind of relief: “It was kind of you to have listened, and to have confirmed my belief: that the devil does not exist. Isn’t that so? . . . It was nothing. There is no devil! What I say is, if he did . . . It is man who exists. The passage” (Rosa, 1963: 492). In spite of the phrases “Isn’t that so” and “if he did” (“if it really is”) which leave the matter for further speculation, Riobaldo denies

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in this passage the existence of the devil as an external entity. And by affirming that “it is man who exists”, he implies that evil, as well as good, is a part of human nature, which is characterized precisely by the coexistence of opposing poles. This conclusion, obvious as it may seem, constitutes a decisive step in the character’s process of attaining self-­knowledge and reveals an acceptance of his human condition. In his speculations, Riobaldo has evolved from a Manichean perspective to a more mature view based on the relativity and reversibility of things, and at this stage his actions as a jagunço come to be seen from a different angle, stripped of their purely mythical, diabolical character. Now the man of thought, having meditated upon his former deeds, accepts the man of action, and the distinction which until then prevailed between them disappears. At this point we come to an important aspect which requires further discussion: the jagunço portrayed by the narrator in Grande sertão: veredas is by no means a type constructed exclusively along a negative semantic axle. It is true that the jagunços frequently appear in the novel as bandits involved in a series of evil actions, as for example when Riobaldo describes their life at Hermógenes’ campground, or when he reports their cruelty when invading small villages. But at the same time they are presented as soldiers, and even heroes; victims of a complex social situation, capable of a number of noble actions, who kill and die out of loyalty to their leader and above all to an ethical code which, though different from the dominant one, is not shown as hierarchically inferior. In the name of this code, which aims at a noble cause—to bring justice, as far as possible, to the backlands—the jagunço commits many atrocities but by manipulating evil as a condition to attain good he transcends, as the critic Antonio Candido affirms, the status of a pure bandit (Candido, 1970: 133–170). Far from being a common criminal, the jagunço is represented as a multiple, contradictory being, also endowed with a heroic status which places him in a position similar to that of the heroes of the European medieval romances of chivalry. This impetuosity of the jagunço, who lives in constant risk, with his desire for glory and reputation, and with his loyalty toward his leader and his companions (among other qualities) is endowed with a strong dose of idealism which makes of him a rather modern version of the knights of the romances of chivalry. However, his lack of perspective on life, constantly pointed out by Riobaldo, and his servility and submission to the figure of the wealthy landowners reveal him to be a social outcast whose survival depends entirely on the will of those men. The jagunços present in Grande sertão: veredas, idealized as they may be, are also a faithful reproduction of the class existing in the Brazilian backlands, which has

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been designated as “retainers”—that is, a huge group of people who, having no other means of subsistence, live under the protection of powerful proprietors who in exchange use their services, ranging from votes in elections to combat against any force that might threaten their stability. A contradictory being: bandit and at the same time hero, capable of extreme actions that range from vile to noble; soldier and social outcast; defender of a society which exploits him for his valor and condemns him for his actions— this is the jagunço one finds in the pages of Grande sertão: veredas. He is a social type based on a concrete reality: the jagunço so common in the Brazilian backlands, and also an ideal, fictitious creation, molded in great part on the heroes of the romances of chivalry, whose values still live in the popular and folkloric tradition of the inhabitants of these lands. This ambiguity of the jagunço type, which makes Riobaldo constantly oscillate in his desire for and at the same time repulsion against identifying with it, is what distinguishes the type represented in Grande sertão: veredas from that encountered in earlier Brazilian literary works. Whereas in the earlier works the jagunço was portrayed from a one-­sided perspective and appeared as either a hero or a social victim, in Rosa’s novel he is a multiple, contradictory being who can be defined as the synthesis of the previously opposing views. The ambiguity present in the figure of the narrator-­protagonist, who embodies the type but at the same time transcends it by means of a questioning that reflects an existential conflict, is also present in the type itself which, though obviously constructed around a series of clichés, transcends the one-­sided perspective of the previous regionalist fiction and is projected on a larger scale, becoming a sign of the regional within the universal. In the same way that the protagonist of Grande sertão: veredas is simultaneously a regional type and a universal character who transcends his typicality by means of the human dimension with which he is endowed, the sertão2 we encounter in the pages of Rosa’s novel is a multiple, ambiguous region which corresponds on one level to a physical, geographical area located in the Brazilian backlands and on another to an inner, spiritual or psychological reality with no external boundaries, and which can be seen as a microcosm of the world. It is true that Guimarães Rosa started the process of representing reality from a concrete

Sertão is a geographical denomination which refers to a vast area of the Brazilian backlands. Guimarães Rosa’s use of the term, which appears in the very title of the novel, will be discussed from now on.

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region where he had spent a great part of his life and transformed or recreated this region to form the universe of his novel. But it is important to note that, in so doing, he never lost track completely of that reality which served him as the point of departure. On the contrary, such a reality is present in all its rawness and concreteness, and that is what constitutes the documental side of his work, so insistently pointed out and much appreciated by sociologists of literature. As a concrete region, the sertão here is a representation, as near as possible, of a specific area of the Brazilian backlands including northwestern Minas Gerais, southwestern Bahia and southeastern Goiás. This precision is clearly indicated in the novel by references to cities, towns, and geographical characteristics that have the same name as actual places and features that it has been possible to trace the route of the narrator’s marches as a jagunço in those lands.3 The area is depicted in all its possible aspects, from merely physical or geographical, including its fauna, flora, climate, and hydrography, to the customs of its people and the social and economic system in which they live. Everything has been done so accurately and with such a sense of verisimilitude that anyone familiar with the region will easily recognize it. Besides, the term sertão is often employed in the novel in its denotative sense. Yet, it is important to note that even in this sense the term cannot be understood as referring to a clearly delimited region, for it varies in the conception of the inhabitants of the area themselves. The sertão is not a uniform region but an agglomeration of several smaller regions that have been unified under a common label; and this diversity is indicated in the book by the fact that the word is often employed in its plural form, sertões, and is sometimes followed by an adjective which specifies the place. The term sertão, still in its concrete sense, is also used to mean a region that is basically rural, as opposed to the city, which is here seen as a center of progress and of a more advanced civilization. And it is in this sense of the sertão that the main conflict of the novel on the factual, episodic level—the war that the jagunços wage first against the government soldiers and then, after Joca Ramiro’s murder, against the traitors who killed him—can be understood. However, it is important to note that at this point the concept of the sertão as a physical region begins to be confused with that of a human reality, This was done by critic Alan Viggiano in his book Itinerário de Riobaldo Tatarana (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1978).

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and the region which served the author as a point of departure comes to be represented by the system of values of the jagunço, here identified with the land. The city is the new: it is progress and civilization which enters the backlands in the form of its soldiers, to conquer and civilize them; hence the reaction of the jagunços, by means of a war that is nothing but the social, economic, and cultural conflict of two societies that live side by side in considerably different stages of development. This conflict between the old and the new, here represented by the sertão and the city, finds its best expression in the novel in the episode of Zé Bebelo’s trial, an anthological passage that has been classified by critic Cavalcânti Proença as the dialogue between the sertão and the city (Proença, 1958: 44). Zé Bebelo was a man who aspired to change the old habits of the sertão, to civilize it. He wanted to finish off the jagunços, and after that to become a congressman with the aim of building bridges, hospitals, factories, and schools in the sertão. He was a farmer who dreamed about big cities and who, before marching against the sertão, learns to read and write and becomes an ally of soldiers and politicians. But he is captured by Joca Ramiro’s group and submitted to a trial in which he is accused of having attacked the land for the purpose of changing its customs. The result is his condemnation to exile, a sentence in perfect accordance with the type of crime of which he is accused. Yet this episode does not imply, as its sentence might indicate, a victory of the sertão over the city, for it contains the germs of the treason that will provoke the scission of the jagunço group. It is true that Zé Bebelo is punished for his audacity in invading the sertão, and that the episode has the effect of making him switch sides—for after Joca Ramiro’s murder he returns with the firm intention of avenging him and becomes a jagunço chief—but by introducing the idea of a trial and obtaining a sentence that was not the death sentence he has broken with the traditional habits of the sertão and has exposed it to the influence of the city. That is why the most conservative faction, here represented by the subleaders Hermógenes and Ricardão, having been beaten by the majority of the votes in the trial, rebelled against Joca Ramiro and decided to murder him. At the level of events, Zé Bebelo’s trial constitutes a turning point in the novel in the sense that it marks a borderline between two distinct moments of the jagunços’ war: their fight against the government soldiers and their struggle for reunification after the split caused by treason. However, in addition to this, the episode marks the introduction of new, civilizing habits into the backlands, a trend which will develop gradually, especially during the leadership first of Zé

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Bebelo and then of Riobaldo. The consciousness of the changes they are introducing into the sertão makes these characters frequently hesitate in their decisions, fearful that they might be betraying their land. And in fact Zé Bebelo falls into this error, during the siege at the Tucano farm, by sending for the soldiers to counterattack Hermógenes, resulting in the loss of his leadership to Riobaldo. But if both Zé Bebelo and Riobaldo introduce new customs into the sertão, a distinction must be made between them. Zé Bebelo has never been a real man from the sertão, in that he has never totally adapted to the way of life characteristic of the land. His aim was to change this way of life, to break with the established order, and he does not hesitate to march against the sertão, consciously at first, when fighting the jagunços, and unconsciously, perhaps, later, when sending for the government politicians to interfere in an internal affair. Zé Bebelo comes and goes to and from the sertão throughout the novel and at the end, when Riobaldo sees him for the last time his plans are to settle down in a big city. Riobaldo, on the contrary, is a man from the sertão, an individual so integrated with his region that the latter exerts upon him a kind of fatalistic influence from which he cannot escape. It is this integration of Riobaldo with the sertão that makes him successful in precisely those aspects in which his predecessors had failed. Zé Bebelo, an outsider, had not been able to understand the sertão and he failed as a result of having attempted to impose his own values upon it. Riobaldo, though hesitant at the beginning, eventually learns how to listen to the call of the land and is successful only insofar as he has been able to identify with it and to assume such an identity up to the end. But his success, like everything else in the novel, has a double meaning, for in order to achieve such a stage he has had to submit to the fatalistic power of the milieu and accept a destiny that seemed to have been traced for him beforehand. This double character of Riobaldo’s achievement, which is part of the general theme of the relativity and reversibility of things present throughout the novel, is significant also at the level of events, in that it establishes a distinction between the conflict of sertão vs. city and the dichotomy found in earlier Brazilian fiction, which inevitably results in man’s final ruin or destruction. Such a distinction is a consequence of the fact that whereas in that older type of fiction nature or the countryside is always seen from a one-­sided perspective, as a victim of man’s ambition and civilized purposes, the sertão in Grande sertão: veredas is an ambiguous reality, endowed simultaneously with the attributes of a mother and those of an enemy. The sertão is not, in Rosa’s works, a mere antagonist of man, but rather a multiple, complex, and ambiguous region,

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constructed under a plural semantic axis which oscillates according to man’s way of relating to it. But this notion of the sertão as a multiple, ambiguous region places us face to face with another reality, of a wider scope, that transcends the region in the sense in which we have been discussing it up to the present. Sertão at this point is no longer a geographical reality that can be characterized by either its physical or its social or economic aspects, but rather a microcosm of the world: a mysterious, unlimited region in which man lives in constant search for meaning. In this universal region, which has been compared by critics to the Chekhovian steppes, Cervantes’s La Mancha, or even Joyce’s Dublin, the jagunço lives with all his contradictions and faces a series of situations that are nothing but a representation of everyone’s daily life, especially in its extreme moments of tension. This sense of the sertão as a microcosm of the world is that which predominates on the subjective level of the narrative, constituted by Riobaldo’s inner conflicts and metaphysical quest; for both these conflicts and his quest for the meaning of life are universal preoccupations that transcend the barriers of a specific geographical region. It is true that these conflicts cannot be totally dissociated from the circumstances of his life—his being a man from the sertão who admired the jagunço’s way of life brought about the question of his being a jagunço, and his ability as such raised the question of his becoming a leader—but to consider them as specific for this reason is certainly to miss the point. Riobaldo’s conflicts on this subjective level—his hesitation between spiritual love for his pure Otacília and carnal desire for the prostitute Nhorinhá; his insecurity resulting from the simultaneous attraction and repulsion he feels toward his friend Diadorim who embodies, through his androgyny, both the licit and the illicit sides of love; his wish to carry out that which he sees as his duty and at the same time his fear of doing it—are all universal conflicts with which humankind has to deal in the world. This notion of the sertão as a universal region is made even more evident in the novel through the theme of the voyage, represented by the word “travessia” (crossing, passage through), repeated often throughout the narrative. If on the denotative level the word refers to Riobaldo’s crossing of the sertão, to his marches and countermarches in defense of the jagunço’s cause, it indicates on the connotative or symbolic level the life journey which the protagonist takes in his search for the meaning of things and the essence of the human condition. In the novel, life is a crossing, a journey to knowledge, a process of learning that stops only at the moment of one’s death, and every step each man undertakes

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along his way is a moment of risk that places him face to face with mystery, with the unknown. Hence Riobaldo’s maxim “Living is very dangerous,” also repeated frequently. Man begins from nothing, from a pure state of innocence and attains knowledge through his experiences, for, as the narrator says, “learning to live is living itself ” (Rosa, 1963: 474) but since both he and the world are dynamic realities, his achievements are always provisory, and what characterizes him is an indefatigable state of search. Hence the statement: “One learns by living; but what one really learns is how to ask new and greater questions” (Rosa, 1963: 389–90). It is important to note that at this point we can no longer separate Riobaldo’s life from the narration he presents to his interlocutor: the existential itinerary which he follows is not concluded in the past, it is an ongoing process that continues through the narrative. The protagonist’s experiences as a jagunço, his battles and toils in the backlands, as well as the inner conflicts he had at that time, are simply the first part of a voyage which goes on into the present, and these elements are important only insofar as they are still alive within him, as they have left marks in the form of questions which trouble him now. These questions form the substance of his narration, which far from being a cold report of past facts and events, is a living process, a phase of his search-­process which develops and takes shape through words in the very act of narration. That is why the whole novel is constructed in the form of a question which extends far beyond the possibility of any sort of answer. The protagonist had the experiences which he is presently narrating, but in the narration he experiences them again, for his narration is, in sum, an effort to decipher what he has not yet been able to understand. In this sense, the “travessia” that Riobaldo undergoes in the novel embraces yet another meaning—that of a voyage through words, through literature—and only at this point can the role of the interlocutor be seen in its full extent. For this character, often described as a learned man, has come to the sertão in order to “launch out on this sea of territory, to find out what it contains” (Rosa, 1963: 9, 19) but when he meets Riobaldo on his farm the physical itinerary which he had planned for himself is replaced by the latter’s report and transformed into an imaginary journey—a journey through art. Thus, rather than coming to know the sertão merely in its physical, external aspects, he becomes acquainted with it through the experience of one of its men, and sees it then as a human region, recreated through art. That is why the novel begins with the word nonada (“nonothing”), forming a sentence by itself, and ends with the word travessia,

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also employed as a sentence by itself, followed by the symbol of infinity. Riobaldo’s interlocutor is the first link of a chain, a representative of the reader, and the entire novel is a journey that every reader will take from the moment he opens the book until he closes it. And since the reader is an active participant in this journey, who is urged to think, to meditate upon the facts narrated, and even to draw conclusions about these facts, the journey is integrated into his existential itinerary itself and becomes, as in the narrator’s case, a part of his life. Thus the sertão is revealed to him not only as a representation of the world but also as an artistic region that is transformed into a part of his own life experience. It is a living reality, revived every time he travels through the book’s pages. The aspects of Guimarães Rosa’s works, and particularly of Grande sertão: veredas which we have discussed here, though highlights of the third phase of the Brazilian modernist movement, have often been seen by European and North American critics as proper of postmodernism, at least in the sense the term has been employed to refer to the literary production of their countries. It is true that if we compare Rosa’s work with that of authors who are considered representative of European and North American postmodernism, we would come across a number of similar traits, which include the constant use of metalanguage, intertextuality, and the questioning of rationality through the exploration of other levels of reality, as well as the substitution of a logic of dichotomy, peculiar to Western modernism, with an all-­encompassing logic, in a bold eclecticism in which mutual exclusion is contested and plurality is desired. Yet, in spite of these common denominators, the differences between the Brazilian and the Euro-North American writers are still relevant, as a result of the circumstances underlying the historical-­cultural contexts they work in. Language innovations, for example, are an element present in both European and Brazilian modernism and the claim to the reader’s participation is a common trait of postmodernism in both these contexts. However, this claim is already present in Brazilian modernism, as well as the questioning of rationality through the exploration of other levels of reality and the defense of a cultural heterogeneity that favors the emergence of discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms. Brazilian literature has always been influenced by European literature as a result of the process of colonization which the country has undergone and which is still alive, though not from the same matrices, on the cultural and economic levels, but there has always also existed a tension between the mere incorporation of a European tradition and the attempt to create a new one of a local or native coinage. This latter tradition began during colonial times and has reached

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important moments throughout its course, especially in nineteenth-­century Romanticism and twentieth-­century modernism. Thus, it does not seem viable to examine its literature with an internalized Europe gaze, especially when twentieth-­century work is concerned. Brazilian modernism has brought about a series of innovations to the country’s literature, and the productions which followed this movement—that of the second half of the twentieth century which is usually considered by Brazilian literary historians as postmodernist—have extended these innovations to the extremes. And in this sense the role played by Guimarães Rosa was fundamental. He not only accomplished a real revolution of literary language—of both language stricto sensu and literary narrative—but also broke with the dualistic perspective according to which Brazilian literature had so far been understood. He produced a work which was at the same time regional and universal, i.e., turned towards its own context but at the same time connected to world literature as a whole; mimetic and self-­conscious; and committed to its aesthetic principles and also to the social, political and cultural context from which it springs.

Works cited Candido, Antonio. “Jagunços mineiros de Cláudio a Guimarães Rosa.” In ______ Vários escritos. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1970. Lorenz, Günter. “Diálogo com Guimarães Rosa.” In Eduardo F. Coutinho, ed. Guimarães Rosa. 2nd rpt. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1991. Proença, Manuel Cavalcânti. Trilhas no Grande sertão. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educaçao e Cultura, 1958. Rosa, João Guimarães. Sagarana. 2nd. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Universal, 1946. Rosa, João Guimarães. Sagarana. A Cycle of Stories. Trans. by Harriet de Onís. New York, 1966. Rosa, João Guimarães. Grande sertão: veredas. 2nd. ed. [Texto definitivo]. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1958. (1st ed.: 1956) Rosa, João Guimarães. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Trans. by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís. New York: 1963. Rosa, João Guimarães. Primeiras estórias. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1962. Rosa, João Guimarães. The Third Bank of the River and Other Stories. Trans. by Barbara Shelby. New York, 1968. Viggiano, Alan. Itinerário de Riobaldo Tatarana. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1978.

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Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism Rita Terezinha Schmidt

In 2015, a volume of 85 short stories by Clarice Lispector entitled The Complete Stories was published in the United States: edited by the American writer Benjamin Moser and translated into English by Katrina Dodson. Six years before in 2009, Moser had produced a biography of the writer entitled Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector,1 re-­edited in 2012 and 2014, which might be taken as evidence of a steady growing interest in the Brazilian writer on the part of American readers. Just a few weeks after The Complete Stories had been launched, more precisely on August 11, a review by Larry Rohter appeared in the New York Review of Books, with a photo of Lispector on the front cover of its Supplement. If one takes this fact as an acknowledgment of the appeal of her writing, if not of her achievements, then it is indeed a landmark, since not one Brazilian writer had received this sort of distinction before. In the follow up to the New York Review, the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair also published reviews hailing Lispector as a Brazilian Virginia Woolf, announcing that the time had come for her to shine: a statement that sounded as if her writings had had no circulation or recognition beyond the borders of her home country. There is no doubt that the reviews illustrate the media at work in breaking news to exert influence in the commerce and circulation of literary translations and, considering its power to do so, it is no surprise that the reviews make a tabula

In the 1990’s two major biographies were published in Brazil. The pioneering major biographical work on Lispector was published in 1995 by Nadia Gotlib, a Brazilian scholar recognized nationwide, and a longtime specialist on Lispector’s life and works. Entitled Lispector: uma vida que se conta (1995), this biography pieces together in a chronological line the fragments of a life history, based on original family documents and a great deal of research into many sources of information, including from locations abroad. Gotlib also published in 2008 the extensive volume entitled Clarice Fotobiography. The other important biography is Teresa Monteiro’s Eu Sou uma Pergunta: Uma Biografia de Clarice Lispector (1999).

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rasa of the history of previous translations. We do tend to be complacent with journalists when they fail in being accurate or thorough; after all, they play a different game that does not require them to be experts in the field, but we certainly view with suspicion the omissions or equivocal statements on the part of any writer/critic who has spent years doing research on his/her object of study. So I was struck by Mr. Moser’s statements in the interview given to The Globe (O Globo), a major Brazilian newspaper, in the same month of the release of his translation. On answering the question as to how he would explain the success of The Complete Stories he affirmed that Lispector was unknown outside the Brazilian context: “pouco conhecida na América Latina e quase desconhecida na França, ao contrário do que as pessoas afirmam” (“little known in Latin America and almost unknown in France, contrary to what people used to affirm”, Moser, 2015: 2) adding that, in the two decades since her death (between 1977 and 1997), Lispector remained virtually untranslated. However, the facts tell a different story. Translations have always been an important ally in the myriad of transits, migrations and disseminations that have made literary works channels for the transmission of linguistic and cultural differences, and this fact alone illustrates the extent to which translations constitute a visible force in intercultural exchanges: a force that leads to mediations and negotiations across geographical borders and cultural identities. In the last two decades or so, translation studies have become an expanding field of academic endeavor in the area of comparative literature and a major topic in ongoing discussions on models of world literature. Given the importance of this context, a map of translations of Lispector’s works across different geographies is due, not only to set the record straight in view of allegations to the contrary, but also because such a record is an index of the international cross-­cultural status her fiction has attained in the last five decades. To a great measure this status lies on the fact that her fiction has become a catalyst for feminist readings on the part of critics and writers from a variety of locations, as they have acknowledged the novelty of her achievement in terms of probing questions of female identity, experience, difference, and writing in and beyond the context of the Brazilian patriarchal culture and its tradition. So, following a section on translations, I will point out some landmarks in Lispector’s early critical reception in Brazil, using the criteria of some representativeness of literary criticism, and then I will focus on some critical works informed by feminist modes of reading or by a concern with women’s issues that have secured a place for Lispector’s works in today’s

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geography of world literature: more specifically in the zone defined by Margaret Higonnet as “where comparative literature meets feminist criticism”(Higonnett, 1995: 155).

Mapping translations International interest in Lispector’s works dates from the 1950s when the novel Near the Wild Heart was translated into French for the first time in 1954. In the 1960s, translations were published in several languages, followed by reviews and critical essays published in magazines and academic journals. Two translations in English deserve to be mentioned: The Apple in the Dark translated by the scholar Gregory Rabassa and published in the United States in 1967, and the almost 700-page-long The Discovery of the World, a collection of short stories and short prose called cronicas: weekly texts published in the newspaper column in Jornal do Brasil and translated by the researcher Giovani Pontiero, published in England in 1992. Also of note is the first source of bibliographical information on works by and about Lispector, including translations, from that period up to 1984 in Earl E. Fitz’s survey “Bibliografia de e sobre Clarice Lispector” of 1994 (Bibliography of and about Clarice Lispector) where the scholar also lists all the essays about Lispector published in a wide range of journals, such as Poetique, Studies in Short Fiction, Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brésilien, Latin American Review, Ibero-­amerikanishes Archiv, Modern Language Studies, Hispanica, Luso-Brazilian Review, Contemporary Literature, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Mexicana da Cutura—El Nacional and World Literature Today. Another important source of information is the 300-page Clarice Lispector: a Bio-Bibliography, organized by Diane E. Martin, published in the USA in 1993, and which is integrated into the project of Bio-Bibliographies in World Literature. Also, it is worth mentioning two chapters on Lispector in important reference books: The Encyclopedia of World Literature, edited by Fredrick Ungar and Lina Mainiero, published in 1975, and The Borzoi Anthology of Latin America Literature, edited by Monegal and Colchie in 1977. As for translations, Fitz lists five titles translated and published in the United States and two titles in England in the period 1967–1984. In addition, he also lists the works translated into other languages: into Spanish, in Argentina (six titles), Venezuela (three titles), and Spain (one title); into German (two titles) and Czech (one title). In 2001, in the bibliography of his book entitled Sexuality

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and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector, Fitz updated the information about translations in the US and listed nine titles. Since 2001, the number of translations has expanded significantly. In Japan, two works were published in 1984: G.H. no Junan/Kazoku no Kizuna (the novel, Passion according to GH, and the collection of short stories Family Ties). In Italy, ten titles were published between 1981 and 2001. Also in 2001, a collection of 78 short stories was published in Mexico under the title Cuentos Reunidos, by Alfaguara Publishing House, and edited with a prologue by Miguel Cossío Woodward2 where he explains how he brought together texts from six volumes previously printed in Brazil. In Germany, the first title was Der Apfel im Dunkeln published in 1964, considered the most elusive and enigmatic of Lispector’s novels and, by coincidence, the first of her novels published in the US in 1967. Also in Germany, six more titles were published between 1966 and 1985, including a new edition of Der Apfel. And after a gap of almost fifteen years, translations into German resumed in 2013 with four more titles published up to 2016. Likewise, Lispector’s works received extensive official visibility in the 2013 venue of the Frankfurt Book Fair, including enthusiastic coverage in newspapers like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung. A case apart is the fate of Lispector’s works in France. The first novel Perto do coração selvagem (Near the Wild Heart) was translated into French in 1954 by Plon Publishing House. Two decades later, in the period between 1978 and 2015, the Edition des Femmes published fifteen works, novels and collections of short stories, including five re-­editions, two of them bilingual. The latest translation is titled Mes Chéries (My Dear Ones), a collection of letters exchanged between Lispector and her sisters, with a preface by Nadia Gotlib who has played a major role in disseminating Lispector’s works in France. According to the Spanish Agency Carmen Balcells, responsible for Lispector’s copyrights around the world, translations were published in thirty countries and into twenty-­eight different languages up to 2014, including Chinese, Russian, Korean, Yiddish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Danish, Greek, Croatian, Turkish and Bulgarian. This record attests to the wide range of circulation and the growing interest in Lispector’s works for decades: a period during which she came to be recognized as one of the most This edition does not include three short stories: “O Triunfo”, “Trecho”, “Eu e Jimmy” and “Cartas a Hermengardo”. Regarding the latter, “Cartas a Hermengardo”, the full text (three parts) was published for the first time in the book Clarice Lispector: Outros Escritos organized by Alícia Manzo and Teresa Montero. This book made available a number of originals that had not been published before.

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provocative and celebrated writers from Latin America. On discussing matters related to the translation of any writer who writes in a language outside the sphere of dominant languages involves complex issues such as the politics of languages and the hegemony of English but also, as in the case of texts by Lispector, the role and power of the media to engender “facts” in order to promote writers and works according to their interest in book marketing. Given recent announcements in the American and Brazilian press about new translations of Lispector’s works into English, it is absolutely fair to say that it is preposterous to assume that Lispector only reached a world audience because of those translations as much as it is naive to affirm that international recognition of her works had been, until now, confined to few academic circles.

Vicissitudes of early critical reception in Brazil Lispector’s debut novel was Perto do coração selvagem published late in 1943. The initial reaction on the part of the Brazilian critical establishment was a mixture of surprise and bewilderment given the audacious creativity and a peculiar expressive form that did not afford any resemblance nor any term of comparison with her Brazilian predecessors, either with major Brazilian fiction writers who engaged in regional realisms in the 1930s or with innovative experiments of the so-­called Generation of 1945 that included Guimarães Rosa, author of the modern epic Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956) and who is placed along with the modernists Mario de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade at the center of the Brazilian avant-­garde literature. In fact, the difficulties in coming to terms with the difference of Lispector’s style and form, for which there was no reference in the national literary canon, explain the reason why early critical interpretations are ambivalent and indeed reveal a degree of impatience or hesitation to fully acknowledge the writer’s achievement. Antonio Candido, a leading scholar in Brazilian literature, was to set the tone for two generations of critics when he published two short newspaper articles in 1944 that appeared years later under the title “No raiar de Clarice Lispector” (“The Rising of Clarice Lispector”, 1977). Even though Candido recognizes the revolutionary experience in prose writing by pointing out the impressive attempt to take the Portuguese language to a level of performance not yet explored and while he assigns to the novel the merit of innovating Brazilian literature, his value judgment falls on the analysis of the female protagonist who is deemed

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weak, and suffering from a coldness incompatible with the normal flux of existence, whatever he means by these terms. In his overall assessment, the novel lacks the stuff out of which great works are made. Also in 1944, the critic Álvaro Lins published a short article entitled “The incomplete experience” where he disparages the aforementioned novel as a sample of “feminine literature” associated with characteristics of female idiosyncrasies such as narcissism and proneness to personal confessional texts, making a point about the ostensive and visible presence of the writer in the narrative. On the other hand, he points out the novel’s indebtedness to the modern lyrical novel in the tradition of André Gide and Herman Hesse, but also of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in terms of the use of narrative techniques such as the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness. However, Lins ends up underlining his impression that the novel is structurally flawed because it has no unity in terms of the experience conveyed and because the personality of the writer expressed in the form of a “strange human nature” imposes itself over the form; reason enough for the critic to define the novel as “very feminine, as one can see” (Lins, 1963: 191). His assessment of Lispector’s second novel O Lustre (The Chandelier), published in 1946, follows the same argument as his earlier comments on the poetics of introspection, overcharged with subjectivity, which produces an effect quite negative on a structure that lacks firm ground because it is enveloped by a layer of nebulosity.3 In the late 1960s, the influential Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz4 in an article that bears the novel’s title, elaborates on the relations between the figure of the protagonist and the design of the novel, based on concepts of causality and totality to affirm that Near the Wild Heart presents a narrative mode that dwells too much on psychological details and loose episodes that, in his opinion, take a heavy toll on the narrative. While pointing out that the novel provides an illuminating perception into the human condition, Schwarz affirms that the narrative presents a serious flaw in perspective, since the protagonist’s inner vision is so overpowering that it erases the difference between her and the other characters, revealing that she has no narrative plan of her own. By the end of the decade, Lispector had already published five novels, which demanded a more Both short essays were published in the collection Os mortos de sobrecasaca (The Dead in Frock Coat, 1963). Sérgio Millet was another critic of the period who charged Lispector for having a style defined by him as “preciosista”, a baroque use of language inappropriate for a psychological novel, in his Diário Crítico (Critical Diary, 1981). 4 The essay “Perto do coração selvagem” was published in the book A sereia e o desconfiado (The Siren and the Suspicious One, 1959). 3

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thorough and consistent analysis if not new approaches and critical tools. Yet, resistances to change in the context of the Brazilian academy meant that the traditional critical discourse died hard. For example, Luiz Costa Lima, one of the leading structuralist critics of the period, produced a strong critique to Lispector’s introspective novels in the book chapter entitled “Clarice Lispector” (1970). According to him, introspection meant a reduction to the merely subjective and to a free play of intellectual divagations that he took less as a value in itself than as a deficiency associated with the writer’s romantic sentimental vision under the guise of existential jargon. The critical difference emerged with a critic who devoted much of his life writing about Lispector’s fiction. In his first book-­length study of Lispector’s fiction, O Mundo de Clarice Lispector (The World of Clarice Lispector) published in 1966, Benedito Nunes5 set the tone for a major critical trend in Lispector studies that may be considered a counterpoint to earlier negative responses. Coming from the area of philosophical studies, Nunes identifies traces of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre in the existential philosophical accent of Lispector’s worldview, through characters endowed with a primeval and chaotic energy bound to disrupt the normal pace of everyday life, which engenders in the process perplexities and conflicts as well as a retraction of the social personality. For Nunes, the effect of this process is devastating in terms of breaking down the protective crust that envelops behaviors crystallized by habit and culture, so that consciousness loses its grip on reality and is reduced to incommunicability. In his collection of essays covering nine fictional works, entitled O drama da linguagem, 1989) (The Drama of Language) Nunes focuses on Lispector’s play of language—the frequent use of apostrophes, exclamation marks, interrogations, oxymorons, antithesis, non sequiturs, and repetitions that evoke ancient rhetoric—and defines her prose as a radical form of fabulation where the signifying process exceeded to its limits puts in doubt the very possibility of narration. From this paradox, something close to a poetical meditation emerges in the figure of an enchantment, an effect of getting close to what cannot be articulated, which suggests an unbridgeable gap between the subject and a non-­human transcendent reality. In Nunes’s critical exegesis, what lies at the core of Lispector’s fiction is the problem of existence posed as a question of expression and communication from a high level of conceptual abstraction. Benedito Nunes was the editor of the critical edition of the novel The Passion According to GH for the Collection Archives, sponsored by UNESCO in 1988.

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Making some exceptions in the case of Nunes’s objective formalist-­ philosophical approach, early reception of Lispector’s fiction presents a traditional critical discourse that features the normative male point of view in relation to which her texts were defined in recurrent terms such as “the strangeness of her personality”, her “strange human nature”, a “strange consciousness”6, the “foreigness”, “meaninglessness”, “opacity” and “vagueness”. It is not unexpected that Brazilian critics familiar with the patterns of technical and linguistic experimentalism of modernist European fiction writers, and who recognized in Lispector’s novels the undercurrent of influences from Joyce, Woolf and Mansfield, to Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Herman Hesse, used such terms as criteria of value judgments, considering that literary studies has been historically one of the most conservative academic enclaves in the country.7 For any attentive reader and particularly to a woman-­resistant reader, it becomes quite clear that the term “strange” is used interchangeably for text and writer, which means approaching the text by the woman writer as if the text were itself the woman, so that her writing becomes the expression of her personality, an assessment that downplays Lispector’s literary achievement. In the history of the patriarchal cultural tradition in which critical thinking was, until some decades ago, an exclusive man’s territory, such a tendentious mode of discourse conforms to a pattern of perception of the woman writer as a strange woman, a stereotype of the deviant other, associated with madness, irrationality and formlessness and, as such, a figure that encodes old-­fashioned assumptions about femininity associated with traditional notions of women’s roles. Writers like Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, George Sand, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, to name just a few, received the same treatment in their time and place. In the context of Brazilian critical discourse, the use of the term “strange” carries a double accent because it also means an opposition to “virile”, a male attribute that appears as a critical category in the validation of some texts written by canonical male writers referred to in scholarly books and literary histories published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8 The authority of such a gender-­inflected discourse that has set standards for good literature explains This is the case of the critic Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna who wrote the preface to the first edition of A LegiãoEstrangeira (The Foreign Legion), 1964. 7 According to the critic Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda in “Parking in a Tow-­away Zone: Women’s Literary Studies in Brazil” (1991: 10). 8 The three most important Brazilian male literary critics in the period between the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Arararipe Junior, José Veríssimo and Olívio Montenegro, used derisive language in their few references to Brazilian female writers. 6

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why the few references to women writers of the past always inscribe derisive comments about their lack, weakness or deficiency in style, in form and expression, to justify the classification of their writings as minor or subcategory literature.9Along the same lines, I should point out another feature in the Brazilian critical discourse of the period that also yields evidence of biased critical treatment (also present in Nunes’s critique) which is the use of the generic universal standpoint when reading Lispector’s texts as dramatic renderings of the human condition: a condition that in the philosophical and critical tradition has always been associated with the male subject, the embodiment of the human par excellence. In order to provide support to these readings, the critical strategy relied on sorting out structures of signification that avoided reading the symbolic system and the layers of embedded meanings present in the characterization and in the experiences of Lispector’s female protagonists.

Critics and texts: The cutting edge of Lispector’s fiction To write is a solitary act, solitary with a different sense of solitude. I write with love and attention and pain and research and I wanted back, in return, a minimum of attention and interest. Clarice Lispector10 Contrary to what happened in countries such as the United States, England and France, where feminist criticism emerged with the work of female scholars and editors who had participated in the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, in Brazil the rise of academic feminism happened during the 1980s with the influx of women scholars into the academy at a time when the government’s agenda was to set up a qualified national system of graduate studies seen as a necessary step to boost and qualify research and scientific development in Brazilian universities. Many women who started a professional academic life in literary studies at that time had pursued their PhDs abroad, No wonder that until 1960 only three Brazilian women writers had received some critical attention: the poet Cecília Meireles; the fiction writer of the so-called generation of the 1930s, Raquel de Queiroz; and Clarice Lispector. 10 My translation of an excerpt from Olga Borelli’s Clarice Lispector: esboço para um possível retrato, 1981: 3. (Borelli was Lispector’s long time friend who organized some of her notes and manuscripts as well as handled Lispector’s contracts with her publishers. 9

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so that the demand for legitimacy of woman-­based scholarship upon their return home was mostly due to their familiarity with the practices of feminist criticism in the United States or France, which explains, to a certain extent, why the positioning in feminism of most scholars working in different institutions and in different regions of the country was not, as a rule, informed by previous political activism in social movements. The migration movement of the North American brand of feminist criticism and of French theories of the feminine to Brazil gathered momentum in the constitution of a national task force with specific concerns and research in 1985, under the name “Woman in literature”, sponsored by the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistic (ANPOLL), which turned out as a major forum for the dissemination of feminist academic production in venues such as national seminars and international congresses organized on a regular basis. The most productive line of research nationwide in the last three decades is best defined in terms of a historiographical turn, that is, the recuperation of women writers from the past who have been erased in our literary histories, a research much inspired by the works of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1984), and by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own (1977) and The New Feminist Criticism (1986). No less important then, were the classical texts such as The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, translated into Portuguese and published in 1962, and A Room of One’s Own by Virgínia Woolf, translated and published in 1985. And although critical interest in Lispector’s work has been on the rise in Brazilian academic circles, the frame of reference for approaching her texts, with very few exceptions, has not been informed by assumptions recognizable as feminist criticism. For example, the important journal Tempo Brasileiro published four numbers dedicated exclusively to Lispector between 1990 and 1997, but only a handful of texts had any connection with a feminist approach. Therefore, I want to make it clear that feminist criticism, and feminism in general, have not yet played a major role in Brazilian academic circles, never expanded into a regular discipline, much less as an undergraduate major or MA and PhD programs, and that women’s studies or gender studies departments are non-­existent. In fact, there has always been indifference, if not hostility, in most intellectual circles, to any initiative of this kind. So, even if gender has been incorporated as a category of analysis in critical texts it does not mean it is grounded in a feminist-­oriented critical approach. This means that when referring to feminist criticism in Brazil it must be understood

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that its range is very limited, which explains a curious if not unexpected phenomenon: the fact that Lispector’s critical bibliography published in the United States is, by far, more informed by a consistent feminist critical perspective than the one in Brazil. Yet, feminist criticism in Brazil as in many other locations around the world has made possible a whole new field of theoretical and critical inquiry on topics that had never been explored in literary studies; topics ranging from female characters, female memory, the female body, women’s writing, women’s poetics, female authorship, women’s literary history and women’s literary tradition, to questions of gender, difference and writing vis-à-­vis the patriarchal structures of power encoded in our literary and critical legacies. Considered as a cultural revolution, feminist criticism has placed canons, aesthetic values, and reading habits under close scrutiny, bringing to the foreground what had been considered irrelevant, trivial and undecipherable in literature by women. Even though Lispector never considered herself a feminist,11 because she was known for having a profound aversion to any label, her fiction has became the object of investigation at home and abroad by some feminist critics who were seduced by the rich potential of her texts for feminist approaches, or by those with different critical and theoretical orientations who found it impossible not to explore feminist issues alongside other concerns. Not one Brazilian writer before her had been able to conceive and draw with such intensity and passion compelling figures of conflictive and ambivalent female characters within the social structures of the patriarchal family, and whose perceptions of identity and experience explode in sudden epiphanies, moments of subtle and irreversible inner revolutions, the effect of which is always a kind of emotional numbness: a damage that renders action impossible but does not throw their subjectivities into a void. Of course the haunting question “who am I?” that stubbornly surrounds their consciousness is never verbalized, but rather intimated in the web of discontent, anxieties and dilemmas that evoke the material context of middle-­class Brazilian women of She never positioned herself in relation to any political matters or got involved with the Brazilian feminist movement of the 1970s, which was mostly a movement engaged with civil rights for women during the period of the military dictatorship. In fact she abhorred conventions and labels, including comments on her Jewishness which sometimes critics insisted on asking about. In the interview published in the Canadian feminist journal La Parole Métèque (no. 11, automne 1989) she was asked about her religious affiliations and whether she practiced any ritual. Her answer was a short and dry “No”, denying that she had practiced any religion, adding that she preferred not to talk about God when asked about her beliefs. The original interview in Portuguese was given to Sérgio Fontana for the Jornal de Letras (Rio de Janeiro, April 1972).

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the 1940s to the 1970s12. So the bulk of her characters are the Joanas, Lucrécias, Anas, Lauras, GHs, and Lóris: women whose dissipation of energies in the entrapment of gender roles and identities may cripple their sense of themselves in terms of human possibilities but do not make them less rebellious when wrestling with the risks of non-­being in the painful hour of solitude. Living on the frail edge of existence, they can hardly balance the flame of desire for something they cannot even give a name to with the demands for fulfilling traditional women’s roles and rituals, and that is the reason why some of them retreat into themselves, but without compromising or conforming to external pressures. For some, solace lies in believing that pain is inherent to being alive, or in imagining oneself as a woman with an inclination to evil. In Um Sopro de Vida (The Stream of Life), a posthumous novel published in 1978, the narrator/writer Angela Pralini expresses her despondency and sorrow for those who live only with what makes sense, thus voicing Lispector’s distrust of linguistic realism, which she considered a sterile use of language, namely meaning-­making serving only conventions, norms and conformity. The fact is that Lispector’s feminist vision, embedded in her woman-­centered fiction, is deeply intertwined with the ways she innovated fictional narrative form through this connection of content and form that most critics have failed to make sense of, even though some agree that on epistemological grounds her fiction dismantles the logic of the modern subject based on the sign and its phallogocentric order. Hers is a poetic style founded on a radical, inventive linguistic register that disrupts lexical conventions, ignores syntactical rules, twists narrative logic, transgresses any established models for fiction, erodes referentiality and breaks down the order of discourse; the result of which does not mean, however, that her fiction becomes a self-­enclosed system of signs reducible to themselves. Rather, her fictional language provokes the reader by producing deviant knowledge in the configuration of an unsettling, dense, lyrical, lavish, and plastic space that materializes extreme states of female subjectivity which, in their turn, liberate her female characters from self-­ censorship. Ultimately, this feminine space resists any closure posed by the For Lidia Santos in the essay “What Happened to The Cool City? Seventy Years of Women’s Narrative in Brazil”, there is a strong literary lineage between Patrícia Galvão’s modernist novel Industrial Park (1933) and Lispector’s works because both “overturn certain categories that belong to bourgeois Christian moral codes” and “de-­essentialize(s) the role of woman” (pp.  35, 37); in: Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America, edited by Anne Lambright and Elizabeth Guerrero. (It must be pointed out that in some short stories and in one novel in particular, A Hora da Estrela (The Hour of the Star) Lispector also dealt with female subalternity and issues of gender, race and regional difference.)

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presence of a narrative ego cogito, and this is how her writing inscribes a challenge to the symbolical order founded on the logos and which secures the Law of the Father. What I call a poetics of transgression is the unleashing of the vital energy of this space of life-­force that has made Lispector a celebrated writer in the context of the development of feminist literary critique in France, mainly through the critical work of Hèléne Cixous whose publications on Lispector have circulated around the world since the 1970s. Cixous, a leading theoretician and critic who moved from institutional philosophy and “master texts” in which knowledge is equated with the appropriation of the world to a poetic model for philosophy, became overwhelmed by the discovery of a writer such as Lispector and initiated a long intimate dialogue with her works, taking them as a form of theoretical practice that she called écriture feminine. This notion refers to a textual modality of spending or practice of writing that relies on a libidinal economy not directly or necessarily equated with biological sexual identity but, on considering the alterity of women’s writings under patriarchy, she understands that it is women who are likely to be the writing subject of this economy that plays out on literary form and content and produces the effect of an effacement of the self by linking self and other on many levels. Her first text “L’approache de Clarice Lispector” was published in the journal Poétique in 1979, the same year of the publication of the classical lyrical essay that celebrates her encounter with Lispector’s voice and writing Vivre l’orange (a book in the bilingual format French/English) in which she praises the brilliant achievement of the novel Um Sopro de Vida (A Breath of Life) as the best expression ever of écriture feminine. For her, its style is a form of archaic writing, a new genesis articulated in its aesthetic, social and body-­textual beauty that makes the text a poetic and political act.13 Cixous’s importance is immense, not only because she introduced Lispector to French readers with her theoretical divagations on Lispector’s fiction14 and with her intertextual readings highlighting connections between her and European avant-­garde writers,15 but also because she actually placed Lispector in the international circuit of feminist critique to the extent that The Mexican writer and critic Rosario Castellanos in the essay entitled “Clarice Lispector: An Ancestral Memory” published six years before Cixous’s Vivre l’orange, also elaborated on this mode of textualization regarding the novel The Passion According to GH. 14 Reading with Clarice Lispector, a collection of essays edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Verena Amdermatt Conley brings together Cixous’s readings of Lispector in seminars given at the Université de Paris VIII in the period 1980–1985. 15 In the article “Reaching the Point of Wheat or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman” Cixous makes a comparative study between Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Man and Lispector’s Near the Wild Heart. 13

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important critics from different places either recognize Cixous’s merits and incorporate discussions of her texts into their own texts or criticize the limitations of her positions from their own assumptions of what constitutes a feminist perspective. Independent of this either/or position, Cixous explored a territory no one had explored before, and contrary to some of her detractors, she was not an essentialist. In one of her classic texts “The Laugh of the Medusa,” published originally in 1975, that is, before her encounter with Lispector’s texts, Cixous made it very clear where she stood in relation to women’s writing, and her words throw light on why she became so enraptured by the Brazilian writer: “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated to philosophical-­theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatism, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate”. Cixous, 1980: 247

Due to the work of Cixous, important American feminist critics such as Donna C. Stanton, Alice A. Jardine and Susan Standford Friedman heard of and mentioned Lispector in their own works. In the book Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative and Violence in Clarice Lispector, Marta Peixoto objects to Cixous’s reading of Lispector for its interpretative limitations, suggesting that Cixous makes the texts more nurturing than they are and affirming that questions of gender are central to the writer’s work. Although Lispector questions and disrupts the fixity of gender as she understands the sufferings of women under patriarchy, Peixoto claims that she refrains from underwriting female passivity and vulnerability by allowing her characters “devious access to an aggressive power” that encompasses a broad perspective on “the multiple violences unavoidably present in biologic, psychic, and social life” (Introduction, xiii). Thus, what Peixoto calls narrative violence articulates on a metafictional level the relation of gender and genre in terms of the disruption and conflation of the autobiographical impulse with the autonomy of fiction, with special attention to the particularities of a woman’s writing in terms of “a renewed attention to the letter of Lispector’s text”. In Nem musa, nem Medusa (Neither Muse nor Medusa) Lucia Helena explores the constructive principle that destabilizes Lispector’s works from a comparative perspective that articulates a possible dialogue between Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on aesthetics

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and his concept of history, and Lispector’s conception of a narrative form where the categories of subject, writing and history provide the nexus between art and society, text and context, authorship and creation. Helena claims that this nexus has made possible the emergence of a female writing subject like Lispector in the historical scene of the new Brazilian literature. On discussing the impact of French theories on the academic approach to Lispector, Helena states that her works offer enough elements to challenge the essentialist concept of the feminine as present in the works of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, though she does not probe into the theoretical assumptions and ethical concerns that lie at the core of their notion of “écriture feminine”. The refusal to appropriate French theories of the feminine as critical tools to approach Lispector’s texts finds resonances in Debra Castillo’s proposal for a locational feminist theory adequate to address the specific features of Latin America literature rather than borrowing from other geographies such as the USA and France: countries with different social and cultural histories and different intellectual traditions. This position finds echoes in Miguel Cossio Woodward’s prologue to his edition of Lispector’s short stories published in Mexico, where he claims that Lispector’s locus of enunciation is a composite of Brazilianess, Third World and IberoAmerican identity, and it is this common ground that has made her an avant-­ garde figure in the renewal of literature and a protagonist in the development of women’s literature in this part of the world. One of the first critical essays to draw a map of the affiliations between Lispector’s fiction and literary traditions in the Western world is “O lugar de Clarice Lispector na história da literatura occidental: uma avaliação comparativa” (“The place of Clarice Lispector in the history of Western literature: a comparative evaluation”) by Earl Fitz, published in the Brazilian journal Remate de Males in 1989. According to his study, which no doubt expands considerably the scope of the findings of the first generation of Brazilian critics, Lispector’s novels partake of different levels of belongingness to three major traditions: the lyrical novel (Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield and Herman Hesse); the phenomenological tradition (writers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jorge Luis Borges and Alain Robbe-Grillet); and the feminist tradition (in which he places Virginia Woolf, Hèléne Cixous, Margaret Atwood, Anne Hébert, Erica Jong, Luisa Valenzuela and, surprisingly, Flannery O’Connor). The essay suggests many possibilities for a more comprehensive comparative intertextual reading of Lispector’s fiction. The latest critical engagement of Fitz with Lispector’s texts

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is Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector, an ambitious attempt to elucidate the presence of a “post-­structural ethos” by tracing a parallel between Derridean theory and Lispector’s sense of language and writing to prove the argument about the centrality of the problem of signification in the stylistic and thematic orientation of her fiction. There is no doubt that the critical sophistication of an analytical deconstructive reading that operates with categories such as decentering, difference and undecidability enlarges the possibilities of theorizing on Lispector’s epistemology embedded in her postmodern textuality, yet there is a distinction between saying that the principle of identity is language-­based and saying that language determines identity, that is, identity conceived as a function of language. For Fitz, Lispector’s texts constitute the epitome of feminist post-­structuralism because they “embody feminist issues” which, in his point of view, does not authorize either/ or definitions on considering her characters. From the point of view of his stance in the relation to language-­based identity, it could be argued that this is a position that actually “degenders” the very conflictive experience of being of her female protagonists. While his reading attests to his profound, lasting admiration and thorough knowledge of Lispector’s texts, his introduction presents a confession that deflates, somehow, his critical efforts when he affirms that: “(. . .) her work remains, in an overall sense, largely an enigma to us. This is so, I believe, because of the elusive and ambiguous nature of her “escritura” (p.7). Arguably, such a skeptical declaration sounds incompatible with the political force of deconstruction. With the limitations inherent to the scope of this text, I would like to make a few comments on four academic publications from different geographies: Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion by Maria José Somerlate Barbosa; the collection of essays Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector edited by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams; Clarice Lispector: Novos Aportes Críticos edited by Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey and Regina Zilberman; and A Ficção de Clarice: nas Fronteiras do (Im)Possível (Clarice Lispector’s Fiction: in the borders of the (im)possible). The scholar Maria José Somerlate Barbosa presents an interesting proposal for reading Lispector based on an interdisciplinary perspective that weaves assumptions from deconstruction, the New History and Feminism to claim that Lispector’s fiction anticipates theoretical debates central to these fields of intellectual inquiry. On appropriating Foucault’s concepts of power, authority and biopower, and Georges Bataille’s work on eroticism, Barbosa discusses questions of female sexuality and violence in contexts related

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to marriage, prostitution, rape, nymphomania and homosexuality. On the other hand, she raises some thorny questions about the usage of male theory as discussed by the Australian feminist critic Sommer Brodribb (1992), which adds some insights into the polemics around feminist essentialism. In Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector, the multiple perspectives and critical intersections of the essays by scholars with different affiliations and from different nationalities illustrate the extent to which Lispector’s fiction elicits a wide spectrum of themes and topics arranged in three parts: autobiography and identity; gender, class, race and nation; and critical reception. The collection of essays entitled Clarice Lispector: Novos Aportes Críticos covers a variety of topics, and one of special interest, authored by Maria S. Barbosa, is related to Lispector’s female precursors in the context of twentieth-­century Brazilian literature. In her essay “O Mergulho na Matéria da Palavra: Clarice Lispector e suas Precursoras” (“Diving into the Materiality of Language: Clarice Lispector and her Precursors”) Barbosa raises the question of the absence of comparative studies between Lispector’s texts and Brazilian women writers who came before her, particularly Rachel de Queiroz and Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, as representatives of the 1930s. The collection of essays A Ficção de Clarice: nas Fronteiras do (Im)Possível present comparative insights from national and transnational perspectives and two of them deserve mention for their novelty in the scope of Lispector studies. The first is an essay that seeks to insert Lispector in the Brazilian modernist tradition by examining her “cannibal poetics”, a term associated with the concept of cultural anthropophagy that evolved during the cultural and literary movement of the 1920s, and which meant to account for the processes of migration and transculturation of European forms into the Brazilian culture. The other essay proposes a comparative reading of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Lispector’s The Passion According to GH as the poetics of a lost imaginary, from the perspective of French theories of the feminine: mainly the theoretical assumptions of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Comparative literature and feminist criticism share the same principles, as fields of academic intellectual inquiry, in that they believe in crossing boundaries, and moving beyond the demarcations and enclosures established by traditional ways of territorializing histories, identities, cultures, languages and literatures. Feminist criticism is interdisciplinary by nature and could only come into being because of comparative work. Otherwise, how could one unveil and probe into the very existence of traditions and their margins or counter-­traditions; into literary histories and their silences; into critical discourses and their biases; into

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esthetic judgments and their power to define the status of canonical texts, not to say of the inextricability of critical interpretation and politics? These topics mean that feminist criticism has always had to count on relations, intersections, translations, migrations and different registers, assuming thereby a chameleon-­ like form while projecting a different composite identity according to the specificities of geographical and political locations. And because of this malleability, feminist criticism spreads out and flourishes even in the harshest weather. The travels of Lispector’s texts across geographical and national borders has afforded a polyphony of voices that converge in a transnational critical network of affiliations and differences but, above all, have led to discoveries compatible with the magnitude of her literary achievement. In 1965, Lispector participated in the XI Congress of Ibero-American Literature at the University of Texas. The theme was the Avant-­garde Literary Movements. The excerpt of her presentation entitled “Avant-­garde literature in Brazil” was published in the Proceedings of the Congress and included in the book Langues de Feu: Essais sur Clarice Lispector (2007) (Language of Fire: Essays on Clarice Lispector) by Claire Varin,16 a scholar from Canada who became a personal friend of Lispector and a passionate researcher on her life as well as a major publicist of her fiction in her home country. The excerpt reads as follows: “Nous avons soin soil de nous connaître, et c’est d’une grande urgence, parce que nous avons besoins de nous-­mêmes plus que des autres. Bien sûr, lorsque Je parle de saisie de notre réalité, je ne suis même pas au bord du mot patriotisme, du moins dans la conception habituelle du terme. Cette prise de possession majeure de nous-­mêmes ne consiste pas à louer des qualités ni même à rechercher des qualités. Notre évidente tendance nationaliste ne provient d’aucune volonté d’isolement. C’est d’abord un mouvement legitime de connaissance de soi, tout movement d’art étant toujour um mouvement de connaissance, peu importent ses conséquences nationales ou internationales”.17

These lines are an example of Lispector’s manipulation of language, her resistance to convey clear-­cut meanings based on a logical common sense, as Varin also published Clarice Lispector: Rencontres Brésiliennes. Translation: “We take care of knowing ourselves, and this is of great urgency, because we need ourselves more than others. Of course, when I speak of grasping our reality, I am not even on the verge of the word patriotism, at least in the usual conception of the term. This major taking of possession of ourselves does not consist in praising qualities or even in seeking qualities. Our evident nationalistic tendency does not come from any desire for isolation. It is at first a legitimate movement of self-­knowledge, every movement of art being always a movement of knowledge, its national or international consequences being of little importance.”

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well as a refusal to make transparent statements that would generate ready-­made associations between her voice and the location from where she speaks. Thus, words such as “patriotism”, “nationalistic tendency” and “isolation” are caught in the obliqueness of a meaning-­making process that erases the cultural referents of a particular national space as a backdrop for the playing out of an essentialized identity while strategically linking spaces and beings, inside and outside, self and other. On the other hand, she does make clear where she stands as a writer on advocating the legitimacy of the search of self-­knowledge and on affirming the movement of art as always a movement toward knowledge. One may say that her achievement as a fiction writer lies in the driving force of these two registers: resistance and affirmation. Resistance to linguistic formulas and aesthetic conventions, and affirmation of a woman’s voice undoing the territorialization of female characters in a patriarchal cultural and social milieu. And we are enlightened and richer for that.

Works cited Alonso, Cláudia Pazos and Williams, Claire eds. Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Bailey, Cristina Ferreira-Pinto. Clarice Lispector: Novos Aportes Críticos. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2007. Barbosa, Maria José Somerlate and Zilberman, Regina, eds. Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1997. Borelli, Olga. Clarice Lispector: Esboço para um Possível Retrato. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1981. Brodribb, Sommer. Nothing Mat(t)ers: a Feminist Critique of Postmodernism. Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1992. Buarque de Holanda, Heloisa. “Parking in a Tow-Away Zone: Women’s Literary Studies in Brazil”. Brasil/Brazil—no. 6, ano 4, 1991. Candido, Antonio. “No raiar de Clarice Lispector”. In: Vários Escritos. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1977. Castellanos, Rosario. “Clarice Lispector: An Ancestral Memory”. Mujer que Sabe Latin. México: SepSetentas, 1973. Castillo, Debra. Talking Back: Towards a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. Cixous, Hélène. “Reaching the Point of Wheat or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman”. New Literary History 19/1, 1987.

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Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. In: New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Edited with an Introduction by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: The University of Massachussets Press, 1980. Cixous, Hélène. Vivre l’orange. Paris: Edition de Femmes, 1979. Conley, Verena Amdermatt, ed. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Costa Lima, Luiz. “Clarice Lispector”. In: A Literatura no Brasil—Modernismo, vol.v. Afrânio Coutinho, editor. Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Sul Americana, 1970. Fitz, Earl E. “Bibliografia de e sobre Clarice Lispector”. Revista Iberoamericana n. 126, vol. 1, 1984. Fitz, Earl E. “O lugar de Clarice Lispector na história da literatura ocidental: uma avaliação comparativa”. Remate de Males, 1989. Fitz, Earl E. Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001. Friedman, Susan Standford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Gotlib, Nádia. Clarice Fotobiografia. São Paulo: University of São Paulo Publishing House, 2008. Gotlib, Nádia. Lispector: Uma Vida que se Conta. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1995. Helena, Lucia. Nem Musa, nem Medusa. Rio de Janeiro: EDUFF, 1997. Higonnet, Margaret R. “Comparative Literature on the Feminist Edge”. In: Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Charles Bernheimer, ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Líns, Álvaro. Os Mortos de Sobrecasaca. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1963. Manzo, Alícia and Monteiro, Teresa, eds. Clarice Lispector: Outros Escritos. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2005. Martin, Diane E. Clarice Lispector: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Millet, Sérgio. Diário Crítico. Vol. II, 2a. edição/São Paulo: Martins/EDUSP, 1981. Monegal, Emir Rodríguez and Colchie, Thomas, eds. The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature: From the Time of Columbus to the Twentieth Century (Volume I). New York: Knopf Inc., 1977. Monteiro, Teresa. Eu Sou Uma Pergunta: Uma Biografia de Clarice Lispector. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 1999. Moser, Benjamin. “Coletânea de Clarice Lispector ganha destaque em suplementos literários pelo mundo”. Entrevista para Mariana Filgueiras. O Globo, Segundo Caderno, 2015. Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

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Sant’Anna, Affonso Romano de. Prefácio: A Legião Estrangeira. São Paulo: Francico Alves, 1964. Santos, Lídia. “What Happened to The Cool City? Seventy Years of Women’s Narrative in Brazil”. In: Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America. Anne Lambright and Elizabeth Guerrero, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Schmidt, Rita Terezinha. A Ficção de Clarice: nas Fronteiras do (Im)Possível. Porto Alegre: Editora Sagra Luzzato, 2003. Schwarz, Roberto. “Perto do coração selvagem”. In: A Sereia e o Desconfiado. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1959. Stanton, Donna C. “Difference on Trial”. In: The Poetics of Gender. Edited by Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Ungar, Fredrick, Mainiero, Lina, eds. The Encyclopedia of World Literature. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1975. Varin, Claire. Clarice Lispector: Rencontres Brésiliennes. Montréal: Les Éditions Triptyque, 2007. Varin, Claire. Langues de Feu: Essais sur Clarice Lispector. Laval, Quebéc: Éditions Trois, 1990. Woodward, Miguel Cossío. Cuentos Reunidos. Mexico: Alfaragua Publishing House, 2001.

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The Brazilian Theater in the World: From Modern Dramaturgy to the Contemporary Post-­Dramatic Scene Beatriz Resende

The theater and world literature1 To propose a reflection on the Brazilian theater within the critical panorama of studies designated as world literature evokes, immediately, the need of a few methodological adjustments to the contemporary understanding of what theater itself is, to the tradition of theater studies—frequently inserted into literary studies from a historicist view—and to the concept of literature itself. Let’s begin with the understanding of contemporary theater as post­dramatic, that is, a theater that can be performed independently of its traditional resources: firstly, the theatrical building and the traditional separation between stage and public; and then the form of dramatic literature that reaches the idea of theater as a process in dialogue with other forms of art, incorporating the immediacy of the performance. From the moment of recognition of the possibilities claimed by contemporary theater, it is the critic’s responsibility to reactivate his or her critical categories, even when they analyse the theater of other epochs. The concept of post-­dramatic theater, established by Hans-Thies Lehmann, even though it recognizes an interrelation between theater and text, identifies that the text will be considered just as one element: a layer and “material,” part of the scenic configuration, and not as “the regent of this configuration” and that it This essay resulted from research collaboration between a team of professors, critics, and researchers that formed an important collaborative network. The author thanks in particular the help of: Agnes Rissardo, Alessandra Vanucci, Ângela Leite Lopes, Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento, Ettore FinazziAgrò, Maria Caterina Pincherle, Nelson Vieira, Roberto Vecchi e Severino Albuquerque.

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would be “attached to the experimental theatrical field and ready to run artistic risks” (Lehmann, 2007: 19). This new way of doing theater, current in the last decades of the twentieth century, proposes the disappearance of a relation of interdependence between drama, action and imitation, converting the performance of the scene of a finished work into a theatrical fact. Upon relativizing or even refusing the primacy of the text, such a rule will make it necessary, unavoidably, a reconfiguration of the literary studies that include theater among their interests, and among them the understanding of what world literature is. In contemporary post-­dramatic theater, in its writing or performance, the multiple means and theatrical resources are placed at the same level of the text, or can even be conceived without the text. The theater theorist Silvia Fernandes defines this as new scenes in which the most evident trace perhaps is the frequency in which they are situated in bastard territories, mixed in with plastic arts, music, dance, cinema, video, performance and new media, besides the option for de-­centered creative processes, contrary to the ascendancy of the drama for the constitution of its theatricality and its meaning. Fernandes, 2008: 12

Such freedom of forms and conceptions is inserted into the condition of plurality of contemporary art itself, so that in the present-­day scene, in Brazil as well as in other countries, such conditions of deconstructing the dramatic tradition can coexist, at the same moment, in the same space, as post-­dramatic spectacles with others that utilize the Italian stage, the dramaturgy guided by Aristotelian models, or the naturalist resource of the fourth wall. The classic repertoire, national or international, can be presented to the public today redone or renewed by the propositions of directors interested in creating a new scene, without the limits of literary genres or of language peculiar to a determined form of art. Works by our greatest playwright, Nelson Rodrigues, written as tragedies or melodramas, can—and are—staged in reinterpretations that make use of the most diverse resources, in dialogue with other forms of art: as much by Brazilian directors as by directors from other countries. In the awareness of the rupture that has already happened in creations in the performing arts, it is necessary to gather new perspectives that are not only critical, but understand what has been presented as theater history, so that we

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can foresee an insertion of the theater as part of the global flux that carries contemporary art. Thus, one can have a vision of what the contemporary stage is like as an artistic practice that, without ignoring our theatrical traditions, becomes stronger, maintaining a relation with the national sensibility, the aesthetic criteria in their autonomy, the conditions of reception in Brazil today, but also in exchanges with the proposals of authors and directors in the rest of the world, in an era of the simultaneous flux of information that includes the immediate visibility of other theatrical experiences, broadcast by the new technologies. It is very important for the evaluation of contemporary theater to take into consideration the fact that the theatrical production, much less portable than the book, can be known and studied by theorists and students of theater, despite the strong restrictions of the virtual audience, through Internet channels. It is no longer necessary to travel in order to be familiar with off-Broadway shows, productions of the Théâtre du Soleil, of Ariane Mnouchkine, of Buffes du Nord, by Peter Brook or the traditionally Shakespearian The Globe. The same Internet also serves made-­in-Brazil theater, broadcasting its works overseas: a vital visibility to the work of the curators of the great festivals. The autonomy of the critic and of theatrical studies in relation to literary studies is very recent. Referring to the history of the theater, during the nineteenth century, and even in a great part of the twentieth century, as being considered a chapter of the history of literature, the theater historian Tania Brandão notes: The theater, side by side with other arts, appears in the texts as an ornamental complement of the flux of History itself, the latter, no doubt, important, chained to the narrative of politico-­economical facts and to the limits of the social game. Brandão, 2010: 354

And yet, on the relation between literary studies and theatrical studies, it is worth lingering briefly on the important author, Pascale Casanova, for a reflection on world literature. In her The World Republic of Letters, where she intends, and in fact manages, to change the perspective describing the literary world, Casanova promotes a reading capable of breaking with pre-­established hierarchies and inserting new categories as points of reference in the global organization of the literary world. The book presents a vast cartography of the literature of the world, where not even Brazilian modernism is left out, being seen as a movement that vindicates national literary emancipation, with an entire chapter dedicated to Mario de Andrade and his novel Macunaíma, a work that serves as reference to

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a part dedicated to the “tragedy of the translated men.” In this great cartography, in reality dedicated primarily to the role of the novel in the universe of letters, only a few pages are dedicated to the theater: from tips to populist and folkloric practices, along with short stories and legends (Casanova, 2002: 343). The theater is, to the author, an “intermediary literary genre between the oral and the written” and, being “oral par excellence,” it serves as a popular art and “instrument of normalization of the emergent languages” (Casanova, 2002: 278). In summary, in the Republic of Letters, a contemporary literary space that would change from a universe dominated by Paris to a polycentric world that includes also London and New York and a few other European capitals, the theater is summarily presented as: The theater is the art of transforming a popular public into a national public, requested directly by the rising national literature, the writer being able to access all the resources connected with writing and with the greatest nobility of the literary art (. . .) at the same time that he operates in the popular recording of the oral language. Casanova, 2002: 279

Perhaps the movement in this direction might have occurred in periods of formation of national literatures, but a few centuries ago, the role of the theater, an urban art above all, of the great centers, stopped signifying an oral register to insert itself in the universe much more complex of the arts of performance. One of the many difficulties facing studies and critical selections that strive to form literary canons, lists that intend to be definitively consecratory, lies in the specificity itself of theatrical creation, of its perception and reception, in dialogue with literary fiction and later with other arts, but always retaining its proper language and deserving autonomous study. It is not the canonical perspective that interests us here; on the contrary, and for that it is necessary to reconfigure the meaning of “literature” itself and, in the last instance, of art. The contemporary art forms do not vindicate, forcibly, their own medium, they frequently mix media and procedures with life forms, as Jacques Rancière emphasizes when he speaks of a new regimen for the arts, one which presupposes the crossing of frontiers, the breaching of hierarchies that allows original combinations. This new aesthetic regime in art, defined as a set of relations between seeing, doing and saying, allows for uncommon combinations, starting from a rupture of a certain number of frontiers that separate the arts among themselves, or the forms of art from the forms of life, pure art from

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applied art, art from non-­art, the narrative from the descriptive and from the symbolic (Rancière, 2014: 17). Theatrical practice is an aesthetic experience that cannot be separated from its immediate fruition and, in this manner, it cannot get away from the impositions of the jurisdiction of recognition and legitimization—also forcibly immediate—which are indispensable so that the theatrical scene is paid for and produced, can occupy a scenic space of any type, wins over the public, justifying its production and receiving the necessary prestige from critics. It is true that, in general, it is after initial local recognition that a theatrical experience will be able to continue its necessary trajectory to participate on the international circuit.This implies, from the outset, translation and publication, when it comes to the dramatic text, and in the case of spectacles: traveling, the access to theatrical spaces, critical reception and, that which is the reason for the theater to exist, the public, in this case, a foreign one. Because of the difficulty, including bibliographical scarcity, of reflecting on the meaning of a theatrical experience as world theater, I would like to analyze quickly a recent theatrical experience: an example of global flux, of an exchange of aesthetics that points to the possibilities of defining itself, or at least of allowing us to question the concept of “World theater.” Even though it concerns an experience that travels in the opposite direction to what we propose here; that is, the presentation of a foreign work in our national theatrical space, the case serves as a theoretical reflection independent of the study of the Brazilian theater. I refer to the reception in Brazil of a spectacle that can be considered emblematic as world theater: the performance of The Suit, a spectacle created by Peter Brook, in Rio de Janeiro, in May of 2015, on the stage of the sumptuous and sculptural City of the Arts, the largest concert hall in South America. In The Suit, the British director, living presently in Paris, transforms the short story “The Suit” by South African writer Can Themba, written in the 1950s, that is, during the severe apartheid crisis in his country, into a theatrical production. The author Can Themba, whose university-­level education was in English and who attended the same university as Nelson Mandela—a school for the Black elite—ended his days exiled in the small African country of Swaziland where he died of poverty, despair and alcoholism. Cast by black actors, surrounded by white musicians, the play breaks the limits between stage, audience and orchestra, making use of important musical resources, absolutely minimal scenery as far as possible made from realistic

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resources, and it invites the audience to participate in what happens on stage. The representation is composed not only by the actors and by the contained scenery but by the musicians who occupy the stage and who play the music that is of fundamental importance to the spectacle. The story that the production tells is about a couple, the woman of which, caught by the husband with her lover—who runs away leaving behind the suit that he had taken off—begins to suffer painful and public humiliations at the hands of the husband, who does not abandon her but does not forgive her till he cannot bear it any longer. The oppression and humiliation that the system inflicts on Blacks is mirrored in the couple’s relationship and in their meetings with friends. The mastery of the director appears in the transference of languages, which transports a narrative in prose (any text can be dramatic) onto the stage, onto the bareness of the stage, in the presence of the musicians, with the anonymous audience being called onto the stage. The text that circulated throughout the world in French and in English was exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, in French, but the climax of the spectacle is the moment in which the woman, just before her tragic end—here Cherise AdamsBurnett, black actress and singer of jazz, born in Luton, UK—sings, magnificently, the song “Malika,” part of the repertoire of the South African singer Miriam Makeba, in Suahili, a banto idiom. The melancholic song says, in a painful way, in an idiom unknown to the public, what the woman is incapable of saying and the director does not desire to dramatize. In the spectacle that circulates around the world, always with great success, at that moment a great difficulty in the universe of translation rises: the untranslatable. The untranslatable is an integral part of any well-­translated text. The untranslatable, in the play, becomes the “uncanny” that Freud speaks of (Das Unheimliche): frightful because not comprehensible, full of anguish for not being explainable. In the cosmopolitan city of Rio de Janeiro, in a country with a population composed of more than 51 percent Blacks, the spectacle is acclaimed by the spectators, almost all white with the exception of a few black actors in the audience: intellectuals, artists, specialists in theater and reporters, in the elegant salon of the City of the Arts. The high cost of production, with the cast and technicians coming from Europe, and the presentation in French, meant the spectacle was restricted to only two presentations, offered to an elite audience. The proposal—the scene— however, leaves traces behind, and will certainly influence other national productions. This is world theater. It is fitting to reflect, or fantasize, about a

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mirrored situation: the presentation of a spectacle of converging arts, working with a text by an author out of the center, someone from the periphery of the Republic of the Arts, staged in Portuguese, in a European capital. Such things happen, but they are limited to occasional festivals, such as the Edinburgh Festival, attended by specialists and aficionados of the performing arts, always to a very limited public. One cannot avoid recalling the polemic that the Indian theorist Aijaz Ahmad disputes with Frederic Jameson about the already famous essay by the American professor: “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital.” Ahmad asserts that there is no such thing as the concept of “literature of the third world” that would have nationalism as the ideology it peculiarly valued. The debate is well known by all but it is worth remembering, as a consequence of the Rio de Janeiro production, an observation by that “theorist of the third world”: It would be rare for a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa not to have knowledge of at least one European language; equally rare it would be, on the other hand, for an important literary theorist in Europe and the United States to have taken the trouble of learning an Asian or African language. Ahmad, 2002: 85

We will return later to the crucial question of translation, but the inequality of the roads to be trodden by the creative artists who can contribute to the constitution of a contemporary world literature is already evident.

The Brazilian theater in its trajectory from the national to the global The difficulty in inserting performing arts into what one can call world literature is not different from the slow journey to recognition of the theater as an art form in our literary tradition. The importance of the performing arts as capable of innovating and uniting in their performances several other arts is a very recent proposition. In Formação da Literatura Brasileira, by António Cândido, a foundational work for the study of the first moments that constitute our literature and our nationality, and a frequent reference in foreign studies about Brazilian literature, the critic does not make any reference to the theater in Brazil, not even in his important study of José de Alencar, a founding novelist but also a

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playwright. Martins Pena is introduced as the creator of the Brazilian theater, “perchance the greatest theater writer that we have ever had,” but that is all that is said about a theater producer who is going to influence many generations, with repercussions on the life of the city and in the spheres of the circulation of culture. The theater, therefore, as an artistic practice, had difficulty being recognized in our French-Lusatian tradition. In the study about “The Lacunas and Series: Standards of Historiography in the Histories of the Theater of Brazil,” the theater historian Tania Brandão, underscores: With frequency reduced to dramaturgy and to the universe of literature, contained in the recognition of requirements and traditions of textual practices, disentailed from the hypothesis of recognition of its particular materiality, subjected to a heavy eurocentrism, the theater itself almost does not have a clear history due to this reductionism that, in recent studies, began to be criticized. Brandão, 2010: 336

Our greatest writer, a personage without a doubt belonging to world literature, Machado de Assis, begins his career in letters as a theater critic, writing for the court newspapers. In his critiques, de Assis is strict with the drama productions of nineteenth-­century Brazil. In an important theoretical reflection on Brazilian literature, “News about the present Brazilian literature: instinct of nationality,” of 1873: an essay of special importance about the limits and dangers of the Romantic recourse of “local color” questioned as an element of national characterization, he saves for the theater the most critical tone of the text, sounding almost hopeless: This part can be reduced to just one line of reticence. There is, at the present, no Brazilian theater, no national play exists, and national plays are rarely represented. The theatrical works of this country have always depended on translations, which does not mean that a national play that did appear would not be admitted. Assis, 1973: vol. III: 80

The text is an analysis, above all, of Romantic literature, dealing with the poetry, of the almost non-­existent theater, and the novel, which values the creative effort of Brazilian authors without setting aside, however, the severity with which he treats not only the literary productions, but above all, the critics. Years before, he had already demanded from our men of letters more reflexive efforts, in a text published in the periodical Literary Week, of January 1866. This is how the article starts:

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The literary temperature is below zero. This tropical climate, that warms up the imagination so much, and causes poets to sprout, almost as it makes flowers bloom, by a phenomenon, in fact, explainable, causes the spirits to be lazy and null the intellectual movement. Assis, 1973: vol. III: 841

“Instinct of Nationality,” as the essay came to be known, discussed the imported literary resource (imported above all from French letters) that mainly dominated our Romantic novels: the principle of “local color.” Starting with a discussion about the necessity or not of “local color” as an affirmation of nationality, Machado will develop his conception of literature by questioning what the “national” elements are in a national literature, yet also conjecturing, on that basis, the proposal for a universal literature. Between 1826 and 1830, Goethe had formulated the concept of Weltliteratur (world literature), saying that the national literature did not mean much, the time was one of world literature. Goethe understood Weltliteratur, not as a literary canon of exemplary works, but as a critical cohabitation among works of diverse countries and languages. He opposed, in this manner, the characteristics of Romanticism with its nationalist recourses, interested in an idyllic past. Goethe wanted to believe that Romanticism itself, with its nationalist and particular characteristics, also belonged to the past and should be supplanted by the construction of a Weltliteratur. In the second half of the nineteenth century, defending what would be a more independent literature capable of dialoguing with the European literature, Machado de Assis condemns in the novel, in the theater and even in poetry the “wearing of the colors of the country.” Criticizing the excess of references to the Romantic model, it is, however, the presence of references to Indianism, as the recording of “local color,” that disturb him the most, as much in the poetry of Goncalves Dias as in the novels of Jose de Alencar. Today, analyzing his criticism against the prevalence of the Indianist movement in our letters, using as a method the recourse to historical corroborations that relate the process of merciless decimation of the Indigenous population by the Portuguese colonizers recorded by contemporary historicity, and by anthropological studies that research Indigenous minorities marginalized from society, we see that de Assis was pointing, at the least, to an opportunistic exploitation of these imagined Indigenous, utilized in myth-­construction, that would form our foundational literature.

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To de Assis, the Brazilian civilization that was contemporary was not, in reality, linked to the “Indigenous element,” therefore it did not make sense “to recover among our defeated tribes the titles for our literary personality,” but it would not be licit either to exclude it from our intellectual universe. That is, for the essayist, it would be a mistake to constitute it as an exclusive patrimony of Brazilian literature, but it would be equally an equivocation to argue for its absolute exclusion. Later in “Instinct of Nationality,” he comments that Shakespearean tragedies like Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet do not take place in British territory, and it is not because of this that Shakespeare stops being “as well as a universal genius, also an essentially English poet.” Afterwards, he affirms, in an anticipatory manner, formulating the same fundamental principles of world literature: There is no doubt that a literature, specially a newly rising literature, should feed on mainly the subjects that its region offers to it; but we should not establish to it such absolute doctrines that will impoverish it. What should be required from a writer, before everything else, is a certain intimate feeling that makes of him a man of his time and of his country, even when he writes about remote matters in time and in space. Assis, 1973: 804

Recognizing the provincialism of the Brazilian theater, a fragile spot in our culture that will outlast the modernist movement of 1922 and only in the 1940s will consolidate itself, he has, however, the sensibility to recognize the importance of the tragedy The Mother, by Jose de Alencar, staged in 1860. Different from other works of Romanticism, the views proposed by the play are universal, bringing into debate, in a critical and sensitive manner, the theme of slavery. In a critique for the journal Revista Dramática of March 29, 1869 that opens with a lapidary phrase: “To write criticism and theatrical criticism is not only a difficult task, it is also a risky enterprise,” de Assis receives with satisfaction the play that is really a case apart in the dramaturgy of the empire. Written even before the abolitionist campaigns became more intense, the drama is the painful story of a slave woman who gives her life for her son, whom she serves, and who was raised by a white couple. The young student, who is not aware of his true paternity, when he finds himself in debt, sells his slave, who is, in reality, his own mother. Only contemporarily can we read appropriately the importance of the text of our great Romantic novelist. Among other denouncements, the play demonstrates

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how much the question of “race” is an imaginary construction: how complex it is, and even subjective for someone to be considered black in a country with so much miscegenation, where skin color, under the tropical Sun, frequently does not differentiate between whites, Blacks and mulattos. The Mother is presented as a new original Brazilian drama, deserving of special mention for the sentence with which the friend, who comes from outside the community, upbraids the student: “You, damned one, you sold your mother!” The same Machado de Assis could not avoid noticing, however, the minimal repercussions that the courageous drama, “so well accomplished,” had among the public, who showed little interest for the national theater. With the knowledge he had of European literature and of the distance between the latter and the national taste, citing the anti-­slavery author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, de Assis affirms: This drama, essentially ours, could, if the enthusiasm of this land were different, have the same nomination as that of the novel by Harriette Stowe—based on the same theater about slavery. Assis, 1973: 840

Machado de Assis, translated and read in several languages, is certainly the author who best represents us in world literature, having been inclusively recognized by Harold Bloom, who has nominated himself as the arbiter of the world canon. He has also been studied and praised by writers like the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and the Americans John Updike and Michael Wood. Also worthy of mention are the commentaries that he received from Susan Sontag in “Afterlives: the case of Machado de Assis,” published in The New Yorker in May of 1990 and re-­edited in the volume Where the Stress Falls: Essays, underlining the originality of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and securing for Machado de Assis a permanent place in world literature. De Assis also wrote for the theater, leaving behind a few plays that only became part of the history of Brazilian literature because of the signature of our principal novelist rather than for the importance they they had in the cadre of Brazilian theater. It is Tania Brandão, stressing the triumph of light theater, specially the operettas, magic and vaudeville shows, who affirms, about the dramatic theater: Machado de Assis is the most significant name to be considered because his theater, strictly speaking, did not happen, that is, it did not become his great form of expression, did not project as did his fictional novels. Brandão, 2010: 342

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Taking into consideration the impetus to consecrate that Pascale Casanova talks of, with respect to the geopolitics of the time, and concerning the recognition accorded the dramatic theater, in monarchical and pro-­slavery Brazil, José de Alencar as well as Machado de Assis, the playwrights, were a far cry from receiving public recognition for their theatrical plays, that is, far from success with the public in the capital city of the empire (Rio de Janeiro). However, they received, on the opposite pole, the recognition of what Casanova presents as autonomous criterion, the aesthetic criterium. The truth is that, even with the arrival of the Republic in 1899, we were very far from recognizing the valor of the national theater, only receiving in the theaters of our capital the French and Portuguese dramas, followed by the operettas and, incipiently, European operas. Vaudeville shows would be successful with the public but few authors were incorporated into the field of study of Brazilian literature. Even the modernist movement that begins in 1922, and which became the longest and the most visible movement in Brazil, gave very little importance to the theater. Among the most important authors of the Movement, Mario de Andrade leaves behind just the unfinished opera Café; Oswald de Andrade, on the other hand, leaves behind three theatrical texts: The Man and the Horse, The Dead, and The King of the Candle. The most interesting of them, however, The King of the Candle, written in 1937, will only be performed once, in a historical staging, in 1967. Presented as a committed spectacle, at the beginning of the military dictatorship (1964), the performance, directed by José Celso Martinez Correa, becomes emblematic of the Tropicalia aesthetic and is received by the public as an act of resistance to the oppression and censorship that had been installed in the country. The true foundation of the modern Brazilian theater, with a vigorous dramaturgy and the capability of becoming part of the theatrical canon, even renewing it, and of being re-­read, translated and staged worldwide, will only happen with the staging of The Wedding Gown, by Nelson Rodrigues.

Nelson Rodrigues and a world theater The playwright Nelson Rodrigues was born in Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, in 1912, but while he was still young his family moved to Rio de Janeiro. He was a journalist his entire career, writing “crônicas,” short stories and feuilletons for

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Rio’s newspapers. As a sports reporter, he wrote for newspapers but also participated in TV shows. His vast oeuvre as a columnist is published in nine books, to which are added two volumes of memoirs. Using the pseudonym of Susana Flag, he wrote popular feuilletons. He wrote his entire life, reaching a great and varied public, including soccer aficionados and newspaper readers. His “crônicas” were colloquial and full of humor, but also marked by irreverence towards national politics. The critic Sabato Magaldi was the first to edit Rodrigues’s works for the theater, into a set of four volumes. Sabato Magaldi classified the seventeen plays into three types: 1. psychological plays; 2. mythic plays; and 3. tragedies in Rio. Even though the classification is not unanimous among the many scholars of Rodrigues’s theater, it reflects an intelligent reading on the part of a critic who occupied himself quite intensely with the works of Nelson Rodrigues. It is important to identify several of his plays as tragedies, an infrequent genre in modern dramaturgy, and always very impactful. These are the most polemic and the ones that most challenge theater directors. His success did not come with his first play, Woman Without Sin, but with the second, the daring one—from all points of view: the formal to the moral—The Wedding Gown, staged in 1943. The critic, professor, and researcher Mariangela Alves de Lima observed that The Wedding Gown became a decisive milestone for Brazilian theater due to a happy conjunction of factors. The first is the innovative structure of the play: “a play technically innovative, interweaving with the observation of the circumstances of its time the design of different fictional planes.” The second factor was the theater company from Rio de Janeiro, “The Commediants,” who imposed artistic quality onto the production. The third factor was, for the critic, a decisive one: The contribution of the Polish director Zbigniew Ziembiski, whose experience in the European stages allowed him to understand the variety of styles suggested by the text, while from a distanced view of an extremely sensitive artist, he managed to preserve, on the realistic plane of the play, what he called “Rio’s reality.” Lima: 1092

Decio de Almeida Prado, a critic and professor, in a critical comment replete with praises for the playwright (much like Mariangela’s), written at the time of This volume, the fruit of exhaustive research and exquisite curation, provides excellent study material on Nélson Rodrigues, divulging texts almost impossible to be consulted, along with essays of the utmost importance.

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the play’s premiere, points to its foundational character, especially if one takes into consideration the absence of the theater from the radically innovative creations of Brazilian modernism. Considering Wedding Gown of enormous importance for the theater in Brazil, he afffirms: “It causes awe to see emerging, suddenly, from nothing, which is our theater, almost by a miracle of spontaneous generation, an author with so much audacity.” (Lima: 96) On the occasion of its revival in 1965, one of our most significant theater critics of the press, Yan Michalski, guarantees that the play, after 22 years, continued to be intensely relevant. In 1976, Sabato Magaldi affirms that “[t]ime gave to this spectacle the serenity of a classic.” The success of Wedding Gown did not guarantee the future of Rodrigues’s dramaturgy. His third play, Family’s Album, would remain censored for 22 years. The tragedy, involving above all incest, was said to shock bourgeois society, exactly the line that will be, in Rodrigues’s entire oeuvre, his main theme. The truth is that Rodrigues’s theater alternated between receptions of enthusiastic success and with indifference or rejection. The playwright’s response to failure was more boldness, more provocation, and the use of the stage as critic or caricature of Rio’s bourgeoisie, that is, the theater audience of the time. Even his last work, The Serpent, of 1978: a tragedy that resorts to Aristotelian rules of unities of time, space and action, resorting even to the inclusion of a chorus, Rodrigues takes to the stage both the tragic and the comical, the dramatic and the humorist. If he resorts to worldly renowned theatrical forms, Rodrigues creates a special theater when he combines with these consecrated forms from overseas, local materials, his own obsessions and obsessions from Brazilian society. The truth is that Nelson Rodrigues was himself a polemical personality, full of paradoxes. Despite his great visibility, above all as a journalist with a constant presence in the media, the reading public had a frequently conflictual relationship with him. Alongside the artistic revolutionary there was the opposing figure of the political conservative, a stance that became more serious during the dictatorial military regime, which Rodrigues supported. Just before his death in 1980, when one of his sons was imprisoned and suffered violence under the regime, his criticism of the left subsided. Despite the recognition that his works received from critics, theorists and Brazilian directors, it is only after his death that the international repercussions of his theatrical works began to be felt. The circulation of Nelson Rodrigues’s theater becomes very extensive in France, starting in 1980 with translations and productions; and also in the United States, where it is, above all, studied in universities. Although there has

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been circulation of his works in several other countries, and a few translations as well, it is in these two centers of world literature that Rodrigues’s opus is received in the more significant manner. It is worth mentioning the scanty circulation of the theater of this Brazilian playwright in Portugal, a country where the dramatic arts are innovative, with theatrical groups like The Tent (active for 40 years) and with an effective cultural exchange with Brazil. Translation is always the initial obstacle to the diffusion of literary texts in other countries, which would not be the case in Portugal, where the study and staging of Nelson Rodrigues would not face this language barrier, at least in the reading of texts. However, it is evident, by the absence of the author’s theatrical works, that it is not only the instances of praise and recognition that determine the transit between different national spaces, but also the systems of production and circulation of literary work; as Casanova and other scholars of book marketing show. The truth is that it is only now, in 2016, after 35 years of dispute among his heirs, that works by Nelson Rodrigues are being translated and published in Portugal. Life imitates art, and the conflicts existing among Rodrigues’s six siblings seem to have come out of a play by Rodrigues himself, along with the representation of family neuroses, on which the author was a specialist. According to the owner of the Portuguese publishing house Tinta da China, that began to publish his works, Rodrigues only began to be mentioned in Portugal around 2008, through literary blogs; before this date neither his theater nor his cronicas were known. The agreement among the heirs to the copyright to this oeuvre allowed translations into Hebrew, for the first time, of the play Kiss the Asphalt, which was published in Israel in 2015. In Italy, where the theater of the author was occasionally studied, Abito da Sposa and Doroteia, has been published in a translation by Biana Zaki and Guillerm Pivari: published by I libri di Emil, in Bologna in 2014. This is an insignificant number of works, considering that Italy is a country with many affinities with Brazil. In his important essay “Conjectures on World Literature,” Franco Moretti stresses a peculiarity in the diffusion of literature in a language other than the hegemonic, like English or French. That is, the close relationship between the national scholar, who can/could play the role of mediator, and the international circuit: And probably, no matter what the object of analysis is, there will always be a point where the study of world literature must yield to the specialist of the national literature, in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of labor. Inevitable not just for practical reasons, but for theoretical ones. Moretti, 2000: n.p.

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France is probably the country where Rodrigues’s theater circulates the most outside Brazil, being translated, published and staged. For this to happen, the actions of the translator, theater professor and director, Angela Leite Lopes were decisive. Currently Professor of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Lopes got her PhD at the Sorbonne, in 1985, with the thesis “Le Tragique dans le Theatre de Nelson Rodrigues.” She translated Kiss the Asphalt (Le Baiser sur l’Asphalt) into French, and All Nudity will be Punished (Toute nudite sera chatiée): both plays destined to be performed on Parisian stages. In 1990, the publishing house C. Bourgois published the volume Valse number 6 followed by Our Lady of the Drowned, in translations by Angela Leite Lopes. In an interview with Fatima Saad for a volume organized by the Theater of the Pequeno Gesto, about Nelson Rodrigues, the researcher raises important considerations about the reception of the playwright before he became a world-­ recognized author. In 1980, the year of the death of Nelson Rodrigues, his life and his writings were still really mixed and were easily rejected. It was difficult for someone to stand back and study his work. There were the impressions, the most diverse, polarized between the confirmation of his genius and of his conservatism. Resende: 357

Also important in the context of the French scene were the stagings directed by Alain Olivier of Valse number 6 (1995), Black Angel (1996) and All Nudity Will Be Punished (1999). Later productions of Valse number 6, in France, like the one by Alain Igonet at the Festival of Avignon in 2007, make reference to Olivier’s emblematic production. The commentary of Alain Olivier, published in number 146 of the journal Theatre Public (Paris: Theatre de Gennevilliers, March-April 1999), organized by him and by Angela Leite Lopes on the staging of Black Angel, in a translation by Jacques Thieriot, is a true evaluation of postcolonial relations. It brings to mind the decisive preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to Les Damnés de la Terre (The Damned of the Earth), a text by Franz Fanon that marks the beginning of postcolonial theories. Recognizing in Black Angel one of the most important plays of the twentieth-­century theater, Olivier is very critical of the difficulty of Europe in recognizing the importance of works like this: Why is it that we have, in France, so much difficulty in reading the theater of Nelson Rodrigues? How to explain that we, grandchildren of Surrealism, taking into consideration what the surrealist thought brought into the artistic and

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humanist world, that we are not able to see, to perceive the interest of this dramaturgy that comes to us from the New World? Olivier: 8

It is the same director that formulated the answer to this question in another essay: “The life of the dead is our unconscious,” still in reference to Black Angel he said: It is a play that is being kept far from our cultural horizon on account of a narrowing in the curiosity that identifies the intellectual life of our country nowadays. Thus, it does not yet find its place in the querulous eurocentrism in which our theater many times rejoices today. Olivier: 13

And he finishes with a conclusion that serves, in a decisive manner, to analyze the situation of any literature that comes from South American countries and from Africa; and the asymmetry still existing in the global exchange between South and North, which deserves particular notice coming from a French intellectual: “The neurosis of the colonizer that was in each one of us has not yet been reduced by the bloody operation of the decolonization.” Other theoretical works, especially the ones written in universities, like Walder Gervasio Virgulino’s thesis—“Les masques du fantastique et les farces tragiques dans l’oeuvre theatrale de Nelson Rodrigues” (The Masks of the Fantastic and the Creation of the Tragic Farce in the Work of Nelson Rodrigues)— also defended in the Sorbonne under the direction of Jacqueline Penjon, French professor and specialist in Brazilian literature, continue to be developed. In 2012, for the occasion of the centennial of the birth of Nelson Rodrigues, the project “Les 100 visages de Nelson Rodrigues” (The 100 faces of Nelson Rodrigues), conceived by the actress and director Flavia Lorenzi, took to the stage at the Theatre de L’Oprime, in Paris, including scenes and readings of works by the playwright. The global cartography of the work of Nelson Rodrigues that we have tried to draw should include, in increasing numbers, the literary studies developed in the United States. If the staging of his plays do not cause impact on the exuberant and plural theatrical American scene, then university studies are demonstrating that the author’s works deserve research geared not only towards departments that include the study of Portuguese—like the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies coordinated by Professor Nelson H. Vieira, himself a specialist in Brazilian fiction—but also in the investigation of the

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theory of theater developed in several programs and centers. The productions of plays by the author that became milestones in the field of theatrical direction were taken from Brazil to the USA, like the ones by Luiz Arthur Nunes of Woman Without Sin in 2000 and, before this, Nelson 2 Rodrigues, by Antunes Filho, in 1989. A pioneer in American academic studies on the theater of Nelson Rodrigues is professor Fred M. Clark, who has been dedicated to the study of Rodrigues’ works since the 1980s and more recently published, in 1991, Impermanent Structures: Semiotic Readings of Nelson Rodrigues’s Wedding Gown, Family Album, and Black Angel. Another American university professor to devote critical attention to the playwright is David George, author of Nelson Rodrigues and the Invention of Brazilian Drama, in 2010. For a long time, the greatest difficulty for researchers and directors interested in Nelson Rodrigues was the usual: the translations. They were very few and had no impact on the editorial world, disappearing within a short time after publication. In 2001, the Ministry of Culture of Brazil, through its National Art Foundation (FUNARTE), published The Theater of Nelson Rodrigues, in two volumes, in an English translation by Joffre Rodrigues and Toby Coe. Even though this translation receives frequent criticism, this rare initiative of the Brazilian government points to an intervention of the utmost importance in the editorial world, showing that, as the central countries of The World Republic of Letters tend to do, the authors who are part of world literature need, for this reason, national support. After the edition of the translated plays, the possibilities of production and of research expanded considerably. Responsible for the production of several plays by the playwright, the director Claudia Tatinge Nascimento—theater professor at Wesleyan University in the United States, and prize-­winning director of a staging of Pornographic Angel (an adaptation of short narratives by Nelson Rodrigues)—studied the reception of the author in the United States. In an essay published in the same volume of the Revista Folhetim previously cited (Nascimento: 345), the scholar relates very clearly how arduous is the task of staging Brazilian plays, like the ones by Rodrigues, with actors who associate Brazil only with images of the “samba,” beaches and carnival. To substitute this imagery for the staging of tragedies and dramas that “are not afraid of being unpleasant,” as the author himself used to say, where everything is exaggerated, required what Nascimento designates “re-­imagination,” avoiding a realistic reading, “something very difficult in a country in which psychological

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realism still predominates on the stages and the public’s preference” (Nascimento: 345). Her experience in production and pedagogy points not only to the necessity to separate the spectator from stereotypes, but also to restructure the dramatic quality of the works through the use of a powerful meta-­theatrics. The efforts seem to be yielding good results, not only in staging, but also in reception. It was Nelson Rodrigues himself who said that all unanimity is stupid, but in this case, there seems to be at least near-­unanimity that the affirmation that Rodrigues’ theater continues to be the one that most attracts directors and actors in Brazil and abroad. The most curious facet of this unanimity is the fact that his theater is presented by the playwright himself, totally correctly, as an “unpleasant theater”. In a text of 1949, published in the journal of Brazilian theater Dionysos, “Unpleasant Theater,” abundantly cited, the playwright says: In just a word, I am making an “unpleasant theater,” unpleasant plays. (. . .) And why unpleasant plays? According to what I have already said, because they are pestilent, fetid plays, able, by themselves, to produce typhoid fever and malaria among the audience. Rodrigues, n.p.

And continuing, in the same self-­defining text: And I will continue to work with monsters. I say monsters, in the sense that they outdo or violate the everyday moral practice. When I write for the theater, atrocities and non-­atrocities do not frighten me. I choose my characters with the greatest calm and never do I condemn them. When it comes to operating dramatically, I do not see in which way the good is better than the bad. I begin to feel that perverted beings are marvelously theatrical. And in the same plane of dramatic worth are the totally lunatic, the heavy drinkers, the criminals of all gradations, the epileptics, the saints, the future suicides. Madness would yield unforgettable plastic images, gloomy and dazzling images for a theatrical transposition. Rodrigues, n.p.

The Brazilian theater as global scene To conclude this reflection on the Brazilian theater, which investigates the possibility of the works in the genre to be included in a world theater, it is

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necessary to go beyond the theatrical texts and to join the contemporary dramaturgy references to theatrical theory and performances of national and international texts by Brazilian groups that circulate through other countries, including the creations of post-­dramatic theater and performances. The Theater of the Oppressed of Augusto Boal, is the theoretical contribution and theatrical practice formulated by a Brazilian that most circulates around the world, conveying a postcolonial sense of Brazil. The Theater of the Oppressed is today a decisive part of the critical comprehension of theater in its liberating potential, with studies about its practice being part of important studies such as the ones compiled in the volume The Applied Theater Reader, edited by professors Tim Prenti and Sheila Preston from the United Kingdom (cf. Boal). After achieving a consolidated career as director and playwright, in 1971 Boal was imprisoned and tortured during the military dictatorship in Brazil. He then left for exile in Buenos Aires, next in Lisboa, where he worked with the group A Barraca (The Tent), and finally in Paris, where he created the Center of the Theater of the Oppressed, today a chain that is spread all over the world. The Theater of the Oppressed, as Boal defines his proposal, is studied in Europe and the USA today as an experimental theater, a method of creation, staging and political proposition. The Theater of the Oppressed is, for its creator, “a method of work, a philosophy of life,” that is, the theater is a pedagogy of struggle to be used by subalterns. In the international site of the Theater of the Oppressed it is indicated that more than 50 countries have developed this work. Boal died in 2009, already back in Brazil. His theater proposals continue to be developed by several groups and his books are published and republished in several languages. Going back to theatrical performances, we have to recognize that the contemporary dramatic arts, as well as the body of critical essays in reference to the Brazilian theater after Nelson Rodrigues, have not yet spread to spaces other than the national, where they present themselves as innovative, fertile and plural, as does, in fact, the whole of contemporary Brazilian literature. Despite the even greater difficulties of diffusion in Portuguese, the situation of our contemporary theater does not differ from the one experienced by the Spanish-America theater, or even the one presented in Spanish. The important volume Stages of Conflict. A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance, edited by Diana Taylor & Sarah J. Townsend, affirms in the preface:

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Stages of Conflict is the first English language collection that provides an overview of both theater and performance practices in Latin America dating back to the Conquest. Taylor & Townsend, 2008: xi

They continue, saying that the motivation for the work is the fact that the Latin American theater is studied very little, and it is important to propagate and publish materials capable of propitiating the means for this theater to be studied, hence they include, in the volume, texts of contemporary plays in translation, accompanied by introductory studies. The Brazilian contribution is “Denise Stoklos in Mary Stuart.” The text of the spectacle by Stoklos was translated by the author and Marlene Ramirez-Cancio. Mary Stuart is a performance and spectacle by the author and actress and circulates all around the world. According to the editors of Stages of Conflict: “Stoklos has created and performed work all over the world, seeking always to find verbal and corporeal expression. Such expression can carry meaning across different linguistic and cultural borders.” Taylor & Townsend, 2008: 281

One notes with surprise how muted the repercussion of the Brazilian theater is in Italy, a country with which we maintain numerous affinities, due partly to strong Italian immigration, especially to São Paulo. A few translated modern texts were included in Brasile in Scena, organized by Alessandra Vannucci and Luciana Stegagno Picchio in 2004. Recently, a few examples of the new dramaturgy such as Pedro Bricio’s are starting to circulate in Italian translations. We end this evaluation by turning to a highly positive aspect of the participation of Brazil in the global scene: the presentation of Brazilian groups and theatrical companies overseas. Of great impact was the production of Romeo and Juliet by the group Galpão, from Minas Gerais state, in the Shakespearean theater The Globe in London. It had two seasons in The Globe Theatre; in 2000 and 2012. Following these shows, the group traveled to various countries of Latin America, the United States and Europe. Conceived and directed by Gabriel Villela, the production of Romeo and Juliet as a comedy, drawing on resources from popular theater and street theater, a trademark of the group, used the theater space in a surprising manner, crossing the borders between stage and public. It was the first time in which a Brazilian group occupied The Globe, incorporating itself into the program of that theatrical space.

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And still keeping the dialogue within the Shakespearean tradition, the Grupo Nós do Morro (Group We, from the Shantytown), a company that has been developing its own theater style for more than 20 years, in its theater space in the Vidigal Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, using actors from the community and trained by the group, presented their version of The Two Knights of Verona. This was by invitation, at the Stratford-upon-Avon festival in the United Kingdom in 2006. The next year, the performance was presented at the Barbican Center in London for a month, gaining special attention from theater critics. Innovative theater groups, like the Theater of the Vertigo group, have circulated through numerous countries, always attracting special attention and establishing new partnerships with the companies of the spaces they passed through. To read more about the unique experience of the group Nós do Morro, it is worth consulting Coutinho & Nogueira, 2009: 170–177. The Cia Vertice (Vertex Company), of Christiane Jatahy: author, theater director and film maker, has participated in international festivals, presenting works in dialogue with distinct artistic areas and utilizing the multiple resources of new technologies in a traffic between the frontiers of reality and fiction of the actor and character, of theater and the audiovisual. An important initiative, decisive for the acquaintance with the new Brazilian theater, as has been called the body of works of young playwrights that have renewed the Brazilian scene, was the publication of the journal Theater volume 45 number 2, 2015, guest-­edited by Claudia Tatinge Nascimento.3 The journal presents to the English speaking public the translation of four plays, by Diogo Liberano (born in 1987), Jo Bilac, Newton Moreno, and Dib Carneiro, accompanied by the commentaries of four important Brazilian theater critics. In the essay, “Subversive Cannibals. Notes on the Contemporary Theater in Brazil, the other Latin America,” Nascimento points at some of the characteristics in common among the four representatives of what is called the “country’s vibrant contemporary theater”. From different perspectives, the authors occupy themselves with the same theme: the violence of contemporary society that is associated with the question of the body and its vulnerability (See Nascimento, “Brazilian Contemporary Theater”). Both the translated dramaturgical texts and the theoretical and critical reflections that accompany them provide pathways for engaging the new Brazilian scenic writing in permanent dialogue with the Special thanks to Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento for mentioning this recent issue of Theater magazine and other generously shared references.

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process of creation of the spectacle, in what can be a theater that forms a part of world literature. I would like to conclude by commenting on the title of the essay itself, where Nascimento speaks of Brazil as “the other Latin America: the one where Spanish is not spoken.” In the essay “La literatura como mundo,” (Literature as World) Pascale Casanova analyses, among other questions, the world-­literary space in relation with the other, more restrictive, the “regional or linguistic field,” after affirming that the primordial characteristics of the literary field are hierarchy and inequality, presenting the Latin American literature as an example of relative autonomy of the literary sphere, without either direct link or relation of cause and effect between the political and economic strength. The example of this autonomy would be shown by the world recognition demonstrated through the four Nobel prizes to Latin American authors. The critic, however, fails to observe that the four prizes were given to authors that write in Spanish. The only writer that has Portuguese as their literary language, and that has already won the prize, was José Saramago in 1998: a Portuguese writer, that is European. After considering an evaluation of the Brazilian theater as world theater, it is clear the importance that our theater can have as the introducer of new technical devices, either for the modern re-­reading of the tragic, as it is done in recent performances of Nelson Rodrigues, or by the proposition of uniting theater and politics in a libertarian form, as the pedagogy of the Theater of the Oppressed does, or even for the deconstruction of the traditional dramatic scene in the name of the new dramaturgy, which unites multiple forms of art in its proposed staging with the incorporation of new technologies and acts of performance. The status of a kind of periphery of the periphery, as Portuguese speakers in “another Latin America,” makes it important to have the support of our own country in participations in international festivals, theater fairs and book fairs and, above all, in support of translations. This engagement of the state itself is beginning to happen, and one hopes that it will be maintained, like the program of support for translations by the National Library Foundation, or the access, through the Internet, to videos and interviews about art—and in our case, about the theater—in English and French on the website of FUNARTE (National Art Foundation www.funarte.gov.br). The international success of an author is beneficial for the entire body of our literature and it should be sought, but it cannot be the only instance of legitimization. Just as obtaining a place in the global cartography does not

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substitute for the lack of politics in the formation of publics and of exhibitions within the territory of origin, including the marginalized spaces of the big cities. If it is true that globalization created a new map of the world, marked by new cultural fluxes, and that the production of art takes place in a polycentric form, requiring inclusively a polyphonic discourse in a clear contradiction with the idea of a single art, universally valid, it is also a fact that the power of the market is equally global and can become an evident obstacle to the circulation of art in an egalitarian way. In the case of the theater, the technical tools and the forms of creation that are emerging in the contemporary scene point to the strong possibility of repercussions in the greater world scene. The incorporation into a scene of the condition of precariousness—of the immediate, of the performative, and the notion of process so dear to the theater— is sought in the elaboration itself of the writing of the scene, that wants to remain provisory, unfinished, including the spectator in the final result of the spectacle. Finally, the will towards the breaking up of hierarchies in the artistic performance itself, the appropriation of the notion of periphery as a refusal of hegemonic centers, including in the aesthetic field: tools that show up in the strength with which authors, inhabitants of the peripheries of the great centers, formulate their artistic experiences are decisive in the Brazilian collaboration for the implantation of a new art regime; from the creation to the circulation of its literature.

Works cited Ahmad, Aijaz. Linhagens do presente. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2002. Assis, J. M. Machado de. Obra completa. Ed. Afrânio Coutinho. Vol. III. Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1973. Brandão, Tânia. In: Mostaço, Edélcio (ed.) Para uma história cultural do teatro. Florianópolis/Jaraguá do Sul: Design Editora, 2010. Candido, Antonio. Formação da literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2nd ed., 1964. Casanova, Pascale. A República Mundial das Letras. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2002. Coutinho, Marina Henriques and Márcia Pompeu Nogueira. “The use of dialogical approaches for community theatre by the group Nós do Morro, in the Vidigal Favela of Rio de Janeiro.” In: The Applied Theater Reader. Ed. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston. New York: Routledge, 2009. 170–77. Fernandes, Sílvia. “Teatros Pós-Dramáticos” O Pós-­dramático. Ed. J. Guinsberg and Sílvia Fernandes. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008. Funarte—Portal das artes em, www.funarte.gov.br.

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Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Teatro pós-­dramático. São Paulo: CosacNaify, 2007. Lima, Mariângela Alves de. “Nelson em polonês adquire sentidos insuspeitados.” Incluído em “Dossiê de críticas.” In: Follhetim no. 29. Publicação do Teatro do Pequeno Gesto. Rio de Janeiro, 2010/2011. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature”. In: New Left Review 1, January– February 2000. https://newleftreview.org/II/1/franco-­moretti-conjectures-­on-world-­ literature. Accessed 5 June 2017. Nascimento, Cláudia Tatinge. “Brazilian Contemporary Theater: Memories of Violence on the Post-Dictatorship Stage.” History, Memory, Performance. David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince, eds. London: Palgrave, 2014: 203–221. Nascimento, Cláudia Tatinge. “Nelson Rodrigues nos Estados Unidos: estranha familiaridade”. Folhetim no. 29. Olivier, Alain. “Nelson Rodrigues, um teatro desagradável”. Folhetim no. 29. Rancière, Jacques. Jacques Rancière: Les grands entretiens d’artpress. Paris: ArtPress, 2014. Resende, Beatriz. Interview with Fátima Saad. Folhetim no. 29: 357–64. Rodrigues, Nelson. “Teatro desagradável.” Revista Folhetim no.7, May/August 2000. www.pequenogesto.com.br/folhetim/folhetim7.pdf Taylor, Diana, and Sarah J. Townsend. Stages of conflict. A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2008.

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Postmodern Brazilian Literature on the World Stage Luiza Lobo

Introduction The last three decades of the twentieth century witnessed, in Brazil, the transition from modernism to the “Postmodern Condition,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s expression (1979). The postmodern poses a rupture with transcendental metaphysics and corresponds, in Frederic Jameson’s definition (1991), to the fifth phase of the 1950s post-­industrial period. However, in Brazil’s case, it is necessary to distinguish between the postmodern and the so-­called postmodernism. The latter denotes the third modernist generation in Brazilian literature: the first one starting in 1922; the second, regionalism, from 1930; and the third, from the 1945 poetry generation and prose to the 1970s. It is during the 1970s decade that the postmodern movement begins in Brazil, twenty years later than in the United States. This movement is characterized by a linguistic or semiological revolution that Julia Kristeva defines as a Revolution in Poetic Language (1972). This means that the postmodern in social sciences incorporates the concepts of Semiology, of intertextuality (Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida), the Imaginary (Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault), besides Nietzsche’s philosophy and New History. It is poststructuralist and deconstructive. Literature goes through a phase of crisis of values and fragmentation of the text, which circulates within an infinite web of intertextuality. The text is considered aesthetically autonomous in relation to reality, which contradicts the idea of mimesis as the mirror of reality, as developed by Gyorgy Lukács in the second volume of his Aesthetics (1966). Even the Annales School (1929) or New History, in its third phase, also inaugurated in the 1970s, incorporates this linguistic change (Duby et al., eds, 1978). New History came to embrace social sciences and a cultural and total history. The postmodern is

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poststructuralist since it re-­introduces history in its diachronic axis and opposes scientism. It considers history not as a science, but as an interpretative narrative, hence analogous to literature. Lyotard, Derrida, Paul De Man, and Jean Baudrillard (1976) proceed with the process of deconstruction of the eighteenth-­century transcendental metaphysical philosophy, a process initiated by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and afterwards intensified by Martin Heidegger’s Hermeneutics. It is Nietzsche who assembles the aphoristic and metaphoric discourse to dismantle the eschatological history of Christianity, whose purpose was transcendental and metaphysical. Heidegger turns to Da-­sein, “there being,” announcing a philosophy of existence that Wilhelm Dilthey, distancing himself from the religious explanation, prefers to tackle as social Pragmatics. Dilthey stresses the affective and existential aspect of the relation of the subject with his/her surroundings, which later became so present in the immediacy of communication in the digital era. Everything that relates to the subject became intensely explored in postmodernity through false diaries and false autobiographies, with fake and multiple subjectivities. Jacques Derrida is the major theorist responsible for furthering the theory of deconstruction (or of the postmodern). He puts forth a systematic critique of the metaphysical concepts of the Greco-Judaic-Christian Western culture that permeate Western society. Simultaneously, he proposes the rejection of “the law of the excluded third”—in which only one element is true, excluding any other (if A, then not B or C), in favor of a logic of the supplement (A, B, and C). Instead of the oneness of meaning, he proposes the logic of non-­identity, of probability, of the supplement and of the undecidable that abolishes the notion of only one truth. Consequently, the postmodern also breaks with linear, chronological time, and replaces it for Einstein’s concept of space-­time, which often contributes to the fragmentation or cleavage of the self. Lacan, Derrida and Roland Barthes remind us that the aim of discourse is to reveal the unsaid, the unconscious, in a new episteme (Foucault)—which was called by Lévi-Strauss, in Structuralist Anthropology, a “conscious model.” Foucault defines the new episteme as the layer of knowledge or a chart of repressed thoughts, proper of a certain group that forms a “community of faith.” This group shares a mentality that represents its “way of thinking” or its “cognitive maps” (see Burke and Porter, Eds., 1997: 147). According to Peter Burke, in History and Social Theory (1992: 153), our current episteme follows the postmodern model into the twenty-­first century.

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There also occurred in postmodernity a shift from the production axis to the reception axis, which brought the emphasis on the reader and on a more dialogic, theatrical or cinematographic, scenic or spectacular literature (see Debord, 2000). It also constitutes a way to survive the assault of mass culture. Therefore, the entire body of Western thought is contested and deconstructed, in a multifaceted and multiple-­meaning vision, no longer following an Aristotelian logic, but rather the image of the rhizome conceived by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980). The rhizome is an open system in which the themes unite through conjunction, supplementing one another, not excluding. Thus, themes associate with one another in an infinite web, and related terms form territories, not unities, as takes place in Aristotelian logic, which works in a crescent order, from beginning to end, from the first to the final element. Instead of linearity—with only one term as the mirror of truth, in the Platonic vision, and a single notion of Beauty, of Good and of Truth, as Hegel proposed in his Aesthetics—different notions of truth combine through supplementation, consequently making several canons possible. Hence takes place the deconstruction of the grand narratives and the universal truths that formed the eighteenth-­century transcendental and metaphysical philosophy, built by the encyclopedists Diderot and Rousseau and by Herder’s and especially by Kant’s philosophy—the thinking elite. Now these metanarratives are contested. Even the idea of the Nation-State or the grand utopias, such as the European Union, now need to be constantly legitimated by society. The postmodern movement and its various tendencies, which appeared in the 1970s, continues to employ until now a fragmented, direct, journalistic style, in connection with the speed of digital communication and much less linked to traditional well-­wrought and personal literary style. We will next weave comparisons between World and Brazilian literatures, recalling that prose fiction increasingly attains greater public reception than poetry.

Postmodernity, intertextuality, and new subjectivities The seemingly infinite amount of information that flows in society since the second half of the twentieth century, even more intensified in the digital era that established itself in its last decade, made it impossible to determine the authorship and the absolute originality of a text. This is what Foucault questions in his lecture “Qu’est-­ce qu’un auteur?” (1969), published a year after the publication of Barthes’s

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article “La mort de l’auteur” (1968). From a semiological perspective, language circulates in an infinite web of intertextualities in the contemporary world. As early as 1973 Harold Bloom had contested, in The Anxiety of Influence, the linear notion of influence, on the grounds of the pull of intertextualities that runs among texts, making it impossible to find out a source or origin for it. This explains why world literature abandoned the notion of influence, which was the basis for comparative literature in the past, and exchanged it for that of intertextuality (Kristeva, 1972), of interdisciplinarity and of interculturality, the latter developed by postcolonial studies, as well as of chronotope, which is the idea that space and time are simultaneous, according to Einstein. (Bakhtin, 1981). The Mexican writer Margo Glantz, in her book Yo también me acuerdo (Mexico, 2014), takes the notion of intertextuality to an extreme upon paraphrasing the fragmentary work of the French writer Georges Perec, Je me souviens (I Remember) (1978). His book was written between 1973 and 1977 and comments on trivial events that took place in France between 1946 and 1961. However Perec, or his part, had already got his inspiration from the work I Remember (1970), by Joe Brainard, who recollects facts from his life from 1940 to 1970. Perec and Brainard initiate each paragraph of their books with the expression “I remember.” Then, Margo begins each paragraph of her almost 300 page long book with the expression “I also remember.” However, she adopts in it the short and direct form of tweets, and deconstructs the grandiose way in which Perec had told facts of his life. By using the abbreviated digital language, she evinces the banality of daily life and of the news that occupy us in the digital world. She fills up her book with a false or fake art, and its short paragraphs with useless information about Medicine, self-­help, hedonism, discoveries, and all the knick-­knacks of the Internet. Her subjectivity imposes itself upon the facts related by the official history, forming a continuous chain of meanings (s1, s2, s3) that finish by meaning nothing, or being nonsense (sn), as states Deleuze in Logic of Meaning (1969). The endless repetition of the series, which is typical of media, consumerism and capitalism end up with the death of the symbolic, in Jean Baudrillard’s words (1976). (See Deleuze and Guattari, 1980).

The roman noir, the games of doubles and false identities, and the inversions of the detective novel Detective fiction has always attracted the public and become bestseller due to its linear suspense and mystery plots about hard-­boiled detectives and

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assassins. The most well-­known examples are the novels by Dashiell Hammett, especially the classic The Maltese Falcon (1929–1930), the Sherlock Holmes series by Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler with detective Philip Marlowe, Agatha Christie with her famous detective Hercule Poirot, besides the Ellery Queen mystery magazines. Since the 1970s, the roman noir replaced detective novels. It became a critical and parodic literature of the detective, crime, police or suspense fiction, which was always part of mass culture, since the 1950s. The roman noir genre was created in movies and later employed in literature. It brings about an inversion in the logic of the plot, making the detective into an intellectual and the assassin into a genius. It allows for a double reading, the first layer being a direct linear plot of action, a second layer consisting of a more erudite meaning, and carrying more cultural information. The genesis of the postmodern in Latin America retrocedes to Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. In Europe, it is created by Nabokov. The first two writers, at the side of Maria Luísa Bombal, profit from surrealism, which enables them to create an autonomous imaginary detached from reality. This fact contributed to the blossoming of the so-­called Spanish-American literary boom. Its most famous exponent was Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ masterpiece Cién años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). However, it was Mario Vargas Llosa in Conversaciones en la catedral (Conversations in the Cathedral, 1969), who truly made use of the innovations of the postmodern by abolishing the formality of the presentation of each speech by the narrators, thus truly achieving a polyphony of voices (Bakhtin, 1970). Such innovation, by the way, had already been introduced by Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), without the same success. Themes like the double or the fragmentation of the self have always been part of the Gothic or horror fiction, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s suspense tale “William Wilson” and E.T.A. Hoffman’s “Sandman.” Nevertheless, it was Einstein’s new physics theory of relativity that gave support to the idea of unfolding the subject in different dimensions of space and time. Jorge Luis Borges illustrates this idea in his short story “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”, 1941), republished in Ficciones (1944). This pioneer story presents an autodiegetic narrator, supposedly Chinese, Tsui Pen, who chases after his antagonist, Captain Richard Madden, in a garden with rows of trees forming a true labyrinth. However, soon he perceives that he is pursuing himself, since he is simultaneously the persecutor and the runaway, but in different dimensions.

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Of course Einstein’s theory applies to space, not to Euclidean geometry, but literature can profit from its freedom of creation in order to multiply the possibilities of readings of the same tale. The presence of an Oriental narrator attests to the interculturality of the West by bringing cultural alterity and mystery into the plot. The suspense existing in the plot of a detective crime or mystery novel, with Borges, opens a possibility of attracting the reader to a parallel second reading, more erudite—a resource often practiced in the postmodern text. Moreover, Julio Cortázar, in “Instructions for John Howell,” from Todos los fuegos el fuego (All Fires the Fire, 1966), introduces the character Rice who, sitting in the audience, is called to replace the actor who interprets John Howell, in the second act of the play. Then, he and the actor run away, chased by the theater men, while the narrator comments on the absurdity of the scene and, implicity, of all acts of imagination. In the classic novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), Cortázar also resorts to surrealism and to metaphor when he proposes a new order of chapters for the reading of the book, a non-­chronological one, which leads the reader to a plot that is diametrically opposite to the first one. Now, not only is the protagonist locked up in an asylum, but the whole Argentina is crazy. And in the short absurd fragments of “Simulacra,” from Cronopios e Famas (Cronopoios and Fames, 1962), Cortázar also ridicules the trifles of everyday life in their anti-­metaphysical banality, as in “Instructions to sing,” “to cry,” “to climb up stairs,” all of which do not lack social criticism of Argentina. Like Borges, Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1917) takes advantage of the latest discoveries of Einstein’s physics in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) to create a double reading for it, one linear and a more erudite one. The fictitious author unfolds himself into the figure of an autodiegetic narrator, claiming to be the protagonist, but sometimes he doubts his own existence, other times he attributes it to his brother who never appears, or even denies both existences altogether, so that, in the end of the book, he concludes that his last name “Knight” refers to a type of knightrider. This is the knight of the pawn, a mere piece of chess, the only one that can perform unusual and random movements on the chess board, exactly as the characters in postmodern fiction do. In this manner, the plot inserts itself into a semiological web of meanings that locks the reader in an intricate maze of meanings, driving him/her to doubt the notion of reality, a notion that beforehand had been a most stable support for the nineteenth-­century realism and naturalism. The double-­plot technique was later on developed very successfully by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose (1961). (It was turned into a movie,

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as usually inferior to the book). Its first reading has a direct relation with verisimilitude and with the reality, hence with mass culture: the story is centered on the assassination of a monk who had discovered Aristotle’s famous chapter on comedy, the lost portion of the Poetics that had been given as hidden or destroyed by the Church during the Middle Ages. The second reading, however, presents a refined history of the medieval Church and the collision between its monastic orders, such as between the Dominican and the Franciscan. Thus the book brings together erudite literature and media culture and paraliterature; the traditional and the present; essay, fiction and history. In fact, dialogy (Bakhtin, 1970), came to be, a constant characteristic of the postmodern. Afterwards, Dan Brown developed the technique in several of his famous bestsellers, such as Angels and Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003). The latter was adapted into a film that, in my opinion, left something to be desired. Italo Calvino (1923–1985), an Italian born in Cuba, in his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), presents a complex intertextual web of stories that are linked together, in which the imminence of the revelation of the solution of a crime is recurrent, but such a revelation is always postponed. Here takes place the typical displacement from the production axis to the reception axis, and the interpretation of the text is left to the reader, who is invited to decipher the plot. Deeply influenced by the motif of the labyrinth, so dear to J. L. Borges, his work combines a complex with an action plot, as it is typical in postmodernism. In Invisible Cities (1972), Calvino demonstrates affiliation with the Persian The Thousand and One Nights as before, and the book is embedded in a long series of intertextualities. His unfinished work Six Memos for the next Millennium (1988), which consists of five of the six lectures that would be presented at Harvard University, but was interrupted by his death, has its origin in the diary genre, once again combining the essay with fictional creation. Authors such as Haruki Murakami, in 1Q84 (2009–2010, 3 v.) and Roberto Bolaño, in 2666 (2004), who take George Orwell’s 1984 as inspiration, as well as Michel Houellebecq in Submission (2014)—turn to a future dystopia for lack of a sustainable philosophy in their own century. The narrator predicts the victory of a Muslim party in the 1922 French presidential elections. At the same time, the protagonist, a university professor, turns to the past, parodying the book Against the Grain or Against Nature (1884), by the decadent Joris-Karl Huysmans and is hired by a Sorbonne dominated by Muslims. The allusion to future dates or to utopic times, as George Orwell had done in 1984, or the return to the cult or retro style, mark the absence of ideology and the

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conscience of the tragic in postmodern intellectuals. They watch the demise of the Gutenberg era of books and see themselves immersed in the digital era of an anti-­humanist and automated world. One can see here a shadow of the science fiction of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by Ray Douglas Bradbury—the ingenious author of The October Country (1955)—who anticipates the catastrophe of the destruction of traditional values in a future society, authoritarian and cold. However, in Brazil, there are very few science fiction authors other than Fausto Cunha and Dinah Silveira de Queiroz. On the contrary, many authors employ surrealism and Magic realism in their compositions, such as J. J. Veiga and Murilo Rubião. These two authors, nevertheless, are not postmodern, since they still take part in a constructive era, linked to modernism. Haruki Murakami contrasts, in a subtle way, the symbolic values that characterize ancient Japan with the new postmodern Japanese society, which lives in the future. A symbol that goes back to the first magic realism of Latin American is the introduction of nature, with the magic presence of two moons in the sky, in 1Q84 (2009–2010). These two moons are not seen by the population, due to the skyscrapers of Tokyo, except by the two youths in love, a sign of Romantic symbolism in the work, although cautious, in a country extremely automated and in an era of distrust in humanity. To represent the urban violence of the present days, there are underground groups of radical sects that exterminate and kidnap people; a feminist group that hire women to plan mysterious assassinations of men who abuse women; police women that are assassinated; persecution by a secret State that exists outside the law; and, parallel to all this, the almost perverse delicacy of human sensitivity where still flourishes a substratum of the traditional Japanese culture, in its gardens, in the tea ceremonies and in the art of the samurais. The lack of freedom that George Orwell portrayed inside an enclosed room, with the spying of the Big (Older) Brother, Murakami extends to an entire city, with its automatism and the loss of the poetic symbolism of the traditional Japanese literature and culture. Murakami tells the story from the angle of the uncanny, of persecution, of violence and mainly of the absurd, as in the long final section of the story, disconnected from the meaning of the initial plot and dedicated to a beggar who raises cats. In place of the love relationships that we read in Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, we have the constant foreboding of a catastrophe, insecurity, threats, the fear of assassinations—exactly the feelings that the media transmits to the population, in the chill of a postmodern newscast, as a way of inciting emotions.

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In Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002), nature is resumed in the existence of a community that has secluded in the forest, far away from urban society, and lives among pygmies and exotic spirits. The genesis itself of the roman noir, which is the cinema, already indicates that postmodern literature is linked to mass culture and charged with a constant nostalgia, “cult” or “retro” wish to return to the past, in a strong negation of the “make it new,” defended by Pound, in the 1920s modernism. Side by side with the dystopia of the future and the return to the past, especially of the decade 1950, postmodernism parodies or paraphrases mythologies of the golden era of suspense films and of the radio era, as Woody Allen does by digging out remade scenes in an aesthetics of simulacrum, of the fake and of the make-­believe. In opposition to modernism, when Proust, Joyce, Oswald de Andrade, Mario de Andrade and Clarice Lispector sought for an original style, in the postmodern era it became rarer and rarer, being replaced by intertextuality and by action plots with complex and convoluted characters that would rather live drama, in detriment of the narrative. It is true that still today overtly adorned style is yet cultivated by some authors, such as the Portuguese Valter Hugo Mãe and José Saramago, the Mozambican Mia Couto and the Brazilian Luiz Fernando Assis Brasil. But the era of authorial style is at an end. Paul Auster unfolded the potentiality of the roman noir in the three short stories that compose his New York Trilogy (1987), by building a plot in which the narrator-detective is also the investigated. In the autobiographical essay The Invention of Solitude (1982), he constructs the story from a classic plot of crime and suspense that, little by little, is complicated into an intricate game of name changes and biographies, not lacking, sometimes, in social criticism. By using the resources of metafiction and intertextuality, the North American author frequently brings up Beckett, Poe and Melville. He also combines false autobiography with parodic resources of self-­criticism, uniting the suspense novel, which takes part in mass culture, to high culture. The fake diaries and autobiographies are disseminated throughout the twentieth century. In the United States, they often appear under the guise of metafiction and self-­parody, among the Jewish immigrant authors, such as Phillip Roth, John Barth and Paul Auster himself. The self is observed in a derisive, caricatured way, with a touch of the grotesque and tragic, masking a non-­existent identity, in a kind of trap without any link to reality, in plain self-­referentiality. The lack of a fixed point of view, a philosophy or a moral stand to sustain these authors, often immigrants who live in their new cultures in a situation of

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in-­betweens, with little sense of citizenship and the sensation of being repudiated, is one of the motifs of postmodern literature. It contrasts with the strongly moralist and constructive literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novels by Austen, Fielding, Hugo, Zola, José de Alencar and Machado de Assis, for example. In the making of the roman noir, occurs an inversion of the idea of Truth, the Beautiful and Goodness by means of parody, satire, and the absurd. There is a deconstruction of fine characters into perverse figures, and the inversion of constructive social values into obsessions, failures and illicit behavior. Out of the way of morality, it is attributed to the criminal or to the bandit qualities that he did not have in the traditional detective novel. The indifference towards crime, the distancing of feelings, characters who are not minimally expansive and discursive and all types of quirks mark this new set of characters. One observes the question of intercultural hybridism in the work of the Pakistani writer Salman Rushdie, who situates himself in the space in-­between occupied by marginal immigrants at the periphery of society and at the fringe of citizenship. In the very controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie shows, in a very cruel, parodic form of the Scriptures, the postcolonial Indian reality clashing against the hegemonic British culture, by means of his failed characters. In the course of the criticism against the religious fundamentalism that has been startling cultures, divested of more consistent metaphysical truths, the French Michel Houellebecq, who was born on the island of Réunion, but lived in Algeria, represents the voice of the former colonies. His Submission (2014) evinces the problem of Arab immigrants in Paris from the perspective of the clash between religious and cultural values. Sergio Sant’Anna is a prose writer who presents complex intrigues in his crime or detective short fiction. He evinces the social contradictions of Brazilian society, and many compare his critical and parodic writing to the cosmovision of Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Employing a direct and journalistic style, without many stylistic elaborations, he ridicules, for example, the lack of Brazilian identity and constant imitation of North American patterns, in his short novel, A senhorita Simpson (Miss Simpson, 1989), one of his best works. As in Pynchon and Barth, it deals with a decadent public official hooked on tranquilizers who falls in love with his American teacher in an evening English course for adults, and its intricate quid pro quos. All the students are portrayed in grotesque paint and in preposterous scenes. The writing imitates slapstick comedy and shows all the characters in an extremely critical way, in contrast with the naïve oldish teacher who does not grasp the Latino spirit. The novel was adapted to

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film by Bruno Barreto and titled Bossa nova (2000), with Brazilian and North American actors. In the same collection of stories titled A senhorita Simpson, “The Duel” also introduces a decadent character, a writer angered for having had the edition of his book rejected by an editor. When the latter invites him to be only a translator for his publishing house and takes him out to a cafeteria for a sandwich, instead of a decent restaurant with good lunch, as he had expected, he throws him into a garbage can. In fact, all stories and novels by Sant’Anna present the parody of the Romantic hero. Since Notas de Manfredo Rangel, repórter (a respeito de Kramer) (Notes of Manfredo Rangel, a Reporter, on Kramer, 1973), one of his first literary successes, Sant’Anna employed suspense and irony, in the roman noir mode, to obtain further success among his readers, since detective stories attract the public thanks to their action plots, in a time when literature loses its prestige quickly, due to the increase of media and of the Internet. He mingles this type of plot with the use of parody, which is carried to an extreme, almost to a perverse inversion of Romanticism, in The Monster (1994) and in Um crime delicado (A Delicate Crime), 1997. Sant’Anna’s most recent collection of short stories, O livro de Praga, narrativas de amor e arte (The Book of Prague, Narratives of Love and Art, 2011), navigates through a certain extravagant baroque, filled with cinematographic images. Specially the plot of the first story, “The Pianist,” is written with the intention to shock. It is difficult to follow the main motif of the plot, which breaks from external verisimilitude and builds itself around the narrator’s self-­referentiality. Characters appear randomly in the plot, with no preoccupation with logic, giving one the idea of indifference or the most complete delirious imagination, which is usual in postmodernism. Exploiting the aesthetics of the grotesque and of the suspense, Caio Fernando Abreu (1948–1996) wrote the short novel Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (Where Might Dulce Veiga Be?, 1990), which stands out as postmodern, for it is written as an action or suspense film script. It resumes the topic of road or hippie literature, as in Morangos mofados (Moldy Strawberries, 1982), for the narrator travels in search for the disappeared popular singer Dulce Veiga, whom he finally finds in the hinterland of Brazil but as a transgender person. The novel portrays many conflicts of present society, between erudite literature and popular culture, between the urban life in São Paulo and ecological life in the countryside, between one’s identity and the theme of homophobia, besides

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the obsession with AIDS. The story was adapted for television in 2008 by Guilherme de Almeida Prado. Silviano Santiago also writes Stella Manhattan (1985) on a transgender character in preposterous tones, but clothed with political overtones. Master of the roman noir, Rubem Fonseca makes constant inversions of the hero and anti-­hero characters. Criminals are invariably interesting and intelligent, intellectual and sophisticated, often maniac, as is the case in Buffo & Spalanzani (1986). One of his most shocking and perverse stories,“Passeio noturno” (Nightly Stroll), from the anthology Feliz Ano Novo (Happy New Year, 1979), portrays a cynical bourgeois executive, a good husband and father, who runs over women with whom he dines out with his luxurious car. The cold-­blooded first-­person narration emphasizes the sense of horror that may stress some social criticism about man-­woman relationships (as in Lucia McCartney, 1967). In one of his best collections of short stories, Romance negro e outras histórias (Dark Novel and Other Stories, 1992), the mediocre John Landers kills a celebrated writer, Peter Winner, takes up his identity, and begins to give interviews and act in an international congress in Grenoble in Winner’s place. Nevertheless, the doubt remains whether John Landers has really killed Winner or whether he is Winner himself. Moreover, since the entire story was but a confession made by Landers to his wife, Clotilde, who does not believe a single word of it, the reader is at a loss about the whole truth. As in Nabokov’s book, a key is supplied for solving the enigma of the text, pointing metafictionally at the classic story “William Wilson,” by Edgar Allan Poe, of whom Landers is a reader. As in Poe, there may be two characters, but most certainly it is a case of paranoia or delirium, or else of a crime. In that same collection, “Olhar” (Glance), the character-­narrator is carried into a crescendo psychopathy until he becomes a cannibal. Keeping faithful to his doctor’s recommendations and his delicate and exquisite gastronomical tastes, he ends up killing in his bathtub each time bigger and more exotic animals to eat, until he kills a ewe and finally a woman. Being a monster reminds us of the story by Sérgio Sant’Anna with this title. Both stories are written in a tone of farce, since it is almost absurd the existence of a character with so much cold blood and lack of moral values. These authors resemble the dramatist Nelson Rodrigues, who shocked his audience from the 1940s to the 1960s with topics that were then considered immoral. Perverse behavior stands out as immoral in a hedonistic and selfish society immersed in consumerism and lacking higher values, such as the postmodern.

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Most of Rubem Fonseca’s detectives are intellectuals and stand out for their bizarreries, which are so typical of roman noir. A grande arte (The Great Art, 1983), for example, plays with the contrast between the cultivated art of the use of the blade, almost a ballet, and the rundown building downtown Rio de Janeiro, renowned for its rogues and crooks where the story takes place. This book was turned into film in 1991 by Walter Salles Junior and later into a TV series, counting among its cast the cynical character of the sheriff Mandrake. Many authors have used the resource of suspense in this type of police story, with the purpose of attracting the public. For example, Isaís Pessotti in Aqueles cães malditos de Arquelau (Those Damned Dogs of Archelaus, 1993), João Gilberto Noll, especially in Hotel Atlantic (1989) and Rubens Figueiredo in O mistério da samambaia bailarina (The Mystery of the Dancing Fern, 1986). Paulo Lins writes action plots that resemble movie scripts, as his first novel Cidade de Deus (City of God, 1997), which was filmed by José Padilha. It is located in a shanty district of the west part of Rio de Janeiro, and shows with fast and direct style the violent reality of life there. Later he actually wrote film scripts, for television and for Tropa de elite I and II (Elite Squad I and II), also for director José Padilha. These two productions, turned into blockbusters, confirm Eric Hobsbawm’s warning (1994) that violence would recrudesce in capitalism with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, since they ceased to act as brakes. Sonia Coutinho (1939–2013), in a more elaborate line, wrote crime novels in the second phase of her career, after the 1980s. She labeled them crime novels instead of detective fiction, because in those days there were not many women working as detectives in the Brazilian police, as she explains in Rainhas do crime: ótica feminina no romance policial (Queens of Crime: Feminine Perspective in the Detective Novel, 1994). This book was originally a thesis for the School of Communication of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her novels Atire em Sofia (Shoot at Sophia, 1989), and O caso Alice (Alice’s Case, 1991) are the most outstanding of the five that she published. In those books the female protagonist begins searching for the perpetrator of a crime and ends up being the murdered woman, so she occupies two roles at the same time, that of the persecutor and that of the victim. This kind of contradiction that doubts and doubles reality, is very much to the taste of the postmodern, in which doubt replaces linearity and certainty. In most of her works, the woman continues to be a victim, abused by family members or killed by supposed friends—as often happened in women’s

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literature of the 1970s (see my Crítica sem juízo, Criticism without Judgement, 2nd ed., 2007). More recently, Patrícia Melo, in her latest books, after Acqua Toffana (1994), wrote about the bourgeois, white color criminals and false identities, which were typical plots of roman noir, taking off from the work of Rubem Fonseca, as in Elogio da mentira (In Praise of Lies, 1998). Her fifth novel, Valsa negra (Dark Waltz, 2003), employs a plot filled with quid pro quos about who the assassin and who the victim is, in a constant exchange of subjectivities, identities and roles, always having as its background the structure of a roman noir novel. However, in her first two novels she exploited the theme of urban violence in Rio de Janeiro’s shanty towns, as Paulo Lins did before her. Given the low strata of society that she focused on, some of her female characters behave independently and work, but as drug dealers—as in O Matador (1995). Others, like Carolaine, in Inferno (2000), become three times pregnant of three different fathers, instead of achieving a good job, as dreamed by her mother, Alzira. Her brother, José Luís dos Reis, has the nickname Reizinho (Little King), not only because of his family name, but also because he is the king of the drug dealing business in several slums. Profiting from these two successes, Patrícia Melo became a script writer for TV, like Paulo Lins. The game of simulacra and appearances between peculiar characters and false identities weaves enigmas that are up to the reader to decipher. Almost always, there is carnivalization, intertextuality and emphasis on the ridiculous, parallel to a metafictional construction in which the voices of the text oscillate between the author, the narrator and the character. This is what happens in the novel The Hour of the Star (1977), one of the few writings by Clarice Lispector that one can call postmodern, along with the universe purposedly kitsch in Onde estivestes de noite (Where Were You at Night, 1974) and some short stories and chronicles, such as “Sveglia,” about the founding of Brasília, or in “A bela e a fera ou a ferida grande demais” (The Beast and the Beauty, or Too Big a Scar, 1940– 1941, published in 1979). If initially the narrator’s voice is cold and supposedly male, and ridicules the half illiterate and poor Macabéa, a victim of society, it ends up taking pity on her and assumes the voice of the author him/herself to criticize social injustice. Postmodernism differentiates itself from more traditional genres by breaking from Aristotle’s rigid classification of literary genres. Its openness allowed for the appearance of women’s literature as well as new African Brazilian authors, in the 1970s. In those years there also appeared a group of hippie poets known

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as “the mimeograph generation” that defended freedom of speech during a time of the military dictatorship (1964–1984). At the same time, documentary realist literature portrayed terrorist or resistance movements, as in Renato Tapajós’ Em câmera lenta (In Slow Motion, 2007), in Fernando Gabeira, O que é isso, companheiro? (What is the matter, chap?, 1979), in O crepúsculo do macho (The Macho Decay, 1982) and in Alfredo Sirkis’s Os Carbonários (The Carbonari, 1980).

New History, politics, and postmodernism Brazilian literature does not often refer to physics or other exact sciences. But it often merges with social sciences, The New History, Annales School or Cultural History. This has been a recurrent theme in innumerous literary works, with the inclusion and revision of history, perhaps in search of the affirmation of civil rights. After the 1970s, under the influence of New History, many writers adopted the confessional essay, the diary or documentary literature as a form to condemn inequality, racial or gender prejudice and injustice towards the subaltern and oppressed (Le Goff et al., eds., 1978). New History adopts the 1960s semiology and the notion of textual autonomy in relation to reality to rewrite or reinterpret official history. It does not consider itself a science and proposes a notion of mimesis that is not realistic. According to Hayden White (1991), historical interpretation deals with the same narrative resources as literature: irony, synecdoche, metaphor and metonymy. Thus, many historians and journalists today write creative works, employing suspense and mixing imaginary plots in history based on suspense narrative to problematize official history. They transform cold facts into emotional events, seen through a personal perspective and focused on the history of mentalities. Among New History writers, there are Laurentino Gomes (2008), Eduardo Bueno (1998) and Fernando Morais, with Olga (2008). The latter novel, for example, this book, one of the first to be published on New History in Brazil, narrates the life of the German-­born Jewish Olga Benário Prestes, who was married to the leader of the Communist Party Luís Carlos Prestes. Olga was imprisoned by the Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas and extradited to Nazi Germany to die gassed in the concentration camp of Lichtenburg, in 1938.

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Among women historians, we have Mary del Priore (2008), and one of the most accomplished, the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, especially in The Emperor’s Beard (1998). She makes great use of photographs and journals in this book to reveal details and everyday happenings to illustrate the habits of Brazilian Emperor Pedro II, during the second Empire, told from the perspective of the history of mentalities. Several writers make use of the reinterpretation of New History in their novels, such as Godofredo de Oliveira Neto, with O bruxo do Contestado (The Witch of the Contestado War, 1996). Antônio Torres, in Meu querido canibal (My Dear Cannibal, 2003), revisits the founding of Rio de Janeiro and the oral history of Cunambebe, leader of the famous Tamoio Confederation, an Indian resistance movement against the French invasion of Rio de Janeiro (1554–1567), dominated by the Portuguese. Combining Feminism and the rewriting of official history, the name of Ana Miranda comes forth, with the novel O boca do Inferno (Hell’s Mouth, 1989). It dwells in the life of the baroque poet Gregório de Matos e Guerra, in the context of Bahian society of the seventeenth century. The author employs quotations from Guerra’s poetry, inserting them in the dialogues. In O retrato do rei (The Portrait of the King, 1991), she reviews the struggles between the Portuguese and the Bahian people for the hegemony of the meat commerce in the eighteenth century in the province of Minas Gerais during the Gold cycle. Her female protagonist wears man’s clothes to be able to exploit a mine she had inherited in Rio das Mortes (the Death River). However, later on in the book, Mariana de Lancastre becomes less daring in the plot and succumbs to the problems of war. In the novel Desmundo (1993), Ana Miranda bases her story on an original letter of 1552 written by the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel da Nóbrega to the King of Portugal Dom John (actually, Dom John III, the Colonizer King) to request the sending of several orphans from Portuguese convents to marry farmers in Ceará, in the Northeastern region. In fact, the new colony lacked white Christian women. Ana Miranda narrates the revolt and later the escape from the ill treatment of one of these eight women who were sent in 1555— Oribela, who had been married to Francisco de Albuquerque, even though the plot seems somewhat far-­fetched. Miranda employs vocabulary from the colonial period, which increases the historical effect of the story. (See also my own novel Terras proibidas, Prohibited Lands, 2011, which takes place in the nineteenth century.) Desmundo was adapted to film in 2003, directed by Alain Fresnot.

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The Amazonian writer Márcio Souza blends satire and corrosive social criticism in his postmodern novel Galvez, o imperador do Acre (Galvez, The Emperor of Acre, 1976), which takes place during the rubber tapping cycle. The author carnivalizes and deconstructs the tragicomic fate of the local elite who lived in Manaus, a city lost in the jungle which lived with the luxuries of Paris. But this golden age had an apex for a flash, between 1830 and 1860, and already declined between 1910 and 1920. Souza writes A resistível ascensão do Boto Tucuxi (The Resistable Ascension of Dolphin Tucuxi, 1982) as a satire against the governing elite of Amazonas State, which confuses personal relations with the public interest. He examines politics in a hilarious and parodic tone and with an intense visual and dramatic lens. The book may be considered a continuation of modernism in its parodic trait—the strong point of Brazilian aesthetics, in literature as well as in the movies. In modernism, with Mário de Andrade in Macuníma (1928) and with Oswald de Andrade in his two manifestos, in the 1950s with the Atlântida “chanchadas,” slapstick films interspersed with dances and songs combining North American musicals with Brazilian music and comedy. The more traditional historical novels, as in the saga The Bruddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, with which Gyorgy Lukács illustrates his thesis of the decadence of the novel after the end of the epic poetry, in his book Historical Novel (1936), there are several magnificent representatives in Brazil. For example, the long roman fleuve by Lúcio Cardoso, Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House, 1959), written in diary form and as a psychological novel which depicts the end of the agriculture cycle of coffee in Minas Gerais. The book, however, does not reinterpret history, therefore it does not belong to New History. The same happens with other important authors, like Dinah Silveira de Queiroz, Antonio Olinto and Agripa Vasconcelos. Political works seem to want to revive the epic form in the postmodern, as in Zero (1983), by Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, a book that criticizes State bureaucracy and was considered revolutionary at the time of the last Brazilian dictatorship (1964–1984). It presents a metaphoric structure denouncing the Kafkaesque bureaucracy construed by the military dictatorship to repress individual freedom. It focuses on the couple José Gonçalves and Rosa, who suffer intuitively under the dictatorship. The novel shows that there exists, besides urban violence and social injustice against the individual, the violence exercised by a dictatorial regime. It is written in an experimental style, gluing together several texts diagrammed as in the press, mixing advertisements, pamphlets, annotations in

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reference to the dictatorship. Loyola’s answer to repression is satire and parody, in a great tragicomic panorama that detracts from and denounces the Brazilian military dictatorship. Renato Tapajós (1943–) was arrested after the publication of his memoir novel on the dictatorship Em câmera lenta (In Slow Motion, 1977) due to the censorship that the military imposed after the 31 March 1964 coup d’état. The book presents an important testimony about guerrilla actions of the group Ala, one of the militant resistance urban movements after the 1964 dictatorship, led by the radical left of students and workers, which perpetrated bank robberies, shootings, and had secret actions. One of these actions is described as a movie-­ like scene—hence the title of the book. Resistance activities not seldom ended in imprisonment, torture and death of those involved in them. Ivan Ângelo, from Minas Gerais, employs the metaphor of a last bourgeois party to launch the idea of the end of a regime under censorship, in his novel A Festa (The Party, 1976). The book, which is segmented in short, independent chapters, describes the attacks to a residence where a party takes place, on the eve of the military coup d’état. A similar metaphor is drawn by Rubem Fonseca in his short story “Happy New Year,” in a collection with the same title, Feliz Ano Novo (Happy New Year, 1979). This book was prohibited by the military censorship due to its shocking violence. It is one of the first to denounce urban violence and class inequality in Brazil. Subsequently, Marcelo Rubens Paiva published a successful short novel called Happy Old Year (1982), which dialogues with Fonseca’s book. The political point of comparison is that his father, an engineer, was arrested by the military dictatorship and assassinated in prison. It has a more personal perspective and recollections of his hippie years, including the accident that made him tetraplegic. It stands for a sort of requiem for the hippie movement, with its drugs and carefreeness, which ended it with Gilberto Gil’s lyrics in his song “O sonho acabou” (The Dream is Over, 1973).

The voices of minorities in the postmodern Despite being a negativist and even a decadent philosophy, the postmodern movement promoted the expression of minority groups, without hegemonic discourses, such as the feminist, the Afro-­descendent and gender minority groups. The North American writer Gore Vidal, for example, was one of the first to initiate the publication of homoerotic works with his novel The City and the

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Pillar (1948), in which he reveals his homosexuality. It provoked such a scandal in the United States that the author was forced, from then on, to publish his detective novels under the pen name of Edgar Box. A hippie poetry movement developed in Brazil, despite the dictatorship, together with the music movement Tropicália (in the late 1960s), and had names like the poet and composer Torquato Neto (1944–1972). He also participated in the so-­called “marginal,” alternative press or “mimeograph generation,” because they distributed their poems in pamphlets in the street. They were Ana Cristina César, Cacaso (Antônio Carlos de Brito) and the group Gypsy Cloud, led by Chacal (Ricardo de Carvalho Duarte), among others, during the hippie phase. They employed an aesthetics of fragmentation and opposed the canon of modernism and poets as famous as Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Their poems were produced under the effect of drugs and they defended sexual liberation. They had much in common with the North American underground movement and travel or road fiction of the hippie era, with names such as Jack Kerouac (On the Road was published in 1957) and Charles Bukowski, besides the poet Allen Ginsberg. One of the most important novels of this phase was A morte de D. J. em Paris (The Death of D. J. in Paris, 1971), by Roberto Drummond (1933–2002), which shocked the public with the tale of an imaginary journey and journal written by a suicidal under drugs. But the character D. J. never left his bedroom, and Paris was no more than a poster on the wall. Partly as a consequence of the violent North American movements of African-American groups in defense of civil rights, with Malcolm X, following along after the long fight by Martin Luther King Junior, a non-­violent movement of African-Brazilians emerged in Brazil, especially in São Paulo in the 1970s. It eventually obtained the inclusion of protective laws considering racism a non-­ bailable offense in the 1988 Constitution. This political minority considered itself racially discriminated in all industry strikes and workers’ union movements. Then a group of liberal professionals from São Paulo founded the Quilombhoje group, and a magazine called Cadernos Negros (Black Notebooks), in 1978 (in 2017 in its 40th issue). Each annual issue focuses alternatively on poetry (issue n. 1) or in short prose fiction, and the magazine is entirely written, edited, printed and divulged by Afro-Brazilians. Another group then emerged in Rio de Janeiro, Negrícia, led by poet Éle Semog. Even today there are not many novel writers in the Afro-Brazilian community. This is why the name of Conceição Evaristo (1946–), from Belo Horizonte (MG), who also participated in

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Quilombhoje in the 1980s, is important. She wrote several autobiographical books of poems and prose, which culminated with her successful novel Ponciá Vicêncio (2003; 2nd ed., 2017)1. It was through this magazine that all the great names of Afro-Brazilian literature came forth, such as the concretist poet Arnaldo Xavier (1948–2004); his wife, Roseli Nascimento; Sonia; Esmeralda Ribeiro; the short story teller Paulo Colina, author of Fogo cruzado (1980), Cuti (Luís Silva) and the poet and storyteller Miriam Alves, who often lectures in the United States, where she published an anthology of Afro-Brazilian poets in translation, Enfim nós . . . (Finally Us) 1995. Many of these writers narrate their own experience with discrimination or retell the violence of slavery, as does Adão Ventura (1946–2004), in A cor da pele (The Skin Color, 1981). In this book, he speaks out of discriminative language in his poem “Preto de alma branca, ligeiras conceptuações” (“Black of White Soul, Quick (mis)Conceptions”, and lists all the prejudices that are repeated daily in Brazilian society, considered non-­racist. Salgado Maranhão, who began writing together with Torquato Neto, became known for his participation, along with Éle Semog, in the anthology Ebulição da escrivatura—treze poetas impossíveis (Abolition of Slavery—Thirteen Impossible Poets, 1978). Maranhão and Éle Semog (Luís Carlos Amaral Gomes) continued the poetry of Oswaldo de Camargo and the dramaturgy of Abdias Nascimento, but their production is engaged in postmodern, since they review literary tradition to re-­evaluate Afrodescendance in the past and its role in the present. Afro-Brazilian poetry became more refined in the twentieth century with the figure of Oswaldo de Camargo, an active fighter for the negritude cause (also called “blackitude”), at the side of Lino Guedes, (1897–1951), Solano Trindade (1980–1974) and Oliveira Silveira (1941-). Camargo published poetry since 1959

See Lobo, Luiza. “O negro, de objeto a sujeito”, Jornal do Brasil, republished in Lobo, L., Crítica sem juízo (1993; 2nd ed., 2007). Carlos Hasenbalg (1979) played an important role in the demystification of the “racial democracy” supposedly existing in Brazil while he presided over the Center for AfroAsian Studies, at Cândido Mendes University from 1986 to 1996. The university and Ford Foundation offered me a three-­month scholarship to study African-Brazilian literature in December 1986. The text was published in its periodical Revista de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos (and reprinted in Lobo, L., 2007). I also published there two essays on the first woman novel writer of Brazil, Maria Firmina dos Reis, and the first to defend the abolition of slavery in a book (see Lobo, 2007). Later I republished her novel, Úrsula (1859), in fac-­simile, in the year of the Centennial of the abolition of slavery (1988), by Instituto Nacional do Livro, Biblitoeca Nacional and Presença Edições. See my “Dez anos de Literatura feminina brasileira (1975–1985)”, published in 1985, which included African Brazilian authors (See Lobo, L., 2007).

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in Parnassian-Symbolist style. His essay O negro escrito (The Negro in Writing, 1987) is a very important referential work for the “blackitude” movement. The Center for African-Asian Studies of Cândido Mendes University and its periodical with the same name were very important to change the Brazilian mentality on racial discrimination and to end the myth of “racial democracy” that never existed in the country. It began to be deconstructed by the director of the center and editor of the magazine Carlos Hasenbalg, in the 1970s (see Hasenbalg, 2005; see Lobo, 2007; see Eduardo de Assis Duarte and Maria Nazareth Soares Fonseca, eds., 2011). It was the acquisition of higher education that provided these authors with the skills to affirm their place in literature. Very few are the writers that have overcome the ethnic and the social barriers in Brazil, the most famous one being Carolina Maria de Jesus, whose name gained international attention in the 1960s. She visited France and gave interviews to prestigious magazines to promote her book Quarto de despejo, diário de uma favelada (Child of the Dark: the Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, 1960), a journal written between 1955 and 1960, in a period that anteceded the postmodern era. She left behind hundreds of manuscripts that are archived in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. (10 reels of photocopies, 22 photographs and fourteen notebooks).

Conclusion The shadow of the personal confession in diaries and the first-­person narration in a fragmented and multifarious form, with the constant masking or changing of identities, still haunts postmodernism. Authors do not practice a personal style any longer, as was the case until modernism and especially in the nineteenth century. There is not much demarcation of territory or of nationalism, as happened with the foundational novels of José de Alencar and Machado de Assis. Without solid referential influences, and not feeling to belong to a State, postmodern writers cultivate the fake, the make-­believe, the theatrical writing, in an imaginary nation that constantly reinterprets history and reality, in a world that presents uncertainty, disbelief, hostility or indifference towards the thinking elite, especially in Latin America. The downfall of metaphysics and the end of the grand narratives—the Beauty, the Goodness, the Truth—traditional aesthetics and a linear literary canon led to increasing insecurity, combined with the increasing range of the Internet and digital books.

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As French sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1988) states, there emerge in the postmodern several nations, tribes or urban groups that populate the cities today, bringing fragmentation of values and of voices. From the hippie anti-­ establishment movement in the 1970s and the Afro-Brazilian claims for equality, feminist groups and much later gender groups gained voice during postmodern times. A less rigid canon and conception of literary genre allowed for the appearance of new literary and interdisciplinary forms, such as New History and documentary literature, which aimed at revising official history, in part as a result of the military dictatorship. The outcome of all of these new expressions seems promising in terms of the achievement of an improved democracy, but in Latin America and under postmodernism, one never knows. In the 1990s, urban violence increased, causing the breakage of the nationState and consequently further fragmentation of the self and the subjectivity. Outside of the market of the paper-­printed book, a new generation exchanges its texts and participates intensely on the Internet, through social networks, blogs, tweets or in poetry books, stories, fragments in digital form (see Lobo, 2006). Most of them do not even contemplate to publish their writings in the traditional paper form. In Brazil, the most common literary genre in postmodernity is the roman noir, for its possibilities of dialoguing with the less demanding reader, for it creates a linking channel with paraliterature and mass culture, securing, by the pull of the suspense and action plot, an accessible reading by the greater public. Thus, the roman noir genre increases the access to more readers in this time of philosophical, ideological and moral crises, which shudder almost all pillars of society. It is possible that present literature, in the twenty-­first century, will continue to be postmodern for quite a while yet, and that we will see more and more flourishing of digital writing, which may bring even greater dispersion and fragmentation of voices, truths and canons, but which, at the same time, may propitiate an increased democratization of culture and diversity of expressions that will sieve through orality, media and social networks. In the end, we hope that the digital resources will help in the survival and enlivenment of the literary.

Works cited Abreu, Caio Fernando de. Onde andará Dulce Veiga? São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990.

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Alves, Miriam (Ed.). Finally . . . Us: Contemporary Black Brazilian Women Writers. Enfim . . . nós. Escritoras negras brasileiras contemporâneas. Trans. Carolyn Richardson Durham. Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press, 1995. Ângelo, Ivan. A Festa. Belo Horizonte: Geração, 1976. Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990. [1987]. Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. In: Collected Prose. New York: Picador, 2005. p. 1–150. Baudrillard, Jean. L’échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Bolaño, Roberto. 2666. Madrid: Anagrama, 2004. [São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010]. Borges, Jorge Luís. Ficcionnes. In: Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. [1944]. Burke, Peter. History and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. [History and Social History. Cambridge: Polity, 2005]. Burke, Peter, Ed. New Perspectives in Historical Writing. University Park: Penn State Press, 1992. Burke, P., and Porter, R. (eds.). The Social History of Language. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Calvino, Italo. As cidades invisíveis. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991. [1972]. Calvino, Italo. Se um viajante numa noite de inverno. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1979. [1963]. Camargo, Oswaldo de. O negro escrito. Apontamentos sobre a presença do negro na literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado de Cultura, 1987. Cortázar, Julio. Rayuela. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974. [1963]. Cortázar, Julio. Instrucciones para John Howell. In: Todos los fuegos, el fuego (1966). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974. Cortázar, Julio. Simulacros. In: Historias de cronopios y famas. 2a parte, Ocupaciones raras. Buenos Aires: Alfaguarra, 1995. [1962]. Coutinho, Sonia. Atire em Sofia. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1989. Coutinho, Sonia. O caso Alice. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1991. Coutinho, Sonia. Rainhas do crime: ótica feminina no romance policial. Brasília: Editora da Univ. de Brasília, 1994. Debord, Guy. A sociedade do espetáculo. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, v. 2. Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit, 1980. (Collection Critique). Drummond, Roberto. A morte de D. J. em Paris. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 1975. [1971]. Duarte, Eduardo de Assis; Fonseca, Maria Nazareth Soares, eds. Literatura e afrodescendência no Brasil: antologia crítica. Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2011. 4 vols. Eco, Umberto. O nome da rosa [1961]. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2010.

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Evaristo, Conceição. Ponciá Vicêncio. 2nd ed. Belo Horizonte: Mazza Edições, 2005. [1971]. Figueiredo, Rubens. O mistério da samambaia bailarina. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1986. Fonseca, Rubem. Feliz Ano Novo. Rio de Janeiro: Artenova, 1975. Fonseca, Rubem. A grande arte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015. [1983]. Fonseca, Rubem. Buffo e Spalanzani. 32nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1985. Fonseca, Rubem. Romance negro e outras histórias. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992. [2001]. Glantz, Margo. Yo también me acuerdo. México: Sextopiso, 2014. Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage, 1972. [1930]. Hasenbalg, Carlos. Discriminação e desigualdade social no Brasil. Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2005. [1979]. Houellebecque, Michel. Soumission. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. Jesus, Carolina Maria de. Quarto de despejo, diário de uma favelada. São Paulo, Ática, 2000. [1960]. [Trans. Child of the Dark, 1962]. Lins, Paulo. Cidade de Deus. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997. Lispector, Clarice. A hora da estrela. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1977. Lispector, Clarice. Onde estivestes de noite. Crônicas. Rio de Janeiro: Artenova, 1974. Lobo, Luiza. Crítica sem juízo. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond/CNPq, 2007. [1993]. Lobo, Luiza. Segredos públicos. Os blogs de mulheres no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 2006. Lobo, Luiza. Terras proibidas. A saga do café no vale do Paraíba do Sul. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 2011. Lukács, Gyorgy. Mímesis. Barcelona, Grijalbo, 1965–1974. 4 vol. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition post-­moderne. Paris: Minuit, 1979. [O pós-­moderno. 2nd ed. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1986]. Maffesoli, Michel. Le temps des tribus. Paris, Le livre de Poche, 1991. [1988]. Maranhão, Salgado. In: Ebulição da escrivatura—treze poetas impossíveis. Rio de Janeiro, Civilização Brasileira, 1978. Melo, Patrícia. Acqua Toffana. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. Melo, Patrícia. Inferno. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Melo, Patrícia. Elogio da mentira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. Melo, Patrícia. O Matador. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 2009. Melo, Patrícia. Valsa negra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Miranda, Ana Maria. O boca do Inferno. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989. Miranda, Ana. Desmundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. Miranda, Ana Maria. O retrato do Rei. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991. Murakami, Haruki. IQ84. A Novel. New York: Vintage, 2011. 1.157 p. [2009–2010]. Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore. New York, Random House, 2005. [2002]. Nabokov, Wladimir. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1959. [1941].

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Paiva, Marcelo Rubens. Feliz Ano Velho. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 1982. A Philip Roth Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Roth, Philip. Novels and other Narratives, 1986–1991. New York: Library of America, 2008. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. A Novel. New York: Random House, 2008. [1988]. Sant’Anna, Sérgio. O livro de Praga, narrativas de amor e arte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011. Sant’Anna, Sérgio. Notas de Manfredo Rangel, repórter (a respeito de Kramer). Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 1989. [1969]. Sant’Anna, Sérgio. A Senhorita Simpson. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1989. Santiago, Silviano. Stella Manhattan. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1985. Semog, Éle. In: Ebulição da escrivatura—treze poetas impossíveis. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1978. Souza, Márcio. Galvez, imperador do Acre. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2001. [1976]. Souza, Márcio. A resistível ascensão do Boto Tucuxi. (Folhetim). São Paulo: Marco Zero, 1982. Tapajós, Renato. Em câmera lenta. São Paulo: Alfa-Ômega, 1977.

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Comparative Literature and Supranational Community Relations: The Administration of Difference, the Ways of Articulation, and the Hegemonies of Cultural Flows Benjamin Abdala Junior

The place from where we access the world and the interactions between subjects or areas of knowledge The first consideration that seems fundamental to us is the need for the critic to have awareness of his locus of enunciation, the place from which he accesses the world. This place, like all social-­cultural formations, is of a hybrid nature and involves multi/interdisciplinary, as well as political-­cultural analyses. It is important that we have the awareness that the fields of knowledge, established by social praxis in our historical trajectory, constitute compartments of a pragmatic order. However, due to the dialectics of our historic process, they might come to constrict the horizons of their own field, since knowledge is always in interactions/ frictions, motivated above all by interdisciplinary relations with other areas of knowledge. The possibilities that open up to new and creative conformations come exactly from these interactions/frictions. The interactions, if innovative, presuppose reciprocities, in relation to these fields, as well as in relation to social-­political situations. What is important here is that one takes into consideration that the pole from which we depart cannot subordinate or, if we want to express it from the point of view of political history, “colonize” the other; or, the other way around, to let oneself “be colonized” by it. If we access the world through literature, this means that the epistemology of reality for those that are from this field can open to politics, sociology, history, linguistics, etc. to remain in the sphere of Humanities, but also to areas of the exact sciences: biological and medical. We cannot, then, allow ourselves to be

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colonized by the criteria of these other areas, as so often happens. The critic’s activity should leave from and come back to the literary object itself that is being analyzed, which is an epistemology of reality akin to the human and social sciences, but that possesses its own specificities, diagnosing what we lack: our needs as well as our aspirations. Our position, when we seek articulations with other areas, is to place ourselves equally as subjects of knowledge. In another field we can find forms of knowledge that come from historical experiences that are not present in the compartments of our area. It is up to us then to incorporate critically these experiences, revitalizing our praxis through reconfigurations in which we are equally subjects and not objects, reproducing specularly/ transparently knowledge that has its compartments. It is indispensable that we look at these experiences of multiple fields in webs/networks, with tensions between each other. The task then is to compare critically, so that we may discard routine practices of the sameness that becomes established in our field and, at the same time, to open spaces for articulations of cultural life in the broadest sense, embracing material culture inclusively. Therefore, we are defending the vision of a world in process, of multiple interactions. We should consider, however, that the forms in their compartments resist, since they come from a historical experience. For example, in a similar way to words that resist, established forms in other fields also resist. An automobile, if we turn to material culture, maintains the structural form of a wagon. Today we still talk of aerial navigation when we refer to airplane flights. And a poem that was ten percent totally creative would be practically illegible. A similar observation applies to the comparativeness of literary objects. Every analysis—one should emphasize—possesses, even if implicitly, a comparison. An inclination, then, between subjects that compare themselves to one another, taking into consideration approximations; but dialectically, the meaning of differences, without leaving aside the locus of enunciation of the one who compares. By extension, what was said about the interactions of the areas of knowledge applies to literary comparison within or without established political frontiers. The tendency to be avoided is to let oneself “be colonized” by those who clothe themselves in the hegemony of symbolic power, that is in asymmetries of cultural fluxes. And also, in the opposite sense, upon analyzing narratives of a people without a writing system, we need to consider the fact that these people have an experience that we do not. We cannot impose on them a unfamiliar methodology, just to legitimize our point of view, placing them as subalterns in

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the due compartments administered by formulations that can legitimize our hegemony. It comes from these postulations concerning the hegemonic countries that administer the hegemony of cultural fluxes the inclination not to accept such impositions, although we know that they possess forms of knowledge different from ours and that we could learn from their experience. It is necessary, then, that we duly consider the political condition of subjects of knowledge, variegating these experiences in the webs/networks established and based on the locus they speak from, which has its historicity and social-­cultural configurations, that do not fail to configure genetically the meaning of the asymmetries of the underlying cultural fluxes. In this sense, in the field of comparative studies of literatures in the Portuguese language, for those who are situated in Brazil it is essential to bring into prominence political and cultural circumstances and articulations that we discussed in Comparative Literature & Communitary Relations, Today: 1. The fact that we are in a moment of crisis concerning the way of thinking about the reality that came from the financial spheres, that culminated in the financial crash of 2008, during which was naturalized “the utopian image of the world of finances: deregulation and flexibility as the economic model, a drawing ‘naturally’ extending to the social and cultural practices. According to the reiterated agenda that has been regulating the means of communication, in this process of naturalization of habits, deregulation tunes in with freedom, and the latter, in the social-­economic spheres, with competitiveness, regarded thus as a criterion of efficiency and higher aspiration not only for the businesses but also for the individual and for democracy itself. The individualism associated with the democratic life and, even more, as one of the fundamental inclinations of humanism. 2. In relation to the above situation, we have to take into consideration that “the present political moment requires, within Brazil and within the world community, reconfigurations of strategies and regroupings, which has already been occurring in international relations. At the level of cultural life, the comprehension of the meaning of this re-­alliance, in the international relations of our country, has not penetrated deeply, having disregarded the spheres of media and culture. Our intellectuals, in general, have positioned themselves in tow of the facts, with discourses that legitimize the hegemonies, turning much more to discourses concerning the administration of

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differences in the parameters of the established system. And, in the face of these solicitations, it is to be understood that the voices of these intellectuals, many times melancholic and contemplating ruins, should take more active and prospective attitudes, to create or redesign, with wider diversification, tendencies of cooperation and solidarity that have always eased democratic ideals. Through the banks of the system of the hegemonic asymmetries, there is the real possibility of the establishment of effective counterpoints to the paroxysm of competitiveness that involves and offers itself as a paradigm of the economical, social and cultural life, according to the logic of these asymmetries of the economic and cultural fluxes. 3. This inclination to the “regulation of social life already manifested itself, in the situation before the crash, exactly as a reaction to the perverse effects of the articulatory models of the financial capital that made national frontiers pliable in order to impose the asymmetries of their hegemonic order. It was through the gaps in this system—since all hegemonies are porous—that the need for ample connections came up, opening up the possibility of community articulations in the supranational range. In this new situation, these communitary associations become even more urgent and involve the possibility of new articulations, ample and well-­structured on multiple levels, from the economic life to the spheres of social-­cultural life.” 4. Among the supranational communitarianisms (that are many and involve the porosity of the hegemonic frontiers), it is politically relevant that we create links of cooperation and solidarity with the Portuguese- and Spanish-­ speaking countries, weaving the Iberian-Afro-America. More particularly, we should consider that “linguistic and cultural communitary inclinations always stimulated democratic tendencies in Portuguese-­speaking countries. The current situation is evidently different than what happened in the colonial period and also in the establishment and consolidation of our republican systems, as the concept of frontier also differs. The communitarianism affirms itself, at present, involving plurality in the political articulations always guided by supranationality. The political actions in the form of blocks are relevant, with ample lines of action, from the economic to the cultural life. Blocks, politically more efficient, to establish counterpoints to the asymmetries of the supranational hegemonic fluxes of the new imperialism, and also in their national correspondences and/or, even social stratifications. 5. Changes in attitudes also in terms of literary comparativism are then imposed. We cannot limit ourselves to the analysis of the network established among

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the spheres of knowledge, but let’s problematize the factors that are subjacent to them and that generated systems of hierarchization in their economical and social-­cultural articulations. As indicated by Lucien Goldman in his “Theoretical Examinations” (in terms that are perhaps excessively strong and that should be in part adjusted), it is necessary to search for these bases so that criticism backs away from “any moralizing position, as for example that of the Frankfurt School and, especially, of Herbert Marcuse. For these thinkers, who criticize and condemn contemporary society, without asking to what measure is this criticism based on an internal social force within this society, the only perspectives are the isolation of the thinker in the world of his peers, or the provisory and transient dictatorship of the philosophers that should transform society” (Abdala Jr., 2012). We’d say, in this perspective, as we attested in our monograph defended for the position of a senior professorship at the University of Sao Paulo (1988), entitled “Image political (n/a/t/i/o/n)”, how the political imagination, through the action of writers, coming from asymmetries of cultural fluxes (hegemonies that evidently do not limit themselves only to colonialism) can reconstruct nations in debris. The book version was published a year later, with the title Literature, History and Politics (Abdala Jr., 2007). This political imagination is fundamental for critical activity as well, because it removes the walls of the merely academic specialization that ascribe it exclusively either to so-­called “productivity,” as in an assembly line, or to the establishment of bonds of solidarity restricted to the other actors in this area of knowledge. In reality, the merely academic field ends up being administered, hanging like distant clouds in social life, as it can occur in fact with sociological imagination itself, which ends up circulating only between pairs. To go beyond the compartments of the sameness of this intellectual field, it is important that more ample and problematic contextual articulations are configured because of the diversity of the economical, social and cultural spheres involved that can direct this field of production of knowledge to interact with public spheres that are politically engaged.

Cooperation and the principle of youth At this moment of international re-­alliance, to oppose the empire of the market, forms of cooperation articulated on a planet-­wide scale are politically

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relevant. They are attitudes emphasized by the hegemony that seeks legitimacy and by those who place themselves against this hegemony as well with ideals of respect for differences of all kinds and for democracy. Nevertheless, the communitarian inclinations, against the grain of the hegemony that intends to administer the difference, emerge at the first level, as a form of mediation between the multiple fields of social life and the state. In the face of the new challenges with emphasis on communitarism, particularizing our field of work, it seems important that literary studies are seen in political and social-­cultural dimensions. We know that it is from the historical process asymmetries of symbolic power came, accustomed to the process of colonization and, afterwards, from the permanence of the habits of the colonized, commuting hegemonic centers. To verify these bases of cultural circulation, from a critical perspective and without assimilation, could be a way for us to situate critically before the fluxes that tend to lead to the maintenance of the continuity of this colonization of our imaginary. In the attitudes of the cultural actors of the past, one can configure lines that are indispensable for a better comprehension of our social-­cultural present stand. However, the restriction to the asymmetries from this comparative perspective, even if we are guided by a critical view of the established networks, does not seem to suffice. We have proposed, taking these networks into consideration, another form of comparative linkages.A prospective comparativity, guided by communitarian relations: a comparativity of solidarity, of cooperation. To compare problems that involve all of us, so we get to know what properly belongs to us and what we share in common; comparative ties in which the particularities of the past should be reconfigured in prospective terms and tending to actions of reciprocity. No longer the historical subject/object relation, but now the subject/subject relation, which compares each other in proximities and frictions, taking into consideration challenges that we need to confront in terms of the social-­cultural present day. In this moment of crisis and political re-­alliances, it becomes important that attitudes are moderated by critical optimism: to believe that the world can be different and better than it is. Beyond the natural inclination of the inherent negativity of critical thought lie the motivation and the impulse of a principle of youth, integrated into more ample political-­cultural projects and actions. If it is proper of the best literature to turn itself to what is lacking, it has then to renew attitudes in the area of literary criticism, in a prospective sense, to make

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use of a parallelism with the 1930s, disregarding now the plot of a melancholic environment that came from the frustrations that marked modernity. A new attitude implies having hope as a principle. Instead of the ideology of the end of history and the indocrination that we live in the best of the worlds, it is indispensable to believe in our subjective potentiality and aim it into projects inclined towards the future. As the poet Carlos de Oliveira explains, “In poetry/ variable nature/of the words/nothing is wasted/or is created,/everything changes:/each poem, in its contours/uncertain/and calligraphic/already dreams of/another form.” Articulations such as those found in the poem of Carlos de Oliveira contest for symbolic power in the intellectual field. They update themselves through the porosity of the dominant world’s way of thinking reality, articulating itself against stasis in the modernization of poetic forms. The poet, when making use of articulations originated from the scientific field in the symbolization of the literary text, upgrades to a dynamic way of thinking reality, where the forms, including the political ones, should be seen in movement, in process. And this permeability of articulations that migrate from one field to another takes us into considering the most general imbrications that come out of the economical field and reach the political, social and cultural spheres. A hegemonic articulation only causes impact on the cultural spheres under the mediation of society and of the state. If in the present democratic states there is a relative autonomy between these forms of organization and of power (we are not talking about neutrality in here), their formal conformations favor the permeability of these dominant articulations. Through the state forms, hegemonies are exercised and they come from economic and social fields and also from the dominant mindsets/forma mentis. Being hegemonic, they develop strategies of legitimacy and can end up being naturalized, becoming part of common sense. Or, if we resort to Terry Eagleton, who, in his turn, cites Pierre Bourdieu: Any social field is necessarily structured by a set of rules not ennunciated as to what can be said or noticed validly inside it, and these rules, then, operate in a way that Bourdieu denominates “symbolic violence.” Since symbolic violence is legitimate, usually it is not recognized as violence. It is, as observes Bourdieu in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977:192), ‘the soft, invisible form of violence, that is never recognized, the violence of credibility, trust, obligation, personal loyalty, hospitality, gifts, gratitude, forgiveness.’ In the field of education, for example, symbolic violence operates not so much because the teacher speaks

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“ideologically” with his students, but because the teacher is perceived as possessing a quantity of ‘cultural capital’ that the students need to acquire. Eagleton, 1997: 142

To those who are situated in Brazil, in the cultural circuit, the time is right to bring into prominence groups of our linguistic-­cultural community, in a form correlated to the economical strategies that have been developed throughout the country. More particularly, what is important is to strengthen relations with our linguistic-­cultural group and also, in a wider sense, with the Iberian-American countries. The networks at the present time are wider, worldwide, and involve everything from the spheres of areas of knowledge all the way to geopolitics. They configure a world of multiple frontiers, and questions of identity should be seen in the plural. Other supranational articulations are configured alongside those that came from our historical formation, as they occur as well in economic relations, like the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa). The linguistic-­cultural communitarianism constitutes a political starting point and it establishes for us a “linkage” in terms of communicational networks from where we open “windows” that are equally multiple. Through cultural communitarianism, we can show differentiated faces, in dialogue with others. In a world in which English has become a kind of “lingua franca” it is important that we also refer to Portuguese as a language of culture, in a more particularized association with the Spanish language. It is of significance to literary criticism to achieve this feat: a change in attitudes, dismissing melancholy. An optimistic perspective is crucial: to have hope, by regulating ourselves by the principle of youth, which implies the modernization of prospective gestures, as happened in the past with the social literature of the period between the World Wars, and after the financial crash of 1929. The great difference in the situations, when one compares the two financial crashes (of 1929 and of 2008), is that in 1929 the intellectuals believed that things could be different and now the manifestation of this desire is shown to be assuaged, wrapped in the articulatory models of the utopia of the world designed by finances. According to these models, we would be living in the best of all worlds—that of an eternal present, of production and competition. Much more than the strength of ideas and reflection, what continue to dominate are systems of thought and behavior modeling/shaping/in tune with a narcissistic individualism, revered by the media, that only throws the spotlight on those who place themselves on the catwalk of the “society of the spectacle.”

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Eurocentric signs and the survival of the forms We are far from, in studies of literary criticism, the positivist Eurocentric tendencies of the comparative studies of the “sources” but the canons continue to come from the hegemonic countries of Western Europe and in their North American reconfigurations. They are the “greater” literatures and the others, in southern Europe and proper to the colonized world, the “lower” literatures. In comparative literature, this first model of study corresponded to the French theoretic hegemony, substituted by the North American hegemony in the mid-­ twentieth century, where national literary profiles, from the formalist perspective, were seen in their supranational interactions. As Claudio Guillen indicates, the moment of supranationality is affirmed, beyond the national frontiers. The hegemonies are never absolute, but, one should reiterate, rather porous. If in these theorizations of the 1950s there appear to be formalities and social-­ political oversights, in the final decades of the century new perspectives for comparative studies will appear, imbued with political meanings, for example, we find them present in the works of Frederick Jameson and Edward W. Said, limiting ourselves just to the United States. They are the contradictions within the same system that involve the image of democratic life, a principle of legitimacy of those who make use of the asymmetries of the cultural fluxes and that is present in the official hegemonic discourses. At the present time and as a result of this comparison East/West in which many important theorists transferred to the hegemonic centers, another comparative tendency surges: the so-­called “world literature.” From the political point of view, we consider necessary the consideration of community alliances over the porosity of the established hegemonies. The communitary articulation configures forms of symbolic power against a pastiche that interests only the hegemonic configurations. Edward W. Said developed the thesis, in the perspective of his political criticism, that culture integrates the colonial action, which is a space of tensions. The concept of Orientalism itself was minted to justify the imperial domination over the always inferior “other”. An analogous situation to the African peoples, to justify their slavery by the “civilized” colonizers. To Said, the analyses of these tensions and conflicts between empire and colonies are concerned with handling culture and imperialism in a relation of interdependency. And in considering this horizon it is important to study the forma mentis of this process. In terms of intersubjectivity, the design that involves relations of domination on the internal

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plane of the hegemonic groups and of the subaltern regions, corresponds to colonial gestures, which continue to mark the subjective and cultural life of these peoples and their symbolic universes. It was in this manner that, since colonial times, Eurocentrism tried to establish the intelligibility and, mainly, the legitimacy necessary to the practices of domination, exactly because it degraded the scientific as well as the lay discourses, it made the spaces, the peoples and cultures of the colonies inferior and pointed to their need to evolve in all senses. Today, this inclination persists through envisionings, practices, and representations that allow for the continuity of the domination and the maintenance of such hegemonies and hierarchizations, even if it is subtle, unintelligible, naturalized or shared by all. It is a planet-­wide system of thought- and behavior-­molding. We should not forget that, in Europe and in the United States, there are numerous marginalized communities, such as the Irish, the Gypsies, the Blacks, the Latinos, the Jews, the Muslims, those on the peripheries, gays, and lesbians, etc. It was in this situational context, hybrid and full of frictions, that the works of Frederick Jameson, Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall, among others, appeared. Eurocentrism corresponds today to Westernization, which does not have geographic precision but has its political and economic bases. It involves a series of repertories accumulated through the centuries, from where the reflections and practices that have spread worldwide come, at the rhythm of the asymmetries of cultural fluxes. We should evidently emphasize that we learn with the experience of the other. After all, we Brazilians are all mixed. Identities are always plural. However, a certain hybridity that converges to a kind of undefined pastiche of frontiers that, in reality, are configured and multiple, could be a similar strategy of the Brazilian elites: a mixing that tends towards Eurocentric formulations. We prefer to consider that the frontiers are multiple and not liquid or undefined. If the tendency to postmodern fragmentation exists, akin to the manner of administrating and thinking the world from the financial point of view, we can situate the frontiers according to processes of articulation that alternate, superimpose and overlap but that do not liquify, according to Zygmunt Bauman’s theory. We are equally multiple from the identity point of view, and, in fact, a critical view of the political implications of these characters (at individual, national, and social levels) will verify that they get into friction and establish hegemonies or dominances that can be reversible.

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And so too are habits that in their articulatory lines impregnate the social actors, even in political situations in which they could contradict them. Observe, in this sense, the novel Mayombé, by Pepetela, written in the middle of the guerrilla wars for the national liberation of Angola. The critical attitude of the narrator underscores lines of articulation of habits, that impregnate his characters, exposing the true motivations of the guerrillas, turned mythical by the official discourses. Let us cite a female character who, from a peripheral angle, analyses the situation that she experiences: This is what drives me into a rage. We want to change the world, but we are incapable of transforming our own selves. We want to be free, to satisfy our own desires, and at every moment we come up with excuses to repress our desires. And the worst is that we convince ourselves with our own excuses, we stop being lucid. Just cowardice. It is the fear of facing ourselves, it is fear left from the time in which we feared God, or the father or the teacher, the repressive agent is always the same. We are a bunch of alienated. The slaves were totally alienated. We are worse, because we alienate ourselves. There are chains that have already been broken, but we continue to transport them along with us, for fear of, after hurling them away, feeling naked (Pepetela, 1982).

From our upbringing came alienated habits and the cultural, as well as the political, social and economic forms of resistance. There is in them, on one side, an accumulated experience and, on the other, ideological implications that tend to justify hegemonies. They constitute designs or lines that resist and determine the formation of character, with defined social roles. The great problem, from the political point of view, is that such impregnations are part of the day-­to-day and configure the expectations of each actor, director or directed. In the United States, there was a more effective implantation of the European population and the establishment of a “white” state, originally Puritan, that refused miscegenation. The consequence was the extermination of the Amerindians and the apartheid of the former slaves. Only from the second half of the twentieth century onward did these marginal populations begin to demand their civil rights. And they gained social, cultural and political power, more recently, for the active presence of the large migrant population that came from other margins. The discussion about miscegenation, pilfered by the North American elites, entered the universities and has already become material for their cultural industry, aspiring to the conquest of legitimacy, to the preservation of the homogeneity of this country.

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Historical experience and cultural frontiers The colonial process fixed habits, literary and cultural repertoires, that came from this historical experience and from the cultural contacts between the nations that up to then had not known each other. If today there is an entire critical inclination towards changing paradigms, be they philosophical or aesthetic, in relation to the areas of knowledge, we understand that this tendency cannot be naturalized under the generic brand of “post-,” a reduction to the obsolescence of an entire experience that substantiates itself in the present. Even worse can occur in relation to political jurisdictions, where the “post,” accustomed to the conditions of the media and of fashionable products, tries to reduce everything to a tabula rasa, without a past. Moreover, one looks to the side, comparatively, and never to the front. The historical experience and its achievements begin to be situated like a passive repertoire, a stylization without history, discarding the process that modeled them. We need to consider the fact that postcolonial theory has conveniently discussed questions related to globalization, under the impact of the media and of consumer marketing. In relation to political-­social questions, however, it can tend toward general inclinations. Equally postcolonial is any society marked by colonialism, without any major consideration for its historicity, thus putting on the same level countries that emancipated themselves in the post-World War II period and those emancipated since the nineteenth century. To speak of postcolonialism without awareness/consideration of these specificities implies leveling a culture like the Canadian, or the South African, for example, with the complex cultural situation of India: all former British colonies. Only an analysis of the political, economical and social-­cultural networks can reveal which postcolonialism is being referred to. This situation becomes even more complex if it is linked—as happens—to an emphasis on the diasporic nomadism of postcolonial studies. The necessity once again arises to consider, in this process, where the critic is speaking from and the social-­cultural links that end up being brought into their discursive formulations. There are many post-­colonialisms. There is, for example, the postcolonialism of the former colonizer, which we find in a novel like The Land at the End of the World, by Antonio Lobo Antunes; and, conversely, of the former-­colonized, like in Mayombe, by Pepetela. The first one is going to deconstruct myths and turn his individual memory into a testimony with historical claims. Pepetela, in the opposite direction, wanders off into myths, without missing the opportunity of criticizing

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individuals who think of themselves as myths. In this criticism, he places in evidence ethnocentric positions of the past that duplicate in the present. In Lobo Antunes, the deconstruction of myths and dystopia is emphasized; in Pepetela, in the formation of a new national state, construction and utopia are stressed. There is also the postcolonialism of the colonizers that remained in the metropolis, and of the former-­colonized that migrated. The clear delimitation of the so-­called locus of enunciation and of its historicity is thus indispensable to a criticism that intends to remove itself from generalities. To reflect upon national specificities implies situating them in a process of communitary negotiations that have a historical soil and relations of symbolic power. We have underscored the political significance of discussing literature within Ibero-Afro-American communitarism but—we insist once more—the communitary articulations can be of many categories and, politically, it seems important to notice that the present-­day world has multiple frontiers and plural identities, be they of an individual or national frontier. They are interactions that lead us to the consideration of a hybrid cultural complex, an interactive one where Brazilian culture, for example, is multifaceted and feeds itself, productively, on pieces of many cultures, without being released from the effects of the asymmetries of the cultural fluxes. Such considerations, beyond national specificities, make necessary the association with the emphatically hybrid repertoire of our cultural formation. Every culture is hybrid, but the more ancient ones have a more evident naturalization than ours; a more recent one. In the appropriation of this repertoire, the consciousness of this historicity and the power relations that it longed for can contribute to ward off mimetic productions, akin to the conventional and the stereotype. Criticism is necessary for the development of inclinations open to creativity and that sometimes end in the questioning of ideological straitjackets and mythic identities. It was what happened, for example, with the poem “Camoes: History, Heart, Language,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, written in a historical context, post-Carnation Revolution. Upon appropriating Luis Vaz de Camoes’s images and poetic procedures, the Brazilian poet established a dialogue with the historicity of the readings of the Portuguese poet and of the new historic situation, Portugal’s democracy. Drummond says: Of heroes that you sang about, what was left, except for the melody of your song? The arms into rust they turn, the barons say nothing in their tombs.

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Dos herois que cantaste, que restou/ senão a melodia do teu canto?/ as armas em ferrugem se desfazem,/ os barões nos jazigos dizem nada.

In this de-­ideodizemization of conservative apprehensions, especially of the Salazar era, never abandoning the images and rhythms of Luis de Camões, the Brazilian poet ends up affirming: Luis, a strange man, who through the word is, more than lover, love itself throbbing, forgotten, revolted, submissive, reviving, re-­budding in a hundred thousand hearts multiplied. You are the language. Private pain ceased existence to be every man’s, musical, in the voice of orphic accent, a pilgrim. Luís, homem estranho, que pelo verbo/ és, mais que amador, o próprio amor/ latejante, esquecido, revoltado,/ submisso, renascente, reflorindo/ em cem mil corações multiplicado./ És a linguagem. Dor particular/ deixa de existir para fazer-se/ dor de todos os homens, musical,/ na voz de órfico acento, peregrina. Cit. in Abdala Jr., 1993: 62

In Literature, History and Politics, we analyzed the cultural circulation between Brazil, Portugal and Africa, having as leitmotif the image of Pasárgada, by Manuel Bandeira. We aimed to discuss this utopic topos through the Cape Verdean poet Osvaldo Alcântara (poetic pseudonym, Baltasar Lopes). Osvaldo Alcântara, with his “feet” in Cape Verde, dreams of Bandeira with a pasárgada that would exist on the other bank of the ocean. If the Brazilian poet dreams of a kingdom with a kind-­hearted king who would allow him all the “liberties/ licentiousnesses” (the title of the collection by the Brazilian poet), Osvaldo Alcântara has longings for a future “pasárgada” that he’d supposedly find on the

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“way to Viseu” (he is appropriating the popular Portuguese song “. . . on my way, on my way, on my way to Viseu”). Osvaldo Alcântara, we reiterate, had his feet in Cape Verde but his head was stuck outside, open to the possibilities of finding plenitude in immigration. His perspective is the one that has always been placed on his people in their condition of migrant, and he, in his critical awareness, knows that “this painful longing for Pasárgada/is a soothing poison inside his heart,” in another poem. The identification of a common repertoire does not imply mimicry on the part of Osvaldo Alcântara or of Drummond. The critical distance comes from the friction of those who establish their poetic basis in conformity with the same communal language. Extending on these observations, we can affirm that it is important from a critical point of view to study these dialogues, embedded— explictly or not—in the literary repertoires that circulate among the Portuguese-­ speaking countries. On the other hand, one cannot disregard the value, from the critical point of view, of the relations of power that involve this circulation, that can be a form of denying the celebration, be it of mimesis, or of a pretended syncretism, or of a hybridity, that rejects power relations and encourages assimilating attitudes tending towards the colonizer’s culture. One cannot, however, exclude the duly consideration of the fact that the plasticity of the Portuguese language has existed since its formation in medieval times and can only be adequately studied in the dynamics of the tendencies of the supranational intellectual fields, in the processes of globalization of European cultures.

The administration of difference To the flexibility of the circulation of cultural products, at the nomadic rhythm of the financial capital, that is articulated in the web, always reducing distances through speed, always unfoldable, it seems important to oppose anti-­hegemonic strategies associated with the supranational communitarisms. This vertiginous process of the standardization of cultural products, by the market economy, does not restrict itself to mass standardization. It is convenient not to forget that hegemony possesses ample bases, that are certainly marketable, and tries to incorporate in its web even the contestation of its own system. It has to do with the perspective of the administration of the difference, which we have been insisting on pointing out: the difference as political administration and as opening of a niche in the market. In another sense, this incorporation can

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contribute to the dynamization of the system: to change so that things remain structurally the same. Or, as it appears in the book/film The Leopard, by Giuseppe Lampedusa/Luchino Visconti, “It is necessary that a few things change, in order for everything to continue the same.” The partial emergency of the new, under the social-­political control of the pre-­established structures, which use their hegemony to control it, at the same time that it benefits from its influxes to update their nets in a new historic configuration. This moment that resembles that of a post-­neoliberal process, the affirmation of a more tolerant tendency, that tries to take advantage of the strategy of administering the difference, similar, for example, to the multiculturalism of liberal tones, can constitute a more intelligent long-­term way to preserve and even to promote hegemony. It is a strategy for an administered capitalism, a return, in our bases, to the guiding principles of the Roosevelt government. It would be a kind of new New Deal, from where—since everything is mixed—it was possible to give rise, nevertheless, to the work of Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway, John dos Passos, Mike Gold, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, etc., and furthermore to the United Nations Organization and the chart that established the principle of people’s self-­determination. Such a Eurocentrism, with a North American tint, can now become attenuated, in the new configuration that starts to delineate, as one of the possible tendencies of the imperial politics. People keep talking, insistently, about the need for “tolerance”: liberal tolerance, a new modality of the pretexts of charity, a one-­way road, without reciprocity. The inclusion of the excluded, which was one of the strong platforms that elected President Barack Obama and that made a difference, is not evidently valued. Beyond this modulation of tolerance, it is vital to critical thought to uncover the involved power relations too. Without the discussion of these relations, the multicultural discourse that, it seems, can become even firmer, despite the ultra-­conservatism that opposes it, will not stop being a conceptual vehicle of the administration of difference, having in view the maintenance of the North American hegemony, that is, of its elites. What is lacking in this multiculturalism of liberal tints is the consideration of simultaneous voices in tension, a kind of rough polyphonic concert arranged by differences. Hence, a critical perspective capable of contradicting hegemonic discursive formulations, that tends toward the leveling of a kind of Eurocentric “whitening,” a forma mentis analogous to the one produced among the Brazilian elites, since the nineteenth century.

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We reiterate, then, the counterpoint that was natural up to the moment of the economic crash of 2008: that access to the supranational web is done through a determined locus of enunciation and it is fundamental for criticism. If, in the university life, for example, a teacher is situated in an American university he cannot disregard the fact that his discourse might be associated with the hegemonies of the country. These are considerations concerning a hegemony that seeks to legitimate itself in the intellectual and public spheres, in which the civil society articulates with the state spheres, forming a supranational consensus. Evidently, the dialectical counter polarity of the supranational communitarism is capable of being established in the intellectual field. Together with hegemonic strategies that try to legitimate asymmetries, in which the action of the media is equally important, there are, evidently, forms of despotic domination that operate from the economic field to the military, more or less active, according to the oscillations of the political relations, which are established above all by economic motivations. In terms of hegemonic consensus, at present, it materializes inclusively in economical terms. It is not a question of simply reaching this consensus through the acceptance of these values, but above all of promoting the capitalization of the difference: a difference that substantiates in products, from the democratic image of the hegemonic country to the most explicitly tradeable merchandise. To illustrate the range of the process of mercantilization that affects inclusively the individual identity, we can use a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “I, Etiquette” (Corpo [Body], 1984). The merchandise here no longer just pries, but incorporates itself into the persons, inclusively, and in an ironic way, into the poet himself. Each person loses his or her identity, transformed into a type of merchandise window. And the brand names consumed are worth less for their use value and more for the social status that they accredit. An acritical consumption that, in the process of literary symbolization, can only be associated with habits that have existed since colonial times, like the authoritarianism denounced in The People’s Rose (1945), by the same poet. Etiquettes are almost always products, brands or imported models, situated as superiors. And perhaps, we could add, since the poetic symbolism lets us: this same gesture is correlated to habits that endure in the scientific field or in literary criticism—importation without a critical sense. Couldn’t a citation in literary studies have the function of an etiquette? An etiquette, as it was similarly observed by the ironic glance, pretentiously inferior, of the poet, who sees himself as a “human-­ad itinerant,/ slave to the announced matter./I am, I am in fashion./It is easy to be in fashion,

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despite being in fashion/means the negation of my identity “homem-anúncio itinerante,/ Escravo da matéria anunciada./ Estou, estou na moda./ É doce andar na moda, ainda que a moda/ Seja negar minha identidade (...). Concerning these practices that oscillate between the hegemony that seeks to legitimate and the despotism of those that affirm authoritatively their power, one should not forget the position of the United States as the only country to defend inserting culture as a “product” in the Commerce World Organization. Beyond the directly commercializable product—particularizing our field of professional action—hegemony implies an international “recognition” of the institution where a critic works, that will certainly attract students and professors, including those from non-­hegemonic countries. After this takes place, they will create conditions for inter-­institutional conventions with these countries, inclined toward the preservation of the established hegemony. Only an effective reciprocity among the actors of the university community involved will be able to attenuate these asymmetries. That is, the conscience of the political dimension that involves the scientific research. The search for “efficacy,” apparently neutral, but in the end mimetic and without criticism, can mascarade procedures that support the continuity of the asymmetries of cultural fluxes and also of the legitimacy of the hegemonic symbolic power associated with them.

Literary images, in conclusion The novel The Raft, by Jules Verne uses, besides documentary sources, a literary imaginary that points to parallel worlds. They are worlds inside our minds, like a utopic island—Thomas More’s island of Utopia, like Jose Saramago’s “unknown island.” There is an entire literary tradition that feeds on these formulations. To dialogue with it is a form of externalizing our will, our desires. And, in a certain way, to impel our gestures. In Jules Verne, the Amazon river’s flux (from the interior of the continent to the Atlantic Ocean) carries the riches out. Inward comes European modernization, which builds the basis for the exploitation of nature. The immense wooden raft that follows the “natural flux” of the Amazon river is broken apart,when it gets to Belém (Pará), so that its wooden frame (tree trunks) can be sold to Europe, while the proprietor of the immense wooden boat/raft, where an entire rural property was fitted, with the family and employed hands, all return back to the interior of the Amazon on a steam boat.

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It is not what happens with the novel The Stone Raft, by José Saramago, published one century later. This novel, written at the time of the discussion of the integration of Portugal into the then European Economic Community—today the European Union—is exemplary in discussing the meaning of community among the Iberian-Afro-American nations, as we have done in the essay “Necessity and Solidarity in the Studies of Comparative Literature.” Organized around the geopolitical strategies and connected to the historic post-April situation, this novel allows us to rethink Portuguese culture in the face of the double solicitation: the European integration and the peninsular singularity. This singularity is linked to the perspectives that marked Portugal’s history: the Atlanticity, the Iberianness and the Mediterraneanness. If Jules Verne’s raft breaks apart in contact with the Atlantic, Saramago’s raft, which joins the Iberian regions and communities, has in this ocean one of its historic reasons for being. It is the attraction to the Atlantic that drives the Iberian peninsula to disconnect from Europe. Without the weight of the empire, the Iberians can now get closer to dialogue with their former colonies. From the literary point of view, although Saramago does make references, sometimes ironically, to the literature of his country and also of the hegemonic countries, he aims at Latin American magic realism. The vectorial direction of the making of literature and the formulations of the underlying imaginary do not come from Europe, but rather from Latin America. In an epigraph to José Saramago’s novel, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier is opposed to the skepticism that the enunciation credits to Europe: the perspective that “All future is fabulous.” It is so fabulous in fabulating this novel that this future, in life as well as in art, turns against the skeptical pragmatism of Europe. It is a “fabulous future” properly belonging to a moment of fracture, where “life begins.” “All future is fabulous,” says Carpentier. So fabulous that, we’d say, it allows for a fabulation—a fictional fable of political action—that, in an inverted temporal directionality, allows for the actualization, on Saramago’s raft, of objectives and aims dreamed for tomorrow or the day after. This temporal displacement operated by the artistic device of the dream of the writer does not bring us drifting/floating/literary images but action-­images that find a port in the literary writing of the present, impelling it to “oceans never voyaged before” (Camões). These are political action-­images that motivate a new epic, now social, in a resourceful movement that is, at the same time, both departure and arrival. The peninsula liberates itself from its conventional status as European appendix in order, in the fictional make-­believe, to find itself. When

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it finds its own identity, the European raft is capable of surprising manoeuvers, since it does not (con)form (to) European piers, too skeptical and ordinary, where it has been for a long time, with difficulties, causing the ruggedness of the Pyrenees. “The times change” and “desire” (Camões) points to other perspectives, to dribble, from the sides of the fictional game, another game, geopolitical, that ended up plotting Iberia in a negative image. In a kind of aquatic uterus, the Iberian community stations itself in a geopolitical region that is not in the doldrums, just to anger hegemonic nations: the American president punches the table. Iberian specificity is preserved, as if it were an island. Wrapped around the aquatic uterus, Iberia, like a child, it waits to cast anchor where there is no callousness as there is in the Pyrenees, remaining at a dialogical point between Latin America and Africa. In a world of multiple frontiers, emphasizing cultural communitarianism is a shared way of facing the process of asymmetric standardization that mobilizes global strategies.

Works cited Abdala Junior, Benjamin. Fronteiras múltiplas, identidades plurais: um ensaio sobre mestiçagem e hibridismo cultural. São Paulo: Editora SENAC São Paulo, 2002. ——. Literatura, história e política. 2. ed. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2007. ——. Literatura Comparada e relações comunitárias, hoje. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2012. ——. “Necessidade e solidariedade nos estudos de literatura comparada”. In: Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada. N. 3. Rio de Janeiro: ABRALIC, 1996, p. 87–95. Andrade, Carlos Drummond. Corpo. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1984. Bauman, Zygmunt. Tempos líquidos. Trans.: Carlos Alberto Medeiros. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2006. Bhabha, Homi K. O local da cultura. Trans.: M. Ávila, E. L. L. Reis, G. R. Gonçalves. Belo Horizonte: EdUFMG, 1998. Bloch, Ernst. O princípio esperança. 3 vols. Trans.: Nélio Schneider. Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ/Contraponto, 2005/2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. O poder simbólico. Trans.: Fernando Tomaz. Lisboa: Difel/Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand, 1989. ——. As regras da arte: gênese e estrutura do campo literário. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. ——. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Eagleton, Terry. Ideologia. Uma introdução. São Paulo: Editora Unesp/Editora Boitempo, 1997. Guillén, Claudio. Introducción a La literatura comparada (Ayer y hoy). Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2005.

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Hall, Stuart. Da diáspora: identidades e mediações culturais. Ed. Liv Sovik. Belo Horizonte-Brasília: EdUFMG/UNESCO, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. Marxismo e forma: teorias dialéticas da literatura no século XX. Trans.: Simon, I.; Xavier, I. e Oliboni, F. São Paulo: Editora HUCITEC, 1985. Lampedusa, Tomasi di. O leopardo. 3rd ed. São Paulo: Difel, 1963. Lobo Antunes, António. Os cus de judas. Lisboa, Editorial Vega, 1979. Löwy, M. e Naïr, S. Lucien Goldmann ou a dialética da totalidade. São Paulo: Boitempo Editorial, 2008. Oliveira, Carlos. Obras de Carlos de Oliveira. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Pepetela. Mayombe. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1982. Said, Edward W. Orientalismo: o Oriente como invenção do Ocidente. Trans.: Tomás Rosa Bueno. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. Saramago, José. A jangada de pedra. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. 16 reimp. Verne, Júlio. A jangada. São Paulo: Editora Planeta, 2003.

Index In this index titles of works have the article placed at the end of the title. E.g. Mundo de Clarice Lispector, O (The World of Clarice Lispector); Abortion, The (O Aborto). Abdala, Benjamin Jr. vii, 18 (see also chapter 14) Abito da Sposa and Doroteia 279 Aborigines 26–7, 73 (see also Indians; Indigenous peoples) Abortion, The (O Aborto) 133 Abreu, Caio Fernando 301 Abreu, João Capistrano de 74 acclimatization 9, 109, 110 Acízelo de Souza, Roberto x–xi, 7 (see also chapter 4) Acqua Toffana 304 activism, political in Portugal 207–8 (see also militancy) actors, training of 15 Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 190 Aesthetics 291, 293 Africa, national literature 208 Afro-Brazilians 119, 309–11 “Afterlives: the case of Machado de Assis” 275 Against the Grain or Against Nature 297 Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, The 190 Ahmad, Aijaz 271 Ainouz, Karim 134 AIZEN (Association Internationale Zola et le Naturalisme) 133 “Albatros, L”’ 175 Alcântara Machado, Antônio de 159 Alcântara, Osvaldo 330 Alencar, José de 6, 7, 62, 77–9, 116, 271–2, 273, 274–5 Alexandre, Antonio Franco 170–1 Alfred A. Knopf Publishers 208–9 Alien, The 142 All Nudity will be Punished (Toute nudite sera chatiée) 280

allegory 28 Almada Negreiros 147 Almeida, Guilherme de 142 Almeida, José Américo 12 Almeida, Manuel Antônio de 107 Alvarenga Peixoto, Inácio José de 51–2, 67, 73–4 Alvarenga, Silva 50 Alves, Castro 6 Alves, Miriam 310 Amado, Jorge cinema 213, 214 and the Communist Party (PC) 199–200, 201–2, 204, 205, 210, 211, 212 cultural mediation of 216 exile/expulsion from Paris 210–11, 213 and Germany 212 imprisonment of 204 institutionalization of 217–19 international impact of 13–14 and José Olympio 201 literature of 219 militancy of 202 politics of 203–4, 205, 210 (see also and the Communist Party (PC)) and Portugal/Africa 207–8 public recognition of 217 and radio 213 and the social and cultural 202–3 and the Soviet Union 211 television adaptations of 199–200, 213–14, 216 travels through Latin America 204–5 and the United States 208–9 Amazonian region 123, 124 American Expression, The 22–3 Americanas (Americans) 77, 91

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Anchieta, José de 4, 21, 26–7, 41 Ancient and Modern Brazilians (Brasileiros antigos e modernos) 119 Andrade, Mário de 10, 12, 93, 138, 140–1, 142, 145–6, 148–9, 177, 267, 276, 307 Andrade, Oswald de 93, 115–16, 118, 140, 141, 142, 146, 148–9, 151–2, 158–9, 177, 276, 307 androgyny 130 Ângelo, Ivan 308 Anglo-Saxon modernism 11 Anjos, Augusto dos 155 Annales School 291 anthropophagy 10, 12, 158–9 “Anti-Traditional Futurist, The” 151 anticlericalism 8, 124–5, 126–7 Antônio José 97–8 Anxiety of Influence, The 294 Apollinaire, Guillaume 149–50, 152 Apple in the Dark, The (Der Apfel im Dunkeln) 245, 246 Applied Theater Reader, The 284 “approache de Clarice Lispector, L’ ” 255 Aragon, Louis 161 Aranha, Graça 141, 142 Arcadian movement 5–6, 51, 54–5 Arcadismo 52–3 Areas, Vilma 131 Arendt, Hannah 173, 176, 193 art(s) baroque 3, 22, 24–6 Counter-Reformation 25 cubism 149–52 Dadaism 155–9 desacralization of 144–5 expressionism 152–5 modern art 140 Modern Art Week 1922 10, 12, 138, 139–42 renovation of 13 surrealism 150, 159–63, 295, 296, 298 “assassination of Mallarmé, The” 194 assimilation 118 Assommoir, L’ 120 Atire em Sofia (Shoot at Sophia) 303 Atwood, Margaret 259 Auerbach, Erich 43 Auster, Paul 299

Auto of Saint Lawrence 27 Auto of Santiago 27 Auto of Universal Preaching 27 avant-­garde avant-­garde movements 137, 138 cubist 149 Dadaism 155–9 literature 247, 260 “Avant-­garde literature in Brazil” 260 Azevedo, Aluísio 8, 119–23 Babenco, Hector 134 backlands 223–4, 233–5 bagaceira, A 12 Bahia 30, 31–40 “Balas de Estalo” 108–12 Ball, Hugo 156 Balzac, Honoré de 103, 124 Bandeira, Manuel 176, 177–80, 185, 186–7, 330 Barbosa, Maria José Somerlate 258–9 Barcas Novas (New Boats) 184 baroque movement 3–4 baroque art 3, 22, 24–6 baroque oratory of Vieira 28–9 and Gregório de Matos 31, 41 Barraca, A (The Tent) 284 Barros, Andre de 29 Barros, Domingos Borges de 76 Barth, John 300 Barthes, Roland 292, 293–4 Basílio da Gama, José 5, 50, 57, 58–61, 73 Baudelaire, Charles 175 Baudrillard, Jean 294 Bauman, Zygmunt 326 Beauvoir, Simone de 252 “bela e a fera ou a ferida grande demais, A” (The Beast and the Beauty, or Too Big a Scar) 304 Belle Epoque aesthetics 131 Belo Horizonte (MG) 309 Belo, Ruy 176, 183 Benário, Olga 212 Benjamin, Walter 28, 185, 192, 256 Bergamo, Edvaldo 207 Between Past and Future 173 Between Times: Mapping the History of the Brazilian Culture 179

Index bias, and criticism 251 “Bibliografia de e sobre Clarice Lispector” 245 Bilac, Jo 286 Bilac, Olavo Brás Martins dos Guimarães 8, 92 Bio-Bibliographies in World Literature 245 Bishop, Elizabeth 175, 184 Black Angel 280, 281 Black culture, in Brazil 210 “blackitude” movement 310–11 Bloom, Harold 275, 294 Blue Knight, The (Der Blaue Reiter) 153–4 Blue Rider, The 152 Boal, Augusto 16, 284 Boas Noites 108, 110–11, 112 boca do Inferno, O (Hell’s Mouth) 306 Bog of Souls, The 172 Bolaño, Roberto 297 “Bons Dias!” 108–12 book markets 205 Bopp, Raul 159 Borges, Jorge Luis 295–6 “Borough, The” 38 Borzoi Anthology of Latin America Literature, The 245 Bossa nova 301 Botelho, João 133 Bourdieu, Pierre 323 bourgeoisie, the 139, 145 (see also elites) Bradbury, Ray Douglas 298 Brainard, Joe 294 Brandao, Fiama Hasse Pais 184 Brandao, Tania 267, 272, 275 Braque, Georges 149 Brasile in Scena 285 Braudel, Fernand 43 “Brazil and Oceania” 86 Brazilian Academy of Letters 98 Brazilian backlands 223–4, 233–5 Brazilian Geographical and Historical Institute 91 Brazilian literature. See literature Brazilian movement, and the European vanguards 13 Brazilian, the 5 Brazilianess 10, 36, 40, 75 Breton, André 159, 160, 161, 162

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Bricio, Pedro 285 Bridge, The (Die Brücke) 153 Brito, Mario da Silva 141 Brodribb, Sommer 259 Brook, Peter 269 Brown, Dan 297 Bruddenbrooks, The 307 bruxo do Contestado, O (The Witch of the Contestado War) 306 bucolic poetry 54 Buffo & Spalanzani 302 Bukowski, Charles 309 Bulhões, Marcelo 127 Burke, Peter 292 Cabaret Voltaire 156–7 Cabral, João 185 Cabral, Pedro Alvares 187–8, 194 Cacao: la vida de los trabajadores en las fazendas y cacahuales del Brasil (Cocoa: the Life of Workers in the Farms and Cocoa Plantations of Brazil) 204 Cacau (Cocoa) 204, 207 Cadernos Negros (Black Notebooks) 309 Caeiro, Alberto 165 café life 157 Cahiers naturalistes, Les 133 Calvin, John 23 Calvino, Italo 297 Camargo, Oswaldo de 310–11 “Camoes: History, Heart, Language” 329 Camões, Luís Vaz de 180–1, 183 Campos, Álvaro de 148, 191, 192 Campos, Haroldo de 151 Candide 47–8 Cândido, Antonio 50–1, 76, 117, 120, 122, 139, 233, 247–8, 271 “cannibal poetics” 259 “Cannibalist Manifesto” 93 “canto do Piaga, O” (The Shaman Song) 7, 78–9 Capitães da areia (Captains of the Sand) 204, 207 capitalism, administered 331 capitalist production mode 207 Caramuru 5, 61–2, 73 Carbonários, Os (The Carbonari) 305

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Index

Cardoso, Lúcio 307 “Carlos Drummond de Andrade” 170, 188–9, 191 Carneiro, Dib 286 Carpeaux, Otto Maria 176 Carpentier, Alejo 335 Carrera, Carlos 134 Cartas Chilenas (Chilean Letters) 5, 66, 67 Cartesian logic 226 Carvalho, Luiz Fernando 133 Carvalho, Ronald de 142 Casanova, Pascale 267–8, 276, 287 caso Alice, O (Alice’s Case) 303 Castillo, Debra 257 Castro Correia, Marlene de 175 Castro, Ferreira de 207 Catharina, Pedro Paulo 133 cathecumens 26–7 Catholic Church 23, 24, 85 (see also religion) Company of Jesus 41, 58 Catholicism, and literature 3 Cendrars, Blaise 152 Central Station (Central do Brasil) 134 “Chastity” 170, 194 Chateaubriand, François René de 106–7 chiaroscuro fusionism 25 Church anticlericalism 8, 124–5, 126–7 Catholic Church 23, 24, 41, 58, 85 Portugal 125 retrograde positions of 135 Cia Vertice (Vertex Company) 286 Cidade de Deus (City of God) 303 Cién años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) 295 cinema and Amado 213, 214 naturalism in 132–5 City and the Pillar, The 308–9 City of God (Cidade de Deus) 134 civil rights 309, 327 Cixous, Hèléne 255–6 Clarice Lispector: a Bio-Bibliography 245 Clarice Lispector: Novos Aportes Críticos 259 Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion 258 Clark, Fred M. 282

class dominant class 106 and futurism 145 and television 215 and whiteness 117, 119, 122, 332 worker’s class 207 Clear Enigma 189 clergy, and Gregório de Matos 34–5 Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector 259 COBRA 154 Coe, Toby 282 Cold War 211 Colina, Paulo 310 “Collage with the verses of Desnos, Mayakovski and Rilke, A” 170 colonization Brazil 49 Dutch 4–5 and European influence 240–1 and global exchange 281 and Indianism 78–9 and the Indians 88–9 and literary criticism 328 and literature 1, 2, 7 and Orientalism 325 Portuguese 26–7, 49 Comédie Humaine 103 communist movement, international 211 Communist Party (PC) and Amado 199–200, 201–2, 204, 205–6, 210, 211, 212 and the surrealists 161 communitarianisms, supranational 320, 322, 324, 329, 331, 332 community of faith 292 Company of Jesus 41, 58 (see also Catholic Church; Jesuits) comparative literature 101, 259, 318–20, 325 Comparative Literature & Communitary Relations, Today 319 Complete Stories, The 243, 244 Comte, Auguste 116 Conceptism 29 Condemned, The 142 Confederação dos Tamoios, A (The Confederation of the Tamoios) 77

Index “Congress for the Establishment of Modern Spirit Guidelines” 160 “Conjectures on World Literature” 279 constructivism 150 Conversaciones en la catedral (Conversations in the Cathedral) 295 cooperation, international 321–4 cor da pele, A (The Skin Color) 310 Corbière, Édouard 77 Coronelism 181 Cortázar, Julio 116, 296 Costa, Cláudio Manuel da 5–6, 51, 52, 62–4, 67 Counter-Reformation 22, 24–5 Cousin Basilio (O Primo Basilio) 132–3 Coutinho, Afrânio 22, 24–5, 32, 41, 54 Coutinho, Eduardo F. viii, 14, 173, 175, 203 (see also chapter 10) Coutinho, Galeão 93 Coutinho, Sonia 303–4 crepúsculo do macho, O (The Macho Decay) 305 crime delicado, Um (A Delicate Crime) 301 Crime of Priest Amaro, The (O Crime do Padre Amaro) 124–7, 134–5 criticism (see also literary criticism) and bias 251 cultural attitude of permanent 138 and gender 250–1 Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House) 307 Cronopios e Famas (Cronopoios and Fames) 296 Cubism 149 cubism 149–52 Cuentos Reunidos 246 cultism 29, 31 culture Black in Brazil 210 Brazilian 3, 5, 10, 12, 14 Brazilianess 10, 36, 40, 75 cultural contacts and historical experience 328–31 cultural identities 199, 244 cultural mediation of Amado 216 hybrid 329 influence of France 7, 9, 115–17 popular 200

343

Portuguese 180 as a product 333 Cunha Barbosa, Januário da 76 “curse of the Indian, The” 76 Cuti, Luís Silva 310 Da Vinci Code, The 297 “Dada Manifesto” 157 Dadaism 155–60 Damnés de la Terre, Les (The Damned of the Earth) 280 Darwin, Charles 105–6 “Death and Severe Life of Severino” 185 “Death of Tapir, The” 92 deconstruction, theory of 292 Deleuze, Gilles 25, 293, 294 Denis, Jean-Ferdinand 74–5, 77, 116 Der Apfel im Dunkeln (The Apple in the Dark) 245, 246 Derrida, Jacques 292 descoberta da América pelos turcos, A (The Discovery of America by the Turks) 200, 218 Deserter, The 50 Desmundo 306 detective novels 294–305 determinism 9 Devil, The 207 Devil to Pay in the Backlands, The. See Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century, The 171–2 Diário de São Paulo 159 Dias, Gonçalves 6, 7, 10, 77, 78–9, 86, 91, 273 difference, administration of 331–4 Dilthey, Wilhelm 292 Diniz da Cruz e Silva, António 54, 73 Dionysos 282 Discovery of the World, The 245 discrimination 130, 250–1, 310, 311 Dolzani, Luis 124 (see also Souza, H. Inglês de) domination 326 Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (Dona Flor/ nland her Two Husbands) 214

344

Index

double-­plot technique 296–7 drama da linguagem, O (The Drama of Language) 249 dreams, and the surrealists 160, 162, 163 Dress of the Bride, The 276 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos 171–2, 174–6, 179, 184, 186, 188–91, 192, 193, 309, 329, 333 Drummond, Roberto 309 Eagleton, Terry 323–4 Ebulição da escrivatura—treze poetas impossíveis (Abolition of Slavery—Thirteen Impossible Poets) 310 Eco, Umberto 296–7 écriture feminine 255, 257 Edschmid, Kasimir 152–3 Eichmann in Jerusalem 193 Einstein, Albert 292, 294, 295, 296 Élegies brésiliennes 77 “Elegy” 167, 192, 194 elites and administration of difference 332 bourgeoisie 139, 145 dominant class 106 skin-­color distinction 117 Elogio da mentira (In Praise of Lies) 304 Eluard, Paul 192 Em câmera lenta (In Slow Motion) 305, 308 Emperor’s Beard, The 306 Enfim nós . . . (Finally Us) 310 Enlightenment in the Brazilian Arcadia 52–5 doubters of 47–9 Enlightenment thinking 43–7 European Enlightenment 5 and Gonzaga 64–8 metaphysics of the stone 62–4 in the New World 49–58 epic poetry 77 Espinola, Adriano 30 “Essay about the History of Brazilian Literature” 76 Essays 47 estação, A 103 Estado Novo (New State) 202, 212 Eu 155

Eurocentric tendencies, literary criticism 325–7 Eurocentrism 181, 326, 332 Europe of the Five Hundred 26 European influence 9–10, 12, 17–18, 97–9, 118, 240–1 European integration 334 European literature 1 European Renaissance 21, 23–6 European vanguards, and the Brazilian movement 13 Evaristo, Conceição 309–10 “Evocation of Recife” 178 Excavatio 133 experimental novels 122 “Expressionism in Poetry” 152 expressionists 152–5 Fagundes Varela, Luís Nicolau 92 Fahrenheit 451 298 Falcon, Francisco Calazans 45 Family’s Album 278 Fanon, Franz 280 Faria, João Roberto 133 Farmer of the Air Carlos Drummond de Andrade 189 fascism, and futurism 143, 145 Faute de l’Abbe Mouret, La 125, 128 Feliz Ano Novo (Happy New Year) 302, 308 female writers, and gender-­inflected discourse 250–1 feminism Brazil 251 and Miranda 306 feminist criticism around the wold 251–2, 253 Brazil 252–3 and comparative literature 259 and Lispector 15, 244–5, 253, 255–61 feminist post-­structuralism 258 Fernandes, Silvia 266 Ferraz, Geraldo 159 Festa, A (The Party) 308 Ficção de Clarice: nas Fronteiras do (Im) Possível, A 259 fiction, evolution of 8 (see also novels) Figaro, Le 143

Index filhos de Tupã, Os (The Sons of the God Tupã) 78 financial crash 2008 319, 320, 324, 332 Finazzi-Agro, Ettore 179–80 Finnegans Wake 11 Fitz, Earl E. 245–6, 257–8 Flaubert, Gustave 116 Fluviano. See Silva, João Norberto de Sousa Fogo cruzado 310 Fogo Morto (Dead Fire) 203 Fold-Leibniz and the Baroque, The 25 folklore 12 Fonseca, Rubem 302, 303, 304, 308 Formação da Literatura no Brasil 271 Foucault, Michel 292, 293–4 France cultural influence of 7, 9, 115–17 French Revolution 43 influence on the Romantic Movement 76–7, 116 and Lispector 255 and Rodrigues’s theater 280–1 free verse 143, 145 Freemasons 125 Freitas, Angelica 194 Freud, Sigmund 160, 162 futurism 140, 142–9, 153 “Futurist Anti-Tradition, The” 150 Gabeira, Fernando 305 Gabriela, cravo e canela (Gabriela, Cinnamon and Clove) 200, 203, 209, 212–13 Gabriela (soap opera) 214, 215, 216 Galpao 285 Galvez, o imperador do Acre (Galvez, The Emperor of Acre) 307 Garcia Márquez, Gabriel 295 Gazeta de Notícias 108–9, 111–12, 119 gender and criticism 250–1 discrimination 130 “General Considerations about Brazilian Literature” 76, 82, 87 Generation of 1945 247 George, David 282 “geração de trinta” (the 1930s generation) 202

345

Germany and Amado 212 expressionism 152–5 German philosophy 46 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 101 G.H. no Junan/Kazoku no Kizuna (the novel, Passion according to GH, and the collection of short stories Family Ties) 246 Gide, André 151 Ginsberg, Allen 309 Glantz, Margo 294 Gledson, John 110 Gleizes, Albert 149, 151 globalization 288, 328, 331 Globe, The (O Globo) 244 Globe Theatre, The 285 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 193, 272 Goldman, Lucien 321 Gonçalves, Adelto 62–4, 68 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 31 Gonzaga, Tomás Antônio 5, 6, 51, 53, 54, 55, 64–9 Gotlib, Nadia 246 Grammar of the Most Used Language on the Coast of Brazil, The 26 Gramsci, Antonio 200–1 grande arte, A (The Great Art) 303 Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) 14, 131, 226–40 Grandpa Morungaba 93 Grupo Nos do Morro (Group We, from the Shantytown) 286 Guarani Indians 58 (see also Aborigines; Indians; Indigenous peoples) Guarani, O (The Guarani) 7, 62, 78, 79–80, 116 Guattari, Félix 293 Guerra, Gregório de Matos e 306 Guerreiro, Antonio 166, 168, 174 Guesa errante (The Wandering Guesa) 78 Guillen, Claudio 325 Guillén, Nicolás 208, 211 Guimarães, Alberto P. 211 Guimarães, Bernardo 60 Guizot, François 106, 107 Gypsy Cloud 309

346

Index

Hammett, Dashiell 295 “Happy New Year” 302, 308 Happy Old Year 308 Hasenbalg, Carlos 311 Hauser, Arnold 44 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 293 Heidegger, Martin 292 Helder, Herberto 166, 168–70, 171, 184, 192 Helena, Lucia ix, 12–13, 256–7 (see also chapter 7) “Hellmouth” 34, 42 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 46 heroic phase, modernism 13, 138, 140, 162, 163, 177 heroism 55–6 Higonnet, Margaret 245 hippie poetry movement 309 História da Literatura Brasileira 82–3, 84 “Historical and Documented Memory of the Indian Villages in the Rio de Janeiro Province,” 85 historical experience, and cultural contacts 328–31 Historical Novel 307 historical novels 307 historiographical metafiction 17 History and Social Theory 292 History of Brazilian Modernism: Antecedents of the Week of Modern Art 141 Hobsbawm, Eric 190, 303 Hocke, Gustav 22 Houellebecq, Michel 297, 300 Hour of the Star, The 304 Hughes, Langston 208 Human Comedy 124 Hutcheon, Linda 17 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 297 “I, Etiquette” (Body) 333 “I-Juca-Pirama” 10, 90 I Remember 294 “ideal do crítico, O” (“The critic’s ideal”) 100 identity(ies) cultural 199, 244 and language 258 sexual 131

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller 297 “Ignorant Philosopher, The” 48 “Image political (n/a/t/i/o/n)” 321 Impermanent Structures: Semiotic Readings of Nelson Rodrigues’s Wedding Gown, Family Album, and Black Angel 282 Impressionism 10 In Search of Lost Time 298 “incomplete experience, The” 248 Inconfidência Mineira 5 independence of Brazil 49–50 movement for 5, 52 “Indian, the Prisoner” 76 Indianism 7, 74–94, 273 (see also Indigenism; nativism) Indians (see also Aborigines; Indigenous peoples) catechization of 4 and colonization 88–9 Guarani Indians 58 Indian poetry 83–5 Uraguai, O (The Uraguay) 5, 50, 57, 58–61, 73 Indigenism 71–3, 81, 116 (see also Indianism; nativism) Indigenous peoples (see also Aborigines; Indians) and Brazilian literature 273–4 customs of 61–2 enslavement of 51, 58 (see also slavery) Indigenous authors 93–4 Indigenous poetry 83–4, 91 individualism 319, 324 industrialization 207 Inferno 304 influence and comparative literature 294 European 9–10, 12, 17–18, 97–9, 118, 240–1 “Inner Space of the World” 166–71, 194 “Instinct of Nationality” 272, 274 “Instructions for John Howell” 296 intellectuals, leftist/organic 200–1 Intentona Comunista (The Brazilian Uprising) 202

Index

347

intercultural exchanges, and translations 244, 279, 282, 285 intercultural hybridism 300 International Stalin Peace Prize 211 Internet, and theater 267 intertextuality 293–4 Intimate Pages 146 Invention of Solitude, The 299 Invisible Cities 297 Iracema 78 Italy, and Brazilian theater 279, 285 Itinerary of Pasárgada 185

Kappus, Franz Xaver 167 Kerouac, Jack 309 Khlebnikov, Velimir 149 King, Martin Luther Jr. 309 King of the Candle, The 276 Kingdom of Stupidity, The 50 Kiss the Asphalt 279, 280 Klem, Wilhelm 153 Knopf, Blanche 209 Krause, Gustavo Bernardo viii (see also chapter 3) Kristeva, Julia 291

Jacob, Max 150 Jameson, Frederick 115, 271, 291 “jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan, El” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”) 295 Jatahy, Christiane 286 Je me souviens (I Remember) 294 Jesuits (see also Catholic Church) and the baroque 22 and the Indians 88–9 Jesuit writers 3 Jesuitical missions 58 repression of 38 role of 41 and theater 15 Jesuits in Uruguai, The 91 Jesus, Carolina Maria de 311 João VI, King of Portugal 51 Jobim, José Luís viii–ix, 9 (see also chapter 5) John VI, King of Portugal 72 Jorge Amado House Foundation 216, 217 Jornal do Brazil 245 Jornal do Comércio 148 José Olympio publishing house 201 Journal of the Historical and Geographical Institute of Brazil 86 Joyce, James 11 Jubiabá: epopeya del negro brasileño (Jubiaba: the epic of the Brazilian Negro) 204, 207 Juca Mulato 140 justice, and Gregório de Matos 34

“Lacunas and Series: Standards of Historiography in the Histories of the Theater of Brazil, The” 272 laicization 8 Lampedusa, Giuseppe 331 Land at the End of the World, The 328 Landes, Ruth 209 language Brazilian 12 and identity 258 Portuguese 324, 331 Portuguese/Spanish 287 power of 222 Tupi language 39 Langues de Feu: Essais sur Clarice Lispector (Language of Fire: Essays on Clarice Lispector) 260 “lapso, O” (“The Lapse”) 99 “Last Song of the Alley” 176 “Laugh of the Medusa, The” 256 Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christopher Rilke, The 167 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 265 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 25, 47 Lelio 108, 109, 111, 112 Leopard, The 331 “Letters” 39 Letters to a Young Poet 167, 194 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 292 Lezama Lima, José 22–3 liberal tolerance 332 Liberano, Diogo 286 Liberating National Alliance (LNA) 203–4 Liberation Theology 135 liberty 46, 192–3

Kafka on the Shore 299 Kant, Immanuel 45–6

348

Index

Library of Babel 187 Lima, Luiz Costa 183, 194, 249 Lima, Mariangela Alves de 277 Lindley, Denver 173 Lindoia 91 Lins, Álvaro 248 Lins, Paulo 303, 304 Lira and Antilira 194 Lispector, Clarice characters of 253–4 early critical reception in Brazil 15, 247–51 and feminist criticism 15, 244–5, 253, 255–61 fictional language of 254–5, 258 growing interest in 243 narrative techniques of 248, 249, 260–1 postmodern writing 304 translations of 244, 245–7 literary criticism (see also criticism) 324, 325–7, 328 literary cubism 149, 151–2 literary objects, comparativeness of 318–20 literary scene, Brazilian 16–17 Literary Week 272 “literatura como mundo, La” (Literature as World) 287 literature Afro-Brazilian 310–11 avant-­garde literature 247, 260 and Catholicism 3 and colonization 1, 2, 7 comparative 101, 259, 318–20, 325 European 1 expressionist 154–5 national on the African continent 208 origins of Brazilian 3, 21, 49–51 overview of Brazilian 1 of Portugal 2–3 postmodern 299–305 Romantic literature 272–3 Literature, History and Politics 321, 330 Literature in the Tropics, A 194 Literature (Littérature) 161 livro de Praga, narrativas de amor e arte, O (The Book of Prague, Narratives of Love and Art) 301

Llansol, Maria Gabriel 184 Lobato, Monteiro 140 Lobo Antunes, Antonio 328, 329 Lobo, Luiza ix–x, 17 (see also chapter 13) Logic of Meaning 294 Lopes, Angela Leite 280 Lorenz, Günter 221, 222, 224 Lorenzi, Flavia 281 Love on a Visit 168 Loyola Brandão, Ignacio de 307–8 Loyola, Ignacio de 24 “lugar de Clarice Lispector na história da literatura occidental: uma avaliação comparativa, O” (“The place of Clarice Lispector in the history of Western literature: a comparative evaluation”) 257 Lukács, Gyorgy 291, 307 Lusiads, The 181, 187–8 Lustre, O (The chandelier) 248 Luther, Martin 23 Luzia, Man (Luzia Homem) 128, 131–2 lyric poetry 6, 27, 78 Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de 107 Machacalis, Les 77 Machado De Assis, Joaquim Maria “Balas de Estalo” and “Bons Dias!” 108–12 as a critic 99–103 historical context of his writing 97–9 and Indianism 77 Quincas Borba/Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas 103–8, 275 Romantic Indigenism 91, 272–5 significance of 8–9, 51 as a theater critic 272–5 Macunaíma 12, 177, 267–8, 307 Madame Bovary 116 Madame Satan (Madame Satã) 134 Madrid Treaty 1750 58 Maffesoli, Michel 312 Magaldi, Sabato 277, 278 Magalhães, Domingos José Gonçalves de 6, 76, 77 Magalhães, Raimundo 8 magic realism 298, 335 Maias, The (Os Maias) 132–3

Index Malcolm X 309 Malfatti, Anita 140 Mallarmé, Stéphane 171, 185, 194 Mallet, Pardal 119 Maltese Falcon, The 295 Malthus, Thomas 106 Man, The (O Homem) 120–1 Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) 161, 162 “Manifesto of the Lord Antipyrine” 156, 157 “Manifesto on Weak Love and Bitter Love” 157–8 manifestos Dadaism 156, 157–9 Futurist Manifesto 143–4 surrealist 161, 162 term 138 Mann, Thomas 307 mannerism 21–2, 24–6, 31 Mar morto (Dead Sea) 213, 218 Maranhão, Salgado 310 Marc, Franz 152 Maria I, Queen of Portugal 50, 66 Marília de Dirceu 55, 64–5 Marinetti, Felippo Tommaso 140–1, 143–4, 146, 154 Martelo, Rosa 185–6 Martin, Diane E. 245 Martins Pena, Luís Carlos 272 Mary Stuart 285 Massa, Jean-Michel 98 Matador, O 304 materialism 8 Matisse, Henri 149 Matos Guerra, Gregório de 3, 4, 26, 30–40 Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich 149 Mayombé 327, 328 Meireles, Cecília 167, 192, 194 Meireles, Fernando 134 Melo Franco, Francisco de 50 Melo, Patricia 304 Meltzl, Hugo 101, 102 Mémoires d’outre-­tombe 106–7 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps 106 Memórias de um sargento de milícias 107 Memórias do sobrinho de meu tio 107

349

Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas) 103–8, 275 Menotti del Picchia, Paulo 140, 141, 142 Menotti, Oswald 141 mercantilization, process of 333 “Mergulho na Matéria da Palavra: Clarice Lispector e suas Precursoras, O” (“Diving into the Materiality of Language: Clarice Lispector and her Precursors”) 259 Mérian, Jean-Yves 120–1 Merquior, Jose Guilherme 177, 179 Mes Chéries (My Dear Ones) 246 “Metamorfoses” 73 metaphor 296 metaphysics of the stone 62–4 Metzinger, Jean 76–7 Meu querido canibal (My Dear Cannibal) 306 Miceli, Sérgio 202 Michalski, Yan 278 migration 129 Miguel-Pereira, Lucia 123, 130 militancy, and Amado 202 (see also activism) Mille Plateaux 293 mimeograph generation 305, 309 Minas Conspiracy 50, 51, 64 Minas Gerais 5, 139, 223–4 (see also backlands) Minas School 5 Minerva Brasiliense 90 Ministry of Culture of Brazil 282 minority groups (see also Aborigines; Indians; Indigenous peoples) literary production of 17 in the postmodern 308–11 Miranda, Ana 306 miscegenation, and Gregório de Matos 33 Mission, The 57 Missionary, The (O Missionário) 123, 124, 126, 127, 128 modern art 140 Modern Art Week 1922 10, 12, 138, 139–42 modernism and Amado 200

350 Anglo-Saxon 11 Brazilian 2, 10–15, 18, 138, 139–40, 142 cubism 149–52 Dadaism 155–60 expressionists 152–5 futurism 140, 142–9, 153 heroic phase 13, 138, 140, 162, 163, 177 Indigenist motifs 93 Modern Art Week 1922 10, 12, 138, 139–42 parodic trait 307 Spanish-American 11 surrealism 150, 159–63, 295, 296, 298 and the theater 15, 276, 278 third phase of 240 Western 240 “Modernist Movement, The” 93 “Modernist Poetry” 177 Monglave, Eugène de 77 Monster, The 301 Montaigne, Michel de 47 Montello, Josue 128 Morais, Fernando 305 mordancy, and Gregório de Matos 34 Moreno, Newton 286 Moretti, Franco 279 Moritz Schwarcz, Lilia 306 “mort de l’auteur, La” 294 morte de D. J. em Paris, A (The Death of D. J. in Paris) 309 morte e a morte de Quincas Berro d’Água, A (The Death and the Death of Quincas Wateryell) 214 Moser, Benjamin 243, 244 Mother, The 274–5 Mulatto, The (O Mulato) 119, 124 Mundo de Clarice Lispector, O (The World of Clarice Lispector) 249 Murakami, Haruki 297, 298–9 Musilno, Robert 194 “My Poet Futurist” 148 Nabokov, Vladimir 296 Nadja 161 Name of the Rose, The 296–7 narrative violence 256 Nascimento, Claudia Tatinge 282–3, 286–7

Index Nascimento, Dalma vii, 3–4 (see also chapter 2) Nascimento, Roseli 310 National Art Foundation (FUNARTE) 282, 287 National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Literature and Linguistic (ANPOLL) 252 National Library Foundation 287 national literature on the African continent 208 foundations of 41 and world literature 272, 273 nationalism 5, 6, 12, 97, 102, 140 nativism 26, 30–40, 50, 71–3 (see also Indianism; Indigenism) naturalism and the backlands: Domingos Olympio 128–32 in Brazil 7–8, 9, 13 history of 115–18, 132 and insertion into the forest: Inglês de Souza 123–8 at the present time: The revival and the cinema 132–5 and reinterpretation of the canon: Aluisio Azevedo’s project 119–23 and theater 15 nature, notion of 54 Navegação de cabotagem (Coasting) 214 Near the Wild Heart. See Perto do coração selvagem (Near the Wild Heart) “Necessity and Solidarity in the Studies of Comparative Literature” 334 negritude cause 310 negro escrito, O (The Negro in Writing) 311 Nejar, Carlos 52, 62–3 Nelson Rodrigues and the Invention of Brazilian Drama 282 Nem musa, nem Medusa (Neither Muse nor Medusa) 256 “Nênia . . .” 76 Neoclassicism 4–5 neorealism, Portuguese 207 Neruda, Pablo 211 Neto, Agostinho 208 Neto, João Cabral de Melo 162–3, 181, 184, 185

Index Neto, Torquato 309, 310 networks, linguistic-­cultural 324 “New Generation, The” 51 New History 291–2, 305–8, 312 New World, the Enlightenment in 49–51 “New Writings” (“Obras novas”) 119 New York Review of Books 243 New York Trilogy 299 New Yorker, The 275 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 292 1984 297 Niterói (magazine) 6 Niterói, metamorphosis of Rio de Janeiro 76 “No raiar de Clarice Lispector” (“The Rising of Clarice Lispector”) 247 Nobel prizes, to Latin American authors 287 noble savages 46, 51, 53–4, 61–2 (see also Indians; Indigenous peoples) “Nocturne” 163 “Nocturno de Belo Horizonte” 145 Norberto, Joaquim 76 Northeast region 128–9 Northeastern novel 12 Notas de Manfredo Rangel, repórter (a respeito de Kramer) (Notes of Manfredo Rangel, a Reporter, on Kramer) 301 novels of Amado 200 detective novels 294–305 establishment of 6–7 experimental novels 122 historical novels 307 the Indian in 93 naturalist novels 115 Northeastern novel 12 proletarian novels 207 Romantic novels 116 social novels 118, 132 Nunes, Benedito 249–50 Obama, Barack 332 Obras poéticas 5 October Country, The 298 “Ode ao bourgeois” 145–6 “Ode to the Savage” 56 Of the Baroque 22

351

Olga 305 “Olhar” (Glance) 302 Oliveira, Alberto de 8 Oliveira, Carlos de 170, 188–93, 323 Oliveira Neto, Godofredo de 306 Olivier, Alain 280–1 Olympio, Domingos 128–32 On the Left Side 188 On the Origin of Species 106 Onde andará Dulce Veiga? (Where Might Dulce Veiga Be?) 301–2 Onde estivestes de noite (Where Were You at Night) 304 “100 visages de Nelson Rodrigues, Les” (The 100 faces of Nelson Rodrigues) 281 One-Way Street 185 Open Letter, The 166, 168 “Opiary” 191–2 organic intellectuals 201 Orientalism 325 “Original Metamorphosis:Moema and Camarogi” 76 Origins of Totalitarianism 193 Orpheu 146 Orpheus 1 192 Orwell, George 297 Our Lady of the Drowned 280 Padilha, José 303 Pães, Jose Paulo 170 país do carnaval, O (The Country of Carnival) 200 Paiva, Marcelo Rubens 308 Paraguaçu 76 Parnassianism 7–8, 9–10, 11, 13 “Passeio noturno” (Nightly Stroll) 302 Passion According to GH, The 259 Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative and Violence in Clarice Lispector 256 “past, the present and the future of Brazilian literature, The” 99–100 patriarchy cultural tradition of 250 and education of women 132 and futurism 143 slavery 51 women’s writings under 253, 255

352 “Pau-Brasil Poetry Manifesto” 93 Pauliceia desvairada 141, 148 Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil 49 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil 86 Peixoto, Marta 256 People’s Rose, The 333 Pepetela 327, 328–9 Perec, Georges 294 “Perfectly Blue” 171 perspectivism 23 Perto do coração selvagem (Near the Wild Heart) 245, 246, 247, 248 Pessoa, Fernando 30, 146–8, 187 Philosophical Dictionary 44 philosophy, German 46 philosophy of perspective 150 Picabia, Francis 159, 160 Picasso, Pablo 149, 152 Pierson, Donald 209–10 Pimentel, Figueiredo 133 Pirandello, Luigi 151 Pixote, The Law of the Weakest (Pixote, a lei do mais fraco) 133–4 Pocket Guitar, The 189 Poe, Edgar Allan 295, 302 “Poema a Jorge Amado” (Poem to Jorge Amado) 208 Poetic Work 192 Poetic Works 52 poetics of transgression 255 Poétique 255 poetry (see also names of individual poems) Afro-Brazilian 310 Arcadian poetry 54 bucolic poetry 54 of circumstance 40 cubist 152 Dadaist 157–8 epic poetry 77 expressionist 153, 154–5 of Gregório de Matos 38, 40 hippie 309 Indian 83–5 Indigenous poetry 83–4, 91 lyric poetry 6, 27, 78 modernist 11–12, 177 Parnassianism 8

Index Portuguese 166–7, 173–4 question-­poets 184 resistance poetry 161 surrealist 162–3 World Poetry 195 poets, Enlightenment 58–68 political activism, Portugal 207–8 political imagination 321 politics 1900’s 140 imperial 332 and postmodernism 305–8 Pombal, Marquis of 59 Ponciá Vicêncio 310 Pontiero, Giovani 245 Pope, Alexander 47 popular culture, and Amado 200 Pornographic Angel 282 Portella, Eduardo 27, 31 Porto dos Milagres (Port of Miracles) 217–18 Portugal Church 125 colonization by 26–7, 49 culture of 180 futurism 146–7 literature of 2–3 neorealism 207 political activism 207–8 Portuguese Generation of 1870 125 Portuguese language 287, 324, 331 Portuguese poetry 166–7, 173–4 and Rodrigues’s theater 279 Portugal Futurista 147 Positivism 116–17 post-­dramatic theater 265–6 post-­structuralism, feminist 258 postcolonial theory 280, 328–9 Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, The 103–8, 275 postmodern literature 299–305 postmodernism 16–17, 291–4, 295, 297, 304–12 (see also regionalism) Prado, Decio de Almeida 277–8 Prenti, Tim 284 Prestes, Luís Carlos 202, 212 Preston, Sheila 284 “Preto de alma branca, ligeiras conceptuações” (“Black of White

Index Soul, Quick (mis)Conceptions”) 310 pride, national 5 Primeiros Cantos (First Songs) 77, 78, 91 Priore, Mary del 306 Proença, Cavalcânti 235 Profession de foi du philosophe 25 proletarian novels 207 “Propensity of the Brazilian Savage to Poetry” 83 Protestantism 26 Proust, Marcel 298 publishing companies 205 Pynchon, Thomas 300 Quarto de despejo, diário de uma favelada (Child of the Dark: the Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus) 311 que é isso, companheiro?, O (What is the matter, chap?) 305 Queiros, Eça de 125, 132, 134 “Qu’est-­ce qu’un auteur?” 293 question-­poets 184 Quilombhoje group 309–10 Quincas Borba 103–8 Rabassa, Gregory 245 Rabello, Manuel Pereira 30, 31 racism 62, 117, 119, 122, 309, 310, 311 radio, and Amado 213 Raft, The (La Jangada) 124, 334 Raillard, Alice 202, 206, 216–17 Rainhas do crime: ótica feminina no romance policial (Queens of Crime: Feminine Perspective in the Detective Novel) 303 Ramirez-Cancio, Marlene 285 Ranciere, Jacques 268 rationalism 8, 225 Rayuela (Hopscotch) 116, 296 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The 296 realism 7–8, 15, 55 magic realism 298, 335 Reason for the Poem 177 “Reflections on Brazilian Literature at the Present Moment—the National Instinct” 100, 101–2 regionalism 8, 9, 12, 14, 129, 202–3, 222, 224, 230, 234–5, 291

353

Rego, José Lins do 203 relativity, theory of 295 religion (see also Catholic Church; Church) anticlericalism 8, 124–5, 126–7 Brazil 125 Protestantism 26 religious schism 23 retrograde positions of the Church 135 Remate de Males 257 repression, of the Jesuits 38 “Reproaches” 39 República, A 148 Resende, Beatriz vii, 16 (see also chapter 12) resistance, forms of 327 resistance poetry 161 resistível ascensão do Boto Tucuxi, A (The Resistable Ascension of Dolphin Tucuxi) 307 Ressurreição (Resurrection) 100 retrato do rei, O (The Portrait of the King) 306 Rêve, Le 125 Revista de antropofagia (Journal of Anthropophagy) 158–9 Revista Dramática 274 Revista Folhetim 282 Revolution in Poetic Language 291 “Revolutionary Independent Art” 161 rhizome 293 Ribeiro, Esmeralda 310 Ribeiro, João 52 Ribeiro, Lourenco 30 Ribot, Théodule Armand 99 Ridenti, Marcelo 211 Rilke, Rainer Maria 167–70, 173–4, 175, 184, 194 “Rilke Shake” 194 Rising Sun 207 Rivas, Pierre 115 Rivera, Diego 161 Robespierre, Maximilien de 46 Rodrigues, Joffre 282 Rodrigues, Nelson 15, 16, 266, 276–86, 302 Rodrigues Silva, Firmino 76 Rohter, Larry 243

354

Index

roman noir 294–305, 312 Romance negro e outras histórias (Dark Novel and Other Stories) 302 Romanceiro da Inconfidencia (Poems of the Conspiracy) 192 “Romances do povo” (Novels for the People) 211 Romanticism/Romantic Movement Brazilian 6–7, 18, 71, 74, 75, 81, 116 French influence on 76–7, 116 and Machado 100–1 and naturalism 130 post-Romantic Indianism 92 Romantic Indigenism 91, 272–5 Romantic literature 272–3 Romantic subjectivism 8 and surrealism 160, 162 and theater 15 and world literature 273 Romeo and Juliet 285 Romero, Sílvio Vasconcelos da Silveira Ramos 62, 92 ronda das Américas, A (Around the Americas) 204, 205 Room of One’s Own, A 252 Roosevelt, President 209 Rosa, João Guimarães characters of 131, 223, 225, 230–40 Grande sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) 14, 131, 226–40 and the landscape 223–4 myth and fantasy in 224–5 narrative language of 221–2, 226–30, 239, 240 regional and universal nature of his work 14 and space 230, 235, 238 Rose of the People, The 190 Rougon-Macquart, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, Les 119 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 46–7, 51, 53 Rubião, Murilo 298 Rubim, Albino 201, 205–7, 212 Rushdie, Salman 300 Russia, futurism 149 (see also Soviet Union)

Sá Carneiro, Mário de 146 Saad, Fatima 280 Said, Edward W. 325 Salazar regime 208 Salgado, Plínio 142 Salles, Walter 134 Sangue Negro (Black Blood) 208 Sansone, Livio 210 Santa Rita Durão, José de 5, 53, 61–2, 73, 77 Santa Rita Pintor 146 Sant’Anna, Affonso Romano de 194 Sant’Anna, Sergio 300–1, 302 Santiago, Silviano 118, 184, 185, 194, 203, 302 São Paulo 139, 140–1 Saramago, José 287, 334–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 280 Satanic Verses, The 300 sauce theory 9, 98 scapegoats 130 Schmidt, Rita Terezinha x, 15 (see also chapter 11) Schöpke, Regina 44 Schwarz, Roberto 106, 248 Seara Vermelha (Red Field) 199 “Second Elegy” 170 Second Sex, The 252 secret societies 65–6, 125 Seghers, Ana 212 Selected Poems 32–6 Semana, A 119 Seminarist, The 60 Semog, Éle 309, 310 senhorita Simpson, A (Miss Simpson) 300–1 “Sentiment of the World” 172–3 Sentimental Memories of João Miramar (Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar) 151 Serpent, The 278 sertão 129, 235, 236–8, 240 “Seven-Faced Poem, The” 172, 173–4, 175 Sexagesima Sermon 29 sexual identity 131 Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector 246, 257–8 Silva, João Norberto de Sousa 81–7

Index Silva, Marcia Rios da x, 13–14 (see also chapter 9) Silva Xavier, Joaquim José da. See Tiradentes Silveira, Jorge Fernandes da viii, 13 Singing Craft, The 192 Sirkis, Alfredo 305 Six Characters in Search of an Author 151 Six Memos for the next Millennium 297 Slave who is Not Isaura, The 142 slavery 51, 58, 89, 112, 274–5, 325 Slum, The (O Cortiço) 119, 120–2 soap-­opera industry 215–16 Social Contract 46 social contract 46–7 social criticism 9 social exclusion 130 social life, regulation of 320 social narrative 140 social novels 118, 132 social sciences and Brazilian literature 305 the postmodern in 291 socialism 215 Society of Jesus 24, 85 (see also Catholic Church) Solitudes, The 31 Some Poetry 172, 190 “son of the Prisoner, The” 76 “Song” 39 “Song of the Prisoner, The” 90 “Song of the Tupi, The” 76 “sonho acabou, O” (The Dream is over) 308 Sontag, Susan 275 Sopro de Vida, Um (A Breath of Life) 254, 255 Sousa Caldas, António Pereira de 53, 56–7 Sousa, João Cardoso de Meneses e 76 Sousândrade, Joaquim de 78 Souza Cardoso, Amadeo de 146 Souza, H. Inglês de 123–8 Souza, Márcio 307 Souza, Noémia de 208 Soviet Union, and Amado 211, 212 (see also Russia) space in-­between 123, 124, 184, 300 space-­time 292 Spanish-American literary boom 295

355

“speech at the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, A” 194 Stages of Conflict. A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance 284–5 Stalin, Joseph 211, 212 Stegagno Picchio, Luciana 285 stele 166 Stella Manhattan 302 Stoklos, Denise 285 Stone of Sleep, The 162–3 Stone Raft, The 334–5 Structuralist Anthropology 292 Students’ House of the Empire 207–8 subjectivities, new 293–4 Submission 297, 300 Subterrâneos da Liberdade (The Bowels of Liberty) 213 “Subversive Cannibals. Notes on the Contemporary Theater in Brazil, the other Latin America” 286 Suit, The 269–70 Suor (Sweat) 207 Surfacing 259 surrealism 150, 159–63, 295, 296, 298 Surrealist Revolution, The 161 Sussekind, Flora 131 symbolic capital, of Amado 200 symbolic violence 323 symbolism 9–10, 11 Taine, Hyppolite 117 Tamoio Confederation 306 Tamoios people 83 (see also Aborigines; Indians; Indigenous peoples) Tapajós, Renato 305, 308 Tavares, José Nilo 204 Taylor, Diana 284–5 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature 143–4 Teles, Gilberto Mendonça 149 television adaptations, of Amado’s work 199–200, 213–14, 216 television, in Brazil 215 Tempo Brasileiro 252 Teófilo, Rodolfo 123 Terras do sem fim (The Violent Land) 208, 209, 213, 214

356

Index

Terras proibidas 306 Theater 286 theater Brazilian 15–16, 271–6, 283–8 contemporary 265–7 Latin American 285 and modernism 15, 276, 278 performed to Indians 26–7 post-­dramatic 265–6 of Rodrigues 277–86 “unpleasant theater” 283 and world literature 265–71 world theater 269–70 Theater of Nelson Rodrigues, The 282 Theater of the Oppressed, The 284 Theater of the Subaltern 16 Theater of the Vertigo group 286 Theatre Public 280 Themba, Canodoise Daniel (Can) 269 “Theoretical Examinations” 321 Thieriot, Jacques 280 Thiollier, René 141 Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not 161 “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital” 271 Timbiras, Os (The Timbiras) 77 Tiradentes 66, 67, 68 Titara, Ladislau dos Santos 76 “To the City of Bahia” 36 “To the Movers and Shakers of Bahia, who are called the Caramurus” 39 Tocaia Grande (Showdown) 214 Todorov, Tzvetan 18 Todos los fuegos el fuego (All Fires the Fire) 296 Tooge, Marly 208–9 Torre, Guillermo de 156, 160 Torres, Antônio 306 Tourism 190 Towsend, Sarah J. 284 traditionalism 12 Trakl, Georg 154 Translations 184 translations and intercultural exchanges 244, 279, 282, 285 of Lispector 245–7 “Treatise on Natural Rights, A” 53

Treatise on Style, The 161 Trianon Manifesto 141 “triumphant Ode” 147–8 Tropa de elite I and II (Elite Squad I and II) 303 Tropicália movement 17, 276, 309 Tupi-Guarani 26–7 (see also Aborigines; Indians; Indigenous peoples) Tupi language 39 Two Knights of Verona, The 286 Tzara, Tristan 156, 157–8, 159, 160 Ubirajara 78 ufanismo 3 Últimos (Last Ones) 78 United States and Brazilian/Latin American literature 208–10 the Enlightenment in 49 miscegenation 327 and Rodrigues’s theater 281–3 universal Man 23 “Universe vast Universe” 176 “unpleasant theater” 283 untranslatable, the 270 Uraguai, O (The Uraguay) 5, 50, 57, 58–61, 73 urban violence 298, 304, 312 Valéry, Paul 118 Valsa negra (Dark Waltz) 304 Valse number 6 280 Vanguarda europeia e modernismo brasileiro 149 Vannucci, Alessandra 285 Vargas, Getúlio 202, 204, 212 Vargas Llosa, Mario 295 Varin, Claire 260 Varnhagen, Francisco Adolfo de 75–6 Vassallo, Ligia Maria Pondé ix, 9 (see also chapter 6) Veiga, J. J. 298 Vejmelka, Marcel 212 Venice Biennale (1954) 161–2 Ventura, Adão 310 Veríssimo, Érico 208 Veríssimo, José 123 Verne, Jules 124, 334

Index Vestido de noiva 16 Vianna, Glória 98 vida de Luís Carlos Prestes, A (The Life of Luís Carlos Prestes) 202 Vidal, Gore 308–9 Vieira, Antônio 3, 4, 28–9, 41 Vila Rica 51, 52, 66 Villa-Lobos, Hector 142 Villela, Gabriel 285 violence narrative 256 symbolic 323–4 urban 298, 304, 312 Violent Land. See Terras do sem fim Visconti, Luchino 331 Vivre l’orange 255 Voltaire 47–9 Waves, The 295 Wedding Gown, The 277–8 Western modernism 240 Western tradition, literature 1 Westernization 326 What Country is This? 194 Where the Stress Falls: Essays 275 White, Hayden 305

357

whiteness, and class 117, 119, 122, 332 Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector 243 Wisnik, Jose Miguel 32 “Woman in literature” 252 Woodward, Miguel Cossío 246, 257 Woolf, Virgínia 252 world literature 103 and national literature 272, 273 and theater 265–71 World Poetry 195 World Republic of Letters, The 267, 268, 282 world theater 269–70 World Wars 137, 154, 161 writers 6 Xavier, Arnaldo 310 Yo también me acuerdo 294 Zdanov, Andrei 207 Zero 307–8 Ziembiski, Zbigniew 277 Zola, Emile 115, 119, 120, 122, 123–4, 125, 128