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"The contemporary Brazilian Novel"
En Daedalus, Cambridge, v. 95, nº 4, fall 1966,
p. 986-1003.
Toward a National Diction
"THE VIENNESE writer who called Brazil "The Land of the
Future" was offering more than a slogan for Brazilian chauvinism
or a pretext for the obvious retort that Brazil will always be the
Land of the Future. In Brazil, the amanhá is as deeply
ingrained in the national character as the mañana
is in the rest of Latin America. Stefan Zweig's remark implies,
nevertheless, a simple but elusive truth: Brazil as a coherent unity
does not yet exist. Politically, it has existed since the Grito
de Ipiranga (1822) severed the country from Portuguese rule-but
not from Portuguese rulers. (D. Pedro, who proclaimed independence,
was the son and heir of the King of Portugal.) As a free country,
Brazil has existed for nearly a century and a half, but as a national
and cultural unity it is still a Land of the Future. Thus, to assume
that there is such a thing as a Brazilian novel is to assume too
much. There are Brazilian novels, but there is no such thing as
the Brazilian novel.
Because of the wide differences between the Amazon jungle and the
North-East desert, the arid plateau of Minas Gerais and the soft,
luxuriant coastline around Rio de Janeiro, the humid forest of Sta.
Catarina and the temperate open spaces of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
encompasses a wide variety of cultures. The microcosms that form
the macrocosm of Brazil are richly reflected in the novels of the
country. The Brazilian novelists of today, like the nineteenth-century
novelists of North America, cannot avoid being regional in their
writing. For this reason also, the all-embracing Brazilian novel,
like that other mythical prototype, the "American novel,"
does not exist.
Literary critics in Brazil have pointed out the obvious contrasts
between fiction written in the North-East -the tragic land of desert
and famine, of epic and bloody revolt- and the fiction of the South
-the gaúcho country of rich grass, cattle, and temperate
climate similar to the North-American West. They have also discussed
the differences between the introspective novelists of Minas Gerais
and the more brilliant and extroverted novelists of the large Atlantic
ports. But it is as misleading to view Brazilian writing only in
terms of a literary map of the country as it is to speak only of
the school of southern novelists or of the New York "international"
group in writing about the novel in the United States today. Although
there is some merit in the approach, it is founded on an erroneous
assumption. It implies that the Brazilian novel is conditioned solely
by the milieu, that novelists are writing exclusively realistic
novels, that the novel, in short, is a documentary form. Twenty
or thirty years ago such views were unchallenged in Brazilian literary
criticism, as they were in all Latin-American criticism. The impact
of Nature over Man in the vast subcontinent, the rediscovery of
political commitment by the French school of existentialist writers,
and the theories of socialist realism that permeated the Soviet
Union were all discussed and widely accepted throughout Latin America.
Not only in Brazil, but also in Mexico and Argentina, in Ecuador
and Cuba, writers were engaged in mapping out their native lands,
describing rivers and mountains, denouncing the local oligarchies
or the all-pervading (although not always visible) "American
imperialism." In that period, novels were written to show the
plight of the Andean Indians or the shocking misery in the spreading
slums of Caracas. Very few of these LatinAmerican novelists were,
in fact, concerned with reality. They seldom wrote about men but
only about Man. Although their aim was documentary realism, the
books they produced were highly stylized exercises in abstract description,
pamphlets thinly disguised as novels, or pious tracts.
In Brazil the regionalist movement of the late twenties grew up
as a reaction against the extreme academism of Brazilian literature,
which was still culturally dependent on Europe. The movement itself
had begun somewhat earlier, and, paradoxically enough, its origin
lay with a group of writers who felt the need to sever all ties
with Portuguese diction and rhetoric. To achieve that, they turned
to France and Italy. The Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week)
held in São Paulo in July 1922 had a tremendous impact on
the cultural life of the whole country and marked the beginning
of a wave of renewal that had important consequences. The group
was baptized the "Movimento Modernista"; it should not
be confused with Spanish-American Modernismo, created some
forty years earlier by Ruben Dario and other Latin-American poets
under the influence of symbolist poetry and pre-Raphaelite painting.
Although clearly inspired by Italian Futurismo and other
European "isms," the Semana de Arte Moderna was oriented
toward a creative discovery of Brazil. Contact with and imitation
of Marinetti and Dada and the surrealists led the Brazilian writers
(rather unexpectedly) to a search for Brazilian essences. Mario
de Andrade (1893/1945), a poet and critic of a very personal turn
of mind, was one of the leaders of the movement. He was among the
first to see the dangers of regionalism and to urge the rediscovery
of Brazil. His only novel, Macunaíma (1928 ), is a
deliberate attempt to produce a poetic narrative based on the whole
of Brazilian folklore and to explore the possibilities of a Brazilian
language that is as different from the Portuguese as the American
idiom is from the British. As a novel, Macunaíma is
a beautiful failure. Too incoherent, obscure, and episodic, too
loosely woven, it has many of the defects of an experimental work
like Ulysses and few of its virtues. As a milestone, however,
Macunaíma is a success. It pointed out, at the very
beginning of the modernist movement, two extremely important truths:
documentary realism is a dead end; language is the first and most
critical problem faced by the novelist. Through Macunaíma,
the lazy antihero of his novel (Que preguiça- "How
tired I feel"is his slogan, and a national one of a sort),
Mario de Andrade showed that the novel could be a mythopoetic creation
and need not be a mere recording of reality. By focusing more on
language than on plot or characters, de Andrade was dealing with
first things first. Unfortunately, Macunaíma never
managed to be more than a wonderfully lucid and poetic experiment.
In many respects, this attempt in the late twenties ought to be
compared with that of Jorge Luis Borges during the same period in
Buenos Aires. Borges's short stories, deliberately presented as
Ficciones (Fictions), emphasized, as Macunaíma
did, the mythopoetic qualities of narrative imagination and the
urge to break with a dead tradition in order to create a truly new
Latin-American language. Although Borges was extremely successful
in his experiments and became the leader of a small group of writers
supported by Sur magazine, the main line of Argentine fiction
continued until very recently to follow a more realistic and documentary
trend. Mario de Andrade was equally successful in changing the literary
outlook of Brazil; he indicated the right path, but he apparently
got no further. In 1926 a new movement had already grown up as a
polemical reaction to the São Paulo modernists. A renewed
emphasis on regionalism marked the North-East group that challenged
the Paulistas.
Regionalism as a Dead End
The starting point of the countermovement was the Primeiro Congresso
de Regionalistas do Nordeste (First Congress of NorthEast Regionalists)
that met in Recife in 1926. If São Paulo represents the dynamic,
modern Brazil of the nineteen-sixties, the North-East in the twenties
represented the Brazil that was left behind by the new industrialism.
It was the region of the obsolete economy of the sugar-cane industry,
the decaying feudal world of slaveholders' heirs, and the marginal
society of poor retirantes, internal emigrants who periodically
ran away from the arid hinterland. In many respects, the land combined
the harsh realities and nightmarish visions familiar to the readers
of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, or John Steinbeck.
Inspired by men like the sociologist Gilberto Freyre (b. 1900),
the Congress of North-East Regionalists saw the beginning of an
important literary movement-it put the North-East on the map of
Brazilian fiction. It did this with a vitality and splendor that
tended to conceal the fact that the novel of the North-East is not
the Brazilian novel. One of the classics of Brazilian sociology,
Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes (Rebellion in the Backlands),
written in 1902, had already explored the vast epic possibilities
of that corner of Brazil; in Casa Grande a Senzala (Masters
and Slaves), Freyre, in 1933, added to Da Cunha's poetic insight
his own large and meticulous vision of a decadent feudal past.
Starting with writers like Jose Americo de Almeida (whose A
Bagaceira, 1928, was a pioneering work) and Raquel de Queiroz
(who, before she was twenty, wrote O Quinze, a classical,
spare document on the retirantes, published in 1930), the
novelists of the North-East, including Graciliano Ramos, Jose Lins
do Rego, and Jorge Amado, soon became known throughout Brazil. Of
these novelists, only Jorge Amado has achieved international fame.
A follower of the Communist leader Luiz Carlos Prestes (whose biography
he wrote), Amado was widely translated in the socialist countries.
He has also achieved success in the United States; one of his books,
Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon),
1958 was the first Latin-American novel to become a best seller
in the States. The American edition, published in 1962, was reviewed
on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Recently,
Hopscotch (Rayuela), a finer and infinitely more creative
book by the Argentine Julio Cortazar, also received a front-page
review in The New York Times.
Despite his international success, however, Amado is not so highly
regarded by critics in Brazil as are Lins do Rego and Graciliano
Ramos. The reasons are obvious. Amado, a born storyteller and a
writer of great charm, was until recently one of the sincere followers
of the sterile theories of socialist realism. His first books (particularly
those in the Cacau cycle) are mere tracts, occasionally relieved
by graphic and near-pornographic descriptions of life in the North-East
plantations and big-city slums. Jubiabá, which appeared
in 1935, is an extravagant novel, a kind of Grand-Guignolesque suite
of horrors, presented as a piece of documentary realism on the social
situation in or around Bahia in the thirties. Since 1956, when the
Soviet leaders officially declared a thaw in the restrictions placed
on literature, Amado has felt free to write novels in a purely narrative
vein. Gabriela is perhaps his best: the characters are alive,
the local color brilliant, and Gabriela charming. But its shortcomings
as a novel are obvious. It never moves beneath the surface; the
language, although adequate, is rarely creative. Amado, like O'Hara
in the United States, or Maugham in England, is a master of the
obvious, the typical, and the superfluous.
More interesting is the case of Lins do Rego (1901/1957). He also
started with a cycle of novels on the sugar-cane culture, but his
approach is totally different from Amado's. Lins do Rego wrote not
with a Marxist blueprint in hand, but out of his experiences as
a boy born and educated in the sugar mills. He was the son of the
owners; what he wrote in rich, chaotic, and undisciplined prose
was his own remembrance of things past. Like Don Segundo Sombra
(1926 ), a masterpiece by the Argentine Ricardo Güiraldes,
his books are full of nostalgic memory. Lins do Rego had a less
poetic and more comprehensive vision of his world than did Güiraldes.
He wrote with bravura and feeling, and with a deep personal concern
for the harsh reality of the North-East. His blueprint was the work
of his master, Gilberto Freyre, to whose charming theories and observations
he contributed his own experience, enriched by literary contact
(in Alagoas, during his formative years) with people like Raquel
de Queiroz and Graciliano Ramos.
Later, the success of his novels and his long residence in Rio
de Janeiro attenuated the warmth and immediacy of his reporting.
While in Rio de Janeiro he completed three of his more ambitious
novels: Pedra Bonita (1938 ), Fogo Mono (1943 ), and
Cangaceiros (1953). Writing now from a purely narrative point
of view and not simply from his memories of the sugar-cane world,
Lins do Rego showed his limitations as a novelist. Only the first
novel is a really solid piece of work. This fictional account of
a mystical rebellion in the deserts of the North-East, kindled by
a fanatic who pretends to be a new Christ ( and perhaps believes
it), is presented through the eyes of a very young boy, Antonio
Bento, a descendant of the fanatic. The story pursues two layers
of time-one present, one remote-that merge at the end of the novel.
The point of view is both distant and immediate.
Lins do Rego did not possess the creative powers to achieve his
ambition; his last two really important pieces of fiction clearly
demonstrate this. While Fogo Morto is occasionally relieved
by the vigor of certain of the characters, such as the captain,
Vittorino Carneiro da Cunha, Cangaceiros relies too heavily
on the basic appeal of its subject: the colorful bandits of the
North-East desert. In balance, Lins do Rego's limitations as a novelist
do not obliterate his achievements. In many respects he was moving
in the right direction. He had discovered that documentary novels
must depend on the imaginative transcription of language as it is
in fact spoken. From São Paulo, Mario de Andrade had fought
hard to free Brazilian Portuguese from the diction and grammar of
the old metropolis. (In Spanish America, the main fight was fortunately
concluded by the middle of the nineteenth century.) Although Lins
do Rego opposed many of the European influences that pervaded the
São Paulo movement, he shared de Andrade's concern about
spoken Brazilian. While de Andrade's aim was really to replace an
old-fashioned rhetoric with a new one, Lins do Rego sometimes created
the impression that he wanted only to eliminate all rhetoric. In
his novels, which are characterized by great freedom of speech,
he attempted to transcribe the "real" language of his
characters. What he lacked was the discipline to keep the spoken
language continually creative. Because of his effort to be faithful
to the actual words and sounds used by people, he occasionally became
literal, monotonous, and ungrammatical to the point of distraction.
The result often justified the charges of certain of his critics
that he wrote badly.
Up to a point, Amado and Lins do Rego did not really care about
good writing and relied, sometimes too heavily, on their storyteller's
intuition. Among the North-East novelists, the writer who did care
about good writing was the novelist most Brazilian critics hail
as the best of that period: Graciliano Ramos (1892/1953). Ramos
was as marginal in his job as a civil servant on the fringes of
the North-East as the North-East itself was marginal to the new
Brazil. An introvert, shy to the point of total silence, Ramos was
reticent to publish his first book. He was forty-one when Caetés
appeared in 1933. Ramos learned to read when he was nine; his formal
education was sketchy. During his early years, he was influenced
by Gorki and by some of the masters of his native language, including
the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz and the Brazilians
Euclides da Cunha and Raul Pompeia.
Some critics have proclaimed Ramos' Vidas sêcas (1937)
a masterpiece of the regional novel. The judgment is debatable,
but, even if it is not a masterpiece, it is an impressive book and
the best of his works-though some people prefer his autobiographical
Infancia (1945). Vidas sêcas, which describes
the plight of a family in the Sertão of the North-East, is
written in a spare and economical style. Each of its chapters is
autonomous (in fact, they were originally published as separate
short stories), and the whole structure of the novel reveals a great
concern with form and style. Although Graciliano Ramos avoids psychological
analysis in this book (he indulged in it in a previous novel, Angustia,
1936), he manages to reveal, more by implication than by direct
statement, the inner life of his destitute characters through their
relationship with the milieu and with animals. The sun, a dog, and
a shadow are as legitimate characters in this tale as the human
beings are.
Ramos was a silent man, and Vidas sêcas is a silent
book -the kind that needs frequent reading to reveal itself. With
the perspective of nearly three decades, it is easy to discover
that it fails precisely because of what appeared to be its virtues
at the time of its publication in the thirties. In a period when
the vital books of Amado and the loosely constructed novels of Lins
do Rego were best sellers, Vidas secas was a lesson in austerity,
in depth of observation, and in antiheroic attitudes toward a stark
and cruel reality. Since the late thirties, new literary forces
have transformed Graciliano Ramos into a respected but not deeply
influential master. Lins do Rego once called him "Mestre Graciliano."
The title was well deserved, but during the last ten years Brazilian
novelists have discovered another master: João Guimarães
Rosa. Paradoxically, his first book was published the same year
as Vidas sêcas, but, instead of ending a creative trend,
Sagarana was opening a new one.
Mestre Guimarães
The problem of regionalism as it was discussed in the twenties
and thirties in Latin America is a false one. It was presented as
primarily geographical rather than literary. From a strictly literary
point of view, all novels are regional because they belong to a
certain linguistic area. For example, the first novel of modern
times, Don Quixote, is about an imaginary knight in a forgotten
region of the Spanish empire; Madame Bovary is about a lady
daydreamer who has read too many romantic novels in her sordid French
province; and The Brothers Karamazov is about a bunch of
drunkards, inflamed by mystical thoughts, in a small Russian village.
But it is not only the so-called realistic novels that are strictly
localized by language and Weltanschauung. The fantastic novels
are also regional. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is as nationally
rooted in eighteenth-century neoclassical prose as Voltaire's Candide,
but their views of the world reveal different national characters.
Kafka's The Trial and The Castle overwhelm the reader
with the most concrete Central-European minutiae and with an Old
Testament notion of guilt. When Borges writes about Scandinavian
or Chinese or Irish heroes, he is always writing about an enormous
library, filled with British books, in a cosmopolitan suburb of
the world: Buenos Aires. It does not actually matter very much what
the writer's geographical situation is. What really matters is the
nature of his approach to reality. From this point of view, some
books are more regional than others because they tend to present
only the typical aspects of a given place and milieu, only the local
color - never moving beneath the surface of what they are describing.
It is the difference in depth, and not the difference in subject
matter, that makes Amado more regional than Ramos.
João Guimarães Rosa (b. 1908) managed to be universal
in his outlook without being unconcerned with his own native territory.
So far, he has published one book of very short short-stories, two
books of nouvelles, and one novel -not very much by the standards
of some of his colleagues. Today, he is acclaimed as the greatest
Brazilian writer and one of the best in Latin America. Originally
published in 1956, his only novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas
(The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), is written in the form
of a monologue. Riobaldo, the protagonist, was once a bandit or
jagunqo, as they are called in the Sertão;
he is now an honorable rancher, growing old. The monologue -which
proceeds almost without pause, though the narrator stops occasionally
to answer some unrecorded questions put to him by an unknown listener
-describes Riobaldo's life of love and adventure. The unknown listener
is a more ambiguous character than the interlocutors used, for example,
by Conrad in his novels. Yet it is for the listener's benefit that
the protagonist tells his story. Every monologue needs a haunted
listener (as the Ancient Mariner well knew) because his presence
justifies the confessional attitude and implies at the same time
that there is some deep secret that will be revealed. Riobaldo,
of course, has a secret.
Riobaldo's monologue creates a world. It is the world of the Minas
Gerais backlands, a high and deserted country that borders on the
northeastern Sertão, a smaller desert which had already been
explored by Brazilian novelists and sociologists. Guimarães Rosa
once told me with visible pride that, compared to the Minas Gerais,
the Sertão is but a fringe of desert, not far from the coast
and the sea. The title of his novel, literally translated, indicates
this extra dimension of land, Big Desert: Little Rivers.
Compared to the enormousness of Minas Gerais, his long book is the
record of only a small excursion.
The world that Riobaldo evokes is a violent one of treason and
burning rivalries, of misery and exploitation, of a territory run
by bandits, politicians, and a ruthless army. The story is set in
the late nineteenth century, but the problems Guimarães Rose
describes are still very much alive, as today's headlines prove.
The novelist is not really concerned with the documentary aspects
of the world about which he is writing. Like some of his more brilliant
counterparts in the Spanish-American fiction of today (such as Alejo
Carpentier of Cuba and Julio Cortazar of Argentina), Guimarães
Rosa does not overlook the misery or exploitation around him but
he knows that reality goes deeper than that. His experiences as
a country doctor and later as an army doctor made him familiar not
only with the men of the region but also with their inexhaustible
language. Through the artistic re-creation of this spoken language,
he manages to convey the whole reality of this brutal and tragic
land. His childhood was spent listening to old men telling tall
stories about the fierce and bloody bandits of the Sertão,
the grotesque errant knights of a dubious crusade. In his youth,
he traveled extensively through the strange, hard, haunting landscape
of the Gerais, spent a great deal of time exploring very small towns
or pacing down roads that led to nowhere, and became intimately
acquainted with the squalor and misery of his very wealthy country.
His life was a quest for a creative language.
Through a technique and sensibility that were molded by the experimental
writing of the twenties and thirties (his debts to Joyce, Proust,
Mann, Faulkner, and Sartre are obvious), Guimarães Rosa, in Grande
Sertão: Veredas, plays with time and space, telescopes events
and persons. He uses the most shameless conventions of melodrama
and never slips into the stale conventions of documentary realism.
Indeed, he even makes fun of these conventions, sustaining (like
Cervantes) a subtle note of parody from the beginning to the end
of his tale. One of the best-kept secrets of Riobaldo's monologue,
for example, is the name of his real father. When it is discovered,
the whole book assumes the form of a quest for identity, one of
the basic literary themes since the Greeks. The most sensational
secret, however, is the real nature of Diadorim, the protagonist's
closest friend and constant companion, a young man of unusual beauty
and purity to whom Riobaldo feels sexually attracted, though he
fights against this. Playing on the ambiguity of this relationship,
Guimarães Rosa transmutes a melodramatic cliche into a deep insight
concerning the nature of desire. Thomas Mann would have liked this
book, and Italo Calvino could have recognized in it some of the
motives and ironies of his Cavaliere inesistente (1959).
As the best Brazilian critics have already pointed out, Grande
Sertão: Veredas is in many respects similar to the medieval
Novela de Cavalaria, the epic fiction of the errant knights
that Cervantes parodied in Don Quixote. Like those prototypes,
Riobaldo is inspired by honor, by unearthly love, by pure friendship,
by a noble cause; and he fights against treason, carnal temptations,
the obscure power of darkness. The vast, sprawling intricacies of
accidental meetings and unexplained separations, brusque discoveries
of a hidden past, and tragic anagnorisis that constitute the plot
are projected, as Professor Cavalcanti Proença has pointed
out, in different layers of meaning: the individual, the collective,
the mythical. The whole novel is divided into episodes that are
carefully interwoven into the fabric of Riobaldo's monologue, as
the medieval rhetoricists advised; even the technique derives from
this type of novel, so popular in the late Middle Ages. In Spanish
America, one of the most promising young novelists, the Peruvian
Mario Vargas Llosa, reflects the same model in his most recent novel,
La Casa Verde (1966). That Vargas Llosa wrote this splendid
book without any direct knowledge of Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece
(Brazil is less connected with the rest of Latin America than with
Europe or the United States) shows that there are some deep undercurrents
that link the epic style of the Novela de Cavalaria and the
narrative style of some Latin-American writers today. The feudal
world of the Peruvian jungle or the Minas Gerais Sertão somehow
matches the feudal world of the late Middle Ages.
But the real theme of Grande Sertão: Veredas is diabolical
possession. Riobaldo is convinced that he has entered into a pact
with the devil, that it was the devil who first drove him to a life
of perversity and crime. But his is not the classical devil of cloven
hoof and ironic mien. Guimarães Rosa's devil is everywhere: a voice
in the desert, a whisper in the conscience, a sudden glance that
is full of temptation, the irresistible depravity of a powerful
bandit. By the devil's side, in this morality tale, stands the figure
of an angel, the beautiful and ambiguous Diadorim. But this is a
modern morality tale, and therefore not a simple one, so Guimarães
Rosa's angel and his devil are not always clearly distinguishable.
Torn between good and evil, often unable to decide which is which,
Riobaldo vacillates, beset by doubt and anguish.
At the center of this epic tale -full of battles, murders, and
sudden death- is the story of a soul divided between love and hatred,
friendship and enmity, superstition and faith. It is nothing less
than a mythopoetic creation, a literary microcosm of the component
elements of Guimarães Rosa's own huge, chaotic, angel -and
devil-ridden Brazilian motherland.
If Grande Sertão: Veredas is an allegory, it is an
allegory that is saved from pure abstraction by the concrete poetry
of diction and character. Hesitantly at first, then more and more
easily as the long tale gathers momentum, it manages to take on
the pure narrative charm of a Western. As the sheer force of the
narrative takes over, a whole world is re-created through language.
Guimarães Rosa's relation to the world of the jagunços
is indirect and distant. Unlike Euclides da Cunha's masterpiece,
which was based on his own experiences during a campaign that ended
the bloody rebellion of one of the most famous Northeastern jagunços,
this novel was written from tales told by survivors, tales rewritten
by Guimarães Rosa's imagination. For the novelist, this distance
in time and in direct experience was more advantageous than the
closeness of Da Cunha's sociological reporting. By his very detachment,
Guimarães Rosa was able to get nearer to the core of things.
What happened to him while he was writing about the jagunços'
world is similar to what happened to Sarmiento when he wrote Facundo's
biography and described the pampa in 1845. The Argentine
author had never been in the pampa, although he had lived not far
from it. What he knew about it came from hearsay and the accounts
of English travelers, who were the first to attempt to write about
its vastness and desolation. In effect, Sarmiento re-created in
Spanish what was actually a foreign vision, but, despite this, he
"nationalized" the pampa through his style. The
same double point of view operates in Grande Sertão: Veredas.
Guimarães Rosa has used his own experience of the Sertão
and documents gathered by people like Da Cunha to evoke, in the
language of an imaginary jagunço, the world of the Brazilian
backlands in the late nineteenth century.
Every phrase of this novel is written as if it were a line in a
poem. The invisible but omnipresent structure of verbal sound is
as important as the story itself. The distribution of accents in
each phrase and the general movement of each paragraph sometimes
reveal more about the real mood of the protagonist than any given
situation or episode. This is the main reason why, at the beginning
of the long monologue, Guimarães Rosa makes his protagonist so reluctant
to tell the full story of his life; why Riobaldo is so reticent
and ambiguous about Diadorim and about his pact with the devil;
why he begins to confess in earnest only when the flow of memory,
the incessant stream of evocation, possesses him completely. The
narrative then mounts and accelerates. The last quarter of the novel
is completely free of asides, of mental reservations, of the relentless
activities of the inner censor. When the confession comes to a climax,
the novel ends. The catharsis is complete.
It is this peculiarity of style that accounts for the difficulties
Guimarães Rosa's novel presents to translators and even to
readers of Portuguese. In fact, the American translation (done with
tremendous care by James L. Taylor and Harriett de Onís)
reads much more easily than the original, for to a certain extent
the translators were forced to simplify and explicate the text.
According to the author, only the recent Italian translation of
Corpo de Baile, a volume of nouvelles, and the German version
of Grande Sertão: Veredas achieve the almost impossible
task of being both faithful to the original and readable. Translating
Guimarães Rosa is like translating Joyce: his, too, is a
purely verbal world.
O Novo Romance
The deep regionalism of Guimarães Rosa's fictional world
is not the only answer to the regionalist challenge of the thirties.
While Ramos, do Rego, and Amado were developing the North-East movement,
writers in other parts of Brazil were exploring new possibilities.
In the plateau of Minas Gerais, Cyro dos Anjos (b. 1900) and Lucio
Cardoso (b. 1913) were creating a more introspective type of fiction;
in the vast spaces of the South, Erico Verissimo (b. 1905, in Rio
Grande do Sul) was achieving fame through novels written in a more
international idiom. None of these writers, however, succeeded,
as Guimarães Rosa had, in crossing the very subtle line that
separates the regional from the universal. Even Rosa was not always
successful. While European critics praised him, the North Americans
reacted with indifference. Misled by critics who did not understand
or perhaps even read his novel, the American public let Grande
Sertão: Veredas pass almost unnoticed in 1963. It is
a pity because Rosa's work deserves a wider audience.
During the last ten years or so, a new group of Brazilian writers
has been experimenting with a form that has been baptized O Novo
Romance Brasileiro. The term novo romance acknowledges
the influence of the nouveau roman and, to a degree, underlines
the deep cultural ties that still exist between Brazil and France.
(This is less true of the new group of Spanish-American novelists,
who are strongly attracted to the Anglo-Saxon world as well.) But
if some of the novo romance is only an adaptation of the
nouveau roman, the best of it is really a new movement. Among
the prominent novelists now writing in Brazil, Clarice Lispector
is one of the most widely respected. She is not alone in the field:
Maria Alice Barroso, Adonias Filho, Mario Palmeiro, and Nelida Piñon
are also recognized as important or promising new novelists. But
Clarice Lispector is the acknowledged master of the experimental
fiction of the sixties.
She has already produced five novels: Perto do Cora¡ao
Selvagem (1944), O Lustre (1946 ), A cidade sitiada
(1949), A Maça no escuro (1961), and A Paixão
segundo G. H. (1964). She has also published three volumes of
short stories. Her first three novels passed almost unnoticed at
the time they were published. Success came with her last two novels,
which are undoubtedly her best. But success, even of a very limited
and specialized kind, is something that cannot affect Lispector's
attitude toward her fiction. She writes to fulfill a very tyrannical
vocation and because she cannot stop. What she writes has very little
to do with what is fashionable at the time. Up to a point, her attitude
is similar to that of Graciliano Ramos: They are both reticent and
very personal in their approach, although their works have very
little else in common. Her last two novels reveal a turn of mind
and an imagination deeply involved with a quest for reality, a determination
to force appearances, and a burning desire to grasp the core of
things. To a degree, she can be compared to Virginia Woolf (as some
of her critics have suggested) because of her rather obsessive philosophical
attitude and obviously feminist bias. But it would be wrong to believe
that Clarice Lispector is simply turning back the clock of fiction.
In a sense, her novels are poetic novels, but they seek to go further
than Virginia Woolf's experimental novels of the twenties and thirties.
While the author of To the Lighthouse was influenced by writers
like Frazer, Bergson, and Joyce, Lispector is influenced by the
contemporary school of social and psychoanalytical anthropologists.
In a very subtle way, her whole enterprise is linked with the one
prematurely attempted by Mario de Andrade. As one of her critics
pointed out recently, her novels are mythopoetic crea tions in which
morose, and even exasperating, explorations of a given reality are
reflected in very primitive types of consciousness. It has also
been noted by the same critic that her two most recent novels retrace
from the so-called primitive mind man's discovery of philosophical
consciousness. According to Jose Americo Motta Pessanha, the mythical
consciousness of man that Lispector explored in episodes of her
previous novels and in her short stories is fully organized into
a mythology in A Maça no escuro. The plight of this
novel's main character becomes a symbol of the hero's return to
the origins, to the roots, to the native land. In A Paixão
segundo G. H., the problem of the origins of everything is presented
in a more philosophical vein. Phenomenology and existentialism help
Lispector to search beneath the surface of man's consciousness.
Her task becomes increasingly more difficult and hard to follow.
Quite recently, one of her most successful short stories, "O
Ovo e a Galinha" ("The Egg and the Hen"), presents
subliminal, almost quartet-like variations on an age-old question.
But even if one fears that Lispector's philosophical assumptions
are sometimes a bit too lofty (it is easy to predict that they will
be considered so by the generally pragmatic North-American reviewers
when the forthcoming translation of A Mafia no escuro is
published in the United States), her skill in creating a totally
fictitious world, her hypnotic power to extract from words, simple
words, all their incantatory virtues, and the single-mindedness
of her tragic vision tend to act on the reader as a charm. In A
Maça no escuro (Apple in the Dark), the inner
struggle of a man who believes he murdered his wife is the pretext
for an unmitigated exploration of man's grasp of reality (both external
and internal), of his power to cope with concrete objects, of his
insertion into a foreign and always hostile environment -the world.
At the beginning of the novel the man becomes lost in a desert,
and in this emptiness even words are hard to find. In A Paixão
segundo G. H., the main character, a woman, talks endlessly.
She is trying to understand, trying very hard and obsessively to
understand reality. Her effort to grasp the naked reality of the
present moment and to recover her own soul reveals her passion,
a word Lispector uses deliberately in a double sense, the Greek
(to suffer) and the Christian. Paradoxically, the use of religious
language in this novel indicates her profane turn of mind. As one
Brazilian critic has remarked, the religious language serves to
mask her vision. It is an oblique way of de-sacralizing the real
world just as the effort to rediscover a primitive mode of consciousness
in her previous novel revealed the intention of destroying the assumptions
of rational psychology. Both novels are at the beginning of a new
and private mythology.
Part of Lispector's works is lost to the common reader. What he
generally finds is a brilliant and hard surface, a very morose tale,
mysterious characters that suffer from some obscure disease of the
mind. Captured by her prose, the reader discovers, in her novels,
that everyday reality becomes hallucinatory. At the same time, hallucinations
are presented as commonplace. Because of her mythological turn of
mind, she is more a sorceress than a writer. Her novels show the
incredible power of words to act on the reader's imagination and
sensitivity. On the whole, she has proved, going by a different
route, what Guimarães Rosa has also demonstrated: the importance
of language in the novel.
All her work reveals an almost maniacal determination to use the
right word, to exhaust the possibilities of each word, to build
up a solid structure of words. Her last two novels are written like
poems. They demand of their reader a concentration similar to that
required by the best contemporary poetry. Once I asked Guimarães
Rosa what he thought of Clarice Lispector's work. He told me very
candidly that every time he read one of her novels he learned many
new words and rediscovered new uses for the ones he already knew.
But, at the same time, he admitted that he was not very receptive
to her incantatory style. He felt it was alien to him. His reaction
is not unique and explains Lispector's limitations as a novelist.
Critics often talk about some form of art that needs an acquired
taste. Lispector's novels belong to this category, I think, while
Guimarães Rosa's have a more universal appeal.
The Latin-American Context
What Rosa and Lispector represent in the Brazilian novel of the
last decade is the new trend in Latin-American fiction. Nineteenth
century realism tended to obscure a novelist's obligation to present
more than individual characters, social or national descriptions,
ideas or beliefs. This realism overshadowed the fact that a novelist's
fight is mainly with language. Flaubert, Henry James, and Conrad
had already shown the way to a new type of fiction, widely conscious
of its dependence on language, structure, and style. The experimental
novel of the twenties and thirties in Europe and the United States
made this commonplace. But in Latin America it took the writers
some time to discover and accept it. Only in the last decade has
it become obvious in Latin-American fiction. The works of pioneers
like Borges and the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, of people
like Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, Onetti of Uruguay, Juan Rulfo of
Mexico, Ernesto Sabato and Julio Cortázar of Argentina made
the Spanish-American novelist widely aware that documentary (or
socialist) realism is finished; that regionalism as a mere expression
of local color is dead; that the novelist's real and only commitment
isto his personal vision and craft. The emergent new writers such
as Carlos Fuentes in Mexico, Gabriel García Marquez in Colombia,
Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Jose Donoso in Chile, and Carlos Martínez
Moreno in Uruguay followed this creative and deeply literary line,
like their counterparts of the new Brazilian novel.
For the new novelists of Latin America, the center of gravity has
shifted radically -from a landscape created by God to a landscape
created by men and inhabited by men. The pampas and the cordillera
have yielded to the great city. For the older novelists the city
was no more than a remote presence, arbitrary and mysterious; for
these new writers, the city is the axis, the place to which the
protagonist of their novels is ineluctably drawn. The somewhat depersonalized
vision of the novelists of the beginning of the century has reacquired
flesh and blood. Suddenly, powerful, complex fictional beings are
emerging from the anonymous masses of the great cities. This dramatic
change corresponds sociologically with the growth of the conurbations,
but also reflects the spreading influence of psychoanalysis. This
change has not spared the novelists who adhere, by and large, to
rural themes. Even if, on the surface, they still record the traditional
struggle of man against nature, the characters they are now presenting
are no longer abstractions or ciphers that justify some political
or sociological approach. They are complex and ambiguous human beings.
A forerunner of this new vision, the River Plate storyteller Horacio
Quiroga discovered early in this century that the natives of Misiones
and the outcasts of the European world who were stranded there could
be as sophisticated as people living in big cities. The Brazilian
novelists no longer write epics of pure and exploited campesinos
and gauchos and indios, with their two-dimensional
characterization, their "documentary" mechanical structure.
The cities and their chaotic inhabitants monopolize the attention
of the younger novelists. Today, in Latin America's great sprawling
cities -Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima- each of
the young writers aspires to be a Balzac, a Joyce, a Dos Passos,
a Sartre.
Yet these new novelists do more than imitate European and American
models. Though linked to these models by a continuous, living tradition,
and by a study of their technique and vision, the new novelists
have an acute social and political awareness. They combine this
awareness with a remarkable subtlety and a personal engagement that
is marked by sensitivity to other, transcendental dimensions. Through
these men, Latin America shows its face to the world and communicates
its hopes and despairs. A new man is emerging from the chaos and
revolutions, and the Latin-American novelists are the mentors of
this new man. Because of their efforts, the Latin-American novel
is beginning to take wing and rise above its present linguistic
limits. The novels are being translated, discovered, and discussed
in Europe and the United States; the number of international prizes
they win and their foreign editions are beginning to multiply. Latin-American
writers are now having some impact on milieux that had been, until
quite recently, rather unreceptive to their works. Perhaps not since
the introduction of the Russian novelists into nineteenth-century
France, or the modern Americans into postwar Europe, have similar
potentialities existed, both for Latin-American writers and for
their readers overseas.
In the present situation of the Western novel, dominated by the
arid writers of the nouveau roman or by the secluded, personal
fiction of the best American, British, or Italian novelists, the
all-embracing and over-confident attitude of the new Latin-American
novelists is worth considering. An enterprise of such vastness and
courage -the portrayal of a whole new society and the representation
of a contradictory, still unclassified type of man- is seldom attempted
with such vigor in our days. It is easy to believe that the Latin-American
novelists have a vision to communicate and to share: the common
vision of a continent that is torn by revolution and inflation,
but also emboldened by anger and mounting expectations, by its awareness
that it speaks for a truly emerging world.
To this continental task, the Brazilian novelists of this century
have already made a great contribution. In the works of the best
novelists a very clear line of development can be traced -the line
of anti-documentary and extra-realistic fiction. Mario de Andrade's
Macunaíma first revealed this development, but more
as a possibility than as an achievement. It was visible occasionally
in some of the novels of Lins do Rego and Graciliano Ramos, but
it achieved concrete form in Guimarães Rosa's vast fictional
world. It is bravely if obscurely present in Clarice Lispector's
hard, uncompromising books. It is the line of writers who believe
in the re-creation of a whole reality through language: the old
line of literature."
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Alfred A. Knopf published Jorge Amado's Gabriela,
Clove and Cinnamon in 1962; Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to
Pay in the Backlands in 1963; Guimarães Rosa's first book, Sagarana
(a cycle of nine related but independent tales set in Minas Gerais),
and Jose Lins do Rego's Plantation Boy (the first three volumes
of his sugarcane cycle) in 1966. It is also planning to publish
this year a second novel by Jorge Amado and Clarice Lispector's
Apple in the Dark.
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