does literature still matter? (working notes on the states of the art of brazilian literature)

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Does Literature Still Matter? (Working Notes on the States of the Art of Brazilian Literature)Author(s): Ítalo Moriconi and Mark StreeterSource:Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, Special Issue: Luso-Brazilian Studies in the NewMillennium (Winter, 2003), pp. 83-88Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL:http://www.jstor.org/stable/3514078 .Accessed: 28/11/2013 21:27

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Does Literature Still Matter? (Working Notes on theStates of the Art of Brazilian Literature)

Italo Moriconi

The final ten to at the most fifteen years of the 20th century have frequently beencharacterized as a period of profound crisis in Brazilian literature. Along with thisdiagnosis-which is not, it may be said in passing, unique in any way either to our countryor to its ideologues-one hears of a crisis in literary ulture, of a crisis in literary ducation[formacao].' In the following pages I will presuppose a relation of necessity between various

diverse terms: literature, iterary life, literary culture, literary education, literary desire[vontade], literary etishization. Literature xists only if there exists a literary ife; literarylife exists only if there exists a literary culture, that is, a more or less codified system ofcollective reference to a determined, yet flexible, canonical repertoire of texts, at bottomfictional and poetical, within a secular civilization that has relegated o a second plane sacredtexts of monological reference such as the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran.

The history of literary culture, n the translinguistic, occidental and now even almostglobal sense of the expression, and of literary cultures, n the particularized, egional andnational sense, is the agonistic history of the dialectic between the trajectory f belles lettresand instances of canonical legitimation. The lively and rapid movement of belles lettres,

which derives from the marketplace nd the public sphere, s always producing anti-canons.In turn, iterary culture can survive only if there exists literary ducation as a central aspectof education n the larger sense (in the sense ofpaideia). The history of education s thesubjective and objective history of educational institutions in which are produced,reproduced, and circulated shared ntellectual values, ethics, and attitudes, hermeneuticaltraditions, as well as the codes and rituals of scholarly practice and thought. In Brazil today,such educational nstitutions are, solely and exclusively, the universities.2

From a socio-structural point of view, literary culture is a result of literary desire,organized in discourses and practices whose thematic obsessions, as well as whose formallimits and possibilities, border on a larger political-pedagogical space n which conflicts aredecided in relation o the

foundational principles and greater nds of the society, understoodas whatever social group (national, regional, local, transversal, virtual) in which theexistence of such a desire is registered and verified. Literary desire is what defines literaryfetishization, without which no text has either sense or value.3 From he institutional oint ofview, literary desire nurtures he formation of the formative radition, defining a horizon forwriting's social responsibility.

In the case of Brazil, writing's responsibility has been linked traditionally o its role inthe construction of an efficient state. One should remember here Antonio Candido's classicthesis about the period that he called the formation f Brazilian iterature the 18th and 19thcenturies), during which the pattern or intellectual and literary ife was instituted n ourcountry, a pattern marked by a certain duality in social roles in which the writer is alsofrequently a professional politician, and, more often than not, the professional politician a

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practitioner of fiction and poetry. In the semantics of Candido, formation s a collectiveterm referring o the historical construction of a we -a community f writers and readers,which he calls the literary system. Such a system is defined by the desire to have aliterature, which echoes the desire to have a nation, tself in formation nder he aegis of a

never-ending effort at political and cultural unification promulgated by the state, for whichwriters are, literally, functionaries.

Despite the ideological ruptures that have divided-for the most part in a rathersuperficial way-the protagonists of our literary and intellectual ife in the post-1 930 epoch,the responsibility for supplying the nation with a literature-a literature acceptable foradoption as a canon by state-supported edagogical nstitutions and capable of entering ntointernational circulation as works of quality-has been thrown upon the shoulders of all.There is a correlation between an individual's educational formation in literature, heformation of an autonomous literary system, and the formation of the nation as an entityendowed with its own erudite cultural dentity. The exportability of erudite or learned (in

sum, literary) culture has always been put forward as the exportation of that potentialnational identity. Oswald de Andrade believed that such exportation would come to beaccomplished by diplomat-intellectuals. Antonio Candido for his part trusted solely andexclusively in the nationalized university system, of which he was the primary roduct of thefirst generation.

No matter how dominant he constructive and pedagogical responsibility o the statemay have been for literary modernism, t failed to control the scene in its entirety; here wasan alternative urrent hat subsequently achieved dominance, one recycled and re-clothed bythe work of Clarice Lispector out of a vanguardist-kitsch ardrobe. This current pertains othe movement represented by prose writers of a tragic bent, such as Licio Cardoso, Corelio

Pena, Octavio de Faria and others, and by poets such as the early Vinicius de Moraesor the

Jorge de Lima from Tempo e eternidade to Invencao de Orfeu. It is a current directed moretowards the existential and subjective dimension of literary creation than towards itspedagogical insertion nto a comprehensive project nspired by the nation or state. If there sa pedagogy here, it is one of intimacy, of affects, of passions.

When we examine the directions that Brazilian fiction took in the 1960s in theemblematic works of Clarice Lispector and Rubem Fonseca we can see that this newdominant is already n play. Lispector and Fonseca opened a creative vein quite differentfrom that given by the model that obliged responsibility o the state (the intellectual patternof which is impiously caricatured n A Hora da Estrela). In Lispector's work-on every pageof every text-one finds reaffirmed the fact that the responsibility of artistic creationconcerns only the idiosyncratic and transgressive ndividuality of the artist herself, in herintense and permanent dialogue with a reading public that nitially was barely sought after,but which she projected with an obsessive, yet polymorphic, coherence nto virtually everybook that she published in her career.

In the characters nd situations of the greater part of Rubem Fonseca's work one detectsthe micrological horizon of a life-world foreign to the totalizing referentiality of thenational politics of unification, a life-world that functions only in accordance with its ownperverse dynamics. (One exception would be Agosto, in which Fonseca, in an investigationof the Brazilian national character via the dynamics of state politics, approaches thehistorical novel.)

The withdrawal of literature rom its relation to any articulated social or politicalexigency continues to be accentuated n the course of the 1980s. Giving voice to the period'slack, the rock musician Cazuza utters he somewhat belated cry: Ideologia eu quero umapra viver ( Ideology / I need one so that I can live ). A crucial aspect of the allegedmillennial crisis is the fact that emerging writers, not knowing in which values to anchor

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their works, see themselves as adrift and lost. Each writer finds himself faced with thecircumstance of having to create his own individual project, n which he must include in anat least implicit manner a definition of its addressee, of its desired reader's nature, becausethe category of the reader too has lost its clarity and homogeneity. If in the modernist

paradigm one wrote in order o construct a Brazilian iterature, t century's end this ethicaljustification for literature s no longer sufficient; for the time being at least, there is simplyno will sufficiently grandiose to be able to occupy the space vacated by the flight of form-giving meta-narrative.

I do not believe that this situation necessarily pertains to any crisis in the nationalproject-despite the fact that one may detect something like this in the process of thedramatic reorientation that occurred in the 1990s with its emphasis on supra-nationalarticulations most notably Mercosul), something hat brings, will bring or that continues obring important onsequences for the disciplinary knowledge of literature n our educationalinstitutions. What one must point out instead s precisely he disjunction etween, on the one

hand, the level of the national project that is undergoing ransformation nd, on the otherhand, the level of political-pedagogical projects hat would offer writers and readers reasonto continue writing and reading.

* * *

A standard eading of the millennial crisis links it to the transformations ssociated withpostmodemity as a global phenomenon. In order to develop suggestions already made byother critics and cultural commentators, ne can admit as a working hypothesis that Brazil

passed directly to postmoderity without ever having had implanted in its territory acanonical moder culture.4 Brazil entered into the era of televisual hegemony and,immediately thereafter, hat of digital literacy before it could be said to have gotten evenclose to winning the war for phonetic literacy and for primary and high school education.One must note, however, that this is a problem only insofar as one believes in a necessarycorrelation between the quality of literary art and the achievement of the Enlightenmentdream of the critical enlightenment of the masses.

In the final two decades of the past century one witnessed the abrupt, hough largelyuntraumatic, establishment of the hegemony of the multi-medial, multi-sensorial,communicational paradigm, which reaches capillary-like nto every corer of our ndividualand collective bodies. One leaves the order of Literature n order to enter into that ofCommunication. From iterary ormation as a cumulative, elf-referential ntellectual rocess(to an I and to a we ) one passes to a libidinal immersion n the constantly changinguniverse of the proliferating ystem of audiovisual signs. From the horizon of constructiveresponsibility one passes to a horizon dominated by the cultural practices of diversion andentertainment.

In Brazil, the primary and high school educational system already has opted forCommunication n place of Literature, erhaps on a scale unimagined n other parts of theworld. The teaching of the reading of signs predominates ver the alphabetic eading ofa discursive text, this understood as a specific type of reading, of reading as an activity, tselfdiscursive, involving paraphrase nd textual analysis accompanied y training n rhetoric ndhermeneutics, and designed to equip individuals and groups with the tools for ntervention nthe public sphere or, as one says in contemporary argon, for the exercise of their rights ascitizens.

Against such traditional iterary pedagogy, we see today that song lyrics, comic books,and facile newspaper cr6nicas constitute he privileged materials n the language lasses of

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our children and adolescents. That which in other countries may yet be seen perhaps as thedaring of revolutionary ducators or as a complement o other more mainstream ctivities hasbecome banal in the day-to-day reality of Brazilian schools. On the other hand,paradoxically, because of the lack of adequate quipment nd he unpreparedness f teachers

in terms of didactic methodology, the pedagogical possibilities of television itself, of video,and of personal computers remain unrealized.

If one looks at the schedules for the final years of high school, one sees that literatureclass, when it exists autonomously rom classes in grammar, ccupies two periods (or evenonly one period) each week and that t is limited, n the absolute majority f cases, to leadingstudents in mechanically dentifying the characteristics f the baroque, of romanticism, ofpamassianism, and of modernism n textual fragments. The reading of entire iterary works spractically banished from the lives of adolescents n the majority of Brazilian chools. Whenit is necessary to read entire books, works of juvenile literature re usually assigned.

There is a clear infantilization of the reader of literature he or she who reads because

he or she likes to read) that is reflected in the publishing world and in its concept ofliterature, and which has spread to the university system itself in the context of thedissemination and decentralization of educational institutions. The decline of the meta-narrative of formation n Candido's sense is indeed the decline of the hegemonic force ofUSP [The University of Sao Paulo], or of what one can call USP-ian thought, understood sa model of thought that endorses a strategy of power/knowledge. ronically, he USP projectattained ts political apogee at the same time as the complementary ystem formed by thepolitical parties PSDB and PT came into existence, while the humanistic hought that hadalways sustained it lost its centrality as a result of the growth of the university system'sgraduate programs n Letters.

* * *

One victim of this new configuration s what in the 1970s we used to like to call theopacity of the text. The myth that provides sustenance o the kind of literature emanded bythe marketplace s that literature s transparent nd clear, and that the writer of literatureshould be capable of communicating with a wide number of people. Male and female writersof the 1990s and of the first years of the 21st century have had to be competent compositionwriters above all. They have had to be prepared o say in an elegant or slightly provocativemanner that which the

publicwants to hear, that which the

public alreadyknows, a

publicthat each day more and more equates to and coincides with the TV-viewing public. A one-size-fits-all knowledge of life's facts and of esoteric spirituality uits the writer best. Thesymbol of all of this is the name Paulo Coelho. In a recent meeting with writers n Sao Paulo,Marcia Denser commented that the end or disappearance f literature n the course ofthe 1980s must have occurred on the day when Paulo Coelho first occupied the top spot inthe bestseller lists.

Indeed, three years ago, my graduate tudents and I made a quick comparison betweenthe bestseller lists of the mid- 1970s and those of the mid- 1990s; it was possible to confirmwhat editors have been saying for years: there is increasingly ess and less room for realliterature n the general accounting of book sales. It is of course true that the Brazilianpublishing market has not stopped growing and that, in absolute numbers, the sales forfiction and for the most renowned poets have increased as well (including contemporarypoets, as in the cases of Adelia Prado, Manoel de Barros, Ferreira Gullar and, more recently,Hilda Hilst). Nevertheless, the percentage of quality literature sold has diminished inrelation to the overall numbers of book production.

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The lists of the bestselling books of the 1970s appear ike something out of a dream: nthe same month one could find, simultaneously, recently published works by authors ikeLygia Fagundes Telles, Rubem Fonseca, Joao Antonio, Osman Lins.... Today, there is noliterature that is, quality fiction and poetry) to be found, even at the bottom of such lists.

Rather, such spots are dominated by books of little real value, which I propose be deemedthe Malba Tahan effect. 5

Still, contrary to the apocalyptic tones of some who see this crisis as absolutelyterminal, one must point out that there is a new generation of prose-writers hat surfacedduring the 1990s. Against what Cazuza was calling for at the beginning of the 1980s, thisgeneration has made de-ideologization its battle cry, while at the same time being able tovary significantly the ways in which such an anti-project might be manifested. One of thewords or expressions most repeated by young writers has been levity, or lightness. Anotherkeyword s de-dramatization. From his basis one can identify n prose fiction two principalcurrents, one that is invested in humor, another hat seeks to reinstate entimentalism. The

former has to do with language humor, with nonsense, which in the case of an author ikeMarcelo Mirisola achieves a total outrageousness, finding in literature he adolescentlyiconoclastic mirage of an offensive machine, which is nothing but the symmetricalcounterpoint o the comforting, seductive machine that is communicational, media-basedculture. There are other notable authors on the humor side, among whom I might highlightNelson de Oliveira and Berardo Carvalho.

The recuperation of sentimentalism has been achieved in part by new female, thoughnot feminist, writers (I will mention here the name of Adriana Lisboa) as well as by gaywriters, although not exclusively, since one can also say that an author like RubensFigueiredo s equally involved in linking literature nd affective intensity. n the sentimental

current n contemporary Brazilian literature glimpse the glimmer of values: solidarity,generosity, identity-not as an essence-but as the dialogical process of the construction finterpersonal memories and histories.

Translated by Mark Streeter

NOTES

See Roberto Schwarz n 1999: At present he literary ystem seems a repository of

forces in disintegration. do not say this with any great yearning, but in a spirit of realism.The system yet manages to function, or can function, as something real and constructiveinsofar as it is one of the spaces in which we can sense what is being decomposed. Thecontemplation of the loss of a civilizatory orce does not for its part cease being civilizatory.For a long time we have tended to see inorganicity, and the hypothesis of its beingovercome, as the particular destiny of Brazil. Now this inorganicity and the ruination of thebelief in overcoming it appear as the destiny of the greater part of contemporary umanity;this is not, in this sense, a secondary experience Seqiiuncias brasileiras 58). See alsoGalvao.

2 1 have investigated the topic offormacao in the intellectual radition n two essays:Conflito e

integracao.A

pedagogiae a

pedagogiado

poemaem Antonio Candido, and

Um estadista sensitivo. A nogao de formacao e o papel do literario m Minhaformacao deJoaquim Nabuco.

3 I have for some time been attempting o elaborate a reflection on the category of thepolitical-pedagogical n essays such as those cited in the previous note, as well as in the

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does literature still matter? (working notes on the states of the art of brazilian literature)

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