Does Literature Still Matter?

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

The final ten to at the most fifteen years of the 20th century have frequentlybeen characterized as a period of profound crisis in Brazilian literature. Along with this diagnosis-which is not, it may be said in passing, uniquein any way eitherto our country or to its ideologues-one hearsof a crisis in literaryculture,of a crisis in literaryeducation [formacao].' In the following pages I will presupposea relationof necessitybetweenvarious diverse terms: literature,literary life, literary culture, literary education, literarydesire exists only if there exists a literarylife; literary [vontade], literaryfetishization.Literature life exists only if there exists a literaryculture,that is, a more or less codified system of collective reference to a determined,yet flexible, canonical repertoireof texts, at bottom fictional andpoetical, within a secularcivilizationthathasrelegated to a secondplanesacred texts of monological referencesuch as the Bible, the Torah,or the Koran. The history of literaryculture,in the translinguistic,occidental and now even almost global sense of the expression, and of literarycultures,in the particularized, regional and nationalsense, is the agonistichistoryof the dialecticbetweenthe trajectory of belles lettres and instances of canonical legitimation.The lively and rapidmovement of belles lettres, which derives fromthe marketplace andthe public sphere,is alwaysproducinganti-canons. In turn,literaryculturecan survive only if thereexists literaryeducationas a centralaspect of "education"in the largersense (in the sense ofpaideia). The historyof educationis the subjective and objective history of educational institutions in which are produced, reproduced,and circulatedsharedintellectualvalues, ethics, and attitudes,hermeneutical traditions,as well as the codes andritualsof scholarlypracticeandthought.In Braziltoday, such educationalinstitutionsare, solely and exclusively, the universities.2 From a socio-structuralpoint of view, literaryculture is a result of literarydesire, organized in discourses and practiceswhose thematicobsessions, as well as whose formal limits andpossibilities, borderon a larger political-pedagogical spacein whichconflictsare decided in relationto the foundationalprinciplesandgreaterends of the society,understood as whatever social group (national, regional, local, transversal,virtual) in which the existence of such a desire is registeredand verified. Literary desire is what defines literary fetishization,withoutwhich no text has eithersense or value.3Fromthe institutional pointof the formationof the formativetradition,defining a horizonfor view, literarydesire nurtures writing's social responsibility. In the case of Brazil, writing's responsibilityhas been linkedtraditionally to its role in the constructionof an efficient state.One shouldremember here AntonioCandido'sclassic thesis aboutthe periodthathe called the "formation of Brazilianliterature" (the 18thand 19th centuries), during which the patternfor intellectualand literarylife was institutedin our country, a patternmarkedby a certain duality in social roles in which the writer is also frequentlya professional politician, and, more often thannot, the professionalpolitician a
Luso-BrazilianReview,XL 0024-7413/02/083 ? 2003 by the Boardof Regents of the Universityof Wisconsin System

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is a collective practitionerof fiction and poetry. In the semanticsof Candido,"formation" termreferringto the historicalconstructionof a "we"-a community of writersand readers, which he calls "the literarysystem." Such a system is defined by the desire to have a underthe aegis of a literature,which echoes the desire to have a nation,itself "information" the effort at and cultural unification state, for which by never-ending promulgated political writersare, literally, functionaries. Despite the ideological rupturesthat have divided-for the most part in a rather superficialway-the protagonistsof our literaryand intellectuallife in the post-1930 epoch, the responsibility for supplying the nation with a literature-a literatureacceptable for adoptionas a canon by state-supported pedagogicalinstitutionsandcapableof enteringinto internationalcirculationas works of quality-has been thrownupon the shouldersof all. There is a correlation between an individual's educational formation in literature,the formation of an autonomous literarysystem, and the formationof the nation as an entity endowed with its own eruditeculturalidentity.The exportabilityof eruditeor learned(in sum, literary) culture has always been put forwardas the exportationof that potential national identity. Oswald de Andradebelieved that such exportationwould come to be accomplished by diplomat-intellectuals.Antonio Candido for his part trustedsolely and productof the exclusively in the nationalizeduniversitysystem,of which he was the primary first generation. No matterhow dominantthe constructiveand pedagogicalresponsibilityto the state may have been for literarymodernism,it failed to controlthe scene in its entirety;therewas an alternativecurrentthatsubsequentlyachieveddominance,one recycledandre-clothedby the work of ClariceLispectorout of a vanguardist-kitsch This current wardrobe. pertainsto the movementrepresented by prose writersof a tragicbent, such as Licio Cardoso,Corelio Pena, Octavio de Fariaand others,and by poets such as the earlyVinicius de Moraesor the Jorge de Lima from Tempoe eternidadeto Invencaode Orfeu.It is a currentdirectedmore towards the existential and subjective dimension of literary creation than towards its pedagogical insertioninto a comprehensiveprojectinspiredby the nationor state.If thereis a pedagogy here, it is one of intimacy,of affects, of passions. When we examine the directions that Brazilian fiction took in the 1960s in the emblematic works of Clarice Lispector and Rubem Fonseca we can see that this new dominant is alreadyin play. Lispectorand Fonseca opened a creativevein quite different from that given by the model thatobliged responsibilityto the state(the intellectualpattern of which is impiously caricatured work-on everypage in A Hora da Estrela).In Lispector's of every text-one finds reaffirmedthe fact that the responsibility of artistic creation concerns only the idiosyncraticand transgressiveindividualityof the artistherself, in her intense and permanentdialogue with a readingpublic thatinitiallywas barelysought after, but which she projectedwith an obsessive, yet polymorphic,coherenceinto virtuallyevery book that she published in her career. In the characters and situationsof the greaterpartof RubemFonseca'sworkone detects the micrological horizon of a "life-world"foreign to the totalizing referentialityof the national politics of unification,a life-world that functionsonly in accordancewith its own perversedynamics.(One exceptionwould be Agosto, in which Fonseca, in an investigation of the Brazilian national charactervia the dynamics of state politics, approaches the historicalnovel.) The withdrawal of literaturefrom its relation to any articulatedsocial or political exigency continuesto be accentuatedin the course of the 1980s.Givingvoice to the period's lack, the rock musician Cazuzauttersthe somewhatbelatedcry:"Ideologia/ eu quero uma pra viver" ("Ideology / I need one so that I can live"). A crucial aspect of the alleged millennial crisis is the fact that emergingwriters,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 the circumstanceof having to createhis own individualproject,in which he must include in an at least implicit mannera definition of its addressee,of its desiredreader'snature,because the category of the reader too has lost its clarity and homogeneity. If in the modernist at century'send this ethical paradigmone wrote in orderto constructa Brazilianliterature, justification for literatureis no longer sufficient;for the time being at least, there is simply no will sufficiently grandioseto be able to occupy the space vacatedby the flight of formgiving meta-narrative. I do not believe that this situation necessarily pertainsto any crisis in the national project-despite the fact that one may detect something like this in the process of the dramatic reorientationthat occurred in the 1990s with its emphasis on supra-national articulations(most notablyMercosul),somethingthatbrings,will bringor thatcontinuesto in oureducational bring important consequencesfor the disciplinaryknowledgeof literature institutions.Whatone mustpoint out insteadis preciselythedisjunction between,on the one hand, the level of the nationalprojectthat is undergoingtransformation and, on the other a reason hand, the level of political-pedagogicalprojectsthatwould offerwritersandreaders to continue writing and reading.
* * *

A standard associatedwith readingof the millennialcrisis links it to the transformations postmodemity as a global phenomenon.In orderto develop suggestions alreadymade by other critics and culturalcommentators, one can admitas a workinghypothesisthatBrazil passed directly to postmoderity without ever having had implanted in its territorya canonical moder culture.4 Brazil entered into the era of televisual hegemony and, immediatelythereafter,that of digital literacybefore it could be said to have gotten even close to winning the war for phonetic literacyand for primaryand high school education. One must note, however, that this is a problemonly insofaras one believes in a necessary correlationbetween the quality of literaryart and the achievementof the Enlightenment dreamof the critical enlightenmentof the masses. In the final two decades of the past centuryone witnessed the abrupt,though largely untraumatic, establishment of the hegemony of the multi-medial, multi-sensorial, communicational which reachescapillary-likeinto every corer of ourindividual paradigm, and collective bodies. One leaves the order of Literaturein order to enter into that of Communication.Fromliteraryformationas a cumulative, intellectual self-referential process (to an "I" and to a "we") one passes to a libidinal immersionin the constantlychanging universe of the proliferatingsystem of audiovisualsigns. Fromthe horizon of constructive responsibilityone passes to a horizon dominatedby the culturalpracticesof diversion and entertainment. In Brazil, the primary and high school educational system already has opted for Communicationin place of Literature, perhapson a scale unimaginedin otherpartsof the world. The teachingof the "readingof signs"predominates over the "alphabetic" readingof a discursivetext, this understoodas a specific type of reading,of readingas an activity,itself in rhetoric and andtextualanalysisaccompanied discursive, involving paraphrase by training in hermeneutics,and designed to equip individualsandgroupswiththe tools forintervention the public sphere or, as one says in contemporary jargon, for the exercise of theirrights as citizens. Against such traditionalliterarypedagogy,we see todaythatsong lyrics, comic books, and facile newspapercr6nicas constitutethe privilegedmaterials classesof in the "language"

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our children and adolescents.Thatwhich in othercountriesmay yet be seen perhapsas the activitieshas to othermoremainstream educatorsor as a complement daringof revolutionary become banal in the day-to-day reality of Brazilian schools. On the other hand, of teachers andthe unpreparedness paradoxically,because of the lack of adequateequipment in termsof didacticmethodology,the pedagogicalpossibilities of television itself, of video, and of personal computersremainunrealized. If one looks at the schedules for the final yearsof high school, one sees that"literature" class, when it exists autonomouslyfromclasses in grammar, occupies two periods(or even of cases,to leading only one period) each week andthatit is limited,in the absolutemajority students in mechanicallyidentifyingthe characteristics of the baroque,of romanticism,of worksis Thereadingof entireliterary pamassianism,and of modernismin textualfragments. schools. When practicallybanishedfromthe lives of adolescentsin the majorityof Brazilian it is necessary to read entire books, works of juvenile literature are usually assigned. There is a clear infantilizationof the readerof literature (he or she who readsbecause he or she likes to read) that is reflected in the publishing world and in its concept of literature, and which has spread to the university system itself in the context of the dissemination and decentralizationof educational institutions.The decline of the metanarrativeof formationin Candido's sense is indeed the decline of the hegemonic force of USP [The Universityof Sao Paulo], or of what one can call USP-ianthought,understood as a model of thoughtthatendorsesa strategyof power/knowledge.Ironically,the USP project attainedits political apogee at the same time as the complementary system formedby the political parties PSDB and PT came into existence, while the humanisticthoughtthat had always sustained it lost its centralityas a result of the growth of the universitysystem's graduateprogramsin Letters.
* * *

One victim of this new configurationis what in the 1970s we used to like to call the demandedby opacity of the text. The myththatprovidessustenanceto the kindof literature the marketplaceis that literatureis transparent and clear, and that the writerof literature should be capableof communicating with a wide numberof people.Maleandfemalewriters of the 1990s and of the firstyearsof the 21stcenturyhave hadto be competentcomposition writersabove all. They have had to be preparedto say in an elegant or slightly provocative mannerthat which the public wants to hear, thatwhich the public alreadyknows, a public thateach day more and more equatesto and coincides with the TV-viewing public. A "onesize-fits-all" knowledge of life's facts and of esoteric spiritualitysuits the writerbest. The symbol of all of this is the namePaulo Coelho. In a recentmeetingwithwritersin Sao Paulo, MarciaDenser commentedthat the "end"or "disappearance" in the course of of literature the 1980s must have occurredon the day when Paulo Coelho first occupied the top spot in the bestseller lists. Indeed,threeyearsago, my graduatestudentsand I madea quick comparisonbetween the bestseller lists of the mid-1970s and those of the mid-1990s; it was possible to confirm what editors have been saying for years:there is increasinglyless and less room for "real" literaturein the general accounting of book sales. It is of course true that the Brazilian publishing market has not stopped growing and that, in absolute numbers,the sales for fiction and for the most renowned poets have increasedas well (including contemporary Gullarand,morerecently, poets, as in the cases of Adelia Prado,Manoelde Barros,Ferreira Hilda Hilst). Nevertheless, the percentage of quality literaturesold has diminished in relationto the overall numbersof book production.

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The lists of the bestsellingbooks of the 1970s appearlike somethingout of a dream:in the same month one could find, simultaneously,recentlypublishedworks by authorslike Lygia Fagundes Telles, RubemFonseca, Joao Antonio, OsmanLins.... Today, there is no literature(that is, quality fiction and poetry) to be found, even at the bottom of such lists. Rather,such spots are dominatedby books of little real value, which I proposebe deemed the "MalbaTahaneffect."5 Still, contrary to the apocalyptic tones of some who see this crisis as absolutely terminal, one must point out that there is a new generationof prose-writersthat surfaced during the 1990s. Against what Cazuzawas calling for at the beginning of the 1980s, this generationhas made de-ideologization its battle cry, while at the same time being able to vary significantly the ways in which such an anti-project might be manifested.One of the words or expressionsmost repeatedby young writershas been levity, or lightness. Another Fromthis basis one can identifyin prose fiction two principal keywordis de-dramatization. currents,one that is invested in humor,anotherthat seeks to reinstatesentimentalism.The formerhas to do with languagehumor,with nonsense, which in the case of an authorlike Marcelo Mirisola achieves a total outrageousness,finding in literaturethe adolescently iconoclastic mirage of an "offensive machine," which is nothing but the symmetrical media-based counterpointto the comforting,seductive machinethat is communicational, culture.There are othernotable authorson the humorside, amongwhom I might highlight Nelson de Oliveira and Berardo Carvalho. The recuperationof sentimentalismhas been achieved in partby new female, though not feminist, writers (I will mention here the name of AdrianaLisboa) as well as by gay writers, although not exclusively, since one can also say that an author like Rubens and affective intensity.In the sentimental Figueiredois equally involved in linking literature currentin contemporaryBrazilian literatureI glimpse the glimmer of values: solidarity, of generosity,identity-not as an essence-but as the dialogicalprocess of the construction interpersonalmemoriesand histories. Translatedby MarkStreeter
NOTES

See Roberto Schwarzin 1999: "At presentthe literarysystem seems a repositoryof forces in disintegration.I do not say this with any greatyearning,but in a spiritof realism. The system yet manages to function, or can function, as somethingreal and constructive insofar as it is one of the spaces in which we can sense what is being decomposed. The contemplationof the loss of a civilizatoryforce does not for its partcease being civilizatory. For a long time we have tended to see inorganicity, and the hypothesis of its being overcome, as the particular destiny of Brazil.Now this inorganicityandthe ruinationof the belief in overcoming it appearas the destiny of the greaterpartof contemporary humanity; this is not, in this sense, a secondary experience"(Seqiiuncias brasileiras 58). See also Galvao. 2 1 have investigatedthe topic offormacao in the intellectualtraditionin two essays: "Conflito e integracao.A pedagogia e a pedagogia do poema em Antonio Candido,"and "Um estadistasensitivo. A nogao de formacaoe o papeldo literarioem Minhaformacaode JoaquimNabuco." 3 I have for some time been attemptingto elaboratea reflectionon the categoryof the in "political-pedagogical" essays such as those cited in the previousnote, as well as in the

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pedagogia da following: "Qualquercoisa fora do tempo e do espaco (Poesia, literatura, and "A outradimensao:desidentidades." barbarie)" 4 Silviano Santiago, "Alfabetizacao,leiturae sociedade de massa";Antonio Candido, "Literatura e subdesenvolvimento." 5 For those unfamiliar with Malba Tahan, see the website: http://www.ohomemquecalculava.hpg.ig.com.br/index.htm.
WORKS CITED

A educacdopela noite. Sao Paulo: e subdesenvolvimento." Candido, Antonio. "Literatura Atica, 1987. 140-163. CadernoMais.Folha de Sao Paulo 17 Galvao, WalniceNogueira. "CulturaContraCultura." Mar. 2002: 5-9. Moriconi, italo. "Conflitoe integracao.A pedagogiae a pedagogiado poema em Antonio Candido." Antonio Candido y los estudios latinoamericanos. Ed. Rail Antelo. 2001. 249-281. Iberoamericana, Pittsburgh:InstitutoInteracional de Literatura ."Um estadista sensitivo. A nocao de formanaoe o papel do literarioem Minha formacao de JoaquimNabuco." Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais 16.46 (June 2001): 161-172. . "A outra dimensao: desidentidades." Raizes e rumos - Perspectivas interdisciplinares em estudos americanos. Ed. Sonia Torres. Rio de Janeiro:Sette Letras,2001. 71-78. ."Qualquer coisa fora do tempo e do espaco (Poesia, literatura,pedagogia da 1999. 75Leiturasdo ciclo. Ed. Rauil Antelo. Florian6polis: Grifos/Abralic, barbarie)." 86. Santiago, Silviano. "Alfabetiza:ao, leitura e sociedade de massa." Rede imagindria Televisdo e democracia. Ed. Adauto Novaes. Sao Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1991. ["Reading and discursive intensities; on the situation of postmodernreception in Brazil."Trans.Michael Aronna.Boundary2 [Durham]20.3 (Fall 1993): 194-202.] Schwarz, Roberto.Seqiiencias brasileiras. Sao Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1999.

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