I have readChico Buarque, Essa gente (2019)
Ana Paula Maia, De gados e homens (2013) Jô Soares, O Xangô de Baker Street (1995) Paulo Coelho, O Alquimista (1988), Onze minutos (2003) Lygia Fagundes Telles, Ciranda de pedra (1954) Jorge Amado, São Jorge dos Ilhéus (1944), Gabriela cravo e canela (1958) Lima Barreto, Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915) Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (1899) Aluísio Azevedo, O Cortiço (1890) Bernardo Guimarães, A Escrava Isaura (1875) |
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I have writtenChapters on Brazilian literature in Historia literatur iberoamerykańskich
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a book of initiation
Brazilian literature is one of simple stories, of simple people. It lacks excessive sophistication, bringing about freshness and directness of human experience. Paulo Coelho is particularly reputed as such an unsophisticated, popular writer; a professor like me should be almost ashamed of reading such things.
Nonetheless, I consider Onze minutos as a high literary achievement; what is more, one that could be born only in Brazil. Contrary to what one might imagine, it is extremely difficult to write an erotic novel without stepping out of boundaries of the good taste, and also of the respect for humanness. Coelho managed it precisely for those typically Brazilian qualities of freshness and directness. There is certainly a particular openness toward the body in Brazilian culture; he works with it. And perhaps to strengthen the dimension of respect, he transports this uninhabited Brazilian eroticism to the most improbable location: Geneva. He counts the story of a young woman, Maria, engaged by a Suisse impresario as a samba dancer for a night club, who ends up making a quiet and orderly life as a prostitute. In parallel to her professional life, she develops her private quest for love, and for orgasm, since the female sexual fulfilment is not immediate; it requires a long search, a long initiation. And finally she meets the right client, a painter, with whom everything becomes possible.
The novel is like a beautiful dream, a constant progress, very much in the line of the Alquimista. Maria lives her life step by step, always in search of her dream, when she works in the shop, when she decides to spend her saving on a trip to Rio de Janeiro, when she meets the impresario and accepts the job in Geneva. Her intimate search is documented on the interspersed pages of her journal, just to show she is the one who speaks, not the one who is spoken of; she is the one who searches, not the one who drifts away on the floats of time. And she arrives at every target, love, orgasm, marriage and family, even money and comfort, because she will live in a beautiful house with her husband and his two daughters. Some people criticize Coelho claiming that the concept is sweet and improbable like a modern Cinderella; nonetheless, the contemporary literature knows various prostitutes who marry and live happily ever after. Just like, to give an example, Geneviève in Houellebecq's La carte et le territoire (another beautiful Creole, that one from Madagascar, that Jed Martin, another artist, cannot forget).
In the background, it is easy to feel a good knowledge of all the classical erotic and pornographic literature; I have no doubts that Coelho must have read it carefully. He seems to be perfectly aware of a tradition of "female education", that in many, or most, textual instances implies whipping, some forms of enforcement, etc., just like, to give an example among many others, the anonymous Beatrice (published in Paris in 1920, and perhaps already in 1895, but usually associated with late Victorian culture). Coelho also has that kind of erotic initiation in his book, but it is only an episode among many other episodes, hardy the crucial one; he is able to go beyond, deeper. Quite close, as it is my private persuasion, to the actual mystery of female fulfilment.
Paulo Coelho, Onze minutos, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Rocco, 2003.
Neuville-sur-Oise, November 2020.
Nonetheless, I consider Onze minutos as a high literary achievement; what is more, one that could be born only in Brazil. Contrary to what one might imagine, it is extremely difficult to write an erotic novel without stepping out of boundaries of the good taste, and also of the respect for humanness. Coelho managed it precisely for those typically Brazilian qualities of freshness and directness. There is certainly a particular openness toward the body in Brazilian culture; he works with it. And perhaps to strengthen the dimension of respect, he transports this uninhabited Brazilian eroticism to the most improbable location: Geneva. He counts the story of a young woman, Maria, engaged by a Suisse impresario as a samba dancer for a night club, who ends up making a quiet and orderly life as a prostitute. In parallel to her professional life, she develops her private quest for love, and for orgasm, since the female sexual fulfilment is not immediate; it requires a long search, a long initiation. And finally she meets the right client, a painter, with whom everything becomes possible.
The novel is like a beautiful dream, a constant progress, very much in the line of the Alquimista. Maria lives her life step by step, always in search of her dream, when she works in the shop, when she decides to spend her saving on a trip to Rio de Janeiro, when she meets the impresario and accepts the job in Geneva. Her intimate search is documented on the interspersed pages of her journal, just to show she is the one who speaks, not the one who is spoken of; she is the one who searches, not the one who drifts away on the floats of time. And she arrives at every target, love, orgasm, marriage and family, even money and comfort, because she will live in a beautiful house with her husband and his two daughters. Some people criticize Coelho claiming that the concept is sweet and improbable like a modern Cinderella; nonetheless, the contemporary literature knows various prostitutes who marry and live happily ever after. Just like, to give an example, Geneviève in Houellebecq's La carte et le territoire (another beautiful Creole, that one from Madagascar, that Jed Martin, another artist, cannot forget).
In the background, it is easy to feel a good knowledge of all the classical erotic and pornographic literature; I have no doubts that Coelho must have read it carefully. He seems to be perfectly aware of a tradition of "female education", that in many, or most, textual instances implies whipping, some forms of enforcement, etc., just like, to give an example among many others, the anonymous Beatrice (published in Paris in 1920, and perhaps already in 1895, but usually associated with late Victorian culture). Coelho also has that kind of erotic initiation in his book, but it is only an episode among many other episodes, hardy the crucial one; he is able to go beyond, deeper. Quite close, as it is my private persuasion, to the actual mystery of female fulfilment.
Paulo Coelho, Onze minutos, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Rocco, 2003.
Neuville-sur-Oise, November 2020.
et in Brasilia ego
(we are all Isauras)
There was a time I knew nothing. I look with nostalgia into that time of innocence, when my brain was empty and avid of everything. Later on, I even wrote a history of Brazilian literature, but there had been a first time, there is always a first time. When I saw a telenovela, the genre itself was a thrilling novelty in Poland. The TV adaptation of Escrava Isaura dates back to 1976-1977, but I suppose it was a few years later that it came to such remote countries as Poland. Yes, it was in 1985, as I check now on Polish Wikipedia; I was thirteen years old. The telenovela became the most viewed emission in the history of Polish television. And it was then that I could read my first Brazilian novel, i.e. the text of Bernardo Guimarães published in instalments in a local newspaper, Kurier Lubelski. Later on, I also had it in a clumsy, paperback volume of Klub Interesującej Książki ("The Club of Interesting Book") that used to promote world literature in the late-communist Poland. We had quite a lot of world literature at the time; I suppose the ideological principle of internationalism was the reason of it, for the world was for the Poles quite a dark, mysterious affaire. We never travelled. And most of those books died unread, and if read, not understood, on the shelves of our public libraries. I often speak of the "world blindness" of the Poles, so desperately unable to comprehend an alien humanity. But of course, as I complain, one might say that I am myself the proof to the contrary. If those public libraries served for little, they at least produced a single world literature scholar - myself. Even if, actually, I came to my knowledge and awareness much later, and in quite distant locations, such as Lisbon, not Lublin. But let's agree that at least an inspiration, a source motivation must have been present there, in Eastern Poland.
And let's come back to Escrava Isaura. I still have this clumsy book, dirty and yellow, and I am just preparing to throw it away, as I pack my belongings to leave the country, dreaming about a new, quite a different library in my Dutch home. As fresh, and erudite, and polyglot as the the old one was cheap, and dirty, and full of dubious translations, resuming all these literatures of the world to a dull, transparent literary correctness of the vaguely 19th-century Polish prose (I suppose the text wasn't really translated from the Portuguese original). So the beginning of Escrava Isaura sounded just as any Polish novel about the landowning gentry: W żyznym i dostatnim okręgu Campos de Goitacases, nad brzegiem Paraiby, nie opodal miasteczka Campos, leżała piękna i okazała hacjenda. There were warzywnik, sad, pastwiska i pola uprawne, as well as ganek spowity w pnące kwiecie, with the sole difference that our native flora did not actually abound in climbers. It was the perfect incarnation of the familiar styl dworkowy ("manor style"); the slaves were just like serfs, and Leôncio, that lustful master who persecuted the unhappy Isaura would be just like any representative of Polish gentry in search of fresh peasant girls. All that was perfectly understandable, and provoked an intense emotional response in any Polish female reader. The Isaura in the translated novel looked as pale and contrasting with her own hair as Snow White in Disney's movie. The only thing that haunted me with its distant, alien, unfathomable depth was the slave song used for the opening credits of the telenovela. I still remember it today.
It was later on that I started to ask questions about this novel. Was it against slavery in general, or against the immoral effects of maintaining in such a condition a girl who was practically white and endowed with all the accomplishments of a gentle young lady? Was Isaura's situation so special, because she played piano? Was it about her race, or her breeding? Or it was all about her disruptive in-betweenness? These were the questions asked by the descendant of the Polish serfs, who demanded equality with the members of a class that moved direct from the countryside manors to universities, and that we used to call intelligentsia. They tolerated me in their saloons as long as I was young and charming. But soon things were to get complicated, and the treatment of masters and slaves was to come to the surface. We were all Isauras.
I am almost fifty years old, and a fully trained literature scholar, as I read A Escrava Isaura again. Yet I still read it as an allegory of my own life and struggle against the Leôncio of Polish intelligentsia. I was born as a charming and gifted serf, and I stepped beyond my condition. Some things were given to me as a charity. But at a given moment I rebelled, I escaped, I became Elvira, I participated in a dance party, I claimed a position in society where I didn't legitimately belong. I was condemned by my masters. They wanted to marry me to a hunchback gardener, to humiliate me once and for all, to show me my place (a hunchback gardener is bent to earth, mixed with the mud, and the contrary of standing tall and aloof). But the university and the country were already on the brink of bankruptcy. At the last moment, Álvaro came on a foaming horse to throw in the face of my oppressors their unsecured promissory notes. There was a much better marriage awaiting me, while Leôncio laid in a pool of his own blood. All that happened because I believed in values. Certainly, not the romantic values of true, constant love and purity of the heart, but rather the protestant values of work, efficiency and perseverance. I was Elvira, aware of my dignity, and, at the same time, I was Álvaro, and I had a choice. I could give up and forget, or I could go and meet the creditors, and buy up the unsecured notes. I took the right decision.
At almost fifty years of age, I am still capable of producing such a childish interpretation of a novel. But perhaps A Escrava Isaura is indeed a fairy tale, and such a Bettelheimian reading is the most appropriate. Or a feminist reading, in the style of Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run with the Wolves. Certainly, Guimarães' book was written in the context of a given cause; more than a decade after its publication, slavery in Brazil was abolished. But apparently, the narration did not lost its impact, its importance. For it was (also) made to keep our belief in the final triumph of a virtue, whatever our virtue might be.
Bernardo Guimarães, A Escrava Isaura [1875], read in a Polish translation: Niewolnica Isaura, trans. Dorota Walasek-Elbanowska, Warszawa, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986.
Kraków, 17.09.2021.
And let's come back to Escrava Isaura. I still have this clumsy book, dirty and yellow, and I am just preparing to throw it away, as I pack my belongings to leave the country, dreaming about a new, quite a different library in my Dutch home. As fresh, and erudite, and polyglot as the the old one was cheap, and dirty, and full of dubious translations, resuming all these literatures of the world to a dull, transparent literary correctness of the vaguely 19th-century Polish prose (I suppose the text wasn't really translated from the Portuguese original). So the beginning of Escrava Isaura sounded just as any Polish novel about the landowning gentry: W żyznym i dostatnim okręgu Campos de Goitacases, nad brzegiem Paraiby, nie opodal miasteczka Campos, leżała piękna i okazała hacjenda. There were warzywnik, sad, pastwiska i pola uprawne, as well as ganek spowity w pnące kwiecie, with the sole difference that our native flora did not actually abound in climbers. It was the perfect incarnation of the familiar styl dworkowy ("manor style"); the slaves were just like serfs, and Leôncio, that lustful master who persecuted the unhappy Isaura would be just like any representative of Polish gentry in search of fresh peasant girls. All that was perfectly understandable, and provoked an intense emotional response in any Polish female reader. The Isaura in the translated novel looked as pale and contrasting with her own hair as Snow White in Disney's movie. The only thing that haunted me with its distant, alien, unfathomable depth was the slave song used for the opening credits of the telenovela. I still remember it today.
It was later on that I started to ask questions about this novel. Was it against slavery in general, or against the immoral effects of maintaining in such a condition a girl who was practically white and endowed with all the accomplishments of a gentle young lady? Was Isaura's situation so special, because she played piano? Was it about her race, or her breeding? Or it was all about her disruptive in-betweenness? These were the questions asked by the descendant of the Polish serfs, who demanded equality with the members of a class that moved direct from the countryside manors to universities, and that we used to call intelligentsia. They tolerated me in their saloons as long as I was young and charming. But soon things were to get complicated, and the treatment of masters and slaves was to come to the surface. We were all Isauras.
I am almost fifty years old, and a fully trained literature scholar, as I read A Escrava Isaura again. Yet I still read it as an allegory of my own life and struggle against the Leôncio of Polish intelligentsia. I was born as a charming and gifted serf, and I stepped beyond my condition. Some things were given to me as a charity. But at a given moment I rebelled, I escaped, I became Elvira, I participated in a dance party, I claimed a position in society where I didn't legitimately belong. I was condemned by my masters. They wanted to marry me to a hunchback gardener, to humiliate me once and for all, to show me my place (a hunchback gardener is bent to earth, mixed with the mud, and the contrary of standing tall and aloof). But the university and the country were already on the brink of bankruptcy. At the last moment, Álvaro came on a foaming horse to throw in the face of my oppressors their unsecured promissory notes. There was a much better marriage awaiting me, while Leôncio laid in a pool of his own blood. All that happened because I believed in values. Certainly, not the romantic values of true, constant love and purity of the heart, but rather the protestant values of work, efficiency and perseverance. I was Elvira, aware of my dignity, and, at the same time, I was Álvaro, and I had a choice. I could give up and forget, or I could go and meet the creditors, and buy up the unsecured notes. I took the right decision.
At almost fifty years of age, I am still capable of producing such a childish interpretation of a novel. But perhaps A Escrava Isaura is indeed a fairy tale, and such a Bettelheimian reading is the most appropriate. Or a feminist reading, in the style of Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run with the Wolves. Certainly, Guimarães' book was written in the context of a given cause; more than a decade after its publication, slavery in Brazil was abolished. But apparently, the narration did not lost its impact, its importance. For it was (also) made to keep our belief in the final triumph of a virtue, whatever our virtue might be.
Bernardo Guimarães, A Escrava Isaura [1875], read in a Polish translation: Niewolnica Isaura, trans. Dorota Walasek-Elbanowska, Warszawa, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986.
Kraków, 17.09.2021.
