"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.