Um Brasil à française

 valor online, 27/02/2009

Um Brasil à française

Por Vanessa Barone e Raquel Landim, de São Paulo

Foi com misto de espanto e desejo que os franceses olharam pela primeira vez para o recém-descoberto Brasil, com sua natureza exuberante, rica do pau-brasil - útil para a indústria têxtil francesa -, e uma vida selvagem de fazer corar os pálidos rostos das nobres francesas. Por um bom tempo, foi assim: fornecíamos o exotismo e eles, a civilidade. Como toda relação que sobrevive ao tempo, ela evoluiu e causou impacto sobre a sociedade brasileira em vários aspectos - a começar pela língua, passando pela filosofia e as ciências humanas, além da moda, da literatura, das artes plásticas, gastronomia, arquitetura, do cinema, da política e da economia. "Em todas as épocas, a França esteve presente em nossa história como sinônimo de civilização e cultura", diz Mary Del Priore, historiadora com pós-doutorado na França e autora de "Revisão do Paraíso: os Brasileiros e o Estado em 500 Anos de História".   Vale do Anhangabaú, em São Paulo, na década de 40: fotografia do francês Pierre Verger integra o calendário "Fotógrafos Franceses em São Paulo", editado pela Imprensa Oficial Neste ano, a aproximação francesa com o Brasil certamente será maior com a programação que marca o Ano da França no Brasil. Entre 21 de abril e 15 de novembro, o país vai receber exposições de artes plásticas, espetáculos musicais e de dança, mostras de cinema, eventos literários e festivais gastronômicos, que deverão expor - e em alguns casos revitalizar - o fascínio que a França sempre exerceu sobre o Brasil. Os eventos culturais, no entanto, não vão ocorrer isolados da agenda político-econômica. Em 7 de setembro, o presidente Nicolas Sarkozy visitará o Brasil pela segunda vez em menos de um ano, um sinal de reestreitamento. Afinal, as relações entre as duas nações são antigas. A Câmara de Comércio França -Brasil, por exemplo, foi criada na virada do século XX e o Instituto de Alta Cultura Franco-Brasileiro, em 1922. Ao longo dos anos, porém, a força dessa troca político-cultural se dissipou. Depois da Segunda Guerra, os Estados Unidos conquistaram o espaço paradigmático que pertencia à França na economia, na política e na cultura brasileiras, e se consolidaram como a grande referência mundial. "Vivemos a época da cultura anglófona e a colaboração cultural e artística entre Brasil e França é bem menor do que já foi no passado", diz Renato Janine Ribeiro, professor de filosofia da Universidade de São Paulo (USP). No entanto, apesar de hoje o Brasil ser o grande emergente na principal área de influência dos Estados Unidos, a França é que desponta como aliada nas ambições de sua política externa. O embaixador francês em Brasília, Antoine Pouillieute, é categórico ao afirmar que a França apoia o Brasil em seu objetivo de ter um papel na governança mundial do século XXI.   Rua 3 de Dezembro, no centro de São Paulo, em registro do fotógrafo francês Jean Mazon, que morou no Brasil nos 1940, para onde se mudou quando tinha 25 anos A admiração do Brasil pela cultura francesa ganhou peso em 1808, com a vinda da família real portuguesa para o Rio, ela própria fortemente influenciada pelos hábitos e costumes de Paris. Segundo Mary Del Priore, com a abertura dos portos, o Brasil recebeu artistas, cozinheiros, modistas, representantes de indústrias e também emigrados ilustres, vindos da França, o que aumentou a influência por aqui. "A língua diplomática e literária colaborou ainda mais para irradiar sua presença entre nós", diz Mary. A partir dessa fase, na Biblioteca Nacional, os volumes mais consultados passaram a ser os de Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) e Victor Hugo (1802-1885). Nessa época, a França era o modelo para a alta burguesia brasileira, que durante décadas se sentiu quase como uma colônia parisiense. Na maioria das escolas, o ensino do francês passou a ser obrigatório e as ciências humanas brasileiras ganhavam musculatura com o pensamento da terra de Voltaire. Na corte, os cardápios eram escritos em francês. Daquela época foram herdados os molhos maionese, madeira e béchamel, além das técnicas - que vão da maneira de preparar guisados ao estilo de criar molhos. A confeitaria de bolos hoje feita no Brasil também tem suas raízes na França, com itens que nunca saíram dos cardápios, como o coq au vin, o escargot, o croissant e o mil-folhas (mille-feuilles).   O Viaduto do Chá, idealizado pelo francês Jules Martin, é fotografado por seu campatriota Pierre Verger, na década de 40 Outra herança daquele período de hegemonia francesa é a linguagem arquitetônica, uma das que melhor captaram a essência dessa fase. Os traços "à française" encaixam-se, principalmente, em quatro escolas: o neoclássico, o eclético, o art nouveau e o moderno. O necolássico surgiu justamente com a chegada da Missão Francesa, a convite de dom João VI, pouco depois de sua mudança para o Rio. O grupo de artistas foi comandado por Grandjean de Montigny (1776-1850), o primeiro professor oficial de arquitetura no Brasil. Montigny foi o principal responsável por projetos que reproduziam cânones do neoclássico francês, o mais moderno de seu tempo, na corte tropical. Essa inclinação francesa pode ser verificada também em edificações posteriores, iniciadas com a renovação urbana carioca do início do século XX. Antes de participar da Comissão de Melhoramentos da Cidade do Rio, entre 1875 e 1876, o então jovem engenheiro Francisco Pereira Passos (1836-1913) esteve em Paris para aperfeiçoar-se na prestigiosa École des Ponts et Chaussées. Na mesma época, o barão Haussmann (1809-1891), responsável pela reforma urbana de Paris entre 1853 e 1870, reformulava a capital francesa. "O plano de reformas do Rio fracassou, mas o paisagista Auguste François Marie Glaziou [paisagista bretão] conseguiu transformar o campo de Santana num arremedo do famoso Bois de Boulogne, de Paris", afirma Mary Del Priore. Anos mais tarde, entre 1902 e 1904, já como prefeito, Pereira Passos resolveu criar uma "Paris-sur-mer", respondendo às aspirações de uma elite que desejava dar nova feição ao país. Abriram-se novas avenidas - a imponente avenida Central e o início da Atlântica - e rasgaram-se túneis - como o do Leme -, arrasaram-se cortiços na Cidade Velha e edificaram-se prédios monumentais, no apreciado estilo eclético tão em voga nas capitais europeias. "A ideia era tornar o Rio uma metrópole glamourizada pela decoração, portanto, uma Paris à beira-mar", afirma Mary.   Vista do prédio da Light e do Viaduto do Chá, em São Paulo, em registro de Pierre Verger: exposição com seus trabalhos integra a programação do Ano da França no Brasil Enquanto isso, em São Paulo, a elite que enriquecia por causa do café também procurava reproduzir os hábitos franceses. Muitos filhos de fazendeiros ou da burguesia da capital estudavam na França e falavam o idioma. A arquitetura que dominava a paisagem paulistana também tinha sotaque: a Estação Júlio Prestes, a Catedral da Sé e o Palácio Campos Elíseos são exemplos contundentes dessa era. O francês Jules Martin (1845-1935), que idealizou o Viaduto do Chá, e o brasileiro Ramos de Azevedo (1851-1928), que projetou o Teatro Municipal, a Pinacoteca do Estado e o Mercado Municipal, são dois nomes importantes da escola eclética paulistana. Ramos de Azevedo estudou na Bélgica e teve mestres franceses. O curioso na apropriação da estética francesa pelo Brasil é que, na década de 40, a força cultural da Europa era tão grande que o país absorveu movimentos franceses que o próprio continente rejeitava. É o caso da arquitetura moderna desenvolvida por Le Corbusier (1887-1965), que orientou vários arquitetos brasileiros, como Lúcio Costa (1902-1998), Carlos Leão (1906-1983) e Oscar Niemeyer. O estilo moderno surgiu logo depois do art déco no país. "Em 1944, o Brasil era uma referência nesse estilo de arquitetura", diz a professora Maria Lucia Bueno, doutora em sociologia e fundadora do mestrado acadêmico em moda, cultura e arte do Centro Universitário Senac. Mas um dos pontos mais importantes do movimento modernista no Brasil havia começado anos antes, com a Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922, também de inspiração francesa. A sugestão de realizá-la partiu da francesa Marinette Prado, mulher do mecenas Paulo Prado, que se espelhava na Semana de Deauville. Idealizado por Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976), o movimento teve participação de Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Anita Malfatti (1889-1964), Victor Brecheret (1894-1955), entre outros, que estudaram em Paris, com bolsas patrocinadas pelo governo de São Paulo.   O francês Claude Lévi-Strauss fotografa o carnaval paulistano na avenida São João, no centro da cidade, em 1937 Tarsila é considerada uma das artistas que melhor souberam traduzir essa influência nos movimentos artísticos brasileiros. Construiu seu repertório em escolas e ateliês de Paris, como a prestigiada Academie Julian, e foi ainda uma das primeiras artistas do país a ter quadros expostos na capital francesa. O escritor modernista Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), um dos articuladores da Semana de Arte, que também viveu na França, chegou a escrever uma referência à francesa no "Manifesto do Pau-Brasil": "Os alfandegários de Santos examinaram minhas malas, minhas roupas. Mas se esqueceram de ver o que eu trazia no coração. Uma saudade feliz, de Paris." No início da década de 30, um passo determinante para o fortalecimento desse ideário francês no Brasil foi dado pela escola filosófica francesa, que ajudou a constituir a Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, a espinha dorsal da USP. Durante quase quatro décadas, o Departamento de Filosofia da USP teve professores franceses remunerados, pelo menos parcialmente, pelo governo da França. O peso da cultura do país era tão grande nas salas de aula que os mestres ministravam seus cursos na língua de Flaubert. Entre os professores estavam mitos da intelligentsia europeia, como Gilles-Gaston Granger, Claude Lefort, Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) e Gérard Lebrun. "A filosofia ali ensinada era rigorosa, republicana e talvez de esquerda", observa Renato Janine Ribeiro. "O caráter republicano era tipicamente o da 3ª República Francesa, com seus valores de educação universal, de laicidade do Estado e de incorporação das massas na cidadania." A participação dos professores franceses na vida acadêmica da USP, segundo Janine, pode ser dividida em dois tempos. A primeira fase ocorreu na década de 30, quando os jovens Roger Bastide (1898-1974), Claude Lévi-Strauss e Jean Maugüé destacaram-se como professores de ciências humanas. "O professor convidava seus estudantes a uma imersão na cultura: assistiam a filmes, a peças de teatro, liam romances e os comentavam com o professor." Essa etapa, observa, foi vital para a formação de uma geração extremamente criativa na cena intelectual do Brasil. O mais celebrado professor dessa geração é, sem dúvida, Lévi-Strauss, que no fim do ano completou 100 anos, em Paris, onde mora. Considerado o antropólogo mais importante do século XX, o autor de "Tristes Trópicos" deu aulas na USP por três anos, de 1935 a 1938. Nesse período, organizou uma lendária expedição etnográfica a Mato Grosso, onde estudou os índios cadiuéus e os bororos. A segunda etapa, mais científica, foi introduzida por professores com uma convicção estrita do que é a filosofia. "Há de se destacar a participação de Michel Debrun, que lecionaria até o fim da vida na Unicamp, e de Gérard Lebrun, na 'Revista Brasilense' e nas discussões políticas prévias ao golpe de Estado de 1964'", diz Ribeiro. Outros nomes que colaboraram para a construção do pensamento nacional são os dos filósofos Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) e Simone de Beauvoir (1905-1980), que em 1960 desembarcaram no Brasil. Além do casal existencialista, Danielle Ancier - hoje Rancière - e Jean Galard, mais tarde diretor do serviço cultural do Museu do Louvre, também fizeram a cabeça dos intelectuais brasileiros. O apogeu dessa presença francesa na universidade daqui se deu em 1966, quando o jovem - e já polêmico - Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ministrou um curso, com abordagem estruturalista, sobre o assunto do livro que publicaria no ano seguinte: "As Palavras e as Coisas". A partir da década de 70, porém, o vínculo francês começou a diminuir. Primeiro, o governo passou a manter apenas duas cátedras na Faculdade de Filosofia da USP, depois a reduziu para apenas uma cadeira e a fez itinerar por Campinas antes de extingui-la definitivamente. Ainda assim, os professores franceses teriam cumprido um papel determinante em dois planos principais: na formação técnica dos alunos e na formação de um ideal de intelectual atuante na cena pública, cidadãos em contato com a sociedade. "Dessa forma, o legado francês na filosofia brasileira continua tendo a sua importância", afirma Janine. Assim como na filosofia, a influência francesa no campo da estética foi determinante no Brasil e seu legado ainda é visível. Berço da alta-costura e das maisons de maior prestígio do mundo, como Christian Dior (1905-1957) e Coco Chanel (1883-1971), a França, é claro, tem uma relevância extraordinária na construção do imaginário fashion nacional - e ocidental. Mas antes desses dois ícones, Mary Del Priore relembra o peso de Paul Poiret (1879-1944), que desfolhou os grandes vestidos rodados e elegeu a imagem da mulher-sílfide, longilínea e magra, em oposição às curvilíneas do fim do império. Em pleno início do século XX, Poiret afrouxou a silhueta e propôs novas modelagens, como as calças de odaliscas e os vestidos em forma de quimonos. A libertária Coco Chanel seguiu revolucionando a roupa feminina, propondo um vestuário menos rígido e mais casual, que se utilizava de tecidos pouco nobres - caso do jérsei, usado por ela para confeccionar vestidos, que até então só era usado para fazer lingeries. Coco adaptou peças do guarda-roupa masculino para o feminino, como o suéter - que nos trajes delas era usado sobre saia reta. O visual ornava com a aparência pessoal da estilista, que era magra, de seios pequenos e cabelos curtos, "à la garçonne". "A América é a grande responsável pela difusão da moda francesa nesse momento", diz Maria Lucia Bueno. A moda casual, com toques esportivos, feita por Coco Chanel, foi muito valorizada no novo continente. Até os anos 60, a moda francesa ditou o gosto não só no Brasil, mas no resto do mundo. "Para se ter uma ideia, na década de 20, 70% da produção da alta-costura francesa era exportada." Na época, as elites brasileiras e americanas consumiam o prêt-à-porter de luxo, que chegava pelos grandes magazines. "As casas francesas de moda, como a Lanvin, tinham representantes no Brasil, e o Masp tinha uma escola de moda que mostrava os desfiles de Elsa Schiaparelli [1890-1973] e Christian Dior." Esse fenômeno começou a configurar-se de outra forma a partir da década de 60, quando a moda passou a buscar suas referências no comportamento jovem. "A partir daí, não foi mais somente a elite a ditar o que era chique e a moda passou a ser vista como elemento de identidade de um grupo." A presença da França ainda é forte na cultura nacional quando se pensa em moda de luxo, apesar de, atualmente, à frente das maisons tradicionais estarem criadores ingleses - John Galliano, na Dior -, alemães - Karl Lagerfeld, na Chanel - e americanos - Marc Jacobs, na Louis Vuitton. No cinema, o período de maior irradiação da produção francesa foi durante a nouvelle vague, nos anos 60. Cineastas como Jean-Luc Godard e François Truffaut (1932-1984), que realizavam um cinema mais autoral, foram os que mais marcaram o cinema brasileiro, sobretudo com os filmes que fizeram no início da década, avalia o crítico Inácio Araújo. "O diretor Davi Neves tem muito a ver com Truffaut; Rogério Sganzerla [1946-2004] e Carlos Reichenbach têm muito a ver com Godard, apesar de essa influência ser difusa e estar misturada com outras, vindas do cinema italiano, do europeu de forma geral e do americano", analisa Araújo. E antes que alguém desconfie de que o Ano da França no Brasil esconde tão-só um novo olhar de cobiça, como foi em meados de 1500, a curadora-geral do evento, Anne Louyot, esclarece: "A França não quer dominar, quer compartilhar. Podemos trabalhar juntos em vários campos, como na arquitetura e na moda sustentável." E, de quebra, saborear juntos o que França e Brasil têm de melhor.

 

Rimbaud and Verlaine's silly fixations

Germaine Greer

The Guardian, Monday 9 March 2009

 

Infernal bridegroom? Arthur Rimbaud. Photograph: Corbis

 

Amid the various booty that came my way on my 70th birthday is Edmund White's new biography, Rimbaud: the Double Life of a Rebel. It was given by an old friend, why I cannot say. He might have guessed I'd be utterly frustrated by White's pedestrian and inaccurate translations of the verse of Rimbaud and Verlaine. What did surprise me, and might surprise him, is that my patience with the deeply banal theme of anal sex is finally exhausted. So what if Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote a bad sonnet about the "trou du cul"? Moi aussi j'ai un trou du cul - and it interests me not at all. This is White's version of part of the octave by Verlaine:

Dark and puckered like a violet carnation
It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,
Still moist from an amorous inclination which follows the gentle dip
Of the white buttocks down to the edge of its scarlet hem.

These days everything is ironic, so describing an anus as a violet carnation must be deliberately over the top, as tasteless as dressing a toilet roll in a crocheted tutu. The actual title of the sonnet, not given by White, is L'Idole. To suggest that anyone would worship an anus is a consciously outrageous contrivance. This is the point at which I lose patience, because a preference for the anus is actually as banal and ridiculous as any other sexual fixation.

White reminds us that the boy Rimbaud was the "infernal bridegroom" and the older Verlaine the "foolish virgin". (White also tells us that, to shock and disgust Daudet, Rimbaud allowed him to believe that he was the passive partner and let the older poet satisfy himself on him as much as he liked; only among the middle classes would you find two drunks trying to scandalise their equally middle-class drinking companions by advertising their sexual preferences.) Since classical antiquity, being on the receiving end has been understood to be inappropriate and degrading for grown men. Rimbaud fascinates White and his readers because he controlled, harassed and terrorised Verlaine "in the bedroom". Drunken, dirty, guilty, feminised, abject Verlaine cannot be a hero, although in my view he is the better poet.

As a variant on the penetration theme, anal intercourse has been used probably more often by heterosexuals than homosexuals. There are few human societies in which it is unknown, though none is prepared to admit that the practice is at all common. In the 1970s, Italian boys used to tell me that American girls insisted on it because they wanted to keep their hymens for their husbands; American men told me the same thing about Italian girls. We shall never know how many farmers' wives bit their pillows as their husbands took their pleasure; what we do know is that, long before contraceptive appliances, birth rates fell in western Europe when people began to want to limit their families, almost certainly because of variations on the penetration theme. Some were intensely pleasurable, but by no means all. Lucky women might get to choose; the rest didn't.

Most people are unaware that the pinnacle of the relationship between Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover is an episode of anal intercourse, which burnt out "the shames, the deepest oldest shames in the most secret places", arriving at "the refinements of passion". "It took some getting at, the core of physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it." Lawrence elaborates the rapists' fantasy, that what women dread they secretly desire. "And how in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!" From then, it would be "forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity". I can think of a shorter name for the "heaviest ore of the body".

In her 1936 biography of Rimbaud, Enid Starkie theorises that he discovered his sexuality after he was raped by soldiers. For Rimbaud, this was "a sudden and blinding revelation of what sex really was". Yet there is no indication in the documentation of Rimbaud's life that this rape happened. What is interesting is that Starkie, looking at anal penetration from a woman's point of view, rather than regarding it as a holy ritual and the highest form of intimacy, could see just how ordinary and unrefined it actually is.

O estilo brasileiro e suas consequências

 

 

O estilo brasileiro e suas consequências

Roberto DaMatta

 

Dizia-se que o Brasil não tinha caráter ou estilo. Afirmava-se que qualquer coisa se desmoralizava entre nós. Não havia pecado debaixo do Equador mas, como compensação, nada funcionava. Exceto o futebol, o carnaval e o jogo do bicho. Curioso que ninguém observasse que nesta admissão ia um enorme desmentido. O jogo do bicho revela uma criatividade rara no concerto das criações populares. Nele, como demonstrei num livro escrito com Elena Soárez, sublima-se o desejo de modernização de ricaços aristocratizados pelo imperador, com a pobreza aguçada no período pós-abolição. Isso para não falar da inusitada humanização dos números através dos bichos. O carnaval relativiza rindo a seriedade hipócrita dos superiores, propondo uma trégua da mendacidade pátria. E o futebol, nascido na admirada Inglaterra, confronta o desejo de vencer, com regras que valem para todos, obrigando a uma calibragem entre meios e fins. E como em sociedade nada se perde, não ter estilo é ter um grande estilo.

Com a crise somos obrigados a enxergar o estilo brasileiro. Ele se torna visível no futebol onde o "jogo de cintura" conjuga técnica e criatividade. Evitamos bater de frente, preferindo a "bicicleta", a "pedalada", a "paradinha", o finge que vai, mas fica. Enfim, todos esses descendentes da malandragem, expressivos da dificuldade de aceitar com o limite e o proibido. Se o estilo é a manifestação de uma singularidade, o nosso estilo tem como base o ideal de aproveitar a vida, de ficar rico de uma só tacada e de supor que, no nosso caso, a lei será aplicada de modo diferenciado.

Pena que essa experiência malandra não possa mais ser aplicada com a mesma legitimidade e desfaçatez, em todos os campos da vida social. Se antes do Plano Real era possível reinventar a economia, criar novas moedas e, em nome do povo, brincar com a inflação, hoje isso é impraticável. O plano teve o mérito de ser o primeiro ponto de confluência concreto entre a "esquerda" e a "direita" no Brasil. Sem ele, estaríamos enfrentando a crise mundial com receitas provavelmente bipolares, o que só faria aumentar a nossa predisposição ao confronto político, com sua fácil retórica acusatória, pessoal e autoritária. Graças ao Plano Real, temos discernimento entre o que é uma questão econômica e financeira; e o que é um problema político ou jurídico. O controle do econômico, dentro de um quadro liberal, trouxe uma inevitável demanda de fazer o mesmo no plano político e em outras esferas da sociedade. Se ordenamos a moeda, os banqueiros e o mercado, porque não podemos fazer o mesmo com os políticos?

A experiência de sucesso tendo como pano de fundo a crise, leva a uma transformação do sistema. Não basta definir o Brasil por ausências, mas de aperfeiçoar o estilo vigente, enfrentando e sabendo que se pode vencer, os seus pontos falhos e cegos.

Não há melhor exemplo disso do que os mijões. De repente, descobrimos que o esquecido carnaval de rua é ótimo, mas com ele vêm os mijões que empestam nossas ruas e constrangem a nossa decência. Sacamos que a questão dos mijões não se resolve somente com a presença maciça de banheiros químicos porque eles os destroem impiedosamente. É preciso entender os mijões para acabar com a mijada. O estilo brasileiro afirmava que com uma nova Constituição, a "cidadã", íamos engendrar imediatamente cidadania. Vale lembrar que não há França sem franceses; e não pode haver cidadania sem cidadãos que a honrem. Destruir armas não acaba com a violência, do mesmo modo que, na "sereníssima república" de Machado de Assis, não se consegue honestidade eleitoral mudando a forma das urnas.

É preciso que, antes das urnas, das moedas e dos banheiros químicos, tenha-se a noção dos estilos e costumes. Proclamar a República não foi suficiente para corrigir a desigualdade aristocrática do Império. Se mijar é um ato expressivo de masculinidade, então será preciso fazer algo mais efetivo do que reclamar dos mijões. Uma multa ao alcance de todos seria talvez mais adequado (como no passado) do que esses rituais policialescos e jurídicos complicados que não servem para nada. Exceto para garantir aos mijões o nobre direito de mostrar que têm bilu e que são mesmo homens, pois mulher não mija na rua. Se assim fosse, todos usariam banheiro!

Em suma: se mijar na rua tem a ver com ser homem; se a política não é uma atividade destinada ao bem do País, mas a permanência no poder e ao enriquecimento pessoal, com oscilações rápidas entre esses dois objetivos, de nada vale mudar o nome da moeda ou repetir que o Congresso Nacional é uma instituição crítica num sistema democrático. Continuaremos a promover e a assistir a essa grande mijada nacional, tentando corrigir o mau hábito com o aumento de banheiros químicos. Não dá mais para enfrentar o mal com remédios errados sem uma calibragem entre meios e fins, como é característico do nosso bom e velho estilo. Pois ele retorna na forma de uma mistura da palhaçada com a hipocrisia.

ESTADO SP  13 março 09

BECKETT

Say it again, Sam…

 

                                                    

 C'est bizarre : de Samuel Beckett, nous conservons l'image d'un personnage de Samuel Beckett. Tout nous suggère que son regard d'aigle, son visage douloureux perché sur sa silhouette osseuse, musculeuse et noueuse se sont échappés d'une représentation d'En attendant Godot dans laquelle il aurait joué le rôle de l'arbre au bord du chemin. Comme si sa physionomie annonçait nécessairement son âme, ainsi que l'écrit Voltaire dès la première page de son Candide, notre mémoire associe Beckett à l'austérité, la sécheresse, la raideur. Il y avait de cela, certainement, car les légendes ne naissent pas de rien. Et avec cela taciturne, pas commode, sauvage, fermé. Un maître de l'incommunication. N'empêche qu'en 2010, ses lecteurs français risquent d'avoir un choc en découvrant le livre qui vient de paraître en anglais : le premier tome de The letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 (Cambridge University Press), déjà encensé par la critique anglaise et américaine. Toute une vie revisitée à travers une correspondance échangée avec des amis, des peintres, des musiciens, des écrivains, des étudiants, des traducteurs, des éditeurs, le tout parfaitement « autorisé » et édité par les soins de deux spécialistes agréés du beckettland. 828 pages pleines de révélations importantes ou microscopiques distillées à travers 2500 lettres sur les 15000 qui seront publiées au final. A commencer par celle-ci qui les supplante toutes : Samuel ne ressemblait absolument pas à Beckett. Non qu'il fut double ou quelque chose du genre. Ou qu'il ait cherché à tromper son monde. Mais il était si peu expansif sur sa sphère privée qu'une fois mise à jour, elle brise l'icône confinée en son hiératisme par les médias même, ce qui n'est pas plus mal. Lui qui avait fait de l'aspiration au silence la respiration de son œuvre, on l'y découvre drôle, piquant, débridé, bavard, autocritique, éloquent, plein d'allant, scatologique, Même la manifestation de ses épisodes dépressifs y est d'une ironie mordante. Il crée des néologismes déjà bien dans sa manière ; dans un même paragraphe, des phrases en anglais, en français ou en italien côtoient  d'autres en latin ou allemand. On y trouve des échos de la guerre civile espagnole et des choses vues dans l'Allemagne de la montée du nazisme, aussi bien que des comptes-rendus de ses lectures, plus conventionnelles qu'on ne l'imagine, ou une évocation essentielle de sa cure psychanalytique et de sa solitude. N'allez pas croire que c'est là un mauvais coup posthume de ses admirateurs. Le prix Nobel 1969 avait lui-même réglé la chose, au risque que sa statue fut ébréchée. A deux conditions toutefois : « Que cela concerne mon travail » et « Pas de commentaire, s'il vous plaît ». Avis aux universitaires qui ne peuvent s'empêcher de mettre (1) leur grain de sel* au moindre mot (a) du grand homme (2) dont ils ont la charge –mais ils ont pu obtenir de donner le contexte, ce qui est parfois plus long que la lettre elle-même, il avait bien raison de se méfier. A supposer qu'ils la publient dans le quatrième et dernier volume de cette fascinante Correspondance, sauront-ils jamais le contexte de cette carte anodine de 1986 dans laquelle Beckett écrivait à un journaliste « … avec plaisir mais, malheureusement, ma vue ne me le permet plus » ? Pour écrire son portrait à l'occasion de ses 80 ans, je lui avais demandé, non pas une interview qu'il aurait refusée, mais une partie d'échecs, qu'il aurait acceptée, disait-il, si le flou, le vague et la nuit ne l'envahissaient. Il est mort trois ans après. Fin de partie.

("Samuel Beckett photogtraphié à Portobello Road par Camilla Hill"; "Beckett dans l'uniforme de la Croix-rouge irlandaise pendant la guerre" photo D.R.; "Beckett à une répétition d'En attendant Godot (1961)" photo Roger Pic)

 

 

 

 

Susan Sontag in 1966.

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February 1, 2009

Essay

Sontag: The Precocious Years

By LUC SANTE

You might say there are two kinds of writers: those who keep a journal in the hope that its contents might someday be published, and those who do not keep a journal for fear that its contents might someday be published. In other words, no journal-keeping by a writer who harbors any sort of ambition is going to be entirely innocent. The complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author's desk drawer is therefore, to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit.

This notion inescapably comes to mind when one reads the entries by the young Susan Sontag collected in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Like any author's journal worth reading, it contains items that anticipate prominent themes of her later published work, as well as others that seem terribly private. What's unusual, maybe, is that sometimes the intellectual items sound more naked and the private items more hedged. The situation is far from simple anyway. As Sontag's son, David Rieff, who edited the volume, explains in his very moving preface, she left no instructions as to what should be done with her journals — "she continued to believe until only a few weeks before her death that she was going to survive." For that matter, "at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition." And those two matters constitute by far the largest themes in the book.

In the end, Rieff decided that Sontag's narrative of self-creation trumped any concern for discretion. The oddly evangelical-sounding title comes from an entry made in 1949, when she was 16: "Everything begins from now — I am reborn." She is referring to sexuality, or at least to an acceptance of her physical self and a general feeling of carpe diem, but the sensation pervades the whole book. She was, in Rieff's words, an "ambitious young person from the deep provinces who wants to become a person of significance in the capital," and self-education in all senses of the term apparently occupied her every moment.

Her age is always at the fore. She is a mere 14 in the first entry, a thumping declaration of beliefs (atheism, socialism and "the only difference between human beings is intelligence"), and only 30 at the end, and her blend of sophistication and naïveté is such that she sounds more often like a much older person whose judgment is sometimes questionable than like a youngster in oversize clothing. Still, the sort of youthful zeal that leads her to peremptory judgments and furious imperatives — "Somewhere . . . I confessed a disappointment with the Mann '[Doctor] Faustus.' . . . This was a uniquely undisguised evidence of the quality of my critical sensibility!"; "Read Condillac!" — never left her, in writing or in conversation. (I encountered her on various social occasions but didn't know her well.)

She was always serious to a fault. Even if, later on, she was able to examine and analyze certain aspects of popular culture (as in "Notes on Camp," 1964), she could undertake such a thing only in service to a higher goal — she was immune to subintellectual cultural pleasures. "How to defend the aesthetic experience?" she asks at 16, wanting it to consist of "more than pleasure," although eight years later, in a rare moment of slippage, she confesses to "a kind of foolish pride which comes from dieting on high culture for too long." Even as the narrative of the journals shows her consistently growing, broadening her focus, her dedication to high culture remains severe and unwavering — it is her church, which must be defended from half-measures and backsliding and squalid ease. She dismisses Faulkner's "Light in August" as a type of "vulgar writing" and decides that by comparison to Kafka, "Joyce is so stupid." She did not wait to be asked to become a gatekeeper, but took on the job before she had proper access to the gate.

In pointed contrast to this intellectual assurance, the emotional side of her education is touchingly uncertain and halting. She realizes at 15 that she has "lesbian tendencies," then alternates between giving herself over to them and (in the spirit of the time) attempting to fight them: "I wanted so much to feel a physical attraction for him and prove, at least, that I am bisexual." She remains a model student, for example making detailed lists of gay slang terms and lore, but homosexuality also causes her to engage with the concrete details of life — for instance, in her evocations of gay bars in late 1940s San Francisco — in ways that her high-mindedness curtails in other areas. She is eager and ardent, but self-lacerating, unsure that she deserves love and sex. She falls in love serially, but the tall, merciless H. soon comes to dominate her life — H. first appears in the Bay Area in 1949 and will reappear a decade later in Europe, still treating Sontag badly and trampling on her self-questioning passion.

Then Sontag marries. The sequence of events is breathtakingly abrupt. She moves to attend the University of Chicago on a scholarship in the fall of 1949. In November she writes, "A wonderful opportunity was offered me — to do some research work for a soc[iology] instructor named Philip Rieff." In the next entry, Dec. 2: "I am engaged to Philip Rieff." A few pages later, after a trip to California to interview Thomas Mann, comes the entry of Jan. 3, 1950: "I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness." And then she is on to "War and Peace" and Balzac and lists of works on theology. Her decision to marry Rieff is never explained or examined, and in fact she says nothing more about the matter, barring an ambiguous recounted dream, until she begins fulminating against the institution of marriage in 1956. The intervening years barely exist in the journals — five years dissolve in nine pages. The birth of her son in 1952 goes unrecorded; he makes his first appearance in an aside.

She comes to life again in 1956, or perhaps it is the journal that does, once again brimming with reading lists and self-exhortations and accounts of intellectual conversations. A year later she has accepted a scholarship to Oxford, and she leaves her husband and son. We understand that there are tears and scenes — Rieff had wanted her trip to coincide with an appointment of his own abroad — but are swept up in her exhilaration: she has been sprung from jail. For a while, the pleasures of the journal become almost entirely narrative. She soon leaves Oxford for the greener pastures of Paris, and there she is reawakened, happily tossed in a whirlwind of intellectual, social and sexual activity. She renews with H., which is probably not the best idea in retrospect, but eventually she links with H.'s ex, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, who is a much better match for her. In 1959 she returns to the United States, to New York City, where she gains custody of her son and begins writing professionally, editing and teaching. We leave her poised on the brink of her great public career.

"Reborn" is in some ways less like a normal book and more like a person — it is consistent in its deepest reaches, but subject to enormous mood swings. Some very large matters are barely glimpsed, whizzing by at terrific speed, while sundry smaller ones are examined in exhaustive detail. Motives often have to be guessed, and important players enter and exit summarily, without introduction. Various opinions and exhortations — or crotchets or tics — are repeated to the point where it takes a great deal of good will or simple affection to tolerate them. But Sontag does successfully elicit the reader's good will and affection. We may never have seen her in quite this light — fully human and as flawed as any of us. We may want to go reread some of her more lapidary work, now appreciating the vulnerable soul that shared a body with that radical will.

Luc Sante's most recent book is "Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005."

 

Borges's 'Library of Babel'

Section: Arts+ > Printer-Friendly Version

A Universe of Books: Borges's 'Library of Babel'

By ALBERTO MANGUEL | September 24, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-universe-of-books-borgess-library-of-babel/86435/

 

n 1939, employed in a small municipal library of Buenos Aires where the oafishness of his colleagues made him weep with daily frustration, the 40-year-old (and still largely unknown) Jorge Luis Borges collected a few of the reading notes he had made on the streetcar to and from work, and pieced together a short text which, under the title "The Total Library," he sent to the magazine Sur, where it appeared in the August issue. The essay, which links the names of Democritus, Lewis Carroll, Cicero, and the forgotten German fantasy writer Kurd Lasswitz, was developed a couple of years later into another, slightly longer one, "The Library of Babel," which Borges eventually included in his collection "The Garden of Forking Paths" (later expanded under the title of "Ficciones"). The end-paper pages of William Goldbloom Bloch's "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" (Oxford University Press, 192 pages, $19.95) reproduce the first and last pages of Borges's manuscript, showing that it was written (in what Borges called "the handwriting of a dwarf") on accounting sheets with the heading Haber, or "Credit," in Gothic letters that magically make the "H" look like a "B" and the "r" like an "l."

Kristofer Porter

Reading is an erratic craft. Judging Borges's book "an exotic and decadent work," the jury for the Argentinean National Prize in Literature refused to give him a prize and, in spite of the support of a handful of intelligent friends, it was decades before the extraordinary importance of the work was recognized. Several are the pieces in "The Garden of Forking Paths" (later included in "Ficciones") that have attained the stature of classics; "The Library of Babel" in particular has given rise to a small critical library of its own. Barely nine pages long, "The Library of Babel" is nothing less than an attempt to describe the chaotic order and meaning of the universe, building on the ancient notion of the world as a book (or a book itself divided into an almost infinite number of books) in which we ourselves are written, and which we also attempt to read.

Mr. Bloch, professor of mathematics at Wheaton College, has woven an elegant, ingenious, scholarly interpretation of Borges's text that contradicts the disingenuous "unimaginable" of his title. In 1967, Borges told the French critic Georges Charbonnier that he had kept two ideas in mind when writing "The Library of Babel." The first was a commonplace, an exposition of the combinatory art that has enthralled mathematicians from Archimedes onward, and a conceit amusingly described by Lewis Carroll in "Sylvie and Bruno": that since the number of words in any given language is finite, their possible combinations — i.e., books — are finite also, and that therefore, in the near future, writers will no longer ask, "What book shall I write?" but, "Which book shall I write?"

Borges confessed that, beyond this abstract idea, he was also describing the troubling feeling of being lost in the universe, and of not being able to understand it. "In my story," he told Charbonnier, "there is an intellectual component, and another, of greater importance, I think, that has to do with my sense of loneliness, anguish, uselessness, and of the mysterious nature of the universe, of time, and more importantly, of ourselves. Or rather, of myself." Sensibly, Mr. Bloch has busied himself with the first idea, and left the second one to the empathy of each individual reader.

Mathematics was one of Borges's lifelong passions; he considered it, with theology, a branch of fantastic literature. In his early childhood, Borges had been taught by his father the paradoxes of Zeno and the rudiments of algebra, and his writing abounds in references to magical mathematical imaginings, such as Leibniz's binary notation or Brouwer's map, which, as Guillermo Martinez demonstrated in his "Borges and Mathematics," lent Borges a framework or scaffolding for many of his fictions, most notable among them "The Library of Babel."

In Borges's imagining, the Library of Babel itself is a building composed of an indefinite number of hexagonal galleries. A ventilation shaft in the center of each allows the visitor to see the floors above and below, in endless sequence. Each wall of each hexagon holds 32 books of identical size; each book has 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, approximately 80 letters. All possible combinations of the 25 orthographic symbols make up the books; therefore, every conceivable book must exist in the monstrous library. In his story, Borges gives just a few examples of what might be found here: "the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of the true catalogue ..."

The numbers he chose for the shelves and books in his story, Borges later confessed, were simply those of the municipal library in which he worked — and which he himself found so horrible. "Learned critics," he noted later, with some evident pleasure, "studied these figures and generously lent them a mystical significance." Mr. Bloch, with similar generosity, and in an exercise he himself describes as "tedious, uninspired, but straightforward" if carried out in full, asks whether our entire universe could in fact contain this dizzying number of books. Even if it could (if the size of the library, as Borges suggests, coincided with that of the universe), the inconceivably vast space would make it impossible for a human librarian to even barely begin its exploration. Walking 60 miles a day for 100 years, notes Mr. Bloch, our vigorous librarian would only travel a distance slightly less than that which light covers in two minutes. "To cross our universe, which is incomprehensibly dwarfed by the Library, light would need to travel for a least 15 billion years." It would take a librarian, moving at the leisurely pace of a connoisseur, considerably longer — a mathematical certainty that mirrors the nightmarish vision Borges said he wished to convey.

Though I confess that my mathematical illiteracy made it difficult for me to follow many of his formulas and graphs, the lucidity of Mr. Bloch's arguments enlightened me nevertheless, in conclusions such as this: "The librarian's life and the Library together embody a Turing machine [a rudimentary computer], running an unimaginable program whose output can only be interpreted by a godlike external observer." This fits precisely with Borges's intuition that the world is its own representation, a notion repeated many times throughout his writings: As a map that coincides with the geography it surveys ("The Cartographers' Empire"), as a world encyclopedia whose entries already are the very world it describes ("The Congress"), as a point of light in which everything in the universe is assembled ("The Aleph"), and as the goings and comings of one man incarnated in that man (the epilogue to "Dreamtigers").

Mr. Bloch notes in his preface that the ideal reader of his book is Umberto Eco. Unworthy as I am to aspire to the condition of the great polymath (with whom I share nothing but the girth and the beard), I was delighted and instructed by the book's wit and wisdom, and grateful for the guided tour through the mathematical foundations on which both the Library of Babel and its mirror, our universe, are so delicately balanced.

Mr. Manguel is a critic, translator, essayist, and author. Among his many books are "A History of Reading," "With Borges," and "The Library at Night."

 

Join the world literature tour to Portugal

We're back in Europe this time round, and we need your help in setting the itinerary

 

Slightly foggy profile: Portugal

 

Australia proved a popular destination for the world literature tour but after almost two months sunning ourselves down under, it's time to move on. First, though, a recap of the delights under discussion.

The big Aussie names flagged up again and again were Helen Garner ("pretty fabulous", says ozzygirl), Tim Winton, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and Clive James, with Coetzee also claimed as Australian after making his home in the country.

The Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz also picked up a few mentions – "an enthralling read, even if it's not quite as intelligent as it thinks it is," said davesoul.

Patrick White, however, split opinions, "a Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in one" for LeoToadstool and "the greatest Australian writer, hands down" for solidmandala, but "beyond tedious" for devojka and "a thoroughly unsatisfactory experience" for Lowfields.

Randolph Stow found a number of champions, while Dorothy Porter's The Monkey Mask, a lesbian detective novel written in verse which has become a cult classic, says msmary, sounds like a lot of fun.

Teejaykay had some great recommendations for life stories from western Australia's indigenous people, the Nyungar, while ozzygirl said that some of the most interesting recent writing has been by Aboriginal writers, citing Sally Morgan's My Place, Kim Scott's novels, Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and Wandering Girl by Glenyse Ward.

Bloggers grappled with a googly thrown by BillyMills who asked what differentiates Australian writing from other English-language literatures, and how its geography, "with that ever-present semi-uninhabited landmass and a fringe of 'civilisation'", informs its fiction and poetry. pepp believes that Australian writers have "laid themselves out in the land around them. Desert, outback, skyscraper, shoreline, one can hear the birdsong, the wind, the silence of Australia throughout it all. The happiness, the bastardry, the peculiar colour, even the scent comes through." Good answer.

There were a few suggestions about where to go next with Portugal getting two votes (thank you BillyMills and wordnerd7) and Egypt three – although as one of those was Richard Lea we're going to disallow it and go for Portugal.

There are some big names there, from Nobel prize winner José Saramago to José Maria Eça de Queirós, but I'd say Portuguese writing has a lower profile than Spanish (where you came up with a sterling bunch of recommendations a year ago). Please let me know what I'm missing.

And do please remember to vote on the next destination – where we go is up to you.

A new novel by José Saramago.

Death Takes a Holiday

 

by James Wood October 27, 2008

Saramago's narration feels modern and ancient at once.

 

The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, "The Makropulos Case," in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an infinite desert of repetitive experiences, lest the self be so altered as to be emptied of any definition. That is why, in the play by Karel Capek from which Williams takes his title, the three-hundred-and-forty-two-year-old Elina Makropulos, having imbibed the elixir of eternal life since the age of forty-two, chooses to discontinue the regimen, and dies. Life needs death to constitute its meaning; death is the black period that orders the syntax of life.

In "Death with Interruptions" (translated, from the Portuguese, by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $24), José Saramago, a writer whose long, uninterrupted sentences are relative strangers to the period, has produced a novel that functions as a thought experiment in the Capek/Williams field. (His novel makes no explicit allusion to either.) At midnight on one New Year's Eve, in a nameless, landlocked country of about ten million inhabitants, Death declares a truce with humanity, a self-interruption, so as to give people an idea of what it would be like to live forever. At first, of course, people are euphoric:

Having lived, until those days of confusion, in what they had imagined to be the best of all possible and probable worlds, they were discovering, with delight, that the best, the absolute best, was happening right now, right there, at the door of their house, a unique and marvelous life without the daily fear of parca's creaking scissors, immortality in the land that gave us our being, safe from any metaphysical awkwardnesses and free to everyone, with no sealed orders to open at the hour of our death, announcing at that crossroads where dear companions in this vale of tears known as earth were forced to part and set off for their different destinations in the next world, you to paradise, you to purgatory, you down to hell.

But "awkwardnesses"—metaphysical, political, pragmatic—soon reënter. The Catholic Church is the first institution to sense a danger. The Cardinal phones the Prime Minister to point out that "without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church." For the Cardinal, life without death is tantamount to God's willing His own demise. Life without death abolishes the soul. A panel of philosophers and clergymen is convened, and both sides agree that religion needs death "as much as we need bread to eat." Life without death is like life without God, one churchman says, because "if human beings do not die then everything will be permissible." (This is a version of the Dostoyevskian fear that without God everything is permitted.) One philosopher, sounding like the slyly secular Saramago, suggests that since death was "clearly the only agricultural implement god possessed with which to plough the roads that would lead to his kingdom, the obvious, irrefutable conclusion is that the entire holy story ends, inevitably, in a cul-de-sac."

A country in which no one dies inevitably becomes a Malthusian zoo. Old people who were on the brink of death on New Year's Eve simply remain on the brink, frozen in their desuetude. Undertakers, those selling life-insurance policies, and the directors of hospitals and old people's homes are variously threatened with unemployment or overactivity. The state will soon be unable to pay for the maintenance of its citizens. And although this sudden utopia may now be the very best of all possible worlds, humans can always be relied upon to wreck utopias. Families with aged, infirm members realize that they need death to save them from an eternity of bedside care. Since death has not been suspended in neighboring countries, the obvious solution is to transport ailing Grandpa over the border, where death will do its business. A Mafia-like organization takes over these death runs, an operation secretly connived in by the government, since no state can afford infinite expansion. As the Prime Minister warns the King, "If we don't start dying again, we have no future."

"Death with Interruptions" is a small-ish, toothy addition to a great novelist's work. It efficiently mobilizes its hypothetical test case, and quickly generates a set of sharp theological and metaphysical questions about the desirability of utopia, the possibility of Heaven, and the true foundation of religion. Recent work by Saramago has tended toward the sparely allegorical, with nameless, universal actors in place of individual characters. These books would be baldly essayistic were it not for Saramago's extraordinary sentences, and the subtlety of their narration. In the absence of vivid fictional people, Saramago's sentences, in which a narrator or group of narrators is always strongly present, constitute a kind of community of their own: they are highly peopled.

Some of the more significant writing of the past thirty years has taken delight in the long, lawless sentence—think of Thomas Bernhard, Bohumil Hrabal, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño—but no one sounds quite like Saramago. He has an ability to seem wise and ignorant at the same time, as if he were not really narrating the stories he narrates. Often, he uses what could be called unidentified free indirect style—his fictions sound as if they were being told not by an author but by, say, a group of wise and somewhat garrulous old men, sitting down by the harbor in Lisbon, having a smoke, one of whom is the writer himself. This community is fond of truisms, proverbs, clichés. "It is said that one cannot have everything in life," the narrator of "Death with Interruptions" tells us, and he adds, "That's how life is, what it gives with one hand one day, it takes away with the other." The narrator of a previous novel announces, "Fame, alas, is a breeze that both comes and goes, it is a weather vane that turns both to the north and to the south." And elsewhere: "It has been said, from classical times onwards, that fortune favours the bold." These platitudes are neither quite validated nor disowned; they are ironized by the obvious gap that exists between the knowing postmodern Nobel laureate writing his fictions and the person or persons seemingly narrating those fictions.

The run-on style is an important part of that irony: the breathlessness lends a sense of chatty unruliness, as if different people were breaking in to have their say. A single long sentence often seems to have been written by different voices, and the unpunctuated welter allows for sly twists and turns, as when a cliché catches itself in the act of being a cliché, and atones: "Such a man, apart from rare exceptions which have no place in this story, will never be more than a poor devil, it's odd that we always say poor devil and never poor god." In the sentence about the people's early euphoria when death is suspended, notice that a poetic image for the Grim Reaper ("parca's creaking scissors") gives way to a more ordinary image ("sealed orders to open at the hour of our death") and then to a frank, weary cliché ("this vale of tears known as earth"), and that this progression allows for the simultaneous presence of the writer, who has his images, and the people he is writing about, who have theirs. And a magical exchange occurs: by the time we reach the end of that sentence about death, the fancy mythical image seems somehow much less powerful than the most banal image.

Saramago's narration thus feels modern and ancient at once. The writer is self-consciously at work, constantly drawing attention to the narration, yet the narration seems to dip easily into a universal knapsack, to flourish its bony, wise truths. It is this cunningly modest approach that allows Saramago to write his speculative and fantastical fictions as if they were the most likely events, and to give them a solid literalism—an unnamed country gripped by an epidemic of blindness, the Iberian Peninsula broken off from the European continent and turned into a huge floating island, a man walking the streets of Lisbon who is both undeniably real and a literary ghost. His work is in some ways closer to that of an ancient satirist like Lucian, whose sketches imagine people travelling to the moon or to Hades, or the gods squabbling among themselves, than to that of any contemporary novelist. When, in Saramago's new novel, Death finally decides to end her "interruption" and let mortality have its way again, the Church, which had been praying for such a restoration, is pleased: "The prayers had taken nearly eight months to reach heaven, but when you think that it takes six months to reach the planet mars, then heaven, as you can imagine, must be much farther off, three thousand million light-years from earth, in round numbers." That prodding voice, with its anti-theological bias, is reminiscent not only of Lucian but of the Lucianic Leon Battista Alberti, whose fifteenth-century satire "Momus" imagines the chaos that might ensue in Heaven if everyone asked God to answer a prayer at the same time.

Saramago's brief novel provokes similar questions. If eternal life could not possibly work on earth, why is heavenly eternity so ardently to be desired? Perhaps it is because we desperately hope that Heaven will be the same as earth but also very different, given that man ruins Edens. For Saramago, as for Bernard Williams, the problem is not just that humans are natural-born utopia-killers; it is that eternity itself —life forever uninterrupted—seems unbearable. And Saramago does more than tease Dostoyevsky in this novel. For if the disappearance of God means that "everything is permitted," and the disappearance of death means that everything is permitted, then, by the novelist's tacit catechism, God must be death, and death must be God. No wonder religion needs death: death is the one God we can believe in.

Saramago is drawn to these Gnostic inversions. In perhaps his greatest book, "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" (1991), the novelist, characteristically, tells the story of Jesus' life and death without changing any of the famous facts, while at the same time turning the theology of the Gospels upside down. One day, Jesus' father, Joseph, overhears some soldiers talking about Herod's orders to kill all children under the age of three. He races home to hide his wife and newborn son, but neglects to warn the rest of the village. For this sin, an angel later tells Mary, Joseph will suffer. And what about my son? she asks the angel. "The angel said, A father's guilt falls on the heads of his children, and the shadow of Joseph's guilt already darkens his son's brow," Saramago writes. In time, Joseph is captured by Roman soldiers putting down a rebellion and is crucified along with thirty-nine other Jews. Jesus, in turn, becomes obsessed with a sense of inherited guilt, and with the idea, as he puts it, that "Father murdered the children of Bethlehem." On the strength of a lightning strike from the storyteller's blasphemous finger, Saramago turns a familiar theological conundrum—the "good" God who brings Jesus into the world is also the "bad" God who permits the massacre of innocent babies—into a deep crux. Suddenly, Jesus is cursed by a form of original sin, and his sacrifice on the Cross becomes not an expiation of man's sin but an inheriting of it: he is following in his father's footsteps, cursed by his patrilineage. "God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit" is how the narrator puts it. On the Cross, hearing his heavenly Father declaim from the clouds, "This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased," Jesus bursts out, "Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done." It is the novel's final, and most wicked, inversion.

"The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" was enormously controversial in Catholic Portugal (Jesus sleeps, and lives, with Mary Magdalene), but it is the most pious of blasphemous books. Behind its savage ironies, Saramago seems to do no more than take the Incarnation as seriously as possible: if Jesus was born a man, he seems to say, then he inherits everything man is prey to, including sin, which comes from God anyway. The stakes are very high, but the authorial temperament is mild, quizzical, seasoned. And what if God were the Devil? the author seems to ask, gently peering at us through his dark-rimmed, television-size spectacles. He is in some ways the least fantastical of novelists, because he so relentlessly persists with his fictional hypotheses, following them through to large, humane conclusions. His new novel gradually becomes less and less conceptual, and increasingly affecting, without ever becoming in any conventional sense realistic, or even plausible.

He pictures Death for us as an embodied female absence, a skeleton in a sheet who lives in a frigid, subterranean room, accompanied only by her much used scythe. (He also denies her a capital "D.") After her seven months of self-interruption, this gloomy goddess sends a letter to a TV station, announcing that she is ending her experiment, because humans have acted so "deplorably." People will die again at the old rate, which is about three hundred a day. Under the new rules, those citizens whose time is up will be given one week's notice: each will receive a violet-colored letter, a notice of termination from Death herself. This apparently humane concession—the nominee now has time to take his leave, get his estate in order, and so on—is of course unbearably cruel, since most people would rather be surprised by death than condemned to it.

One such nominee, a fifty-year-old cellist, bewilders the goddess. Death has selected him for termination, but the violet-colored letter is returned to sender, again and again; the cellist seems to refuse his orders. In a series of unexpectedly beautiful scenes, Death, much perplexed, insinuates herself into the cellist's apartment, and sits quietly watching him while he sleeps; she sees how he gets up in the night to get a glass of water and let the dog out, sees a Bach suite (No. 6) on his chair, and so on. It is the cellist's time to die—"the time prescribed for them at birth has expired"—but Death seems to have no power over this "perfectly ordinary man, neither ugly nor handsome." In an earlier novel to which the new one is an obvious companion, "All the Names," a modest clerk similarly becomes obsessed with a perfectly ordinary citizen, a woman whose name on a birth certificate catches him by surprise one evening at his workplace, the Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. As in the new novel, the clerk selects one citizen from the ranks of the ever-dying and living, and gradually, without ever naming her (the cellist likewise goes unnamed), endows her with metaphysical particularity.

This is what the novelist does, too: he takes a name, a character, a person, and saves her from wordless oblivion through the irradiation of words. But he can also kill her whenever he pleases: every novel is "interrupted" simply because it ends. We speak of omniscient authorial power because writers have the power of life and death over their "names." The clerk in "All the Names," who is known only as Senhor José, shares his first name with the novelist. In his new novel, Saramago again asks us to reflect on the storyteller's godlike powers. When Death's letter is published in the newspapers, a grammarian is consulted, and notes its "chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas. . . ." Death writes like José Saramago. As Death watches the cellist drink, Saramago writes that she looked at the water "and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed." The reader wonders: if Death cannot imagine thirst, can she possibly imagine death? And can the novelist? One answer that Saramago offers—it is the wide, universal, antique truth toward which his complex fiction has been travelling—is that if we neither recoil from death nor religiously long to vanquish it, but, rather, accept the old actuality that in the midst of life we are in death, then death surrounds us like life, and to imagine death is really to imagine life. ♦

You Never Know What You'll Find in a Book

 

 
 

 

You Never Know What You'll Find in a Book

 

By HENRY ALFORD

Published: December 19, 2008

 

 

We may never fully understand what prompts people to leave unusual objects inside books. I speak of the slice of fried bacon that the novelist Reynolds Price once found nestled within the pages of a volume in the Duke University library. I speak of the letter that ran: "Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here," which the playwright Mark O'Donnell found some years ago in a used paperback. I speak of any of those bizarre objects — scissors, a used Q-tip, a bullet, a baby's tooth, drugs, pornography and 40 $1,000 bills — that have been discovered by the employees of secondhand bookstores, according to The Wall Street Journal and AbeBooks.com. Mystery surrounds these deposits like darkness.

But the motives of some depositors — the novelist David Bowman, for instance — are knowable. "I was cleaning out a drawer and thought, Let's do something with this," Bowman said of the day four years ago when he stumbled upon all of the rejection letters from agents and editors about his first novel, "Let the Dog Drive" (1993). "Some of the letters were nasty," he said in a phone interview. So Bowman scooped them up, tucked them in between the pages of a first edition of the book and sold the noxious bundle to the Strand, New York City's famous used-book store. "It was very liberating," Bowman said. "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

Bowman's quest for vengeance is on the far end of the book-stuffing spectrum. More commonly, the stuffers are trying to create an aide-mémoire for themselves. "I have filled books with flowers I've received, to save the ­flowers in dried form and to remember the happy moment of receiving them," Anne Rice said in an e-mail message. After Wayne Koestenbaum interviewed Vanessa Redgrave at a hotel bar about her role in the movie "Mrs. Dalloway," he took Redgrave's lipsticky napkin and placed it in the paperback copy of the novel he'd brought with him. That Redgrave's lipstick traces might have besmirched his book seems not to have fazed him. "I might have also taken her swizzle stick," he confessed.

In "Never Do That to a Book," an essay in her collection "Ex Libris," Anne Fadimansays that these aides-­mémoires are often specific to the book owner's profession. Fadiman writes about a landscape architect who "savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life's work." She also mentions a science writer whose copy of "Birds of Yosemite and the East Slope" contains an owl feather and the tip of a squirrel's tail — remnants of an ­animal-on-animal smackdown — and whose copy of "Mammals of the World" has been "enhanced" by the "excremental splotches" of a band-tailed pigeon that perched on the book while learning to fly. Blurry grows the line between litter box and litter books.

Sometimes things get lost in books. The novelist Diana Abu-Jaber recalled putting a favorite photograph of a friend's greyhound inside her copy of M. F. K. Fisher's "How to Cook a Wolf" — and then promptly leaving the book on a plane. ("I hope it comforts someone who's afraid of flying," she wrote in an e-mail message.) Similarly, the musician Dan Zanes once used a book to store a prized possession given him by his mother — a rare photograph of J. D. Salinger, taken by Mrs. Zanes's mentor, the German photographer Lotte Jacobi. "I'm sure it's safe, but I have no idea where it's safe," Zanes said. "Not in any book that I currently own, that's for sure."

Sherman Alexie figured out a way around botched safekeeping during his hard-drinking college days at Gonzaga and Washington State Universities in the 1980s. Fearful that he would spend all his money during a bender, he would "slide tens and twenties into random books in my apartment." Months later, having forgotten about the money, he'd find it again. "It was like winning little jackpots," he wrote in an e-mail message, adding, "I'm sober now, have been sober for many years, and I keep my money in banks."

The cadre of book-depositers is not without its stylists. The comedian Jean Villepique, who played Tracy Morgan's therapist on "30 Rock," says she likes to slam insects between the pages of library books and then return the corpse-laden tomes. "I like to think that someone will get to Page 62 and think, "Eww!" and then, "Who?" Villepique said in an e-mail message. She preys only on small bugs that land on the page voluntarily — mostly gnats ("like a little dust poof") and mosquitoes, whether unfed ("neat and dry") or bloody ("page joiners"). But Villepique warns that if any cockroach in her Los Angeles apartment "dares to creep near my copy of 'Collapse,' by Jared Diamond, I will kill, knowing that my behavior and the roach's existence are both causes of the collapse of our society."

Who knows what puzzling items lurk, or soon will, on the bookshelves of the world? Well, Meg Wolitzer gave advance warning of one. In the early '70s, during her freshman year at Smith, she and a friend got "punch-drunk" from too much studying in the library one night. "To entertain ourselves on a break, we took out a sheet of lined paper and wrote a 'diary entry' for one 'S. Plath' ('Saw the most delicate bell jar today in an antique store. . . .')," Wolitzer wrote in an e-mail message. The pair gave the document a 1950s date, then placed it between the pages of a reference book, "and left it there to age and corrode and finally be discovered."

Wolitzer added, "To my knowledge and to my relief, it has not been."

Henry Alford is the author of "How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth)," to be published next month.

temos que engolir...

 06 janeiro 2009

folha de sp

PASQUALE EXPLICA

Os acentos diferenciais de 'pelo', 'polo' e 'pera' já vão tarde!

PASQUALE CIPRO NETO
COLUNISTA DA FOLHA

O Acordo passou o facão nos acentos diferenciais. Mantiveram-se só os de "pôde" e "pôr".
O diferencial de "pôde" é de timbre (fechado, no caso) e distingue "ele pôde" de "ele pode".
O circunflexo da forma verbal "pôr" a distingue da preposição homógrafa (átona) "por".
Os demais acentos diferenciais foram sumariamente eliminados pelo Acordo. Deixaram de existir as seguintes grafias: "pára" (do verbo "parar"), "pêlo/s" (substantivos), "pélo", "pélas" e "péla" (do verbo "pelar"), "pólo/s", "pôlo/s" e "pêra" (substantivos). Esses acentos se justificavam pelos correspondentes homógrafos átonos: "para" (preposição), "pelo" (combinação de preposição e artigo), "polo" (combinação arcaica de preposição e artigo) e "pera" (preposição arcaica).
Com exceção do acento na forma verbal "para", os demais já vão tarde. O de "para" fará falta em alguns casos. Um título como "Trânsito pesado para Recife" será ambíguo, portanto não deverá ser publicado.
Por fim, uma novidade: é opcional o acento em "forma" (sinônimo de "molde"). É isso.

Ficção nacional que cruza fronteiras

 

 Ficção nacional que cruza fronteiras

Pesquisadores de diversos países apontam caminhos, desde dicionários bilíngües até programas de incentivo mais agressivos

Ubiratan Brasil

 

 

Enquanto os Estados Unidos assumem o primeiro posto entre os países que mais estudam a literatura brasileira, a Alemanha reserva meros 7% de seu imenso mercado editorial para a tradução de livros de escritores do Brasil. As constatações, entre outras também surpreendentes, fazem parte das primeiras conclusões obtidas pelo projeto Conexões, mapeamento internacional da literatura brasileira promovido pelo Itaú Cultural. Nos últimos meses, pesquisadores, tradutores e estudiosos de diversos países foram consultados sobre a percepção e o conhecimento da escrita literária nacional. "Já recebemos 72 questionários e, até dezembro, aguardamos mais 20", comenta Claudiney José Ferreira, gerente do Núcleo de Diálogos do Itaú Cultural.

Trata-se de um trabalho inédito, que busca clarear a real importância que a literatura brasileira ocupa no exterior. As primeiras informações serão divulgadas em um simpósio na Universidade de Salamanca, na Espanha, que acontece no dia 21. E, no ano que vem, provavelmente em agosto, acontece um congresso internacional em Chicago, nos Estados Unidos, a fim de apresentar o projeto para a comunidade acadêmica norte-americana. "E temos planos ainda para realizar o mesmo em Londres e em um país da América Latina", diz Ferreira.

As primeiras conclusões são animadoras. Segundo apontam os questionários, a quantidade de traduções vem aumentando, especialmente de autores contemporâneos e não apenas de clássicos ou best sellers, como Paulo Coelho. "O conhecimento é muito mais amplo e inclui escritores que surgiram mais recentemente, como Milton Hatoum, João Gilberto Noll, Luiz Ruffato, além de nomes mais jovens como Adriana Lisboa, Bernardo de Carvalho."

Escritores tradicionais, é claro, continuam puxando a fila, garantindo a presença permanente da literatura brasileira nos estudos e pesquisas estrangeiros. Mas, entre nomes esperados (como Jorge Amado, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca), surgem outros que mesmo no Brasil já não têm a mesma repercussão. É o caso de José Mauro de Vasconcelos, autor de Meu Pé de Laranja Lima, clássico juvenil. "Ele é muito respeitado e traduzido especialmente no Leste Europeu, onde até é adotado em escolas", conta Ferreira, que ensaia algumas explicações. "Trata-se de uma visão nada exótica do Brasil."

O mapeamento permite também rascunhar motivos do sucesso planetário de Paulo Coelho entre os críticos estrangeiros, situação que não acontece no Brasil. "Para os resenhistas daqui, a obra dele resvala na auto-ajuda enquanto, na Europa, Coelho é considerado escritor de ficção."

Os problemas ocupam, no entanto, espaço essencial. O relativo interesse pela língua portuguesa no mundo é um dos principais entraves. Pesquisadores europeus e norte-americanos apontam o espanhol como língua latina de ponta, o que acaba ofuscando as demais. "O trabalho feito por institutos culturais como o Cervantes, é muito poderoso e faz com que o idioma espanhol ganhe um espaço precioso", comenta Ferreira. "A embaixada espanhola produz uma lista de livros novos publicados em seu país e envia às editoriais inglesas, além de divulgar em seu website", completa Margaret Jull Costa, que faz traduções para o inglês.

Claudiney Ferreira não confirma, mas há um outro entrave, provocado pelos portugueses. De acordo com alguns pesquisadores, que comentam informalmente, a divulgação maciça da literatura brasileira, reconhecidamente vibrante e conectada aos problemas atuais, poderia atropelar a portuguesa que, embora viva um momento de renovação, talvez tenha chances mais reduzidas em relação à da antiga colônia.

A tímida ação governamental também é lembrada pelos pesquisadores consultados. Todos são unânimes em apontar a necessidade de se implantar um plano que facilite a tradução de obras nacionais para diversas línguas. E a divulgação dos livros exige um projeto mais elaborado - para eles, o Brasil deveria considerar o Instituto do Livro e o Instituto Camões em Portugal como modelos a serem seguidos.

"Apenas alguns escritores brasileiros de destaque são traduzidos para o inglês, enquanto vários autores excelentes não têm nem chance de serem considerados", observa Alison Entrekin, responsável por versões em inglês. "As editoras investem no marketing de escritores cujos livros tiveram boas vendas no Brasil. A ironia é que alguns dos menos conhecidos têm muito mais a ver com o de língua inglesa do que aqueles que as editoras promovem."

Além do foco, as escassas ferramentas de trabalho são outra fonte de queixas. Os profissionais que trabalham com literatura brasileira no exterior são unânimes em elogiar dicionários como o Aurélio e o Houaiss, mas reclamam de não dispor de bons exemplares bilíngües. "Eles sentem falta, por exemplo, de um dicionário inglês-português do Brasil, capaz de dirimir dúvidas sobre a língua falada em nosso País e não em Portugal", observa Ferreira.

Fórmulas de sucesso são outro caminho a ser evitado. Pesquisadores e tradutores comentam que a literatura brasileira precisa manter sua autenticidade e jamais adotar esquemas que fazem sucesso lá fora. "Não adianta tentar copiar Borges nem Cem Anos de Solidão", acredita Regina Machado, que vive na França. "Receitas já provadas não voltam a atuar, mas talvez possam nos ajudar a estender à nossa vasta paisagem humana e literária o olhar que alguns escritores souberam lançar sobre sua própria realidade."

A grande diversidade lingüística, o uso incrível da coloquialidade, além de uma interessante e fluida liberdade de expressão são, no entender do tradutor Alex Levitin, as principais qualidades da escrita brasileira que a distingue das demais literaturas.

Virtudes também encontradas em outros meios de expressão, como o cinema, que conquista terreno com mais sucesso e velocidade que a literatura. Assim, a fama dos filmes brasileiros deveria ser utilizada como plataforma para espalhar a obra de autores nacionais, no entender do americano Ross G. Forman, que vive em Cingapura, onde divulga, com dificuldade, autores do Brasil.

Apesar de tantos empecilhos, os primeiros resultados do Conexões são animadores. "A presença da literatura brasileira no exterior é superior ao que usualmente imaginamos", comenta Ferreira. "E há um grande interesse pela escrita contemporânea - os clássicos decerto são estudados, mas os brasilianistas demonstram cada vez mais preocupação com o aqui e agora da literatura brasileira."

 

(Estado de SP -  03 nov 2008)