A Democracy of Perception

SOL LUCKMAN

Any comparison between the fiction of E. L. Doctorow and Ivan Ângelo must take into account the very different–if not opposite–functions of the writer in the United States and Brazil, respectively. This topic merits a book-length discussion and I can but touch on it here. Writing in 1977, the year following the publication of an extaordinarily complex novel entitled A FESTA, at a time when Brazil was still a military dictatorship, Doctorow specifically addresses the distinction between U. S. writers and their counterparts in the less developed industrial countries. With respect to the latter, he claims: “Wherever citizens are seen as enemies of their own government, writers are routinely seen to be the most dangerous enemies … So that in most countries around the world literature is politics. All writers are by definition engagé.”

Contrasting this situation with his own, Doctorow argues that in general U. S. writers are protected from censorship and imprisonment “by our faith in the strength of the regime of facts. Our primary control of writers in the United States does not have to be violent–it operates in the assumption that esthetics is a limited arena where according to the rules we may be shocked or threatened, but only in fun. The novelist need not be taken seriously because his [sic] work is a taste of young people, women, intellectuals, and other pampered minorities, and, lacking any real currency, is not part of the relevant business of the nation.”

In a similar vein, Virginia Carmichael concludes her study of THE BOOK OF DANIEL (FRAMING HISTORY) by arguing that Doctorow’s novel represents, among other things, a sustained critique of “the failure that is operative in U. S. social fiction … A failure that results in a national literature that the rest of the world considers apolitical and unworldly, focused on private lives living in pure social groups in suspended time and space, and mindlessly replicating the traditional relationships that make a specific social order possible.”

By contrast, it’s practically a truism that Latin American writers in particular have tended to be more overtly political in their work, and more openly persecuted for it. Reviewing the English translation of A FESTA (THE CELEBRATION, 1982), Patrick Breslin observes that “despite their reputation for uninhibited literary experimentation, expansive imaginations, and lavish use of myth and fantasy, most Latin American writers base their work on the political and economic reality of their countries.”

This is true of a wide range of contemporary novelists from a diversity of countries, from Gabriel García Márquez (Columbia) to Rosario Ferré (Puerto Rico) to, perhaps most stridently, Ivan Ângelo. Roberto Schwarz relates a darkly humorous anecdote that epitomizes the precarious political role many Latin American writers have found themselves playing. At a moment during Brazil’s military dictatorship when literature as a mode of resistance was perceived to be giving way to other forms of cultural production such as theater and popular music, Schwarz explains that Brazilian writers were so frustrated that one poet publicly accused another of “not having a single line capable of landing him in jail.” The problem of censorship as it relates to literary production during the Ditadura is a tricky one to which I’ll return, but Schwarz’s point is well taken.

Not only do Latin American and U. S. writers typically occupy distinct sociopolitical positions; their novels also tend to differ considerably in both content and form. Here again, as in THE BOOK OF DANIEL, it’s important to resist the urge to essentialize these notions. In a novel like A FESTA, for instance, the “content” of a society fractured by violence and terrorism becomes most apparent precisely in the fragmentary, discontinuous “form” the narrative assumes. I’ll return to this subject shortly.

In the interest of simplicity, we might say that the content or plot of many popular Latin American novels is topical in a political sense (either directly or allegorically), while their form or structure is very often radical or even “avant-garde.” My own opinion is that, with certain obvious exceptions like THE BOOK OF DANIEL and Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING, the confluence of politics and stylistic experimentation in mainstream U. S. fiction is unthinkable. At the very least, and more damningly, it’s widely considered unmarketable.

Arguably, what most palpably distinguishes U. S. and Latin American novels is their use of and relation to journalism. In an article entitled “Novels and Newspapers in the Americas,” Lois Parkinson Zamora has observed, “Almost all of Latin America’s first-rank novelists are also journalists, if not by training then by constant and passionate practice.” In a passage worth quoting at length, Zamora points out that

in recent years Latin American literature has often responded when the press has failed to address (or has been preventing from addressing) actual political and social conditions. The novels of Brazilian journalists Marcio Souza … and Ivan Angelo … are particularly clear examples of fiction written to disseminate information which was being suppressed by an authoritarian regime. If government censors create fictions by distorting actual events, writers like Souza and Angelo invert that process, writing fictions which document actual events even as they disguise those events in vivid, elliptical satires. Where newspapers cannot publish all the news that’s fit to print, fiction may become the medium to fulfill that function.

Acknowledging the “non-fiction novels” of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as the “new journalism” of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Joyce Carol Oates, Zamora persuasively argues that these writers–despite their narrative use of journalistic techniques–“ultimately write less journalistically than autobiographically.” Simply put, Zamora’s point is that “U. S. writers have engaged the political and literary potential of journalistic writing far less than Latin American writers.” And this is because–and here we come back to Doctorow’s assertions with which this essay began–contrary to the situation in many countries around the world, in U. S. culture literature is generally not thought of as a political expression.

My only problem with Zamora’s article is that, her disclaimers notwithstanding, she maintains a stubborn belief in a reality “out there” that such journalistic techniques are privileged to access and describe; whereas more than one of the political novels cited, including most strikingly A FESTA, call attention to the impossibility of an empirical epistemology in the very act of articulating “history,” past and present.

A good example of this paradoxical process is the novel’s opening chapter, “Documentário,” a virtual litany of transgressions against freedom and human rights throughout Brazilian history. And yet the actual historical documents that comprise this retrospective pastiche repeatedly contradict each other in various and fundamental ways. As Beth Brait puts it in an illuminating essay on A FESTA (“A Narrativa como Criação e Resistência: A Cumplicidade da Escritura“), “O processo de instauração de múltiplos narradores, cuja função é multiplicar e respaldar a voz narrativa, retomando acontecimentos, insistindo sobre eles de forma opinativa, configura A FESTA como um espelhar de narrativas que, apontando umas para as outras, parecem tentar dissuadir o leitor de existência homogênea dos acontecimentos.” This self-conscious referential paradox, which installs the “real” only to dissolve it in a contested discursive matrix, is the primary feature of what I’ve been calling the postmodern.

But before I discuss A FESTA in the context of postmodernism, some historical contextualization is in order. The novel takes as its primary subject matter the darkest moment (1970, referred to as the “ano da desgraça”) in one of the most troubled periods in Brazilian history. Military rule had been instated following the collapse of the populist Goulart government in 1964, a collapse brought about in large measure by growing fears of communism, fears repeatedly reflected in A FESTA in both its dramatizations and documentary citations.

The political climate of the post-coup 1960s evoked in the novel is the Brazilian equivalent of the cold war United States of the 1950s evoked in THE BOOK OF DANIEL and THE PUBLIC BURNING. (Of course, a military dictatorship is one thing and a democracy, however paranoid, is another.) Despite military rule, however, the years 1964-68 witnessed the ascendency of the Left, culturally speaking, as the Castello Branco government was willing–with rare exceptions–to tolerate public dissent.

The second military government, headed by President Artur da Costa e Silva, succeeded in transforming Brazil from a passive dictatorship into something rather more Orwellian. In December 1968, with the passing of Institution Act #5, which effectively gave the president unlimited power, a period known as the Sufoco (the “Suffocation”) began. In Antônio Cândido’s words, the dictatorship “se transformou em 1968 de brutalmente opressivo em ferozmente repressivo.”

Prolonged throughout the Medici and Geisel administrations until the mid-1970s (many would say until as late as 1978), the Sufoco provoked the dilution, alteration and elimination of a great deal of artistic and intellectual production, in addition to the exile (voluntary or otherwise) of many of the country’s most important cultural figures–among them Roberto Schwarz, arguably Brazil’s preeminent cultural critic. Ranging from the picaresque eponymous hero of Sérgio Sant’Anna’s CONFISSÕES DE RALFO (1975), to the more tragic figures of Carlos Bicalho, Marcionílio de Mattos and the hundreds of refugees fleeing the Northeast in A FESTA, exile constitutes a veritable leitmotif in the literature from this period.

While Brazil under the Sufoco was indeed, to quote Flora Süssekind, an “império do medo,” it’s important to insist that censorship never fully constituted the final word. By way of illustrating that literature-as-social-critique did in fact continue during even the darkest of the dark years from 1968-72, Süssekind, writing in 1985, points out the existence of “textos mais tensos e capazes de trabalhar ficcionalmente com silêncios, cortes, risos nervosos,” concluding that “[a] censura deixa de ser explicação suficiente e nota-se que ela mesma é apenas um dos personagens criados nos dois últimos decênios. E personagem talvez não tão poderoso quanto se imaginava.” Thus, to refer sweepingly to this historical moment as a “cultural impasse,” as many have, is to overstate the situation and ignore the writers and editors who braved the wrath of the regime by publishing subversive texts.

Ângelo is one such writer: more or less. The critical reception of A FESTA has tended to place it on a pedestal for courage and audacity and regard its author with a sense of awe. “Relendo A FESTA,” writes Inácio de Loyola Brandão, author of ZERO, another important Brazilian novel from the 1970s, “a gente se pergunta: Por que este romance não foi proibido nos anos 70?”

This, in my opinion, is a somewhat naive question which Süssekind’s remarks on censorship go a long way toward answering. There was also at the time of A FESTA’s publication something like a cultural renaissance occurring in Brazil as a result of the Distenção, or “Decompression,” which was accompanied by an editorial boom and a new cultural policy known as the Política Nacional de Cultura. This policy was designed, paradoxically, both to enforce censorship and create initiative by making available publishing opportunities through supportive, albeit restrictive, government programs.

All of this to say that Ângelo’s novel (which was, in fact, initially censored) was a daring but hardly inconceivable literary work for its time. Ângelo himself intimates as much. Self-consciously linking his voice to that of the novel’s self-conscious “escritor” (as the “outro autor” who represents the escritor projected into the future), “Ângelo” confesses, “Este livro … é o resultado de um fracasso. É o que eu consegui fazer de um projeto pretensioso que tracei em linhas gerais há uns dez anos ou mais.” This statement, which is autobiographically accurate–Ângelo actually began A FESTA in 1963, and only returned to it in 1974–betrays a sense of failure, and even of guilt, at not finishing and publishing the novel at an earlier, more critical moment under the dictatorship.

This sense of failure is of a piece with the novel’s (self-)critique of radicalism, particularly the ineffectual “radicalism” of those referred to by Robert DiAntonio as “Brazil’s middle class cafe intellectuals.” As DiAntonio remarks, A FESTA indicts this group’s “hypocrisy, sterility, and inertia” early and often. In a scathing passage that distills this critique into two sentences, “Ângelo” writes, “Estavam acostumados àquele jogo, o jogo do que é possível ou não é possível neste pais. O jogo dava-lhes a ilusão de serem, ao mesmo tempo, participantes-do-problema-social-brasileiro e/ou escritores-impedidos-de-escrever-porque-o-Brasil-não-estava-precisando-disso-agora.”

I’ve continued to place quotes around Ângelo in order to call attention to the slippery ontological status of this figure who represents at once the narrator, an unnamed character known simply as the “escritor,” and the author of A FESTA in 1976 known as Ivan Ângelo. The above citation takes on considerable irony when we realize that “Ângelo” is reproaching not just any group, but a group to which he clearly belongs. In other words, as a writer unable or unwilling to write, he has more than a little of the café intellectual in himself. The “ano da disgraça” referred to in the text thus applies as much to the author as to anyone or anything else. (Such self-problematizing extends to the very narrative premise of the novel-as-political-resistance, as we will see.) It goes almost without saying that this narrative conflation of subject and object, critique and autocritique, is an emphatically postmodern gesture.

Ângelo has been incorrectly described as a “journalist turned novelist by censorship.” If anything, as I trust I’ve suggested, he might be thought of rather as a novelist (temporarily) turned ex-novelist by censorship. DiAntonio commits a similar error, claiming that Ângelo “worked as a reporter and managing editor for the JORNAL DA TARDE, a major São Paulo newspaper, before turning to literature.” Actually, Ângelo began his literary career in 1954 and continued to publish fiction, independently as well as collaboratively with Silviano Santiago, while working as a journalist.

The temptation to misrepresent Ângelo’s biography–innocently or otherwise–is understandable when we realize that A FESTA is often considered a stellar example of that most Brazilian of genres, the romance-reportagem, or “news novel.” Popularized by José Louzeiro, the romance-reportagem appears in Brazil at a moment when “o jornal parece não poder mais informar, noticiar e muito menos pronunciar,” and it expresses “uma tendência mais geral da ficção dos anos 70 que se empenha numa espécie de neonaturalismo muito ligado às formas de representação do jornal.” Whereas A FESTA does have certain affinities with the romance-reportagem, its formalized, antinaturalistic, Argus-eyed narrative is anything but a 20/20 eyewitness account of the events that gradually come into focus in its pages.

Indeed, A FESTA is best thought of as a novel that radically problematizes the very notion of representation, whether journalistic or novelistic. Against the young reporter Samuel Fereszin’s Capote-like “romance-verdade,” in which he absurdly aims to reproduce Andrea’s reality stroke for stroke, “Ângelo” produces a narrative in which any such totalizing, naturalizing or mimetic tendencies are systematically exploded from within.

This move from realism to postmodernism, if you will, suggests Ângelo’s own development as a writer, as well as a general tendency in Brazilian literature. It’s tempting to explain (away) A FESTA’s twisted, encoded design as a strategy developed to avoid censorship, but this is to misread the situation. In a profound–I almost want to say, structural–sense, A FESTA is about the realization that the only way its story could possibly be told is the way it is told: as a polyvalent, multi-voiced, internally contradicted narrative that formally enacts the difficulties inherent in interpreting/creating history. The text thereby indissolubly weds form to content–yet another postmodern strategy.

A collection of nine loosely interlocking stories arranged around two contrasting events of March 30, 1970–the arrival in Belo Horizonte of eight hundred starving drought victims and the birthday celebration of a local artist–the novel is based on a single, ironic paradox: the much anticipated festa of the title never occurs. The narrative relates what happens before and after the party, but not the event itself. On the one hand, this tactic deflates the pseudo-subversive intentions of what Malcolm Silverman has called the “esquerda festiva.” The implication is that while the bourgeois café intellectuals were having a ball sipping champagne and mouthing revolution, people like the flagelados and Samuel Fereszin were dying in the streets. Thus the novel’s empty center points to the empty rhetoric of the narcissistic bourgeois Left, much as THE BOOK OF DANIEL does.

At the same time this hollow middle suggests the lacunae and aporias at the heart of any discursive account of “reality.” What can be known about history? In response to this question, the novel purposely refuses to provide hermeneutical closure. Despite its prolific use of documentary and “factual” sources, mysteries abound. Most glaringly, what were the roles of Carlos Bicalho, Marcionílio de Mattos and Samuel Fereszin with respect to the events at the train station? Was there a conspiracy, or was the DOPS merely doing what police states do, assuming guilt until proof of innocence?

The point is we’ll never know with certainty. Marcionílio may or may not have been assassinated, may or may not have “evaporated” from prison, may or may not have been the devil. Even eyewitnesses like the flagelado-turned-historian Viriato can no longer make sense of what happened: “A história de Viriato, repetida através dos anos, tornou-se a única e incompreensível verdade em Curralin’u. Uns dez ou quinze anos depois, a história ficou incompreensível para o próprio Viriato.” Despite its numerous narrative perspectives, A FESTA remains a far cry from a modernist text like Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING. Faulkner ultimately employs a cubistic perspectival technique in the service of a unifying vision; there’s precious little room for doubting, as there is abundantly in A FESTA, what “actually happened.”

We might say that Ângelo’s novel dramatizes the (con)fusion of history into story or stories. Or once again to quote Brait: “A linguagem … assume o papel de protagonista e de cúmplice do escritor. Sendo seu único instrumento, ela é dimensionada não como intermediária entre os fatos e sua narração, mas como a matéria-prima metamorfoseada nos vários níveis de sua interação social.” “Ângelo” betrays this transformative process through a telling slip of the tongue while discussing his manuscript (which we, impossibly, find ourselves reading) with a friend. The friend has suggested relocating the first chapter, but “Ângelo” disagrees: “Exatamente onde eu não queria mexer é na primeira história–perdão, estava pensando em inglês–no primeiro episódio.”

By instinctively, as it were, equating the novel’s most “historical” chapter (“Documentário”) with “story,” Ângelo’s narrator humorously elides the distinction between fact and fiction, implying that “there is only narrative,” to employ Doctorow’s formula. The liquidation of the realist referent finds hilarious expression in the latter part of this same conversation when the friend asks whether the escritor has read Rui Mourão’s O CURRAL DOS ENFORCADOS, which also tells the tragic story of the flagelados at the train station. The escritor replies that while he was working on his manuscript, his wife told him about Mourão’s novel. “Li o livro do Rui,” he says, “vi que não tinha nada que ver, e continuei. Acho até interessante a coincidência dos nordestinos. Fica parecendo que aconteceu de verdade.” At this point we realize that “Ângelo” (as opposed to Ângelo) has been writing in ignorance of the events at the train station, making up (hi)story as he goes along!

By overtly fictionalizing history, postmodern metafiction refuses to accept or produce monolithic versions of reality. Not that it denies the existence of reality; it merely processes the real in terms of realities (in the plural). A novel like A FESTA is less concerned with pinning down the Truth about the events it relates (indeed, pinning down the Truth is shown to be impossible) than with examining the ways in which Truth is splintered into truths. In Hutcheon’s words, “postmodern fiction does not ‘aspire to tell the truth’ as much as to question whose truth gets told.” Or as Doctorow has put it:

Since history can be composed, you see, then you want to have as many people active in the composition as possible. A kind of democracy of perception. Thousands of eyes, not just one. And since we’re not only talking about history, but reality as well, then it seems to me a noble aspiration of a human community to endow itself with a multiplicity of witnesses, all from this idea of seeing through the phenomena to truth.

This notion of a “democracy of perception” strikes me as an even more accurate description of Ângelo’s work than of Doctorow’s. Admittedly, Daniel’s narrative threads through various consciousnesses (Rochelle’s, Paul’s, etc.) in addition to his own, and a novel like RAGTIME is told from several different perspectives.

But nowhere in Doctorow do we witness the extraordinary profusion of points of view that we find in A FESTA. Ângelo’s text forms a postmodern pastiche in the broadest sense, not only generically with its bric-à-brac of everything from political pamphlets to ars poetica to Piaget’s child psychology, but also dialogically. Pastiche performs an eminently heteroglossic function, enabling the expression of a plurality of voices, many of which would otherwise be condemned to silence. In this manner A FESTA conveys a fuller–if less orderly–sense of Brazilian “reality” than conceivable through the official discourses of historiography and journalism. The disappearance of the real in A FESTA–or rather, its reconfiguration of the real in and as a matrix of competing discourses–goes hand in hand with the loss of any privileged perspective and the decentering of subjectivity which make this text truly a democracy of perception.

Like THE BOOK OF DANIEL, Ângelo’s novel is a somber meditation on the collapse of boundaries between the public and the private in a paranoid society. I’m thinking in particular of Ataíde’s kidnappers’ repeated gang rapes of Cremilda in her own home and Andrea’s harrowing misadventure with the DOPS, in which personal secrets of a most private nature are publicly exposed, through Samuel’s romance-verdade, to the cruel scrutiny of the masculist gaze. Call Samuel’s text biography, pulp fiction or pornography, its uncompromising, virtually photographic “realism,” which serves to transform it into a very hot commodity by the novel’s end, enables and reifies the objectifying ideology of the masculist gaze at the core of the capitalist–and in this case, police–state.

The novel thereby levels a penetrating critique at the rational empiricist mentality that underwrites not only journalism but capitalism and totalitarianism as well. And in proper postmodernist fashion, it includes the author in this critique: Ângelo is of course a practicing journalist himself, and as “Ângelo” he’s ultimately responsible for objectifying Andrea as a “typically” beautiful, vapid and at times hysterical female. In an attempt to clarify his intentions concerning Andrea, the escritor explains, “queria mostrar a personagem vista através dos preconceitos da sociedade que a involvia … O autor daquele conto [Samuel] é também uma das pessoas que julgam Andrea.”

The situation is analogous to Doctorow’s treatment of the Isaacson children in THE BOOK OF DANIEL. According to Carmichael, Doctorow’s “use of gender, motivated perhaps at least in part by formal needs, is an unambiguous example of the potential in representational fiction for the reproduction and reinforcement of oppressive and destructive social and political roles and relationships.” Specifically, the characterization of Susan as the embodiment of weakness and irrationality “is an extension and replication of … society’s essential and natural notions of women.”

The risk of self-cancellation inherent in representation finds perhaps its most pessimistic elaboration in the words of Thomas Adorno, who has argued, “For discourse to refer, even protestingly, is for it to become instantly complicit with what it criticizes; in a familiar linguistic and psychoanalytic paradox, negation negates itself because it cannot help but to posit the object it desires to destroy.” I find this to be an extreme position which submits rather too readily to the authoritarian strictures of logic: affirmation (+) x negation (-) = negation (-). Nevertheless, the problem is a genuine one and both Doctorow and Ângelo (self-)consciously grapple with it without ever reaching a resolution. As the escritorBom, eu acho que é um problema sem solução.” concludes his explanation of his intentions with respect to Andrea, “

In a novel where the public and private are frighteningly interchangeable, the implicit critique of the unified bourgeois subject includes by extension, as it does in THE BOOK OF DANIEL, the concept of “national identity.” The idea of national identity has obsessed many of Latin America’s most important cultural theorists including Alfonso Reyes (Mexico), José Lezama Lima (Cuba) and Oswald de Andrade (Brazil), to name only a few. According to a number of critics, the principle theme of Latin American thinking has always been the problem of identity.

Recently, Brazilian artists and intellectuals have begun to rethink the concept of national identity, and in so doing have taken steps toward deconstructing the notion of a Brazilian “essence.” Santiago has provided, in my view, the most provocative theoretical reconceptualization of Brazilian “identity.” In the well-known essay “O Entre-lugar do Discurso Latino-americano,” Santiago has convincingly argued that the Latin American writer possesses no proper cultural identity from which to draw, as colonialism destroyed much of what was culturally indigenous to Latin America, and capitalist neocolonialism has liquidated whatever was left over.

The Latin American writer, to put it a bit differently, seeking a true self, finds only the colonizing other. This forces the self-aware (as opposed to naively nationalistic) Latin American writer into a condition of cultural dependency where national “identity” is necessarily constructed as a rewriting, simultaneously admiring and critical, of the colonizers’ established texts. “O imaginário,” writes Santiago, “no espaço do neocolonialismo, não pode ser mais o da ignorância ou da ingenuidade, nutrido por uma manipulação simplista dos dados oferecidos pela experiência imediata do autor, mas se afirmaria mais e mais come uma escritura sobre outra escritura.” Santiago thus posits intertextuality as the defining and enabling condition for a Latin American literature which, to employ Oswald de Andrade’s (in)famous metaphor, must cannibalize the other in order to survive.

The emblematic figure for this cannibalizing writer is Pierre Menard, the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.” According to Santiago, Menard’s “rewriting” of Don Quixote–an exact (word-for-word) copy of Cervantes’ text–stands as the ideal metaphor “para bem precisar a situação e o papel do escritor latino-americano, vivendo entre a assimilação e o respeito pelo já-escrito, e a necessidade de produzir um novo texto que afronte o primeiro e muitas vezes o negue.”

This manner of conceptualizing “dependency” resists cultural colonization in at least two important ways. First, it dissolves the traditional hierarchy that subordinates copy to original (and thus Latin America to Europe) by defining the former as an equally (if not more) valid creative-critical response to the latter. Secondly, it undercuts the primacy of “influence” as a critical paradigm, releasing Latin American writers from their “anxiety of influence” into an “in-between” space where influence becomes the necessary ground on which culture can grow. The implication is that the Latin American writer, forced to operate through a duality of discourses, occupies a privileged, “bifocal” epistemological position.

Through the deliberate inclusion of the discourse of the other within the discourse of the self, the type of literature Santiago describes by definition conflates complicity and resistance, a paradoxical move at the heart of postmodernism. This is a literature which takes place between “o sacrifício e o jogo, entre a prisão e a transgressão, entre a submissão ao código e a agressão, entre a obediência e a expressão.” Or to return to the representative figure of Menard, Latin American discourse “se instala na transgressão ao modelo, no movimento imperceptível e sutil de conversão, de peversão, de reviravolta.”

In these passages Santiago’s language–although employed in a “multicultural” rather than feminist context–anticipates Judith Butler’s nonessentializing theories of performativity by more than a decade. Both Santiago and Butler are invested in radically rethinking what constitutes identity and political resistance. Both conclude that identity is a fabrication, a construct made possible by dominant discourses, and that the act of self-construction, by openly subverting these hegemonic discourses, is the form effective resistance must take. For Butler, such resistance expresses itself in parody and pastiche; in Santiago’s model resistance takes the form of intertextuality. In both cases the idea of revolution is replaced by subversion.

This brings us back to A FESTA, arguably the most self-conscious and relentlessly intertextual novel since the days of Machado de Assis. In addition to engaging Brazilian writers like Machado, dos Anjos, Euclides da Cunha and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, A FESTA openly initiates dialogue with Machiavelli, Flaubert, Borges, Márquez, Robbe-Grillet, Capote, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even Alfred Hitchcock. All of this intertextuality takes place in a deeply theatrical environment where power and weakness are ultimately performative.

Consider again, for example, Andrea’s interview with the DOPS. At a particularly trying moment during that interview, Andrea “olhou para os homens, procurando apoio. Encontrou caras de pessoas assistindo a um filme.” Or the chapter entitled “Bodas de Pérola,” in which the disintegration of a marriage is rendered as acts in a play. Ângelo’s novel might itself be thought of as a performance of unmasking, one that reveals the processes which sustain a given–patriarchal, capitalistic, military–order.

To be sure, the ideological nature of national identity is exposed as one of these processes. At times the representatives of the dominant order are allowed to indict themselves, as when the sexist, self-obsessed, farting writer-turned-lawyer Jorge Paulo de Fernandes looks in the mirror and calls himself what he is: “Porco.” At other times the text treats Brazilian nationalism with more subtle humor, as when the alphabetical list of “things Jorge told the police” concludes with the assurance that “o uísque era nacional.” In its intertextuality, its myriad (and often contradictory) perspectives, the novel enacts the multiple exposures of Brazil to the other which is itself, revealing that self to be fissured, fragmented and, finally, empty of essence.

Analyzing what he terms the “nova narrativa” of the post-1964 era in Brazil, Cândido has written, “vê-se que estamos ante uma literatura do contra,” a literature characterized by “a negação implícita sem afirmação explícita da ideologia.” This, it seems to me, is an accurate summation of the general tenor of Brazilian literature under the military dictatorship, a literature that finds its keynote expression in A FESTA.

Despite “Ângelo”’s assertion that he’s not writing a generational novel, A FESTA, to quote DiAntonio, “has evolved as the thesis novel of its generation.” The literatura do contra–which includes the work of writers like Sant’Anna, Brandão, Rubem Fonseca and João Gilberto Noll–deliberately engages in a double-edged social critique, razing the façades of historical objectivity and national identity without explicitly proposing an alternative to traditional empiricist ways of knowing and being. The ambiguous, and possibly nugatory, nature of this critique is repeatedly foregrounded in these texts. “Ângelo” articulates such skepticism with references to “futilidades artísticas e sociais” and searching questions such as, “Será que é isso que nossa geração tem de fazer?: escrever romance?”

Ângelo’s former collaborator Santiago puts a slightly different spin on the problem, pointing out the disconcerting fact that Brazilian publishing houses regularly publish books in editions of three thousand copies for over a hundred million inhabitants:

O livro é, pois, objeto de classe no Brasil e, incorporado a uma rica biblioteca particular e individual, é signo certo de status social. Come tal, dirige-se a uma determinada e mesma classe, esperando dela o seu aplauso e a sua significação mais profunda que é dada pela leitura, leitura que se torna um eco simpático de (auto)revelação e de (auto)conhecimento.

Despite this bleak situation, and despite his own cynicism, Ângelo, like his narrator, finds himself compelled to take action, however symbolic or ineffectual, to create, if only in “fiction,” a democracy of perception which may or may not play a role in shifting consciousness in the direction of difference. In a typically paradoxically postmodern move, Ângelo’s literatura do contra calls into question the possibility of literature-as-political-resistance in the very act of resisting. Throughout, complicity is shown to be the rule, not the exception. As the poet Esdras, o Hermético, says: “A vida literária não cria amigos, mas cúmplices. Isso é do Drummond.”

Copyright (c) 2008 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]