Anti-Literature

The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina

Adam Joseph Shellhorse

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780822982432
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anti-Literature articulates a rethinking of what is meant today by "literature." Examining key Latin American forms of experimental writing from the 1920s to the present, Adam Joseph Shellhorse reveals literature's power as a site for radical reflection and reaction to contemporary political and cultural conditions. His analysis engages the work of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Oswald de Andrade, the Brazilian concrete poets, Osman Lins, and David Viñas, to develop a theory of anti-literature that posits the feminine, multimedial, and subaltern as central to the undoing of what is meant by "literature."By placing Brazilian and Argentine anti-literature at the crux of a new way of thinking about the field, Shellhorse challenges prevailing discussions about the historical projection and critical force of Latin American literature. Examining a diverse array of texts and media that include the visual arts, concrete poetry, film scripts, pop culture, neo-baroque narrative, and others that defy genre, Shellhorse delineates the subversive potential of anti-literary modes of writing while also engaging current debates in Latin American studies on subalternity, feminine writing, posthegemony, concretism, affect, marranismo, and the politics of aesthetics.

1

FIGURATIONS OF IMMANENCE

Writing the Subaltern & the Feminine in Clarice Lispector

SIFTING THROUGH Clarice Lispector’s numerous notes, fragments, chronicles, and interviews, one finds an entire archive of anti-literary statements. “Literature,” Lispector states, “is a detestable word—it’s outside the act of writing” (é fora do ato de escrever) (Outros 165).¹ Literature, for Lispector, becomes reactionary with its system of prizes, etiquettes, and, above all, reductive classificatory procedures. In a final, 1977 televised interview, Lispector is asked about the role of the Brazilian writer and whether literature “alters the order of things.” She seemingly brushes aside this burning question that contextualizes Brazilian literary production in the 1960s and 1970s. Anchored as the question is to a repressive military dictatorship that would not falter until 1985, Lispector affirms that the writer’s role consists in “speaking as little as possible” and that literature “alters nothing.”² What are we to make of Lispector’s anti-literary utterances? Are we to conclude, like many critics on the Left in the 1960s and 1970s, that Lispector’s writing was ultimately alienated from the political and the epochal question of engagement? And what are we to make of her final novel, A hora da estrela (1977), in which the question of writing the feminine and subaltern configures a central problematic?

The crisis of the Brazilian state in the 1960s triggers a crisis of language. Politicized literary movements blossom throughout the country.³ The military coup on 31 March 1964 pushes the social relevance of literature front and center, while the repressive crackdown on students, artists, and dissidents through Institutional Act V in December 1968 amplifies the problematic. In a revelatory text, “Literatura e Justiça” (1964), Lispector examines her much-critiqued incapacity to approach “a coisa social” (the social problematic) (149). The question of social justice to whose cause Lispector is committed seems for her overly obvious, while writing is only ever arduous “procura” (searching). For Lispector in the 1960s, to write is not to communicate political messages or to reflect the social in its totality. Literature as process, as intimate procura: writing becomes the name for a “linguagem de vida” (language of life) detached from any criteria or program (Outros 106).

With the hardening of censorship and the torture of students and dissidents, Lispector partakes in the March of 100,000 against the dictatorship. Indeed, she iconically walks at the front of the protest with a host of artists from Rio. And yet, in the late 1960s, Lispector undergoes a crisis. While producing chronicles, short stories, newspaper columns, and children’s books, she complains to close friends of having lost the desire and ability to write. Upon completing the mature, experimental novels Água viva (1973) and A hora da estrela (1977), Lispector confesses her distaste for her “lighter” works and the chronicle form. Lispector will have rediscovered the necessity for writing.⁴

With trepidation, Lispector delays the publication of Água viva for three years for its lack of storyline. The central thread that runs through the novel’s fragmentary mode of expression and its series of metaliterary sketches (esboços) is perhaps best summarized in an initial utterance: “Este não é um livro porque não é assim que se escreve” (This is not a book because in this way one does not write) (Água 13). The novel’s defiance of genre, chronological ordering, and flight from “reason” articulate its resounding achievement. Its self-reflexive procedure of laying bare the device finds echo in A hora da estrela. More than this, the work ushers forward an impressive meditation on an anti-literary, constructivist mode of writing. Words only achieve their splendor, perceptive field, and intimate life by freeing themselves from the prison-house of language as a system of representations. And one way to attain this power of the word is by making writing a fragmentary system of questions without answers. Writing will only reach life, will only transfigure itself in vision and sensation, by thinking its own limits: “é como o verdadeiro pensamento se pensa a si mesmo, esse espécie de pensamento atinge seu objetivo no próprio ato de pensar . . . pensamento primário” (it is as though true thought thinks of thinking itself, this species of thought attains its objective in the proper act of thinking . . . primary thought) (Água 107–8). On examining Lispector’s annotations or “roteiro” (itinerary) for the book’s revisions, one finds an interesting, anti-literary project: “abolir a crítica que seca tudo” (abolish criticism which dries up everything) (Varin 186).

Lispector’s resounding fame today, as Benjamin Moser relates, largely rides on A hora da estrela.⁵ In revisiting such reach, one cannot ignore the fact that the book in 1985 was made into a movie by Suzana Amaral that won numerous international and national prizes. Yet if we were to speak of it as a unified, plot-driven story, as many critics inevitably do, we would run the risk of reducing a book with thirteen names and thirteen titles. Moreover, such a plot summary often falls within the trappings of a representational logic that interprets the impoverished protagonist, Macabéa, as a hapless victim. Lispector will maintain a far more ambitious project. In her televised interview, Lispector condenses her vision of the protagonist: “é uma história de uma moça, tão pobre que só comia cachorro-quente; mais a história não é só isso . . . é a história de uma innocência pisada, de uma miséria anónima” (it’s the story of a girl, so poor that she only eats hotdogs, but the story is not only this . . . it’s the story of a trampled innocence, of an anonymous misery). In a manuscript note, Macabéa is described as “hardly material . . . in its most primary form” (Varin 96). From the figure of the impoverished girl, to an impersonal, collective landscape of misery; from anonymous misery, to the primary form of a material that knows no reason (A hora [1998] 69). The great problem underwriting A hora da estrela is the problem of pushing literature to its limits. Let us consider the novel’s design through its metaliterary focus.

A hora da estrela begins at the border of literature by inscribing the abyssal presence of Lispector as author. For example, Lispector’s signature is one of the work’s thirteen possible titles, and the opening dedicatory begins by framing her as the “(in truth author)” (A hora [1998] 9). The novel next delimits the story as a formidable writing project by protagonist-narrator Rodrigo S.M., who has decided to transgress, via experimentation, his former literary “limits” (13, 17). The plot begins, then, really at a second border, in media res, with heightened attention toward the work’s medium (meio) (24, 35), and a philosophical justification of the text’s heterogeneous style. Comparing himself to a carpenter, manual labor, shapechanger, soul-catcher, playwright, and a form of “knowledge” (82), such a style will evoke, Rodrigo assures, a multitude of media and questions: popular poetry (literatura de Cordel) (33), cinema (em tecnicolor) (10, 29), photography (17), discordant music (11, 22, 24, 30), abstract painting (17, 22), melodrama (82), tragic and absurdist theater (21, 23, 48–49, 71, 84–85), stuttering (23), stabbing tooth pain (24), as well as a simultaneous search for “primary life” (13, 16, 21), messianism (19), facts (16), metamorphosis (20), and personal ethics (13). Foregrounding the existentialist theme, Rodrigo affirms his commitment to tell a story of wide social implications (é minha obrigação contar sobre essa moça entre milhares delas) (10, 16). Rodrigo’s experiment moreover mixes intertexts from Woolf, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Bram Stoker, Shakespeare, Anita Malfatti, the Bible, Joyce, and Hollywood. Yet as an exodus from “literature” (70), his project will not simply concern questions of form, but rather aim at attaining a productive dimension of “nakedness” between writing and life (82). It is the limit, as boundary and passage between worlds, that has sparked Rodrigo’s inquiry: his haphazard glimpse at an impoverished girl in Rio has damned him on a mission to cut all ties with literature and to create a hybrid text that hooks up writing to outside forces. Cultivating a writing style concerned with expressing “primary life” (13), Rodrigo’s capacity to perceive the sensuous life of this anonymous indigent girl coincides with his newfound ability to capture “the spirit of language” (o espírito da língua) (18).

No longer interested in writing literature, Rodrigo’s break, then, implies a gambit: a painfully objective writing technique that will propel him to create the impoverished Macabéa, and to lay bare the literary device in two fundamental ways as a “force” (16, 18). First, Rodrigo reminds us that, due to difference in education, class, gender, and language, he is struggling with all his might to bring to life the socially marginalized Macabéa. Second, he ceaselessly comments on the writing of the story. Such suspensions of the fictive order parallel Rodrigo’s regime of privations, which includes abstaining from shaving, soccer, and sex. In sum, Rodrigo will endeavor to affirm the “truth” (sentido secreto) of writing subaltern experience (14), even if it means composing a story that “kills” all authority, including his own (86). Accordingly, beyond the prevailing view that perceives Macabéa as a hopeless victim, I argue that she embodies forces of life that shed light on the problem of writing the feminine, the subaltern, and the political in Lispector.⁶ Macabéa as the woman without particularities and subjectivity, Rodrigo as the pariah of literature that cannot stop interrupting this impossible writing project—such are the contours of Lispector’s monumental anti-literary work that goes a step further than Água viva in its exploration of writing subalternity and the feminine.

THE ANTI-LITERARY & THE LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY REGIME

Lispector once said, “[P]erhaps I understand the anti-story best because I am an anti-writer” (porque sou antiescritora) (qtd. in Borelli 71). When asked of her outsider yet consecrated position with respect to the Brazilian and Latin American literary traditions, she never hesitated to mark her distance. Against professionalization and etiquettes, straying from what she called “the superficial world of literary writers,” Lispector’s constructivist approach turns on problematizing the separation between writing and life (qtd. in Varin 195). The consummation of her vision, what she called “a linguagem de vida” (a language of life), implies an exodus from the Latin American literary regime of representation (Outros 106).

I am here invoking a larger debate within Latin American cultural studies and its subalternist orientations. To speak of the subaltern is to critique a stagnant concept of culture and the historical entwining of Latin American literature with politics since the nineteenth century. The impetus informing Latin American subaltern studies, in its various guises and camps, begins with a critique of state-centered conceptions of culture. Gareth Williams, Alberto Moreiras, and José Rabasa have written of the exhaustion of unitary models of analysis and of the subaltern as a relational term and epistemological limit. Like Macabéa, who is characterized by Rodrigo as a “porous material” (A hora [1998] 13), we can understand the subaltern not as mere downtrodden marginals but as a “constitutive outside,” a limit term or fissure, where the fictions of state-centered, unitary discourses become suspended (Williams, Other 11).

Beginning in the 1990s, literature and literary criticism in Latin American studies become suspect due to a sequence of related yet divergent sources. In the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980s and the electoral defeat of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the first source of this contrarian vision concerns the emergence of Latin American subaltern studies as a response to the sedimentation of neoliberal models across the continent, as well as to the crisis of Marxism and revolution (Bosteels 147). To the extent that the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group’s “Founding Statement” (1992) calls for reconceptualizing “the relation of nation, state, and ‘people,’” it does so in order to question the then dominant conception of cultural production, most notably, the literary, understood as a representational, class-based apparatus of representation that endeavors to “speak for” the subaltern (137, 140).

Another source concerns the critique of Ángel Rama’s cultural theory of Latin American literature as transculturation. As already indicated in the introduction, Rama likens Latin American literature to a unified culturalist project, a “sistema” or “campo de integración” (Transculturación 56) assigned the anthropological task of representing the continent’s marginalized peoples as an act of difference and “descolonización espiritual” (20). Consider the example of Rama’s analysis of João Guimarães Rosa’s novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956). Through the monologues of retired killer Riobaldo—which, akin to the narratives of William Faulkner, intertwine experimental writing with regional voices—Guimarães Rosa is able to achieve an organic conception of Brazilian culture. Faced with the homogenizing tendencies of a “corrosive” modernization (Transculturación 31), Guimarães Rosa’s procedure of “neoculturación” restores an original, representative vision of a Latin American region through modern, literary criteria (39). This is why the task of literature, according to Rama, is to “coronate” culture (las obras literarias no están fuera de las culturas sino las coronan), to reestablish literature’s mediational relevance and role as spokesman for the organic roots of Latin American popular and subaltern cultures (19). However debatable Rama’s vision of literature, he places his finger on a larger historical phenomenon: the historical Latin American literary regime of representation. By the historical representational regime of Latin American literature, I refer to the interpretative, integrating, and representational functions that Latin American writers assigned to the literary beginning in the nineteenth century and that run all the way through the twentieth to Rama’s monumental theory in 1982. In short, the literary becomes inexorably linked to the state. And literature is assigned the task of expressing the “spirit” of the nation—however hybrid, disenfranchised, or marginalized its peoples—as willed cultural difference. This brings us back to the problematic of anti-literature.

The move from “literature” to subversive invention entails making the historical distinction between the institutionalized field of literature as a habitus that conflates experimentation with identitarian description, and literary works that redistribute the encoding of social reality.⁷ Against the redundancy of representations that subject and reduce the immanence of both work and social field, the experimental work is always inaugural, cutting through the established hierarchical sensory, gender, and class divides. The innovative composition reveals a new capacity of language, a new image of writing at stake in the present, immanent to its subversive design-structure (linguagem), refractive and open to its very finitude, to nonlanguage, to nonverbal systems of communication, and to other media. I refer to the problem of the anti-literary’s perceptual and constitutive powers, its radicalized medium, and the ways in which it defies what is normatively meant by “literature.”

Marking the distinction between the institutionalized field and the singularity of the inaugural work entails, consequently, going against the grain of the Latin American literary regime of representation.⁸ The Latin American literary regime of representation encodes, territorializes, and represses the revolutionary potential of the experimental text. Constituted through a willed cultural difference and an irrevocable class divide that informs its mode of expression, under the literary regime, as we see clearly in the example of Rama, writing becomes subsumed through an instituting discourse of identity.

Against the regime’s claims to national popular synthesis and its disavowal of composition, anti-literary works challenge and rearrange the sensible encoding of the real. Even so, indistinction, rife today, lies at the very origin of the Latin American literary regime. Claims to purity have led likewise to a disavowal of the literary’s power. For all of this, there is no question that the literature debate in Latin American studies today has reached a state of impasse. Or is it that, at worst, weighed down by its critiques, literature is simply disregarded altogether as passé by a new generation of thinkers? Refusing to go this route, the regime’s stagnation summons a new horizon for reassessing the literary problematic in Latin America and its culturalist avatars: the imperative of constructing a countergenealogy, an anti-literary line, to use Décio Pignatari’s lucid expression, an insurrectional return to the past (“Marco” 149). For anti-literature, as experimentation, constitutes a procedure of the sensible that i...