Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil

Memory, Politics and Identities

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783169870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art et politique

Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil brings updated criticism in English on the work of the prominent Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953), a key figure in understanding the making of modern Brazil. Building on existing literature, this book innovates through chapters that consider issues such as Ramos's dialogue with literary tradition, his cultural legacy for contemporary writers, and his treatment of racial discrimination and gender inequality through the multifarious, provocative and enduringly fascinating characters he created. The volume also addresses the question of Ramos's political involvement during the years of the Getulio Vargas government (1930–45), to revisit established readings of the author's politics. Through close reading of individual works as well as comparative analyses, this volume takes readers into the complexities of modernisation in Brazil, and highlights the writer's significance for our understanding of Brazil today.

Chapter One

Reflections on Graciliano Ramos

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INTERVIEW WITH LUIZ RUFFATO

Luiz Ruffato is one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary writers, with a number of his works having been translated into English, Italian, French, amongst several other languages. Born in Cataguazes, in the state of Minas Gerais, in 1961, his first major success came with the novel Eles eram muitos cavalos, of 2001 (translated into English by Anthony Doyle as There were many horses, 2014). In seventy short vignettes, wrought in a variety of styles, the book provides flashes into the lives of different inhabitants of the Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo, all captured on the same day, 9 May 2000. Other works include the novel Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (I was in Lisbon and Thought of You), of 2009, and his pentalogy Inferno provisório (Temporary Hell), which he began in 2005 with the publication of the novel Mamma, son tanto felice (Mum, I’m So Happy) and concluded with Domingos sem Deus (Sundays without God), in 2011. His works are marked by his attention to the lives and struggles of the lower middle class, which has traditionally been a blind spot in Brazilian literary tradition. A socially committed writer, he was invited to open the Frankfurt Book Fair of 2013, in which Brazil was the guest of honour. His speech at the opening ceremony generated a huge controversy, at home and abroad, for taking to an international platform an unapologetic survey of Brazil’s historic social ills and its probing into the role and place of the writer within the country’s context of social and political injustice. Hailed by many as a voice for political and socially committed writing, Ruffato also came under attack by those who felt his critique of his country, especially at the grand opening of the book fair, was ill-advised. In this interview, carried out by e-mail in October 2014, Ruffato speaks about his relationship with Graciliano Ramos, one of his literary masters.

1. What books by Graciliano made the greatest impression on you and how?

The first one I read was Vidas secas, when I was around 18 or 19 years old (I have since re-read it at least three times). But the book that most touched me was São Bernardo. The story of a man who, having born poor, gets rich using any ruthless means and ends up utterly alone is unforgettable. His inability to love others, his selfishness, arrogance, make up one of the most complex characters of world literature.

2. Is there one particular work or more than one by Graciliano that inspired you in your own career as a writer?

Graciliano Ramos has always been a reference for me, not only in terms of themes – that is, how to write about the destitute without falling into clichés – but also, and perhaps above all, in terms of how to be unique, in form and style, in each of his novels. I mean, Graciliano Ramos reinvents himself from Caetés to Vidas secas – each of his four novels is a specific incursion into a different way of narrating. And it is this that makes his work one of my bedside readings.

3. What do you consider to be Graciliano’s significance as a political author for contemporary readers?

Graciliano faces the misfortune of having become a canonical author in a country with a population of low levels of formal education and a dire education system. Students are forced to read him at school, generally Vidas secas, and subsequently hate him, as one hates everything that is compulsory, forced. The few students who become fascinated and revisit his work over time end up stopping at his most well-known works, São Bernardo and Vidas secas. I believe that the importance of Graciliano as the declaredly political author of Memórias do cárcere is decreasing more and more. That said, I think that anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of Brazil’s political history of the first half of the twentieth century should delve into his work.

4. Do you have a favourite quote or passage?

The closing chapter of São Bernardo, when Paulo Honório, alone at night, reflects on his life includes some of the best pages of world literature. Its closing words, ‘I ruined my life stupidly’ express the agony of a man whom we learned to despise throughout the book, but who thanks to the mastery of the author leads us with him through his tragic life choices towards self-destruction.

5. How can we read Graciliano against the context of Brazil today, an emerging power?

I believe that Graciliano, as a typical man from Brazil’s sertão,² distrustful and objective, would reject the definition of Brazil as an emerging power with an ironic smirk. An emerging power that has levels of education amongst the lowest in the world? An emerging power that witnesses a real corruption epidemic? An emerging power that destroys its forests and rivers, that fails to offer its people even a barely adequate health system, that witnesses one of the widest gaps between rich and poor? No, he would certainly not agree with this definition … Graciliano must be read within the current context and not as an author of an archaic Brazil of the past, but as one of the writers who perhaps best understood the soul of the Brazilian nation.

6. In what way is Graciliano a reference for contemporary Brazilian writers?

Unfortunately, I honestly believe that contemporary writers – I mean those who are between 20 and 40 years old – have no kind of deeper engagement with the work of Graciliano. At the moment, we are witnessing a certain dominance of North-American literature, and deepest Brazil, the real Brazil that Graciliano deals with, is somewhat absent from what is currently being published.

7. Do you believe there is a need to change the way Graciliano is read and interpreted in Brazilian schools?

Graciliano is read in secondary schools – as set reading, with educational ends … Generally speaking, this produces superficial and boring readings, guided by ill-prepared teachers whose approach leads them to not look beyond the obvious. School books still treat Graciliano as a regionalist writer and just describe aspects of his work that are not even remotely those that are most significant for its understanding. At university, Graciliano is studied, and there are good analyses of his works, such as postgraduate theses, for example, but these languish without readers as soon as they are completed as part of an academic course of study.

8. Do you consider Graciliano a modern writer?

Graciliano is an extremely complex writer. If we take Caetés, clearly influenced by the nineteenth-century Portuguese author Eça de Queiroz, we can see that, despite appearing old-fashioned at first, it has certain narrative features that are in line with what was most new for its time – the 1920s and 30s. We can think of São Bernardo, Angústia and Vidas secas in the same light, because they are novels that appear traditional but are not so in essence. Of these, Vidas secas is perhaps his most daring formal experiment: a book made up of short chapters that are like self-contained short stories, but that constitute a harmonious whole. So, Graciliano is modern, if we think that modern is the kind of author that despite having written in a specific space, specific language and time, transcends time, space and language.

9. Do you share Graciliano’s view on the modernist writers of São Paulo, as relayed to Homero Senna, when Graciliano referred to their movement as ‘a dishonest deceit’, saying that ‘bar rare exceptions, Brazilian modernists were charlatans’ who ‘concocted a whole load of false values and interfered with judgments’? Why?³

What Graciliano denounced, in the interviews he gave, was the fact that the modernists of São Paulo (and I believe he had writers Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade in mind) made a lot of noise to mark a moment: as though nothing had happened before 1922. In terms of literature it was as though they were inaugurating new forms of seeing the world, new ways of writing about Brazil. Now, in reality several writers had already been preparing the ground for the São Paulo modernists, writers such as Lima Barreto, Hilário Tácito, Adelino Magalhães, among others. Moreover, the São Paulo modernists decided to establish certain standards – mediocre poets and prose writers were elevated to the status of geniuses – and actually fiddled with the reputation of others – such as dismissing the wonderful poetry of Olavo Bilac – and were presumptuously dishonest – promoting one another and actively spread the idea that before them there was chaos and they brought the light …

10. If you had to choose one adjective to define Graciliano as a Brazilian intellectual, what would that be?

Engaged.

Notes

1 Questions by Lucia Villares and Sara Brandellero.

2 The sertão is the name given to the arid hinterland of north-eastern Brazil. Translator’s note.

3 Homero Senna, República das letras – entrevistas com 20 grandes escritores brasileiros, 3rd rev. edn (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1996), p. 202. The modernist movement discussed here involved a series of avant-garde cultural events in the early 1920s in São Paulo that aimed to redefine and update Brazilian culture. (Translator’s note.)

References

Senna, Homero, República das letras – entrevistas com 20 grandes escritores brasileiros, 3rd rev edn (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1996).

Chapter Two

Graciliano Ramos and Politics in Alagoas

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RANDAL JOHNSON

On 3 March 1936, novelist Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953) was arrested in Maceió, capital of the north-eastern state of Alagoas, presumably based on suspicions that he had in some way participated in an attempted left-wing putsch – the so-called Intentona Comunista – that had taken place in November of the previous year. No charges were ever brought against him, but he was imprisoned for ten months. With his arrest the social capital he had developed through service to the Alagoan oligarchy collapsed.¹

Along with Jorge Amado, Graciliano Ramos is the most significant canonical Brazilian writer clearly associated with the left in Brazil’s literary universe. Graciliano joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1945, and he remained a party member until his death in 1953. Living in Maceió in the early 1930s, it is well known that he associated with people who were or would become members of the Communist Party (e.g. Rachel de Queiroz, Alberto Passos Guimarães, José Auto), and his two oldest sons were apparently members of a communist youth organization.² Nonetheless, friends associated with the party in the early 1930s insist that he was not a communist, as does his daughter Clara, and there is no evidence that he had anything whatsoever to do with the events of November 1935 or that he was a member of the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL), which was behind those events.³ Dênis de Moraes cites Rachel de Queiroz as suggesting that Graciliano was what would today be called a social-democrat and Passos Guimarães as describing Graciliano as a ‘progressive liberal’ who ‘would not go a step beyond that’.⁴ Graciliano also asserts his lack of active political involvement in Memórias do cárcere.⁵

Unlike Jorge Amado, Graciliano’s writing did not generally coincide with positions taken by the more orthodox left, and he had little patience with such things as the proletarian novel or socialist realism. His first novel, Caetés (1933), appeared when debates raged about proletarian literature, yet its focus is on the mediocre lives of mediocre, generally middle-class, people in a mediocre town in the north-east rather than on the proletariat. Several critics took issue with his second novel, São Bernardo (1934), for focusing on the bosses – or a specific boss – rather than the workers. As Luís Bueno has put it, at the time of its publication ‘a very clear model for the novel of the left existed, and Graciliano Ramos’s second novel did not conform to it’.⁶ Angústia (1936), completed shortly before his arrest and published while he was in prison, is a profoundly psychological novel that was praised by rightists such as Octávio de Faria. Only in Vidas secas (1938), written after his release from prison, does Graciliano focus centrally on the lives of the subaltern, and even there he comes nowhere near the kind of political approach evident, for example, in Amado’s Jubiabá (1935), with the political radicalization of the prota...