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Hope College Digital Commons @ Hope College Faculty Publications 2016 From Anthropophagy to Allegory and back: A Study of Classical Myth and the Brazilian Novel Patrice Rankine Hope College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.hope.edu/faculty_publications Part of the Classical Literature and Philology Commons Recommended Citation Repository citation: Rankine, Patrice, "From Anthropophagy to Allegory and back: A Study of Classical Myth and the Brazilian Novel" (2016). Faculty Publications. Paper 1255. http://digitalcommons.hope.edu/faculty_publications/1255 Published in: Greek Myth and the Novel Since 1989, January 1, 2016. Copyright © 2016 Bloomsbury, London. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Hope College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Hope College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. From Anthropophagy to Allegory and back: A Study of Classical Myth and the Brazilian Novel through J. G. Noll’s Hotel Atlantico , and Jorge Amado’s The War of the Saints and The Discovery of America by the Turks Let it be remembered that events narrated in this chronicle – full of veracity, albeit lacking in brilliance – took place during the worst years of the military dictatorship and the most rigid censorship of the press. There was a hidden reality, a secret country that didn’t get into the news. The newsrooms of newspapers and radio and television stations found themselves restricted to covering generally unexpected events. Their editorial pages were reduced to unconditional praise for the system of government and those who governed. Jorge Amado, The War of the Saints , 104 (1993). In the epigraph above, the narrator The War of the Saints , written by Jorge Leal Amado de Faria (Jorge Amado) in 1993, sets his narrative – ‘lacking in brilliance’ but filled (ostensibly) with the stuff of social and cultural narrative – against a backdrop of the ‘hidden reality,’ the ‘secret country that didn’t even get into the news’. In the passage that follows the epigraph, the narrator goes on to elaborate on what took the place of political coverage, namely ‘a total prohibition of any reportage that carried the slightest allusion to the daily imprisonments, torture, political murders, and violation of human rights’. 1 The historical events remained outside of the official accounts of newspapers and therefore did not happen – at least, not officially. The narrator of The War of the Saints seems to implicitly criticize journalists for their reportage of ‘recipes’, ‘poems, ballads, odes, sonnets by classical poets, and stanzas from The Lusiads ’, and yet the narrative of The War of the Saints is no weightier, politically potent, or consequential than those topics. In fact, given the repeated – though subtle – references to classical narratives such as the story of Theseus, or to figures like Aphrodite and Menelaus, the novel might be read to a certain degree in epic terms alongside the Portuguese The Lusiads , rather than as an insignificant, quotidian tale. Nevertheless, as is the case with literature under many repressive regimes throughout history, 2 the façade of myth and fairytale – the allegory – to some extent conceals the potential subversiveness of the material. The War of the Saints privileges cultural (‘relating to a particular group of people and their habits, beliefs, traditions, etc.’) over political (‘of or relating to politics or government’) accounts.3 At the same time, the third-person omniscient narrator’s complaint masks the extent to which the cultural practices reveal a great deal about the military dictatorship and its aftermath. Herein lies the paradox of Amado’s story. That is, Amado’s The War of the Saints , set approximately ten years before its publication, in 1980s, seemingly does no more to reveal the mysteries of the ‘hidden reality’ or ‘secret 1 Cavalcanti (1992) recounts, between 1964 and 1974 ‘military justice arrested, tortured, and tried 7,367 Brazilians for subversive activities…To those numbers were added 10,034 individuals reported by civilians, 6,385 of whom went through preliminary military interrogation and trial’ (107). 2 See Bartsch 1998 and Rudich 2013. 3 The definitions are from the Merriam-Wester Dictionary . 2 country’ where ‘strikes, demonstrations, picketing, protests, mass movements, and guerrilla attacks’ occur than would other books and articles published during the period, texts that the narrator implicitly criticizes. The story in The War of the Saints of the cultural clash between the folk cultures “on the ground”, as it were, and the catholic, national narrative of ordo e progresso – ‘order and progress’, Brazil’s slogan emblazoned in the globe on the country’s flag – holds a key to the hidden, secret truth. The ‘war’ between local and national culture, or between culture and politics, itself occurs in the aftermath of the military regime, although Amado – somewhat uniquely – succeeded in advancing culture over politics even before 1989. The status of Brazilian public discourse in 1989 is apparent in the clash in The War of the Saints : between, on the one side, the Yoruba goddess Yansan and the practices that celebrate her and other orixás, the African ‘saints’ that came to Brazil along with the slaves; 4 and, on the other side, accepted, state-sanctioned, Catholic practices embodied in saints like Paul, Lazarus, and Barbara. The War of the Saints has many of the features of other Brazilian novels written after 1989. The characteristics are evident in J. G. Noll’s Hotel Atlantico and in The Discovery of America by the Turks , the other novel by Amado with which I am concerned in this essay. Even before the military dictatorship in 1964 these feature include a narrative focus essentially apolitical because Brazilian authoritarian rule is not confined to the dictatorship but comes as early as the birth of the Republic in 1890. 5 One difference after 4 For a general overview of this prevalent aspect of Amado’s work, see Hamilton 1967 and Nunes 1973. 5 As Smallman argues, ‘the Brazilian military has long used terror during moments of crisis’ (2000: 119). He points to the treatment of rebels in the navy in 1910 (suffocation, summary assassination). 3 1964 was that military tactics became professionalized, quotidian rather than an exceptional or temporary responses during crisis. Especially under the regime, successful Brazilian fiction as a whole – which is to say readable and not subject to censorship – does not directly take on political themes. In part because of this, classical myth is one of the primary mode of expression in the Brazilian novel before 1989, as an allegorical cover for real events. The second feature of Brazilian fiction after 1989, along with the continued apolitical nature of successful books, is the retreat of classical myth from monumental to multivalent status. The longer arch of twentieth century Brazilian fiction helps to contextualize this claim. In 1922, Brazilian modernists declared anthropophagy (omophagia ) as a literary mode during the Week of Modern Art, Oswaldo de Andrade’s Anthropophagia Manifesto (1928) being one of the key documents to emerge. Brazilian artists would come to see the country, founded in 1500 in competition with native inhabitants, who were mythically purported to eat the human flesh of their defeated enemies, as having a native mode of consuming material from the outside. Brazilians would become themselves by consuming the forms, stories, and the styles of expression of others. The blending of these would be the unique Brazilian contribution to humanity. Classical myth would be only one of many outside influences to be symbolically eaten. Between 1964 and 1989, however, there are several examples of the centrality of classical myth in providing a cover for political and cultural discussion, ranging from Chico Buarque’s A Gota de Agua to Orfeu Negro . This monumental classicism in some cases allowed culture to rise to the level of national politics, and Amado is one who was able to remove the classical cover and simply speak in terms of local cultures – such as 4 African religious practices – in national terms (Vieira 1989). It is worth noting that many of Amado’s more socialist leaning novels were published prior to 1964 (Hamilton 1967). For writers under the regime, such as Scliar, the consumption of the Greco-Roman classics would seem at times wholesale rather than an integration into the whole being that comes with anthropophagy. After 1989, Brazilian novelists do not abandon a diet of classical vitals, but the novels with which I am concerned here do seem to return to a deployment of classical myth alongside other cultural influences more like the pre-1964 model of anthropophagy. If an apolitical narrative and the role of the classics in it were two features of the Brazilian novel, a third aspect that continues after 1989 – perhaps in heightened fashion – would be the degree to which the stories upset traditional Bildungsroman. The protagonists of the novels with which I am concerned here might each be called antiheroes, or at least piquaresque, and this description applies even to the hero of Moacyr Scliar’s The Centaur in the Garden , whose animalistic nature leads him to infidelity and other foibles. The heroes of Amado’s novels might be called misogynistic, and they project troublesome Brazilian norms in terms of their treatment of women. In the eyes of Amado’s narrator, however, these characters are part of a moral environment in which virtue and vice are not on any continuum (with good on one pole and evil at the other extreme). Amado points to another set of metaphysical realities to some extent embodied in the African orixás and their human manifestations, in which ethics do not map onto behavior in expected ways. These metaphysical realities cause the African practices, folk forms that overturn norms of the Catholic Church, to prevail in The War of the Saints .

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