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BRAZIL UNDER CONSTRUCTION: LITERATURE, PUBLIC WORKS, AND PROGRESS BY SOPHIA BEAL B.A., COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 2004 M.A. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2008 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PORTUGUESE AND BRAZILIAN STUDIES AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Sophia Beal This dissertation by Sophia Beal is accepted in its present form by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Date _________________________ ____________________________________ Nelson H. Vieira Recommended to the Graduate Council Date _________________________ ____________________________________ James N. Green Date _________________________ ____________________________________ Anani Dzidzienyo Approved by the Graduate Council Date _________________________ ____________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Sophia Funkhouser Beal was born in Danvers, Massachusetts on 30 March 1982 and grew up in Essex, Massachusetts. She received her secondary education at Milton Academy. In September 2000, she began her undergraduate studies at Columbia University where she majored in Comparative Literature and Society. She spent her junior year in Rio de Janeiro studying Brazilian literature at PUC-Rio in the Brown in Brazil program. In 2004, she graduated from Columbia University Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with departmental honors for her thesis ―Becoming a Character: An Analysis of Bernardo Carvalho‘s Nove Noites.‖ After spending a year in Maputo, Mozambique on a Fulbright grant, she began her graduate studies in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University in 2005. She earned her M.A. in 2008 and her PhD in 2010. During her time at Brown University, Beal was awarded the Joukowsky Presidential Fellowship and the Cogut Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellowship, as well as various fellowships to conduct research and teach in Brazil, including the Belda Family Research Fellowship. At Brown, she taught language, culture, literature, and theater courses about the Portuguese-speaking world. She has published articles, reviews, and translations in several academic journals and anthologies. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the following people, writing a dissertation has not been a lonesome endeavor, but in fact a vibrantly collaborative and enjoyable one. Special thanks to my thesis advisor, Nelson H. Vieira, for his excellent guidance during all steps of the process. I also would like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, James N. Green and Anani Dzidzienyo, for their terrific advice and enthusiasm about this project. Thank you to the extraordinary staff of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies: Armanda Silva, Candida Hunter, Kit Salisbury, Leslie Uhnak, Traude Kastner, and Susan Hirsch. In addition, I would like to thank those who pointed me toward relevant texts, answered questions, offered advice, and gave me a place to stay while I was conducting research. This group includes Gabriel and Vera Andrade, Anna Bulbrook, Manoel Costa, Petra Costa, Christopher Dunn, Ana Letícia Fauri, Patricia Figueroa, Drew Heitzler, David Jackson, Lian, Thayse Lima, Nuria Net, Bill Patrick, Leinimar Pires, Andréa Rocha, Sandy Tolan, my cohort and professors in the department, the staff of the archive at the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, and Rossana Libânio at the archive of the Centro Cultural da Light. In addition, I am grateful for the support of Mr. and Mrs. Artemis Joukowsky, the Belda Family, and the Cogut Center. Thank you to Bruce Robbins and Michael D. Rubenstein for inspiring me to write this dissertation and for providing feedback. I am also grateful to many other people who have read and commented on parts of this dissertation: Justin Beal, Thaddeus Beal, Daniel Block, Sara Fine, Allison Fong, Ghenwa Hayek, Hilary Kaplan, Drew Konove, v Robert Newcomb, Sara Pfaff, Katerina Seligmann, Michael Steinberg, and the 2009-2010 Cogut Center fellows. Special thanks to Erica Funkhouser, Rex Nielson, and Francis Shen for putting so much time and care into editing my chapters. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1-29 Chapter 1: The Generation of Electricity: Fiction, Light, and Progress in Rio de Janeiro in the Early Twentieth Century 30-59 Chapter 2: The Power of Light: Representations, from 1906-1962, of a Transport and Utility Company in Brazil 60-86 Chapter 3: The Real and Promised Brasília: An Asymmetrical Symbol in the 1960s 87-136 Chapter 4: Progress Narratives and Monumental Public Works: Brazil under the Military Regime (1964-1985) 137-161 Chapter 5: I Dreamed the City Stopped: Failed Public Works in Ferréz‘s Capão Pecado and Luiz Ruffato‘s Eles eram muitos cavalos 162-195 Conclusion 196-204 Works Cited 205-220 vii INTRODUCTION Canudos, the site of Antônio Conselheiro‘s religious community of over 25,000 followers, was famously desiccated by the Brazilian military in 1897 because the government saw it as a threat to the young Republic. The War of Canudos (1896-97) is a defining event in Brazilian history marked by its racial, political, regional, and religious intricacies, which are documented in one of the most canonical texts in Brazilian letters: journalist Euclides da Cunha‘s 1902 Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands).1 Although the military burned down Canudos in the late nineteenth century, we might expect the ruined city—rich with significance as a place of religious fanaticism, popular uprising, military missteps, and massacre—to have been transformed into a historical site with museums and guided tours. However, Canudos is now underwater. In the late 1970s, the Brazilian military regime (1964-1985) built a reservoir there as part of the Cocorobó Dam project. In the name of utility—supplying water to a drought-stricken region—the government let visual evidence of an unflattering aspect of the country‘s military history disappear under a shimmering surface. Although not directly referencing the construction of the Cocorobó Dam, a one-sentence chapter in Ignácio de Loyola Brandão‘s experimental novel Zero, written from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, opposes this sort of governmental choice. The chapter‘s willful reversal of the history of 1 Decades later, the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa‘s 1981 historic novel La guerra del fin del mundo [The War of the End of the World] aided in expanding awareness of the event beyond Brazil. 1 2 illumination—connoting knowledge and technology—condemns the military regime for moving the country backward not forward: "Há tantos anos, foi descoberta a vela de cera, a maior invenção depois da lâmpada elétrica" [Years ago, the wax candle was discovered, the greatest invention since the electric lamp] (191).2 Loyola Brandão wrote Zero while the military regime was building Itaipu, what would soon be the world‘s largest hydroelectric power plant. The regime celebrated superlative electricity production; however, Loyola Brandão saw Zero progress. The reservoir at Canudos and the Itaipu dam reveal how governments can use public works to drown out or amp up specific national narratives. Yet, they also reveal how literature can resist governments‘ official narratives. Loyola Brandão wrote Zero in alienating, fragmented prose that leaps from genre to genre with little cohesive narrative to make its fragments adhere. The defamiliarization this creates pulls readers away from unreflective assumptions about narrative, not only Zero‘s own narrative, but also national narratives beyond the novel. Moreover, Zero‘s incoherence and open-endedness allowed it initially to pass through the regime‘s censors when it was published in 1975. However, months later, the novel was censored, and it would only be allowed to be published again in Brazil in 1979 when censorship had eased. This dissertation, ―Brazil under Construction: Literature, Public Works, and Progress,‖ analyzes literary representations of Brazilian public works to explore questions about power and narrative. I begin with the examples of the reservoir over Canudos and the Zero chapter because they illustrate how opposing, sometimes mutually exclusive, national narratives coexist. Some understood the reservoir as a practical 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 3 solution, whereas others saw it as erasure. Some viewed the military regime‘s construction of public works as a symbol of progress, while others deemed it the deplorable action of an authoritarian dictatorship. This dissertation explores how, from the 1900s through the 1970s, the federal and municipal governments and companies operating in Brazil created not only public works, but narratives to demonstrate how specific public works would aid Brazil‘s national progress. In response to these narratives, fiction writers portrayed public works to complicate idealistic notions of national progress that deserved further reflection. By analyzing references to public works in literature, we can better understand conflicting conceptions of the nation that have coexisted at different moments in time. Thus, the contribution of this dissertation is to show the integral role that narratives about public works have played in Brazil‘s multifaceted self-representations. A brief overview of the types of public works and narratives