Caio Yurgel Landscape’s Revenge Latin American Literatures in the World Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo Edited by / Editado por Gesine Müller Volume / Volumen 2 Caio Yurgel Landscape’s Revenge The ecology of failure in Robert Walser and Bernardo Carvalho ISBN 978-3-11-061757-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061758-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061766-5 ISSN 2513-0757 e-ISSN 2513-0765 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956339 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Caio Yurgel, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgement If this book exists – and I would like to believe that it does –, it is greatly due to the unwavering generosity and guidance of Joachim Küpper and Susanne Zepp. The final text has also benefited from the insights and support of Jürgen Brokoff, Anne Fleig, Gaia Gubbini, and Gesine Müller. This book also couldn’t have existed without the love and encouragement of some of the kindest Berliners to ever have ventured north of the Ring: Camila Gonzatto, Jasmin Wrobel, Jorge Estrada, Jule Govrin, Laura Gagliardi, Lena Abraham, Maddalena Graziano, Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves, Nora Weinelt, and Zairong Xiang. My deepest gratitude to the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule and to all the incredible people that make things happen at the Freie Universität Berlin on a daily basis. Open Access. © 2019 Caio Yurgel, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617580-201 Contents Acknowledgement V 1 Introduction 1 Table of abbreviations 10 2 Literature review: Landscape’s revenge 11 3 From the unreal to the apocalypse: The landscape as a function of language and narrative in Walser and Carvalho 47 3.1 Walser: Träumen (1913–1920) and the short prose 49 3.1.1 The dissolution of the landscape into language in Walser’s short prose 49 3.1.2 The quest for movement and the use of adjectives 51 3.1.3 Portrayals of people and the ‘what-if’ scenarios of Konjunktiv II 53 3.1.4 The unheimlich and the first signs of a dark and unsettling landscape 56 3.1.5 The rift between indicative and subjunctive fiction: Walser’s penchant for miniaturization 60 3.1.6 A defeatist’s answer in face of the unreal: The retreat into a world of objects and the option for the margins 64 3.2 Carvalho: Aberração (1993) and the early novels 69 3.2.1 The Romantic longing for homecoming and the exile of the mind 69 3.2.2 Carvalho’s intellectual and linguistic post-apocalyptic scenario 73 3.2.3 The problem of geography: Carvalho’s civilizing project 84 3.2.4 The last human beings: On Carvalho’s poetics of subtraction 97 3.2.5 Um romance sem descendência: The politics of epidemics in Carvalho’s early novels in light of Susan Sontag’s take on the “rise in apocalyptic thinking” 102 4 The disappearing act: Moving towards the margins 110 4.1 Walser: Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (1904) 111 4.1.1 A Romantic death fifty years too late: Fritz Kochers Aufsätze as a program of Walser’s entire oeuvre 111 4.1.2 The nature of the Aufsatz: From Romantic idyll to language’s artifice 113 VIII Contents 4.1.3 The found manuscript: Fritz’s unnamed teacher as the narrative mastermind behind the Aufsätze 119 4.1.4 The bared text: Walser’s interweaving of narrative voices and displacement of narrative authority 124 4.2 Carvalho: Mongólia (2003) 128 4.2.1 The overlapping of narrative voices and the systemic refusal of manual labor 128 4.2.2 A minor literature: The case for marginality 138 4.2.3 A “minor” reading of Machado de Assis’ narrators and their influence on Carvalho’s work 142 4.2.4 What is literature and where does it happen?: The displacement of reality into the act of representing 150 5 How to do things with fire: The desert as landscape’s final revenge and as the culmination of Walser’s and Carvalho’s literary projects 158 5.1 Walser: Jakob von Gunten (1909) 159 5.1.1 A dreamlike atmosphere 160 5.1.2 The slow onset of madness and the ghost of truth 164 5.1.3 The anti-hero: A departure from Romanticism 170 5.1.4 Jakob’s conflict between the world of culture and the world of nature 178 5.1.5 Brother ex-machina: The role of the eldest brother in Jakob von Gunten 184 5.1.6 Johann’s seventh labor: To become a tree 190 5.1.7 Walser’s politics of fire and the desert as the inevitable end 196 5.2 Carvalho: Nove Noites (2002) 201 5.2.1 Buell Quain: A tragic in the tropics 201 5.2.2 The making of a Walserian character 203 5.2.3 L’auteur avant sa mort: Adding Walser to a Structuralist recipe 210 5.2.4 Carvalho’s Napoleon: Truth, historical truth, and (auto) biography 221 5.2.5 Orphans of civilization: The quest for a paternal figure 224 5.2.6 “Daqui para frente, é o deserto”: The fire and the desert in Carvalho’s work 237 6 The desert for conclusion 242 References 248 1 Introduction There is something amiss behind Robert Walser’s idyllic vistas and Bernardo Carvalho’s exotic sceneries. They are, upon closer inspection, neither idyllic nor exotic, but the first subterranean signs of a world that is slowly undoing itself. Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the work of the Swiss and the Brazilian writer, provides an excellent – and yet insufficiently explored – pathway to the authors’ literary projects. Through their treatment of landscape both authors reveal not only their main aesthetic concerns and stylis- tic preferences, but also their broader literary goals – and, in Carvalho’s case, the extent to which he is influenced by Walser’s work. This study, thus, posits the landscape as the feature which not only binds the work of these two authors together, but also unveils their literary projects in their entirety. The landscape functions as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of landscape description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors’ works, such as their preferences for settings and themes, their linguistic and narrative tics, their Romantic influence and backdrops, their penchant for movement and heights. However, when sustained as a method- ological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of Walser’s and Carvalho’s oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist, barely disguised resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors’ prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, the obsession with the themes of madness and sickness, an under- standing of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality, as well as the anti-heroic agenda which undermines the very same Romanticism from where both authors seem, at a first glance, to draw their strengths. A comprehensive study of the landscape and its implications in the work of both Walser and Carvalho is barely inexistent. With two notable yet still insuffi- cient exceptions,1 the landscape within the critical reception of Carvalho’s work is usually – if at all – used as a byword for the post-colonial or the (trans)cultural, when it in fact underscores a much more literary than political maneuver, as the opening chapters of this research seek to demonstrate (the politics is in the details). The landscape is also, in both authors’ cases, commonly equated to the poetic (in 1 One unfortunately too short – Pedro Dolabela Chagas & Dárley Suany Leite dos Santos, “O Narrador e a Paisagem: Milton Hatoum, Bernardo Carvalho e o Fim do Projeto de uma Litera- tura Nacional”, 2015 –, and the other too adjectival – Carlinda Fragale Pate Nunez, “Mongólia de Bernardo Carvalho: Romance de Espaço e Imagologia”, 2015. Open Access. © 2019 Caio Yurgel, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110617580-001 2 1 Introduction Walser) or the photographic (in Carvalho), a naïve notion which this research also seeks to offset by showcasing the complex implications triggered by land- scape description in the authors’ oeuvres, as opposed to the mere affectation of a writerly or aesthetic sensibility. It is also not unusual, within the authors’ critical reception, to have the landscape foreshadowing the mood of a given character or, rather, of a given narrator, as if symbolically mirroring said narrator’s psychology and inner turmoil. This book shows how the narrators’ agendas run much deeper than psychology, a notion in any case shunned by both authors, and how their inner turmoil is located above all in language, of which the landscape is not only a function, but also the gateway to all that is hidden underneath the text’s surface. The landscape, as previously stated, also functions here as a unifying figure, not only triggering both the main and covert elements in the authors’ oeuvres, but also providing a conceptually sound conclusion to their analysis.