ABSTRACT

Studies of Latin American culture have returned time and again to the issue of how to capture the many conflicts and tensions inherent in national, group, and individual identities of the region. This dissertation examines an overlooked component of identity debates: the experience of being anonymous or unrecognized. In particular, I focus on late twentieth and early twenty-first century representations of anonymity in Argentina and Brazil. These countries share various key characteristics: emergence from recent military dictatorships; accelerating urbanization and globalization; rapid transformation of public spaces and media technologies that shape the possibilities of expressing an identity and having it recognized. Within these contexts, my dissertation considers a corpus of novels and films centered on attempts to either escape anonymity or become anonymous. Chapter 1 analyzes the decay of family and community bonds as a source of recognition and social value in Fernando Bonassi’s Subúrbio and Guillermo Saccomanno’s El oficinista. Chapter 2 examines media technology and the relationship between audiences and celebrities. I read Alejandro López’s La asesina de Lady Di and Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s O anônimo célebre as depictions of individuals seeking mass-media fame as a form of large-scale, public recognition. Chapter 3 looks at two cinematic representations of the bus 174 hijacking in Rio de Janeiro. José Padilha’s Ônibus 174 and Bruno Barreto’s Última parada 174 show the challenge of preserving the disruptive potency of the hijacker’s demand for recognition, and the danger of neutralizing it through conventional narrative tropes. Chapter 4 analyzes representations of “desired anonymity” in Sergio Chejfec’s novel Mis dos mundos and Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios. The first explores the freedom of anonymous wandering in cosmopolitan and digital spaces. The latter imagines the creation of a community in which the burden of post-dictatorship memory and identity can be de-individualized and shared. Taken together, these works illustrate the continued demand to identify oneself and be(come) recognized as a basis for everyday social-civil interactions. They also question the value and viability of expressing a clear identity or cohesive self-narrative in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian society.

© Copyright by Adam Demaray, 2016 All Rights Reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my parents, Randi Malach and Bill Demaray. For all the love, support, and books that they have given me.

Despite “anonymity” being the central topic of my dissertation, I would be remiss if I did not recognize the following people.

My tremendous thanks go first to Idelber Avelar—for his guidance and patience in helping me formulate my topic from the earliest days, and for his incisive feedback along the way, which enabled me to truly understand and imagine the potential of this project. Thank you to Rebecca Atencio, who more than anyone else helped me discover Brazil and Brazilian culture, and challenged me to find new ways to study and appreciate them. Thank you to Antonio Gómez, who has been helping me to both expand and refine my point of view since my first semester at Tulane. I owe so much to the members of my committee, whose investment in my research and in my academic career has been invaluable, and whose own work continues to inspire me.

This project never would have come to fruition without Sophie Esch, my dissertation buddy, who beat me to the finish line but nevertheless continued to read and comment on my work. On countless occasions, her feedback has allowed me to illuminate and hone my best ideas.

I want to extend my appreciation and admiration to all the professors with whom I have had the honor of studying during my time at Tulane. My particular gratitude goes out Sophia Beal and Chris Dunn, whose courses directly contributed to my doctoral work. Thank you also to Leila and Jeremy Lehnen for hosting me back in Albuquerque and for suggesting different areas this project could explore. And to Antonio Gómez and Dale Shuger’s Dissertation Writing Group, which pulled me through some of the later legs of this process.

Thank you to the Tulane University Department of Spanish and Portuguese as a whole, for giving me the opportunity spend these years studying literature, film, and culture in the city of New Orleans. Thank you also to Claudia DeBrito and Terry Spriggs, for their unfailing graciousness and efficiency.

My enormous gratitude also goes out to Susana Chávez-Silverman at Pomona College, without whom I would never have started down the path of languages and literatures. Many thanks to Mallory Falk and especially to my mother, for their constant encouragement and their assistance in making my writing clean and readable. Finally, thank you to all my wonderful colegas at Tulane, who all at some point or another helped me to get my mind either off or back on this project. !ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………….….….ii

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………..…….1

Chapter

1. TOXIC BONDS: CRISES OF RECOGNITION IN THE HOME AND ON THE STREET…….……………………………..…………………19 Subúrbio: Recognition in Ruins…..……………………………………..24 El oficinista: Dystopian Anonymity..……………………………………45

2. A CELEBRITY OF ONE’S OWN: MASS MEDIA, FAME, AND ANONYMITY………………………………………………………….73 Conceptions of Mass-Mediated Fame in Latin America .……………….79 O anônimo célebre: The (Im)possibilities of Fame……………………107

3. RE-PRESENTING FACELESSNESS: CINEMATIC RETELLINGS OF THE BUS 174 INCIDENT……………………………………………...138 Ônibus 174: Can the Hijacker Speak?……………………………….…141 Última parada 174: Losing Sandro………………………………….…168

4. NOT ONESELF: TOWARD DESIRED ANONYMITY..………………..…188 Mis dos mundos: Wandering Away from the Self.…………………..…190 Los rubios: Decentering Self-Narration.…………………………….…213

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………243

NOTES………………………………………………………………………………….250

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..…………………………………………………………………….262

!iii !1

INTRODUCTION

“How am I not myself?” - from the film I ♡ Huckabees

What does it mean to be unrecognized? That question lies at the heart of this study—not only how one defines recognition, but also how one experiences its achievement or failure. The notion of identity—both group and individual—has historically been treated in affirmative terms, responding to questions such as: Who are you? What are you? Where are you from? What do you do? In Latin America, the socio-historical complexity of the region has only highlighted the absurdity of giving any single or straightforward answer. Theories of hybridity, mestizaje, and transculturation,1 to name only a few, have complicated the question of identity in significant and fruitful ways. The value of these attempts to define regional, national, and local identities is not necessarily to be found in whether they “resolve” a question of identity. Indeed,

“identity” as a concept has only ever existed as a problem that demands but constantly eludes any fixed definition or articulation. As Zygmunt Bauman has said:

at no time did identity ‘become’ a problem; it was a ‘problem’ from its birth—was born as a problem (that is, as something one needs do something about—as a task), could exist only as a problem [….] One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs; that is, one is not sure how to place oneself among the evident variety of behavioural styles and patterns, and how to make sure that people around would accept this placement as right and proper, so that both sides would know how to go on in each other's presence. ‘Identity’ is a name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty. (“From Pilgrim” 18-19) !2

Carlos Alonso has argued that a perpetual sense of “crisis” in Latin American cultural identity is precisely what has produced many of Latin America’s greatest cultural expressions (14-16). However, lurking in the background of debates about identity is the issue of being anonymous or unrecognized—in particular, the issue of how different spaces, media, and social norms restrict or negate the expression of an identity. The goal of this dissertation is to consider distinct ways in which this issue is perceived and represented in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian culture by analyzing a corpus of contemporary novels and films.

In literary and culture studies, there is an understandable tendency to focus on all the forms of identity that were or can be expressed. Innumerable groupings and associations clearly still exist, yet the constant shifting, overlapping, and dissolution of identitary definitions calls into question their basic durability and viability (McCann 4).

Even the most nuanced examinations of identity in Latin America have continued to be affirmative—continuing to state identity in terms of what a person is or what a people are. Likewise, a negation that complements an assertion of identity (i.e. what a person is not) normally still functions as affirmation: by not being “this,” one affirms the opposing identity of “that.” Yet to be unrecognized is to exist outside of these debates—to have an expressed identity that is denied or ignored, or to live and act in a way that defies definition. What we are dealing with, therefore, is the issue of perception. How does one experience being unrecognized by others, a feeling of being physically present yet socially absent? A number of terms could apply here, including anonymity, which !3 implies the lack of a name, and invisibility, which often implies social neglect or marginalization. The term I will use most, however, is “unrecognition,” emphasizing the multiple meanings of being “recognized”: 1) to have one’s presence or existence acknowledged; 2) to receive praise or acclaim; 3) to be acknowledged as familiar (from previous knowledge or contact).

At its heart, identity is social—not only dependent on a network of opposing identities, but also on the acknowledgement of others. For the purposes of this investigation, I have found Stuart Hall’s definition of identity to be the most useful and adaptable as a theoretical framework. Hall states:

By identity, or identities, I mean the processes that constitute and continuously re-form the subject who has to act and speak in the social and cultural world. Identity is the meeting point, or the point of suture, between, on the one hand, the ideological discourses which attempt to interpellate or speak us as social subjects, and, on the other hand, the psychological or psychical processes which produce us as subjects which can be spoken. So I certainly don’t want to restore the notion of identity as a unified essence, something continuous with the self, an inner truth that can be discovered. (“Fantasy” 65)

Hall’s description of the identitary process reflects the on-going tension and instability inherent in any individual’s sense of self. Of course, to understand this from a critical, academic perspective is not the same as adopting such a conception as part of day-to-day life. In other words, it is my contention that despite the demythification or “death” of the integral, autonomous subject (Jameson, “Postmodernism” 167-168), lived experiences— and the formal and informal discursive contexts in which they play out—still often demand the expression of a single, coherent self. !4

One need only produce a passport to see how frequently and casually one is asked to display a single, fixed identity, expressed through a name, face, country of origin, and concise history of one’s movements. Moreover, if passports were nothing more than a bureaucratic requirement for international travel, we would not have the common practice of saving and even nostalgically flipping through those that have expired. While it may be an illusion or a myth, the desire to be perceived as a unique being, with a cohesive self-narrative, reappears time and again in works of literature and film as well. The works I have chosen highlight extreme crises and breakdowns in the process of identification. Although the conflicts they depict transpire in a range of contexts, each responds to particular, quotidian circumstances in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Argentina and Brazil.

In the late 1980s Argentina and Brazil, geographic neighbors and two of the most populous countries in Latin America, each faced the complex problem of how to recover and rebuild socially and politically after years of military dictatorship. This process has often been referred to as one of “re-democratization,” in which differing groups and individuals can stake a claim for rights and representation that had been restricted or denied under military rule. Interwoven with this knotty legal-political transformation,

Brazilian and Argentine societies have continued to undergo dramatic urbanization and globalization. Cities like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires have become some of the densest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world, and Brazil and Argentina have two of the most urban populations in Latin America.2 The amorphous crowd that !5 startled and disturbed early twentieth century observers like Roberto Arlt and Lima

Barreto is now one of the most common and inherent elements of the urban space in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A preponderance of mediated spaces and forms of communication have engendered new avenues for interaction and identitary expression. Yet the fear or hope that one can disappear into a crowd are as immediate as ever. In representations of undesired anonymity in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries, we will see the recurring failure of recognition as an achievable, stabilizing construct. These tragic, often violent grasps at recognition will lay the groundwork, I argue, not for a new, more effective form of gaining recognition, but rather for a fundamental conceptual shift—toward desired anonymity, as a means of self- reinvention and escape from demands to expose, restrict, or control how one self- identifies.3 My literary and film analyses trace a variety of attempts at achieving or avoiding recognition in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian cities.

Recognition: A Conceptual Overview

While the possibilities of fame have seemingly grown through processes of modernization and urbanization, close, personal relationships still tend to emerge from direct, physical interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century Georg Simmel elaborated two crucial concepts of urban social relations: “singleness” [Einzelheit] and

“uniqueness” [Einzigkeit]. The former—to conceive of oneself and others beyond circumscribed groups defined by religion, profession, heritage, etc.—was strengthened by !6 the abundance and diversity of the emerging metropolis, which provided a level of social contact, mobility, and exploration that smaller communities did not. Cities potentially resolved the type of anonymity that is a lack of singleness but also created a new type of anonymity: a lack of uniqueness, defined as the capacity to distinguish oneself and stand out amid crowds (literal and figurative) that threatened to swallow or obscure individual identities (Simmel, “Group Expansion” 271-274).

Moments of anonymity or unrecognition are a fundamental part of urban life, and one with which the psyche of the urban individual must cope. In “The Metropolis and

Mental Life,” Simmel observes how metropolitan life gave birth to forms of existence characterized by physical proximity and social distance (333-334). It is now accepted as entirely normal, for example, to spend an hour or more on a bus, with one’s body pressed tightly against complete strangers with whom one will never share a word, much less meaningful thoughts or feelings. The very nature of sensory and conscious perception has had to evolve in response to distinctly urban circumstances (Simmel, “Sociology”

118-119). Undoubtedly, the metropolis offers more opportunities than ever for meeting and engaging with other individuals. That being said, it has also demanded profound psychological changes in how individuals understand themselves within their spatial and social surroundings. Such shifts have not reversed or diminished since the turn of the twentieth century. In many cases the urban forces that helped bring about these shifts have only become more intense and entrenched. !7

In The Struggle for Recognition:The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Axel

Honneth argues for a Hegelian concept of recognition as the foundation for identification and social relations in contemporary society. Honneth proposes that the struggle for recognition takes three forms—love, rights, and esteem—all of which are basic conditions for full self-realization in a practical sense.4 In this first chapter, I will draw mainly on Honneth’s work related to love and friendship. Within this general framework,

“rights” correspond to recognition from official legal and political institutions, whereas

“esteem” refers to recognition within broader society, according to historically defined value systems. For the purposes of my overall analysis of anonymity and recognition, I have chosen to group these latter two concepts—esteem and rights—under the notion of

“public recognition.” I do this for a number of reasons: first, because pursuing recognition from State institutions or society at large involves interaction with a group (or public) that can be nebulous, hard to delineate, and reachable only through mediated communication; second, the pursuit or negation of “rights” and “esteem” are often interwoven and simultaneous. In contrast, close, personal bonds that provide “private recognition” depend predominantly on direct contact between pairs or small communities of individuals.

Honneth also introduces negative actions into his schema: those that undermine or pervert affirmative recognition through insult, humiliation, or direct physical violence.

Like Hegel, Honneth sees transgressive or violent reactions to one’s being attacked, disrespected, or ignored as logical within the struggle for recognition. Yet despite being !8 undoubtedly problematic, this characterization still tends to take for granted the unrecognized individual’s access to recognition. That is to say, it is reasonable to suggest, as Honneth does, that “socially ignored individuals attempt, in response, to damage the others’ possessions […] in order to make the others take notice of them” (45).

Nevertheless, in this hypothetical situation, what if the unrecognized individuals do not have the capacity, even through destructive action, to sustain others’ acknowledgment?

To be recognized can entail acknowledgment of one’s physical or social presence (from the past and/or in the present), and it can also entail acknowledgment of one’s social value. In the following analysis, I will use the term “unrecognition” to refer to having one’s social presence or value unacknowledged as well as having one’s access to (the struggle for) recognition be in doubt.

In using the term “recognition” I will refer most often to two particular aspects of this word: recognition of one’s presence and recognition of one’s social significance.

Although these two definitions may be distinct in everyday use, when applied to a person they are deeply intertwined. An individual cannot be endowed with significance or value if his or her presence is not recognized. Likewise, to recognize an individual’s presence is to attribute some minimal or potential value to him or her. This is evidently a low threshold—to “recognize” a person can include recognition of agency or subjecthood, but this is not necessarily the case. It is precisely because the threshold of recognition is so low—so basic—that its denial can be experienced with such profound anguish. This !9 form of utter social negation is a vital but often overlooked aspect of any study related to identity in contemporary society.

For much of human history, few individuals had any guarantee of (or access to) public recognition, especially on a large scale. On the other hand, the experience of private recognition—provided by family, friends, and regular acquaintances—was frequently a given. The more localized communities and less mobile lifestyles that typified premodern existence provided stability and continuity for social interaction. This was true in both temporal and spatial terms. The individual may have enjoyed less freedom or flexibility when defining his/her place and value within a society, but the responsibility to define oneself in relation to one’s world was largely nonexistent. As

Zygmunt Bauman has observed, the many liminal or ambiguous archetypes of early modernity—the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist—are no longer exceptional. The

“settled,” stable towns that they once traversed gradually transformed into “unsettled,” disjointed metropolises, where being unrecognized by those around you is the norm

(“From Pilgrim” 29).

The Argentine and Brazilian Contexts

In Argentina and Brazil, we can undoubtedly still find cultural products (including literature and film) that contemplate non-urban people, experiences, and spaces. Since the turn of the twentieth century, these works have often functioned as a means of wrestling with the legacies of the past, even as the city looms on the horizon.5 Canonical !10 examples include Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “El Sur” (1944) and Graciliano Ramos’ novel Vidas secas (1938). In contrast, works set in the city have often functioned as a means of wrestling with circumstances whose immediacy makes them feel critical yet hard to define (Lowe 41-42). My dissertation expands on previous studies of urban literature from Brazil and Argentina to think about crises of basic recognition and social interaction that recur in many works from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Additionally, I call attention to the expressive and experiential opportunities that may emerge when one embraces being unrecognized or unrecognizable. Theories of radical anonymity or de-individualized subjectivity have frequently been elaborated in abstract or utopian terms.6 Yet I believe that going forward we must explore the messy, quotidian reality in which recognition and unrecognition actually play out. Drawing on sociological studies of urban life as well as studies of media culture, I have concentrated my analyses on two of the most urban and media-saturated societies in contemporary

Latin America. Nevertheless, I hope that this dissertation can contribute to our understanding of the stakes of identitary expression, anonymity, and social interaction in other city spaces and mediated spaces as well.

None of the protagonists of the works examined in this dissertation attempt to alter the conditions of their unrecognition in formal, political or structural ways. My selection of these texts is not intended to ignore this possibility; instead, I want to emphasize the way that anonymity and recognition are manifested in informal, quotidian

(but concrete) circumstances. With that said, the actions and experiences depicted in !11 these works are very much shaped by formal changes in the political, spatial, and economic character of Brazilian and Argentine society. Karen Ann Faulk observes that after the end of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983), notions of human rights and citizenship became inextricably entwined with the continuation of neoliberal economic policies. Thus freedom of expression, freedom of movement, and the right to privacy (among other rights) became framed more and more often in relation to individual ownership and consumption (6-14). The decade following Brazil’s emergence from military dictatorship (1964-1985) saw a similar process take place, despite the development of alternative, resistant forms of citizenship and sociopolitical engagement

(Lehnen 9-12). In both countries, urban spaces in particular have been dramatically reshaped by globalization and the growth of information and communications media. As

Andreas Huyssen points out:

urban imaginaries are […] sites of encounters with other cities, mediated through travel and tourism, diasporas and labor migration, cinema, television, and the Internet. The global and the local invariably mix, a fact captured with the neologism glocalization. (5)

As we will see, within the “glocalized” mix of Argentine and Brazilian cities, the practical possibilities of identification and recognition—being noticed, becoming famous, becoming anonymous—continually shift and evolve.

With respect to contemporary Brazilian relationality, sociologist Roberto

DaMatta’s study of the expression “Sabe com quem está falando?!” proposes that romanticized, non-confrontational traditions of jeitinho, malandragem, and cordialidade belie an informal and contentious hierarchization of recognition, which divides !12 indivíduos from pessoas. According to DaMatta, Western democracies typically aspire to eliminate distinctions between the rights and freedoms of each citizen. General equality

(among indivíduos) thus corresponds to a positive and general anonymity, since no one’s name or position bestows particular rights (claimed by pessoas) (227-232). However,

DaMatta contends that in day-to-day interactions Brazilians from many different segments of society insist on being treated according to particular, instead of universal standards. Hence the quasi-question: “Sabe com quem está falando?!” James Holston makes the reasonable objection that people seek special treatment in all societies, and that

Brazilian law has always incorporated particularisms into notions of equality (20).

Nevertheless, what is important for the present discussion is the quotidian, pragmatic function of “Sabe com quem está falando?!” That is, to demand that others recognize one’s name and/or face so that they give unique respect or status.

While the question implies a sense of self-valorization, to utilize the question reveals its context as one in which the speaker’s social importance is threatened.

DaMatta found that, despite his informants’ general distaste for the expression, most still resorted to it in certain situations. Crucially, in the home and in small communities where everyone knows one another, “Sabe com quem está falando?!” is unnecessary because social positions and relations are already clear to everyone (249). Only in larger cities and more busy public spaces do anonymous encounters take place in which one party demands to be recognized as a pessoa—special or belonging to a higher social status—rather than as a universal, anonymous indivíduo. This dynamic highlights once !13 again the centrality of the Other in the identification process. That is to say, one not only negotiates a subject position—an identity—in relation to hailing discourse, as Hall has explained; one also negotiates a subject position in relation to other flesh-and-blood people in a variety of daily situations. Such interactions also call to mind Hegel’s asymmetrical master-slave dialectic. The issue of unrecognition emerges when this dynamic is so imbalanced that the individual fails to gain or maintain a minimal engagement from the Other, and as a result experiences a collapse of the identification process.7 This can occur in less explicitly confrontational relationality as well, like in the struggle for recognition through love that Honneth describes.

I should stress that the present study is not concerned with anonymous authorship, at least not in any narrow, conventional sense. All of the works that I analyze have been released and reproduced by authors or directors using their original names. In every case, my focus is on protagonists who experience being unrecognized as a torment and look for a way to escape it, or who find recognition burdensome and seek to make themselves harder to read and identify. The novels that I analyze are works of fiction, and although the films deal with certain real people and events, I am primarily concerned with how each film represents, reinterprets, and even fictionalizes its protagonist. This is true even for a film like Albertina Carri’s Los rubios, in which the on-screen protagonist is a representation of the director herself. Central to every one of these works is the question of how to compose a narrative of the self that will allow a person to either be seen or go unseen. !14

In some instances, protagonists try to write or record some form of autobiography or self-narrative; in other instances, protagonists try to complicate or obscure the name attached to their biographical narrative. Nevertheless, I have ultimately chosen not to venture into discussions of copyright, plagiarism, and other legal issues related to the inclusion or exclusion of an author’s name.8 I have done so, firstly, because many of the self-narratives created by the protagonists I consider are informal, imaginary, or failed.

Therefore, although the desire to attach one’s name to a coherent narrative of characteristics and experiences is not dissimilar to Foucault’s author-function, it is not always possible to treat the result as a “product” in a legal sense. I agree, moreover, with

Paul de Man’s contention that attaching a proper name to an autobiographical project should not be thought of as creating a contract so much as a speculative, irresolvable tension between what one is and what one imagines oneself to be (70-71). In fact, the examples that I study will be notable precisely because of how problematic, unsuccessful, or undesirable the expression of a singular, coherent identity proves to be. Most importantly, I argue that in all of these novels and films the protagonists’ overriding preoccupation relates to the everyday, social experience of being recognized or unrecognized. These works also stand out for their depictions of individuals who actively respond to such experiences, regardless of how successful their actions prove to be. In this sense, they contrast with portrayals of characters, or even places, that could be described as anonymous, but which do not explicitly confront the (re)production of anonymity.9 !15

Chapter Overview

My first chapter considers close, personal relationships as a form of recognition and a potential solution to feelings of social invisibility and inadequacy. My analysis centers on Brazilian Fernando Bonassi’s novel Subúrbio and Argentine Guillermo

Saccomanno’s novel El oficinista. The protagonist of each novel functions as a contemporary take on the “man of the crowd”—the harried, anonymous, and potentially dangerous figure from the eponymous story by Edgar Allen Poe. Bonassi’s and

Saccomanno’s characters each attempt to abandon a fractured, unfulfilling home life in the hopes of finding another individual who will acknowledge and appreciate them. Both narratives unfold within chaotic, crumbling cities where the types of stable homes and communities that were essential to pre-metropolitan imaginaries seem impossible.

Nevertheless, the protagonist of each text hopes that the love of a young woman can save him from being swallowed up and made invisible by the crowds around him. In the end, their inability to realize satisfying self-narratives, reified through close, personal recognition, drives them toward shocking, anti-social acts of violence.

The second chapter looks at celebrity—large-scale, public recognition—as a potential resolution for feelings of social invisibility or anonymity. Making use of Leo

Braudy’s conception of fame as social form of recognition that provides (the illusion of) wholeness and uniqueness, as well as Jesus Martín-Barbero’s mapping of the growth of mediated cultural expression in Latin America, I outline how fame and audience engagement with mass media has been represented in various canonical works of !16

Argentine and Brazilian fiction. Through an analysis of Manuel Puig’s La traición de

Rita Hayworth, Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela, Julio Cortázar’s “Queremos tanto a

Glenda,” Alejandro López’s La asesina de Lady Di, and Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s O anônimo célebre, this chapter examines evolving notions of the roles of audience and star in Argentine and Brazilian society. Changes in the public’s perception of and access to media technologies has gradually changed the fundamental nature of celebrity. Although the works above reveal a view of fame as increasingly attainable and desirable, they also suggest that as a form of recognition, it remains too fickle and precarious to truly provide an escape from anonymity.

The third chapter considers two cinematic representations of the life of Sandro do

Nascimento, the orphaned, homeless youth who would gain national infamy when his hijacking of bus 174 in Rio de Janeiro played out on live television. Both films attempt to give context and nuance to the public image and experiences of Sandro by illuminating the social, racial, and economic exclusion that characterized much of his short life. José

Padilha’s documentary, Ônibus 174, places the hijacking itself—when Sandro ceases to be one of thousands of anonymous, marginalized kids living on the streets of Rio—at the center of its retelling and devotes considerable screen time to Sandro’s own exhibition of his face, emotions, and experiences. In contrast, Última parada 174, Bruno Barreto’s semi-fictionalized retelling, minimizes the hijacking and tries to temper the disruptive power of Sandro’s sudden visibility by framing his life within conventional coming-of- age and redemption narratives. I argue that the contrast between the two films is !17 fundamental for understanding the consumption of Sandro’s image, the bus 174 incident, and indeed any event in which an individual escapes anonymity by means of a confrontational, even violent, demand for recognition.

As the first three chapters will show, the problem of anonymity and the desire for recognition recur in a range of fictional and non-fictional artistic works from late twentieth and early twenty-first century Argentina and Brazil. The protagonists of these works conceive of different ways to gain recognition, whether in the form of intimacy, celebrity, or infamy. Their varying approaches also demonstrate ways in which engaging with modern, urban crowds have changed over the last century—as through the evolution of mediated social interaction, for example. Yet at the same time, the possibility or difficulty of standing out within a crowd evokes similar tensions to those that emerged in early twentieth-century representations of urban life. As a whole, these works are largely pessimistic, presenting protagonists’ hope of recognition and the ultimate futility of achieving or maintaining it. Anonymity, these works suggest, has not merely become normal, but also a central aspect of contemporary, day-to-day life in increasingly urbanized, mediated societies. At the same time, they demand that we question the desire for recognition and the pressure it continues to exert on social dynamics.

The fourth chapter therefore examines two works that attempt to reframe the debate about recognition’s value. Sergio Chejfec’s brief novel Mis dos mundos and

Albertina Carri’s quasi-documentary Los rubios each offers a unique embrace of becoming anonymous or unrecognizable. The former portrays a twenty-first century !18 flâneur who, over the course of an afternoon walk, deconstructs the characteristics, experiences and memories that would seem to compose his individual identity. As he scrutinizes them, he becomes aware of how nebulous, slippery, and unsatisfying they are.

He dedicates himself to becoming anonymous and undefinable so as to enjoy freedom from recognition, from the never-ending process of expressing and fulfilling a cohesive self-narrative. Carri’s documentary is also concerned with ways to be less recognizable and, in her case, less burdened by the expectation to recount and preserve the Carri family’s history. Because the director’s parents were both disappeared during the

Argentine military dictatorship, the film’s treatment of memory and personal identity has been controversial. I propose, however, that Carri’s film represents not a loss or abandonment of her identity as the daughter of the disappeared, but rather a challenge to its limits, achieved through a rejection of singular, “true,” biologically-centered narratives and an embrace of ambiguity, multiplicity, and affective community. !19

CHAPTER 1

Toxic Bonds Crises of Recognition in the Home and on the Street

In Edgar Allan Poe’s canonical story “The Man of the Crowd,” the narrator describes the eponymous protagonist as: “the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds” (396, author’s emphasis). Charles Baudelaire equated Poe’s character with the wandering flâneur, who would feature prominently in much of the French author’s work; however, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the “man of the crowd” lacked the ease, distance, or command of the flâneur as he moved through the crowded streets of the metropolis (172). This figure—unwilling to be alone, capable of terrible deeds, yet barely distinguishable amongst the material and human abundance of the city—would reappear many times in works of modern urban literature. In many ways, the protagonists of the two novels that are the focus of this chapter are contemporary takes on this problematic inhabitant of the city: the man of the crowd.

Nevertheless, Fernando Bonassi’s Subúrbio (1994) and Guillermo Saccomanno’s El oficinista (2010) are notable for placing their protagonists within contemporary society and highlighting the violent extremes that an anonymous individual might be capable of, while continuing to go ignored or unnoticed. !20

Bonassi’s and Saccomanno’s protagonists are men of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and they live in fast-paced and rapidly changing societies. The development of modern transportation and communication technologies continue to expand and diversify the bounds of social interaction. At the same time, they have disrupted and fragmented the nature of recognition, of having one’s presence acknowledged and ascribed value.1 Although the forces of modernity and modernization affect rural as well as urban spaces, their impacts have been more dramatic and acute in the city. Hence the focus here on questions of recognition and unrecognition in urban

(con)texts. The experience of being unrecognized entails being unknown, unacknowledged, and/or unvalued in a given social context. Moreover, to be unrecognized or anonymous is not only isolating but can also undermine one’s basic sense of self, if the social presence that one tries to assert is not (re)affirmed by anyone else. In a large-scale, public context, fame would be the manifestation of recognition. In a smaller-scale, private or intimate context, a sense of social love or belonging could fulfill a desire for recognition. I examine manifestations of fame and celebrity in subsequent chapters. In this first chapter, my focus will be on the desire for a close, personal connection between individuals, based on reciprocal appreciation and knowledge of the other. In the modern city, only celebrity truly elevates one above the anonymous multitude; a sense of intimacy, friendship, or belonging does not offer distance from the multitude but, as an older and more common human experience, it potentially offers recognition within it. !21

One could question to what degree the urban experiences depicted in these novels

—and specifically conflicts related to family, community, and social bonds—are fundamentally different from those of earlier urban fiction, like that of Roberto Arlt or

João do Rio. While the settings of the more recent novels are inevitably different, it is possible that those conflicts are in many ways similar. Yet Bonassi’s and Saccomanno’s novels explore the perception (even if not the verifiable reality) that conditions are, if anything, worse. To a certain extent, the perception of worsening conditions reifies that very idea. If a space is considered more violent, recognition more difficult, then regardless of whether that is statistically true (or measurable), reactions to such conditions will correspond to the perception more than the reality. These two novels are fundamentally about individuals reacting to how they perceive their lives and communities to be.

Fernando Bonassi’s novel is set in a crumbling subúrbio2 of São Paulo in the late twentieth century, while Saccomanno’s El oficinista takes place in a vaguely dystopian version of Buenos Aires. The experiences of the characters reflect not only the general nature of city life, but also specific circumstances tied to sociopolitical trends that transformed post-dictatorship Brazil and Argentina, especially: neoliberal policies3 of the

1990s; the abandonment or decay of open, public spaces and the fortification of private spaces4; and the persistence of significant criminal and police violence.5

In this chapter, I first analyze how Subúrbio presents unrecognition as a form of social invisibility, which the protagonist experiences at home and in his neighborhood. !22

This feeling of being invisible and unvalued drives him to form a bond with a young girl as a possible resolution to his situation. In the end, however, being unacknowledged and overlooked is also what allows him to commit the brutal crime that finally forces the community to see him. In the second half of the chapter, I explore the representation of overt domestic and public violence in the world of El oficinista—specifically how they frame the possibilities and obstacles to achieving stable recognition through familial and romantic relationships.

Both novels feature nameless, male protagonists for whom the domestic sphere no longer functions as a source of recognition and self-identification. By traditional measures, the two men should not experience the unrecognition of social isolation since both are in fact married and live with their spouses. In both cases, the feeling of anonymity is produced by the erosion of family and community bonds that might have provided a form of recognition and valorization. Their respective lack of names within the novels (always called simply “o velho” and “el oficinista”) can be read in a number of ways. Characters can be given generic descriptors instead of proper names as a way to make them archetypes—individuals who are significant because they cannot be dismissed as exceptions. On the other hand, characters may be denied proper names as a means of denying or questioning their significance. In Subúrbio and El oficinista, we can assume that the protagonists are not literally anonymous to their respective families or coworkers.

Yet despite each text offering glimpses into the thoughts and emotions of its protagonist, the reader is never able to connect this perspective to a unique name. The anonymity that !23 the authors impose on their protagonists forces readers to constantly acknowledge the basic lacunas and limitations in their knowledge of these apparently unremarkable individuals. The broader perils of their continued anonymity and unrecognition will be a central theme of both novels.

The protagonists of Subúrbio and El oficinista abandon their fractured, failed homes with the hope of finding a sense of emotional closeness and acknowledgment once again, amidst the chaos and abundance of the city. Each protagonist does develop an extramarital relationship with a young female character, who appears to offer a chance for the men to redefine and affirm their social significance. However, their pursuits of recognition do not allow them to escape the hostility of the private and public spaces they inhabit. Instead, their desperation leads to shocking violence and more extreme social negation. Saccomanno’s and Bonassi’s novels raise the issue of close, personal recognition within disjunctive and antagonistic environments. They question whether the metropolis, while straining and splintering pre-urban sources of recognition (like the home), has also carved out new opportunities to form a bond with another individual and escape anonymity through his/her acknowledgment. The novels’ tragic conclusions suggest not. Although the ability of the home to provide recognition may be in crisis, the street proves no more conducive to creating stable social bonds. These bleak narratives point toward societies in which ever-expanding cities inflict anonymity and thwart familial, romantic, and community relations as sources of recognition. Bonassi and

Saccomanno also force the reader to confront his/her own relationship to these crises. !24

Subúrbio: Recognition in Ruins

Since the 1990s, Fernando Bonassi has been one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary chroniclers of urbanism and violence in Brazil. His prose fiction, plays, and essays have touched on a range of topics, from sexual relations in As melhores vibrações (2002) to legacies of the military dictatorship in Prova contrária (2003).

However, Bonassi’s works revolve most frequently around the social and spacial impacts of urbanization and globalization on daily life. Examples include Subúrbio (1994),

Passaporte (2001), and his newest novel Luxúria (2015), among others. As Leila Lehnen has highlighted in her study of Bonassi, the author draws clear links between socioeconomic precariousness in post-dictatorship Brazil and an increase in social hostility and neglect (73-78). From a formal standpoint, Bonassi’s works have often combined or interwoven elements of traditional narrative fiction, theater, film, journalism, and micro-narrative.

Subúrbio takes place in one of the many poor or working class neighborhoods that make up the periphery of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil and one of the world’s largest metropolises. The novel is divided into two parts, each of which contains dozens of short chapters describing various places and a small set of characters in the titular subúrbio. This space reflects much of the city’s growth and development, but little corresponding prosperity. The protagonist, referred to as “o velho” lives in a small house with his wife (“a velha”), with neighbors so close that he can observe them through a hole in his bathroom wall. Nevertheless, the velho’s physical proximity to others has not !25 engendered emotional closeness—on the contrary, he resents his wife, with whom he rarely speaks, and he treats his neighbor merely as an object of masturbatory fantasies.

After retiring from his job, the velho’s days lose structure and purpose as he slides into alcoholism and indolence. The few people in the neighborhood who know him resent his presence and decline to offer him work or company.

The protagonist struggles to make his presence acknowledged and valued in his home as well as his community. Within close familial or community spaces everyone is presumed to be what Roberto DaMatta calls a pessoa, rather than an anonymous indivíduo with no special respect or status (249). When the presumed recognition of the domestic space (casa) breaks down, the velho’s inability to engage in the assertive, confrontational manner of the busy street (rua) leaves him with no clear path for recognition.6 He ultimately attempts to create a domestic relationship in the street—an undertaking whose failure will reveal crises of unrecognition and social invisibility in both private and public spaces.

One day, a young girl—“a menina”—catches the eye of the old man and inadvertently awakes in him the hope of a personal bond that will reify his social value.

He begins a relationship with her, which is initially characterized by friendly or fatherly overtures for her affection. The velho imagines himself as transformed by the menina’s gaze. Instead of being a miserable and unapproachable drunk, he can be a caring and beloved figure in the life of another. The instability of the menina’s home life seems to allow and account for her inclination to spend time with the old man. Nevertheless, as !26 their relationship develops—potentially providing the closeness that their respective homes have failed to provide—the bond between them becomes perverted. The velho’s contact with the menina becomes increasingly sexual until he finally rapes and kills her, turning the possibility of mutual recognition into the type of destructive, dehumanizing closeness that they had each tried to escape. The community of the subúrbio, that until then had generally ignored both menina and velho, finally awakens and responds to the girl’s death by embodying the worst nature of the urban multitude: the violent mob. As they gather to lynch the old man, he weeps with gratitude at finally being acknowledged by those around him. Although the moment gives him pleasure, this recognition is fleeting as well, characterized by the mob’s extreme violence and only brought about by the velho’s own extreme violence. Bonassi’s novel, therefore, portrays little hope of stable, affirmative recognition, forcing the reader to wonder whether the atmosphere of the subúrbio and the city have made it irreparably fraught and unsustainable.

Seen and Unseen

The novel begins with various allusions to visibility and the promise of identifying and understanding the members of a society. On the first page, we learn that the street where the plot unfolds is “a rua Lombroso,” named for Cesare Lombroso, the

Italian criminologist who argued during the late 1800s and early 1900s that criminals possessed inborn physical and emotional traits that scientists could discern. The possibility of isolating undesirable individuals in order to purge them from society was !27 debated in many places on both scientific and ethical grounds (Leps 32-43). However, various Latin American countries formulated policies based around that hope. In Brazil,

Raymundo Nina Rodrigues was the most prominent figure to take up and develop further the type of determinist criminology that Lombroso advocated. Yet he was not alone. As

Carlos Alberto Cunha Miranda explains, forces like immigration, industrialization, and the abolition of slavery radically altered ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic demographics at the turn of the twentieth century. This inspired many Brazilian doctors and intellectuals to “procura[r] justificar e legitimar a exclusão social.” They did so by anchoring their ideas in the “determinismo biológico de Lombroso, nos discursos racistas de Artur de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bom, Vacher de Lapouge e nas ideias eugênicas de

Francis Galton” (299).

In the novel, whose story takes place near the end of the twentieth century, the placard displaying the name “Lombroso” is so faded as to be nearly illegible. This detail conforms to the general deterioration of the subúrbio, including basic components of ordering a space and giving it an (official) identity. Yet the name of the “Emérito

Cientista Italiano” also conjures up the hope—now faded and ultimately misguided—that criminals and criminality could be identified by sight. The velho’s presence in this neighborhood is treated as largely inconsequential, and at most, a nuisance. With his murder of the menina, the novel calls into question not only the possibility of distinguishing the criminal, but also of even knowing one’s neighbors amidst the chaotic growth and decay of the modern metropolis. !28

The first lines of the novel, positioned as an epigraph (though not a quote), claim that the narration that follows will provide “primeiras informações” and a “paisagem vista a olho nu” (13). The text itself contains an abundance of seemingly banal descriptions, a cataloguing of buildings, people, advertisements, and—above all—the physical objects accumulating inside and outside of the velho’s home that testify to the deterioration of the spaces he calls home. In Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary

Brazilian Literature, Leila Lehnen offers by far the most in-depth analysis of Subúrbio, reading the disintegration of human bodies and city spaces as symbolic of Brazil’s failure, during its neoliberal turn of recent decades, to ensure either material comfort or inclusive citizenship (102). While the instability of material and social life in the subúrbio becomes increasingly stark over the course of the novel, the issue of what can be discerned amongst the clutter and degradation takes on a hopeful tone for a time, as the velho and the menina seem to develop a sweet, unexpected friendship. Ultimately, that same issue will take on existential and tragic implications, as the velho kills and rapes the menina, raising the question of how much the accumulation of people and waste allowed the protagonist’s predation to develop unnoticed. For the reader, it is difficult to know whether the novel’s depictions of the quotidian and the material function more as clues or distractions from the velho’s eventual crime. As Lehnen points out, Bonassi’s ostensibly realist language, by often reflecting the chaotic and fragmented nature of landscapes and dialogues, paints a picture that seems simultaneously manifold and incomplete (77-78). !29

Nowhere is this incompleteness more evident than in the main characters’ textual anonymity.

If observation is Subúrbio’s central mode, a more specific form of observation— voyeurism7—pervades the text in a number of ways. First, the velho uses a key to dig a peephole in his bathroom wall, from which he can observe the woman who lives adjacent to him while she uses her own bathroom. Their homes are literally joined, yet their relationship does not reflect a similar closeness. The modern tension of physical proximity and emotional distance is one that scholars have long associated with the experience of city life in the post-industrial age.8 In this case, the velho’s unsatisfying marriage drives him to look—literally—for other outlets for his emotional and sexual yearnings. His neighbor, the first object of his gaze, is dehumanized through his observation of her. In one telling scene, the velho happens to witness the neighbor masturbating in her bathroom, as he proceeds to do the same. Despite their parallel activities, the opportunity to watch his neighbor in such a personal moment does not give nuance to the velho’s view towards her. Instead, he feels compelled to demean her, calling her “vaca” and “puta” (63). As Lehnen argues, his parallel masturbation coupled with the one-sidedness of his gaze replicates an invasion and violation of her private space, body and desire (119).

Although the spatial circumstances of the subúrbio allow the velho to spy on his neighbor, intruding upon her privacy clearly does not substitute the recognition that the velho has lost in the dissolution of his marital relationship. His gaze moves from his own !30 home, to that of his neighbor, then to the street—from private to public spaces—in search of another individual willing to gaze upon him, and in that way reify the value of his existence. The novel’s second part is framed by the introduction of the menina to the velho and to the reader. The narrator explains that when the velho first glimpses the menina on the corner of his street, he could not have realized that his life would be turned upside down. Yet it turns out that the velho could have encountered her many times before. The menina had always lived on the street just behind his, had always gone to school at that time, and for whatever reason: “o fato é que essa não-coincidência em tudo coincidiu nesse dia” (142). The second time the velho sees her, he already begins to invest her with the power to transform him: “Era como se ele fosse ressuscitado por essa germinação de mulher” (149). Her idealized youth and beauty contrast with the more adult and autonomous bodies of his wife and neighbor. The third time the velho sees the menina, the mere glimpse of her moves him to abandon his coffee and rush into the bustling crowds on the street, seeking “entre todos os corpos o corpo” (157). The transition from observation to action marks an important shift in the narrative. It also initiates and then problematizes the velho’s desire to remake himself through recognition from another.

As mentioned above, Bonassi employs a narrative style that is generally unemotional and descriptive. The narration, as such, may at times evoke sympathy for certain characters, like the velho and his wife, as the reader learns about their malaise and frustration. However, the documentary, sometimes voyeuristic tone of the novel, in !31 which depictions of characters are often similar to those of clutter and refuse, resists empathy. In Narrativas contemporâneas da violência, Adélcio de Sousa Cruz faults

Bonassi, among other authors, for a tendency to create: “um narrador que apresenta cenas de modo que a alteridade se transforma em parte do cenário” (21). Souza Cruz criticizes

Bonassi’s Passaporte—a collection of 137 micro-scenes that take place around the world, including rural and urban Brazil—in particular. However, he does credit Passaporte with moments of ironic and implicit condemnation of the cynical perspective that allows upper- and middle-class Brazilians to remain detached from the violent realities that they merely glimpse (or imagine happening) in poorer communities (68). In Subúrbio, published seven years earlier, the narrator does not jump from setting to setting as in

Passaporte; instead we get a broad, sweeping view of the neighborhood as well as detailed descriptions of some of the characters (primarily the velho and velha).

Nevertheless, the narration does maintain a sense of distance. The narrator is dedicated to giving a full, detailed picture of the velho’s home life and his potential intimacy with the menina. Yet the narrator clearly does not speak as a member of the same community.

The narration enters private spaces and occasionally the minds of the velho and velha, but primarily depicts—as opposed to explaining or justifying—their thoughts and actions.

The decision to maintain the anonymity of the main characters, only giving them generic labels, has various implications. The application of the term “menina” reiterates the youth, and to some degree the innocence, of that character. The application of the term “velho” is descriptive, but also pejorative and suggestive of the protagonist’s being !32 worn out or used up. Additionally, calling the protagonist “velho” contains a hint of irony, since the term’s most affectionate usage is as slang to refer to a father. The velho has no biological children and fails in the most gruesome way to become a caring father figure for the menina.

Because we see so much and learn so much about the velho and his surroundings, we may feel as if we are gradually acquiring a complete picture. But by situating the reader as a type of voyeur, Bonassi ultimately puts the reader in an uncomfortable moral position. Although the narration places the reader in the position of outside observer of the subúrbio, s/he does not get to jump between different types of settings as in

Passaporte. Despite the abundance of detail that Subúrbio provides, the narration eventually forces the reader to question what s/he has truly understood. Is the menina’s death something we could have foreseen, and is it something we should have foreseen?

The voyeur who remains distant and/or hidden occupies an unusual space with respect to complicity. In the case of Subúrbio, whatever curiosity or lurid fascination the narration satisfies by letting the reader see the characters in great (often intimate) detail, the reader is also forced to watch closely when descriptions of the banal finally turn to the exploitative and violent.

Markers of Identity

In The City in Brazilian Literature, Elizabeth Lowe observes that modern fiction frequently conceives of the urban environment as particularly hostile and isolating for the !33 elderly (141-142). For Bonassi’s protagonist, the long commute to work at least imbued the bustling, crumbling city with a stable, functional sense of order for thirty-seven years.

Although he has no particular pride or attachment to the factory that has employed him, it dawns on the velho that he has spent more time there than in his home. On his final day on the job, a few coworkers gather to share a bottle of wine with him and congratulate him on reaching the time when he can spend every day relaxing and drinking. Although he does devote more and more time to drinking, without work he has no regular social interaction except with the wife, who has become almost a stranger to him. With no job and no friends, the velho hopes to occupy himself by helping to run the lottery game

(jogo do bicho) in his neighborhood, but is turned away for being drunk and unreliable.

Increasingly, both inside and outside of his home, the velho is viewed as a nuisance on the occasions when he is noticed at all.

Because Bonassi has left almost all the characters in Subúrbio nameless, the brief appearance of a character with a name creates a notable contrast. The velho is out drinking one afternoon when the arrival of a young criminal silences and unnerves the whole bar: “Naldinho era um nome que só queria dizer uma coisa naquele lugar: uma pessoa que fazia tudo o que queria. Um demônio. Um bandido. Um menino” (42-43).

Naldinho’s notoriety gives him a level of recognition and resonance that may not extend beyond his local community, but is nonetheless more than an individual like the velho could hope for. The velho marvels not only at the impact of Naldinho’s name, but also at the power and exploits—both criminal and sexual—already realized by someone so !34 young. In a sense, he is everything the anonymous velho is not and which the velho laments never having become.

When a pair of police officers enters the bar, they approach Naldinho and ask him for identification, thus reestablishing the contemporary context of the story—one in which identity is increasingly documented and regulated by the State. When Naldinho produces his “RG” (Registro Geral), the officers reject it as probably fake and suggest that any “bandido” can acquire one. Naldinho, defiant, responds by tearing it up and throwing the pieces in a trashcan, declaring: “Se não serve pra nada, então tá melhor aí” (46). The recognition that his infamy creates in the community is dependent on word of mouth and a degree of mystery and uncertainty. The velho even expresses awe at the discordance between Naldinho’s reputation and how young and delicate he seems in person.

The officers’ refusal to acknowledge Naldinho’s official documentation, and

Naldinho’s subsequent refusal to respect the value of official documentation, highlights the distance between the formal, legal establishment of identity (as well as rights associated with identity and citizenship) and the day-to-day operation of a police force and legal system meant to respect and ensure the rights of individuals. The officers do not specify what form of identification would satisfy them, but the designation they immediately give him—bandido—suggests that the onus is on him to provide sufficient proof that he is otherwise. This presumptive label of bandido also harkens back again to the Lombrosian belief that a criminal’s physical appearance is sufficient to identify him !35 as such. (In Brazil, this theory also became profoundly racialized.) In City of Walls,

Teresa Caldeira explains how designating someone as a “criminal” often functions as a political and police strategy for dehumanizing—and thus denying basic rights and recognition—to those who are arrested or in prison (340-345). Caldera also lays out the extent to which working-class residents of present-day São Paulo, in the face of arbitrary and often violent police action, depend on the carteira profissional as an important (but by no means guaranteed) method of identifying oneself as not a criminal or drug- trafficker (182-183). Although neither the narrator nor any characters suggest that

Naldinho’s outlaw reputation is unearned, his confrontation with the police is not a result of his breaking the law.

The chapter concludes with Naldinho’s arrest for “desacato.” This non-specific charge presumably refers to his contemptuous attitude toward the police. However, it is also interesting to note that the officers as well as Naldinho fail to respect the authority of

Naldinho’s government-issued documentation. In tearing up his RG, Naldinho essentially agrees with the officers, acknowledging that his informal reputation is the form of recognition that will truly drive their encounter. In theory, if his RG is fake or holds no functional value, then destroying it should not be offensive. Yet in doing so

Naldinho briefly usurps the officers’ authority to establish the terms of identification, or as Lehnen puts it: “he recaptures a measure of self-determination” (114). During this same scene, in which various levels of identification and recognition are in play, both

Naldinho and the officers refer to the protagonist merely as “velho,” reiterating his !36 anonymity and status on the margins of productive society. Whereas Naldinho’s notoriety inspires the bar patrons and the police to consider how much validity to ascribe to his name, the velho is unable to attract more than the briefest and most dismissive attention. To borrow from Roberto DaMatta’s “Sabe com quem está falando?!”, the velho is unable to realize “[uma] ação que rompe com uma norma social,” in order to stake a claim to his position in a public, social context (215). While Naldinho represents a segment of São Paulo society that is often marginalized and harassed, he has managed to engage in a process of self-definition by demanding attention—and becoming a pessoa— in the eyes of the local community and the law. For the velho, recognition of any kind would seem preferable to his utter invisibility and devaluation.

Strangers and acquaintances in the street and other public spaces are inclined to ignore the velho’s presence. His age, unemployment, and disheveled drunkenness produce his social marginalization, but rather than chase some degree of fame, his thoughts are more preoccupied with one-on-one relationships. At home he also feels increasingly isolated as his marriage decays to the point that he and his wife reorganize their living arrangements to reflect their fractured relationship: “Quando a velha não quis mais ser a mulher do velho, fez sua cama de armar e colocou no corredor.

Definitivamente” (15). At times the velho attempts to conjure memories or nostalgia of how their relationship once was, but the velha soberly rejects his efforts. For the velho, the most disorienting and painful discordance is between the unappealing physical and emotional reality of the present—a wife whose body and behaviors make her a stranger to !37 him. The velha, on the other hand, silently immerses herself for hours on end in the saccharine, idealized representations of love on television and in magazine advertisements. In both cases, their limited financial resources oblige them to live with someone who now embodies everything they do not desire. They invent arrangements to be apart despite living together, and have many disputes over money, as the velho’s drinking has driven the velha to parcel out his pension payments as if he were an impulsive child.

Lehnen observes that the increasing decay, division, and hostility that characterizes their marriage and domestic space mirrors similar processes occurring outside the home:

Subúrbio begs the question about the status of citizenship in the neoliberal episteme. If citizenship arises and is ensconced within the notion of a social contract, then the weakening of this contract dissipates the premise of the citizenry as a group that has both rights and responsibilities vis-a-vis the state and, in a more narrow and direct sense, the community. (100)

The social and financial strain that the elderly couple endures is not unique. By the late

1980s and early 1990s, when most of the events in the novel take place, Brazil’s economy had spent years mired in stagnation and high inflation. As Caldeira explains, high unemployment and the precariousness of long-term planning made it “impossible to be sure about one’s social place” (45). For the velho and velha, childless, already marginalized by age, and increasingly hostile to each other, the possibility of recognition

—of having their presence acknowledged and appreciated by anyone else—seems all but eliminated. Time spent living together, instead of increasing their intimacy, has gradually !38 unraveled their ability to appreciate or even understand each other. In addition to dividing their home, their communication decays to clipped and mumbled utterances.

The velho is even surprised to discover that he had forgotten the color of his wife’s eyes, her physical presence now unfamiliar to him in even the most basic ways.

As each loses the ability and desire to recognize the other, the velha seems to turn inward, consolidating her area of the house and fantasizing about a type of romanticized affection she no longer hopes to have for herself. When she receives a chain letter, encouraging her to express affection—by kissing someone she loves and sending the letter to others who are dear to her—she throws the letter in the trash, acknowledging her fundamental solitude. In theory, a chain letter connects a network of people, even if it does not create physical proximity or ongoing reciprocal communication. In this case, the velha does not feel she can engage even on that limited level. The velho, meanwhile, struggles initially to define the nature of his yearning:

O velho, a sua sede. Sede ar, sede pressa, sede vício, sede pão, sede bóia dos afogados. […] Nada, dentro ou fora da cabeça. Nada. Nem cor, nem luz, nem ruído, nem a fotografia violenta. Só a sede definindo o velho na vírgula da sua boca arreganhada. (86-87)

When he finally sees and then meets the menina, he seems to discover the possibility of recognition that has eluded him at home and in other social spaces like the bar and the corner shop. !39

Hope and Perversion

DaMatta explains how “indivíduos” attempt to navigate the social dynamics of the street in the following way:

A entrada no mundo (e a saída de casa) é, como vemos, equivalente a conhecer a rua com seus mistérios e suas regras. […Recebemos] ao longo dos ritos de passagem, padrinhos, paraninfos, patrões, pistolões, entidades espirituais e santos que nos ajudam a enfrentar as dificuldades que a ‘vida’ põe em nosso ‘caminho.’ (250)

Since retiring, the velho has no friends, no social structures outside the home to either provide him recognition or enable him to demand it himself. Despite being a longtime resident of the subúrbio, the velho is subject to the extreme “individualization” of what

DaMatta designates povo or massa—those with no social ties or patronage to empower them in any way (252).

In her study of urban Brazilian fiction, Lowe identifies a current of social fragmentation, wherein characters turn away from homes and families in search of surrogate relationships, although these surrogate relationships are most often “palliatives” rather than stable solutions to the breakdown of traditional bonds of intimate recognition

(142). Moreover, she argues: “Woman is at the center of urban fiction, either as a the personification of the city, the object of quest, or as refuge from the terrors of modern life” (138). In Subúrbio, the velho’s gaze turns first from his wife to his neighbor, then finally to the menina. Unlike his one-sided contact with the neighbor, however, his relationship with the menina is initially characterized by a sweetness and innocence that suggests a potential redemption for the lonely, degenerate protagonist. !40

The velho’s first contact with the menina is largely voyeuristic, but not the sexualized male gaze that he directed at his neighbor. Then one day he glimpses her among the mass of people circulating through the streets and markets, when by chance she slips and falls. The velho sees the menina drop her bottle of soda, cutting her hand on the broken shards, and her vulnerability ignites something in him: “ficou possuído de uma corrente de vontade que não via limites” (157). This surge of emotion first manifests itself as a doting, parental concern for her wellbeing. The velho takes the menina to the pharmacy, where he not only comforts her, but also summons an unusual focus and assertiveness in demanding that the menina receive immediate care. At the end of the encounter, the velho instructs her to go home to her parents, but now feels certain that he will see her again.

Their next contact occurs when the menina is with her parents and brother—her biological family—as they move hurriedly down the street. The velho, observing the crowd, sees the menina at the exact moment that her eyes catch his: “A ligação elétrica.

Daquela perfeita simetria de vontades o velho viu se desdobrar a verdade do seu sentimento. Era já uma adoção, um compromisso, o noivado aceito” (171). The symbolic creation of a new family, a bond of mutual recognition, which the velho interprets in this glance, does become realized to some degree. As they begin spending more time together, they play house multiple times, cultivating the intimacy that they have not found in their own homes—sharing food, asking one another how the other’s day was, holding hands. The menina appears to resolve the anguish of his unrecognition, !41 while he gives her a kindness and attention she does not receive from her parents. The velho stops drinking and begins taking care of his appearance, improving and remaking himself to earn and keep the affection of the menina. In a sense, she provides a new mirror to reflect and validate the velho’s presence at a time when he has seemingly ruined or been denied any other source of recognition. At one point, the menina falls ill; when she improves and finally goes to see the velho again, they both describe her return to health as a rebirth—an experience of renewal that the velho declares having undergone as well. However, as we see at the end of the above quote, the manner in which the velho views the menina gradually blurs, from “adoção” to “noivado,” from (grand)fatherly to marital and sexual.

Although we see only a few scenes of the menina’s family, their house is referred to as “a Casa Mal-Assombrada” and we learn that poverty, abuse, and neglect dominate the menina’s home life. She eventually runs away from home, hoping to live with the velho and unaware of the predation now underlying his affection. Caldeira notes that in

São Paulo an anxiety about controlling the activities of children and a general fear of anonymous interactions on the streets has been a motivating factor in the geographical and architectural reorganization of the city, particularly in recent decades. People from all social classes, she finds, speak of crime and the danger of strangers with terms like: infiltrate, infest, contaminate, and evil (91). Wealthy and middle-class communities have frequently worked to reduce the number of open spaces with unregulated public access while also isolating and fortifying their private residences (92-97). This process has not !42 been limited to certain socioeconomic groups, but the economic or political capacity to privatize and control public spaces is clearly not shared equally.

The velho and menina both want to escape homes that are physically and socially decaying and inadequate. The working class neighborhood where they live, although itself the subject of various transformational forces, appears to represent the potential danger that has driven the division and elimination of open public spaces. The collapse of their respective home lives along with the brevity and anonymity of most public interactions allow the velho to meet the menina and allow his predation to progress largely unnoticed. On a number of occasions he is asked about his relationship to the menina; shortly before killing and raping her, the velho is even confronted by “a juizado de menores” who asks for documentation to prove that she is his granddaughter (as he claims). But when the menina begins to cry and wail, they are simply sent on their way.

The State and the community fail to give either one the attention necessary to avert the eventual tragedy.

The gradual accumulation of warning signs and near misses in Bonassi’s novel can seem, at times, slightly excessive or contrived: the innocent young girl whose family cannot care for her falls victim to the lecherous old man who meets her on a busy city street. The presence of State apparatuses meant to insure safety are portrayed as either incompetent or insufficient, so it is left to the community or individual families to protect the welfare of their members. With regards to the community, Lehnen contends:

“whereas the old man's decaying physique represents the degradation of the suburban !43 terrain, the young girl's violated corpse becomes an emblem of the absence of sociability within Sao Paulo's crises-ridden peripheries during Brazil's neoliberal turn” (76). A preoccupation with how an “absence of sociability” can allow violent crime to proliferate is not unique to Subúrbio. The final scene of Luiz Ruffato’s panoramic, fragmentary portrayal of São Paulo in Eles eram muitos cavalos (2001), for example, describes a married couple listening to the dying gasps of a man who has been stabbed outside their door, and finally deciding that the wisest and safest thing for them to do is to ignore him and go to bed. The disintegration of the family, meanwhile, recurs as the cause of sexual perversion and violence in numerous fictional depictions of Brazilian cities (Lowe 138).

It also recurs as the root cause of crime and “evil” in actual São Paulo residents’ characterization of their city (Caldeira 279-280). To what extent these pessimistic perspectives are based on perceived trends as opposed to measurable realities is a worthwhile question, but is beyond the scope of this study. It is undeniable, however, that merely the perception of urban danger and familial collapse can drive significant, concrete behaviors.

The world put forth in Subúrbio reflects, above all, the perception that traditional families and communities are in the process of collapsing, which allows the incidence of crime and perversion to increase. To understand Bonassi’s particular representation of these problems, we must examine it within a framework of recognition. The emotional estrangement of the velho and his wife motivates him to leave his home in search of an alternative relationship with someone who will value his presence and give him the !44 personal, affective recognition that he desires. Nevertheless, the way in which the velho and menina’s relationship develops calls into question the viability of forming new, stable relationships and identities—escaping anonymity—in an environment that persistently strains and ruptures them. Lehnen observes:

It is significant that the rape takes place in the makeshift ‘house’ that the old man and the child have erected beneath a picnic table […]. Within this scenario, a debased simulacrum of the domestic sphere, the old man transforms a menina into a surrogate for familial and emotional ties. (120)

As the velho’s friendship with the menina turns toward one of sexual predation, the fact that he is perpetually ignored and passes largely unrecognized through the splintered subúrbio permits him to proceed to the point of finally killing and raping her. Only then does the community truly perceive him, once he has become a criminal and a monster.

With neither law nor sociability asserting a strong presence on the community, the crowd that gathers and pulls him from his bed becomes monstrous too and demands that he be murdered as retribution. DaMatta has proposed that despite being destructive, rioting and other acts of spontaneous, communal violence can be a powerful challenge to official and unofficial networks of marginalization and oppression (253-254). Nevertheless, in

Subúrbio, mob violence cannot restore the menina nor the relational bonds that were insufficient to protect her. It only serves to end, finally and completely, the velho’s otherwise anonymous existence. For the velho, the tragic is perversely transformed into the triumphant: “[o velho] viu tanta gente diferente que chorou daquela atenção. […]

Estava tão comovido que o que ele quis dizer quando disse: —Obruirrr… Era justamente:

—Obrigado” (291-292). The irony of his maudlin gratitude is that his desire for !45 recognition has become so warped and desperate that he can hardly express his appreciation for a moment of acknowledgment—even if that moment will only last as long as it takes the mob to carry out his death.

El oficinista: Dystopian Anonymity

El oficinista tells the story of a man who is, by all appearances, utterly mediocre.

Feeling unrecognized—that is, ignored and unvalued—both at home and at work, he longs for an opportunity to realize a more assertive identity that will earn the appreciation of others. The city space he inhabits contains a mixture of fictional menaces, like acid rains and packs of cloned dogs, as well as present and historical problems, like poverty, crime, and clashes between government forces and insurgents. The oficinista, despite having a job, a home and a family, lives in a city where those structures of self-definition are unsatisfying and give him no sense of uniqueness, while also being under constant threat. When the protagonist meets a secretary at the office and begins a sexual relationship with her, he must hide this relationship at work because revealing it could open him up to personal or professional attacks. Nevertheless, he also begins to imagine that their love can be a catalyst to transform his identity.

The life he has created for himself—his home, family, and job—ties him to the precarious, unrecognized sense of self that he wants to escape. In order to escape, he devises a plan to kill his family, forge his boss’s signature to embezzle money from their employer, and flee with the secretary to a beach in Mexico. When the secretary becomes !46 pregnant, she refuses to confirm whether the child belongs to the oficinista or to another lover. As his plan for an alternative family and source of recognition collapses, he becomes increasingly paranoid, hostile, and desperate. Instead of agreeing to run away with the oficinista and start a new family with him, the secretary ultimately rejects him and his plan, deepening and reaffirming his sense of isolation and unrecognition.

Although the oficinista lives in a modern, urban space, the type of one-on-one recognition he longs for is not unique to that space. However, it is uniquely complicated by the circumstances of the metropolis he inhabits.

El oficinista is Saccomanno’s seventh novel, and although it won Seix Barral’s

“Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela” in 2010, very little has been written yet about this work. However, a number of its central themes have appeared in Saccomanno’s previous works. His 2008 novel 77, for instance, also depicts a violent, nightmarish Buenos Aires, marked by paranoia and authoritarian oppression. In the case of 77, the story takes place in the year 1977 under the military regime that ruled Argentina at that time. El oficinista, meanwhile, takes place in a fictional present or near-future which, despite featuring science fiction elements, contains many echoes of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship, the effects of neoliberal reforms that peaked in the 1990s, and the economic crisis of

2001. In an interview with Juan Ignacio Boido in 2011, Saccomanno contends that the problems portrayed in El oficinista, especially socioeconomic precariousness, heavily impact present-day Argentine society (85). This portrayal is suggestive of anthropologist

Karen Ann Faulk’s assertion that: !47

The most recent military dictatorship, through its isolation of individuals and undermining of the capacity for constructive interaction, was a destructive force on social life in Argentina. Neoliberalism, rather than opening a space for social reconstruction had many of the same effects. Though the methods and aims were different, the atomization of individuals and the dismantling or discrediting of the structures for participation in public life were a legacy and a continuation of a process begun with the violence around the 1976 coup. (125)

As Faulk explains, this trend also undermined employer-employee relations and

“traditional protections in a nation that had always prided itself on stable, regularized employment as a fundamental aspect of identity” (115). The protagonist’s only moniker in the novel—oficinista—must therefore be read ironically, as work does not provide him with either economic security nor social belonging.

The story of the oficinista is told through a third-person limited narration that offers substantial insight into the protagonist’s way of thinking, but little critique of the forces and discourses structuring the world around him. In other words, although the narrator is heterodiegetic, we see the city almost exclusively from the protagonist’s point of view, and his general acquiescence, ignorance, and dissatisfaction color the description of his experience—the novel offers no alternative perspectives on the circumstances of either the narrator or the society in which he lives. Because we see the narrative from only the narrow view of the oficinista, we must consider the protagonist’s plight more in depth than we otherwise might, due to his apparent mediocrity and his sometimes cruelly selfish actions. Like the novel itself, my analysis does not seek to validate the protagonist’s actions nor his perspective as such. Rather, my analysis is intended to validate the desire for recognition, examine the context of the oficinista’s tormented !48 anonymity, and consider how the novel represents the social ramifications of hopeless unrecognition.

Families of Strangers

The narrative of El oficinista begins, predictably, in a high-rise office where the main character spends his days and, increasingly, much of the night as well. We learn that he prefers returning home as late as possible, in order to reduce contact with a wife and children who he feels neither love him nor understand his true character. The oficinista’s colleagues frequently express their admiration of his ostensibly stable and traditional home life. Yet the narration of his thoughts reveals the bitter de-humanizing view that the protagonist has toward his home: “El clima familiar que describe en la oficina no tiene nada que ver con la verdad. Su mujer, una mole con facciones equinas, es una tipa agria y despótica, y sus hijos una cría de obesos malcriados” (39).

One evening, the oficinista encounters his boss’s young secretary and, after accompanying her home, begins a sexual relationship with her. In her single apartment, while looking at pictures of her relatives, the oficinista and the secretaria consider the cyclically destructive relationship between the public and private spheres of their city.9

They discuss the now common instances of arson at nursing homes (one of which killed the secretaria’s own parents), and compare them to the recurrence of mass shootings at grade-schools. The oficinista and the secretaria agree: “La responsable es la familia […]

Porque el hogar es la primera escuela” (29). In other words, young people learn hostility !49 and violence at home, then go out into the city and perpetuate that violence, especially against those most vulnerable: children and the elderly. But the office worker and secretary’s concern for the traditional family model proves to be mostly lip service or, at most, a case of cognitive dissonance. Not long after, we see the oficinista fantasizing that his own children, between whom he can no longer even distinguish, might be massacred at school by “uno de esos chicos asesinos” (54). Their deaths, he imagines, would liberate him from the physical, emotional, and financial distress that they cause him.

Later, the secretaria confesses that she would like to have a son so she could make him one of the young boys who practice kickboxing in the streets, brutalizing and killing each other for the entertainment of crowds. The city, she feels, is a savage environment from which children cannot be safeguarded; instead, they should be raised to survive (or perish) according to the violent terms of the street: “Cuando ella traiga una vida a este mundo procurará que no le falte entrenamiento para la jungla de asfalto” (117).

It goes without saying that ideas of family and home are ambiguous, flexible, and influenced by a variety of external social and structural forces. Nevertheless, as

Elizabeth Jelin asserts in Family Household and Gender Relations in Latin America, the most basic objective of the household “is to carry out activities related to the maintenance of its members, following culturally defined ‘normal standards of living’” (29). The household should at least theoretically function as the primary mechanism for sustaining one’s existence and as an elemental framework of individual identity. The protagonist’s antagonism and alienation from his (supposedly model) family raise profound doubts !50 about the family’s effectiveness in this society. Even in the very first pages of the novel, the oficinista situates his struggle for recognition as one of displacement from the traditional sources of identity: “Ni en la oficina ni en su hogar saben quién es él. Y si medita que él mismo tampoco sabe, entonces le da vértigo. Un día de éstos van a ver” (12). Family and occupation, as Simmel argued, were central to establishing one’s identity in pre-modern societies. The abundance of people and space provided by cities offered the opportunity to define oneself apart from these structures and realize one’s

“singleness.” Yet to define and express one’s identity within the ambiguity of the urban crowd is a dizzying challenge with which the oficinista struggles to comes to terms.

Despite his general lack of attachment to his current family, he does not treat merely abandoning them as sufficient to fully realize a new affective relationship and identity. In addition to wishing that his children might be killed at school, he begins to contemplate and plot killing his family himself: “A menudo imagina que los liquida” (40). Meanwhile, he notices that his wife is increasingly enthralled by news stories about domestic violence. In one telling scene the narrator lists the array of destructive activities carried out in the streets by the government, rebels, and common citizens—the last being an attack on an infant-cloning laboratory. The last is a doubly disturbing notion: on the one hand, an apparent perversion of the creation of life; on the other hand, an effort to kill whoever creates and is created through such experiments.

The narration then shifts from what is on the television to the protagonist’s home

—ostensibly a site of more customary procreation. We then discover that the oficinista is !51 not alone in his impulse to harm his family. His wife, who roams the house, striking and shouting at their children, is captivated by all types of domestic crimes, so much so that the protagonist wonders: “cuánto falta para que se le ocurra pasar de espectador a protagonista” (51). Similar to Bonassi’s Subúrbio, the home in El oficinista does not enable bonds of mutual support or recognition. In contrast, however, the oficinista’s household is progressing swiftly towards not only decay but active self-annihilation. As part of his plan for starting a new life, the oficinista eventually decides that turning on the gas and poisoning his family would be the best (and least suspicious) option. More than once, the novel’s narration describes him, in the present tense, returning home late at night and turning on the gas. This gives the reader the impression that the protagonist is finally (ex)terminating the family in which he has felt unfulfilled and a stranger. Each time, the description of his actions turns out to have been imagined or dreamt.

Eventually the oficinista decides: “no es necesario ese crimen múltiple para ejecutar la parte más importante de su plan” (187). His plan being to gain recognition from the secretaria by developing a new intimate, familial relationship with her. The protagonist’s eventual decision to merely abandon his family rather than murder them, however, does not mitigate the sense of familial crisis that the novel depicts.

El oficinista’s setting is fictionalized, but it also clearly evokes specific types of historical violence, paranoia, and desperation. First, we see various methods of State oppression: misleading and reductionist propaganda, police brutality, and a general air of surveillance and terror. There is, of course, a broad literary tradition depicting dystopian !52 governments that maintain power by creating both order and chaos (probably the most famous example being George Orwell’s 1984). But within an Argentine context, the strongest reference point is the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s. The government of El oficinista is never associated with any specific individual, party or platform, yet the whirring blades and roving spotlights of police helicopters project a sense of constant vigilance. The city itself is a battleground for clashes between soldiers deployed by the nebulous government and rebel guerrillas who also carry out frequent suicide bombings. Although the novel does not take place in the present-day capital, the conditions it describes also seem to reflect broad socioeconomic forces that reshaped life in Buenos Aires during the 1990s and 2000s. These include the impacts of globalization and privatization on many industries and labor markets, such as increased unemployment and underemployment; the polarization of labor markets; deregulation; depreciation of hiring standards; and a general erosion of job security and stability, above all during the economic crisis of 2001 (Ariza and Oliveira 33). Perhaps most evocative is the way in which Saccomanno interweaves the atmospheres of anxiety and desperation created by different historical circumstances.

These conditions have combined with changing values to upend the traditional financial and social organization of many households. Urban life, with its pressures to be more mobile and flexible with respect to housing, work and socialization, favors individualization and the formation of smaller nuclear families (Chambers 25). But there is no reason that the new types of families that emerge under such conditions should be !53 considered any less functional or cohesive. The concern that the family is “in crisis” is by no means a recent phenomenon. The question raised by El oficinista, however, is whether alternatives exist when the family—the traditional institution for nurturing, protecting, and giving recognition to the individual—is insufficient or ineffectual.

In the context of Buenos Aires specifically, José Eduardo Abadi and Diego Mileo argue, in Tocar fondo: La clase media argentina en crisis, that the market collapse at the turn of the century planted feelings of socioeconomic precariousness (and even impending catastrophe) firmly in the forefront of the urban, middle-class mindset

(19-20). In El oficinista, the protagonist’s wife does not work, but his wife and children’s demands for money perturb him and exacerbate the tenuous hold he has on his job. As we have seen, the oficinista’s coworkers praise his ostensible maintenance of a traditional family, with the protagonist being the stereotypical breadwinner. In truth, however, his household is under enormous strain from inside and out. In Subúrbio, the limited space and financial resources of the elderly couple provoke frequent arguments while also limiting how much they can alter their situation or how far from it they can flee. In El oficinista, the protagonist’s employment does not provide financial security and he feels that fleeing to another place will require stealing a large amount of money.

The oficinista and secretaria blame the dissolution of familial structure and values for the violence ravaging both the public and private spheres. Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that perception drives reality in this “crisis of family.” That is to say, though outside forces undoubtedly affect the ability of a family to maintain and give recognition !54 to its members within a particular society, if the members of a family come to view it as insufficient or ineffectual, that stance may exacerbate the family’s deterioration. The oficinista intends to “liquidate” his own family, and the secretaria eventually refuses to form a loving, monogamous relationship or raise a child with him. In the end,

Saccomanno’s novel does not deal with ways to strengthen or “fix” the family. It deals with alternative sources of recognition (gained through love and companionship), as well as the issue of whether they are viable.

The protagonist’s narrated experiences contain no positive or hopeful image of family life. Yet he maintains the hope that an intimate, affirming relationship is still possible: “Si ha seguido adelante durante tanto tiempo no fue por cobardía sino por esperanza: el anhelo de un hecho trascendente: el amor. Porque el amor, lo sabía, finalmente le abriría una perspectiva nueva de la existencia” (175). He hopes, ultimately, that if he were to kill or abandon his family, it would enable him to start a new life with the secretaria. Although the normal structures of home and family have fallen apart, he still imagines that a bond with another individual will validate his existence and unearth in him some distinct and greater self.

Another Being

In Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” the narrator can only observe and speculate about the eponymous stranger whose face displays “something even more intense than despair” (396). In Subúrbio, Bonassi sometimes describes the velho’s or velha’s !55 thoughts, but primarily utilizes a documentary and voyeuristic narrative tone.

Saccomanno’s narration, in contrast, attempts to take us deep into the mind of this beleaguered and easily overlooked figure. The protagonist is a member of an anxious middle class whose knowledge and preoccupations rarely extend beyond his own immediate experience. The oficinista’s wife is never described outside the home. We only see two characters whose social, political, or economic influence is greater than the protagonist’s: 1) his boss, who is his immediate superior, yet seems to hold the oficinista’s wellbeing (and very existence) in his hands; 2) a judge, who instructs the police to forgive the oficinista for trying to steal a necklace because the protagonist was not even savvy enough to realize its jewels were fake. In other words, the protagonist lives in a state of general fear and bafflement with regards to the powers that regulate his world.

The novel certainly does not present a hopeful view of the type of city being produced by the urbanization and globalization of recent decades. That being said, the protagonist—from whose point of view the narration flows—is oblivious to production and consumption of almost every kind. His job keeps him from destitution and his family can be a financial burden, yet neither concern is tied to any specific activity, need, or desire. In fact, the protagonist perceives labor and consumption almost exclusively in social terms, framed by their role in interpersonal relationships and the possibility of recognition. One of the most explicit examples (and one that highlights his general !56 naiveté) occurs when the oficinista finds himself observing the youths who prostitute themselves in the red-light district of the city:

Se pregunta también si estas criaturas […] no serán, en vez de chicos, productos. Razona: si quienes vienen a encontrar su placer en estas calles son consumidores, los chicos, basta de escrúpulos, son productos. Y nada de esto, se dice, tiene que ver con el amor. (169)

The protagonist attempts to elevate the bond of mutual recognition that he naively believes he shares with the secretaria above any notion of exchange. Moreover, the instances when he does reach for wealth, like the money he tries to embezzle from his employer, are not motivated by material goals. They are driven by his desire to formalize his relationship with the secretaria, and to enable their escape from the home and city that (re)produce his unrecognition. We can identify here an implicit critique of the capitalist logic in which the protagonist lives—work has not enabled him to form stable social relationships at home or the office, but acquiring a sufficient amount of money remains the only path he can imagine to fundamentally change his circumstances.

Thus it is possible to consider some of the general ordering and disordering forces that create the protagonist’s sense of social isolation and unrecognition. However, the limited perspective provided by the novel’s narration complicates the identification of definitive causes. Instead, we are forced to consider the response of an individual like the oficinista—a seemingly common individual, with a seemingly conventional family and job, whose general ignorance and lack of agency do not prevent him from trying to take action. As an essentially mediocre man, living in a modern metropolis and struggling to affirm and confirm his place in society, his frustration and longing for meaning might !57 superficially resemble the classic ennui of the petit bourgeois.10 Yet he is a man whose desperation for the most basic recognition ultimately carries him to the edge of madness and murder. Saccomanno’s depiction does not justify or defend the figure of the oficinista—indeed, the manifestations of his self-interest and paranoia are frequently disturbing. What can we discover, then, in a character whose limited view and desperation drive him toward the destruction of himself and others? The protagonist, I would argue, is significant precisely because of his extreme insignificance. The oficinista’s general lack of social definition makes him easy to overlook. Nevertheless, the novel raises the question of whether deep, prolonged unrecognition may have more dramatic consequences than one might assume. Additionally, we must then consider whether an individual like the protagonist, who finally decides to take dramatic action, has any real hope of succeeding—any real hope of gaining recognition. And if he fails, what sort of existence is left for him?

The most ambiguous (and ambivalent) presence in the novel is “el otro.” At times, el otro represents the identity that the protagonist feels his family and coworkers do not perceive and value—an identity that, if realized, will undo the passive, submissive existence in which he silently suffers and seethes. In other moments, el otro appears as a voice in the oficinista’s head or even a figment of his increasing delusions. Even before meeting the secretaria, the protagonist consoles himself with the idea that his unrecognition stems merely from a choice to conceal his true nature. “Ser otro” simultaneously excites him and troubles him. He sometimes even worries that having !58 behaved timidly and accepted unrecognition for so long will have foreclosed the possibility of transforming his identity.

To stand out on the street or in the office—to be perceived as anything but innocuous and forgettable—can entail a certain amount of professional or bodily danger.

Nevertheless, feeling recognized by another individual alters the way he views himself in public as well as private: “hoy él no es un pasajero más [….] El amor le ha enseñado que puede cambiar. Ha tomado conciencia de que puede ser otro. Y el otro, entre todos, se siente superior” (59). Meeting the secretaria functions as a divide between anonymity and a stronger, recognizable identity—a divide that he must find a way to preserve so as not to slip back into his previous, anonymous self. He must remind himself from time to time: “Él ahora es otro. Y el otro no tiene piedad” (63). To be without compassion is necessary, he feels, to survive and escape the city, and also to liquidate his family.

In spite of the oficinista’s romantic overtures, the secretaria resists any attempt to treat their relationship as more than casual. From the beginning, he frets over the possibility that she is also maintaining a romantic or sexual relationship with their boss.

When she allows him into the intimate, domestic space of her apartment, the oficinista imagines that he is a detective, conjecturing about her character and her relationship with their boss based on what he finds. She divulges very little to him about herself, yet the oficinista tries desperately to arrange what he knows into a coherent narrative. He interprets the physical intensity of their relationship as proof, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the narrative of her life leads toward him: !59

La secretaria […] no le ha contado más que instantáneas. Sin embargo a él le parecen capítulos de una novela. Y él es su lector. Su gran lector. Al introducir primero unos dedos, después todos, después el puño y, una vez adentro, abriendo la mano en su interior, cree que en su expulsión líquida, su arquearse voluptuoso, ella es suya como no fue de nadie. (125)

Axel Honneth observes that the recognition offered by a close, personal bond consists of a “communicative arc” suspended between the experience of being merged with another individual, and the knowledge that this merging gains its significance through periods of separation (and the continued possibility of separation). A strong bond of mutual recognition functions when one can trust that the other will return (105). Gradually, the protagonist’s persistent (and justified) doubts about the secretaria’s commitment to him creep into his conception of their relationship. He cannot trust the secretaria to return to him and consistently affirm his social value. He hopes that running away with her and/or having a child with her will bind her to him more securely, but he cannot convince her to do so.

Paul Ricoeur, in The Course of Recognition, engages in a number of ways with

Honneth’s work on the “struggle for recognition.” One important contribution is

Ricoeur’s examination of self-narration and memory in the realization of recognition and identity. To narrate identity requires, as Ricoeur argues, an attempt to reconcile the aspects of one’s identity that remain consistent over time with the aspects of one’s identity that change over time in response to historical conditions (101). For John Locke, identity was defined as a single consciousness extending through time. Ricoeur problematizes this idea within the frame of recognition by examining the role of memory !60 and promises—memory being what connects identity to the past, and promises being what connect it to the future (110). Memory is therefore necessary for maintaining a sense of identity over time, but for the individual who hopes to become “otro,” memory is an obstacle to self-reinvention. The oficinista laments: “el gran dilema existencial es la memoria. Hace que uno no pueda olvidar quién es” (115). The protagonist gradually concocts a plan to kill his family, embezzle money from work, and flee the city with the secretaria, making her “la estrella” of the life he is rewriting (196). These actions would constitute a dramatic reformulation of his life’s social, spatial, and socioeconomic context. However, to be recognized through a new identity will require a more radical break with his notion of self.

While he hopes recognition from the secretaria will facilitate his full transformation into el otro, this other notion of his identity increasingly takes the form of a rival or antagonist: “Se pregunta de cuál de los dos se habrá enamorado ella, si de él o del otro” (120). Since in truth “él” and “el otro” both refer to the oficinista, this preoccupation reflects his growing anxiety and madness. Much like the eponymous protagonist of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” the oficinista’s “other” represents both the protagonist himself and his double. Whereas the oficinista initially believed that el otro would be the newer, stronger identity into which the secretaria’s love would transform him, el otro eventually becomes an opponent he has created for himself—but one whose destruction would mean his own death as well:

El otro es el responsable de toda su desgracia. Quisiera sacárselo de encima. Está acercándose al puerto cuando tiene una idea: la forma de deshacerse del otro es !61

arrojándose al agua con un adoquín atado al cuello. Al ahogarse, ahogará al otro. La idea es buena, pero tiene un inconveniente: él todavía no quiere morir. La idea, se da cuenta, es una idea del otro. Quiere liberarse de él. El otro ha pensado en matarlo, pero él no le dará el gusto. Será mediocre pero no idiota. (161-162)

As his desperation grows, the oficinista finds himself wandering around the city at night, hallucinating, arguing with himself, and fantasizing about killing his family, the secretaria, and himself. In the end, the secretaria chooses another romantic partner (their boss), and by failing to recognize him as in any way transformed, she invalidates the new identity by which he imagined escaping his unsatisfying, anonymous existence. When the protagonist goes to the secretaria’s house for the last time, sure that he can persuade her to run away with him, he encounters their boss, who literally shoves him from her home and out into the street. Having abandoned his original home and now having been denied access to the secretaria’s, the oficinista relinquishes any final hope of intimacy or a new identity. The secretaria’s refusal to recognize him extinguishes not only el otro but even the submissive and mediocre sense of self from which he hoped to escape. After trying and failing to develop a new bond of familial intimacy—a new source of recognition—the protagonist discovers that he has merely confirmed and assured for himself the most absolute social nonexistence.

Sites of Incomprehension: The Street and Technology

One of the most basic undercurrents in the novel is the absence of security or sanctuary. In the context of Argentina’s largest city, a variety of forces—including policies of urban development during the most recent dictatorship, as well as the !62 globalization and privatization of space in the decades that followed—have transformed the socioeconomic landscape of the capital (Sarlo, “Cultural Landscapes” and

“Violence”). In its 2011 study on inequality in emerging economies, the Organisation for

Economic Co-operation and Development found that in the mid- to late-2000s Argentina saw income inequality remain relatively steady (whereas in many countries it increased during that period), with some progress made toward addressing extreme poverty. With that said, the OECD points out that inequality in Argentina continues to be very high— and well above the OECD average—after spiking in the 1990s (51-52).11 During both of these periods, socioeconomic trends have continued to (re)shape the spatial character of the capital. For instance, while many poor now occupy villas miseria on the periphery of

Buenos Aires and enter the city for work, many others must work, sleep, and eat in sidewalks, subway stations, and other public areas. Or as Beatriz Sarlo puts it: “Poverty privatizes public space” (“Cultural Landscapes” 46).

This is the particular context which Saccomanno refashioned into a vaguely sci-fi dystopia. The public and the private in the fictional city both suffer extreme degradation, making it difficult for many, including the protagonist, to find any space that is sheltered or peaceful. The oficinista and his coworkers are acutely aware that any workplace infraction could mean finding themselves unemployed and destitute. Similarly, when violence on the street bleeds into private areas—like the home or the workplace—there is little reason to hope that one’s fellow citizens will offer any assistance. During a visit to the secretaria’s apartment, for example, the oficinista muses that if someone were to !63 come in and attack her, not one of her neighbors would respond to her screams: “Los que están despiertos y mirando la tele, al oír sus gritos, subirían el volúmen” (120). This sentiment echoes the indifference to others that permeates Subúrbio up until the murder of the menina (and almost exactly mirrors the final scene of Luiz Ruffato’s Eles eram muitos cavalos).

Even the meteorological conditions of the city in El oficinista contribute to its menace and degradation. Smog and acid rains can make the day seem like night, but do not prevent helicopters from monitoring the citizenry, “vigilando que no se formen grupos” (83). The government makes an official effort to suppress politicization of the general populace: “Se advierte a la población que las manifestaciones pacifistas se considerarán apoyo al terrorismo” (50). Curiously, even the novel’s most direct evocations of State oppression—the disappearance of persons—do not spur any mention within the narration of the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

Regardless of whether Argentina’s historical dictatorship forms part of the fictional world of the novel, its discourses and methods permeate that world, including ostensibly non- political situations.

From the oficinista’s perspective, disappearances tend to be the result of interpersonal or business decisions, executed by one’s employers. The protagonist and his coworkers avoid but accept uncritically the clashes between government forces and guerrillas on the street. Their impact is largely indiscernible from the non-political violence of school shootings, muggings in the city center, or drug wars in the villas !64 miseria. An implicit promise of Argentina’s re-democratization was to put an end to the immediate danger that the dictatorial State had posed to citizens’ physical safety and wellbeing. While the threat of State violence diminished, levels of urban crime and random, non-State violence increased. The inability of the democratic government to ensure basic security for its citizens—in truth, an issue faced by cities and governments around the world—has caused many residents to either live in fear or take extreme measures to defend themselves against amorphous threats, often creating “un estado de guerra de ciudadanos contra ciudadanos” (Sarlo, “Violencia” 208). In El oficinista, the two types of violence that have figured most prominently in the last half-century of

Argentine history—organized State violence and unpredictable urban violence—are superimposed in a way that suggests they have no spatial or temporal limits. Moreover,

Saccomanno’s novel suggests that the immediate threat of urban decay and crime threatens to inhibit the general public’s awareness and response to State violence.

By setting his novel in a quasi-cyberpunk Buenos Aires, Saccomanno dialogues not only with recent sociopolitical and economic events, but also with a literary tradition stretching back to the early twentieth century. A variety of Argentine authors have depicted the capital as a hostile, tumultuous space, where the individual traversing the city may evoke Poe’s harried and overwhelmed “man of the crowd.” The turn of the twentieth century saw one of Buenos Aires’s most dramatic periods of urbanization, transforming the city as a space, as an idea, and as a social environment. As Christina

Komi writes: !65

La Buenos Aires de los años veinte surge como una ciudad de cemento que crece y se extiende a un ritmo desenfrenado, amenazando no sólo las tradiciones locales sino, más profundamente, la integridad psicológica del individuo que se transforma de repente en hombre de masas dentro de una ciudad masificada, en una fracción de la sociedad o en pieza de máquina. (21)

Two of the most noted interpretations of this change were elaborated by Jorge Luis

Borges and Roberto Arlt. The poetry and short stories of the former, as Sarlo has argued, were heavily colored by a nostalgia for a liminal culture that barely existed anymore, while the fiction of the latter concentrated on the ambivalent character of Buenos Aires’s new and volatile reality (“Roberto Arlt” 218). Within the Argentine canon, perhaps the clearest touchstone for Saccomanno’s titular oficinista is Remo Erdosain, the protagonist of Arlt’s Los siete locos (1929) and Los lanzallamas (1931).

Like Erdosain, the oficinista expresses destructive fantasies, an amateur enthusiasm for science, and above all, a neurotic anxiety toward his anonymous existence in the brutal, concrete metropolis. However, the differences between the protagonists’ perspectives are instructive as well. Erdosain imagines explosive violence as a means of exerting power over the urban space and gaining notoriety. Despite a lack of nostalgia for pre-urban society, Arlt’s main character perceives the city within a process of development—a process that cannot be reversed, but that could be altered or even conquered. As J. Andrew Brown explains in Test Tube Envy: Science and Power in

Argentine Narrative, a genuine understanding of scientific principles and rhetoric were key to the ambivalent place science holds in Arlt’s work, on a textual and meta-textual level. That is, for Arlt’s characters an understanding of science and technology enable !66 production and destruction, oppression and liberation; for the author, this understanding allows for admiration, but also offers discursive authority for real critique (101-103).

Erdosain’s knowledge of science affirms him in a practical way, by providing employment, which in turn invigorates his body and affirms the value of his name and presence in the social sphere of the street:

Augusto Remo Erdosain—tal como si pronunciar su nombre le produjera un placer físico, que duplicaba la energía infiltrada en sus miembros por el movimiento. Por las calles oblicuas, bajo los conos de sol, avanzaba sintiendo la potencia de su personalidad flamante: Jefe de Industrias. […] Y esta satisfacción lo aplomaba en las calles… (Los siete locos 204)

In contrast, Saccomanno’s oficinista enjoys scientific magazines and technological fantasies because they seemingly promise order and reason in a world where he can find none. For the oficinista, science is emotionally compensatory rather than socially or professionally empowering. Despite his affinity for science, he demonstrates no real understanding of its principles or functional applications. Furthermore, whereas Erdosain feels invigorated simply by speaking his proper name, the oficinista either has no name or gains nothing through its enunciation since it does not connect to any socially valued or recognized identity. Unlike Erdosain’s title “Jefe de Industrias,” the oficinista’s title corresponds to a menial, unsatisfying job and is so generic that it reiterates his anonymity instead of resolving it.

Without a doubt, there is a correspondence in Saccomanno’s novel between technology and control. The oficinista, however, does not attempt to understand the exercise of power through technology as it endangers his life and continually disrupts the !67 city around him. Although fond of science, he never considers why dogs and people are being cloned, what causes the acid rains, or how the government and rebels use technology (helicopters, explosives, etc.) to intervene in the lives of the city’s residents.

Instead, the oficinista imagines science in purely abstract terms as it relates to his social and emotional concerns. He animalizes (naturalizes) real technology, as opposed to studying it, describing the helicopters as “insectos de acero oscuro con ojos amarillos, expectantes” (21). At the same time, he attempts to technologize his relationship with his body and his feelings in hopes of gaining a rational control over them:

Se imagina a sí mismo como un robot capaz de corregirse que, al quitarse la cabeza, ponerla sobre le escritorio y […] acomodar los conductos por los que debe fluir el deseo. […] ningún deseo, por frenético que sea, alterará su funcionamiento normal. Pero la desesperación lo puede. Una jaqueca insoportable. Se le nubla la visión. La boca arenosa, las palmas húmedas. Taquicardia, un mareo nauseoso. (96)

As we see, in contrast to Arlt’s protagonist, the oficinista’s conception of technology does not capacitate him professionally or socially. Moreover, it only provides a brief respite from the physiological distress caused by his desire for the secretaria going unrequited.

His robot fantasies only rephrase his sense of failure: “Esta mañana es un robot que avanza con una falla motriz” (161). Ultimately, the oficinista does not value science as a means of achieving sustained recognition—it only helps him deal temporarily with the violent and unsatisfying present. His dreams of escape focus on fleeing with the secretaria to an idyllic (and undeveloped) beach in Mexico.

Although the chaotic, hellish streets of the city do frame the oficinista’s relationship with his family and with the secretaria, it is actually the semi-public space of !68 the office that first offers alternative relationships of recognition. The protagonist hopes to “liquidate” his current family life, as the traditional domestic space can no longer give meaning to his present or future existence. The workplace, on the other hand, has become the most potent space of identification—simultaneously promising and perilous.

This is not because his actual job imbues him with any pride or devotion; he is generally unambitious and we learn virtually nothing about his small role in an enormous bureaucracy. The workplace has not supplanted the domestic space as a source of identity due to the value of the work itself. Rather, on a practical level, the workplace has become the space where many individuals, like the oficinista, spend a disproportionate amount of time. Even more importantly, the workplace offers social and economic opportunities that the domestic space cannot. On the one hand, the protagonist meets the secretaria there, and hopes that her love can redefine him as an individual worthy of the recognition he lacks. Additionally, he sees an opportunity to misappropriate a large sum of money from the company where he works in order to leave the country and start a new life with the secretaria. The flip-side of these opportunities is the ever-present threat of being cast out on the whim of a superior or through the betrayal of a coworker.

After some time, the secretaria becomes pregnant, but she refuses to tell the oficinista whether the child belongs to him or their boss, with whom the secretary also has a sexual relationship. Even as he plots killing the children he already has, the idea of having another child excites the oficinista because he thinks that this new child will be a product of el otro, thus anchoring his potential new identity and ensuring it a legacy. !69

From his perspective, the workplace has become a possible source of family outside the home, as well as romantic love. In the end, however, the office in Saccomanno’s novel will prove inadequate for the creation of alternative familial bonds, much like the subúrbio’s fraught and crumbling streets in Bonassi’s text.

Significantly, the oficinista is willing to treat the secretaria’s unborn child as his own and give it his surname even if it is not his biologically. He fears that if he were to lose the secretaria now, the new identity he has tried to forge will be lost entirely. He eventually goes to her house and reveals his plan to her, proclaiming: “hoy sucederá un hecho trascendente en la oficina” (195). This event will be his falsification of their boss’ signature on a check, so that they will have the resources to leave the city and the country. The oficinista assures the secretaria that: “ha venido a salvarla […] Después se corrige: van a salvarse ambos, dice. También la criatura que ella lleva en su vientre. Ella le contesta que no necesita que nadie la salve de nada” (195). This final rejection ends his hopes for gaining recognition and transformation through a romantic bond with her.

When their boss emerges to eject him from the secretaria’s home, after having overheard the oficinista’s embezzlement scheme, even his identity as a simple “oficinista” is brought to an end.

Out Among the Perros Clonados

The protagonist of El oficinista frequently describes his wife and children using animal terminology as a way to express his disgust with them as well as his emotional !70 distance from them. On the street, the protagonist compares the urban crowds to cattle on their way to the slaughter (59), and later describes the city center as an

“hormiguero” (83). J. Andrew Brown notes that in Roberto Arlt’s novels, references to

Darwin, animalized descriptions of people, and the depiction of the city as a savage environment served to question the dichotomy of civilización versus barbarie that

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento famously elaborated in Facundo (111). Saccomanno’s novel certainly portrays the city as similarly brutal and Darwinian—as, for example, when a young man on the street briefly takes the oficinista hostage in a standoff with police, holding a gun to the nape of his neck and telling him simply “matar o morir” (172). For Arlt, the savagery of the metropolis gave lie to the promise that the modern city ostensibly offered at the turn of the twentieth century, as a new type of space, constructed according to math and reason as a catalyst for civitas. Saccomanno’s dystopian portrayal of the metropolis does not resist any ideal, but rather shudders under the tension and trauma of a city that has already passed through countless cycles of destruction and reconstruction.

Yet the most frequent animal element in the novel are packs of cloned dogs, whose origin remains unclear but that roam the streets attacking pedestrians and cars.

The fact that they are cloned—by definition, not unique—reinforces the general notion of replaceable and/or disposable beings that we see in the protagonist’s workplace. That being said, the oficinista gradually begins to dream and hallucinate that he himself is a dog, and finds the experience liberating since it means not answering to anyone for his !71 actions. When his wife discovers him naked and on all fours in the middle of the night, she ridicules him and threatens to beat him. Awakening to his human form highlights once and for all his failure to be valued and acknowledged at home. It also motivates his final attempt to escape his family, escape his city, and achieve the love of the secretaria.

Ultimately though, this “man of the crowd” proves incapable of gaining recognition— neither his home, his office, nor the street offer redemption or escape. When the secretaria and his boss finally cast him out into the street, they seal his social isolation and an unrecognition so profound that even the cloned dogs no longer perceive him: “A veces se da vuelta para ver si el otro lo sigue. Pero no. Camina. Ya no hay otro. Está solo. Camina solo. Un perro clonado se le acerca, le gruñe, lo huele y después se va. Él no existe siquiera para los perros” (199).

***************

Saccomanno’s protagonist, like Bonassi’s, achieves no redemption. Unable to find intimate recognition with their traditional families, they search for (and briefly find) it in a chance encounter with a female character, in whom they see the opportunity to remake themselves and no longer be overlooked and dismissed by all those around them.

While one can empathize with their anguish in being unrecognized, these characters are not sympathetic figures. Their efforts to alleviate undesired anonymity drive them to destroy their families and homes, surrogate as well as traditional. If Subúrbio and El oficinista do not offer hope for resolving the conflict of unrecognition, they instead put !72 the reader in an uncomfortable position with respect to its potential consequences. We see the protagonists begin from an understandable frustration with unsatisfying family lives and limited social or economic options for pursuing an alternative. Yet as the initial promise of a surrogate relationship proves misplaced or unsustainable, we see the protagonists turn down perverse and violent paths. Both novels’ portrayals of their protagonists push back against the inclination to take an ambivalent—horrified but still romantic—view of criminals, especially murderers, as embodying “the extreme of human liberty” (Biron 17-18). The oficinista’s (ultimately unrealized) plan to poison his sleeping family with gas, and the velho’s rape and murder of the menina are too selfish and cowardly to be romanticized. Although the narrative modes of the two novels are distinct, in both cases the reader is aware of the protagonists’ disturbing thoughts and actions while also observing how they continue to be overlooked and unrecognized by those around them. The reader is thus obliged to consider the terrible extremes to which they turn in their desperation, and how long the contemporary “man of the crowd” may go unseen. !73

CHAPTER 2

A Celebrity of One’s Own Mass Media, Fame, and Anonymity

During the twentieth century, the development of mass-media technology— especially radio, film, television, and the internet—fundamentally altered the way in which individuals perceive themselves within society. Although the United States and

Europe are still major forces in the production and export of mass-media culture and technology, and therefore have influenced those of Latin America, Argentina and Brazil now boast considerable media networks and celebrity industries of their own. In the following chapter I examine how the possibility of gaining public recognition has changed with the growth of mass media and celebrity culture in general, and in particular in Argentina and Brazil. More specifically, I consider what actions are possible or desirable for an individual to achieve fame during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The way that audiences have conceived of stars and stardom has progressed from one of distance and idolization toward a context in which audiences feel not only that stars are more accessible, but that stardom itself has become more accessible. The growth of mass-media—its cultural products as well as the technological tools for creating and communicating those products—has been an important catalyst in that process. !74

The terms fame (fama), celebrity (celebridad/celebridade) and stardom (estrellato/ estrelato) are often used interchangeably. There is a fair amount of overlap in their meanings, and they all connote public recognition, but I will address some ways in which they differ in the following overview of fame as a concept. Of the numerous texts devoted to the role of fame in Western culture, Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown remains the most exhaustive and definitive. Braudy points to Alexander the Great as the first truly “famous” individual, due to his concern for “the relationship between accomplishment and publicity” (32). The Romans, the author goes on to argue, developed a society centered around fama and celebritas as measures of civic accomplishment within the social space of the city (56). Christianity would introduce more spiritual, inward-looking concepts of achievement and recognition (in relation to

God and his precepts), which the Roman Empire eventually merged with its established exaltation of grand public men whose grand public acts demanded grand public monuments (188).

Braudy traces the notion of becoming a “star” to Chaucer’s coinage of “stellify” to describe a spiritual transcendence that few will manage (246). But it would be through the advent of the twentieth-century film star that the union of emotional/spiritual expression and material success became framed within the eighteenth-century idea of self-fashioning as an individual project (554). These figures—the first “movie stars”— would become icons of social and material values. Even as perspectives have changed over time regarding who does or does not “deserve” fame, the term star still retains !75 generally positive undertones. Fame and celebrity, meanwhile, tend to be used interchangeably nowadays and can refer to individuals whose public recognition may be viewed favorably or unfavorably. It would be virtually unthinkable, moreover, for a person in the late-twentieth or twenty-first centuries to gain fame/celebrity/stardom outside the mechanisms of mass media. Lastly, as fame became more individualized and secular, it came to be understood not only as an indicator of accomplishment but also often as a goal or accomplishment in itself.

Fame from any era, including the present, emerges from two interrelated hopes: to be recognized right now and to be remembered in the future. Framed another way, fame is a response to the threat of being invisible, ignored, anonymous, or forgotten. With respect to identity, I am working generally from Stuart Hall’s notion of an “identification process” wherein an individual invests in the temporary, two-way interaction between him/herself and a hailing discourse (“Introduction” 4-6). I believe it is imperative, however, to add that an individual not only conceives of his or her identity in relation to others, as Hall argues, but also tends to seek others’ recognition of his or her engagement in the identification process. Celebrity, as Braudy points out, can seem profoundly compensatory: “In search of modern fame, we often enter a world of obvious fiction, in which all blemishes are smoothed and all wounds healed. It is the social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness” (7). Fame becomes idealized, moreover, as the height of personal freedom—a state in which one is permitted to be one’s self and praised for it. Inasmuch as fame promises the validation of !76 a cohesive self, infamy can function equally well since it too represents the creation, by the notorious individual and his/her audience, of an identity that has drawn public attention.

The threat of anonymity or unrecognition (im)posed by urban crowds of early industrial modernity prompted many individuals to exhibit flamboyant fashions and behaviors on the street, but mass media would eventually give more structure to the struggle to stand out. Twentieth century capitalism sought to formulate “the mass” in relation to consumption, as opposed to work and class, in order to create what P. David

Marshall, in Celebrity and Power, calls the “audience-subject” (61). Much of the audience-subject’s power comes, as Marshall notes, from the inherent impermanence and indeterminacy of its interests—the culture industry is simultaneously frustrated and sustained by the audience-subject’s nebulous character, but within this interaction individual celebrities function as valuable inflection points (63-66). The attention of the audience determines the celebrity’s public value, but at the same time, that attention can only be gained by positioning oneself in opposition to the audience through the exhibition of some unique characteristic. Furthermore, the ubiquity of one’s image—made possible by the multiplication of media technology—is read, ironically perhaps, as evidence of one’s uniqueness. That is, the more public recognition the famous individual receives, the more distinct they are from the anonymous, collective public. Whether one’s uniqueness is in some sense “real” or comparable to any other, is ultimately immaterial.

Yet, as we will see, in recent decades, audiences have not merely been sold the notion of !77 uniqueness via a “star system”; they have come to treat fame as an attainable as well as desirable status.

As the issue of unrecognition is, in many ways, a product of modern, urban life, mass media—now the established mode of public communication and fame—is central to the question of its resolution. The fact that unrecognition has become common has not made it necessarily comfortable or easy to accept. While the urge to be noticed, acknowledged or appreciated is hardly new, the growth and diversification of urban multitudes has only complicated it. Mass media, especially television and the internet, abound with individuals clamoring to “make a name” for themselves, to gain acknowledgment of some expression of their identity. To assert particular characteristics

—through labor, social behavior, material or symbolic consumption, etc.—can be a first step towards forming new types of communities, but it also responds to the yearning for

“uniqueness and irreplaceability” that arise when faced with modern, metropolitan crowds (Simmel 339). The street, however, is no longer the only stage for expressing uniqueness. By the end of the twentieth century, to stand out in the proverbial crowd usually entailed a mode of expression that was mediated rather than dependent on sharing a physical time and space.

The first section of this chapter provide an overview of how notions of media technology and fame have arrived at where they are today—that is, seemingly more accessible than ever, and seemingly, therefore, a solution to feelings of undesired anonymity or unrecognition. In mapping this trajectory I will not only draw on studies of !78

Latin American, U.S., and European mass media, but also make use of various Argentine and Brazilian literary texts as signposts. These are: Manuel Puig’s La traición de Rita

Hayworth (1968), Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela (1977), Julio Cortázar’s

“Queremos tanto a Glenda” (1980), and Alejandro López’s La asesina de Lady Di (2001).

I place Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s O anônimo célebre (2002) at the end of this line and devote the second section of this chapter to a close analysis of the novel. Above all, I will consider how Brandão’s text engages with questions of public fame and anonymity that were only nascent in narratives depicting earlier decades. The protagonist, as he constructs his public persona in the South American metropolis of São Paulo, understands his place in the celebrity sphere by way of his depiction in tabloids, television programs, and websites. Of the various texts that I consider in this project, Brandão’s novel deals most explicitly and directly with the issue of anonymity, which even the title places in contrast and in tension with the possibility of celebrity. With O anônimo célebre, the author attempts to lay bare fame’s contemporary promise of democratized attainability, as well as its most enduring promise: the chance to create a stable, enduring identity.

Therefore, the novel contributes a crucial perspective to our exploration of the crises of unrecognition. !79

Conceptions of Mass-Mediated Fame in Latin America

Stars We Can See

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter

Benjamin observes how the film star’s performance did not allow for the same direct connection with an audience as the stage actor’s performance had. The film industry compensated for this lack by cultivating the actor’s personality as a substitute for aura, and making this the manner in which the audience connects with the person they see

(1061-1062). The actor’s personality, offered to the public, inevitably becomes a kind of second performance that often surpasses or obscures the primary (onscreen) performance.

The film industry, in particular, also encouraged and profited from a shift away from the

“high culture” appreciation for the on-stage or on-screen actor’s portrayal toward the

“mass culture” identification with characters and the conflation of character and actor.

The dreams and values evoked on screen could then be projected out, through the “star system,” into daily life for sale and consumption (Martín-Barbero, De los medios

199-200).

In De los medios a las mediaciones, Jesús Martín-Barbero highlights the way in which radio and film—especially that of Mexico and Argentina—in the first half of the twentieth century not only captured the attention of the general public, but also utilized these media to represent and connect with the interests of popular (often illiterate) classes. In Latin America, the ability to weave cultura popular, on such a large scale, into an exploration of collective history and identity played a significant role in populist !80 movements of the twentieth century. While the contention that Latin America passively consumed North American mass-media products is now widely—and rightly—dismissed

(Franco, “Globalization” 213), mass-media culture expanded the symbolic/discursive archive from which people across the Americas could draw, including illiterate or otherwise marginalized populations (Riobó 12-13). A number of literary works, but above all those of the Argentine writer Manuel Puig, thematize the impact film and mass- media culture had on touchstones and frames of reference across society. The characterization of Puig as “post-boom” in part reflects his texts’ understanding that the author and the written word would not be the primary organizational forces in this expanded symbolic archive. In “Narrator, Author, Superstar,” Jean Franco contends that the works of the Boom writers deified the individual author as the founder of an alternative community that he salvages from “the failures of dependent capitalism and

[…] the disappearance of older communities whose traces still persist in the popular culture and imagination” (157). The rise of the mass-media star threw this narrative into crisis by privileging the reproducible image (over the written word), connecting with the audience as an assemblage of individuals (rather than as a community with a unified perspective), and undermining the dream of the singular, all-encompassing cultural product. Franco posits that Puig’s originality, therefore, was to capture, rather than resist or lament, Latin American audiences’ reception of this new cultural force (165).

The “star system,” initiated by Hollywood especially, engendered a novel type of figure for consumption. The film star carved out an imaginative space in which off- !81 screen activities (interviews, photo shoots, etc.) and on-screen performances became entwined and reinforced each other. The star’s image was not merely a consequence of this set of performances; the content of future performances could be motivated or altered in order to conform to the audience’s established perception of the star (Marshall 84-85).

On the one hand, the mass-media celebrity—whether imported or domestic—offers a set of social and material values disseminated for adoption or rejection by the public. On the other hand, by occupying a liminal state between the fictional (his/her character) and the real (the actor himself/herself), the film star became a presence in the lives of the audiences in a way that other cultural figures, like the characters or authors of novels, could not. P. David Marshall explains:

For some, the characters of the films themselves, which among them construct their own intertextual framework of the celebrity’s identity, are quite sufficient. For others, those called fanatics or fans, the materiality of identity must be reinforced through the acquisition of closer representations of existence and identity. […] Belonging to a fan club entails an investment into the maintenance of [the star’s] coherent identity… (90)

Clearly, the relationship that a fan has with a star cannot be reduced simply to treating an on-screen character or performance as if it were non-fiction. To engage with a star’s persona is to treat explicit performances (like film roles), off-screen performances (like talk-show interviews), and ostensibly unplanned moments (like candid photographs in magazines) all as essential elements of a whole. The nebulous divisions between these elements make their “authentication” largely irrelevant since the star’s persona has no one referent that could be fixed or isolated. !82

The chance to feel kinship with stars, or even to feel like a participant in their career trajectories, depends on contact with public as well as private aspects of stars’ lives, which an array of media can provide. Yet this relationship is shaped by the immediacy of this contact—a star’s retirement (or even death) does not inevitably stop the evolution of his/her image, depending on the regularity and reach of the media’s coverage of his/her off-screen activity. In the case of film actors, the audience-star relationship was nonetheless initially characterized by spatial and rhetorical distance:

“[el] espacio cinematográfico [es] dominado por la distancia y la magia de la imagen” (Martín-Barbero, De los medios 300). Early stars of Hollywood and emerging domestic Latin American film industries were perceived and appropriated as larger than life heroes and archetypes. Franco argues, for example, that in Puig’s La traición de Rita

Hayworth, film fulfills the function of religion by providing social and moral models, in addition to a shared cultural archive for creating bonds, despite the characters’ physical distance from Los Angeles or Buenos Aires (“Narrator” 165-166).

In Clarice Lispector’s novella A hora da estrela, the main character Macabéa moves from the Northeast to the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro, but she too has a remote and awed view of mass-media stars, even as she makes clumsy, tentative attempts at imitating them. When she goes to the cinema, Macabéa finds herself enraptured by the women on the screen, but when she tries to paint her lips like Marilyn Monroe, the result appears grotesque, even bloody—as if it were a type of self-harm to emulate an individual whose form of beauty was so foreign to her. At the end of the novella, a !83 fortuneteller suggests that Macabéa is about to emerge from her sad, anonymous existence by marrying a foreigner and becoming rich and glamorous. The prospect so distracts her mind that she steps in front of a speeding car and dies bleeding in the street.

Her death seems to be an immediate punishment for daring to believe she could have the type of existence she sees romanticized in films.

While she is alive, however, Macabéa, like the protagonist Toto in La traición de

Rita Hayworth, discovers an affective reassurance and promise in the divine images of movie stars. In her case, gazing at a portrait of Greta Garbo assuages the social and emotional isolation in which she lives. As film and later television industries grew throughout the Americas, contact with the star’s image inevitably became less rare, less remote, and less daunting. This did not eliminate, however, curiosity and even a defensive sense of ownership in relation to certain screen idols. Such dedication, it bears repeating, would be to a figure—neither precisely real nor fictional—whose character was defined in part by the star system and in part by the audiences’ own impulses. Eva

Perón1 and Carmen Miranda2 are two prominent, Latin American examples of individuals whose images, constructed in large part through an assortment of mediated formats, became contested sites for defining values and desires.3 Although the socio-cultural impact of each woman was distinct and complex, in both cases mass-media visibility meant that debates over their significance could take place within personal, national and even international contexts all at once. !84

Stars We Can Touch

Julio Cortázar’s short story “Queremos tanto a Glenda” explores one extreme of audience affection, wherein a group of fans dedicate themselves to the perfection of the fictional matinee idol Glenda Garson’s onscreen existence. The fan club’s engagement with her work engenders community and a shared purpose. The fan club experiences an ironic horror when Glenda decides to come out of retirement and thus alter her immaculate image—an image for which she provided raw material, but which her fans, referring to themselves in godlike terms, have claimed and crafted. Their essentially religious devotion is not to Glenda the person and actress, but rather to the idea of Glenda that they have forged. Not unlike Christ in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in

Dostoesvky’s The Brothers Karamazov (and echoing the sanctified function of movie stars in Puig), the flesh-and-blood Glenda has become unnecessary for her present-day followers and even a threat to her own image. From this point of view, it is justifiable for the fan club to carry out her (implied) murder.

Audience engagement, of course, is not typically taken this far, yet the central concept here is crucial: the figure of the star, an amalgam of on-screen and off-screen manifestations, emerges from an array of competing influences, including the actor, the mass-media industry, and the consumer.4 Furthermore, this figure can never be wholly isolated or extracted from the various mediated material—photographs, sound and video recordings, etc.—that communicate it. Marshall, drawing again on Foucault, uses the term “celebrity-function” to denote how the star’s name, face and/or voice organize !85 meaning (57). We should point out a significant distinction, however, between “author- function” and “celebrity-function”: the celebrity’s and audience’s contributions to the

“celebrity-function” frequently occur simultaneously, in real time, more often than in the case of the author and his/her readership.

Finally, it is worth noting how the perceptive distance between the star and the audience has changed. Part of Rita Hayworth’s “betrayal” in Puig’s novel, set in the

1930s and 40s, stems from the discordance between small-town life in the pampas and the idealized world and moral certainty that Toto in particular finds within the movie theater. Glenda’s betrayal, in contrast, is to the image that her fans have taken up and shaped on her behalf.5 In other words, the fans in Cortázar’s text are capable of intervening in the “star system” and feel entitled to do so. Cinematic modes and tropes, as part of an expanded discursive cultural “archive,” are utilized frequently by characters in Puig’s novels and by Puig himself (El beso de la mujer araña being the best known example). Cortázar’s story, while less stylistically novel or cinematic, is an interesting counterpoint because of how literally the characters lay hands on their idol and her works. Even though Glenda is not consciously aware of their efforts, they assert that she implicitly appreciates their devotion to her image: “algo en ella había acatado sin saberlo nuestro anónimo cariño” (23). The fans’ relative anonymity—as opposed to Glenda’s name, which the narrator repeats reverently and almost compulsively—is acknowledged but does not prevent them from asserting their perspective on Glenda and through her. !86

The rise of television further established a paradigm of direct communication between the on-screen personality and the audience. Television viewing does not replicate a true face-to-face conversation; nevertheless, many standard television formats seek to evoke this type of contact. While products of mass media, and television programs especially, have sometimes been condemned as a homogenizing, pacifying force, they have also come to be seen over time with more ambivalence. Néstor García

Canclini, in Consumidores y ciudadanos, summarizes this move as seeing communication in terms of collaboration and transaction more than direct domination

(41-42). Television’s gradual entrenchment in the daily lives of people all over the

Western world necessitated a more complex approach and, above all, greater distinction between critiques of medium and content (Santiago). The debate over the socio-cultural virtues and ills of mass media, however, is vast and outside the scope of the present study.

What I would like to explore is how mass media have affected the set of circumstances in which individuals conceive of fame and the possibility of gaining recognition in the public sphere.

Generally seen as an elemental part of modernization, the development of mass communications networks was one of the few privileged areas of state investment in

Latin America, especially during periods of dictatorship and even the economic “lost decade” of the 1980s (Martín-Barbero, “Between Technology” 39-40). In Argentina and

Brazil, communications industries have received state support, whether in the form of funding for publicly owned media networks or policies favoring private conglomerates, !87 for most of the last sixty years—since the government-led modernization projects of Juan

Perón and Getulio Vargas, through years of military dictatorship, and also during the subsequent decades of democratic transition and neoliberal privatization. Despite some notable differences in each country’s development of information and communications technology, Argentina and Brazil currently possess some of the largest and most wide- reaching media networks in Latin America, concentrated, above all, in the metropolises of Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro.6 This does not mean that access to communications technologies has been consistent or egalitarian; similarly, the cultural influence of imported versus domestic mass media has varied over the last half-century depending on changes in regulation and markets (international and local). Nevertheless, in both countries, urbanization as well as expansion of mass-media production and access are trends that have accelerated dramatically in the last few decades and show no indications of reversing. In both countries, as of 2011, over 95% of households had televisions (CEPALSTAT), and over 45% of the population used the internet

(International Telecommunication Union). This latter percentage is also increasing rapidly due to market demand and state investment.7

Before considering what role the internet plays in the evolving relationship between viewer and mediated content, I would like to further address the impact of television—the medium that still exercises the broadest and most regular impact.

Whereas film relies on the effect of distance and the spectacular image, television, as

Martín-Barbero terms it, “asume y forja dos dispositivos claves de interpelación: la !88 simulación del contacto y la retórica de lo directo” (Al sur 86). Factors that contribute to this effect include: the literal size of the television screen; its presence in the domestic space; formats in which a host speaks directly to the camera/viewer (like talk shows and news programs); live programming; viewing patterns and program scheduling that emphasize quotidian regularity. Thus mass-mediated images and ideas, instead of being consumed in the public sphere of the theater and carried into the private sphere (as in La traición de Rita Hayworth or A hora da estrela) are available for consumption in the private sphere at all times. In the case of on-screen stars, fans do not need to seek them out because television creates the perception of stars seeking out the viewer, entering the viewer’s private space, devoting themselves to holding the viewer’s attention. This situation emerges from the distinct content that television companies have developed as well as from the more explicit commercial nature of television. As Marshall asserts:

the aura of the television celebrity is reduced […] because of three factors: the domestic nature of television viewing, the close affinity of the celebrity with the organization and perpetuation of consumer capitalism, and the shattering of continuity and integrity of character that takes place through the interspersal of commercials in any program. (121)

Yet even the aura of the film star suffered as a result of television. Film traditionally (and to some degree still) creates a unique ritual in which a diverse audience pays to enter a special space—the theater—and give its full attention to the cinematic object. But the advent of video, not to mention the growth of cable and the internet, initiated a shift toward watching movies at home in circumstances more like those of television viewing

(García Canclini, Consumidores 134). !89

The nature of television viewing has altered the social experience of consuming audiovisual material. On the one hand, it undermines the more open, unfamiliar contact that can take place in the theater; on the other hand, television’s unprecedented reach means that popular shows can evoke audience engagement on a scale that even early film and radio could not. Brazilian telenovelas are often held up as examples of mass-media products that manage to dialogue with contemporary social and political issues through the “mass ceremony” of viewing and discussing a show with family or friends (Porto

123-124).8 In this sense, telenovelas can gradually democratize the space of mediated representation as they begin depicting members of society who have tended to be marginalized, like women, people of color, and gays and lesbians. There continue to be serious and troubling issues related to the depiction of non-hegemonic identities across mass-media formats in Brazil (Baptista da Silva and Rosemberg) and Argentina (Courtis, et al.). Without overlooking these concerns or efforts to address them, one can argue that visibility—even if stereotypical or un-nuanced—can be meaningful in itself. Mauro

Porto maintains that even when telenovelas offer disparaging portrayals of certain individuals or groups, the shared consumption of these portrayals creates an opportunity

(at least) for critical perspectives on current local or national circumstances (143).9 What is more, telenovelas contribute to a gradual transformation of television into a representational space whose overriding principles are the inclusion and proximity of the viewer. The driving force behind this transformation may generally be profit-based more than idealistic, but the result is nevertheless to break down and blur the divisions between !90 the world on the screen and the world around the screen. The pluralization of on-screen portrayals, even when clichéd or exploitative, has the basic advantage of supplying material to be contested or supplanted.

As some networks attempt to develop domestic programming that represents a broad segment of society and dialogues with present-day social realities, also significant is the arrival of programming that aspires to a more direct depiction of reality. This admittedly vague category could include, but is not limited to: reality television, singing and dancing competitions, talk shows, and news coverage. The extent to which these different types of programs accurately reflect particular individuals or groups is less important for the present discussion than the fact that they allow the audience to conceive of itself as a participant in the production of—and potentially the star of—a medium like television, instead of simply as a consumer. It is not uncommon for on-screen personalities to actually thank the viewer for letting them into his/her home; likewise, viewers of emotionally affecting programs, like telenovelas, may even refer to on-screen characters as if they had met personally, sharing feelings and experiences—sharing the intimacy of domestic time and space (van Tilburg 207-208). Clearly, domestic programming will usually realize this effect to a greater degree than imported programming, for reasons of cultural, spatial, and linguistic familiarity. Argentina has one of the highest rates of cable television subscription in Latin America, and has therefore been one of the largest markets for imported programs (Vialey, et al. 23). Brazil has historically had a lower rate of cable subscription, but its domestic media networks !91 have nonetheless been influenced by U.S. economic and aesthetic models. Today, however, both countries are home to some of the largest media conglomerates in Latin

America, producing and now exporting much of their own content as well (Matos 156).

If the stars of fictional programs can be imagined as friends whom the viewer sees regularly, then reality-based programming—on-air competitions, reality shows, live broadcasts—take “la retórica de lo directo” even further by finding more means for the audience to impact on-screen material. In some ways, opportunities for participation— such as voting on which contestants stay or leave the show, or having letters, phone messages, and tweets displayed on air—potentially empower the viewer and make mass- mediated content more democratic and responsive. Yet programs that most reflect the visceral and immediate desires of their audiences are frequently those most derided as shallow, exploitative, vulgar, and culturally simplified or standardized.

There is an undeniable tension between the homogenizing versus actualizing impact of the symbolic capital, information, and technological devices made available by mass-media industries. Value judgments are inevitable, but ultimately this inherent tension is the basis for a medium like television’s influence and relevance. Access to mass media can no longer be considered a luxury, but rather a basic necessity for participation in urban life. As Teresa Caldeira argues, the abundance of satellite dishes in even the most impoverished slums10 should be read not as poor residents’ irrational extravagance but as an indication that they recognize the informational/symbolic !92 importance of mass-media products and regular, instant access to them (70-71). Put another way:

Por más escandaloso que parezca, es ya un hecho que las mayorías en América Latina se incorporan a y se apropian de la modernidad no de la mano del libro, no siguiendo el proyecto ilustrado, sino desde los formatos y los géneros de las industrias culturales del audiovisual. (Martín-Barbero, Al sur 169)

This being the case, we must ask what consequences increased access to mass media as well as an increased sense of influence and ownership over mass-mediated content have for individual viewers. In particular, what consequences do they have for individuals who desire fame or feel oppressed by anonymity?

Stars We Can Be?

Two types of programs stand out for their emphasis on audience incorporation: 1) talk shows showcasing non-celebrities and 2) reality shows centered around daily life.

Networks, production companies, and hosts still dictate a fair amount of structure and content, but these types of programs have made non-celebrities indispensable elements of the show, either by putting them in front of the camera or by letting the audience’s opinions (often in the form of votes) determine the show’s outcome. In the case of talk shows, the premise is for “real people” to present and/or resolve a specific problem within the context of a live taping. Beatriz Sarlo suggests that this function—offering

“un espacio de reclamos y, también, de reparaciones simbólicas”—may be appealing in large part because the show presents itself as capable of addressing issues immediately and directly even when established political and legal structures cannot or will not !93

(Escenas 84). The popularity of this type of program derives not from a show’s ability to deal meaningfully with the concerns and conflicts of participants (who are drawn from the general audience, often speak before a live audience, and speak to the audience at home). Rather, its popularity stems from the perpetual promise of recognition. The audience’s familiarity with the host, by way of contact that cultivates a sense of intimacy and regularity, also fashions the talk show into a space where the viewer trusts that s/he could be seen and heard.

“Reality television” is a large, unwieldy category. However, many reality shows and talk shows are similar in that they spotlight non-celebrities. Of particular relevance here are the array of shows that present previously anonymous (i.e. not famous) individuals brought together to live in front of cameras, with Brazilian and Argentine versions of Big Brother / Gran Hermano being obvious examples. These programs, along with reality competitions, frequently rely on audience feedback and voting to decide un-predetermined outcomes—the audience’s impact thus extends beyond the traditional standard of viewership ratings. Both types of shows, by providing a view of non-fiction (even if not wholly authentic) life, form part of a broader trend observed by

Micael Herschmann and Carlos Alberto Messeder Pereira: an intense production and consumption of biographical material whose scope extends well beyond traditional subjects and formats (“Vida” 41-42).11

Two matrices—sometimes complementary, other times competing—make up the biographical: the assemblage of small, quotidian activities that can seem inconsequential !94 in the moment, and the large, narrative arcs that ideally organize and validate the accumulated experiences of day-to-day life. The impulse to comprehend society and individual life within linear narratives of development—wherein the future builds upon the past and surpasses it—is, according to Matei Calinescu, the fundamental characteristic of modernity (13). Regardless of how one defines the late- or post-modern period in which we find ourselves, writers like Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric

Jameson have identified a crucial breakdown in the dogma of modernity-as-progress.

This shift in thinking has led to a fragmentation and de-temporalization of group— especially national—identity narratives (Lyotard 1467-1468). It is worth considering to what degree a similar shift has or has not occurred on the personal level. That is to say, the idea of individual life as a clear arc, in which a person develops a cohesive, communicable identity, may prove to be more entrenched than the idea that societies develop along clear arcs. For the individual, unrecognition represents a failure or renunciation of coherent biographical narrative.

Seeking narrative frameworks on an individual level may be an instinctive response to the “schizophrenic” experience of the perpetual present—to use Jameson’s terminology—that distinguishes postmodernity. The increased variety and accessibility of media technologies in the last couple of decades has opened a seemingly contradictory possibility, as Herschmann and Messeder Pereira observe:

Embora, de modo geral, a mídia seja encarada como um conjunto de dispositivos tecnológicos e comunicacionais que acentuariam a sensação de desnorteamento dos indivíduos, poder-se-ia indagar se a mesma mídia, enquanto principal espaço de produção e veiculação das narrativas biográficas e da memória, não permitiria aos seus !95

usuários construir, ludicamente, um chão mais firme para suas vidas tão freneticamente transformadas. (“Vida” 46-47)

Thus consumers of biography-infused media, from highbrow literature to reality television, can make use of it to orient their individual experiences and to construct their own narratives. This type of activity does not necessarily resolve (or need to resolve) one’s sense of transience or fragmentation, but it does represent an approach to navigating these experiences. It is pragmatic pastiche, in the face of the sensorial and informational bombardment of contemporary, urban existence. Such functionality could partially explain the popularity of supposedly trashy or frivolous material. It may also offer insight into the apparently arbitrary rise and fall of individual stars and programs.

Big Brother is a particularly apt example, here and in many cases, because of its ubiquity and its simple, ostensibly insubstantial nature. Fernando Andacht, in studying audience reception of the Brazilian and Argentine manifestations of the show, argues that

“index appeal”—the quantity of quotidian activity in the Big Brother house—is their primary attraction. Aware that participants may purposely play up certain characteristics or behaviors for the camera, most viewers watch with a degree of skepticism. Yet nearly all agree that the omnipresence of cameras ensures that, sooner or later, interactions will occur that have not been contrived by the performers or producers (127). Viewing, therefore, becomes a conscious attempt to glimpse spontaneous or “authentic” behavior.

The format also authorizes viewers to contemplate everyday life, identify for themselves what is respectable or true, and vote to determine the eventual winner. In both regions, outbursts of anger or sorrow are usually viewed as genuine (although subject to !96 manipulation in the editing/production process), whereas sexual and romantic behavior tends to be dismissed as fabricated or exaggerated (130). Notably, Andacht finds that in

Brazil and the Río de la Plata region, the behavior that audiences praised most consistently is the ability to “ficar na dele/dela,” thus apparently resisting the pressure to perform or meddle more than one would off-camera (131).

There are evident contradictions here: 1) those contestants who project normalcy and an aversion to attention-seeking are those mostly likely to gain popularity, remain on the show longest, and become celebrities; 2) to privilege contestants who seem to stay true to themselves requires that they be surrounded by contestants who do not. In a general sense, relatability and shared values are central to the appeal of many traditional mass-media stars. Perhaps, however, the allure of Big Brother’s indexical nature is not only to discover moments of “truth” or “reality,” as Andacht asserts. Performance, after all, is not limited to the screen—everyday life is a mixture of conscious performance and spontaneous reaction. To describe a specific contestant as the most authentic is to describe him/her as the most biographically consistent within the observed period of his/ her life. Apart from supplying material, as Herschmann and Messeder Pereira point out, through which viewers can continually (re)contextualize their own lives, a program like

Big Brother displays both the difficulty and the possibility of preserving biographical stability within an environment that can be tense and chaotic while still being mundane.

In many ways, contemporary life off-screen is not so different. From this perspective, the contestants who offer the most hope are those who seem most biographically cohesive. !97

The presentation of a cohesive image, moreover, is in line with demands that fans—as in

Cortázar’s “Queremos tanto a Glenda”—have often placed on traditional stars. To what extent fame actually permits or corresponds to biographical cohesion will be examined later in this chapter.

How then does contemporary consumption of the biographical (in whatever form) differ, other than in its pace, from the distant emulation of styles, values, and narratives projected by the earliest film stars? First, imitation and appropriation of the star’s image

(not the star himself/herself), combined with greater proximity and more direct contact, leads toward an inevitable perceptive shift, a hanging question: why not me? Second, the gradual reduction of the star’s aura—from film to television—is interwoven with the explosion of technological innovation, production and sale that enables the audience to put itself on display.12 Walter Benjamin, while praising the immediate sociopolitical impact of film, hoped that there would be a continued expansion of “the human being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced” (1063). In a strange way, reality television and, above all, online platforms (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) represent a resurgence of non-professional self-reproduction, though clearly in different circumstances and with a different set of values than the experimental, early Soviet film that Benjamin admired.

There is an implicit need within the claim to have one’s image (and voice) reproduced: the desire to be seen and heard. Efforts toward the democratization of information and communications technology have not guaranteed for the individual the !98 means of self-reproduction, as access is still determined by the availability and affordability of products as well as local and national infrastructure. The internet, since it is not dominated by major media networks the way that television is (by Rede Globo in

Brazil and by Grupo Clarín and CEI-Telefónica in Argentina),13 may be a more promising medium for the non-celebrity to be seen or heard, and also to experiment with different social personas. In addition to offering many new platforms for constructing a public image, the internet has also spawned the phenomenon of “going viral,” in which anonymous individuals gain overnight fame and recognition through the rapid circulation of a piece of content (an image, a video, etc.). Traditional media outlets, like television news programs, increasingly find themselves inclined or obliged to give attention to this insurgent content. With the enormous growth in recent decades of all forms of media, public visibility and recognition have never seemed so within reach. Products of mass media (like a blockbuster film or network television program) and products that might be called “individual media” (like a cell-phone video or personal blog) certainly do not occupy the same space in relation to their potential audience and/or market. Yet the division between the two has inarguably shrunk and blurred.

Alejandro López’s La asesina de Lady Di, set in 1990s Argentina, captures mass- media audiences’ further evolving sense of proximity and entitlement in relation to celebrity (and celebrities). The protagonist, like Lispector’s Macabéa, travels from a small town to the metropolis. But López’s main character, Esperanza, is not wowed by modern media, nor does she view stars as occupying some vague, unapproachable realm. !99

In fact, she moves to Buenos Aires with the stated purpose of meeting Puerto Rican pop idol Ricky Martin and having his baby. Critics have frequently compared Lopez’s novel to works by Puig. However, while Puig’s characters demonstrate an emerging sense of comfort and ownership in relation to mass-mediated cultural archives, López’s characters demonstrate an emerging sense of comfort and ownership in relation to the actors and apparatuses producing such archives. Esperanza worships Ricky Martin and obsessively seeks out the mechanisms through which his image and voice are internationally publicized—fan clubs, magazines, posters, CDs, concerts, music videos, and television appearances. But face-to-face contact is within reach as well. Esperanza recounts how two years earlier she met Ricky Martin in her hometown, when he visited “incógnito para la apertura de los carnavales” (111). He did not go unrecognized, but Esperanza does not feel that meeting him again, in Buenos Aires after his fame has skyrocketed, would be an unreasonable expectation. And, in fact, she does manage to obtain his cell phone number and sneak into a press conference to ask him if he remembers her. Her relative anonymity is not a definitive impediment to contact with celebrities nor to the reproduction of her image.

Before traveling to Buenos Aires, Esperanza has already appeared in the local news twice and in national print and television stories after a gas explosion destroys her house and kills her sister and father. Her media presence corresponds to tragic events for which she may or may not ultimately be responsible, but she finds public acknowledgment of any kind to be deeply satisfying: “Aprendí de chiquita que, para !100 pedir, lo mejor es la tele” (45); “Verme en esa foto en el diario al día siguiente fue mi mejor regalo de cumpleaños” (109). In Buenos Aires, she appears in the media both purposely (as an extra in a telenovela) and against her wishes (in a weight-loss advertisement in Clarín magazine). Although she still remains fairly anonymous and

Ricky Martin fails to remember her at the press conference, Esperanza is undaunted in her pursuit of media exposure and a romantic relationship with Ricky. Significantly, she not only rejects the distance between her stratum of public recognition and his; she also rejects Ricky Martin’s prerogative, as a star, to treat her merely as part of an anonymous audience.

Nevertheless, Esperanza fantasizes about a form of public recognition that straddles the line between fandom and stardom: “sólo yo quería encargarme de su imagen y nadie más lo iba a tocar. Y todo el mundo preguntando quién soy, muertos de envidia” (125). Eventually, in desperation, she decides that infamy—gained by killing

Princess Diana and perhaps Ricky Martin—may be the next best thing. When Esperanza discovers an apparent ability to telepathically hurt people, including celebrities, her willingness to do so differs from the fan club’s in “Queremos tanto a Glenda” in that she harms celebrities for the benefit of her own public image as much as theirs. In O anônimo célebre, we will see a protagonist who views any action as justified if it will deliver him out of anonymity, and who engages with mass media in pursuit of a fame that will be fully his own. !101

If fame is indeed more obtainable than ever before (a suggestion that I will interrogate more later on), it is nonetheless difficult to say whether more people actually want fame than did in previous eras, or whether there is simply more occasion now to actively chase it. Regardless, the emergence of mass media, and with it an associated framework of stardom, tends to provoke harsher criticism than more traditional manifestations of fame (like that of great statesman or masters of fine art). García

Canclini, for instance, is able to make the following statement, confident that it will be read as an expression of disillusionment and even disgust: “Todo pasa tan rápido que para miles de jóvenes de clase media y media baja el modelo de triunfo social es ser un ex big brother.” As he proceeds to argue, there are undoubtedly profound consequences associated with the new frames of reference engendered by media technologies: “Si quieres vivir en el hiperpresente, no te quedará tiempo para la memoria ni para la utopía" (Diferentes 175). This is a valid concern, and if reaching the status of reality- show-participant engages with preoccupations of the past or future, then it would appear to do so predominantly at an individual level. Nevertheless, is such a desire limited to young people, and is it truly as unambitious as García Canclini’s implicit criticism makes it out to be?

We have already considered various reasons Latin American viewers may watch

Big Brother, and it is fair to assume that not every viewer wants to be a contestant. That being said, the industry of reality television depends on a continuous supply of previously unrecognized objects (contestants) for the audience to contemplate. If “thousands” (if not !102 millions) of Latin Americans truly do watch, vote on, and yearn to be on a show that essentially consists of a group of previously anonymous strangers simply living on camera, the appeal cannot be an activity otherwise foreclosed to them, apart from the very act of being on camera. To become a reality-show contestant represents not so much a disregard for past and future as a response to the precariousness of the present. Many critics associate the perceptive dissolution of past and future with the intense mediation of thoughts and experiences. However, we should question whether conceptions of past and future have diminished and slipped away, or whether they have been drawn toward the “hyperpresent” and absorbed into it. This shift prioritizes one’s relationship with the present, but does not necessarily assure or stabilize it. To feel comfortable expressing oneself within new technologies and mass-mediated culture does not mitigate the possible breakdown or negation of identity. As we will see, the desire for mass-media celebrity stems from a belief that fame affirms the scope and value of one’s social existence.

The Demand for Recognition and Recognition’s Demands

Fame is unstable and tends to be produced by a combination of effort and chance, realized within available mass-mediated forms. Yet the attribution of fame is self- reinforcing. While large-scale, public recognition is not consistently predictable, an individual’s fame justifies itself at the moment of its attainment: once one has reached the status of celebrity, there is an assumption that an element of uniqueness, whether praised !103 or condemned, warrants celebrity. Likewise, those who do everything in their power to become famous may have their paths to celebrity disparaged, but the mere fact of their having “made it” implies the possession of some unusual characteristic. It may be more productive to understand the appeal of appearing on a program like Big Brother within this logic. This type of reality show lays out a clear path to progress from anonymity to fame—that is, to progress from precarious recognition to the more concrete recognition that comes with the audience’s consumption of one’s name, face, and/or voice on a massive scale. The portion of the reality television industry that features previously anonymous individuals is sustained by the fundamental paradox of mass-media recognition: anyone can become famous, but everyone cannot become famous.

Andacht’s study of the Argentine and Brazilian versions of Big Brother reveals viewers’ preference for contestants who did not resort to unnatural or exaggerated behavior in order to earn the audience’s attention. Yet individuals who did not want mass-media recognition would not volunteer to be contestants in the first place.

Ultimately, it should not be surprising that the expression of “authenticity” and biographical cohesion would be the characteristics that reality television audiences most often reward. The former reaffirms the notion of democratized access to celebrity by equating normalcy and uniqueness. Both traits correspond to the enduring myth of fame

—to have the expression of one’s self reified through public attention and adoration. As

Braudy asserts: “To be famous for yourself, for what you are without talent or premeditation, means you have come into your rightful inheritance” (7). Could achieving !104 fame on Big Brother—where one is asked to do nothing but live as oneself—not be conceived as a swift and potent realization of idealized celebrity? I have already posited that we cannot limit to a particular segment of society the desire to appear on reality show and the like. But what is at stake for different participants will vary. In addition to

Sarlo’s observation that many programs, especially talk shows, can function as a space of enunciation (if not resolution) for people who feel neglected by official civic and juridical structures for addressing conflicts, Herschmann and Messeder Pereira argue that:

em países como o [Brasil], marcados pela desigualdade e pela exclusão social […] o anonimato é interpretado pelas camadas menos privilegiadas da população como um ato de violência, mais uma comprovação de sua falta de cidadania. Sua participação, portanto, em programas de auditório, reality shows e similares […] deve ser vista também dentro dessa perspectiva, isto é, como uma forma de compensação, uma chance, ainda que limitada, de serem protagonistas temporários do filme-vida. (“Isso” 60)

Those who realize a certain level of public recognition can employ it (for as long as they can preserve it) as social currency. As Roberto DaMatta has famously argued, in

Brazilian society the question “Sabe com quem está falando?!” functions as a demand that others recognize one’s relative social value (and implied superiority). The increasing predominance of mass media has engendered a number of celebrities whose recognition will rarely (if ever) be in doubt. If absolute anonymity would be never having the social capital to ask, “Sabe com quem está falando?!”, the ultimate manifestation of what

DaMatta calls “personhood” (i.e. distance from anonymity) would be never needing to ask it.14 !105

Mass media—especially talk shows, reality shows, and the internet—are public spaces. As already discussed, access to media has not become universal but it continues to become pluralized. In metropolises, like those where the texts I am analyzing take place, the traditional public spaces of plazas and boulevards no longer provide a stage for recognition like they did in the first half of the twentieth century. Both Sarlo (“Cultural”

45-49) and Caldeira (309-335) have remarked on the “losangelization” of physical urban space in cities like Buenos Aires and São Paulo. This trend consists of privatizing public spaces, dividing them, and fortifying new sub-sections against intrusion from other segments of society. Even where crowds still form, interactions tend to be much more wary and hostile. The threat of violence or robbery makes calling attention to oneself more dangerous, therefore overriding even the urge, which has long been central to urban life, to assert one’s uniqueness and avoid being wholly subsumed by the crowd (Simmel,

“The Metropolis” 336-338). Mass media do not reproduce the same interactions as occurred in cities of the past, and very little mediated content garners universal attention.

Nevertheless, websites and television shows traverse physical distances and boundaries that bodies cannot. The street, after all, has never been wholly open and democratic either. But now the individual who seeks recognition must frame this endeavor within mediated spaces as much (if not more than) physical spaces.

Finally, before beginning my analysis of Brandão’s O anônimo célebre, I would like to specify some of the key questions to consider. We have seen the evolution, over the course of the last century, of the ability and the right that audiences feel they possess !106 to interact with mass-media stars. This development has gone hand-in-hand with greater access to the technologies that produce media personalities and narratives, as well as changes these technologies have wrought on audiences’ frames of reference. During the last fifty years, numerous Argentine and Brazilian literary works, of which I have highlighted only a few, have depicted this change at various moments in its progression.

This is not to say, of course, that it has been perfectly linear or definitive. Yet O anônimo célebre, whose protagonist aggressively and systematically pursues mass-media fame

(always staying “plugado”), serves as a valuable interrogation of that goal in the period since talk shows, reality shows and the internet became major cultural factors alongside more traditional film and television.

The proximity and ubiquity of the star and the opportunity to draw parallels between his/her narrative and one’s own have the potential to mitigate or aggravate the feeling of anonymity. On the one hand, the opportunity to put oneself in front of a camera or microphone has never been greater, which endows an increasing number of people with the willingness and capacity to express themselves and garner public recognition. On the other hand, with respect to the potential to emerge from anonymity, a profusion of mediated images and voices may ultimately prove just as overwhelming as the street could be at the turn of the twentieth century. What, then, are the limits and the demands of reaching celebrity, and what are the limits and demands of maintaining it?

Fame may be more widely available, but for how many and at what cost? In what ways might utilizing various media—to display and call attention to one’s name or face— !107 function to stabilize or destabilize (auto)biographical narratives? Is contemporary fame, ultimately, a viable solution to the condition of undesired anonymity or unrecognition?

O anônimo célebre: The (Im)possibilities of Fame

The idea of fashioning a public persona is not new, yet the protagonist of O anônimo célebre undertakes this project in a thoroughly contemporary manner.

Specifically, he dedicates himself to the creation of a mass-media image—a celebrity identity—whose recognition will affirm and confirm his social significance. In the following section I will examine the way in which the protagonist presents unrecognition as a form of torturous non-existence, escape from which demands unceasing exertion. At the other extreme, the protagonist imagines an idealized concept of fame—affirming and satisfying in and of itself. Success, not only in expressing a specific identity but also in having that identity publicly recognized, is what allows him to feel he exists at all.

Significantly, he does not view fame as produced by any exceptional talent or achievement. Instead, celebrity status is exceptionality: it is self-justifying and an end in itself. Moreover, because the protagonist gives fame this inherent and absolute value, any means of achieving, maintaining and expanding it becomes permissible and valid.

It is possible to read O anônimo célebre in line with Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer’s general critique of mass culture in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as

Mass Deception.” However, I believe the novel can be read in a different and more fruitful way that does not simply condemn mass media and celebrity as morally, !108 intellectually, and aesthetically impoverished. As discussed previously, the desire for public recognition is socially meaningful and not rare. Although mass culture contributes to the forms this desire now takes, it is not a modern phenomenon. The actual and potential uses of mass-media technologies are vast, diverse, and certainly not limited to the realization of public recognition. But as fame’s principle contemporary mode, mass media are central to gaining this type of recognition.

I read Brandão’s novel as an exploration of the practical possibility of mass- media fame: how and if an individual could achieve fame in twenty-first-century Brazil, when technological and cultural development seem to have made fame more accessible than ever before. Hence it is also an exploration of fame’s potential to resolve the dilemma of unrecognition. If we examine the protagonist’s desire for fame on his terms, then it is not frivolity but rather a desperate grasp at recognition and existential significance. This reading does not treat the world of celebrities as mindless or pointless, and it does not treat the desire to be famous as silly or superficial. The novel does not depict the protagonist’s project as ultimately failing for moral, intellectual, or aesthetic reasons, nor because fame would not satisfy him. It fails because even the most devoted and rigorous pursuit of mass-media celebrity cannot guarantee its realization. The novel obliges us to question, therefore, the functional value of fame as a solution to anonymity.

This is still not an optimistic reading (because the novel remains deeply pessimistic), but it allows us to better comprehend the attraction of celebrity recognition and its limits. !109

Brandão's protagonist demonstrates an impressive ability and desire to engage with mass media in order to gain visibility and fame. He is clearly a student of media and celebrity. The two challenges he continually encounters—to formulate an identity that will garner attention, and then to maintain whatever celebrity status he achieves— eventually prove overwhelming. In spite of his engagement with all manner of media, and his willingness to sacrifice every resource and relationship (possibly even his own life), large-scale public recognition proves elusive. It is true that some individuals will manage to develop this type of recognition by making use of increasingly available media technologies. However, Brandão’s novel serves to expose the contemporary myth of achievable fame as means of creating a coherent public identity, and as a solution to the conflict of anonymity.

A Stranger in the Home

The novel is divided into two main sections. The first is a fragmentary mixture of diary, self-help guide, research project, and record of a third-rate actor’s attempt to achieve celebrity in early twenty-first century Brazil. This first-person portion constantly reiterates the severe dichotomy between the ecstasy of celebrity existence and the torment of anonymous non-existence. The protagonist himself, a lesser-known film and television actor, often appears to speak and write from a kind of existential limbo between those two extremes. A social position between absolute anonymity and celebrity would seem perfectly normal—acceptable, even if not ideal. It is notable, therefore, that !110 the protagonist rejects this in-between status, framing it as a condemnation essentially equal to that of absolute anonymity. While his efforts indicate that he feels he can realize a famous identity, he does not give himself an alternative. This all-or-nothing mindset in regard to celebrity is central to the tragedy of O anônimo célebre.

The second portion of the novel is significantly shorter and consists of a number of scenes, narrated in the third-person, focusing on what will be done with the body and belongings of the now deceased protagonist. The central “twist” of the second section is to reveal that the majority of the first section—the fame project—apparently took place in the imagination of the protagonist. His actor’s dressing room, which features prominently in the first section, turns out to be a secluded room in a mental institution. O anônimo célebre creates significant ambiguity regarding how much of the protagonist’s first-person narration is sincere, exaggerated, or invented. But what ultimately concerns us most here are the motivations and methods that the protagonist identifies in his attempts to escape anonymity.

Although the protagonist’s voice dominates the varied entries that comprise the first part of the novel, there is another voice that intrudes on the protagonist’s project and on his psyche: Letícia. Letters from this ex-lover to the protagonist are interspersed with pieces of diary, self-help guide and research related to fame. The tone of intimate recognition expressed in these letters and in the protagonist’s remembrances of Letícia contrasts with the public recognition that the protagonist is frustrated not to have achieved: “Todas as células de meu corpo tomadas, transformadas em Letícia, !111 dependendo dela, vivendo por ela. Uma pessoa é a outra. A outra, uma” (183).

Nevertheless, the protagonist never gives himself over fully to this relationship, a fact that Letícia blames on his apparent inability to relinquish control of his emotions, his image, and the situations in which he puts himself. This drives him to confine himself physically (in his dressing room / institutional quarters) and also to increasingly invest himself in a kind of recognition that he feels he can more fully command: fame.

We do not know to what extent the protagonist’s mental illness caused or stemmed from the loss of Letícia. However, he perceives this loss in terms of his own failure to construct a satisfying identity. On the one hand, he claims that Letícia wanted him to become a new man: “Talvez tivesse idealizado um homem […] e procurou me moldar a essa imagem” (94). On the other hand, he hypothesizes later that he was unable to satisfy Letícia’s demand that he confront some essential notion of who he is (302).

The protagonist, though clearly unable to comprehend or become the person that he believes Letícia desires, does view their relationship as a (missed) opportunity to forge a new identity: “Eu te amei para tentar me salvar, pelo prazer, paixão, tentativa de ser outro. Se soubessem o isolamento em que me encontro” (36).15

The text offers few clues about the specific identity the protagonist needed to leave behind, but there are mentions of previous relationships—he claims to have an ex- wife and a son—and jobs, of which he lists dozens: “Cozinheiro. Marinheiro. Boxeador violento. Ferramenteiro […]” (186). As with many details in the first part of the novel, the second part suggests that they may have been at least partially fabricated. The !112 protagonist seems to conflate or proliferate women in particular according to the needs of his narrative. The three who appear most frequently have markedly similar names:

Letícia, Lavínia and Lenira. Regardless of what aspects of Letícia the protagonist remembers or invents, ambivalence is not necessarily uncommon in a romantic relationship. At times the mystery that each represents for the other is exciting; at other times it is disconcerting. Yet what is unusual in this case is the protagonist’s conviction that he has no stable, underlying character to share with another individual. What is more, Letícia’s presence, because he cannot fully control or determine it, threatens the rigorously constructed celebrity image that he intends to create.

The protagonist’s affection for Letícia haunts him throughout the narrative, and remains an unresolved remnant of his attempts at intimate recognition. However, Letícia herself observes his increasing obsession with celebrity and public recognition. She complains that he reminds her of “um não lugar”16—specifically, the non-place of his dressing room, where he presumably formulates the characters he plays as an actor as well as his celebrity identity. Moreover, while the intimacy contained in his letters and memories of Letícia is often explicitly sexual, the protagonist employs an erotic vocabulary to describe the experience of fame, elevating it beyond even his bond with

Letícia:

Nenhuma sensação na vida pode superar o instante em que se descobre, se é informado, se percebe, que o país inteiro (por que não o mundo?) está de olho em você. Todos pensando numa só pessoa, no célebre que ocupa mente e desejos, invocações e invejas, paixões e repúdios. Se esse momento me acontecer, será o orgasmo máximo, múltiplo, final. Viver depois será doloroso. Desnecessário (21). !113

Contact between a star and his or her audience has often manifested itself in ecstatic terms. Indeed, in La asesina de Lady Di, the protagonist Esperanza experiences an apparent orgasm at a Ricky Martin concert as the crowd surges toward the singer. In O anônimo célebre, however, the audience becomes the idealized lover with whom the protagonist yearns to connect. It is useful here to remember Leo Braudy’s description of fame as “the social version of a love that absolves the loved one of fault, restoring integrity and wholeness” (7). Significantly, for the protagonist celebrity recognition is also mainly theoretical, a dream. He can therefore preserve the hope that it will ultimately redeem his life, provided he can perfect his self-representation. The affection he receives from Letícia is not one he can control, and she demands he reveal himself to her with an authenticity he cannot or will not express: “[Letícia] sempre quis que eu fosse verdadeiro, quando o único eu que me interessa e me acomoda, é o falso. O que elaborei por anos, como um escultor […] Não concordo com o que definem como falso, fake.

Não!” (302-303).

Throughout the novel, the protagonist calls into question two notions of

“authenticity”: 1) the possession of a true identity; and 2) the capacity to communicate a true identity. The former he refutes time and again, questioning the value as well as the possibility of having a fundamental character. For this reason, he finds acting especially gratifying, since it allows him to embody a range of identities without having to commit to any single one. Although he claims that every actor has three lives—his real life, his character’s life, and his celebrity persona (77)—the protagonist time and again describes !114 his “real” life as too meager and hollow to register as an existence. The lives of his on- screen characters and his public life off-screen (on talk shows, websites or in magazines) feed into each other. This purely public identity, however, as a conscious creation, does not represent a parallel identity but rather the most true—an integrated whole for which pre-celebrity characteristics and experiences merely provide bits of raw material: “Nada saberão de mim. O que se vai saber será incoerente, contraditório, paradoxal, confuso, ininteligível, suspeitoso, inverossímil. E, no entanto, eu” (304).

Self-Invention

Many of the entries that make up the first part of O anônimo célebre appear in a larger font, in italics, or in a different font altogether. At times, these distinctions correspond to the emotional tone of the entry; at other times, they correspond to a particular type of content. The fact that Letícia’s letters appear in italics, with her name signed at the end, suggests their physical reality in the compilation of texts to which the protagonist struggles to give order. Nevertheless, they do not represent an on-going correspondence. Many were clearly written during the beginning of their relationship, and the protagonist notes that on the rare occasions when he now receives letters from

Letícia, they do not respond to the questions in his letters. He doubts, in fact, that his letters ever leave the “studio” (possibly, in truth, the mental health clinic) where he has taken up residence (137). The protagonist has almost entirely eliminated physical contact with Letícia, but we see that even their apparent epistolary contact has broken down. In !115

“Self Writing,” Michel Foucault emphasizes the historical value of correspondence as a means of “manifesting oneself to oneself and to others” whose immediacy and physicality in many ways approximate face-to-face interaction (216). The protagonist of

O anônimo célebre, in essence, has gradually ceased to invest himself in (or hope for) one-on-one recognition with another individual. The mode of self-writing and self- presentation to which he shifts his efforts is explicitly public and mediated through modern, audiovisual technologies.

The “text” that the protagonist composes—compiled, ostensibly, within the first part of the novel—shares a number of characteristics with the Greco-Roman hupomnemata that Foucault describes in “Self Writing.” Specifically, like the hupomnemata, his work is a diverse assemblage of quotes, observations, best practices, and a documentation of public statements and activities, upon which the protagonist labors and calls in order to define his place within a social (celebrity) sphere. In contrast to the hupomnemata, however, the protagonist’s work also contains the type of introspection and emotional revelation that characterized later Christian literature (“Self

Writing” 210). His eventual wish that he could purge his work of Letícia’s presence, as well as various personal confessions, reiterates his discomfort with this latter, intimate form of self-writing. Yet the most important contrast between the hupomnemata and the protagonist’s composition is their temporal purpose: instead of constructing this work in order to understand what he is and has been, the protagonist does so to project what he intends to be. It is, in this sense, also an act of overwriting that the protagonist !116 undertakes. Despite his efforts, he is not able to fully erase remnants of his past so that he may compose future, public identities on a clean slate. Thus he offers to the public abundant and contradictory information about himself in order to obscure previous markers of any particular identity. In the second part of the novel, when staff from the mental health clinic sift through the protagonist’s belongings, they find tremendous collections of papers and notebooks, all illegible: “ele escrevia sempre em cima da mesma linha. Ou quando aquele computador velho […] ainda funcionava, ele imprimia sempre em cima da mesma página. São montes de papel preto” (338). In other words, his attempt to overwrite the story of his life was both figurative and literal.

Because of the disparate, and ultimately unfinished, nature of the protagonist’s self-(over)writing, his work is not an autobiography in a strict, classical sense.17 He does not worry that the fictionalization and variability of his self-narration will put off his audience because he is not concerned with accuracy or sincerity. The protagonist also understands that these may no longer even be aspects that audiences demand from biographical material. If audiences choose to treat a biographical text as material to be played with, recycled and reimagined, according the demands of their own individual projects of self-narration, then the value of a biography lies in its richness more than its sincerity. This is the approach that critics like Herschmann and Messeder Pereira have recently put forward, arguing that such an approach may motivate the prodigious consumption of biographical material in present-day Brazil (“Vida” 47-48). The protagonist of O anônimo célebre does not empower nor ask the audience to accept his !117 account as factual or sincere. If recognition itself is the goal of his project, then confounding his audience is more productive than establishing historical veracity.

All autobiographies are a mixture of (un)consciously selective fact and fiction.

While the traditional approach may elevate the former and attempt to avoid the latter, the protagonist of O anônimo célebre inverts this paradigm. In this way, celebrities like those the protagonist admires function less as models for how to live than as models for how to construct one’s image. For this reason the protagonist only once offers an

“instante fugaz de sinceridade” (269), emphasizing instead the composition of narratives he feels are most compelling: “Penso em um passado obscuro, com pistas fugazes que indiquem um homem contraditório […], com ligações desonestas, espúrias (o que excita o público)” (132). In addition to presenting his past in this way, he plans future actions that will fit the intriguing and mysterious persona he is constructing. The protagonist’s life does not produce his self-narration so much as the demands of his self-narration produce the life that he relates—an idea that Paul de Man argues may actually underlie most autobiographical projects (69).

The protagonist’s self-narration is clearly performative and based on a belief that public recognition of this performance will reify the identity he projects outward. Diana

Klinger has proposed a reading of “auto-ficção” applicable to this type of endeavor:

A auto-ficção participa da criação do mito do escritor, uma figura que se situa no interstício entre a ‘mentira’ e a ‘confissão’. A noção do relato como criação da subjetividade, a partir de uma manifesta ambivalência a respeito de uma verdade prévia ao texto, permite pensar […] a auto-ficção como uma performance do autor. (51, author’s emphasis) !118

We should indicate a distinction in terms of meta-textuality: Klinger’s study focuses on works by real-life authors whose use of auto-ficção blurs the boundaries of the novelistic space. Brandão’s protagonist is, strictly speaking, a fictional character whose auto-ficção is realized within the novel. That being said, Klinger’s idea still applies well to the protagonist’s view of his own project. He feels that he can only express himself adequately from a position of auto-ficção, wherein invented characteristics and experiences are no less meaningful than those that are genuine.

There is, seemingly, a contradiction between the usefulness of displaying an enigmatic and inconsistent image to the public and the acceptance and wholeness that the myth of fame promises. The protagonist does not imagine his ideal end state as fragmentary or unstable. He believes he is “comp[ondo] o homem moderno […] com as qualidades plenas exigidas neste ano de 2002. Uma biografia sem distorções” (300).

According to the protagonist’s view, narrative cohesion does not demand narrative consistency, though this tension is constant throughout the novel. Public recognition will

(theoretically) provide him with the firm ground of social presence and significance. The sometimes disparate or incongruous material that composes the protagonist’s self- narrative will be held together, in principle, by his name, similar to Foucault's “author- function.” In Look at Me!: The Fame Motive from Childhood to Death, Orville G. Brim notes that, in contemporary society, name-recognition is still the first and most fundamental requirement for fame. Although face- or voice-recognition are increasingly potent within the audiovisual media landscape that now predominates, if the public does !119 not associate an individual’s name with his or her famous face/voice, then that individual’s recognition will be unmoored and hollow (106-115). Brandão’s protagonist is acutely aware of this dynamic and anguishes over being labeled in magazine photos as a star’s friend, as “desconhecido,” or merely as “X” (102-103).

In trying to parse the fundamental components of a famous identity, the protagonist does consider the possibilities of physical reengineering:

Colocando esses (nossos) rostos no computador e extraindo os elementos fundamentais, seremos capazes de, pela mutação genética ou cirugia plástica, transformar em famoso um homem qualquer apanhado por amostragem na multidão? (45)

It is curious, however, that during the process of building his celebrity persona, the protagonist’s name is one of the most unstable aspects of his identity. As an actor, he is accustomed to having names of characters he plays associated with his physical face and body. Yet he also considers dropping the “de” from his surname—this is the closest we, the readers, come to discovering his off-screen name. Additionally, the protagonist claims that like his professional rival—“o Ator Principal” (“AP”)—he has cycled through a range of professional pseudonyms.

Early in the novel he develops a plan, ultimately never executed, to kill the “Ator

Principal” and replace him, since their faces are so similar that the protagonist is often confused for him. When pondering the nominative implications, he remarks: “Anular- me. Porque seria AP e AP passaria a ser eu. O nome? O que importa? O nome dele é falso, artístico, nomes nada significam” (238). Because anonymity is the overriding fear and motivation for his project, names are not functionally meaningless for the !120 protagonist. He manifests his bitterness toward the “Ator Principal,” for example, by refusing to refer him by name. It is the authenticity of a name—the issue of whether one uses an adopted name—that does not matter. A pseudonym, of course, entails not a lack of name, but an obscuring of one’s previous name(s). In this case, although the protagonist does resist consideration of his past, the use of a pseudonym is very much aspirational as well. In the second part of the novel, the staff of the mental health clinic debate what name they should put on his tombstone. It turns out that the protagonist gave such a profusion of different names that no one knows what his given name might have been. In the end, the fact that he is buried in an unmarked grave is another testament to his project’s eventual failure.

Over the course of the novel’s first section, we slowly discover that the protagonist’s composition—the mixture of diary, guide, and research-project that we are ostensibly reading—is, in fact, unwritten. That is, it is unwritten in the literal sense because the protagonist has created it solely in his mind: “Esta minha vida vocês não poderão ler. O conjunto finalizado, pronto, editado, está em meus pensamentos.

[… A]prendi a pensar com perfeição, a construir seqüências, deixá-las congeladas em compartimentos especiais da memória” (296). Hoping that in the future scientists will have the technology to extract his “autobiografia pensada,” the protagonist does not simply overwrite the textual, material account of his pursuit of celebrity—he believes he can overwrite his own memory of this experience. He also hopes that the transmission of pure thought may free him from the limitations of linguistic communication, but this !121 merely leads him to put his faith in the cinematic (audiovisual) mode—another form of representation. The gesture of overwriting himself is clearly in opposition to any traditional conception of life as a progression or as chronologically meaningful.

Additionally, because he works with thoughts and memories (both lived and invented), whose significance in the mind is not determined by a set structure, the protagonist conceives of his “autobiografia pensada” as taking place at random and all at once. In this sense, it operates very much within a postmodern notion of a perpetual present. His intention, however, is to resolve the chaotic nature of thoughts—an impossibility that prevents him from ever feeling that his self-narration is fully ready to be transmitted.

Without a doubt, the general principle behind the protagonist’s self-narration is not unusual. Every individual (certainly every autobiographer) consciously and unconsciously gives order to the characteristics and experiences that they feel define them. This takes place in the mind as well as in the social act of expressing some notion of oneself. The protagonist’s case is notable for his extreme attempt to entirely overwrite his identity as well as his rigorous efforts to make public and manipulate his image through the use of contemporary media. Despite the fact that the novel does not clarify which incursions into the public sphere were “real” versus “imaginary,” the methods the protagonist uses are worth examining as avenues that could present themselves to an individual trying to become famous. !122

Staying “Sempre Plugado”

In La asesina de Lady Di, Esperanza imagines life as Ricky Martin’s wife as a means to escape an unsatisfying and socially limited life (as well as the memories of that life). She also demonstrates an understanding of the central role mass media must play in her becoming famous. Previously we saw that Esperanza appeared in media at various times: in a local newspaper at the time of her birth; in national news after a gas explosion killed her father and sister; in an advertisement for a weight loss clinic in Buenos Aires; and as an extra in a telenovela. When she discovers a destructive power that allows her to apparently bring about the death of Princess Diana (and Ricky Martin, if he were to refuse her), she decides that infamy may be an acceptable alternative to the public recognition she initially envisioned. Significantly, of all these media representations, only the weight loss advertisement upsets her because it shows her as physically unappealing. But the act of making herself an object of public interest and desire is, from her point of view, fundamentally amoral.

Like the protagonist of O anônimo célebre, Esperanza eagerly dedicates herself to studying and imitating popular styles and mannerisms that she sees on television and in magazines. She even keeps a “cuaderno Éxito”18 in order to track and organize the process of creating a famous identity. That being said, in comparison to Brandão’s protagonist, Esperanza’s efforts to make a name for herself are still relatively unrefined.

On the bus to Buenos Aires, for example, she carves her name into the back of a seat as a minor act of insurance against anonymity: “si yo explotaba o me veía envuelta en una !123 nueva tragedia, mi nombre iba a quedar ahí para siempre” (21). The protagonist of O anônimo célebre, meanwhile, is firmly ensconced in the twenty-first century and dedicates himself to developing recognition across every platform available: print, film, television, and the internet. It goes without saying that mass media are central to fame in contemporary society. But if one conceives of public recognition, as the protagonist does, as the basis of existence itself, then mass media also becomes fundamental to one’s existence. Proclaims the protagonist: “Está claro que sem mídia nada sou. Nada somos.

Nada serei. Não permanecerei, e nenhum de vocês, meus telespectadores […] saberá como vivi” (19).

Inasmuch as mediated technologies allow one’s public image to be separated from one’s immediate spatial and temporal presence, they can offer the illusion of greater control over that image. The protagonist views his status as fluid—his actions continually reposition him within a hierarchy of celebrity. Anonymity is not just a state, but can be the result of an action—“anonimizar”—whose occurrence he must resist. In

The Media and Modernity, John B. Thompson describes an inevitable tension in mediated self-narration:

While the availability of media products serves to enrich and accentuate the reflexive organization of the self, at the same time it renders this reflexive organization increasingly dependent on systems over which the individual has relatively little control. (214)

The protagonist’s response to this dilemma is to embrace this media dependency and, by studying it, gain some mastery of it from within. He frequently declares that he has no inherent talent or uniqueness that would attract attention without great effort on his part. !124

Thus his strategy is to stay “sempre plugado” so that he can remain not only visible but culturally relevant at every moment: “A mídia molderá minha alma, meus gestos, minhas palavras, meus pensamentos e atitudes. Basta estudá-la e formar o Manual que deve ser reciclado continuamente” (91). His manual, similar to Esperanza’s “cuaderno Éxito,” functions as both a guide and record of his fame project. Many of the entries composing the first part of the novel represent the protagonist’s ongoing study.

Celebrity is, in many ways, a form of social capital, in the Bourdieuian sense and especially in the sense that possessing it requires continual (re)investment in the social relationships underpinning it (Bourdieu 249-251). Celebrity value is not based on the exchange of objects or services so much as the transmission and reception of information.

Brandão’s protagonist often appears obsessed with acquiring fashionable products or knowledge, but he wants them purely for their symbolic value when displayed through mass media. Radio, television, and the internet have elevated audiovisual information— speakers and screens—to a central component of everyday life. Modern media technologies can be dialogical, and even a form like television can incorporate that aspect, as in certain talk shows or reality shows that rely on audience participation.

However, as Thompson observes, although media consumption can still be fruitful in the process of formulating individual identity narratives, it often does not involve dialogue

(246). Back-and-forth communication is not the primary measure of significance within the sphere of mediated culture. As the protagonist of O anônimo célebre perceives, attention is the currency of mass media. This is not to say that modern media oppose !125 dialogue. But as the number of voices competing for attention increases, mere attention

—basic recognition—becomes more difficult to attain. Within this context, the protagonist does not treat recognition as a prerequisite for dialogue or understanding—he elevates it to an end goal.

In The Ecstasy of Communication, Jean Baudrillard argues that the division between private and public space has gradually been dissolved into a “double obscenity” by the expansion of media technologies. The public is made ever-present in the private space by way of screens (televisions, and now computers); these apparatuses, in turn, encourage the private to be endlessly exposed and projected out into the public space

(25-26). Access to the intimate lives of celebrities, as discussed in the first part of this chapter, has often been a central component in the creation and maintenance of stardom

(even if this intimacy is manufactured). With this in mind, Brandão’s protagonist seeks to publicize the most personal—quotidian, corporeal, sexual—aspects of his life. As a guest on a talk show episode dedicated to sex in Brazil, the protagonist marvels at the public’s demand to see intimate activity exposed:

nem a Casa dos Artistas nem o Big Brother conseguiram tal audiência… as pessoas querem a intimidade… querem entrar nas casas… querem ver os famosos cagando… trepando… depilando… comendo… vomitando… estamos vivendo em um tempo bonito… de liberdade… nada mais se esconde… tudo é permitido… (114)

Clearly, talk shows and reality shows, by reproducing the sense of proximity—of participation in actual lives taking place—are formats that have catalyzed this trend. On the one hand, the protagonist is delighted by the audience’s insatiable curiosity toward the !126 banal. For an individual with no notable talent, a willingness to offer the most extreme access to his home and body—as when he auctions off a used condom—can garner recognition. This is not to say that the public-ation of his private life, as when he spends twenty-four hours with a fan, is spontaneous or authentic. This performance is, he argues, more essential to his celebrity identity than any work he does on screen. There is a voyeuristic character to this exchange that can seem perverse. Yet underlying the consumption of any biographical material is the desire for private thoughts or actions to be revealed. In the increasingly crowded and chaotic spheres of mass media and the city, one individual’s self-narration (even the most vulgar or mundane) can serve to frame or inspire another’s. The protagonist hopes, therefore, that his self-narration can be a means of gaining recognition rather than being a precondition of recognition.

Absolute exposure is a state to which the protagonist aspires, but as we have seen, the emotional bond he once shared with Letícia was ultimately incompatible with his celebrity persona: “Rompi as regras ao revelar certas dores e angústias. De acordo com o tempo e as exigências da época. Não fosse Letícia. Ela interferiu, sendo real” (301). His inability to either incorporate her or purge her from his auto-ficção is primarily why her memory torments him. There is a distinct contrast, moreover, between the sexual intimacy expressed in Letícia’s letters and the cold, sexualized exhibitionism that the protagonist offers to the public. The latter is simulation, performance purely to justify having an audience. The protagonist acknowledges that the identity he exposes is one he has largely fabricated for that purpose. He acknowledges as well that this is not easily !127 accomplished: “Têm os ensimesmados, os retraídos, os tímidos, destinados, portanto, ao fracasso. O único ensimesmado que funciona sou eu, fiz um tipo, montei um personagem” (57).

The protagonist’s ideal celebrity persona would be “famous for being famous.”

The logic of this concept is curious although generally accepted and understood: there is no unique ability, characteristic or achievement back to which the individual’s fame can be traced. With respect to this idea of recognition without uniqueness, the concept of the medalhão, created by Machado de Assis and utilized by Roberto DaMatta, is a useful reference point. As explained in the introduction to this dissertation, DaMatta’s essay

“Sabe com quem está falando?!” maps an informal social hierarchy framing many interactions in Brazilian society. According to the sociologist, most Brazilians look to develop special privileges or status so as to become pessoas and rise above the general, democratic, but anonymous status of indivíduo. A select few will achieve the status of superpessoa or medalhão.

The term medalhão originally comes from the short story “Teoria do medalhão” by Machado de Assis, which describes a father’s instructions to his son on how to occupy the most elite strata of Brazilian society. The status of medalhão, according to the father, does not require the ability to offer novel ideas or transformational actions; it is simply a matter of leveraging social norms and expectations. Machado’s medalhão is not equivalent to modern celebrity status, but it does introduce the argument that an elite position in Brazilian society can be achieved without accomplishment or originality. In a !128 similar vein, Mario de Andrade, in his canonical modernist novel Macunaíma, elaborated the idea of the “herói sem nenhum caráter,” which plays on the double meaning of

“character”: identity traits and moral/ethical values. Although Brandão’s protagonist does not represent the ethnic and cultural ambiguity of Macunaíma, he does re-elicit the question of what, if anything, the Brazilian hero/star represents for the public that consumes him. This concern also highlights just how much contemporary fame differs from its early associations with great civic accomplishment and spiritual transcendence, as described by Leo Braudy.

On the surface, it would seem that to be “famous for being famous” would be self-sustaining—for the unscrupulous protagonist, a nirvana of perpetual recognition.

The problem he discovers, however, is the enormous effort required to stay in the public eye. This worry is at the heart of O anônimo célebre: even if the protagonist is willing to study media and celebrity, and sacrifice every resource and relationship toward achieving fame, it may not promise an escape from unrecognition. This is not because fame does not provide a form of recognition, but rather because the social capital of fame is too elusive and ephemeral to effectively resolve the anguish of anonymity. We have seen how the democratization of media technology, in addition to the evolving notion of celebrity, laid the foundation for anonymous audiences to feel that fame could be available to them. Brandão’s protagonist puts this possibility to the test, disregarding any limitations on how he is perceived, so long as he is perceived: “É agradável ser visto, !129 reconhecido, é a mola mestra de minha vida. Ser amado e odiado, porque há os que me detestam, me odeiam, os que gostariam de cuspir em mim” (13).

Over time, the protagonist discovers that his ability to provoke love, hate, fascination, or disgust cannot match his willingness and desire to do so. He looks to hire a secretary, an agent, a press agent, a business manager, a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a psychologist, an autograph signer, a letter responder, a nutritionist, an endocrinologist, an accountant, a columnist, drivers, bodyguards, bike messengers, a life coach, and consultants on hair, makeup, culture, terminology, tribes, images, style, art, speech, patronage, merchandising, hats, and cuisine (121-125). Additionally, he attempts to hire writers to produce false stories about him so that his media presence extends even beyond all the actual activity his staff enables him to do. Because no single characteristic or activity can guarantee him prolonged recognition, he must constantly tend to his celebrity image. Eventually he confesses the overwhelming pressure this puts him under:

“Ficando impossível, as coisas ultrapassam a velocidade do som […] Quanto tempo devo dispender por dia-semana-mês-ano-década para aprender, assimilar tudo, sabendo que a duração é efêmera?” (257). Regardless of how rigorously his identity conforms to the trends of any given moment, he can never escape his dependence on an inherently changeable audience.

There are ways in which the protagonist describes his circumstances as specifically Brazilian. Living in São Paulo, South America’s largest city, he points out the globalized nature of celebrity culture that exists there. At the same time, he repeats !130 the stereotypical characterization of Brazil as always slightly behind the United States and Europe, technologically and culturally. Brandão’s protagonist is obviously not a hero in any traditional sense, but what is absent from his descriptions of Brazil reflects the author’s underlying criticism, as well as the author’s explicitly satirical depiction of the titular fame-seeker. In particular, the protagonist confesses a willful ignorance about the years of military dictatorship, whose repressiveness is a theme in Brandão’s most famous novel, Zero (1974). According to the protagonist: “Acontecem festas como nunca, a propósito de tudo. Lembram os anos 50, cheios de clamour. Nas décadas de 60 e 70, parece que o Brasil foi rico e confuso, cheio de atropelos e obras. Não gosto de ler sobre esse tempo, me deprimo” (65). This approach to the past is not dissimilar to his treatment of his own past. Meanwhile, his descriptions of present-day Brazil contain some of his darkest and most cynical views regarding the possibilities of becoming famous. When in a car, he rolls up the windows to avoid seeing São Paulo, which he describes as “uma boca cheia de cáries” (109). In another moment, he compares the complex intrigue of his fight to gain public recognition to the fight for survival he sees playing out on São

Paulo’s streets. While such a juxtaposition highlights the protagonist’s general lack of concern regarding crime and violence in the city, from his point of view recognition represents survival—a question of existence versus oblivion. Questions of physical survival and suffering are secondary.

Certainly, the protagonist’s indifference to a range of social issues in his country, and indeed the novel as a whole, can be read as a broad condemnation of celebrity value !131 systems. But the protagonist was not born into fame, nor did he stumble into it. When anonymity itself is experienced as a form of violence and oppression, to pursue fame single-mindedly is not irrational. We should recall here Herschmann and Messeder

Pereira’s argument that in societies of profound socioeconomic inequality, like Brazil, even “trashy” forms of mediated fame (reality shows and the like) should be understood as one of the few opportunities available to the public at large to feel like the main character of a narrative (“Isso” 60). Herschmann and Messeder Pereira also observe that

Brazil’s celebrity culture has reached a level of size and competitiveness that entering this sphere—gaining recognition—requires creating ever more dramatic spectacle (“Isso” 59).

This is not because paths to fame are insuperably exclusive, as they may have been in previous eras, but rather because the gradual pluralization of media technologies and content has made these paths ever more crowded. This concern is also reflected in the novel. The protagonist must consider participating in basic reality shows like Big

Brother, yet also in more extreme programs, like the fictional Você Vai Ter de Me Engolir

Brasil in which thousands of people compete for the opportunity to eat human feces and become “o cara mais famoso do país por muito tempo” (292). Like Esperanza in La asesina de Lady Di, the protagonist concludes that fame and infamy can be equally rewarding when measured according to the attention they draw. Eating feces, however, is not the most drastic action the protagonist contemplates in his pursuit of celebrity. !132

The Ultimate Price

The two acts that the protagonist considers most promising in terms of gaining prolonged fame are the “Ator Principal’s” death and his own. The “Ator Principal” features in the protagonist’s life as a professional rival as well as an apparent threat to the protagonist’s existence (recognition). Due to the strong resemblance between the two men, the protagonist constantly finds himself passed over for on-screen roles in favor of his more famous doppelgänger. Other times, he must suffer the indignity of standing in for the “Ator Principal,” knowing that the audience is unlikely to notice the difference.

When the protagonist’s agent suggests that they might be able to arrange the death of the

“Ator Principal,” the protagonist begins thinking about how he might manage it and fantasizing about the potential it holds for him. Specifically, the protagonist intends to abandon whatever previous identities he has had in order to adopt the name and celebrity standing of the “Ator Principal.” The dynamic between the two is reminiscent of classic literary doubles in that the protagonist, like that of Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” feels he must destroy his double to preserve his own social existence. The “Ator

Principal,” whose real name—Marcos Meira—turns out to be similarly alliterative, impedes the protagonist’s quest for fame by (unintentionally) appropriating whatever recognition might be tied to the protagonist’s face. The protagonist refers to him, therefore, as an “imitação” and “usurpador,” and points out that the “Ator Principal” was actually born eight months after him (70). Nevertheless, as the “Ator Principal” achieved !133 celebrity recognition before the protagonist, the latter is doomed to forever seem like the duplicate.

The decision with which he presents himself is to continue living and working as an indistinguishable double, or eliminate the “Ator Principal” and claim that identity, that site of recognition: “[Enquanto está] vivo, nunca serei ele, portanto, nunca serei eu” (141). If he carries out his plan, he must accept living the remainder of his life in the identity of another—an idea that, on the surface, seems fraught, when one considers the energy he has devoted to crafting his celebrity identity. This sacrifice troubles him, but he feels it is worth the public recognition he would acquire: “O que me angustia é pensar que sendo ele, continuarei anônimo, deixarei de existir. O que me importa? Serei, sairei

às ruas, célebre. E ele se tornará o anônimo” (209). To understand how the anonymity of using someone else’s identity would be preferable to the anonymity of simply having one’s own identity be unknown, we should remember that unrecognition—for the protagonist and perhaps generally—is not a state so much as an ongoing experience.

Time and again the protagonist describes anonymity in these terms. Consequently, to be able to walk the streets and receive recognition is appealing, even if that recognition is not directed at an identity engendered by the protagonist himself.

Near the end of the first section, the “Ator Principal” finally dies and the protagonist’s composition becomes increasingly confused and contradictory, leaving the reader in doubt as to whether the protagonist killed his rival or not. In either case, he appears to have misplayed the opportunity to replace the “Ator Principal.” The !134 protagonist’s own death follows shortly after but also remains mysterious, although his obsession takes on a desperate tone that hints at his ultimate failure to gain the recognition he so desired. Violence towards others was something the protagonist felt could be necessary to achieving celebrity, and he documented this strategy in his

“Caderno de Crueldades.” But violence towards himself is justified as well. In an entry entitled “O Enigma da Televisão Brasileira” the protagonist comes up with a variety of titillating and shocking ways that he could die. His ideal death would be mysterious and unexplained because it would guarantee prolonged public interest and speculation: “Ser o enigma do século. Essa é a minha glória. Se eu tivesse essa certeza, não me incomodaria de estar morto” (141). This declaration harkens back to an earlier entry in which the protagonist explains the value of dying young. The examples he cites—from James Dean to Che Guevara to Ana Cristina César—support his theory that dying prematurely and dramatically can have a powerful effect on one’s legacy. Leo Braudy points out, moreover, the “close relation fame has always had to both death and transfiguration” (589). For the protagonist, death offers the hope (but in truth, not the promise) that the self-narration he has been forging will transcend the cycle of public recognition over which he can never gain full control. The fact that he fantasizes about death as a grand method of gaining recognition highlights how exhausting and never- ending is the struggle to be recognized. It also highlights how the urge to be recognized and to exist in the public consciousness can be greater even than the urge to live and exist as a physical being. !135

Although the second section of the novel provides certain insights into the protagonist’s approach to his imagined identity, in many ways it is superfluous to the novel’s central theme: one’s desire for fame and the ability to engage with its underlying apparatus does not guarantee that one can achieve it. The novel suggests, therefore, that despite its ostensible attainability in the twenty-first century, fame is problematic—if not doomed—as a solution to anonymity. As the protagonist’s plans to replace the “Ator

Principal” and perfect his self-(re)creation unravel, we see him approaching insanity, death, or both. It becomes clear that his efforts to escape anonymity and gain public recognition have essentially failed. Brandão’s decision to reframe this narrative within a mental institution—where patients are treated by a staff that often does not know or does not care what patients’ names are—only serves to make the protagonist doubly- anonymous within the narrative. But the protagonist himself has already put forth the dynamic in which his life should be perceived: famous or anonymous, existent or nonexistent. In other words, any life that is not one of celebrity is as tragic and hopeless as any other. When he compares unrecognition to a lethal injection or laments, “Estou morrendo. De normalidade” (274), this is the illness and death—not the corporeal illness and death of the novel’s second section—that troubles the protagonist and that he is ultimately unable to overcome. The suggestion that mental-health institutions

(re)produce anonymity is valid, and Foucault and others have examined the nature of such places. Yet the protagonist’s particular situation is not strictly regulated, and ultimately it is not the institution that prevents him from becoming a celebrity. It is the !136 nature of contemporary fame—its promise of recognition and its specious accessibility— that the protagonist cannot master.

Rescuing the Anonymous

For the most part the protagonist’s fame project is profoundly individualistic and consciously selfish. One aspect, therefore, stands out as uniquely empathetic: his interest in rescuing other individuals from anonymity. The protagonist not only documents his own methods for gaining and maintaining the public’s attention, he often frames his techniques as suggestions for others to adopt. While these entries concern themselves with addressing unrecognition in the present (for the protagonist) and in the future (for those who will one day consume his work), another set of entries concerns the anonymous of the past. The entries entitled “Resgatando anônimos,” of which there are sixteen, relate the stories of various individuals who found themselves participants in significant moments of history, yet have been all but excluded from records and memories. These include: Franz Kafka’s nurse, Janet Leigh’s body-double in Psycho, a soldier who was kind to Graciliano Ramos while the author was imprisoned, and a middle-aged woman in a movie theater with whom the protagonist shared one of his first sexual experiences. Thus, although the protagonist’s condition is one of dramatic isolation—a feeling of invisibility, of utter unrecognition—it is not merely his own anonymity that concerns him: “Tarefa difícil. Resgatá-los para a luz, cancelando sua dor e seu sofrimento” (67). !137

The collection of media-related best practices as well as the efforts to expand the spotlight of history emerge from his understanding of anonymity as a shared condition— perhaps even a community. His community of the anonymous, however, is not an affirmative one. Here it is a community of the condemned, similar in some ways to a prison.19 In the community of the anonymous, assistance and empathy for one another serve not to preserve or strengthen the community as a whole, but rather to facilitate its undoing, so that each individual might eventually find an escape (and ideally never return). The protagonist does not perceive the contradiction in his seemingly admirable goal, however. Large-scale public recognition is a vague but limited resource; if many more individuals were to become famous, it would dilute and eventually dissolve the unique position they had supposedly gained. Even as the protagonist’s personal attempts to compose a self-narration that will create and keep an audience are frustrated, he refuses to question the need for public recognition—his own or anyone else’s. He refuses to imagine existence without recognition. !138

CHAPTER 3

Re-presenting Facelessness Cinematic Retellings of the Bus 174 Incident

On the afternoon of July 12, 2000, a twenty-one year old man named Sandro do

Nascimento boarded bus 174 in Rio de Janeiro, drew a 38-caliber revolver and attempted to seize control of the vehicle. The police, alerted to the hijacking by a number of passengers, forced the bus to stop in the neighborhood of Jardim Botânico. The hostage standoff that followed became the subject of intense national scrutiny, not merely after the fact, but in real time as the situation unfolded. As the personal history of the young man gradually emerged, he became a focal point for various overlapping debates about public safety, the Brazilian prison system, the availability of weapons and drugs, police training and brutality, and the overarching issues of racial and socioeconomic inequality.

What is more, these questions became framed in a unique (and uniquely contemporary) way due to the presence of television media during the hijacking and the impact its presence had on the behavior of the hijacker and the police, who ultimately killed Sandro after taking him into custody.

The media spectacle of the hijacking also inspired several cinematic attempts to explore possible causes and effects of the event. This chapter will consider various components of the bus 174 hijacking itself, however, the primary focus will be two films !139 depicting the day of the hijacking and the difficult life that Sandro led up to that point.

The first film, entitled simply Ônibus 174 (2002), is a documentary directed by José

Padilha,1 whose reliance on talking-head interviews—with witnesses, relatives, social scientists, and others—gives his documentary a generally conventional structure and feel.

That being said, the circumstances of the hijacking itself also provided him with the unique opportunity to incorporate real footage of the event, instead of resorting to indirect representations, such as oral retellings or dramatic recreations. The final product, in addition to fleshing out the social and personal contexts of Sandro’s actions, gives a significant amount of attention (including in the form of literal screen time) to the hijacking itself. This is notable, I will argue, because it allows Sandro and his actions to speak for themselves to an unusual degree for a subject who was not only marginalized during his life but also was deceased when the film was made.

The reception of Ônibus 174 upon its release was overwhelmingly positive, and the filmmakers showed it in major film festivals around the world, where it won a number of awards (“Bus 174”). They also showed it in many commercial theaters, which is uncommon for non-fiction Latin American films (Galindo 85). I will contrast the narrative choices of Padilha’s film with Bruno Barreto’s film: Última parada 174 (2008).

The latter is a semi-fictionalized retelling of Sandro’s life, the hijacking, and his death at the hands of the arresting officers. Barreto’s filmography includes a range of comedy, romance and action films in Portuguese as well as English. Última parada 174, despite being submitted as Brazil’s entry for “Best Foreign Language Film” at the Academy !140

Awards (“Last Stop 174”), has generated significantly less audience and critical attention.

Barreto’s film, like his earlier work O que é isso, companheiro?,2 presents a dramatized version of a widely-known event from contemporary Brazilian history. Although the expectations of accuracy and realism are different for a film “based on a true story,” as opposed to a documentary, the way in which Última parada 174 tells Sandro’s story reveals a fundamental problem of representation. Specifically, by choosing to frame

Sandro’s story within familiar narrative constructs, Barreto not only makes Sandro’s experiences easier for audiences to consume, but also easier to file away as yet another tragic tale that nevertheless contains a seed of hope and redemption. The primary tropes that Barreto employs are the coming-of-age story, doubles/brothers from different mothers, and the reuniting of a long-lost mother and son.

As a starting point for my analysis, I will draw on the application of the

Nietzschean dichotomy of tragic versus dramatic representation within contemporary

Brazilian culture, as proposed by Micael Herschmann and Carlos Alberto Messeder

Pereira (“O espetáculo”). In this dichotomy, the tragic is disruptive, chaotic, and largely defies reason, thus functioning as a limit and challenge to the dramatic and the latter’s ordering comprehensibility. Sandro’s anonymity—as a dark-skinned, orphaned menino de rua—emerged in many ways from socioeconomic and racial stratification of the

Brazilian urban space. Yet, the preponderance of modern media also brought recognition

(in the form of fame) temporarily within reach. The act of hijacking a bus—and especially his subsequent engagement with the crowds around him, as well as with the !141 cameras projecting him into millions of homes—briefly liberated him from anonymity.

His actions also arrested an array of social and institutional organizing forces, including televised news coverage, the police, and the flow of urban traffic. In Última parada 174, the impact of this “tragic”—irrational, disordering—spectacle undergoes the type of discursive transformation that Herschmann and Messeder Pereira have dubbed a “gestão dramática” (“O espetáculo” 29).

The real-life Sandro’s stage-taking eventually provokes a violent, literal silencing at the hands of the police; by suffocating him to death immediately after taking him into custody, the police prevent Sandro from ever clarifying or expanding on his words and actions that day. In Última parada 174, the hijacking is refashioned into a rational and less disruptive occurrence within conventional narrative frameworks. Thus Barreto's film carries out a symbolic silencing through the minimization and obfuscation of Sandro's brief moment of public recognition. Ônibus 174, I believe, emphasizes the tragic power of Sandro’s own words and actions during the hijacking—in this way, amplifying and concretizing Sandro’s impulsive, conflicted attempt to escape anonymity. In contrast,

Última parada 174 dedicates little attention to the hijacking itself, ultimately undermining further Sandro’s agency in the expression of an individual identity.

Ônibus 174: Can the Hijacker Speak?

After the bus 174 incident, research by José Padilha and others began to paint a clearer picture of the now (in)famous Sandro Rosa do Nascimento. In the DVD extras of !142 his documentary, Padilha explains that his primary motivation was to better understand who Sandro was and what might have driven him to hijack the bus. We now know that

Sandro’s mother was stabbed to death during an apparent robbery of her store in the neighborhood of São Gonçalo on the outskirts of Rio. Although Sandro’s aunt Julieta became his legal guardian, the traumatized Sandro fled the neighborhood not long after and, despite occasionally returning to Julieta’s house, lived primarily on the streets of Rio for over a decade. The two notable exceptions were time spent in juvenile detention centers when he was arrested for muggings and when an older woman, Elza da Silva

(Dona Elza), took him into her home and acted as a sort of surrogate mother. On the street and in prison, Sandro became a regular drug user and received virtually no formal education.

We will never know whether Sandro originally boarded bus 174 with the intention of hijacking it. Nevertheless, his statements and actions during the standoff with police do not suggest that he had any clear goal or exit-strategy. One of the interview subjects in Padilha’s documentary is a professed mugger who observes that Sandro’s supposed requests—R$1000 and a grenade—come nowhere near justifying the risk of an armed confrontation with police. Over the course of the five-hour standoff, Sandro himself, though agitated and erratic, seems to recognize that the most likely outcomes are a return to prison or death. This being the case, he transforms the bus from an impromptu bunker into an impromptu stage. !143

Instead of limiting his exposure to the world outside the bus, he increasingly shows his face (which he initially tried to cover with a towel) and speaks to the assembled police and media. As John B. Thompson observes in Media and Modernity:

“Since the development of print and especially the electronic media, struggles for recognition have increasingly become constituted as struggles for visibility within the non-localized space of mediated publicness” (247). Even if recognition—of his existence and the harsh experiences he had endured up to that point—was not the initial, conscious purpose of the hijacking, it becomes a goal he can potentially realize. In a sense, the existence of Padilha’s documentary is that goal’s most formal realization because it preserves and extends Sandro’s recognition beyond the moment of the hijacking, fleshing out his claims and giving his identity and experiences a greater degree of depth and cohesion. This is a thorny goal for any work to pursue, however. In The Course of

Recognition, Paul Ricoeur raises the primary issue behind how narratives attempt to stabilize and communicate identity:

In the test of confronting others, whether an individual or a collectivity, narrative identity reveals its fragility. […I]deologies of power undertake, all too successfully, unfortunately, to manipulate these fragile identities through symbolic mediations of action, and principally thanks to the resources for variation offered by the work of narrative configuration, given that it is always possible […] to narrate differently. These resources of reconfiguration then become resources for manipulation. (104)

In the specific case of Sandro, silence—the figurative and/or literal inability of the larger public to hear him—will be a central problem.

Despite the unlikelihood of a successful escape, Sandro appears to view surrender

(and a return to prison) as an unacceptable option. At various points, Sandro requested !144 that the police provide him with a driver, which would have allowed him to flee in the bus. The police demur and delay, eventually prompting Sandro to exit the bus on foot with one of the hostages, Geísa Firmo Gonçalves, under his arm. A member of the specialized BOPE police unit (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais) seizes the opportunity to shoot at Sandro, but ultimately misses (it was later revealed that his shot struck Geísa’s head). In the chaotic moments that followed, Sandro falls backward and shoots Geísa three times in the back, and the crowd rushes the scene chanting “mata!”

The police succeed in keeping Sandro out of the hands of the mob and force him into the back of a police van, where the officers trying to restrain him ultimately suffocate him to death. Geísa would also die at the scene.

In considering cinematic representations of Sandro and the hijacking, we should observe that both Padilha and Barreto are successful, mainstream film directors. Sandro do Nascimento was a poor, black, functionally illiterate “street kid,” who regularly used drugs (mostly sniffing glue and cocaine) and regularly suffered physical violence at the hands of police both in and out of prison. The disparity of Sandro’s socioeconomic conditions and the platforms available for him to speak in comparison to those of the directors, calls to mind Gayatri Spivak’s famous question: “can the subaltern speak?”

Undoubtedly, Sandro had been excluded from virtually all avenues of accepted, hegemonic discourse, which is partly why the purpose of the hijacking proved so baffling initially for the police and for much of the public watching on television. Jessé Souza has argued that: !145

In peripheral societies such as Brazil’s, precarious habitus—which implies the existence of invisible and objective networks that disqualify the precarious individuals and social groups as sub-producers and sub-citizens, and this, under the form of an unquestionable social evidence, both for the privileged as well as for the victims themselves of precariousness—is a mass phenomenon and justifies [the] thesis that what substantially differentiates [advanced and peripheral] societies is the social production of a ‘structural underclass’ in peripheral societies. (29)

Although Sandro belongs to just such a “structural underclass,” I believe his actions and words during the hijacking constitute an expression that can be heard/read, including through its use of disruptive violence. With that said, the central question of this chapter is how—and how effectively—each film director enables the larger public to be

(re)confronted with Sandro’s own call for recognition and narrative identity. To be anonymous often goes hand-in-hand with an inability to be seen and/or heard insomuch as modes of identification—one’s face, actions, voice, or words—are disconnected from one’s name. While the question of (in)visibility is vital for understanding mediated recognition and the bus 174 incident specifically, becoming visible is not equivalent to escaping anonymity or being recognized. Recognition involves a conscious engagement from the Other with one’s self-identification or self-narration. Achieving visibility, in other words, can be the first step in achieving recognition. However, the social value of one’s presence is reified by successfully eliciting a conscious response to one’s identification. For Sandro, escaping anonymity meant being seen and heard in a way that would impel the people surrounding the bus and watching him on television to eventually learn his name and his history. !146

Approach

Both the formal and the discursive character of Ônibus 174 are based on approximation. While beginning a film set in Rio de Janeiro with a scenic wide shot from a helicopter is hardly novel, the opening sequence of Ônibus 174 begins all the way out in the ocean. As ominous string music plays, the camera swoops over a rocky beach and then over the many favela-covered hills of the metropolis. We hear snippets of anecdotes from various youths describing domestic violence, poverty, emotional issues, and other troubles they have endured trying to survive on the streets. While we do not see faces, it is significant that the first voice that we hear in the film is that of a 19 year- old woman who gives her name, Luciana, thus establishing her particularity even if her story is not uncommon. As other (unidentified) individuals describe daily life on the streets, the single-cut aerial shot gradually moves into more central, planned areas and closer to street level until we can see cars and buses traversing the wealthier southern zone of the city where the hijacking would take place. Lorraine Leu, in her analysis of

Ônibus 174, points out that the totalizing and legible nature of these initial helicopter shots also set the stage for the film’s deconstruction of a disruptive, irrational event (177).

Finally, we hear static from a police radio and the voice of Captain Batista, the police negotiator, describing how he was called to Jardim Botânico and was one of the first to arrive to where bus 174 had been detained. After a brief shot of his face as he speaks, we see the bus itself on the day of the hijacking, as a voiceover explains that the first televised images from the event were taken from traffic helicopters. In other words, !147 after Padilha’s cinematic helicopter shot takes us over Rio’s streets from high above, we jump to a traffic helicopter shot that takes us close to the bus, although still seen from above and unremarkable except for the single police vehicle and two military police officers beside it. Yet as the film progresses, an overarching goal becomes to move closer and penetrate the interior space of the bus, visually and conceptually, to understand the social dynamics of the event. A few minutes later, after learning about Sandro’s mother’s death and his introduction to life on the streets from a social worker and another street kid who had been friends of his, the documentary jumps back to news footage from the hijacking and gives us the first glimpse of Sandro through a partially open window, his face covered by a towel taken from a hostage’s bag.

The film’s structure frequently proceeds in this way: giving the audience background into the life of Sandro or other marginalized youths, followed by more (and closer) footage of the hijacking. On the one hand, this strategy has a didactic function inasmuch as it allows our perception of Sandro to evolve and become more nuanced each time we see his face again. On the other hand, Padilha doles out the spectacle—the violent action of the hijacking—in pieces. This maintains the audience’s hunger for more, while potentially allowing the audience to reflect on the problematic nature of that hunger in the context of an event whose cinematic drama threatens to obscure brutal, real circumstances. In “Bus 174 and Post-modern Documentary” Gloria Galindo highlights the strange effect within the film of Sandro’s now famous declaration to the cameras and police: “isto não é um filme de ação.” Despite the fact that Sandro said it before !148

Padilha’s film existed, Galindo characterizes this statement’s appearance within Ônibus

174 as a “self-reflexive reference of authentication […] as if the film were conscious of the ambiguity of its own aesthetic language” (85). In other words, whether inadvertent or purposeful, by including Sandro’s assertion, Padilha’s film inevitably appropriates it and adds another layer to the overlapping claims of authenticity and reality. Sandro’s original statement simultaneously acknowledges the cinematic aspect the hijacking has taken on, while at the same time refuting the consequence-free diversion of action films. When audiences hear the same statement in Ônibus 174, in a sense they are watching an action movie, but one that, in addition to addressing real events as a documentary, contains extensive footage of the actual event, giving it an unusual yet deceptive claim of verisimilitude.

In “Ônibus 174 - Imagens da humilhação social” Paulo Roberto Ramos argues that the documentary’s most basic, structural influence may actually be Orson Welles’

Citizen Kane (1941), specifically because of its use of testimonial flashback to piece together the blurry history of its protagonist, as well as its attribution to the camera of

“poderes sobre-humanos” (648). Ramos also cites the Cinema Novo film Terra em

Transe (1967) and the documentary Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (1999)3 as notable Brazilian films that have used aerial shots similar to Padilha’s in order to contrast the vibrant beauty of the city (including the favelas when seen at a distance) with social crises that become evident upon closer examination (647). However, a significant difference between those films and Padilha’s is the extreme contrast between wide, !149 sweeping shots of the city and the singular, interior space of one bus that becomes a nexus of conflict yet somewhere the audience can never fully enter or know. Ramos contends that Padilha’s choice to open the movie with visual distance and to make the first faces we see those of “intermediários” (a police negotiator and a reporter) reflects an overarching desire to symbolically give the camera the point of view of the more socioeconomically privileged sectors of Brazilian society, which are also likely to be a large segment of the film’s audience. Similarly:

uma das características desta classe [privilegiada] é que na maioria dos casos ela se relaciona com as classes pobres e com infratores, como Sandro Nascimento, através das janelas de seus automóveis ou por meio das telas do cinema e da televisão. (Ramos 644-645)

This may be true, yet I would argue that in many ways Ônibus 174 reproduces the experience of being a privileged spectator in order to unsettle and problematize it.

When Padilha’s film came out, in 2002, two years after the event, many Brazilian audiences would have already been familiar with a significant portion of the footage in the documentary because so much of it is taken from news footage that aired live during the hijacking. The film takes them back to the “scene of the crime” and intersperses its recreation with information and interviews that call into question the innocence of the bystanders, even those who watched at home on their sofas. The first time the audience saw the events of the hijacking unfold, they did not know who Sandro was, what he had experienced, or how his life would end. The second time through, the audience is obliged to contemplate their role in (re)producing Sandro’s anonymity and extreme social exclusion. They are obliged to ask what role their failure to acknowledge and value !150 individuals like Sandro may have played. In Ônibus 174, the hijacking’s tragic character

(in the Nietzschean sense) re-confronts viewers with the limits of their comprehension of

Sandro’s actions.

Names and Faces

Padilha interviews various friends that Sandro made while living on the streets of

Rio, a number of whom refer to him by the nickname “Mancha”—spot or blotch— because of a birthmark he had. While this name appears to have been applied affectionately (or at least not in a pejorative way) it does correspond to the life and identity that emerged from leaving his neighborhood and legal guardian (his aunt Julieta) after his mother was stabbed to death by three men robbing her shop. In other words, although this transition represented a physical move from his birthplace on the outskirts of Rio to the more centralized and prosperous southern zone, the transition to a life as

“Mancha” also corresponds to a more socially and economically precarious existence, which includes various arrests and time spent in juvenile detention facilities.

When police first arrive at the scene of the hijacking, no one yet knows anything of Sandro’s identity or history. Captain Batista, the police negotiator, notes that when he arrives he asks Sandro if he can refer to him as “Sérgio,” and he does so with Sandro’s consent for the duration of the standoff. As Batista explains: “Até aquele momento, não sabia, ninguém sabia quem era o Sandro.” There are, of course, two layers of anonymity in play. Like Sandro’s initial attempt to conceal his face with a towel, the negotiator !151 concedes to him the concealment of basic identity markers (name and face), which maintains the pretense of a possible escape without identification and capture. At the same time, the negotiator’s phrasing creates a revealing temporal paradox. No one knew yet that they were dealing with Sandro because until the dramatic, violent act of the hijacking, there was no Sandro—no one had any reason to see him, know his name, know his story. One could argue that the authorities might have had the best chance of knowing who Sandro was before the hijacking, as he had been in and out of the juvenile penitentiary system various times, and like most street children, was a victim of regular police violence. If the authorities have a self-interested motivation not to draw attention to the treatment of juveniles living on the streets and behind bars, the larger public was more passively ignorant of Sandro and others like him. In one of the most explicitly expository sequences of the film, Padilha juxtaposes an interview of the sociologist Luís

Eduardo with images of elementary and middle-school aged children doing acrobatics and juggling in the crosswalk of a busy street, then begging for money from drivers waiting for the light to change. Luís Eduardo argues:

A grande luta destes meninos é contra a invisibilidade. Não somos ninguém nem nada se alguém não nos olha, não reconhece nosso valor, não preza nossa existência, não diz a nós que nós temos algum valor, não devolve a nós a nossa imagem […] esses meninos estão famintos de existência social, famintos de reconhecimento.

During the same sequence we also see children in parks and plazas, covering their faces with their shirts, reenacting their facelessness in relation to most of the residents of the city they share. In snippets of interviews that follow, they attempt to affirm the legitimacy of their presence in public spaces like parks, plazas, and boardwalks, where !152 even those who try to earn money as street performers or selling food and jewelry are treated the same as those who attempt to swindle or steal. When one interview subject insists, “aqui não tem marginal,” it reveals the problematic complexity of a term which will be regularly applied to Sandro throughout the film. As Sarah J. Hautzinger explains:

In Brazil, the term marginal is commonly used in the newspapers’ sections on crime to mean ‘criminal.’ Marginalidade— marginality—is broader, including those who are marginalized from society, disallowed from participating in “normal” life, whether this means the formal economy, social respectability, or lawful citizenship. The ambiguity of the word prefigured endemic conflict, wherein poverty itself is frequently criminalized. (15) 4

That same youth who declares “aqui não tem marginal,” pushing back against his presumed criminality and socio-spatial exclusion, expresses a wish that society in general would stop ignoring and antagonizing street children, to see them instead with a different face (“outro rosto”). Ironically, Padilha has blurred out his interview subject’s face as well as those of most other street children who speak on camera. It is possible that for the initial sequence Padilha asked the children to cover their faces with their shirts to allude to their metaphorical facelessness. That being said, the fact that those he interviews individually have their faces blurred tells us that, although they want to draw attention to their situation, they were uncomfortable making their identities fully public and/or entrusting their image to the director. Mass media does offer the possibility of identitary affirmation, but to what extent an individual can control his/her representation is a complex concern.5

Without speculating too much about the subjects’ choice to have their faces blurred, it is likely that, despite a desire to have their presence recognized and !153 legitimized, attempting to make oneself visible—to the media, to the authorities—carries risk for them, be it of further stigmatization or more direct, physical violence. An unnamed, adult marginal who appears throughout the film in formal interview segments maintains his anonymity and unrecognizability by covering his face with a stocking and even pulling his sleeves over his hands. During his descriptions of life on the streets and in prison he recounts a range of crimes, including breaking out of jail and brutally murdering police officers in the favela. His desire to remain unidentifiable is understandable considering the severity of what he confesses to doing. In contrast, the other street kids, whose faces are blurred, contend that they are merely trying to survive and make a living legally and peacefully, only to be victimized by the police. The fact that they share a similar aversion to identification as a confessed murderer highlights their aversion to being lumped under the umbrella of marginalidade.

Personal risk is also the reason that Padilha preserves the anonymity of a BOPE officer who was deployed to the scene of the hijacking and gives a critical account of the tactics used there. Because his superiors denied him permission to speak on camera, the officer’s comments are filtered through voice-altering software and his face is covered by a black ski mask that conceals all but his eyes. These accommodations echo the broader tension between having one’s face seen, having one’s voice heard, and having one’s experiences given serious consideration. The BOPE officer’s ability to identify and express himself is formally restricted by the discursive authority exercised by the leaders of Rio’s police force. For Sandro and the other marginais, identification and expression !154 are threatened by informal discourses that categorize them as either socially invalid or irrelevant.

The effect that cameras and microphones had on how the hijacking unfolded became a point of emphasis in subsequent analyses of the bus 174 incident. When the media’s impact is discussed in the documentary, Padilha takes us to the tallest hills of

Rio, where cameras have typically been drawn first and foremost to the enormous statue of “Christ, the Redeemer” perched above the city. The severe dichotomies and contradictions that characterize the city beneath it—immediately visible in the juxtaposition of some of the most wealthy and most impoverished communities in the country ascending up Rio’s famously beautiful hills—imbue any image of the statue with similarly contradictory meanings. The hopeful promise of redemption implies the presence of error or sin. At the same time, an image of the statue can be read ironically, as a naive faith in the possibility of redemption or the easy categories of good and evil.

Padilha’s clever move, as a helicopter shot tracks over the hills where the statue resides, is to employ a voiceover about the power of media to draw our attention to the radio and television towers on adjacent hills. The mediated communication transmitted from those towers ultimately reflects the same irresolvable contradictions as the statue of Christ: they promise a connectivity and visibility that are real possibilities, yet that are also wholly insufficient for resolving the extreme invisibility, anonymity, and marginalization of millions of people below. !155

Early in the sequence of the hijacking, Sandro displays an antagonism toward the media and the possibility of being filmed. He even points his gun and fires through the windshield at a cameraman who approaches the front of the bus. As time passes, however, Sandro’s impulse seems to shift toward a desire for greater visibility. The hostage negotiator notes: “A violência dele estava associada diretamente à presença das câmeras. Ele sim estava preocupado ali em aparecer, representar a peça dele.” On a practical level, as the police, media, and hostages testify, the proximity of television cameras—permitted by the police’s inadequate attempts to maintain a perimeter around the bus—unintentionally prolonged the standoff. They also preserved Sandro’s life since the police were concerned with how executing Sandro with a sniper shot to the head would be received by the millions of Brazilians watching the event unfold live on television. On a discursive level, the organization of cameras around the bus expanded

Sandro’s audience exponentially beyond the police and small crowd gathered around the bus itself.

Lorraine Leu argues that Sandro, by taking on “the role of a fearsome bandido” before his audience, can “use the threat of violence to denounce the huge injustice that is his life” (186). Yet there is a fundamental identitary conflict in that act. The accounts of

Sandro’s friends and family, as well as those of the hostages on the bus, agree that Sandro had little inclination towards violence and displayed little stomach for it. If playing the role of a violent criminal allows him to speak, to relate part of his personal history, then the hijacking becomes simultaneously a concealment and a revelation. Only by playing a !156 role that is unnatural to him can he find an audience to communicate what he feels are true, essential elements of his life. Initially covering his face with a towel taken from a passenger (rather than using a mask or bandana, for example) hints at the spontaneous nature of his decision. Unsurprisingly, the towel does not function well as a mask, and

Sandro’s frequent attempts to shift it and secure it—at times to cover and other times to uncover his face—inadvertently capture his own struggle with exposure and its consequences.

The sociologist Luís Eduardo describes Sandro’s decision to pick up a gun and take hostages as mediating through violence in order to demand visibility, in essence trading his life for a moment of fame and “glory.” However, in addition to making himself visible, Sandro asks that attention and consideration be given to his existence and his experiences. He brings up various formative experiences in his life (like the death of his mother and his time in prison), which suggests a more complex engagement with the identification process. During the hijacking Sandro never gives his real name, yet he does begin emerging from anonymity by sketching out a rough narrative of his life that will be linked to the face that the public sees framed by the bus’s windows.

Such an extreme, confrontational demand for recognition is evidently risky for all sides. The hijacking was initially assumed (by the police, the media, and even the hostages) to be merely an armed robbery gone wrong. And initially it very well may have been. But it was also a burst of violence with little reason or planning, and apparently with only the vague goal of radically disrupting his life at that moment. The !157 hijacking thus created a “tragic” rupture in the quotidian life of Sandro as well as the city of Rio. In his extreme social marginalization, the only recourse Sandro could identify to quickly make himself recognized, to make himself matter, was to create circumstances that also ensured he would not survive that moment.

Performing Life and Death

As mentioned above, Sandro’s interaction with the police and media gradually transformed from one of hostility and evasion to one of confrontation and performance.

As Georg Simmel pointed out a century earlier, life in a metropolis inevitably creates a peculiar social dynamic which combines greater physical proximity with social and emotional distance (“The Metropolis” 334). This phenomenon is especially true on public transportation, where strangers regularly share a close (and enclosed) space while engaging in little or no social interaction and often even making a point of avoiding eye- contact with one another. In twenty-first century Rio de Janeiro, armed robberies have become an occasional aspect of public transportation. One of the hostages admits that when Sandro first held up the bus, she telephoned her boss to tell him that she would be a little late for her internship—she assumed that Sandro, like most muggers, would demand money from some of the passengers and flee within a matter of minutes. In other words, even outbursts of crime and violence are woven into the psyche of the commuter such that they can be dismissed or overlooked as minor inconveniences. Only when Sandro unexpectedly remains on the bus and deviates from the norm of brief, anonymous !158 interaction (including within the context of a robbery) do the passengers on the bus begin to perceive the unique identities and circumstances of each other and of Sandro.

In Insurgent Citizenship, James Holston elaborates various ways in which interactions between strangers in public spaces reflect and shape notions of rights and citizenship in Brazilian cities. Although these interactions are often banal, they have a profound impact on the ability of individuals to acquire basic services or to engage with state and market structures that regulate civil society. Such interactions can be occasions for the reassertion of unequal privileges and opportunities based on traits like socioeconomic standing or race; however, they can also be occasions for challenging inequality that excludes certain segments of the population (15-16). Clearly, hijacking a bus—violently occupying that particular public space—is more extreme than the petty crime which forms part of everyday urban life. Nevertheless, street kids like Sandro, as those interviewed in the film explain, have been systematically denied access—by the police, with the consent of the general public—to many public spaces and public interactions. Even as homeless youths are often driven by the police from busy streets and plazas, other public spaces have been privatized or abandoned, creating Brazilian cityscapes in which the spaces these children can occupy are more limited, more deteriorated, and less safe (Caldeira 3-4). Perhaps the most glaring and infamous example of the violent exclusion (and attempted eradication) of homeless youths is the massacre of eight sleeping children by the police in front of the Candelária Church in

1993. !159

Anticipating efforts to delegitimize his use of violence to occupy public space,

Sandro uses the stage of the bus to call attention to the police’s right to assert their presence through violence, referring numerous times to their “terrorzinhos”: “Vocês podem criar terror quando estão na condição. Também vocês fizeram aquilo lá em

Vigário. Não estiveram no Vigário? Não mataram os irmãozinhos na Candelária? Eu estava lá.” In addition to the massacre at Candelária, which he survived, Sandro references the massacre of twenty-one innocent people in the Vigário Geral favela, which a group of police entered hoping to avenge the deaths of four officers killed by drug traffickers. In other words, despite the discomfort with taking hostages at gunpoint that

Sandro sometimes displays, he achieves an inversion of power between police and marginal(ized) inhabitants of the city. He uses the opportunity to highlight the police’s prerogative to mediate through violence, regardless of how unwarranted or unjust their actions. This prerogative is frequently endorsed by a large segment of the civilian population, which views favela dwellers and street children with suspicion or disdain. As

(Tia) Yvonne Bezerra, a social worker and friend of Sandro’s, notes in the film, after the tragedy at Candelária: “uma rádio fez uma pesquisa na época, e a maioria achou que foi bem feito, que é isso mesmo, que tem que matar essa cambada toda e deixar a cidade livre.”

Although Sandro’s actions on the bus are admittedly criminal and endangered innocent lives, the things he shouts from the window complicate how we view the event because the hijacking becomes a form of spontaneous public protest against police !160 brutality, the prison system, and marginalization of poor and homeless members of society. Moreover, in order to hold the attention of the police and the assembled media,

Sandro must continually give the impression of being dangerous and unpredictable.

What the interview testimony of hostages and witnesses reveals is that while Sandro evidently was dangerous and unpredictable on some level, he enlisted the help of the hostages to play up that image. This strategy included having one of the hostages write on the windows in lipstick that he was crazy and that he would kill them at 6:00pm.

When we consider Padilha’s re-presentation of Sandro’s performance, we must consider how successfully he conveys the disruptive nature of the act. On the one hand,

Padilha does create moments that tempt the viewer into treating the bus 174 incident like a Hollywood-style action/suspense movie. But he also uses hard cuts to live news footage of the event, which jolt the viewer back to the raw complexity of Sandro’s speech. The clearest example of this occurs a quarter of the way through the documentary when Padilha plays fast-paced rock music over a montage of police and media bustling around the scene—the music and cuts are slick and lively, sucking the viewer into the drama of wondering what will happen next. When the music abruptly stops, we are looking directly at Sandro with a hostage under his arm, a gun to her head, as he sticks his face out the window and begins shouting:

Não quero saber desses terrorzinhos de polícia. Aqui é sério mesmo. Isto vai ficar sério mesmo. Pode olhar para minha cara, marcar minha cara. É um crime mesmo, é sério.[…] Pode filmar para todo o Brasil olhar. Isto vai piorar. Há quinze anos, arrancaram a cabeça da minha mãe. Não tenho nada a perder. Isto vai aquecer.[…] Isso aqui não é filme de ação. Isto é sério, meu irmão. !161

Sandro’s speech is unplanned, expressed in a moment of extreme anxiety and possibly under the influence of drugs. Yet in a way, its density and scope give it more power because understanding it requires unpacking many different elements.

The most basic function of the statement, “isto aqui não é filme de ação” is to imply that the situation has real consequences and may at any moment deviate from the script of a classic cops-and-robbers standoff. It is as if Sandro anticipates the desire of the police to impose a conventional cinematic narrative on the situation—one that would frame the state-sanctioned authorities (the police) as heroes whose exercise of lethal force is justified. As Captain Pimentel, a retired training officer explains in the film, the average Brazilian military police officer is poorly trained and conceives of his primary responsibility as “prender marginal, matar marginal.”

In the long quote from Sandro above, we see a challenge to the police’s use of excessive force as well as a reference to the traumatic death of his mother—herself the victim of a violent crime, which destabilized Sandro’s place (and sense of place) within the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. More crucially for the present discussion, we see

Sandro’s invitation to the media to show his face so the entire country can see. In interviews that appear later in the documentary, we learn that Sandro had made comments about becoming famous to his aunt and to Dona Elza, the maternal figure with whom

Sandro lived for a period of time. To the former, Sandro affirmed: “vou mudar de vida e vou ser conhecido no mundo inteiro”; to the latter, he suggested that one day she would see him on television because he would be a “sucesso.” The idea of fame, especially !162 mass-mediated fame, as a measure of success will be familiar nowadays to most people.

As Messeder Pereira and Herschmann put it: “Vivemos, em sua quase plenitude, uma cultura mediática, espetacularizada e performática, na qual formulações identitárias […] são forjad[as] no interior do ambiente comunicacional” (“O espetáculo” 23). It goes without saying that neither woman imagined Sandro realizing those promises in the manner that he did, and it is unlikely that Sandro ever imagined taking such a path to fame either.

What is perhaps more notable about Sandro’s moment in the spotlight is the fact that little of what he says projects toward a future of any kind. Instead, he uses his moment of visibility to enunciate and put on record the narrative of his life up to that present moment. Lorraine Leu contends, moreover, that: “Sandro's understanding of witnessing as being facilitated not just through violence, but through a moment of celebrity, is symptomatic of the absence of legitimate juridical processes for someone in his social position” (183). Even during the hijacking, one of the hostages was able to perceive that Sandro’s actions emerged from broader, societal injustices rather than a selfish desire for money or notoriety. Luanna Belmont recounts:

Eu perguntei para ele: ‘você sabe qual é a maior vítima desse ônibus, desta história?’ Aí ele parou e baixou a cabeça, como se estivesse pensando na resposta. E eu falei assim: ‘Você.’ Aí ele parou para pensar, como se ele estivesse acatando o que eu tinha falado.

Although we cannot say for certain how Sandro imagined the hijacking would end, a number of those interviewed in the documentary film suggest that he, like most police and witnesses, understood he was unlikely to make it out alive—a suspicion that !163 would prove correct. Herschmann and Messeder Pereira even compare Sandro’s various activities on the bus with a reality television performance: “Cantava raps, gritava frases bombásticas, gesticulava e expunha-se excessivamente aos atiradores de elite” (“Isso”

60). Sandro’s inclination to speak, to prolong the standoff despite or because of his having “nothing to lose,” brings to mind Jean Baudrillard’s characterization of existence in a contemporary, hyper-mediated society: “The need to speak, even if one has nothing to to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning” (31-32). Sandro’s experiences up to that point led him to a situation in which merely proving, documenting, and demanding recognition of his existence would be an achievement.

If we return again to Sandro’s statement regarding the police and his situation, we also find an assertion that his actions are serious and real, in contrast to the hijackings in action movies which film and television viewers are used to seeing. The irony, of course, is that even as he makes this claim, he begins enlisting the help of various hostages to project a more menacing persona and more urgent circumstances than Sandro actually feels capable of creating. As one hostage explains: “ele pediu para todo mundo gritar, berrar, mostrar desespero, enfim. […] Todo mundo colaborou gritando e chorando, além do desespero que a gente tinha mesmo.” The descriptions of this “diálogo paralelo” and

“encenação” illuminate just how many overlapping and criss-crossing lines of communication Sandro’s actions produce. If the police could have been certain that

Sandro did not want to harm any of the hostages, they could have more readily shot at !164 him or stormed the bus. By cultivating an air of unpredictable dangerousness, Sandro managed to paralyze the police response and thus hold his impromptu stage—and the cameras broadcasting and reifying his existence—for hours. Luanna Belmont, the hostage who seemed to form the closest emotional connection with Sandro, observes at one point that all of them, including Sandro, struggled to maintain a clear distinction between real danger and pretend danger put on for the benefit of the police, the crowds, and the television audience: “acho que ele deve ter se dado conta de que realmente tinha uma coisa dupla, uma coisa ambígua no que ele estava fazendo. Ou ele queria que a gente bem fingisse, ou queria que— ou ele ia matar.”

Sandro’s theatricality went as far as having one hostage, Janaína Neves, get on the floor of the bus, out of sight of the police and cameras, and firing the gun towards her.

Although the moment is shocking to witness, Janaína had already appeared numerous times as an interview subject in the documentary, evidently physically and emotionally well. In that instance, the suspense of what we see is tempered by our knowledge that

Sandro did not, as he initially claimed, kill her with a shot to the head. We can contrast this with the presentation of Geísa, who is absent from the film as an interview subject, despite being one of the hostages whom Sandro most often displayed and threatened in the windows of the bus. Viewers familiar with the event might recall that Geísa was eventually killed, but as Cecilia Sayad points out, Padilha leaves out any direct references to the deaths of Sandro or Geísa, which contributes to the film’s “dramatic crescendo” (94-95). When the climactic moment finally does occur on screen, Padilha !165 replays clips of the BOPE officer moving toward Sandro and Geísa with his rifle raised and the two of them falling as three shots ring out. As voiceover testimony from hostages and police describe the scene, we see those few seconds broken down and repeated over and over in slow motion.

Sayad argues: “At once resurrecting the recorded reality and removing itself from it, this image achieves, through the obsessive repetition associated with melancholia, the separation between subject and lost object that defines the act of mourning” (104). A number of critics have characterized Padilha’s documentary as a mourning project for the trauma and multiple deaths of Candelária as well as the bus 174 incident (Sayad; Leu;

Cohen). The conclusion of the film with two funeral scenes—that of Geísa and that of

Sandro—certainly aligns with this general reading. We see news footage of the two funerals back to back and the disparity is striking: a crowd of hundreds gathers, weeping around Geísa’s grave, while only Dona Elza follows Sandro’s body to its resting place.

The contrast highlights the public response to the two deaths immediately after the incident, but this juxtaposition could also be viewed as an explanation (or even a justification) of the limited attention the film gives to Geísa, the other major victim of the hijacking. It would appear that many have mourned for Geísa, but will only one individual mourn Sandro’s death, the film seems to ask, even though millions witnessed his final moments?

Those final moments, which precede the funerals, were also captured on live television after Sandro and Geísa fell to the ground. As we see, Sandro’s disruptive !166 demand for recognition—which stopped traffic, mobilized a major police response, and attracted the attention of millions of Brazilians watching the standoff on television—was ultimately short-lived. It required an extreme action, so shocking to the general public that the crowd around the police cordon rushed the bus in an effort to kill him. As an epilogue before the closing credits informs us, the police who took Sandro into custody and choked him to death in the back of a van—literally and symbolically silencing him forever—were tried for murder but acquitted by a jury. Padilha’s documentary offers some interview testimony speculating on what drove the crowd into such a rage, as we see the utter chaos that brought together Sandro’s threat of violence toward bystanders, the police’s customary use of violence toward marginais, and the crowd’s latent violence toward a disruption of normal, quotidian order. Sandro’s actions, it must be acknowledged, posed a genuine danger to the wellbeing of those inside the bus. Yet

Padilha’s film, especially the testimony of the sociologist Luís Eduardo, postulates that

Sandro’s demand for recognition, his rejection of the invisibility and anonymity imposed upon him, projected a different kind of threat outwards—a threat to the police and the general public that had taken for granted their ability to marginalize and ignore his presence.

In the introduction to Theorizing Documentary, Michael Renov argues that it is useful to consider documentary films in relation to the Derridean distinction between

“truth” (a construction that requires a speaking subject) and “reality” (what is, neither true or untrue) (7). Within this framework, we can say that the raw news footage that !167

Padilha uses is closer to being “real” than the material available for many historical documentaries. However, no representation can be fully real—a consequence in this case of the fact that the director cuts and (re)organizes footage from different sources, and even the mere fact of Sandro’s being recorded on film and reacting to being recorded. At the same time, Padilha contends in the DVD extras that achieving a degree of “truth” is the driving force behind the creation of Ônibus 174. Renov observes that even with the best intentions, “the very act of plucking and recontextualizing profilmic elements is a kind of violence” (7). Sandro’s case is unique because once the standoff is underway, he knowingly seeks out cameras and asks them to film him. Yet one might argue that the most deferential documentary re-presentation of Sandro’s actions would simply be to show five hours of unedited news footage of the hijacking. Evidently, Padilha has set himself the challenge of facilitating and continuing Sandro’s own attempts to tell his story in way that would not suppress or obscure them. The heavy use of live footage and testimony from Sandro’s friends and family allow this project to be largely successful.

As Tom Cohen puts it in “Exploding Buses: José Padilha and the Hijacking of Media,” the film “alters the event’s condition of emergence” (125)—it does not restore Sandro but it does allow the preserved images of Sandro to take over the bus and the space of the film.

Sandro uses the media to become visible and make a name for himself; he simultaneously exposes the invisibility and anonymity that the media (and implicitly its audiences) had imposed on him up until the hijacking. By placing such an intense focus !168 on the hijacking itself, Padilha’s film acknowledges that Sandro’s violent creation of a stage for recognition and self-narration should not be read as an exception in an otherwise sad but acceptable life. Rather, the hijacking was a direct product of and response to

Brazilian society’s devaluation of Sandro’s existence. As a solution, it proved temporary and imperfect, but effective in a way that continues to resonate, above all in our understanding of the roles played by mass media and official, structural authorities (like the police) in the realization of public recognition.

Última parada 174: Losing Sandro

Última parada 174, Bruno Barreto’s fictionalized take on Sandro do Nascimento and the bus 174 incident (with a screenplay written by Braulio Mantovani), was released as a mainstream feature film eight years after the hijacking and six years after Padilha’s documentary. Barreto has said in interviews that he views the hijacking as “Brazil’s

September 11th,” referring to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (“O ônibus”). The primary basis of his comparison seems to be the way in which both incidents occurred with much of the public glued to the TV as events developed over hours (Barreto “Oscar?”). This is a fair observation, however, the perceived causes and effects of each incident were different enough to make Barreto’s comparison fairly facile. On the most elemental level, the

September 11th attacks is viewed as an attack by a foreign threat of which the general public had been largely ignorant. The bus 174 incident was a profoundly domestic event !169

—an unplanned, amateur crime by an individual who, unlike the 9/11 hijackers, minimized and faked his use of physical violence until his panicked final moments.

Sandro, as we have seen, was born, grew up, and died in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, his actions cannot be framed within any extreme political or religious belief system. The circumstances that contributed to his confused, desperate actions were the product of decades of neglect and marginalization—both casual and systematic—of thousands of impoverished urban youth.

Barreto’s film, as a largely fictional work, does not set out to examine those circumstances in the structured, didactic manner that Padilha’s documentary does. While a number of critical articles have looked at Ônibus 174’s treatment of Sandro and the hijacking, the more commercial Última parada 174 has often been ignored as a point of comparison. However, as two distinct approaches toward representing a complex, transgressive act, it is useful to contrast the two films with respect to how we process that act. According to Barreto, his work “não é sobre um episódio violento, mas sobre as conseqüências da violência. […] O que me interessou mais foi o drama humano e não o episódio violento que ele se torna no final” (“O ônibus”). I will analyze how Barreto attempts to depict the “human drama” of Sandro’s life, the “violent episode” that made

Sandro famous, and how Última parada 174 ultimately treats the demand for recognition at the heart of the bus 174 incident. I argue that, regardless of the director’s intentions, the narrative structure and techniques employed by Barreto do not merely undermine

Sandro’s own attempts at identitary expression. On the contrary, Última parada 174 !170 actively compounds Sandro's anonymity—his lack of recognition—by overlooking and palliating the disruptive power of the hijacking.

A Tale of Two Sandros

As Barreto himself acknowledges, Última parada 174 tackles a story that many

Brazilians had seen play out live, had seen discussed in news media in the years that followed, and had possibly seen deconstructed in Padilha’s documentary. Therefore, it is understandable that Barreto would look for a unique angle from which to explore

Sandro’s story. There is no artistic or philosophical reason that his film ought to hew to the “hard facts” of Sandro’s life. With that said, as a potential sociocultural inflection point, we must look at how Barreto’s film engages with the shock and reflection wrought by the hijacking.

After informing us that the film is “based on a true story,” an inter-title card highlights the subject of the first scene as “Um menino chamado Alessandro.” Whereas

Padilha’s documentary begins with shots of the ocean and Rio de Janeiro skyline, gradually approaching the subject of his film, the narrative of Última parada 174 begins in an intimate, domestic space and gradually expands outward. In the cramped, crumbling shack of an unidentified Rio favela, a young mother, evidently intoxicated, watches a telenovela, shuffles about, and then picks up her infant son to breastfeed him.

Soon a man enters with an assault rifle over his shoulder, argues with the young mother about cocaine and money, strikes her, and takes her son, thus quickly establishing for the !171 audience that the boy will grow up in a place where poverty, drugs, weapons, and domestic violence predominate. In the following scene, 10 years later, the same man who took the infant Alessandro now teaches the boy to fire a handgun. Not only that, he also teaches him to “hate” and to begin imagining himself in confrontations where he has to kill. With his guns, flashy jewelry, and casual exercise of violence, the man raising this

Alessandro fits easily into a generic archetype of the unrepentant, irredeemable drug- dealer.

Fernanda Ribeiro Salvo, in her analysis of Última parada 174, observes that when the film came out, its referential specificity was not limited to audiences’ familiarity with the bus 174 incident. Moviegoers would have also recognized the opening scenes as similar to other depictions of urban violence and poverty in the numerous “favela movies” released during the first decade of the twenty-first century (182). The most famous of these was undoubtedly Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 adaptation of the Paulo Lins novel Cidade de Deus. Yet following his film’s release Barreto was adamant that Última parada 174 was not another “favela movie,” and that the intimate tone he sought made his work the opposite of the epic Cidade de Deus (Salvo 179). There is reason to seriously question Barreto’s contention that his film operates from a fundamentally different perspective. However, as Salvo concedes, Barreto’s film does feature some technical choices that distinguish it from other recent favela movies. In particular, it utilizes a soundtrack that becomes gradually more muted and somber as the film progresses, which corresponds to an editing style that features longer cuts; together they !172 create the possibility of a more tempered and introspective viewing experience than one normally associates with favela films (181). Moreover, I would argue that from a narrative perspective, the third scene offers not only a small twist but also a possible commentary on the uncritical reception of films set in favelas: the young Alessandro who we saw being raised to be a violent criminal turns out not to be the eventual bus hijacker,

Sandro do Nascimento.

An inter-title card introducing the third scene tells us that we will see: “Um outro menino chamado Sandro.” This second “Sandro,” is watching TV at his home in the São

Gonçalo neighborhood, when a boy runs to his window, informing him of the attack on his mother at her store. He finds her bleeding to death and lays himself across her body until his aunt pulls him away. Sandro’s aunt takes him in, but he struggles with school and the adjustment to a new home. Not long after, he uses what little money he has to travel to the busier, wealthier neighborhood of Copacabana. Over the course of Última parada 174, we see the fictional Sandro do Nascimento grow up, learn to live on the streets of Rio, fall in love, spend time in prison, and eventually hijack bus 174. During what is structurally a coming-of-age story, this Sandro’s life becomes crisscrossed and entwined with those of two other characters: the mother and son from the opening scene.

Because of a mix-up when both Sandros are imprisoned, the mother from the opening scene believes that her son is the Sandro whose real mother was stabbed to death. She will reunite with her biological son when the two meet at the grave of the other Sandro, who is killed in police custody after the hijacking. !173

I will return to the figure of the second mother later on, but first I would like to consider the function of the second Sandro within Barreto’s film. Barreto’s opening narrative trick—to begin by showing a different “Sandro”—offers what may be the film’s strongest social critique. Because of the recency of the hijacking, many Brazilian viewers would have known the name of the hijacker, but may not have known or remembered many other details surrounding the event. The portrait of the first Sandro and his parents in Última parada 174 conforms to stereotypical characterizations of marginais by police (Holston 305) and by the general population (Caldeira 79). Such characterizations include not only the impoverished and abusive atmosphere in which the boy grows up, but also the aggressive criminality that he is taught to embody. This is the same type of image that, as James Holston points out, has often been employed by politicians and police to depoliticize and delegitimize the presence of criminal gangs in order to justify denying them basic human and judicial rights. Nevertheless, the gangs’ engagement with their communities, with the police, and with the discourse of rights is more nuanced and difficult to judge than the standard stereotype would suggest (Holston

300-309).

Barreto anticipates that viewers who walked into the theater knowing only that the hijacker had been a street kid named “Sandro” might unquestioningly accept the first

Sandro’s education in violence and cruelty as the predictable backstory of a future hijacker. When the second Sandro appears, we learn (or are reminded) that Sandro do

Nascimento’s childhood was marked by various tragedies as well as a longer and more !174 reluctant path toward criminality and violence. By using the opening scene to play with audiences’ expectations, Barreto’s film undermines preexisting generalizations and prejudices about marginalized street kids like Sandro do Nascimento. For those inclined to demonize Sandro do Nascimento, the film’s creation of a second Sandro offers a foil whose stereotypical criminality makes doing so more difficult. To what extent this doubling actually elucidates the life and identity of Sandro do Nascimento will be a more problematic question.

In the real-life bus 174 incident, Sandro came to have a double functionality: 1) as but one example of the many socioeconomically marginalized street kids whose presence is often overlooked or uncritically resented; 2) as an exception to that categorization because he achieved fame and name recognition, albeit through a dangerous, extreme act.

In both cases, at issue is what means and opportunity exist for expressing a unique, individual narrative of the self. During the hijacking, Sandro speaks at times from the standpoint of “we” and other times from a very particular “I.” The treatment of Sandro as a street kid (“we”) tends to foreclose the chance to develop and gain social, public recognition as Sandro do Nascimento (“I”). Although Barreto’s introduction of a second

Sandro in Última parada 174 serves at first to challenge assumptions and ignorance about the origins of those who commit violent crimes, the ongoing presence of a second

Sandro often confuses or obscures our perspective of the hijacker and undermines his uniqueness. !175

For the majority of Barreto’s film, the two Sandros are not even referred to as

Sandro, but rather as “Alê.” In other words, the use of a different abbreviation for

“Alessandro” does not help the audience or the other characters distinguish between the two when making reference to them. At one point, Barreto’s fictionalized Sandro do

Nascimento almost seems to decry the film’s own doubling device and the confusion it causes. Speaking about the mother who (incorrectly) believes Sandro do Nascimento is her son, he says: “Essa mulher não sabe o meu nome de verdade,[…] continua me chamando de Alê, mas meu nome mesmo é Sandro.” The doppelgänger that Barreto has invented responds: “Porra—Sandro, Alê, Alessandro… toda é a mesma merda.” Yet it is not all the same. Barreto’s film at times highlights this problem—the urge and the challenge to have one’s uniqueness recognized, symbolically encapsulated in one’s name.

But in an overall narrative sense, the film anonymizes Sandro do Nascimento rather than making him more discernible. In Padilha’s documentary, we learn that Sandro’s nickname among friends was “Mancha” because of a unique birthmark that he had. In

Barreto’s film, Sandro the hijacker must share a (fictional) nickname with a more aggressive, confident, socially dominant character. The entirely fictional Alê/Sandro is also the first and last to appear in the film—the inter-title cards introduce him as “um menino,” while the ostensible protagonist of the film (Sandro the hijacker) is called “um outro menino.” In effect, the doubling of Sandro has the effect of giving the hijacker second billing in a film based on his life. !176

In a broad sense, Barreto’s depiction of the hijacker’s life progresses like a warped Bildungsroman in which each potential moment or catalyst for self-realization and integration into society fails.6 A painful event drives him from his childhood home, but as he ages, educators (like the fictionalized version of Tia Yvonne), companions (like the other Alê/Sandro character), and lovers (like Soninha, the prostitute character who will not give up her profession or independence to commit to him) either cannot or will not help him understand how to relate to others and develop a sense of who he wants to be. Barreto’s representation of Sandro do Nascimento remains formless, impulsive, and largely subject to the desires of others without gaining any apparent insight from his experiences. Aline Frey rightly notes that giving the character of Sandro do Nascimento so little agency leaves viewers with the impression that “Sandro’s misery […springs] from individual misfortune” rather than from “the broader and complex causes for his social exclusion.” The latter, Frey points out, remain vague or wholly absent from the film (65-66). As mentioned earlier, the director explicitly chose to deemphasize the hijacking itself, suggesting that he did not want to reduce Sandro’s story to the violent spectacle that led to his death. The end result is a portrayal of Sandro that subjugates his life and his death to the development of other, more clearly defined characters. Such a portrayal makes it hard to demonize Sandro and to some degree absolves him of responsibility for his destructive final actions. However, it also indirectly absolves

Brazilian police, government, and society at large for Sandro’s anonymity and socioeconomic marginalization leading up to the hijacking. !177

A Family Reunion for Whom?

Because Última parada 174 is “based on a true story,” Barreto cannot save

Sandro do Nascimento from carrying out the hijacking and being suffocated to death by the police. Yet the film attempts to save Sandro’s legacy by distancing it from the

Gordian knot of societal ills with which Ônibus 174 leaves us. Instead, Barreto’s film presents us with an individual (the other Alê/Sandro) who seems to be even worse—a shameless, ruthless criminal—and reunites him with his generous, god-fearing mother as they stand over the hijacker’s grave. In Nietzschean terms, Última parada 174 shifts the viewer’s attention from the “tragic,” disordering effect of the hijacking to a “dramatic,” reaffirming story of redemption.

We know from the interviews in Padilha’s documentary that the real Sandro do

Nascimento’s family life was shaped first and foremost by the brutal murder of his mother, which Sandro likely witnessed, and which would haunt him through adolescence and adulthood. In Barreto’s film, both Alês/Sandros grow up without mothers, but a possible reunion with one of the mothers becomes a central plot line. The character of this second mother is based on Dona Elza da Silva, the woman who for a time housed and acted as surrogate mother to the real-life Sandro do Nascimento. In Padilha’s documentary, we see her interviewed various times about her perception of Sandro’s character; after his death, she will be the only person to attend his funeral. In Barreto’s film, this character—called Marisa—is a reformed drug addict who finds work as a housekeeper, becomes a devout evangelical Christian, and marries the pastor of her small !178 church. But she is adamant that she find her lost son before she can have any children with her new husband. At one point, the fictional Alê/Sandro reminds the other (the will- be hijacker) that they are “brothers” and observes that they even have the same name.

Their often parallel and intersecting lives evoke the narrative trope of “brothers from different mothers,” yet even metaphorical brothers do not generally have the same name.

Time and again their friendship/rivalry suggests that their relationship is one of doppelgängers more than brothers. As their stories merge, the will-be hijacker is increasingly displaced by the more self-assured Alê/Sandro—first from a house they share, then as a lover of Soninha, and finally as son to Marisa.

In Última parada 174, the insertion of a double changes the surrogate family that the real Sandro do Nascimento created with Dona Elza from a lost opportunity for social stability into a mistake. After unknowingly crossing paths various times as they move about the city of Rio de Janeiro, Marisa comes to believe (incorrectly) that her son was one of the street children attacked during the massacre at Candelária, and that he is serving time in juvenile prison. The other Alê/Sandro is erroneously arrested for committing the massacre when he shows up at the scene afterward, and thus ends up in prison at the same time. When Marisa asks that the prison staff allow her to speak with

“Alessandro da Candelária,” she is inadvertently connected with the young man who is not in fact her biological son. The real-life narrative of Sandro do Nascimento and Dona

Elza’s formation of an alternative family is thus transformed in the fictionalized version into a scenario where Sandro do Nascimento is the accidental interloper impeding the !179 reformation of a traditional family. For a while in Última parada 174, this Alê/Sandro pretends to be Marisa’s son in order to obtain money and a roof over his head. In essence, Barreto’s film makes Sandro do Nascimento an imposter in this part of his own story.

With respect to recognition specifically, Dona Elza plays a key role in the real-life

Sandro do Nascimento’s story. The home and affection she offered him did not ultimately prevent him from seeking a violent rupture with his traumatic, precarious life up to that point. Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the hijacking, Dona Elza was the only individual in all of Brazil willing to mourn Sandro at his burial (surrounded, not insignificantly, by news cameras), and in that way to call attention to his humanity and affirm his existence despite the problematic nature of his actions. In Última parada

174, as Marisa stands over the hijacker’s coffin, she is joined not by news cameras but by the other Alê/Sandro, who in the fictional narrative is her true biological son. As this Alê/

Sandro tosses flowers onto the hijacker’s grave, he apologizes to Marisa for disturbing her mourning, explains that he was a friend of the hijacker, and notes that they had the same name. Marisa looks up at him with an expression of dawning awareness, and the film closes with the suggestion that the some good—the reunion of a mother and her long-lost son—has come from the terrible ordeal of bus 174.

In contrast to Padilha’s documentary, Barreto’s film only dedicates approximately ten minutes to the hijacking itself. Various details from the real-life hijacking are incorporated into its depiction in Última parada 174—for example, we see Sandro shout, !180

“Isso não é um filme de ação,” and rail against the Candelária massacre. But he also laments the fictional Soninha’s unwillingness to marry him and references “breaking glass,” the latter being a nebulous leitmotif meant to suggest the unresolved trauma of his mother’s death. Thus the real-life Sandro’s demand for recognition, of his presence and of the experiences that had significantly shaped him, is abbreviated and muddied by the insertion of fictional narrative material whose purpose is vague. Perhaps still more problematic, by creating the double story arc of two Alês/Sandros, Barreto gives the audience an out—a chance to look past how swiftly and completely the police at the real hijacking extinguished Sandro’s ability to speak. Rather, Última parada 174 offers a possibility of redemption for the invented Alê/Sandro, which the real Sandro never had.

The arc of the fictional double, who began the movie as the “bad” Sandro, in the end follows a hopeful trajectory, culminating in a humble, polite reunion with his biological mother. Significantly, this reunion is only brought about through the death of Sandro the hijacker.

Off the Bus

Herschmann and Messeder Pereira have suggested that the explosion in production and consumption of biographical material in Brazil, especially that which lays out coherent identitary narratives, may be rooted in a “self-help” functionality of sorts.

Biographical works provide audience members’ respective self-narratives with frameworks for understanding fragmentary or troubling experiences (“Vida” 45). In !181

Última parada 174, the conventional, hopeful ending closes the fictional circle of separation and reunion within which Sandro do Nascimento’s more confounding biography is employed as a catalyst for resolving a neater fictional tale. The final reunion functions as a palliative that permits the audience to avoid confronting Sandro’s silencing and annihilation, carried out by the police, seemingly on behalf of (and at the behest of) a mob of strangers who tried to do it themselves. In this way, Barreto’s film undertakes the type of “gestão dramática” that Herschmann and Messeder Pereira identify as an ongoing trend in mediated narratives (“O espetáculo” 33-34). Whereas Padilha’s documentary tries to capture and communicate the “tragic” component of the hijacking, Barreto’s film weaves it into recognizable narrative forms in such a way that the power of its incomprehensibility is lost. As Tom Cohen argues, Barreto’s desire to “restore Sandro to

‘one of us’ would be to restore the control over visibility that was interrupted, shattered, hijacked, upended by [Sandro’s] takeover of media” (121). There is an unintended irony, perhaps, in the fact that Última parada 174 was coproduced by Globo Filmes, an arm of the dominant media conglomerate whose airwaves and audience were briefly hijacked by the real-life Sandro during his five hours on bus 174.7

It is fair to say that both Ônibus 174 and Última parada 174 respond to the widespread shock and discomfort provoked by the bus 174 incident, not only the extraordinary exposure of an individual from the most extreme margins of Brazilian society, but also the extraordinary exposure of lethal violence, on the part of Sandro and the Rio police. The issues of systemic inequality that frame Sandro’s story were by no !182 means unknown before the hijacking. Padilha’s film foregrounds issues like poverty and the prison system along with the explicit, tragic acknowledgement that, despite the attention given to Sandro’s actions and death on that day, there is no reason to assume that they will effect meaningful change. Barreto’s film, on the other hand, gradually shifts these issues to the background, focussing on more “universal” narratives of orphans trying to find their way, ill-fated young love, and the restoration of biological family.

These stories are products of fiction and are therefore easier to imbue with humor and hope. Yet this type of narrative focal shift cannot be treated merely as an artistic choice

—it is an ethical choice as well.

In studying the work of authors and artists speaking from the “margins,” like

Paulo Lins, Ferréz and André du Rap, João Cezar de Castro Rocha has elaborated an important development in the representation of liminal and outsider figures in Brazilian society. Working from Antônio Cândido’s canonical concept of the dialética da malandragem,8 Rocha argues that in recent years a new form of engagement has challenged and complicated (although not replaced) the smooth, non-confrontational guile associated with the malandro. Rocha calls this new form the dialética da marginalidade, the key components of which are: “o princípio da superação das desigualdades sociais através do confronto direto em vez da conciliação, através da exposição da violência em vez de sua ocultação” (162). This stance emerges in part from the predominance of violence in everyday Brazilian life, which the dialética da !183 marginalidade exploits as a discursive tool instead of downplaying its significance for the sake of agreeableness.

Rocha’s concept, it should be noted, is based on observable trends in cultural expression and social behaviors more than empirical data regarding violence and crime

(162). Although he considers it a more recent phenomenon, Rocha highlights Carolina

Maria de Jesus’s first book, Quarto de despejo (1960) as an antecedent to contemporary works of the dialética da marginalidade, and it serves as an interesting possible comparison for Sandro’s self-expression during the hijacking. In addition to the unpolished, non-professional character of these two examples, part of what makes Quarto de despejo unusual is that its creation began as a personal diary—that is, without a clear notion of what, if any, audience it could have. Carolina Maria de Jesus’ account of her experiences in a São Paulo slum ultimately became the best-selling book in Brazilian history. Sandro’s self-narration during the hijacking was undoubtedly briefer and more spontaneous, however, his attempt to communicate his experiences and the conditions of his life similarly found an unexpectedly massive audience when the police cordon allowed news cameras to set up close enough to capture Sandro’s face and voice.

With respect to cinematic retellings of the bus 174 incident, we can draw a rough parallel between Bruno Barreto and Audalio Dantas, the journalist who not only proposed that Carolina Maria de Jesus publish her diary, but also significantly edited the first edition. Rocha argues that Dantas’ edits and forward display an intention to legitimize and “enobrecer” the text by comparing it to canonical works, like those of Jorge Amado !184 and Maxim Gorky. Thus Dantas frames the value of Quarto de despejo in relation to academic concepts and consecrated authors even though its supposed appeal is its profoundly non-academic, “marginal” style and perspective (173). On the one hand, this type of well-intentioned mediation and interpretation has long been an issue for those hoping to disseminate testimonial works. On the other hand, Rocha sees this problem as a particularly Brazilian one—an extension of the dialética da malandragem in which conventionally “positive” attributes of a liminal figure are emphasized and re-articulated so that mainstream society can more easily consume and appropriate his/her color and difference. Similarly, Última parada 174 edits Sandro’s story so as to minimize the hijacking (Sandro’s moment of self-authored fame) and repurpose his death as a catalyst for a narrative of reunion and redemption.

Because Última parada 174 is a fictionalized recreation, Barreto’s camera is able to fully enter the bus when showing the hijacking. Barreto also incorporates certain details that were revealed in Padilha’s documentary, most notably the unexpected declaration by one of the hostages that Sandro himself was the greatest victim in that situation. On the surface, her statement would seem to capture the overarching motivation of the film: to “humanize” Sandro. Yet instead of imagining more of the dynamic that would lead to that poignant exchange, the hostage’s statement appears to come out of nowhere and there is no indication that Barreto’s Sandro understands or appreciates the sentiment. We see Sandro behaving aggressively and manically, as well as promising in one moment that he does not intend to actually kill anyone. Nonetheless, viewers spend so little time on the bus with Sandro and see so little of his interactions !185 with the hostages that the hijacking appears to be simply one more arbitrary, violent event in which Sandro finds himself swept up without any real comprehension of what is happening.

Most crucially, in the representation of the hijacking in Última parada 174,

Sandro never becomes aware of the power of visibility acquired through the live media coverage of the hijacking. During the real-life hijacking Sandro do Nascimento gradually realizes his own escape from anonymity—demanding recognition from a public and media that had ignored him—through the extreme nature of his actions. In this fundamental way, his actions can be read as an example of Rocha's dialética da marginalidade, in which an individual or group confronts another directly (often with and through violence) in order to: “assumir controle da própria imagem, expressar-se com a própria voz” (170).

Despite Barreto’s insistence that Última parada 174 is the opposite of the film

Cidade de Deus, he not only gives a similarly voyeuristic and generalized view of favelas, he also creates a character—the fictional Alê/Sandro—with clear echoes of Zé

Pequeno in Cidade de Deus. Specifically, both are sadistic, violent, unrepentant criminals who wear flashy jewelry and prey on all those around them. While Zé Pequeno dies in Cidade de Deus, Última parada 174 cynically suggests that its villain will turn his life around when he reencounters his long-lost mother. Regardless, as discussed earlier, Barreto’s film forestalls the demonization of the hijacker by providing a foil who is unquestionably more cruel and shameless. Rocha is sharply critical of the film version !186 of Cidade de Deus, in part because of what he calls the “infantilization” of narrative perspective plaguing many films set in favelas:

Qual é o objetivo dessa infantilização […]? Não será uma forma de fazer com que os problemas associados ao narcotráfico sejam deixados à margem e, assim, reencontremos a “humanidade” das relações “mesmo” numa favela? Tal infantilização termina por criar uma favela abstrata, descontextualizada… (169)

By giving audiences a clear contrast between a largely sympathetic protagonist and another largely unsympathetic character, Última parada 174, like Cidade de Deus, does not oblige viewers to see things from the more difficult perspective of an individual with agency, who chooses confrontational violence as a mode of social engagement.

Rocha wonders what type of reception Cidade de Deus might have had if the narrative point of view had been that of the “impiedoso” Zé Pequeno (167). He suggests, in fact, that Padilha’s documentary accomplishes this very challenge, similar to Rubem

Fonseca’s short story “O cobrador” (170). We have seen how Ônibus 174 preserves and prolongs Sandro’s time on the bus and in the spotlight without providing a “gestão dramática”—a clean narrative of adversity or redemption—to help audiences process what Sandro says and does. Nevertheless, Padilha does not oblige viewers to stay with

Sandro’s unfiltered perspective throughout the entire film. When Sandro brings up

Candelária church, he does so with the assumption that his audience in that moment, in particular the police in front of him, know very well the details of that event. In Padilha’s film, the voices of a social worker and a sociologist relate for the viewer the background and events of the massacre. In other words, both films employ a degree of translation and contextualization. However, Ônibus 174 attempts to unpack the discourse around the bus !187 and, above all, the discourse emanating from the bus—that is, from Sandro himself.

Barreto’s film, in contrast, removes the figure of Sandro from the bus in order to provide sense (if not justification) to the hijacking.

Barreto fabricates a narrative of reconciliation when in fact the potency of the bus

174 incident continues to be the challenge of reconciling Sandro’s multiplicity during that climactic afternoon: victim and perpetrator, visible and invisible, sincere and performative. As long as Sandro is inside the bus—literally and metaphorically—one must confront the conjunction of social conflicts and inequalities that he embodies as a poor, black, uneducated street kid, survivor of Brazil’s juvenile prison system and the

Candelária massacre. Ultimately, Última parada 174 sets out to give Sandro recognition, to make him the star of a movie and invent a “humanizing” narrative for him, whereas the goal of Ônibus 174 is to allow Sandro to take over the movie, to once again invade the screen, to cry out once more for recognition. !188

CHAPTER 4

Not Oneself Toward Desired Anonymity

The pursuit of intimate, personal recognition and the pursuit of fame both reflect a desire for identitary cohesion. They resist anonymity by trying to create a clear self- narrative that others will perceive and appreciate. What then would a self-narrative project look like if the narration ceased, ceased looking back, or ceased “making sense,” while the subject remained? In response to the limitations and/or dangers of asserting a coherent, cohesive identity, a number of critics and thinkers have wondered about the potential of resisting what has long seemed an essential goal of the human condition. I refer to such an alternative as “desired anonymity.” As with most works in my study, the proper name—its assertion or negation—is often the most acute point of identitary conflict. But as always, the proper name is only one prominent shorthand to which individuals may link themselves or be linked to a complex personal narrative. Therefore, to desire anonymity must be understood as part of a broader urge to become undefined or unrecognizable.

In The Ecstasy of Communication, Jean Baudrillard declares: “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning !189 and it is killing us” (55). He advances, therefore, “a strategy of absence, of evasion, of metamorphosis” (58). In addition to Baudrillard, my analysis will primarily focus on ideas put forth by Zygmunt Bauman, Giorgio Agamben, and Fredric Jameson, though notions of “desired anonymity” are by no means limited to these four. The first two offer useful proposals for how an individual might move through spaces, cross borders, and encounter other people without having to maintain a single or fixed identity. The latter two have put forth different notions of “anonymous community,” in which solidarity and resiliency stem from the fact that members cannot be easily identified, singled out, or distinguished from one another. In the following chapter, I begin by considering a work that imagines the first notion of “desired anonymity”: Sergio Chejfec’s novel Mis dos mundos (2008). The second work that I analyze— Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios

(2003)—depicts a shift from individual recognition to anonymous community. Together these works explore the practical possibilities of desired anonymity and

“unrecognizability,” specifically in twenty-first century South America.

Although it is possible to identify some characteristics of the protagonist and setting in Chejfec’s novel, it is a narrative in which ambiguity and uncertainty exist not as conflicts waiting to be resolved, but as fecund and natural states. Mis dos mundos, like

Guillermo Saccomanno’s El oficinista and Fernando Bonassi’s Subúrbio (analyzed in

Chapter 1), engages with archetypes of the urban wanderer. But unlike those texts,

Chejfec’s novel does not lament the experiences created by modern communication technologies, international travel, and the (post)modern crowd. Los rubios, which mixes !190 and blurs fictional and non-fictional material, represents an explicit response to the director’s experience as a child of disappeared parents in post-dictatorship Argentina.

While Carri’s film has been analyzed as an interrogation of memory and the act of writing history, I believe it also posits a particular form of desired anonymity— communal, affective—when failures of memory or historicization make traditional self- narration unworkable.

Mis dos mundos: Wandering Away from the Self

Mis dos mundos is a short novel recounting the first-person narrator’s thoughts and experiences over the course of a day spent at a park in a southern Brazilian city.

Although it contains a series of scenes, Chejfec’s text lacks chapters, divisions, and anything resembling a conventional plot or narrative arc. Enrique Vila-Matas suggests that this makes it more a work of “pensamiento narrado” than a novel as such.1 This style is common to much of the Argentine writer’s prose fiction, which includes eleven novels.

Dianna C. Niebylski, noting that circulation and critical consideration of Chejfec’s creative works have increased considerably since the publication of Mis dos mundos in

2008, recently published the first compilation of critical essays on the author’s oeuvre.

Chejfec, who also teaches and publishes poetry and academic works, does not often speak in depth about his own personal biography, nor has he been inclined to relate it to the content of his fiction (Niebylski 13). That being said, his tendency to create protagonists who are also middle-aged Argentine writers, sometimes also of Jewish !191 heritage, has led critics to read various parts of his work through the lens of the

(auto)biographical. Many of his novels feature meditations on the nature of travel, physical spaces, and language, as well as first-person narrators whose identities

“vacila[n] inciertamente entre identidades intersticiales y difusas” (Niebylski 15). Mis dos mundos is not his only work that could be analyzed in relation to experiences of anonymity; it is apposite, however, as the nameless narrator specifically contemplates the urge to be unrecognized and spends the entirety of the novel in a public space, around unnamed strangers with whom he has only passing interactions.

The narrator of Mis dos mundos provides a number of details about himself and his life, but he remains nameless and his interactions with those around him consist of only brief, superficial gestures and a few words. He begins by noting that as his birthday approaches (his fiftieth), the books of two friends have inspired him to attempt a reflection on his life up to that point. Nevertheless, his reflection neither encounters nor responds to any imminent crisis or conflict. What the narrator elaborates instead is an embrace of unrecognition and undefinition as a more natural (and perhaps inevitable) form of engaging with contemporary life.

To understand the view towards identity and experience that emerges from

Chejfec’s novel, a useful starting point is Stuart Hall’s basic conceptualization of the

“identification process” as temporary attachments between discourses that “hail” the subject and the subject’s “investment” in the resulting subject-position (“Introduction”

5-6). Working from this notion of the identification process, however, we should add that !192 for an individual identity (albeit negotiated and impermanent) to achieve social significance or weight, the subject’s investment must be in some way manifest and acknowledged. “Successful” identification involves not only a two-way engagement between subject and discourse, as Hall proposes, but also must be read(able) in whatever context it takes place. The on-going performative component of identification is key for those who desire recognition. The question that arises in Mis dos mundos (and in my subsequent analysis of Los rubios) are what practical possibilities exist for individuals who do not want to be recognized. I will begin by examining how Chejfec’s narrator- protagonist experiences space and time, and how these experiences frame his conceptions of identity and anonymity. The novel is unique in that it imagines anonymity in neither utopian nor dystopian terms. Ultimately, I read Mis dos mundos as the depiction of a gradual (if occasionally conflicted) shift away from identity and toward forms of unrecognition more compatible with everyday, contemporary experience.

Un-mapped Spaces

The setting of Mis dos mundos is simultaneously known and unknown. The narrator describes the park and gardens in great detail, and begins by describing their location within the city’s layout on a map. On the one hand, as the novel’s protagonist, he is a tourist who openly admits his ignorance of the spatial and historical character of the place where he finds himself. On the other hand, as the narrator, he appears to deny the reader some of the little information he does have. In particular, he evades the use of !193 proper names, anonymizing both the city, which he merely tells us is located in southern

Brazil, and the park, which appealed to him because of its musical-sounding name—a name that the narrator nevertheless withholds (5). By noting that the narration takes place in a city in southern Brazil, the city is framed as simultaneously near and far, potentially familiar but also foreign. In southern Brazil, for instance, they drink yerba mate like their Argentine neighbors; but as the narrator observes, the Brazilian mate gourds are distinctively large, to the point of being nearly impossible to hide, if one were so inclined (58). What the narrator does not explain is what situation would necessitate hiding such a seemingly innocuous object. In this passing comment, however, we can observe two important strains of the novel: 1) an acknowledgment of the unconscious performance of identity through myriad small indicators that can define a person from a distance; 2) his inclination to see such immediate indicators in terms of how feasible it would be to “disimularlos.” There is no imminent threat driving the narrator to avoid being identified, yet he is clearly concerned with the restrictive pressure exerted by any form of identification. There is an understanding at the heart of Chejfec’s novel that what the quotidian experience lacks in acute intensity should not obscure its cumulative force.

At various points in the novel, the narrator describes experiences in at least three different countries: Argentina, his home country; Brazil, where the narration takes place; and Germany, where he remembers a number of similar wanderings. At no point does he give the name of any of the cities where he has lived or traveled. His characterizations do sometimes provide enough detail for speculation: “en cierta oportunidad estuve por pocos !194 días en una ciudad europea, célebre por su espléndido lago y sus antiguos canales” (60).

That being said, by not offering their names, the narrator obliges the reader to conceive of them primarily through his (the narrator’s) ambulatory and park-centered recollections.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau highlights the back-and-forth relationship between maps and pedestrians: the map attempts to reflect and also order the movements of people; at the same time, the shifting needs and impulses of pedestrian movement can reiterate or rewrite the character of a space (97-99). Chejfec’s narrator fails in his first attempt to reach the park and finally accepts the insurmountable disparity between the simplified order of his map and the chaotic, three-dimensional experience of the streets. After returning to the hotel, the narrator asks the reception desk for a map of the whole city, on which he locates the park and plots a new route for another attempt.

Yet as he stares at this new map, he gradually loses himself in it as well: “devoré el mapa, intentando memorizar algo casi desconocido y que para mí carecía de significado, porque ningún nombre de avenida ni concentración de calles remitía a jerarquía alguna ni a ningún paisaje visual” (18).

The protagonist eventually does make his way to the park. He reveals, however, that his habit of taking long walks through cities entails an engagement with urban spaces that largely precludes the construction of a broad spatial or historical understanding of them: “En general, miro bastante hacía abajo cuando camino.[…] uno es testigo de lo anónimo, de lo inclasificable para la historia, y es a la vez testimonio de lo que difícilmente perdurará” (37-38). In this way, the narrator focuses his attention on the !195 palimpsestic indices of what Certeau calls “pedestrian speech acts,” which continually

(re)shape the urban space. To study the remnants of quotidian movement is to know a city more intimately than by the fixed names and boundaries that are recorded in formal maps and histories; at the same time, it is to know a version of the city that resists characterization before quickly disappearing. With such an approach, it is not surprising that the names of cities, streets, plazas, and the like are excluded from the recollections of his travels and strolls. Over the course of the novel, his experiences in the park in southern Brazil not only echo and recall experiences from other cities in other countries, they also begin to bleed into each other. The structure and clarity of the narrator’s sentences differentiates them from the colloquial language common to many stream-of- consciousness narratives. That being said (and despite the narrator’s use of the past- tense), Mis dos mundos retains a meandering spontaneity and indulgence of tangential thoughts and anecdotes. The novel’s structure, therefore, reasserts the narrator’s inclination to blur temporal and spatial distinctions between the accounts of his wanderings.

In attempts to characterize the “globalized” and “postmodern” landscape of late twentieth and early twenty-first century cities, we often find a tension between a sense of universality or sameness, on the one hand, and fragmentation or particularity on the other hand. The compression of time and space brought about by new technologies of travel and communication (hand-in-hand with the expansion of global capitalism) made possible the homogenization of many cultural products and perspectives. But this trend !196 also disrupted hegemonic cultural narratives in a way that offered space and time for a greater range of distinct perspectives (Huyssen 5-7). The narrator-protagonist of Mis dos mundos takes a curious approach to this dynamic. When traveling, he seeks out city parks specifically as ambiguous, liminal spaces. They are man-made but natural; often tranquil or empty, but still open to and traversed by urban crowds. Their generally public, democratic, and non-commercial functionality fits more with the logic of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities. Yet for the narrator, what is important is not the sense of local character a given park retains, but rather its universal (generic) character, which only free and regular international travel allows him to perceive and appreciate. In other words, as he visits one park after another, in different cities around the globe, all parks become essentially the same park, offering essentially the same experience. The swans he watches in a park in Germany blend into the swan boats he watches in Brazil. Their vagueness, moreover, is a good setting for making oneself vague:

el entorno se suspende momentáneamente y uno puede imaginar estar en un parque de cualquier lugar, aún en las antípodas. El sitio arrumbado, indistinto, o mejor todavía, el sitio donde la persona movida quién sabe por qué tipo de distracciones, se ausenta, se convierte en nadie y ella misma termina siendo imprecisa. (6)

The narrator’s passion for ephemeral and ambiguous spaces is intertwined with his desire to be perceived as ephemeral, ambiguous, anonymous. In his essay “Paseo, narración y extranjería en Sergio Chejfec,” Edgardo Horacio Berg draws numerous parallels between

Chejfec’s protagonists and the author’s narrative style: both tend to wander, follow tangents, circle back, and frustrate attempts at a structured description or mapping !197

(47-48). The goal seems to be expression that defies concise summary; or put another way, the realization of undefinability. Berg calls Chejfec’s protagonists “sujetos desterritorializados” (49); however, it might be more accurate to call them subjects in the process of deterritorialization. When we see the narrator-protagonist of Mis dos mundos he is not no-one from no-where, but he is increasingly drawn to the possibilities of indefinition.

Global, Digital Flânerie

Urban parks, like those in Mis dos mundos, are not what first come to mind when one thinks of uniquely contemporary or postmodern spaces. Nevertheless, for Chejfec’s protagonist, they are the setting for his particular experience of traveling and wandering.

He is, in many ways, a twenty-first century flâneur. Yet what does it mean to be a flâneur in the twenty-first century? Walter Benjamin returned often in his writings to the work of

Charles Baudelaire and the question of what it meant to wander through the modern urban space. The flâneur, as Baudelaire imagined him, was free to explore and appreciate the human and material abundance of the modern city as it flowed around him

(Benjamin 171-172). However, not all wanderers could experience the street and the crowd with the same ease. For this reason, Benjamin found it necessary to make a distinction that Baudelaire had not—a distinction between the privileged social and economic position of the flâneur and the more discomposed and disquieting “man of the crowd” (172).2 Zygmunt Bauman points out that unusual social types of early-modernity !198 whose identities most resisted being fixed or cohesive—the stroller, the vagabond, and the tourist—are no longer exceptional. (Whether privileged or marginalized, one notes that these are all archetypes of ambiguous or anonymous individuals.) Although these figures once disturbed and contrasted with the stability of their surroundings, the urban sphere has come to reflect and reinforce their fragmentation and undifferentiation (“From

Pilgrim” 29). The narrator of Mis dos mundos does not necessarily view the spaces he passes through as his natural or ideal milieu, but he does acknowledge that, like the classical flâneur, to be able to travel and wander as he does depends on a certain level of historical and socioeconomic privilege.

As we have seen, during his walks Chejfec’s narrator expresses an appreciation for the type of quotidian (re)writing of space that Certeau contrasted with the formal drawing and naming of space. But the narrator, as a visitor, never really engages with the accumulation and evolution of “pedestrian speech acts.” For this reason, his tendency to stare at the ground when he walks cannot be incorporated into any culturally specific self- narrative. The journey, whether local or global, has a long tradition as a mode of self- discovery and self-identification. Chejfec’s narrator, however, confesses early on: “La verdad es que he dejado de buscar sorpresas porque creo que me resulta ya muy difícil encontrarlas. Por lo tanto conservo del antiguo anhelo el mecanismo básico, una suerte de tic físico y social a la vez, que es la caminata” (16).

Marc Augé, building on Certeau’s work, has elaborated a concept of “non- places”—spaces of transit and commerce, like airports, buses and supermarkets—that !199 mostly lack cultural or anthropological identity and are regulated primarily by text rather than human interaction (96). The expansion of modern cities has led to the expansion of non-places. The expansion of non-places, in turn, is closely tied to the expansion of unrecognition, since individuals occupy non-spaces for only a short time, sharing only the most generic, temporary identities (like “passenger” or “shopper”) (101). The parks of

Mis dos mundos are not non-places in the strictest sense because they retain a freedom of movement and function more common to the streets of the flâneur. All of these spaces produce or facilitate anonymity, but Baudelairean flânerie entailed opportunities to be surprised and to contemplate the past (Benjamin, Arcades 416, 430). Augé’s contemporary non-places and Chejfec’s parks, in contrast, both feature a sense of perpetual, de-historicized present.

Luz Horne, in an essay on Chejfec’s novels, groups the author with a number of

Argentine and Brazilian writers who share a preoccupation with how to represent post- modern experiences of time as, at various moments, accelerated, irregular, or frozen.

These include César Aira, Luiz Ruffato, and in particular, João Gilberto Noll (126-127).

Contemporary flâneurs are not unique to Chejfec’s novels or Mis dos mundos specifically. Indeed Noll’s texts contain not only stylistic but thematic concerns that are a useful counterpoint to Chejfec's. In The Untimely Present, Idelber Avelar’s analysis of

Noll considers a set of protagonists who also wander aimlessly and anonymously. Noll’s and Chejfec’s protagonists are notable for their acceptance of the condition of anonymity.3 As Avelar explains, Noll’s contemporary flâneurs are “misfits, negators of !200 the world around them, who, however, do not evolve into bearers of an alternative principle” (194). Although they do not attempt to escape anonymity, the empty, hopeless nature of their experiences suggests a continued belief in the value of individual subjectivity and recognition. In other words, in Noll’s texts the value of experience (even existence) is still bound to the expression of an identity—the failure of one implies the failure of the other. The lack of a proper name becomes the most basic indication of this failure (Avelar 202).

Novels like Guillermo Saccomanno’s El oficinista or Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s

O anônimo célebre, although not realist works, are nevertheless concerned with the practical possibility of escaping anonymity in the twenty-first century.4 Noll’s narratives begin, in a sense, where these works end: with the conclusion that to create or sustain any coherent individual identity is futile or impossible. The protagonist of Mis dos mundos, while ostensibly similar to Noll’s protagonists, ultimately experiences anonymity with a greater sense of ambivalence and possibility. Noll’s works oppose traditional narratives and depictions of protagonists by tending to stop abruptly with no moment of real narrative resolution, no moment of identitary realization (Avelar 189-190). Mis dos mundos, however, opposes both approaches by presenting the relatively abrupt end to a series of banal experiences as epiphanic—more specifically, the realization toward which the narrative builds is not the formulation of a coherent subjectivity, but rather the final appreciation of a sense of self that will not be narrated or defined. By forgoing the inclination (and the expectation) to make himself read(able), Chejfec’s protagonist is free !201 to act and experience the world with an otherwise impossible immediacy. Although I read Mis dos mundos as more optimistic than Noll, Brandão, or Saccomanno, it is not a utopian conception of being undefined and/or unrecognized. Chejfec’s novel, I would argue, is made more potent through its contemplation of the quotidian, practical experience of desired anonymity.

Before discussing the narrator-protagonist’s final conception of anonymity, we must consider the particular type of flânerie through which it comes about. He admits that the urge to walk began with the hope of finding remnants of the past, like a “dandy,” learning, exploring and being surprised, as he traversed the streets of Old World cities

(20). But over time this endeavor becomes a frustrating and fruitless activity because his brain cannot order what he does and sees according to any chronological or cultural logic:

soy capaz de retener esquinas, escenas, episodios, células en general de realidad, pero no puedo asignarles una secuencia y mucho menos algún contexto asequible, ninguna referencia. […] No obstante sigo caminando empujando, más bien remolcado, por la sensación de ambigüedad, la referida zozobra. (22)

Although walking becomes a useless exercise—at least with respect to the creation of a narratable journey or trajectory—the protagonist still feels compelled to do it. He describes himself alternately as a zombie and an automaton, mindlessly moving without interacting with those around him, and without drawing conclusions or insight from his experience.

He wonders why he continues if his walks never produced the type of revelatory stimulation that he associated with Romantic and Modernist images of strollers. Above !202 all, if they do not serve as a stage or framework for a process of identification, what purpose can they have? Zygmunt Bauman observes:

the quandary tormenting men and women at the turn of the [twenty-first] century is not so much how to obtain the identities of their choice and how to have them recognized by people around—but which identity to choose and how to keep alert and vigilant so that another choice can be made… (Individualized 147, author’s emphasis)

Bauman’s argument for what he calls “liquid” identity stems from the understanding that fixed self-narratives do not make sense in increasingly changeable and fragmentary societies. It must be said, of course, that the very notion of a stable, fixed identity may have always been an impossible ideal. At the very least, the notion of identity can only exist in a state of crisis—as a desired or imagined solution to feeling uncertain of one’s place in society (Bauman “From Pilgrim” 19-20). What Bauman proposes is a compromise of sorts: not to challenge identification, but to embrace it as a flexible, on- going process. For the narrator of Mis dos mundos, however, a “liquid” approach to identity does not address his basic disinterest in nearly every opportunity for identification: “me he sentido incapaz de creer en casi nada, […] decepcionado de la política [,…] incrédulo ante la cultura juvenilista [,…] espectador ocioso de la carrera colectiva hacia el dinero…” (56). Walking, he concludes, may not offer a framework for the identification process, but when stripped of that supposed purpose, it proves “lo más parecido a la mente disponible y en blanco” (57).

Perhaps the most evocative characterization of his walking is the narrator’s comparison to navigating the internet. He does not merely find similarities between the !203 two experiences; he believes that the experience of moving through cyberspace has fundamentally altered the way he moves through physical space:

Mi impresión es que durante las caminatas me gana una sensibilidad digital, desplegante.[…] es de lo peor que me podía pasar porque afecta mi faceta intuitiva y se impone como una condena. Los puntos o circunstancias donde concentro mi atención toman la forma de enlaces de internet… (24)

Changes in modes of transportation and communication have always impacted sensory perception of the world around us. Clearly, the narrator does not feel that growing accustomed to navigating digital space has facilitated his ability to navigate spaces like the park. Yet this complaint is emblematic of the central ambivalence of the novel, as the narrator endeavors to wander and simultaneously analyze the act of wandering to see if he can discover some alternative value in it. His “digital” way of viewing spaces may perturb him, but the difficulty it presents him in organizing memories and experiences is merely a continuation of what he experiences through international travel: a seemingly arbitrary, infinite and atemporal flow of images and information.

The narration of the novel also reflects what he finds to be the only suitable organizing principal: to link ideas by familiarity and affinity, even if the results can be forced or random (26). Admitting that the internet itself is not to blame, the narrator’s commentaries on the internet (like the novel as a whole) ultimately do not become an elegy for older paradigms of journeying, flânerie, or identification, nor are they a celebration of contemporary life. Beatriz Sarlo describes Chejfec’s protagonist as “el narrador/personaje ‘sin cualidades’: incapaz tanto de entusiasmos como de creencias, inerte y, sobre todo, resistente a cualquier exhibición” (“Originalidad” 70). But he is not !204 quite “inert”—in limbo, perhaps, but not static. Through the act of narration—and more precisely, narrated wandering—we see him working through his bouts of confusion and anxiety. The overarching question becomes whether he (and we) will come to understand his lack of characteristics as a failure, defeat, or something else entirely.

Indeterminate at Last

The process of identification requires time. It requires that time be spent elaborating an identification such that it is recognizable, then doing so again and again in other moments and circumstances. Identification also requires time insofar as recognition depends on the existence of a shared historical context. When the narrator of Mis dos mundos recalls his fascination with an unusual watch whose hands run backwards, we see his interaction with time briefly expand beyond the sensation of perpetual present that characterizes much of his traveling. In one sense, the backward watch potentially leads him toward a more personal and culturally specific past than he has found in most other places—he discovers the watch in Germany where, as a Jew, much of his own family perished in the Holocaust. At the same time, he pictures buying the watch as an heirloom to pass down (to his nephews since he does not have children of his own), thereby projecting its significance into the future. Yet instead of reestablishing a traditional sense of chronological time and laying the foundation for a conception of identity based on familial ties, he imagines the watch as a mechanism for confusing and undoing time. !205

The location of the store, seemingly significant because of its association with his family’s cultural history and journey to Latin America, is contradicted by the narrator’s declaration that his family emerged from “esa nada” beyond the ocean. He remains ignorant of everything before the last few decades (65). The only material connection that he has to his family’s history are a cigarette lighter and binoculars left to him by his father. But as he has no children and wants no children, he has renounced any direct attempt at what Paul Ricoeur calls “self-recognition through filiation” (193-196). He plans to eventually pass the lighter and binoculars on to his two nephews, yet he feels that these objects lack instructive value in comparison to the watch. Most objects, he believes, are silent witnesses to history, that can be made to speak only with great effort.

The narrator ponders the questions his relatives in Argentina might have put to him as they regarded his German watch and asked him whether the convergence of personal, familial, and ethnic history provoked any moments of shock or panic. As we know, however, the experience of shock has long since ceased to form part of his travels.

Throughout this scene, the narrator repeatedly floats the possibility of using the watch and his trip to Germany as means of reasserting a coherent identitary narrative, only to immediately reverse or negate that very possibility. He believes that giving the backward watch to a nephew would serve as a reminder, for example, to look backward and remember one’s history. When his nephew would then ask what value there could be in knowing one’s history, he would respond: “para doblegarla, cosa imposible, y para ocultarla, para creer que la dejamos atrás, etc. Para mentir y seguir adelante” (65). Thus !206 the didactic function of the backward watch would not be to reiterate the value of history and memory in service of identification, but rather as a symbol of self-erasure or self- unknowing.

Even this idea is subsequently undermined by the fact that, although he does plan to leave the lighter and binoculars to his two nephews, he does not actually have a third to whom he could give the watch. Finally, leaving the watch to anyone is itself merely part of a daydream, since he never purchased it. In other words, the narrator never ultimately acquired the backward watch that he would have left to a non-existent nephew in order to teach him the importance of hiding and dissimulating one’s connection to the past. Paul

Ricoeur, in The Course of Recognition, argues that identity narratives are anchored by the ability to say “I remember” and “I promise.” The former configures the value of the past and one’s connection to it, while the latter performs the same operation toward the future

(109-110). In contrast, the backward watch episode in Mis dos mundos confounds the value of past and future at every turn; even the anecdote itself revolves around a hypothetical memory. The narrator briefly ponders the type of “memory” offered by a more modern technological object: the computer, the digital interface that increasingly dominates the narrator’s sense of perception. In spite of its capacity, though, he concludes that computer memory is never “active,” and its contents can be ignored or eliminated with ease (46).

Over the course of the novel, the narrator’s desire to obscure himself gradually comes into focus. As a traveler visiting a public park in southern Brazil, a certain degree !207 of unrecognition is a given. That being said, as Augé points out, even in many spaces

(including “non-places”) that are characterized by open movement as well as the conglomeration and dis-conglomeration of anonymous crowds, there are still a range of circumstances in which individuals are obliged to identify themselves, oftentimes with formal documentation (101-102). On the one hand, these spaces create a context in which individuals coexist in mutual unrecognition; on the other hand, they preclude the adoption of anonymity as a way of life because they demand that each individual tie his/ her presence to a clearly defined name. Depending on the location, individuals are often asked to additionally tie their presence to a photograph, an address, and/or an abbreviated history (of purchase, travel, etc.). Individuals are thus situated in an awkward limbo: generally unrecognized, yet unable to flow easily between identities (as Bauman proposes) or to forgo identification entirely.

For decades now, the social demand to identify oneself—its implications and forms—has concerned critics of Western society and culture.5 For some, intentional

(desired) anonymity emerges as a potential response. In The Coming Community,

Giorgio Agamben is concerned above all with how to resist the means by which powers of State and State-supported capitalism might co-opt processes of identification in order to categorize, regulate, and exploit their citizens/consumers (62-64). Agamben’s proposal is decidedly utopian: “In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity

—even that of a State identity within the State [….] What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an !208 identity” (84). I will discuss the specific notion of an anonymous community later in my analysis of Los rubios. With respect to Mis dos mundos, I want to focus on the individual, quotidian experience of being recognized or going unrecognized. The form of anonymity that we see in Chejfec’s novel is therefore more narrow and less radical than what Agamben imagines. Nevertheless, the narrator’s reflection on wandering and identification postulates possible first steps away from the demand to express a recognizable identity and toward conscious undefinition, similar to that which Agamben exalts as being “whatever” (85-86).

Picking up on the narrator’s (and author’s) almost excessive reflexivity and self- deconstruction, Mariana Catalin has argued that: “Mis dos mundos es una novela sobre el temor al fracaso que al mismo tiempo se arriesga a fracasar, repitiendo una y otra vez lo que de tan obvio se vuelve absurdo, y ni siquiera tanto” (269). What is unique about this use of repetition is that over time it dissolves identitary expression as much or more than it solidifies it. The notion of linguistic or rhetorical exhaustion calls to mind Michel

Foucault’s canonical essays on Georges Batailles, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski, and Stéphane Mellarmé, wherein Foucault postulates carrying language to its absolute limits as a means of speaking as if from a void, instead of from a discernible, centered subject position. As Foucault points out, narration, at least since Homer, has been employed to resist the finality, the finitude, and the oblivion that death threatens to impose on the writer/speaker (“Language” 90-94). As an alternative to the ultimate futility of this exercise, in which expression depends on the preservation of the expresser, !209

Foucault praises Bataille for his work’s “constant movement to different levels of speech and a systematic disengagement from the ‘I’ who has begun to speak and is already on the verge of deploying his language and installing himself in it” (“Preface” 80). In Mis dos mundos, Chejfec and his narrator-protagonist experiment with similar types of strategic disengagement from a concrete “I.” These exercises extend beyond the mere choice of the writer to sign his/her proper name; Chejfec’s novel confronts the day-to- day, often banal experiences that frame (and complicate) radical identitary projects.

The demand to identify oneself is often external—a learned, socialized expectation that can become entrenched and instinctive even when emptied of value.

Baudrillard observes that, faced with existential uncertainty, we have become “too preoccupied with saving our identity to undertake anything else. What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning” (31).

Additionally, regardless of how much time or energy one invests in creating and expressing an identity, the transient nature of recognition requires that any identity be continually re-elaborated. This is the fundamental, Sisyphean aspect of identification.

The text of Mis dos mundos is, in many ways, a first-person account of the narrator- protagonist’s struggle between the ingrained urge to self-identify and the allure of being indeterminate. The former is evident when he admits: “Me preocupa la opinión que tengan […] aquellos que me conocen poco, acaso solamente de vista, y para quienes soy relativamente familiar, o no, relativamente borroso e inexistente” (102-103). Not only does he wonder in certain moments what type of identity he projects and how he is being !210 recognized or read, he also treats these moments as tests of his physical and social existence. When he waves at an ice-cream vendor and receives no response, he tries to deconstruct the impulse to greet those around him. On the surface, a wave might seem to function as an initial call to be read/recognized, but the narrator concludes that he does not wave to attract attention. Waving for him is an ambivalent gesture—he is not fully comfortable with absolute social invisibility, nor does he hope to be seen as native to any given place (“cosa imposible en cualquier lugar”); he merely hopes to be seen as superficially “normal,” manifestly unremarkable (95).

To seek recognition is to require that others behave, at least temporarily, as an audience for the performance of identity. Apart from minimal glances, waves, and utterances made to the other people in the park, the narrator’s only expression toward an audience are his one-sided conversations with the fish and turtles in an artificial lake and with the birds in an aviary. Yet it is in his address to the animals that we find another challenge to conventional identification and recognition. He speculates that the birds may have wanted him to expound on his species, gender, or nationality. However, he ultimately resists employing these conventional markers of identity, and restricts his comments to his experiences and impressions at the park. More importantly, through the animals (and referring to them as “gente”), he conceives of the type of audience that would facilitate anonymity over identity: “el público más real es cuando menos entiende, o sea, cuando blande su sordera, o por lo menos una resistencia, cuando señala nuestra !211 inutilidad, etc.” (98). The “realest” audience for him is that which opposes the traditional role of recognizer and in fact undermines communicability.

The narrative of Mis dos mundos is circular and meandering, so it is significant but not surprising that we find some of the clearest yearnings for anonymity and unrecognition at the beginning and at the end of the novel. Upon arriving to the park, the narrator wishes he could be “otro,” but not for the opportunity (or obligation) to formulate a new identity so much as the opportunity to exist in a state of general indeterminacy and unrecognizability:

ser otro significaba no tanto un nuevo comienzo o una nueva personalidad, sino más bien un nuevo mundo, o sea, que la realidad y todos los individuos perdieran o dejaran de lado su memoria y me admitieran como un miembro hasta entonces desconocido, recién llegado, o como alguien sin ostensibles ataduras con el pasado. (11)

Finally, near the end of the novel, the narrator sits in the park café and returns to the question of whether he can occupy public spaces without constantly proving and defining his presence. He considers himself a writer because that is a basic activity to which he dedicates a large portion of his time. Nevertheless, he experiences an increasing level of anxiety toward presenting himself or being recognized as a writer: “A eso se reducía la vida, podía decir, mientras me acercaba a un cumpleaños crucial: a no ser descubierto” (122). His paradoxical fear is that despite being an experienced and published writer, he might fail before an unforeseen demand to prove this identity, to show his notebook, to be read(able). It is, as always, an attempt at recognition that either reifies or dissolves an expressed identity. !212

He eventually realizes that inspiration and fulfillment come from simply being in public spaces, like cafés, and being neither recognized as a great writer, nor as a fraudulent one; his fulfillment comes from being an anonymous writer—creating while remaining perpetually undefined and undetermined. Echoing his wish from when he first entered the park, the narrator wants to act and engage with the world around him, but in a state of indeterminacy, without being diverted by identification: “Mi sueño, ser nadie, escritor de nuevo secreto, otra vez realizado…” (126). The publication of Mis dos mundos in 2008 coincided with (and contributed to) an increase in public recognition for

Chejfec himself as an author. As we have seen, the narrator shares a number of characteristics with Chejfec: the Argentine author turned fifty in 2006, and is also a child of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants. It is difficult to measure the autobiographical component of the novel, and when interviewed the author has denied a strong inclination toward either obscurity or fame (Trejo 12). Yet regardless of whether or not we read the narrator as a fictionalized version of the author, public recognition, whose historical allure has been its capacity to stabilize an identity in scope and duration, emerges in the novel as a constraint.6 We have seen that for an individual like the narrator, traditional ways of ordering space, history, and memory have broken down. Fame belongs to an ordering logic that has ceased to function.

In the last pages of the novel, the narrator finally elaborates on the titular “two worlds.” Specifically, they are: active engagement with the world and people around him, and silent, passive coexistence with his surroundings. These are not, he contends, !213 particularly separate, distinct, or measurable in terms of any relative value. Significantly, the harmony and lack of division between his inner existence and his outer existence does not correspond, as we have seen, to the formulation of a stable or coherent sense of self.

Instead, the consonance between the two existences emerges from an acceptance of the social and material conditions into which he was born, as well as his (albeit tentative) disavowal of identification and recognition: “al fin y al cabo debía plegarme a estas condiciones, porque así como uno no elige el momento en que va a nacer, también ignora los mundos variables que va a habitar” (128). The perceptive experiences of his wandering body and his wandering mind overlap and bleed into each other until distinguishing between the two becomes pointless. Although the narrator-protagonist has not altogether escaped the demand to express a stable identity, he is gradually discovering that only by remaining indeterminate and anonymous can he truly move and think freely.

Thus Mis dos mundos ultimately represents not a radical challenge to the identification process, but nonetheless an attempt at being before or outside of it, for an individual whose perspective is increasingly globalized, de-historicized, and digitized.

Los rubios: Decentering Self-Narration

In previous chapters, I have focused primarily on two fundamental and interwoven aspects of recognition: the acknowledgment of one’s presence and the acknowledgement of one’s (social) value. A consideration of disappeared persons demands not only a consideration of these two aspects, but also the incorporation of a !214 third: recognition as recollection. Although I have touched at various points on the relationship of recognition to memory and the construction of identity narratives, the ability to recognize—recall, recollect—a person from the past will be an especially vital issue when considering Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios. To be forgotten can be a particularly intractable form of anonymity. Perpetrators of disappearances attempt to undermine the possibility of recognition by denying victims their physical presence, which then leaves to survivors the burden of recognition’s other two strands— recollection and the attribution of social value.

Los rubios is a quasi-documentary film which ostensibly portrays a search for information about director Albertina Carri’s disappeared parents as well as the process of creating a film about that search. The work considers topics of identity, memory and, I will argue, various types of anonymity from the perspective of a generation that inherited the legacies of the Argentine dictatorship of 1978-1983.7 This, despite the younger generation’s having been too young to remember or actively participate in much of the conflict associated with that period. Because Carri’s parents (Ana María Caruso and

Roberto Carri) were relatively well-known activists, being recognized by her surname as a child of the disappeared has been a regular part of her social experience since the end of the dictatorship. Therefore, her relationship to recognition is somewhat unique but nonetheless instructive.

As Carri’s film highlights, for members of her generation the task of affirming the identities of the disappeared—not allowing them to succumb to the anonymity of being !215 forgotten—complicates the development of their own individual identities since such a process often involves coming to terms with traumatic and fragmentary family histories.

For Carri, there are always two identities in play: her own (her present) and that of her parents (and her past). Although the anonymity of oblivion is a concern that Carri’s film addresses, I believe it also points to another form of being anonymous or unrecognizable

—one that allows for identitary freedom and creativity without renouncing the work of memory.

In his essay “On Literary and Cultural Import-Substitution in the Third World:

The Case of the Testimonio,” Fredric Jameson elaborates a utopian conception of anonymity based on the rejection of bourgeois subjectivity, the latter being characterized by isolation, fragmentation, and a dependence on memory and linear temporality. In literary works, this type of subjectivity has developed primarily in the genres of autobiography and bildungsroman. Jameson puts forth the testimonial novel in contrast, as a genre that privileges space and ritual in the face of a traditional, Western notion of a

History as framed by a series of renowned individuals. In doing so, the testimonial novel,

Jameson argues, realizes a unique type of anonymity:

Anonymity here means not the loss of personal identity, of the proper name, but the multiplication of those things; not the faceless sociological average or sample or least common denominator, but the association of one individual with a host of other names and other concrete individuals. (185-186)

I do not propose to read Los rubios as a strictly testimonial work, nor does the film represent an entirely faithful example of Jameson’s idea.8 That being said, Jameson’s notion of anonymity can help us understand the potential of Carri’s particular approach to !216 identity. I refer not only to her treatment of personal and family history, but also to her dramatic attempts to multiply, blur, and decenter the site(s) of her enunciation as well as her own self-narrative. There are three elements of Carri’s film that provide the most insight for my analysis: 1) the use of Playmobil figurines to represent past events, including the abduction of the director’s parents; 2) the use of an actress (Analía

Couceyro) who plays the role of “Albertina Carri,” but who also appears on screen numerous times interacting with the actual Carri; 3) the use of blonde wigs by Couceyro,

Carri, and other members of the film crew in the final scenes of the movie.

On one level, Los rubios exposes the impossibility of assembling a cohesive, coherent history of the lives and deaths of Carri’s parents. The film’s critique of the search for and historicization of victims of the Argentine military dictatorship is valuable and by now well established by a growing number of analyses of the film.9 More than that, however, Carri’s film reveals as false the binary of either preserving or neglecting a faithful memory of her parents—parents whose disappearance simultaneously frames and fractures her own self-narrative. Her parents’ legacy does not consist of merely what they did and what was done to them; it also includes fantasies, “false” memories, and images of the couple that have social weight but no referents. Rather than try to define and clarify her family’s history, the film accentuates its fragmentation and ambiguity. In the process, the delineation of Carri’s individual identity blurs and expands. She thus cultivates a unique form of unrecognizability in which she does not abandon or forget previous identitary markers or histories. Instead, she multiplies and disperses them, !217 thereby creating a community—of rubios—capable of obscuring Carri’s individual presence and easing her representational burden by embodying elements of her irresolvable family history.

Identity and Disappearance

To eventually lose one’s individual identity—the recognition of one’s name, face, etc.—to oblivion is, on some level, a basic component of mortality and the finite nature of the human existence. Disappearance, as a strategy of State-sponsored oppression, attempts to turn oblivion into an acutely immediate threat, making resistance to it an act of political urgency. The end of the military dictatorship in 1983 did not remove that threat or urgency because officially tying each disappeared individual to his/her name and personal history would become a fraught, protracted undertaking.

When the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo first began to gather in front of the presidential palace in April of 1977, their main tactic for calling attention to their disappeared children was to hold up placards with their names and photographs along with the question: “¿dónde están?” (Wright 120). As their efforts grew and evolved over the following decades, they would be joined by other human rights and social justice organizations, drawing on a range of approaches to identify victims and bring together biographical information. At the core, the question remains of how to (re)assert the existence of victims even if their physical bodies would never be found. As Diana Taylor explains: !218

the confrontation between the Madres and the military centered on the physical and semantic location of the missing body. […] While the military attempted to make their victims invisible and anonymous by burying them in unmarked graves, dumping their bodies into the sea, or cutting them up and burning them in ovens, the Madres insisted that the disappeared had names and faces. (“Trapped” 199, my emphasis)

The efforts of the Madres and other groups often work toward multiple goals at once: 1) building cases to hold accountable those who committed acts of State terror; 2) locating surviving victims, the remains of diseased victims, and/or the children of victims; 3) creating a record of the victims, often that went beyond merely stating the circumstances of their torture and/or death. All three goals deal directly with the issue of anonymity, but in distinct ways. What is more, all three goals position anonymity as a danger or a failure. In fact, one could argue that once the junta was no longer in power, the concept of anonymity, far more than any individual or group, came to be viewed as the primary threat to victims, their families, and others working for social justice. We will see later, in my analysis of Los rubios, how Carri had to confront this generalized preoccupation with anonymity in her efforts to create an alternative mode of biographical narrative for her parents and herself. Carri’s experimentation with blurring and problematizing individual identification highlights a number of issues related to memory and representability. Instead of pursuing specificity and trying to verify concrete facts,

Carri questions whether, for some survivors and children of the disappeared (like herself), these are truly the most productive means of addressing an absence. Because Los rubios embraces ambiguity, doubt, and the fragmentation of biographical narratives, it makes sense that earlier analyses in particular felt this gesture was misguided.10 Carri does not !219 claim to speak for her entire generation, nor for all children of the disappeared. However, she expands the operative notion of anonymity to engage with identity in a way that is inclusive, affirming and even liberating, but not restorative. She thereby upsets the view that holds anonymity exclusively as an obstacle to post-dictatorship memory and narrative.

When the Argentine dictatorship ended, the democratically elected administration of Raúl Alfonsín quickly established a truth commission and initiated prosecutions of high-ranking members of the junta. In Brazil, in contrast, official, large-scale efforts like these would come more slowly or not until years after the first democratic elections

(Atencio 8-12). Nevertheless, the results of these actions in Argentina found mixed success, and in some cases were undermined by concessions (and later amnesty laws) for perpetrators; therefore a wide range of memory and transitional justice projects continue to this day (Wright 142-145). The testimony given to the National Commission on the

Disappearance of Persons purportedly contained 1,300 to 1,500 names of individuals who participated in torture and murder during the dictatorship; although many were tried in court, the full list of names was not made public with the 1984 release of of the

Commission’s report: Nunca más (Wright 145). Therefore, there was still the chance that many individuals who ordered or carried out torture and disappearances would be able to quietly reenter civil society.

Fictional works like Ni muerto has perdido tu nombre by Argentine Luís Gusman and “O condomínio” by Brazilian Luis Fernando Veríssimo explore the possibility of !220 reencounters between former torturers and victims in post-dictatorship civilian society.

For some on the political left as well as the right, adopting a new name and identity could be advantageous or necessary to live in the sociopolitical context of re-democratization, the implications of which recur from different perspectives in the texts mentioned above.

On one hand, reintegration into civilian society of perpetrators and victims has sometimes been framed as a necessary component of overcoming past conflict; amnesty laws in

Argentina and Brazil were intended, in part, to facilitate this transition.11 On the other hand, the erasure or recreation of a previous identity—by force or by choice— significantly complicates the realization of symbolic or juridical justice for victims of torture, murder, and disappearance.

In response, a group of children whose parents had been disappeared started Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olivido y el Silencio (H.I.J.O.S.). Founded in

1995, the group’s most notable activity has been escraches—a particular type of political protest in which activists gather, chant, put up signs, and/or paint graffiti at the home or workplace of known perpetrators of State terror (Wright 165). A key component is the exposure—to neighbors and the public at large—of the identity and biography of a perpetrator living with impunity. In other words, H.I.J.O.S. and similar groups combat the potential anonymity of perpetrators, who might otherwise go about their lives without general recognition of their past professions and crimes.

In 1986, the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo split into two main groups, one devoted to “keeping alive” the disappeared, and the other—Linea Fundadora—dedicated more to !221 bringing the perpetrators to justice (Taylor, “Trapped” 189). The latter group has aligned itself with H.I.J.O.S., who represent its symbolic (and sometimes literal) descendants, entrusted to continue its work (Wright 166). As Marguerite Bouvard points out, the

Madres also now “speak of giving multiple births” in reference to the young Argentines who have joined their marches and will carry on their legacy (183). The original congregation of mothers also spawned the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo, whose primary objective is to locate the children of victims, some of whom had even been adopted by members of the junta.

With respect to identity, Andre Graham-Yooll observes that the Abuelas “have established for themselves what might be considered a strange target: telling people who they are and showing the world that there are ways of clarifying a wide variety of problems inherent in identity” (50). For some, reconnecting living persons with names and family ties that they had unwittingly lost has been a noble endeavor with many successes, but it can also be profoundly traumatic. For children of the disappeared who have not considered the possibility of being adopted, telling them their origins is not a matter of simply clarifying or restoring their biographical narratives. It can also mean undoing the only family relationships they have ever known, delegitimizing part of their sense of self, and forcing them to wrestle with competing identities—biological and adopted—that correspond to the violent, still fraught relationship of perpetrator and victim.12 !222

Los rubios obliquely touches on the first two issues of post-dictatorship anonymity: the (re)identification of perpetrators and the (re)identification of stolen or adopted children. But the film’s predominant concern is the third: how to remember and record the lives of known victims. The use of photographs in protests or the compilation of personal names and histories in projects like Nunca más respond to the fear of forgetting or generalizing the victims of dictatorial oppression. Such actions implicitly preserve and affirm the human uniqueness of victims of violence, in particular of the disappeared. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo have refused to accept monetary compensation for the deaths of their children because it would imply giving up hope of finding their children alive, as well as symbolically obscuring the void of their missing children (Wright 158). In some cases, the constructed image of the disappeared stays incomplete, especially if visual and historical pieces must be drawn from material that was kept or altered by the dictatorial regime (Longini 49-50). Although often characterized as a resistance to oblivion (forgetting), the materiality of many memory projects opens room for debate and even controversy around the negotiated process of identitary representation.

Such is the case in Los rubios. By making use of Playmobil figurines, for instance, to represent moments from her youth and specifically her parents’ kidnapping,

Carri depicts a child-like perspective (perhaps her own). However, she also transforms that history into a form of play, in which the identities of the figurines are often ambiguous. This highlights two central currents of Los rubios: the extreme subjectivity !223 of memory and the degree to which those who write history shape its consumption through form and editing. Carri’s family history is neither clear nor stable—it can only ever be (re)told through approximations of real places, persons and events, according to the information and memories that are available. Moreover, the act of “playing” with her family’s history potentially serves to demystify it and loosen its grip on the present. Carri does not neglect or turn away from the traumatic narrative she inherited, but she does seize control of its expression and push back against conventional historicization.

In one crucial scene, Carri’s film crew receives a fax from the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA), from whom they have sought funding for the project. The fax suggests that they focus, with “un mayor rigor documental,” on the history of Carri’s parents in order to avoid what the INCAA sees as “el peligro de ficcionalizar la experiencia.” The INCAA speaks from the perspective of Carri’s parents’ generation, whereas Carri and her crew hope to show the perspective of their own generation. Says Carri (on screen, as director): “Ellos necesitan esa película. Yo entiendo que la necesitan, pero no es mi lugar hacerla. O no es, vamos, no tengo ganas de hacerla.” What the INCAA apparently expects is a project that adheres more closely to the conventional presentation of photographs and concrete biographical information— that is, remnants of the past—to write the history of the disappeared and, in that way, affirm their existence.13

To have made a documentary film that focused on only the most concrete facts of the lives of Carri’s parents would have been to adhere to paradigmatic strategies of !224 historicizing the identities of the disappeared (Longini 44). But it is interesting to note that demands for recognition of the disappeared had already undergone a progression toward more varied and abstract forms. In “Fotos y siluetas: dos estrategias contrastantes en la representación de los desaparecidos,” Ana Longini traces various approaches to representing the disappeared both during and after the dictatorship. These include: the display of photographs, silhouettes of bodies and hands, and blank masks. The earliest methods for representing the disappeared tended to be the most direct and literal. To display photographs and names was to show what had been lost, whereas to display silhouettes was to show what remained: an absence that was, paradoxically, nonetheless present. There exists a tension between: on the one hand, the assertion of specificity and individuality in the display of photos, names and personal details; and on the other hand, the assertion of generality, collectivity, and proxy-ism through the use of blank masks and silhouettes. The creation of silhouettes, Longini notes, began as an expression of the

(latter) impulse toward collectivity rather than specificity. Interestingly, however, an intertwining of the two impulses gradually emerged as many people inscribed unique details (sometimes including proper names) on the purposefully generalized form of the silhouette. Los rubios realizes a similar operation but in reverse. Instead of imbuing the indeterminate and anonymous form with particularity, Carri multiplies and gives a measure of indeterminacy to the particularity of being a “Carri.”

As Longini argues, such varied strategies “expresan énfasis y posiciones políticas distintas dentro de una misma lucha” (60). Carri, for her part, perceives disagreements !225 about how to represent an absence along generational lines. Although she does retain some direct memories of her parents’ abduction, Carri’s film primarily engages with

“postmemory”—the transmission of memory from one generation of victims of trauma to a subsequent generation that does not have direct experience or memory of that trauma.14

In Argentina’s specific post-dictatorial context, the distinction between memory and postmemory can be somewhat specious. There are, of course, still survivors from multiple generations able to give direct accounts of torture, oppression, and exile. Yet various groups, like the Madres and Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and H.I.J.O.S, have chosen to invest their names with an explicitly generational character.

The Madres and H.I.J.O.S. both interweave the biological (DNA evidence, photographs) with the performative (marches, escraches) so that the two complement and reinforce each other in what Diana Taylor calls “DNA of performance” (“You” 155-156).

Los rubios, which combines performative and biological elements from the perspective of a child of the disappeared, has naturally been compared to the efforts of H.I.J.O.S.

Beatriz Sarlo’s analysis of the film in Tiempo pasado contrasts the treatment of memory by Carri and H.I.J.O.S. and praises the latter for a desire to understand and represent the social and political image their parents hoped to leave behind. Sarlo characterizes these efforts using terms like reconstruction, restoration, and recuperation. Such a project, it should be said, is entirely valid inasmuch as there is no correct way to remember or honor what has been lost. Yet in this formulation, the child’s own identity is inevitably displaced by the parent’s. Gabriela Nouzeilles, in considering the role of postmemory in !226

Los rubios, raises the concern that “to many sons and daughters of the disappeared, inheritance means assuming a mimetic, derived identity” (266). The implicit expectation is that the child’s identity be developed beneath (and in service of) the parent’s; the success of the child’s efforts become measured by the relative completeness and coherence of the resulting expression of the parent’s identity. In response to this problematic, Carri’s film asks how memories and remnants of the past might be utilized not merely for identitary re-construction, but for the construction of an identity narrative that is not confined by what can be documented or verified as true.

As discussed in my previous analysis of Sergio Chejfec’s Mis dos mundos,

Giorgio Agamben attacks the State’s use of identification—recognition, qualification, categorization—of individuals as a basic tool of influence and control. This is, above all, a bureaucratic process, fundamentally based around the registration of markers of identity

(one’s face, proper name, birthdate, etc.). When a government—like the dictatorial regime of Argentina—removes individuals from official records or makes their proper inclusion impossible, it is acting according to the same bureaucratic logic in which the individual’s presence and value within society depend upon his/her identification

(Longini 49). Registries of victims and the accumulation of data in the post-dictatorship period also function according to this logic. Within a juridical context, where primary concerns may include the prosecution of human rights violations or the allocation of reparations, the (re)construction of official records is a practical necessity. Unlike many actions of H.I.J.O.S. or the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Carri’s project does not directly !227 participate in defining and realizing legal accountability. Los rubios engages with the social, affective meaning of being and being defined as a child of the disappeared.

Despite Carri’s choice to frame in generational terms how she represents her disappeared parents, it must be said that her situation is not necessarily the norm.

Children who have little information or recollection of their disappeared parents may value specificity and the discovery of details even if they turn out to be incomplete, ambiguous, or contradictory. In Los rubios, however, it is curious to see both Analía

Couceyro (the actress playing Carri) and Carri herself give blood onscreen to a forensic anthropologist who uses DNA evidence to help children of the disappeared, especially those who were adopted, to find information about their biological parents. As Verónica

Garibotto and Antonio Gómez point out, Carri’s familial identity is never in doubt and therefore her blood test, like that of her stand-in Coueceyro, can only serve a performative function. Submitting the blood sample highlights her parents’ physical

(corporeal) absence, but because of their physical absence, there is no DNA against which to make a match and (redundantly) establish Albertina’s familial identity (117).

Although Carri’s parents were disappeared, leaving behind a fractured and tangled family history, it is ultimately their/her recognizability rather than anonymity that complicates

Carri’s own sense of self. !228

Multiplication, Fragmentation, and Distortion

The use of representational layering and fragmentation may be the most fundamental characteristic of Los rubios. On a formal level, this includes: color as well as black-and-white footage; photographs; text displayed on a warping, waving background; extensive voiceover; sped up and looped tracking shots; stop-motion

Playmobil scenes; live interviews, staged interviews, and ostensibly off-camera footage of both; two distinct sets of film credits; and above all, numerous different representations of Carri herself. Clearly, many of these techniques can be characterized as Brechtian strategies of “alienation,” reminding the audience of the artist’s—and here also the rememberer’s—on-going negotiation of meaning, which is being done for and with the audience (Brecht 136-140). Additionally, distinct formal elements or styles are often applied in purposefully inconsistent ways. For instance, when Carri appears on screen as the film’s director, these scenes are often, but not always, shot in black-and- white; and while the Playmobil figurines generally occupy their own space, at one point two of them appear off of their toy set, superimposed on footage of a real-life country road near where Carri and her sisters lived after their parents’ abduction. Because of the nature of the personal and historical archives with which Carri is engaging, lacunas and inconsistencies are inevitable challenges. But as Joanna Page argues, Los rubios has disturbed some viewers and critics not for its willingness to fictionalize certain elements of the Carris’ story so much as for the director’s rejection of established conventions of historical narration. Instead of organizing fragments of the past in order to tell a story of !229 the past, Carri organizes them to relate the fissures and conflicts that persist in the present

(“Digital” 205). Los rubios suggests that a fragmented and sometimes confused history perhaps can only be told faithfully through a fragmented and sometimes confused narrative.

One scene featuring the Playmobil figurines deals explicitly with Carri’s conflicted relationship with her identity as the daughter of famous, disappeared parents.

It is worth first noting that the scene in question immediately follows the discussion of the INCAA letter and Carri’s contention that it is her parents’ generation (not her own) that needs a documentary which strives for informational order and accuracy. The film then cuts to a stop-motion animation sequence of a Playmobil figurine moving into a toy house and seeming to look out through a window. Next, the figurine moves outside and stands still as a succession of various hairpieces and hats (a cowboy hat, a top hot, a crown, a space helmet, etc.) appear on its head. At the same time, a voiceover read by the actress playing Carri explains:

Dice Régine Robin que la necesidad de construir la propia identidad se desata cuando ésta se ve amenazada, cuando no es posible la unicidad. En mi caso el estigma de la amenaza perdura desde aquellas épocas de terror y violencia, en las que decir mi apellido implicaba peligro y rechazo. Y hoy, decir mi apellido, en determinados círculos, todavía implica miradas extrañas: una mezcla de desconcierto y piedad.

On the one hand, it is precisely the uniqueness of Carri’s familial and historical identity that has proven constrictive or oppressive. On the other hand, although the identity established by her surname is, in a sense, unique, at the end of the film Carri does not seek to create the singular personal identity whose development has been problematized !230 by the historical weight of her surname. To the contrary, what she develops is a version of the type of anonymity elaborated by Fredric Jameson: the ability to speak from an identitary position that is unfixed and manifold. The fluid and multiple nature of Carri’s enunciative act does not merely entail the various, competing, fragmented tellings of her history. It also entails a gradual shift away from centered, individual subjecthood—not a loss of uniqueness, but rather its collectivization, portrayed most explicitly in the wearing of blonde wigs.

With respect to the image of Carri’s parents, explicit images of the couple never appear in the film.15 Carri has said in interviews that she did not want the audience to come away with a clear picture of her parents because to do so would be overly

“tranquilizador” (Carri, “Entrevista” 60). By depicting her parents’ absence or fragmentary presence, as opposed to her parents themselves, she obliges the viewer to experience some of the same frustration and uncertainty that has characterized her life as a child of the disappeared. The contrasting gesture of multiplying representations of herself and blurring the boundaries of her different roles, ultimately accomplishes something similar: the viewer cannot leave with a clear image of Albertina Carri either.

The most concrete portrayal of Carri’s parents is the simultaneously impersonal and intimate use of Playmobil figurines in the reenactments of family gatherings and, eventually, the parents’ abduction. More precisely, the figurines show ways in which

Carri remembers or imagines experiences from her childhood. As figurines stand in for the young Carri and her family, the actress—Analía Couceyro—frequently stands in for !231 the adult Carri. Couceyro’s main role is to enact how an adult Carri’s search for information about her parents might unfold. The proxies occupy central positions in the narrative of the film but simultaneously deemphasize the specific personal identities of the individuals that they represent. At no point can the audience trust that it is seeing a direct, exact representation or recreation of the past. Finally, Carri herself also appears on screen numerous times (usually in the role of director), reinforcing the fact that in Los rubios there are many Albertina Carris occupying the same representational space.

Couceyro’s introduction is purposefully jarring. It occurs more than seven minutes into the film, after both Couceyro and Carri have appeared on screen in previous scenes. After Couceyro has stated her name and defined herself as the actress playing

Carri, we see Couceyro standing still on a country road as the camera pans from right to left, giving the impression that she is advancing forward—that the ground beneath her is moving—without her lifting her feet. In broadly metaphorical terms, attempting to hold a position or perspective does not prevent time from continually pushing one forward, into the future. Yet Carri complicates the image further still. Two panning shots, one filmed from slightly closer to the actress than the other, are looped so that just as Couceyro leaves the frame on the right, she reappears on the left and passes across the frame again.

As dramatic string music plays in the background, we see Couceyro pass across the frame eighteen times. What began as the introduction of one proxy of Carri seems to become an assembly line of Carri proxies; what seemed to depict an inevitable forward momentum becomes circular, repetitive, an inescapable loop. !232

Finally, after the eighteenth Couceyro disappears off screen, the camera continues panning down the now empty road. The viewer instinctively expects Couceyro to appear again, and after a long pause, she does one final time. Repetition can be comforting as well as disconcerting, and this scene can be read from a number of angles. The break in the string of Couceyros provokes an uneasy sense of absence and doubt as to when and if the actress will reappear. At the same time, Carri’s redundant self-representations, at least at this early point in the film, literally lead back each time to where they started. The question will be whether a more kaleidoscopic identification process allows Carri to ease the weight of being recognized as a Carri and sharing her family’s tragic history.

In her examination of Los rubios, Beatriz Sarlo identifies anonymity as a crucial issue in the film, but she criticizes Carri for leaving nameless those friends and relatives of her parents who provide testimonies and anecdotes on screen: “La operación de doble afirmación de la identidad de Albertina Carri contrasta con el severo despojamiento del nombre de otros” (150). This is, for Sarlo, an act of “hostility.” Carri does juxtapose these testimonies in such a way as to highlight the intractable contradictions they present.

Yet are the accounts given by friends and family devalued by the absence of names?

Their relationships with Carri’s family are not obscured, nor are their voices or faces.

Their anonymity in the film only delegitimizes their perspectives to the extent that an individual’s name is treated as a prerequisite for legitimacy. Moreover, Carri’s strategies of self-multiplication and distortion (using the actress, Playmobil recreations, and eventually blonde wigs) in fact destabilize Carri’s self-representation, making it more !233 inclusive but also more nebulous. If Los rubios contains a fundamental hostility, it may be towards names themselves, or towards other such rigid markers of identity. As previously discussed, the discovery and preservation of names and personal information have contributed to valuable justice and memory projects. Yet part of Carri’s motivation for making the film is to potentially address the isolating privilege and burden inherent in communicating her family’s history.

Throughout the film, Couceyro (as a version of Carri) acts out the ultimately frustrated desire to find and assemble enough information about her parents to create a coherent image of them. At the same time, however, we see how the unsatisfying and interminable nature of the task drives her to seek a form of expression that operates within a different logic—one not based on traditional markers of identity and traditional narrative constructs. As observed above, we see no photographs or images of Carri’s parents, and the descriptions offered by friends and relatives are frequently contradictory.

Furthermore, over the course of the film the inflection point of Carri’s personal history— her parents’ abduction—does not progress from ambiguity and subjectivity toward objectivity. In fact, the reverse takes place; immediately before Couceyro’s introduction we see a white screen with lower-case black type. The words are slightly warped, but are nonetheless relatively legible and direct:

el 24 de febrero de 1977 ana maria caruso y roberto carri fueron secuestrados ese mismo año asesinados tuvieron 3 hijas andrea, paula y albertina !234

The use of the written word, official language, a black-and-white color scheme, and the full names of the two individuals recount her parents’ disappearance through conventional registers of objectivity and authority. The subsequent account of her parents’ abduction is provided by Couceyro playing Carri and relaying a more personal memory of being questioned and initially detained by the police. This version imbues the facts above with a degree of subjectivity while also projecting them through the filter of the actress and the process of constructing a film, the latter indicated by various cuts and interruptions in Couceyro’s monologue.

The abduction is described for a third time by a former neighbor who witnessed the arrest of Carri’s parents and identified the family to the police when they came looking for them. This scene maintains a generally documentary tone, with the camera focusing primarily on the former neighbor’s face, her family, and her home as she describes the events she witnessed. By seeing her face (in color) and hearing her account

—which includes her personal opinions and speculation regarding the Carri family, and what we learn is a mis-remembrance of their supposedly blonde hair—the film injects more complexity, subjectivity, and uncertainty into our understanding of the event. Carri has stated explicitly that the subjectivity of testimony and memory is one of the central issues explored in her film (Los rubios: cartografía 28). That being said, the neighbor’s telling of the abduction is still presented as an attempt, albeit problematic, at factuality.

Lastly, just before the neighbor concludes her account, Carri inserts a fourth version of her parents’ abduction. In this final instance, none of the individuals involved !235 are identified, and all of them are represented by Playmobil figurines.16 We see a toy car driving at night, soon being pursued by a flying toy spaceship—a classic UFO with flashing lights all around it. After the UFO lifts one of the car’s occupants we hear a scream and the ship descends again to grab the other toy person and fly away. In the version of the abduction told by Couceyro, we saw that Carri has memories of the actual abduction, so the largely fantastical Playmobil representation should not necessarily be read as a child’s conceptualization of what happened. Instead, I would argue that the

Playmobil version functions more as a metaphorical expression of the incomprehensible feeling of having one’s parents disappear(ed). In its contrast with the black-and-white text version, the Playmobil version does not forgo detail, but rather forgoes a particular type of detail—that which corresponds to official notions of identification and history: names, photographs, and a verifiable sequence of events.

Blonde Recognition: From Carri’s to Carris

After the toy spaceship leaves the scene, we see three small, blonde figurines— presumably Albertina Carri and her two sisters—shuffling around the toy luggage and other items left in the middle of the road. The film cuts from the toy abduction directly to the former neighbor, who identified the Carri family to the police as blondes, saying goodbye to the film crew. Next we see the film crew, including Carri, inside their car and visibly unnerved by the experience of interviewing the former neighbor. One member of the crew observes that he was distracted by thinking about Carri being present for the !236 interview as the neighbor described what had happened to Carri’s family, so he tried to pretend she was not there. What is curious is that, in a sense, she was not. Because she does not give her name and the neighbor (mis)remembers her as a blonde, Carri is essentially in disguise as herself. Her general dilemma, of course, is that the recognizability of her name and her parents’ history has often constrained or established in advance the ways that she can identify. It has also made it difficult in many situations for her to forgo identification. The utilization of blonde wigs toward the end of the film

—the opportunity they offer to not be immediately recognizable—represents a concrete and symbolic response to these issues.

The titular characteristic of blonde hair originates from the neighbor’s account of the Carri family’s abduction. According to her, the parents and children were all blondes.

Despite the fact that they all have dark hair, this trait ultimately serves as a symbol for being notable, easily recognizable, and an outsider (as well as evidence of the problematic fallibility and subjectivity of memory). Even if she has naturally dark hair,

Carri and her sisters have lived with the consequences of being identified as blondes. The gesture of donning a blonde wig challenges the initial, condemnatory meaning of blondness. Writes Carri:

si sobre el final de la película yo me pongo una peluca rubia es por varias razones: una es para construir mi propia identidad, no asumir el lugar que me dejaron de manera lineal, sino reinterpretarlo y convertirlo en algo propio aunque sea parte de la historia. Y también para festejar esa historia que heredé, aunque sea parte de una tragedia nacional. (Los rubios: cartografía 112) !237

In the past, blondness, like the surname Carri, imposed a traumatic, contradictory and irresolvable history upon Carri the individual, which in turn isolated and limited her own act of self-narration. However, at the end of the film, Carri finds a way to share and disperse that problematic characteristic, thus finding a measure of identitary freedom in unrecognizability. This gesture also reaffirms the inevitable presence (and potential value) of a broader archive of history and memory—not refuting the importance of facts and truth, but acknowledging the continuous influence of the ambiguous and erroneous.

Many critics have observed that hair color has historically also been a shorthand for class distinctions in Argentina (Sosa 75). While it is true that wearing a blonde wig does not resolve the Carri family’s ultimately unsuccessful integration into the working- class neighborhood where the police found them, it does not ignore the issue either. Carri does not paint her parents’ legacy as exemplary or heroic. Their faults and difficulties are interwoven into the blonde wigs as well. I believe it is also meaningful that in Los rubios wearing a blonde wig is not portrayed as an immediately natural act. Blonde wigs are first introduced in a scene in which Couceyro goes alone to a wig shop to try on a variety of styles. In subsequent scenes, Couceyro appears shifting and fussing with the wig, at one point straightening it in the side-mirror of a van. For Carri, being defined as blonde is uncomfortable in some ways, but it is also a characteristic that has profoundly shaped her current condition, and therefore a characteristic whose original falseness makes it no less central to her identity. !238

Over time, Couceyro (as Carri) becomes comfortable with her blondness and we see her walk down a city street wearing the wig; if someone were to see her, they might well assume that the blonde hair was her own. In another moment, while on screen

Couceyro is sitting in a park with the wig on, she declares in a voiceover that whereas survivors from her parents’ generation want to be protagonists of a history that does not belong to them, her generation is left “construyendo sus vidas desde imágenes insoportables.” To explore the limits and impossibilities of this construction makes Los rubios, as Joanna Page points out, an unusual type of “performative documentary”

(“Memory” 30). The film’s most notable performance, however, is not the depiction of fissures and contradictions in personal and familial narratives. Its most notable performance is the decentering and dispersion of blondness—the blonde wigs function simultaneously as a token of a traumatic past and a way to avoid individual recognition in the present.

Without the presence of her parents and without the participation in the film of her sisters, Carri engenders a new family that is defined by its position in and toward history. As Elizabeth Jelin has observed, the traditional family had a central role in the discourse of the military junta and in the discourse of the human rights movement that took place during and after the dictatorship (“Victims” 182-183).17 This context helps explain, perhaps, some of the objections or mischaracterizations of Los rubios by the

INCAA and critics like Sarlo. Carri explores her family’s history, but she also appropriates it, not to demand recognition of her particular loss, but rather to share the !239 experience of loss and how it complicated the ways she could identify and be recognized.

Instead of clarifying and defining her parents’ identity and the family history that frames her own identity, Carri incorporates specious and contradictory accounts into her biographical project and casts doubt over the nature (though not the existence) of those very identities. Carri’s project produces a new type of family, united by condition and empathy rather than lineage. Jelin asks:

Why did the historical process following the transition lead to [a] familialistic and victim-centered approach rather than to a perspective that could foster a wider form of citizenship and participation based on the principles of civil commitment and equality? (“Victims” 196)

Los rubios—the film as well as the wigs worn by Carri and her friends—sets forth one possible answer to the problematic posed by Jelin.

Carri’s experiences, as a victim of the dictatorship and as a filmmaker examining the legacies of the dictatorship, do comprise the vast majority of the material in Los rubios. Nevertheless, she does not emerge as a singular voice or representative of the new family of blondes that comes together near the end of the film. The sequence begins with the film crew rising early and putting on their blonde wigs before heading outside.

Next we see Couceyro in her wig, walking alone in the countryside away from the camera, as “Influencia” by Charly García plays in the background.18 The song itself refers ambiguously to the capacity to express oneself, the realization of one’s destiny, and the question of what exerts control over one’s being.19 Couceyro looks back toward the camera a few times but continues moving forward, the metaphorical character of which might seem clear were the scene to end there. Such an ending would conform, in other !240 words, to the type of individualized, victim-centered narrative described by Jelin. But in this case, the camera keeps rolling and we see five members of the film crew (including both Carri and Couceyro) come together, all still in their blonde wigs, to walk side-by- side into the countryside. In other words, Carri immediately undermines the final scene that the audience might have expected in a more conventional documentary film.

What takes place instead is an inversion of the paradigm of representativity: Carri does not represent the group—the group represents her. The other members of the group may not be children of disappeared parents, but they nevertheless take on, express, and literally wear some of the conflicted history of one of their generational cohort. Carri’s experiences and her historical uniqueness, symbolized by blondness, are dispersed among her peers in a way that deemphasizes her individuality. As blondes, anonymity for them is not negative or exclusionary, but rather affirmative and social.

Cecilia Sosa has proposed an insightful queer reading of the notion of family in

Los rubios, characterizing the non-biological family of blondes as “queer” in how it develops non-normative bonds and associations rather than attempting to reestablish traditional familial forms of association. I believe this argument can be taken be a step further, as the director attempts to explode not just what it means to be a Carri, a metaphorical blonde, or a descendant of the disappeared. The film’s conceptualization of how to narrate the self—against specificity, singularity, and cohesion—is strengthened, on one hand, by its engagement with concrete historical circumstances; but at the same time, the way in which Los rubios engages with the identification process itself can !241 resonate beyond the Argentine context. Carri’s treatment of herself as subject becomes not unlike the unique reflexive mode that Foucault identified in Pierre Klossowski’s writing:

the speaking subject scatters into voices that prompt one another, suggest one another, extinguish one another, replace one another—dispersing the act of writing and the writer into the distance of the simulacrum where it loses itself, breathes, and lives. (“Prose” 134)

What emerges is a reflexive mode that nevertheless moves away from singularity and confession and toward a kaleidoscopic plurality. The histories Carri depicts through her film do not and cannot form an integral narrative. Los rubios is, at its heart, an invitation

—an invitation to experience and contemplate the jumbled pieces of her family’s history, but also an invitation to appropriate and carry some of those pieces. As the community of rubios grows, Carri’s particular family history endures while Carri herself no longer must

(nor can) assert any exclusive claim to represent it. As the film crew walks off into the countryside, their blondness remains visible even as it becomes difficult to identify which of them is Carri.

***************

Mis dos mundos and Los rubios are particular explorations of what I have called

“desired anonymity”—choosing to be unrecognized or unrecognizable. They do not nihilistically question the value of existence or the self; they question how the value of both should be framed. In each work, competing influences make blurring or un-defining oneself an ambivalent and imperfect exercise. The two protagonists cannot entirely !242 escape the impulse or the expectation to identify oneself in a discrete, coherent way. In that sense, these two works acknowledge the extent to which individual identification still permeates many social interactions. Mis dos mundos and Los rubios do not offer idealized solutions. They do, however, insert themselves into specific twenty-first century contexts and invert the process of identification.

Both works approach recognition as a dilemma wherein names are destabilizing and biographical memory is confounding. The protagonists of these works, instead of trying to define themselves with more clarity and singularity, lay out their efforts to do the opposite. In Mis dos mundos, the protagonist uses wandering and writing to loose the constraints of name, profession, and personal history until he achieves the freedom of a fluid, identitary limbo. In Los rubios, Carri opens her personal narrative and that of her family to include not only hard facts and testimony, but also ambiguity and mis- remembrances. She makes herself harder to single out; however, she does not erase or forget aspects of her and her family’s history. On the contrary, she multiplies and disseminates them so that she is not obliged to represent them alone. Thus these works imagine modes of experience and expression in which one is neither simply oneself nor

Other—one is, undefinably. !243

CONCLUSION

In recent years, major cities in both Brazil and Argentina have witnessed a number of large and highly visible protests. In Brazil, the Movimento Passe Livre and

World Cup protests of 2013 and 2014 gradually grew to include denunciations of broader concerns, like government corruption and police brutality. In 2016, Operação Lava Jato and other investigations into wide-spread political corruption and embezzlement in Brazil have sparked more massive public protests. Beyond concern about corruption and the handling of the investigations, many rallies have centered on the question of whether to impeach the sitting president Dilma Rousseff and whether to prosecute her predecessor

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In Argentina, hundreds of piquetes have questioned the detention of indigenous leader Milagro Sala and various economic reforms initiated by

Argentine President Mauricio Macri since he took office at the end of 2015. In two countries whose histories are marked by notable moments of public protest and resistance,1 the evolution of twenty-first century protests has raised numerous key issues.

These include the degree to which individuals still manifest their presence physically on the street, in comparison to (and sometimes coordinated with) speech and action online, as well as the degree to which ideas should be tied to clearly defined groups or leaders.

Nowadays, the term “anonymous” increasingly calls to mind the online

“hacktivist” collective that grew out of the melange of forums on 4chan.org in the early !244

2000s, with localized groups sprouting up and joining protest movements around the world (McDonald). In 2008, Anonymous’ activities expanded beyond online pranks and vandalism, which had characterized a fair amount of its early forays into the public sphere, and into collective political actions (Stryker 49-70). Despite its still predominantly digital character, it no longer makes sense to think of what Anonymous does—nor what anyone does online—as divorced from the physical world. Many street and online protests exercise their potency through the disruption of everyday activities, like driving or banking.2 Governments in Argentina as well as Brazil have responded to recent protests by trying to limit rights of free assembly and expression. Macri’s Ministry of Safety authorized police to break up protests if they are considered to be obstructing the free flow of traffic, in addition to arresting and prosecuting protesters who fail to disperse (Obarrio). In Brazil, laws have been proposed to classify as terrorism the disruption of traffic or public services (Carvalho), and various provinces have passed laws prohibiting wearing masks during protests (Farias; Breda; Dióz).

The Guy Fawkes mask that serves as Anonymous’ main emblem is now a regular sight at many protests, alongside scarves and ski masks worn by anarchist-leaning groups like black blocs, a major presence in the Brazilian protests. Paulo Gerbaudo notes that

“protest avatars,” like the Guy Fawkes mask, “have emerged as visual representations of empty signifiers, which emphasize inclusivity and unity” (922). The masks and scarves worn by black bloc members to hide their faces help them avoid identification by law enforcement when breaking the law, but they also force the media spotlight they attract to !245 focus on reading their performative violence instead of their identities (Locatelli and

Vieira).3 It remains to be seen to what extent Brazil’s anti-mask laws prevent or alter the ability of individuals to remain anonymous while undertaking social and political action.4

The novels and films analyzed in this dissertation do not represent political protest movements specifically. Yet basic, quotidian (even banal) questions of identification and recognition can surface in manifold and unforeseen ways, including within more politicized moments like the Brazilian transportation protests of 2013 or the escraches of the Argentine group H.I.J.O.S. How distinguishable should one’s clothes or hair be when participating in a protest? Should they be different when traveling to and from a protest?

What type of identification should one carry or not carry? What are the advantages and disadvantages of revealing or concealing an identification in any given moment? And above all, how much control can the individual truly have over those moments?

Looking forward, the internet is rapidly transforming the nature of identity and recognition. Control over moments of identification can play out online in highly technological ways, as in the use of anonymizing Tor software or the creation of

“anonymity networks.”5 However, moments of online identification are still profoundly shaped by official and unofficial societal norms. To discuss “control” over identity in twenty-first century society is not to ignore the conflictive, fluid, and ephemeral quality of the identification process. Rather, this discussion should seek to understand the evolving terms by which identification of any kind can take place. With respect to the identification of individual actors, how can societies balance the right to privacy with the !246 realization of justice? Who can and should regulate identitary expression online or in the street? If one wishes to express, obscure, or alter an identity of some kind, we must consider what restrictions citizens should accept from the State, but also what restrictions are imposed by social norms and expectations.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the United States’

National Security Agency (NSA) had been collecting—largely clandestinely—vast amounts of telephone and internet communication data from US citizens as well as many foreign officials and governments. Among them was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who made various speeches concerning the importance of online privacy and prioritized

Brazil’s “Marco Civil da Internet” (Lei no 12.965)—a law originally proposed in 2009, with the intent of ensuring net neutrality, freedom of speech online, and the right to online privacy. A version of the law was passed in 2014, but the implementation and preservation of its original intent have been somewhat vexed (Muggah and Thompson).

With that said, internet use does not merely relate to the technological and legal infrastructure that a society creates. When we think about internet access, security, and privacy, Ian Clark suggests: “the ‘digital divide’ should not be considered purely in terms of access, it also needs to be understood in terms of skills—the divide between those who can exploit the internet to their advantage, and those that cannot” (1). Among the most fundamental of such skills is the management of online identity.

As David Lyon points out in Surveillance After Snowden, among the most scandalous and disturbing revelations of the Snowden leak was the extent to which !247 cooperation from private-sector phone and internet companies enabled the NSA to access data and communications from private individuals (100-101). This discovery prompted, at least in part, subsequent efforts by Rousseff to require that servers storing personal data of Brazilian citizens be housed on Brazilian soil (Abdenur and Pereira da Silva Gama

467). The internet offers, on the one hand, more possibilities than ever to be anonymous,

(re)invent identities, express ideas, and explore new forms of social interaction.

Simultaneously, the gradual accumulation of personal information online—inevitable to some degree in developed, twenty-first century societies—can make it nearly impossible to truly reinvent oneself or ever have a “clean slate.”6 In Brazil, this tension is already playing out in a unique way because Article 5, Section IV of the Constitution of 1998 states: “é livre a manifestação do pensamento, sendo vedado o anonimato.” In other words, in Brazil the link between self-identification and the legitimacy of self-expression is not merely socialized but also written into the fundamental law of the land. Some legal scholars have argued that Article 5 makes unconstitutional various privacy protections that the “Marco Civil da Internet” tries to establish. The argument for legally denying anonymity tends to focus on the ability of law enforcement to identify those who would commit libel or other criminal activities online (da Costa Santos, et al.).

The refusal to make oneself identifiable according to traditional markers of identity—as with a name or face—is itself a disruptive act whose significance continues to provoke fierce debate. For those who oppose anonymity, the ability of the community or the law to identify individuals and hold them responsible for criminal acts is regarded !248 as essential to the protection of a citizenry and the space it inhabits. At the same time, the demand to identify oneself according to prescribed indices or narratives can also be seen as a form of violence against the individual’s freedom to dissolve, reformulate, or even play with how and when they present themselves to others. The implication that hiding one’s face or name undermines the validity of one’s words or actions is still common in dramatic confrontations and banal, everyday exchanges. Thus the desire to be recognized

—to give an expression of oneself and have it acknowledged, understood, and appreciated—continues to play a structural role in many social interactions, both big and small. Yet it is not enough to simply understand how problematic is the unending process of self-narration (and self-abbreviation) inherent in trying to answer the question: who are you? We should consider the ways in which anticipating, answering, or evading that question determines the limits of social interaction.

The identification process can undoubtedly be beneficial as a means of self- exploration and discovery. But as a pre-requisite for social interactions and associations, as it so often is, we must interrogate the value placed on “being recognized.” How might we allow—in concrete, quotidian terms—for interactions and relationships that forgo the demand to name and narrate the self? In Chapters 1-3, I have endeavored to highlight the need for such a possibility. Specifically, we saw crises of familial and community recognition in Fernando Bonassi’s Subúrbio and Guillermo Saccomanno’s El oficinista, and the fraught challenge of achieving celebrity in Alejandro López’s La asesina de Lady

Di and Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s O anônimo célebre. In Ônibus 174 and Última !249 parada 174 we saw the disruptive power of creating spontaneous, public visibility by a previously marginalized individual, as well as the problematic impulse to reestablish social order and reintegrate the individual into conventional, non-threatening narratives.

In Chapter 4, I explored two attempts to resist conventional narratives of the self and realize desired anonymity. Sergio Chejfec’s Mis dos mundos imagines the fluid, individual freedom of wandering through spaces and across borders without a fixed identity. Albertina Carri’s Los rubios responds to the irreconcilable contradictions and lacunas in post-dictatorship memory and personal history by forging a community that is neither composed of nor restricted by coherent, conventional, individual narratives.

These works illustrate the potential value of questioning or forgoing recognition, yet they are by no means the only or definitive representations of anonymity in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian society. Issues of identification that are surfacing once again in the streets and online suggest there will and must be many other affirmative, productive avenues for unrecognizability—for being present, being heard, and being acknowledged, even as not oneself. !250

NOTES

Introduction

1. For a brief comparison of hybridity, mestizaje, and transculturation, see “Memory as Cultural Practice” by Diana Taylor.

2. According to 2010 census data, 92% of Argentina’s population now lives in urban areas (Soriano), and the urban population of Brazil is now 84% (“População”).

3. Although I do not undertake a specifically queer reading of the works included in this dissertation, it should be noted that scholars in the field of queer (and feminist) studies have also interrogated many fundamental norms and categories of identification. See Butler or Ahmed, for example.

4. Honneth primarily bases his work on the social aspect of Hegel’s earlier, Jena writings. He contends that in Hegel’s later work, including the master-slave dialectic, “social and political forms of human interaction now represent mere transitional stages in the process of the consciousness-formation that produces the three media [art, religion, and science] of Spirit’s self-knowledge” (32). By shifting focus back to the formation of a social identity, Honneth applies Hegel’s initial insight into the human need for recognition (and not merely self-preservation, as proposed by Hobbes and Machiavelli) to twentieth century, “post-metaphysical” thought. George Herbert Mead’s empirical work on social psychology is also a central component of Honneth’s project.

5. In Argentina, the dichotomy of civilización and barbarie, first outlined in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo, casts its shadow over virtually any rural-urban comparison.

6. See Baudrillard or Agamben, for instance. !251

______Notes to pages 13-20

7. This problem may recall the subaltern perspective as well. However, with the exception of the protagonist analyzed in Chapter 3 (Sandro do Nascimento), the individuals featured in this study cannot be characterized as subaltern. Their sense of unrecognition is one of psycho-social experience and perception, as opposed to the type of structurally-imposed social exclusion associated with subalternity. In terms of the distinct expressions of identity that emerge, John Beverley’s interpretation of testimonio is instructive: “Testimonio represents an affirmation of the individual subject, even of individual growth and transformation, but in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle. If it loses this connection, it ceases to be testimonio and becomes autobiography, that is, an account of, and also a means of access to, middle- or upper-class status, a sort of documentary bildungsroman” (41).

8. One could raise various other topics related to anonymity that, despite dealing with some of the same concerns, fall outside the scope of the present analysis of literary and cinematic representation. See, for example, Matt Carlson’s On the Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism.

9. See, for instance, Luiz Ruffato’s Eles eram muitos cavalos.

Chapter 1: Toxic Bonds

1. It bears noting that the internet is absent from both novels analyzed in this chapter. Subúrbio, published in 1994, could not have anticipated the transformations of social interactions wrought by the internet over the next 20 years. That being said, the two main characters of Subúrbio (o velho and a menina), because of their socioeconomic precariousness and respective ages, would be among those members of society least likely to have regular access to the internet or be well versed in its social potential. Even that distinction will surely continue to dissolve in the coming decades as internet access and literacy become more fundamental to all societies. However, online interaction has not supplanted or erased face-to-face relationships, but rather become interwoven into them. In the case of El oficinista, the dystopian city where the plot unfolds appears to be technologically advanced in some ways, but retrograde in others. The protagonist’s office contains computers, but there is no mention of a network like the internet. !252

______Notes to page 21

2. I have chosen to keep the Portuguese word subúrbio rather than use the English term “suburb” because of their distinct connotations. Both correspond to communities located on the periphery of an urban center. However, in Brazil (and much of Latin America), subúrbio connotes a poor or working-class neighborhood whose residents usually cannot afford to live within the city proper. The North American “suburb” describes a middle-class or wealthy community whose residents have specifically chosen to live outside the city proper, often in pursuit of more space or security. In other words, a “suburb” rarely lacks for socioeconomic opportunity, transportation, or municipal services, whereas subúrbio generally connotes a certain amount of spatial, institutional, and socioeconomic marginalization.

3. As David Harvey explains in A Brief History of Neoliberalism: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (2).

4. In the 2000s, the presidencies of Nestor and Kristina Kirchner in Argentina and of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil endeavored to reverse many of the neoliberal policies of their predecessors in order to restore and expand social services, education, healthcare, and workers rights. Despite progress in many areas, income stratification remains an issue in both countries (OECD 52). In terms of the quotidian urban experience, governmental policy shifts did not forestall various forces of social and socioeconomic segregation (in Argentina, see: Sarlo “Cultural Landscapes”; in Brazil, see: Caldeira 213-215), nor the fortification of many private dwellings, economic institutions, and governmental institutions (in Argentina, see Chronopoulos; in Brazil, see Caldeira 199-200).

5. Regarding perceptions of crime and police violence in Buenos Aires, see Auyero and Lara. Regarding the fear of crime in Brazil, see “Chapter 2: Crisis, Criminals and the Spread of Evil” in Teresa Caldeira’s City of Walls. Finally, as the large-scale protests of 2013 highlighted once again, police violence in Brazil is a concern of extreme immediacy and scope. I will touch on this topic in my discussion of the bus 174 incident (Chapter 3). As we will see in Bonassi’s Subúrbio, however, day-to-day life is still frequently impacted by the conspicuous presence or absence of the police. !253

______Notes to pages 25-62

6. For more about DaMatta’s concepts of pessoa and indivíduo, see the introduction to this dissertation.

7. The plot of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” also springs from the narrator’s voyeuristic impulse.

8. See, for example, Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and “Sociology of the Senses.”

9. My use of the terms “private sphere” and “public sphere” is distinct in some respects from that of Jürgen Habermas. By “private sphere," I refer primarily to the domestic space and relationships associated with it (family and close friends). By “public sphere,” I refer primarily to the workplace (especially the office) and public spaces like streets, plazas, subways, etc. While the workplace and public spaces are partially regulated by the State, they are also shaped by various other forces. This more inclusive use of “public sphere” is not meant to ignore these distinctions, but rather to place the spheres of workplace and public space in contrast to the domestic sphere. The function of the workplace and public space within the protagonist’s pursuit of intimate recognition will be explored later in this chapter.

10. The emergence of such a condition in literature is perhaps most commonly associated with works by Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire (and their subsequent analysis by Walter Benjamin). For a more in-depth analysis, see Elizabeth S. Goodstein’s Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity.

11. According to the OECD: “Although real income growth in Argentina and Brazil largely benefitted the lowest and middle incomes during the past decade, the top quintile still accounted for about 55% of total income in the mid-2000s in Argentina and 60% in Brazil” (52). !254

______Notes to pages 83-84

Chapter 2: A Celebrity of One’s Own

1. Eva Duarte de Perón was born in rural Argentina and as a teenager moved to Buenos Aires, where she worked as a model and actress before eventually marrying the future president Juan Perón, and becoming a widely beloved advocate for women, the poor, and the working class in Argentina. During the 1930s and 1940s her physical appearance and her rise to fame came to function as proxies for debates over national and female identities. Sanctified by many, yet still reviled by some, “Evita” appeared frequently in photographs and on the radio. She also spoke openly about developing a persona that would suit her relationship with the public. Her untimely death in 1952 did not diminish her presence in social and political discourse. For more information see Paola Cortés Rocca and Martín Kohan’s Imágenes de vida, relatos de muerte: Eva Perón: cuerpo y política.

2. Carmen Miranda was a singer, stage performer, and film actress who achieved enormous celebrity in Brazil and later internationally in the 1930s and 1940s. Originally born in Portugal, Miranda’s family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was an infant. Appearing first at festivals and on the radio, Miranda’s popularity peaked in Brazil with films like Alô, Alô Brasil, Estudantes, and Alô, Alô Carnaval. However, after she began starring in Hollywood films (like Down Argentine Way and That Night in Rio), Latin American audiences largely soured on her, criticizing the stylized and generic (i.e. inauthentic) “Latin” image that she presented for consumption in international markets. For more information see Tânia da Costa Garcia’s O “it verde e amarelo” de Carmen Miranda (1930-1946).

3. Both Perón’s and Miranda’s images now tend to be viewed with more nuance and complexity than during their lives, but without a doubt neither could have achieved the same sociocultural impact without having taken advantage of the visibility that a range of new mass media provided.

4. Without negating the power over production that studios, stars, and agents still maintain, this breakdown of traditional barriers between the fictional and the real, as well as the democratization of authorship, might be read as realizing the challenge to the hermetic conception of fictional works, as put forth by Macedonio Fernández, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel de Unamuno, among others. !255

______Notes to pages 85-93

5. Cortázar’s story was published twelve years after La traición de Rita Hayworth, but the exact period in which “Queremos tanto a Glenda” takes place is left somewhat vague. The cinematic references in A hora da estrela, meanwhile, place its narrative in the 1940s or 1950s. Regardless, Macabéa’s view of movie stars, like Toto’s, is one of extreme distance and veneration.

6. See Guedes-Bailey and Barbosa on Brazil; see Vialey, et al. on Argentina.

7. In 2010, the governments of both began major initiatives (O Plano Nacional de Banda Larga in Brazil and El Plan Nacional de Telecomunicaciones “Argentina Conectada” in Argentina) dedicated to expanding broadband and satellite internet infrastructure and increasing internet access and interconnectivity over the subsequent five years.

8. Porto’s description of telenovela viewing as a “mass ceremony” makes use of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities”: cultural digestion that enables shared ideas of collective identity to develop among a large number of people who do not communicate directly or who do not know each other.

9. Latin American filmmakers, it should be said, have not forsaken contemporary and local issues, but even the most successful movies do not become a regular presence in the lives of viewers in the way that television programs can.

10. Caldeira’s comments refer specifically to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the periferia of São Paulo, but the same observations can and have been made in reference to poor neighborhoods of other Latin American cities, including the villas miseria of Buenos Aires (Sarlo, Escenas 109).

11. The prevalence of the biographical is not limited to television programs, and although Herschmann and Pereira concentrate their analysis on Brazilian cultural production, other critics have identified similar trends in works from other parts of Latin America (see Arfuch; Klinger). The question of how central the (auto)biographical imperative is today in comparison to previous eras is not one I wish to take up here. As the primary focus of this chapter (and this dissertation as a whole) is the most recent three decades in Brazil and Argentina, suffice it to say that during this period employment of the biographical mode has definitely not waned. !256

______Notes to pages 97-112

12. Some of these changes relate to format: the appearance of online audiovisual content sites (like YouTube) and the already mentioned growth of domestic programming that incorporates the audience (as contestants, voters, commenters via social media, etc.). Other changes relate to technological usage: for example, as of 2013, Brazil had over 70 million Facebook users while Argentina had over 20 million (“Facebook Statistics”). Brazil and Argentina are both among the top ten countries with the highest percentage of Twitter users: approximately 10% and 15% respectively (Benzinga).

13. The Argentine “Ley de Medios” (La Ley 26.522 de Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual) was created in 2009 by the administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in an effort to demonopolize the production and distribution of radio and television content. The administration of Mauricio Macri, elected in 2015, has taken steps to deregulate media industries and accused Fernández de Kirchner of using the “Ley de Medios” as a tool to suppress negative media coverage (Smink). The legal structures determining the extent to which a conglomerate like Clarín is permitted to dominate the media industry will no doubt continue to evolve in the years to come. As of now, Brazil has not placed such restrictions on media conglomerates, although Rede Globo’s cultural and political influence has been a subject of debate and criticism for decades (Porto).

14. This chapter is focused predominantly on the possibility of becoming famous—transforming from anonymous audience member into recognized celebrity. Extreme social exclusion, invisibility, or voicelessness are vital but distinct issues, which I examine in Chapter 3. The characters analyzed in the present chapter vary in terms of their expressive capacity, but only Lispector’s Macabéa could possibly be thought of as marginalized or subaltern.

15. In Chapter 1, I explore in depth the notion of using an intimate relationship to engender a new, more appreciable identity.

16. This characterization may or may not be intended to evoke Marc Augé’s notion of “non-place.” Regardless, the protagonist shares with Augé’s non-places a de- emphasis and/or dissolution of traditional social bonds (i.e. stable, prolonged, person-to- person interaction). !257

______Notes to pages 116-152

17. Philippe Lejeune’s concept of the “autobiographical pact,” for example, does not fit the protagonist’s project on account of the instability of his name and his difficulty in having it recognized by an audience. Lejeune is also concerned with framing autobiography as a genre that is distinct from memoir, autobiographical novels, and the like, whereas the protagonist’s self-narration is a stylistic amalgam and purposefully unclassifiable.

18. “Éxito” is a brand of notebook common in Argentina. In Esperanza’s case, however, “éxito”—especially public glory— is also the goal toward which she employs her notebook.

19. In Chapter 4, I consider a distinct conception of anonymous community in Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios.

Chapter 3: Re-presenting Facelessness

1. Padilha is best known for the action crime films Tropa de Elite (2007) and Tropa de Elite 2: O inimigo agora é outro (2010).

2. Barreto’s O que é isso, companheiro? (1997) is a semi-fictionalized depiction of the 1969 kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, carried out by the revolutionary student organization MR-8 (Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro). The title and general plot were taken from Fernando Gabeira’s 1979 memoir.

3. In Ônibus 174, Padilha uses a few scenes from João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund’s documentary Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (1999). Padilha also interviews Captain Pimentel, a police training officer who appeared in Notícias de uma Guerra Particular. Salles and Lund’s film deals with similar issues of socioeconomic marginalization, police violence, and the prison system in Brazil.

4. It also should be noted that word “marginal” has been taken up by various artistic movements that have attempted to appropriate the term’s transgressive character or challenge its pejorative character. See, for example, Charles A. Perrone on “poesia marginal” of the 1970s (117-148) or Leila Lehnen on twenty-first century “literatura marginal” (159-192).

5. For more discussion of mediated image construction, see Chapter 2. !258

______Notes to pages 176-207

6. I am working from the general definition of Bildungsroman elaborated by Marianne Hirsch in “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions.”

7. For a discussion of Globo Filmes’ entrance into the motion picture market and investment in films with sometimes problematic depictions of favelas and their inhabitants, see Cacilda Rêgo’s “Brazilian Cinema since 1990.”

8. The traditional conception of the malandro is, as Rocha puts it: “homem de muitas faces e discursos, cujo gingado compete com sua habilidade em tirar vantagem nas mais diversas, e adversas, situações. Esse modo especial de negociar diferenças permite a coexistência de diversos códigos dentro do mesmo espaço social, evitando— dessa maneira—o surgimento de conflitos sociais ou, pelo menos, tornando-os mais prontamente controláveis” (159).

Chapter 4: Not Oneself

1. Although in some respects the text’s narrative mode is similar to an interior monologue or stream-of-consciousness style, it often takes on an analytical and expository tone that makes it difficult to classify in a single way.

2. See Chapter 1 for further discussion of this more mysterious, pitiable, and potentially dangerous figure, first described in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd.”

3. The works that I examine in Chapters 1-3 feature individuals who, despite being anonymous, still desire to gain recognition and therefore attempt to achieve some type of visibility, fame, or close, personal bond within their respective contexts. Regardless of the outcome of these attempts, they are still rooted in a fundamental belief in the act of self-narration and the creation of a socially coherent identity.

4. For an analysis Saccomanno’s El oficinista, see Chapter 1; for an analysis of Brandão’s O anônimo célebre, see Chapter 2.

5. See, for example, Louis Althusser's conceptualization of “ideological state apparatuses” in On the Reproduction of Capitalism, or Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of “societies of control” in “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” !259

______Notes to pages 212-221

6. See Chapter 2 for my analysis of fame as it relates specifically to anonymity and recognition. For a history of fame as a concept, see Leo Braudy’s The Frenzy of Renown.

7. The military junta was officially known as “El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional.” Figures for the number of individuals killed or “disappeared” vary depending on the source, but most estimate the total to be at least 8,000 and as high as 30,000 (Calvo).

8. His idea relates primarily to the identitary possibilities of peoples in a condition of subalternity, and Carri does not share this condition.

9. See, for example, analyses by Aguilar; Noriega; Nouzeilles.

10. See Kohan; Sarlo; or the INCAA letter that Carri reads aloud in the film.

11. In Argentina, the “Ley de punto final” (Ley no 23492) of 1986 and the “Ley de obediencia debida” (Ley no 23521) of 1987, following the “Juicio a las Juntas,” brought a legal end to official investigations and prosecutions of individuals accused of committing political crimes and crimes against humanity in the periods immediately before and during the dictatorship. In 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court ruled both laws unconstitutional, allowing for individuals to once again be investigated and tried. In Brazil, the “Lei da anistia” (Lei no 6.683) of 1979 remains in effect but various national and international efforts have nevertheless opened the door for individuals to once again face prosecution (Atencio 18-19).

12. The Oscar-winning film La historia oficial (1986) brought international attention to identitary issues surrounding adopted children of the disappeared. More recently, the case of Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, the adopted children of Ernestia Herrera de Noble, who owns the multimedia empire Grupo Clarín, refused for years to submit DNA samples to determine whether their biological parents had been victims of the military dictatorship. In 2011, a court ruling ordered a compulsory collection of DNA to be tested against samples from a database of victims’ DNA created by the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo. After various court cases disputing the legal right of individuals to refuse testing and the State’s power to demand testing, the samples were found not to match those of any victims in the Abuelas’ database. However, because the database is incomplete (and continually growing), many consider the case to still be unresolved (“Polémico”). !260

______Notes to pages 223-239

13. The films final credits reveal that Los rubios did eventually receive financial support from the INCAA, among others. Nevertheless, Carri’s decision to incorporate the letter into the onscreen narrative of the film’s production indicates her desire to engage more generally with the type of perspective expressed in the letter.

14. See Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory for the development of the concept of postmemory. For more in-depth analyses of postmemory in relation to Los rubios, see Beatriz Sarlo’s Tiempo passado or Joanna Page’s “Memory and mediation in Los rubios: a contemporary perspective on the Argentine dictatorship.”

15. The only photographs whose images are distinguishable show children who one might assume are Carri and/or her relatives, but the film never explicitly identifies them. The names of adult friends and relatives who give testimonies about Carri’s family are likewise excluded.

16. In addition to using toys to depict an event as serious as the abduction of her parents, the generic nature of Playmobil figurines specifically makes it difficult to distinguish between “good guys” and “bad guys.” This use of Playmobil figurines has been a source of consternation for some, most notably Martín Kohan, who expresses concern about a potential depoliticization or frivolization of history (29). Carri, in an interview with Gustavo Noriega, questions why Playmobils should be seen as simply “frivolous” and not “political,” and cites Alan Pauls’ suggestion that the film politicizes the frivolous (59). I believe that although the Playmobil version of the abduction could be problematic in a vacuum, it is significantly presented as neither the only nor the definitive version. The different possible ways that I have highlighted of seeing and expressing the abduction enrich and disturb one another. However, the choice to juxtapose them all is undoubtedly a challenge to the politics of historicization.

17. According to Jelin: “The private family link to the victim became the basic justification and legitimacy for public action” (“Victims” 183).

18. The Argentine singer-songwriter and rock musician Charly García became a major cultural figure during the military dictatorship in part because of his talent for incorporating coded political dissidence and criticism into his songs. For further discussion, see Mara Favoretto’s “Charly García’s allegories as counter-discourse.” !261

______Notes to pages 239-247

19. The song begins: “Puedo ver y decir / puedo ver y decir y sentir / algo ha cambiado / para mí no es extraño. / Yo no voy a correr, / yo no voy a correr ni a escapar / de mi destino. / Yo no pienso en peligro. / Si fue hecho para mí, / lo tengo que saber. / Pero es muy difícil ver / si algo controla mi ser.”

Conclusion

1. In Argentina, for instance, we can look at the protest actions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo and H.I.J.O.S. (discussed in Chapter 4), or those responding to the 2001 economic crisis, in which “¡Que se vayan todos!” became a rallying cry against representatives and officials (including then-President Fernando de la Rúa) who had failed to adequately address deteriorating economic conditions. In Brazil, protest marches in 1968, like the Passeata dos Cem Mil, denounced the political oppression and human rights abuses of the military junta that had come to power in 1964. In 1983 and 1984, the “Diretas Já” movement took to the streets to demand the restoration of democratic elections, free speech, and other basic rights.

2. Although not a protest in the strictest sense, we saw the lethal aggression with which authorities and the public responded to Sandro do Nascimento’s disruptive call for recognition in Chapter 3.

3. For more on the history of black blocs and their participation in the Brazilian protests of 2013, see Ortellado.

4. Lawmakers in Brazil have also proposed requiring individuals to provide their full name and CPF (Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas) identification number in order to post comments on blogs and social networking websites (Higa).

5. See “The Age of the Anonymous Web” (Stryker) and “Exit Node Repudiation for Anonymity Networks” (Clark, Jeremy, et al.).

6. For more discussion of these tensions, see Solove. !262

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BIOGRAPHY

Adam Nathaniel Malach Demaray was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in

1984. In 2006, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish with a minor in Politics from

Pomona College, where his undergraduate thesis was awarded the Romance Languages and Literatures Department’s Spanish Prize. After graduating, Adam spent ten months in

Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina on a Fulbright Fellowship, then taught for a year at

Shanghai Pinghe School in Shanghai, China. He obtained a Master of Arts in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Tulane University in 2011, and a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Literature from Tulane University in 2016. He has participated in academic conferences in the US, Latin America and Europe, and was the recipient of the

Tulane University’s Monroe Fellowship. In the summer of 2013, he received the Brazil

Initiation Scholarship from the Brazilian Studies Association, which allowed him to spend six weeks in São Paulo, Brazil studying recognition, anonymity, and familial discourse in the live performance gatherings of the Cooperativa Cultural da Periferia

(Cooperifa). At Tulane University he has taught courses on Portuguese and Spanish language as well as Spanish American and Brazilian culture. During the 2016-2017 academic year he will serve as Visiting Assistant Professor of Brazilian Studies at the

University of Texas-El Paso.