Brazil as (jungle-)green screen

Over at my academic blog, Domestic Issue, I've just posted a little something on the intellectual history of Brazil--the topic all America is buzzing about, I know--by way of a discussion of a book on that very topic. (It's no longer in print, or else I would link to it.) [EDIT: Just to be clear here, I'm speaking of how this book has treated its subject up to the year 1870, which is the point where I am right now.] The upshot of the post is that the book reads very strangely, to my mind: its author argues in the introduction that we need to be attentive to the historical fact of large numbers of indigenous and African people and that fact's influence on Brazilian thought, but then has spent the hundred or so pages I've read a) also arguing that a multicultural approach to Brazil will not reveal an unalloyed Brazilian mindset; and b) pretty much all but ignoring all non-white Brazilians. It's an indirect verification of something that Darlene Sadlier argues in her book Brazil Imagined, which I recently wrote about with regard to literary regionalism here: that cultural products whose subject is Brazil, whether by Brazilians or non-Brazilians, historically have been more like projections of their makers' fantasies or nightmares, rather than products that purport to show Brazil as it in fact is. I have a little speculation over there about the Brazilian intelligentsia's wholesale embrace of Positivism, also.

You're hearing about all this because, I reminded myself this morning, Brazil's history with regard to the integration of indigenous and African people is very different from Mexico's, and that when speaking of "Latin America," it can be easy to forget or elide those differences. Even the earliest discussions of intellectual history in Mexico contend in some way with its indigenous past and its significance for the nation at that point in time, even if to rail against it. Up to the point that I've so far read in this intellectual history of Brazil, there's plenty of railing at the Jesuits' alleged detrimental effects on intellectual life there; otherwise, Indians and blacks are all but invisible. The gaze is turned toward Europe. Projected on all that green of the Brazilian interior, all they see is what they've borrowed from Europe. But no Brazilian forest, and no trees.

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The novel-as-package-tour: John Updike's Brazil

The first-edition cover of John Updike's Brazil. Image found here.

At some point during my just-completed rereading of Brazil (1994), I asked myself, Now, why is it that I'm reading this thing? And then I remembered that it was at the very end of my dissertation defense that one of my committee members said something like, "All this you've been talking about sounds just like John Updike's new novel." At some point afterward, I bought a cheap paperback edition and read it and was underwhelmed; this summer, though, I thought I should re-read it in case I'd missed something that might be useful for the book project, a fleck or two of critical gold in the matrix of Updike's quartz-like prose. Alas, no gold but plenty of pyrite that I'll spare my reader(s) the assaying of here (though pyrite can be pretty to look at on its own terms sometimes); in fact, I found myself more irritated than underwhelmed this time around. As the Mrs. and I discussed it this past week (after I finished it, she read it in about a day and a half--she's a fast reader anyway, but it's a quick read, which is a virtue, I suppose), it occurred to me that to my mind it violates a core principle of literary fiction: it tells more than it shows.

Here's the plot: Tristão and Isabel meet on Rio de Janeiro's famed Copacabana Beach in the late-mid '60s and, within a couple of minutes, feel their mutual destiny lies in being together. Divided by both race and class, they could not be more opposite. Tristão makes his living by thievery, lives in the favelas (slums) on the hillsides overlooking Rio's waterfront and might as well be an orphan; he is about as full-blooded an African as it is possible for a native Brazilian to be. Isabel's family, meanwhile, is the embodiment of the leisure class; she herself is white-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed. They go to Isabel's uncle's nearby apartment, where Isabel lives (her mother is dead; her father is in the foreign ministry in the capital, Brasilia), and they make love for the first of what will be numerous, often explicitly-described times (Updike's well-known lush, erotic language is very much on display here). After a couple of months together, they run away to São Paulo to make a life together; Isabel's father sends some gunmen after them to take her to Brasilia; Tristão goes after her and together they head deeper, ever deeper into the sertão (the Brazilian "outback") and, eventually, the jungle. There, something significant and, frankly, perplexing occurs which I won't divulge here (though the Amazon reviews contain spoilers, so be forewarned), and then they retrace their route, hoping to reconcile with Isabel's father, through a Brazil now experiencing the growth and development of the '80s, back to Rio, where, in the end, things essentially come full circle. It is a simple plot, which Updike notes in his Afterword he's adapted from the medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult. And I have nothing against simple plots or, for that matter, simple plots with lots of sex in them. Too often, though, I get the feeling that Updike's chief goal here is to write a book with a simple plot and lots of sex that happens to be set in Brazil, a Brazil, moreover, that feels less like a genuine setting and more like an exotic backdrop--and that, I do have a problem with.

More below the fold.

The aforementioned Afterword is an odd one, and it also, I think, begins to get at Brazil's weaknesses as a novel. In it, by way of acknowledging some of his sources Updike mentions some specific titles of classic works on and about Brazil, some Lonely Planet guidebooks, the names of prominent Brazilian novelists from whose works he "took courage and local color," and some people at Companhia Das Letras, a Brazilian publishing house in São Paulo, who saved him from "many errors and implausibilities." Although the Afterword's contents do not preclude Updike's actually having visited Brazil and drawn additional inspiration from having been there himself, I get the strange feeling from it that he hasn't been there. Not that he has to have been there to have written a great novel about Brazil or, for that matter, any other place, of course. But often what I find most offputting about this book is that it's, well, bookish. Tristão, we're told two pages in, "had spent enough time in school to learn to read street signs and advertisements and no more," yet his diction is often that of the medieval knight upon whom he's modeled. And more than a few times, we get speeches by people like this one, by Tristão's brother Chiquinho, whom Tristão and Isabel have hoped to meet in São Paulo:

"I am no longer making fuscas [Brazilian slang for Volkswagen Beetles]. I am into a new thing, electronics. But my education is too poor for the work, so I am stuck at the lowliest level, cleaning the factory so there is not a fleck of dirt. In the intricate thing we make, which solves all mathematical problems in a little stroke of directed lightning, a fleck of dust is like a rock in the engine of a car. Under the enlightened capitalist policies which have supplanted the dangerous socialist experiments of Quadros and Goulart, I have been privileged to head the team of cleaners, while taking night courses that educate me in the mysteries of the new technology." (64)

One reads passages like this and feels compelled to say, Who is really the audience for this? Surely not someone like, oh, I don't know, a Brazilian, much less a Brazilian who's new in town and wants his slightly-better-educated brother to help him find work. But it's here, nevertheless, along with many other, similar passages, reading more like a novelized combination history and guidebook than a novel. (This, by the way, is my more charitable explanation for such passages; the less-charitable one is a compulsion to use what one has read so that that reading won't have gone to waste, rather than letting it inform one's writing via shaping the background for that writing. The fact that the latter doesn't happen suggests some insecurity on Updike's part with his setting--insecurity being something that, whatever else one might think of his work, Updike isn't usually thought to suffer from.)

Indeed, our lovers, though native Brazilians themselves, are unfamiliar with their own nation beyond Rio; so, while they are not tourists, they encounter these landscapes--or, rather, they are presented as encountering them--much as tourists would: wide-eyed, a bit disoriented, attuned to the unfamiliar. But neither do Tristão and Isabel seem especially responsive to any of the worlds in which they find themselves. Before they met, one gets the feeling that they had existed only for themselves. Now that they are together, they exist only for each other. Meanwhile, Brazil's multitudinous settings end up getting only enough attention as the novel's servicing of the plot will allow. Brazil-as-place is certainly colorful, to be sure, but by the novel's end I don't feel as though I know very much about Brazil, or even very much about its main characters. Not enough to genuinely care about them, at any rate, I'm sorry to say. But we can at least say we've seen some local color.

Maybe the saddest question to ask of a novel is why its author felt compelled to write it. To ask that question reveals that the reader hasn't been moved by its subject(s) either emotionally or intellectually, even to the point that one suspects the writer hasn't been moved by his/her work, either. Yet, even "money" doesn't seem to work as an explanation for Updike's motive here. In terms of his output, it would seem to be a mistake to say that in Brazil Updike is just playing out the string--he would go on to write ten more novels, not to mention short stories, poems and criticism, before his death in 2009, 15 years after Brazil's publication. Perhaps Updike wanted a change of scenery in which to set some familiar themes. Nothing at all wrong with that in the abstract, but it has not resulted in work that advances Updike's reputation. Rather, it makes me want to read some Brazilian novels, to linger in that world for a while rather than breeze through it.

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The dark side of literary regionalism

David Edwin Bernard, Threshing Run # 7 (1984). Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Image found here. About a hundred years after the rise of regionalist literature, but it captures well regionalism's usually-rural setting and life therein, and the implicit tension between the old ways and the new.

I've just finished reading around in Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present by Darlene J. Sadlier, billed by its publisher (Univ. of Texas Press) as "the first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English." It does indeed seem to be comprehensive (but then again, I don't know a heck of a lot about Brazil relative to the little I know about the rest of Spanish-speaking America, so, "grain of salt" and all that), and it's written in a very approachable manner. At the very least, it's an excellent place to start for those interested in learning a little more about how others have imagined and depicted Brazil and--the reason I'm posting this today--how Brazilians have imagined themselves to themselves.

Though politically Brazil's history in the 19th century does not parallel ours, I was intrigued to learn from Sadlier's chapter on the emergence of Brazilian literature that its literary history does. In both countries in the second half of that century, as cultural and economic power shifted to the cities, the regions of the interior became the subject of writers intent on exploring their topography and cultural and linguistic mores: the essence of literary regionalism (itself an offshoot of literary realism). In the U.S., among the more prominent regionalists and the places they wrote about are Sarah Orne Jewett (Maine), Kate Chopin (New Orleans, and Cajun and Creole country), Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia), Bret Harte (the West), and, later, Willa Cather (the Plains and New Mexico) and Charles W. Chesnutt (North Carolina; intriguingly, Chesnutt was an African-American writer whose first-person narrators often "passed" to their readership as white by not explicitly revealing their race). In the case of Brazilian literature, Sadlier notes the influence of Portuguese writers becoming more interested in the lives of people living in rural Portugal (of course, they would have been reading other European writers doing the same sort of thing, as were the U.S. writers I named above).

An obvious, and relatively benign, cultural function of regionalist writing is that at its best, its depiction of a distinctive place unfamiliar to many readers reveals the people of that place in its distinctiveness and, at the same time, to be in its essence as much a part of the wider nation as any other part. For a relatively new nation seeking to gain a sense of national identity, regionalism thus also performs important political work. Clearly some of this is at work in U.S. regionalist writing, coming as it does in the wake of the Civil War and the beginnings of the settlement of the West along with the rise of urbanization and immigration from both Europe and Asia. But in this writing there's some nostalgia-feeding as well: much regionalist writing appeared in magazines, whose readership was urban and, more often than not, had moved away from the very places that served as settings for the regionalists--and, as well, the stories themselves often recall "the way things used to be" in those now much-changed places (as just one example, Harris's Uncle Remus tales have their origins in antebellum times--though, as near as I can tell, Uncle Remus himself isn't nostalgic about slavery itself). So, then: two levels of nostalgia--the audience's for a place; that place's people for an earlier, now-lost time--are often at work in U.S. regional writing.

These aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves. But, as per the title of this post, an endnote in Sadlier's book reminded me that they can be, and that led me to wonder a bit about our own contemporary moment.

As I mentioned earlier, though Brazilian and U.S. regionalist literature appeared at about the same time in the 19th century, our corresponding respective political and cultural moments were quite different. Though Brazil won its independence from Portugal in 1820, it was ruled by a monarchy until the 1890s; moreover, Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888. For another, Brazil's landmass is the size of all of Europe's, the result being that, whereas certain regions of the U.S. (with, probably, the exception of Creole society) never appeared exotic but, rather, quaint, for Brazilians enormous expanses of their nation seemed like other nations entirely to the Europeanized coastal areas. The people of these regions--the sertanejos (the Brazilian equivalent of the gauchos) of Brazil's semi-arid deep-northeastern interior, and the by-then-all-but-extinct Indians of the coastal regions--were the romanticized heroes of these narratives, but they were also types that the vast majority of Brazilians reading these narratives would have had no direct experience with . . . and yet, their writers were establishing these types as archetypal Brazilians, as embodiments of the nation's emerging national consciousness.

It's within this context that Sadlier paraphrases literary historian José Maurício Gomes de Almeida's discussion of regionalism (which doesn't differ in its essentials from mine above) and then goes on to speculate:

It is interesting to consider late-nineteenth-century Brazilian regionalism in light of Benedict Anderson's discussions of the nation as an imagined community. Perhaps the concept of a regional literature, which focuses on a specific area and communtiy, was a way for writers to circumvent the vastness and variety that made knowing or representing Brazil as a whole implausible. (315, n. 39)

This is an intriguing idea. I'll just say that I don't know if this is right, but it's certainly not incongruous with anything about regionalism that I've said above. All of us know the risks inherent in insisting on a single place--or, for that matter, some experience in that single place--as being a synecdoche of even that place, let alone an entire nation. Still, perhaps, also at work in the audience for those magazine stories about Home was the comfort that, as confused, confusing and alienating as life in the city could be, there was always a place where life made sense. (Just to be clear: I'm speaking here of U.S. regionalism. My sense of Brazilian regionalist fiction's audience, as I mentioned before, was that they had little if any direct knowledge of the sertão (the "backlands" of the northeast) and the jungle; to them, these places might as well have been entirely different countries.)

The "dark side" reading of this idea, though, is that regionalism can become a means of insisting on a place's distinctiveness, its misunderstood-ness, even its superiority, relative to (and, thus, to the exclusion of) the rest of the nation. In other words, regionalism becomes provincialism. Just off the top of my head, when thinking about this idea as regards U.S. regionalism I think one could make the case that this happened with the "moonlight and magnolias" turn that novels set in the South took after the end of Reconstruction and into the 20th century, culminating in the Southern Agrarian movement as articulated in the essay collection I'll Take My Stand and, much more disturbingly, in the novels of Thomas J. Dixon (whose most famous novel, The Clansman, was made into the film Birth of a Nation). I think we also can hear echoes of provincialism in the recent politics of some via the "real America" trope that seems implicitly to exclude large urban, more cosmopolitan places in favor of an older, more culturally-homogeneous America. That trope, I hasten to add, is not explicitly a racist or a xenophobic one, but it seems inherently suspicious of the Other--it is a trope as old as America itself. It is resistant to difference to the point of being unwilling even to consider that acknowledgement and acceptance of difference under the umbrella of a set of ideas to which we collectively subscribe might also be American.

You might have suspicioned that I don't think that trope is a good thing. To our credit, our literature largely has avoided being too provincial. That which strays too far that way tends not to survive. Sarah Orne Jewett's most famous story, "A White Heron," has survived--and flourished--not because it is about Maine but because it is about a little girl learning the cost of what it means to become a person separate and distinct from other people, something not only Mainers have experiences with. As goes our literature, so goes our nation. We are at our best when we are not insisting on authenticity or reveling in nostalgia. We'll never find the truly authentic; the nostalgic is always prettier than it really was.

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