SOURCE: Bernd, Zilá. “The Construction and Deconstruction of Identity in Brazilian Literature.” In Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, edited by Amaryll Chanady, translation by Chanady, pp. 86-103. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Bernd discusses two Brazilian epics, particularly their focus on the use of mythology and tradition in order to articulate a national literature and identity.]

Identity cannot have a different form from that of narrative, because to define oneself is, in the last analysis, to narrate.

—Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (317)

Although the question of identity is always intimately associated with the act of narrating, as Ricoeur claims, it becomes central to emergent and peripheral literatures (as in the Americas), whose main preoccupation frequently is to provide an explicit or implicit definition of its communities in its narrative. As Edouard Glissant pointed out in his study of the formation of national literatures, literature has two main functions:

It has a desacralizing function, one of heresy and intellectual analysis, which deconstructs the organization of a particular system, exposes its hidden mechanisms, and demystifies it. It also has a sacralizing function, which reassembles the community around its myths, its beliefs, its imaginary, and its ideology.

(192)

A literature that attributes to itself the mission of articulating a national project, and recuperating the foundational myths of a community as well as other aspects of its collective memory, only has a sacralizing and unifying function that tends to perpetuate sameness, monologism, or the construction of an ethnocentric identity, and thus circumscribes reality to a single frame of reference.

In Brazil, the foundational epics of the colonial period (eighteenth century) and romanticism (nineteenth century) acted as sacralizing forces indicating a “naive conscience” (Glissant 192), because they only recuperated and solidified the country's myths. On this level, literature incorporates an invented image of the Indian that excludes his or her voice, and that is most consistent with the construction of the national project. The Brazilian modernismo of the 1920s, however, conceived of national identity as a desacralization, which corresponds, according to Glissant, to a politicized perspective that is continuously open to difference, and that enables a culture to establish relations with others.

In particular historical periods, literature tends to unify the community around its foundational myths, its imaginary, or its ideology, and this leads to discursive homogenization, or the creation of an “exclusive voice” that practices a systematic concealment or misrepresentation of the Other (see Gómez-Moriana and Hart, especially 53-176). In the case of Brazilian literature, these Others are the Afro-Brazilian and the Indian, who are often represented in a marginalized space and from a deforming perspective, if they are represented at all.

This sacralizing or “celebrative” function “recalls the sacred origins of all poetry and seems to consolidate the ideological basis of literary practice” (Dubois 74). Within this sacralizing function (either epic or tragic), however, literature “must signify … the relationship of a culture with another in difference” (Glissant 193), unless it wants to remain folkloric or backward.

Certain authors who invest their writing with a mythology of origins and closeness to one's roots initiate the construction of the idea of the nation, for it is true that “literature makes the country and the country makes the literature,” to quote Gilles Marcotte (82). In this essay I will discuss some of these texts that are characterized by a primarily sacralizing function.

FIGURATIONS OF AMERICAN SPACE AND THE INVENTION OF THE INDIAN IN THE EPIC

Retracing the history of Brazilian literature involves the identification of successive stages that go from the recognition of the earliest writing as literary manifestations and the subsequent process of institutionalizing these as national literature, to their transformation into an object of study and knowledge. It is in the eighteenth century that the “literary manifestations acquire the organic characteristics of a system” (Cândido 1964: 45).

I am interested in delineating the paradigms through which each period articulates its project of constructing a national literature, and will develop the hypothesis that, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, a strong principle of cohesion oriented this process, transforming literature into a hegemonic discourse in which ruptures and dissidences were brought about with great difficulty.

The epic poem is the appropriate genre for the description of foundational historic events that it associates with mythical elements and the feats of heroes or “beings of superior physical and psychological strength.” This genre had a celebrational function that was essential for the creation of a minimum focus of cohesion capable of unifying the members of a community in the early stages of the process of identity formation.

Two epic poems in particular, O Uraguai (1769), by José Basílio da Gama, and Caramuru (1781), by Santa Rita Durão, besides celebrating the feats of the conquistadors, fulfill the function of creating common cultural roots and symbolizing national identity. These poems extol American geography and choose nature as their protagonist. The main project, namely, the celebration of the epic feats of the European invader, is sabotaged by the power of the marvelous character of the American continent. The poet inscribes nature as the founding element of his discourse, instead of introducing it as a simple scenic background, as he would have done if he had adhered to the canons of the traditional epic genre.

This is especially evident in O Uraguai, in which we can discern a progressive development of national consciousness: the mythical dimension of the epic material

apelando para o maravilhoso nativo integra na perspectiva indígena a brasilidade e põe em cena o colonizado como herói.

(Silva 31)

requires the native dimension of the marvelous to incorporate the Brazilian national character [a brasilidade] within an indigenous perspective and represent the colonized as a hero.

Although the epic narrates the feats of the conquistador Gomes Freire de Andrade and his expeditions to the Jesuit mission in order to subdue the last resisting Indians and enforce the Treaty of Madrid, the cultural perspective of the colonized is contrasted with that of the colonizer. This makes possible the emergence of a Brazilian national consciousness in narrative, as Anazildo Silva demonstrates in A formação épica da literatura brasileira. As an analysis of Brazilian literature will confirm, the American mythical referent informs the epic project of eighteenth-century writers, who are seduced by the idea of a novel and surprising New World. This emphasis on the wonderful nature of the continent finally displaces the initial project, which consisted in consecrating the Portuguese colonial enterprise. A good example is the following poem, in which the introduction of the magical world of the seer Tanajura clashes with the European rationality of the protagonist, Gomes Freire de Andrade, and with that of the poet himself, who is influenced by the European Enlightenment:

Mas a enrugada Tanajura, que era
Prudente e experimentada (e que a seus peitos
Tinha criado em mais ditosa idade
A mãe da mãe da mísera Lindóia)
E lia pera história o futuro,
Visionária, supersticiosa
Que de abertos sepulcros recolhia
Nuas caveiras e esburgados ossos
A uma medonha gruta, onde ardem sempre
Verdes candeias, conduziu chorando
Lindóia, a quem amava como filha;
E em ferrugento vaso licor puro
De viva fonte recolheu.

(O Uraguai 3:65-66)

But the wrinkled Tanajura, who was
Prudent and experienced (and who at her breast
Had suckled in a happier age
The mother of the mother of the wretched Lindóia)
And read the future through history,
Visionary, superstitious
Who gathered from open sepulchers
Bald skulls and picked bones,
To a dreadful cave, where always burn
Green candles, she led the crying
Lindóia, whom she loved as a daughter;
And in a rusty cup collected
Pure liquor from a running spring.

The Indian in O Uraguai is valorized according to the axiological paradigms of the Westernized white population, and this entails the systematic negation of indigenous culture, as is indicated by such expressions as “uncultivated America” (“inculta América”), “crude masses” (“povo rude”), “seven villages inhabited by the barbarians” (“sete povos, que os bárbaros habitam”), “coarse Indians, without discipline, without value, without weapons” (“índios rudes, sem desciplina, sem valor, sem armas”), and “uncultivated and simple people” (“a inculta gente simple”). The national consciousness that is developed during the eighteenth century is thus ambiguous: the colonizers' values are praised at the same time that the American continent is glorified by authors who “take an aesthetic and human interest in the natives” (“interessando-se estetica e humanamente pelos nativos”), as António Cândido pointed out in his article “Literatura e consciência nacional” (9; see also Cândido 1987).

This ambiguity is obvious in the lines of Caramuru, which, in spite of their construction of indigenous images based on a phobic perspective (“barbarous people,” “cruel people,” “coarse and brutish people,” “cruel savage,” and so on, provide an exhaustive catalog of American geography, fauna, and flora, thus revealing the poet's strong attitude of wonderment with respect to the country's natural attributes. The use of language is also characterized by a certain ambivalence. Although Santa Rita Durão affirms that the language of the Indians is “obscure,” the large number of indigenous terms incorporated in the text indicates a gradual process of hybridization, rendered necessary by the limitations of the Portuguese language, which did not have adequate terms to designate the numerous indigenous referents of the New World. By naming America with words and expressions taken from autochthonous languages, the poet is conceding a certain validity to the indigenous symbolization of the continent.

In general, however, American culture is focalized from an ethnocentric perspective, according to which what is different can only be inferior to one's own culture. The poet is thus incapable of considering anthropophagy as a ritual (as the modernistas of the 1920s were to do), but describes it as an “abominable” practice:

Companheiras de oficio tão nefando
Seguem de um cabo a turba e de outro cabo
Seis torpíssimas velhas aparando
O sangue sem um leve menoscabo.
Tão feias são que a face esta pintando
A imagem propríssima do diabo.

(Caramuru 1: LXXX)

The assistants to this so abominable task
Follow on the one side the crowd and on the other
Six very filthy old women who remove
The blood without the least disgust.
They are so ugly that their faces imitate
The very image of the Devil.

As in O Uraguai, the Indian is given certain heroic dimensions in Caramuru. Besides describing the courage of the Portuguese protagonist, Diogo Alvares Correia, the poet describes that of his wife, Paraguaçu. Her beauty, however, is hardly acknowledged, and then only when it corresponds to Western standards:

Paraguaçu gentil (tal nome teve)
Bem diversa de gente tão nojosa,
De cor tão alva como a branca neve
E donde não é neve, era de rosa.

(Caramuru 2: LXXVIII)

Polite Paraguaçu (that is her name)
Very different from those who are so disagreeable
Her heart is as pure as the white snow
And where it is not snow, it is like a rose.

Paraguaçu accompanies her husband to Europe and is given the name Catarina. The loss of her name corresponds to the loss of her identity and symbolizes the alienation of the indigenous inhabitants, who had to divest themselves of their identity in order to be accepted by the colonizers in what was frequently a unidirectional process of transculturation.

To summarize, literature in the colonial period is characterized by the following traits:

1. The appropriation of American space as a marvelous-mythical reality.
2. A conceptualization of time based on the nostalgic return to the past, which corresponds to a desire to recuperate an original unity and the beginnings of history.
3. The construction of a monolithic and marginalizing discourse, which misrepresents the native inhabitants of the continent and judges them from an external perspective based on European axiological paradigms.
4. The emblematic hero continues to be Portuguese.
5. A contemptuous attitude toward the indigenous Other, whose culture is considered inferior to that of the white colonizer.

THE FIGURATION OF ORIGINS: THE INVENTION OF THE INDIAN AND THE CONCEALMENT OF THE AFRO-BRAZILIAN: JOSé DE ALENCAR (1829-1877)

As I have already mentioned, phenomena of hybridization characterized Brazilian literature since the earliest moments of its formation, and maintained a significant presence throughout the romantic period, in which authors openly expressed their intention to contribute toward “the slow gestation of the Brazilian people” (“a gestação lenta do povo brasileiro”), to quote José de Alencar.

An initial stage, corresponding to a certain extent to a cartographic necessity (see Sussekind 35) that led writers to symbolize the national space in a euphoric representation of Brazil, was followed by a foundational stage (of which Alencar's work is representative) characterized by an exhaustive textualization of origins, roots, foundational myths, and genealogies. The novelistic production of Alencar bears testimony to the simultaneous movements of deculturation and acculturation of two of the founding ethnic groups in Brazil: the Whites and the Indians.

In an ambitious literary project, Alencar attempted to reconstitute the process of nation building in Brazil. This project, characterized by the romantic sensibility of the majority of writers at that time, was based on the idealization of the founding figures of the Brazilian “nation,” who were considered as heroes in the classical sense of the term, that is, people who possessed qualities that were superior to those of common mortals. Imbued with the desire to produce what Alfredo Bosi calls a novelistic summary (“suma romanesca”) of Brazil (151), Alencar, like his eighteenth-century predecessors, did not situate the Afro-Brazilian on the same level as the inhabitant of the sertão (hinterland), the gaucho, the Indian, the bandeirante (member of an armed band), not to mention the European colonizer, all of whom were portrayed more or less in detail in the literature of the period.

Alencar's work demonstrates the difficulty of significantly transforming a dominant paradigm and articulating a dissident perspective in the field of ideas, as well as the longevity of hegemonic discourse that imposes and legitimizes certain ideas that are repeated by succeeding generations. The discursive dominant based on the conception of the Indian as a symbol of nationness (which dates from the eighteenth century) is reinforced in Alencar's work, which eulogizes the autochthonous inhabitant of the nation as the mythical ancestor and hero who has the extraordinary advantage of being “free of any stain,” to use António Cândido's expression, since the enslavement of Indians was abolished in the seventeenth century.

With Alencar and Gonçalves Dias, national literature is finally born (Cândido 1969), thus making possible the expression of the “Brazilian spirit” (“gênio brasileiro”; for a study on “national character,” see Moreira Leite). Alencar himself, in his preface to the novel Sonhos d'ouro (1872), uses the expression “national literature”:

A literatura nacional, que outra coisa não é senão a alma da pátria, que transmigrou para este solo virgem com una raça ilustre, aqui impregnou-se da seiva americana desta terra que lhe serviu de regaço, e cada dia se enriquece ao contato de outros povos e ao influxo da civilização.

(34)

National literature, which is nothing but the soul of the nation that migrated to this virgin land with an illustrious race, was impregnated with the American sap of this soil that welcomed it, and every day it is enriched by contact with other cultures and the influx of civilization.

Alencar identifies three phases in Brazilian national literature, which he illustrates in his novelistic production: (1) a primitive or aboriginal phase, characterized by legends and myths of a savage land (Iracema); (2) a historical phase, in which the invading conquerors appropriate the land and make possible the “slow gestation of the American people” (O Guarani and Minas de Prata); and (3) the infancy of our literature (Tronco de Ipê, Til, and O Gaúcho).

Alencar initiates his project of symbolizing national identity through his Indianist writings, represented by Iracema (1857) and O Guarani (1865). He situates his characters in a distant past that coincides with the beginnings of colonization, and depicts the first violent clashes between the invading and the conquered peoples. The harmonious and even Edenic vision of life before the conquest, the positive representation of the indigenous population, and the national pride of the author (who constantly extols nature and the noble savage) are interwoven in this narrative characterized by a euphoric conscience in which the valorization of the regional and natural aspects of the Brazilian nation compensate for its backwardness.

Parodying Hegel, Edouard Glissant affirms that the sacralizing function of literature is representative of a “collective consciousness that is still naive” (192). In spite of the terminological variations (Cândido's euphoric consciousness, Glissant's and Darcy Ribeiro's naive consciousness), the observations made by these authors point to the same phenomenon: a new nation's urgency to name itself before the rest of the world and to be seen and heard as a specific collectivity frequently gave rise to a literature characterized by a form of exoticism that differs very little from that of colonial literature.

Alencar's work, in fact, remains faithful to the discursive hegemony established by travel literature written by European discoverers since the sixteenth century. The main emphasis of his narratives is on the description of the exotic aspects of the inhabitants of the New World. Rather than describe the ways of life and difficult conditions of the indigenous inhabitants, who were very much marginalized in the nineteenth century, Alencar paints an idealized portrait of the “savages,” to use a term that was common in all travel narratives between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as well as in Alencar's texts. Exoticism, in which the author concentrates on local color and on what is unexpected and surprising, generally involves the valorization of the exterior aspects of a country or culture as it is defined (exclusively) by an external observer (see Todorov 1989 for a lengthy analysis of the West's relationship to its Other).

According to Todorov, the principle that rules exoticism is paradoxical: if it is impossible to praise the Other without knowing it, detailed knowledge is incompatible with exoticism. The exotic vision consists of a eulogy based on incorrect or insufficient knowledge of what the Other presents as immediately and obviously different. In the case of the Indians, the differences that fascinate the European are usually related to their supposed closeness to nature. The myth of the noble savage arises as an indirect criticism of one's own society: because the latter is considered corrupt (by thinkers such as Rousseau, for example), one nostalgically imagines a society characterized by plenitude and harmony. Alencar describes the Tabajara people as living in a paradisiacal society, in which men are “generous,” virgins have “honeyed lips,” warriors are courageous, the sand on the beaches is soft, and the rivers supply an abundance of fish.

The valorization of a mythical past provided Alencar with an indispensable basis for anchoring the construction of national identity. The son of pain, Moacyr (born of the love between the “beautiful” Indian woman Iracema and the “noble Portuguese warrior” Martim), is represented as the founding father of the Brazilian race, and becomes a source of pride, especially to the dominant sectors who are in the process of constructing the young nation. What an analysis of Alencar's work demonstrates is that it adheres very closely to the dominant conventions of not only Brazilian but also European literature, some of whose common topoi (the noble savage, the idealization of the “state of nature,” the nostalgic view of the past) are incorporated in the narratives of the Brazilian author.

If we return to the colonial paradigm, we realize that it remained practically unaltered, in accordance with Angenot's hypothesis (1989; see also Angenot 1988 for a more general discussion of “social discourse”) that the “new,” not-yet-expressed, or destabilizing structures have great difficulty in penetrating the ensemble of discourses circulating in a given society. Contrary to the widespread belief that romanticism brought about a literary revolution in Brazil, I would claim that this literary movement did not transgress the principle of discursive acceptability and that, in spite of the variation of several motifs, it is possible to detect the perpetuation of the doxa, or “eternal return” of certain paradigms. The following aspects of eighteenth-century narrative did not change in Alencar's period: the textualization of American space as mythical and marvelous; the conception of time based on a nostalgic attitude toward the past; and the construction of an exclusive discourse, based on a misrepresentation of the Indian.

As Flora Sussekind observed (190), the figuration of the narrative voice in Alencar is characterized by the choice of a historico-genetic perspective that is blinded by a nostalgic search for origins, inaugural frames of reference, sources, roots, and primordial time. The Greek etymology of nostalgia (nostos, return) refers to the melancholy produced in exile by homesickness for the native land. Alencar's ingenuous attitude does not allow him to realize (as the modernistas, with their greater critical consciousness, were able to do in the 1930s) that “neither time, neither history, neither individual nor collective identity, can return to its origins, and that on the contrary, the one incessantly produces the multiple” (Cambron 180; emphasis added). The Indian is elevated together with the Portuguese forefathers to the position of an emblematic hero who becomes a symbol of the origin of the Brazilian people.

The devalorization of the indigenous inhabitants in the initial stages of identity construction is replaced by an obsessive hypervalorization of the culture of the Other. Nevertheless, the cultural elements valorized in Alencar's Indianist narrative are ones that no longer existed three and a half centuries after the arrival of the European conquerors, and thus merely provide illustrious mythical origins for our ancestors.

In conclusion, the cultural dialogue established between the colonized (Iracema, Poti, Araquém) and the colonizer (Martim) gives rise to a double process of deculturation (the loss of one's original culture) and acculturation (the adaptation to a different culture). The process is obviously unequal; while Martim adheres to some local customs, his values—the values of the hegemonic culture—end up being imposed as the dominant values of the Brazilian nation, as we can see in the conclusion of Iracema:

A mairi que Martim erguera à margem do rio, nas praias do Ceará, medrou. Germinou a palavra do Deus verdadeiro na terra selvagem e o bronze sagrado ressou nos vales onde rugia o maracá.

(57)

The mairi that Martin had planted at the edge of the river, on the banks of the Ceará, grew. The word of the true God was propagated in the savage land and the sacred bronze reverberated in the valleys where the maraca was rattling.

The death of Iracema (an anagram of America) is symbolic of the death of the mythical America that succumbed in the confrontation between “civilization” and “barbarism,” in which civilization was supposedly represented by European culture and barbarism by the indigenous culture.

As I have tried to show, until the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazilian literature adhered fairly closely to the hegemonic national project oriented toward the formation of a mestizo nation, but one that adopted predominantly European values. It fulfilled a sacralizing function, because it contributed toward the solidification of this project. The Afro-Brazilian was “absent from history,” as was the Indian; the latter only served the function of justifying an original ancestry, which was rapidly neutralized by the supposed ethnic and cultural supremacy of the colonizer.

The authors of previous centuries were interested in symbolizing collective memory, and aimed at a mythical totalization of the present, the past, and the future, given that continuity and a certain amount of repetition are essential to the national conception of time. Starting with modernismo in 1922, Brazilian literature had a preponderantly desacralizing function; it claimed to reject the excessive crystallization of discourses that were dominating the artistic scene, and the institutionalization of works that supposedly reflected “the national character” or the “collective spirit.” Through their integration into narrative of heterogeneous discourses, and through their ironic and parodic strategies, the Anthropophagy Movement and Pau-Brazil poetry—in short, the work of Mário and Oswald de Andrade—initiated the process of destabilizing a homogenizing perspective that had become consolidated.

Between the forms of construction (the sacralizing function), which tend toward homogenization and even the radical negation of Otherness, and the forms of deconstruction (the desacralizing function), which introduce heterogeneity and were considered by Régine Robin as an essential condition of literary production (171), in this in-between space, a synthesis of the two poles begins to take shape. In works written after 1980 and thus after the beginning of the process of democratization, contemporary Brazilian literature sees the emergence of texts that associate the recuperation of myths with their constant demythologization, and the rediscovery of collective memory with its continuous rewriting, implying an incessant questioning of oneself.

Following in Mário de Andrade's footsteps in Macunaíma, João Ubaldo Ribeiro is able to relive, in the 1980s, the revolutionary modernista experience of bringing about a revision of Brazilian historical and cultural formation, and problematizing the traditional figure of the hero. Viva o povo brasileiro thus returns to the decisive moments in Brazilian history, dislodging hegemonic knowledge from its position of unquestioned truth and bringing to the forefront obscure characters from the popular sectors of society whom it depicts in their search for self-affirmation. The result is a vast multifaceted panorama in which the hegemony of the educated part of the population is relativized and in which the role of the Afro-Brazilian in the construction of national identity is revalorized.

The dominant discourse of the aristocracy is sabotaged by the author's corrosive treatment of it, while popular speech is recuperated and integrated within the textual weave in a conscious project on the part of the author to recuperate the “native originality” of which Oswald de Andrade wrote, and through which the critical consciousness of the oppressed sectors of society is constructed. Like the Caribbean authors who emphasized the marvelous dimension of orally transmitted popular tales and myths in their search for a version of Caribbean history that differed from that of written texts privileging the hegemonic perspective, João Ubaldo Ribeiro turns his attention to Bahia, a veritable crucible of popular cultural manifestations.

Letting himself be “contaminated” by the language and worldview of characters from the most humble strata of society, the author identifies with their interpretation of Brazil and adopts the marvelous, which enables him to rediscover and revalorize Brazilian culture. Candomblé and other rituals practiced by the descendants of slaves are thus not described as barbarous, or even presented as exotic in an effort to provide local color; on the contrary, they are fully integrated within the narrative structure and constitute alternative forms of narrating a different Brazil.

According to Hubert Fichte (17), rituals are forms of organizing the relations between human beings and the world. Fichte, who studied the poetic anthropology of Afro-American religions, considers ritual as a space where the time of individual life is connected to collective universal time, and as a structure of support with a function analogous to that of psychiatry or mental hygiene. In Viva o povo brasileiro, João Ubaldo Ribeiro depicts numerous initiation rites, describing them in a manner consonant with Fichte's point of view. In the case of the people who practice popular religions, the experience of salvation occurs by means of a trance or rather through the transformation of the believer, contrary to Christianity, which considers redemption as coming from above. In Afro-American religions, the trance transforms the believer into a god capable of vanquishing death, misery, and other ills.

Eusébio Macário, the only character of Viva o povo brasileiro belonging to the elite who is interested in popular knowledge and who decides to undertake an epic voyage of return to his origins, going back to his “native land” (the island of Itaparica) in order to understand his past, is totally transformed during an initiation rite. He learns that

a magia não é feita de fora, mas de dentro. Por isto é que se fala tanto da necessidade de ter fé para que as coisas aconteçam, pois a fé, afinal, não passa de uma maneira de ver o mundo que torna possíveis aquelas coisas que se deseja que aconteçam. A fé, portanto, é um conhecimento, conhecimento que ele não tinha e que ninguém poderia lhe dar, só ele mesmo, embora pudesse ser ajudado.

(595)

magic is not created from the outside, but from the inside. That is why we speak so much about having faith so that things will happen, for faith, in the final analysis, is nothing more than a manner of seeing the world that makes possible those things that we want to happen. Faith is thus a knowledge, a knowledge that he [Macário] did not have and that nobody can give him, only he himself, even though he could be helped.

This passage and others in which the narrator describes the metamorphoses occurring during the Afro-Brazilian rituals situate the author within the Latin American current of marvelous realism, whose objective is, as Irlemar Chiampi explains, to

problematizar os códigos sócio-cognitivos do leitor, sem instalar o paradoxo, manifesta-se nas referências freqüentes à religiosidade, enquanto modalidade cultural capaz de responder à sua aspiração de verdade supraracional. Em El reino de este mundo, de Alejo Carpentier, a série de acontecimientos legendários que antecederam a independência do Haiti é sistematicamente vinculada ao pensamento mítico dos negros, para evitar o efeito de fantasticidade que converteria a própria História num impossível referencial.

(63)

problematize the sociocognitive codes of the reader without creating a paradox. It [marvelous realism] appears in the references to religious faith, because it is a cultural modality capable of corresponding to a society's aspiration to suprarational truth. In El reino de este mundo by Alejo Carpentier, the series of legendary events that precede Haitian independence is systematically connected to the mythical thought of the Blacks, in order to avoid the effect of the fantastic, which would transform history itself into an impossible referent.

The recurring descriptions of apparitions, metamorphoses, deep trances, and other supernatural effects in the Latin American novel, including Viva o povo brasileiro, are not inserted for their local color or exoticism, but in order to problematize the rationality of the European tradition, and especially to name everything that defines the American continent as completely as possible through “the voices whose discourse was not troubled by the temptation to dominate the world,” as Wolfgang Bader writes in his preface to Hubert Fichte's book.

João Ubaldo Ribeiro's work attempts a recuperation of religious beliefs and popular myths and traditions with the intention of restoring the people's capacity for recovering what is lost, and bringing back the “collective consciousness” that was repressed by rationality. The project is completed by the integration of the reader as a “collective being, a member of a (desirable) community without monolithic and hierarchical values” (Chiampi 69). According to Irlemar Chiampi, marvelous realism, which characterizes the literary production of the best Caribbean authors (writing in Spanish or in French), such as Alejo Carpentier and Jacques Stephen Alexis, has an

efeito de encantamento [que] restitui a função comunitária da leitura, ampliando a esfera de contato social e os horizontes culturais do leitor.

(69)

effect of enchantment that restores the communal function of reading, enlarging the sphere of social contact and the cultural horizons of the reader.

The formation of Brazilian literature is thus characterized by a kind of errancy, constituted by the alternating movement between the predominance of sacralizing forces and that of desacralizing forces that favor interrelation, or, in other words, the construction of a form of collective identity that does not exclude the Other.

Works Cited

Alencar, José de. Preface. Sonhos d'ouro. Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1872.

———. Iracema. Ed. Silviano Santiago. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1975.

Angenot, Marc. “Pour une théorie du discours social.” Littérature 70 (1988): 82-98.

———. “Hégémonie, dissidence et contre-discours.” Etudes littéraries 22, 2 (1989): 11-24.

Bosi, Alfredo. Historia concisa da literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1976.

Cambron, Micheline. Une société, un récit. Montreal: Hexagone, 1989.

Cândido, António. Formação da literatura brasileira. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Martins, 1964.

———. “Literatura e consciência nacional.” Suplemento literário de Minas Gerais 156 (6 September 1969): 8-11.

———. “Literature e subdesenvolvimento.” In Cândido, A educação pela noite e outros ensaios. São Paulo: Atica, 1987. 140-162.

Chiampi, Irlemar. O real maravilhoso. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1980.

Dubois, Jacques. L'institution de la littérature. Brussels: Nathan, 1978.

Durão, Santa Rita. Caramuru. Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1957.

Fichte, Hubert. Etnopoesia. Preface by Wolfgang Bader. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987.

Gama, José Basílio da. O Uraguai. Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1964.

Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil, 1981.

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