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Third
World Literary Fortunes : Brazilian Culture and Its International
Reception
Amazon.com - Where was Brazil
in the so-called "Latin American" literary
Boom? Third World Literary Fortunes
posits a response contrasting the
figures of Jorge Amado, "vulgar" but
uniquely successful in turning Brazilian
popular energies into literature,
and Joo Guimares Rosa, "Brazil's
Joyce." The Brazilian establishment
expected Rosa would win the Nobel
Prize. Abroad Rosa remains utterly
obscure. Piers Armstrong probes the
gulf between the Brazilian intelligentsia's
perception of the world and the world's
perceptions of Brazil - in which
the Brazilian elite is essentially
invisible. The result is a cultural
mapping of the relative power of
four great rhetorical currents: literary
Brazil; popular artistic expressions
of identity dominated by Rio and
Bahia; the representation by white
social anthropologists of Brazilian
popular culture as being unique by
virtue of its (their) blackness;
finally, the dissonance between Brazilian
literature and the supposedly continental
dimensions of the Spanish American
writers apotheosized in the Boom
as the poetic priests of Latin American
alterity.
Third
World Literary Fortunes introduces the reader to the life and
work of five of Brazil's greatest writers, including (apart from
Rosa and Amado): the country's other "greatest" writer,
the extraordinarily subtle and psychologically acute Machado
de Assis, a mulatto who, though a witness to slavery completely
effaced his own racial identity from his work; its best poet,
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the great twentieth century
portraitists of urban bourgeois mediocrity; and the seminal Renaissance
man of Brazilian modernism, Mrio de Andrade. The book examines
their respective domestic and international receptions, discerning
a clear pattern of international irrelevance with the exception
of the black sheep, Jorge Amado - the only major Brazilian writer
who celebrated negritude.
The
enormous differences between the other writers lead Armstrong
to the conclusion that the common point determining international
failure is the absence of the one marketologically apt rhetoric
of identity, the "Carmen Miranda syndrome" - the cultural
aura of coastal and urban Afro-Brazilian and the sexual mystique
of the mulatta, present in Amado's work but also in the brilliant
speculative socioanthropology of Gilberto Freyre, Rio's carnaval
and in the current explosion of cultural tourism to Bahia. |
