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Rationalism Called into Question in the Latin American Narrative: From Jorge Luis Borges to Jorge Amado

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.49.3.0372

1528-4212

Eduardo F. Coutinho,

Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity

Among the many elements markedly present within Latin American twentieth-century literature, one that stands out as a characteristic feature is the criticism of a rationalist logic. This criticism is expressed in distinct ways, extending from simple critique to the employment of the mimetic realism that dominates this type of cultural production to the exploration of two categories of the real. In itself, the introduction of these categories of real within a narrative threatens any attempt at representation based exclusively on the reproduction of an empirically provable reality. These categories, which have been designated the “strange,” the “uncommon,” the “fantastic,” or the “marvelous,” or even the “strangely fantastic” the “purely marvelous,” or “marvelous realism,” have been the object of study of a number of literary critics and theorists. The intention here, however, is neither to direct the reader's attention to these concepts nor to attempt to classify literary works based on them. Instead, it is simply to examine how works such as those by Jorge Luis Borges and Jorge Amado have many elements in common even though there are remarkable differences between them, elements that derive from the use of the fantastic as a form of protest against rationalist logic and as the only way to understand the real in literature.In an already classic book on the subject, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970), translated by Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973), Tzvetan Todorov affirms that the fantastic can be defined as the “hesitation” experienced by a person cognizant of natural laws when faced with a supernatural occurrence. For Todorov, the fantastic is a literary genre and not only a category or element within narrative genres. The basis of Todorov's theory is the notion of an “ephemeral” genre: the pure fantastic comes into being when there is an oscillation between the marvelous, as found in fairy tales, for example, and the strange, and it is characterized precisely by hesitation, doubt, and uncertainty. This hesitation has to come from the reader as well as from the character, and it presupposes the integration of both. Additionally, three conditions are essential for this hesitation to occur. The first refers to the writing and concerns the reader. It is what causes the reader to feel reluctance toward the explanations the event elicits in the narrative. The second concerns the character—it is what causes the hesitation. The third concerns the reader again but is connected to the possibilities of reading, to the reader's need to take a stand, refusing allegorical or poetic interpretations. The fantastic contains an element of subversion because it allows for themes to be approached that are prohibited by institutionalized censorship or self-censorship. On one level, the pragmatic, the fantastic stirs emotions, frightens, and creates suspense, producing an effect on the reader. On another, a semantic level, it creates a universe that cannot exist outside of language. On yet another, a syntactic level, it organizes the narrative in its own manner, making it compatible with what is enunciated, the strange fabulation that drives it.Irène Bessière's Le récit fantastique: La poétique de l'incertain (1974) (The Fantastic Narrative: The Poetics of the Uncertain) supports and slightly advances Todorov's theory. In addition to engaging with traditional narratives concerned with supernatural terror, as does Todorov, Bessière also describes more contemporary perspectives on reality. Unlike Todorov, however, Bessière does not concern herself with literary categorizations or genre. For her, the fantastic is an aesthetic formulation of intellectual discussions that occurred during a particular moment in history and is related to a subject's connection with the suprasensitive, reflecting a cultural metamorphoses. What characterizes the fantastic is not only the presence of the improbable but above all, the juxtaposition of and contradiction between several probabilities, and this is what gives the fantastic its paradoxical nature. In the fantastic narrative, the impossibility of a solution results in, in Bessière's words, the presentation of all possible solutions. The oppositions natural/supernatural, reason/fantasy, sanity/insanity all become neutralized in the fantastic, giving way to a real that is mixed with unrealities or that can even be said to exhibit a convergence of the thetic/antithetic. In this way, the fantastic problematizes the nature of the codes, as it presents a question that threatens rules and norms, its ambiguity marking the impossibility of any affirmation, which makes the rules uncertain. In addition to this, the conjunction of these oppositions, which results from a polyvalence of intellectual signs, exposes the arbitrary nature of cultural signs and defines the end of their submission to an external referent. Bessière affirms that one of the main conditions of the fantastic is that misunderstanding be connected to an anthropocentric consideration, which leads her to Borges, who, in her view, highlights the identification between the strange and the human mind. Lastly, the fantastic event exposes the totality culture has obliterated, establishing a liberatory function for itself.Although there are common denominators between these two theories, I would like to point out that there are also important divergences, including Todorov's emphasis on objectivity in relation to the text, which contrasts with Bessière's position, which values the reader's role, calling attention to the fact that the reader literally participates in the construction-deconstruction of the narrative. Bessière also does not bestow the same importance on hesitance as Todorov and states that the fantastic surpasses the strange and the marvelous, grounding itself on the convergence of both. For Bessière, the real and the supernatural exhibit the same level of coherence within the text, and the fantastic resides within the imaginary experience at the limits of reason. In addition, Bessière formulates principles that contribute to the categorization of the fantastic, and she includes in her considerations the traditional supernatural narrative as well as the modern fantastic narrative, such as those of Borges and Cortázar. According to her theoretical proposal, no analysis can be performed on only one level, because the fantastic surpasses the many strata of a text and manifests itself differently within each one. At the level of enunciation, it constitutes a special narrative logic in which the real and the unreal rupture the probable. At the ideological level, it constitutes a way of problematizing codes, laws, and conventions as the real is exposed. Lastly, at the reading level, it forms a mechanism capable of stimulating specific reactions from the reader.One of the most interesting reflections on the fantastic in the Latin American context can be found in Irlemar Chiampi's book O realismo maravilhoso (1980) (Marvelous Realism). Concerned with the characterization of Latin American marvelous realism, the author provides a critical overview of several theories of the fantastic and establishes a contrast between two of these categories, Latin American marvelous realism and the European fantastic, from which emanates the idea that the first is a transcultured expression of the second. Setting aside the matter of the marvelous real, the axis of Chiampi's text, and focusing here on the fantastic, we may note that this category presents itself as a complex discourse in which two semantic fields converge (the natural and the supernatural), establishing the paradox Irene Bessière defines. For Chiampi, the key element defining the fantastic is provided by the psychological principle guaranteeing its aesthetic perception: fantasy is fundamentally a way of producing a physical reaction in the reader (fear and its variants) through an intellectual restlessness (doubt). It is a fear of the supernatural, of the unknown, generated by the division between real and imaginary. Getting the reader to oscillate between a rational explanation of the narrated facts (the fantastic as hallucination, for example) and a plausible explanation of the supernatural constitutes the objective, which is projected in the discourse as a questioning of the two orders: the natural and the supernatural. The limits of these orders, of these codes, are downplayed by the irreconcilability of the narrated facts, be they with or without reason. As such, fear surges from the perception of threat, natural or supernatural. In the fantastic, the reader's stability is destabilized, and the cultural hierarchy between the real and unreal is questioned, without any metaphysical certainty being set in its place, without any eminence afforded to an extranatural state. The possible explanations—even those based on myth—are constructed on a ludic artifice of textual verisimilitude, whose project is to avoid any assertion, any fixed meaning. This leads Chiampi to affirm that the fantastic makes falsehood its object, its cause.Our concern here is with two narratives by twentieth-century Latin American authors, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges's tale “El sur” (“The South”), published in Ficciones (1956) and the Brazilian Jorge Amado's A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro D'Água (The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell), which appeared in Os velhos marinheiros (1961) (Home is the Sailor [1964]). The theme of both these works is the idea of the double and in both stories this idea is represented by death. I demonstrate how the fantastic is employed in these narratives as a way of questioning rational logic and of critiquing the dominant point of view that constantly subordinates dreams and desires to the imperatives of a reason inherited from the European tradition and imposed during three centuries of colonization. I did not choose these texts gratuitously. My choice was guided not only by the presence of the theme of the double but also by factors such as the presence of a search for cultural identity and by the way these texts treat irony or comedy. This treatment is considerably distinct in each of these works, but in both cases, be it through thin irony or through the employment of dark comedy or even through a “carnavalization,” to use a Bakhtinian term, it functions as a fundamental element of the ways in which these authors operate.“El sur,” one of Borges' masterpieces, is one of only a few texts in which the author deals explicitly with issues of cultural identity. In this story, com-posed of two symmetrical parts, an individual, divided between his European origins and his identification with the place in which he lives (he was of German descent but felt very Argentine), wishes to visit a family estate in the southern part of Argentina but keeps postponing his plans. One day, he is greatly injured, hospitalized with septicemia, and nearly dies. Once he recuperates, he finally goes to the estate per his doctor's suggestion. Just before he arrives, he is challenged to a knife duel from which he feels he will not survive. The last paragraph of the narrative, which until this point has been very realist, discreetly introduces the fantastic. With the use of subtle language, the text suggests that the protagonist had already died and that this death by duel was how he would have chosen to die if he had been given the choice. This means of death was connected to the cultural experience of that part of the country, of the south, with which he had always wanted to identify.Sintió al atravesar el umbral, que morir en una pelea a cuchillo, a cielo abierto y acometiendo, hubiera sido una liberación para él, una felicidad y una fiesta, en la primera noche del sanatorio, cuando le clavaron la aguja. Sintió que si él, entonces, hubiera podido elegir o soñar su muerte, esta es la muerte que hubiera elegido o soñado. (195)(As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. [174])1 For Irene Bessière, everything here is connected to the notion of misunderstanding. Under the guise of continuity and apparent narrative coherence (an injured man seeks convalescence and risks being killed in a duel), Borges introduces a series of themes, including dreams, the unfolding of a personality, and death, without directly relating them to the causal sequence that entails them and at the same time that they destroy. The supplementary detail that at first ensures verisimilitude here imposes inconsequence and, as such, the fantastic (one cannot die twice). The author avails himself of the realist novel's arbitrariness, inserting the improbable without ever evoking the unusual or the extraordinary.2 The fantastic here is, as we have affirmed, very discreet; it is not explicitly designated but constructed by the reader at the moment a causal chain is reestablished. It is at this moment that we discover something illogical: the fantastic emanates in conjunction with other narrative possibilities without invoking the supernatural or even the strange. The story virtually contains other stories, but since these do not define themselves, it makes the impossible possible. The narrative only exists because of this paradox: in spite of its ending it can become one or the other, possible or impossible. This opening of meaning is the literary expression of unnerving strangeness: human discourse never ends. The end of the story, far from providing an end per se (“Dahlman empuña con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabía manejar, y sale a la llanura” (195) (“Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlman went out into the plain” [174]), returns the reader to an unsuspecting route within the text itself, a route the reader must take backward, where the search for an explanation unfolds, where the argument is seemingly inadequate to itself.“El Sur” is an example of a story that becomes fantastic through a redoubling of the text. The ambiguity it presents is never immediate, instead, it is completely produced through a reorganization of the narrative levels and through a displacement of narrative units from one level to another, from the first part of the story to the second part. The verisimilitude is constantly present. There are a series of indicators, which point to the fantastic, such as references to The One Thousand and One Nights, to time, to the idea of a double (“Era como si a um tiempo fuera dos hombres,” (191) [“It was if he were two men at a time” (170)]), to the protagonist's literary knowledge, to the idea of traveling to the past, to the idea of the old gaucho living outside of his time, to the use of books to hide reality, and to dreaming (the first breeze of autumn). Nevertheless, the text itself does not present any fantastic occurrences. According to Bessière's analysis, a paradigmatic order replaces the narrative's syntagmatic order, which in turn creates the fantastic. For the fantastic to be achieved, the paradigmatic system must define itself as a possible syntagmatic determination, and this occurs with the author's interventions when he affirms, “A la realidad le gustan las simetrias y los leves anacronismos,” (189) (“Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms” [169]). In reality, the narrative contains twin stories, which mark its ambiguity. There are two exclusive stories, one believable and the other unbelievable, and it is the coexistence of both that gives way for the fantastic.The second story within Borges' tale is a story of desire, of identification with one's place of origin, with the land of the gauchos, a story of a mental structure ingrained within one's psyche. Dahlman, the protagonist, desired an honorable death and in the end, his wish is granted. He is the descendant of estate owners, and one day, when he stops in the village for something to eat, a group of delinquents provokes him, and at the moment he is recognized, at the moment his name is pronounced, Dahlman instinctively knows he will be unable to avoid an altercation. When an honorable duel becomes inevitable, he knows that defeat is imminent. Resigned, he heads toward his destination. Irony is the strategy sustaining this second death and is the literary device on which the fantastic is based. Dahlman could have died in the hospital, a victim of septicemia, but this would have been an inglorious death. Death by duel, however, is a celebration; it is the death he would have chosen had he been given a choice; it is the dignified death of a man who, because of his origins, could share a code of honor with the local inhabitants. Dahlman had wanted to return to the south, as evinced by the frequently postponed desire to visit the estate. Nevertheless, at the end of the story ambiguity subtly surfaces within the narrative. The question arises: did the second death truly occur or was it merely wishful thinking, the affirmation of an identity that would transport him from a mediocre life to one of possible coronation?In contrast, Jorge Amado's novella A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro D'Água carries within its title the ambiguity of the fantastic. It indicates that the story will be about two deaths, and evidently, the two deaths of the same person, the laid-back Joaquim Soares da Cunha. Joaquim is an exemplary public employee who one day decides to abandon his family and his respectable career to live among the scoundrels and prostitutes of Salvador in a rented room as a vagrant drunk. The theme of the double already shows up here: as he breaks away from his former life and becomes a libertine, Joaquim acquires a nickname, Quincas Wateryell—a nickname he receives after he emits a yell one day when he realizes his glass contains water and not cachaça. Quincas adopts this new lifestyle completely and lives that way until he passes away in the modest rented room. When notified of his death, Quincas's family shows up for his wake and attempts to recover his former image by giving him a funeral designed to erase the traces of the last years of his life. During the wake, however, many of his new friends show up, bringing with them bottles of liquor. After a series of minor disputes, the friends convince the family members to leave to run errands, and once they have left, the friends lead Quincas around town to his favorite places, until they reach a moqueca food vendor on a boat. Once there, a thunderstorm ensues, and the group watches as Quincas throws himself into the sea.The presence of the double and of the protagonist's two deaths, the first in his room and the second at sea as an “old sailor,” constitute the narrative's core. The fantastic's ambiguity, however, is suggested by the epigraph, composed of a sentence Quitéria overhears—Quitéria was Quincas's lover, and she was with him at the moment of his second death—as he fell into the sea: “Cada qual cuide de seu enterro; impossível não há” (“People need to take care of their own funeral; nothing's impossible”).3 This ambiguity is also evinced in the narrator's words at the beginning of the tale: Até hoje permanece certa confusão em torno da morte de Quincas Berro D'Água. Dúvidas por explicar, detalhes absurdos, contradições no depoimento das testemunhas, lacunas diversas. Não há clareza sobre hora, local e frase derradeira. (19)(A certain amount of confusion about the death of Quincas Wateryell persists even today. There are doubts to be explained away, ridiculous details, contradictory testimony from witnesses, diverse gaps in the story. Time, place, and last words are uncertain. [3]) The narrator proposes a verification of the facts and seeks the objectivity that would ensure the reader's trust. At the same time, he leaves the matter's lack of resolution clear, since the facts he expresses were presented to him through the contradictory testimony of several witnesses, with the result that succeeding versions annul the ones that precede them. The first version, the one provided by Quincas's family, the one framed by their petit bourgeois ideology, describes his death as an end inherent to the human condition and randomly occurring. The second version, the one provided by his friends, transforms death. As Maria do Carmo Pandolfo affirms in an essay on the subject, this version transforms death “em escolha individual, afirmação de liberdade, realização de um projeto, truncado no decorrer da existência, mas talvez compartilhado em dimensões não-humanas” (“into an individual's choice, the affirmation of one's freedom, the realization of a project, which was fragmented throughout one's existence but perhaps shared along nonhuman dimensions”).4 The first is supported by the death certificate, a written document, consecrated by a rationalist tradition; the second is based on spoken testimony, on the speech of a socially and economically marginalized group of people, but finds itself upheld by the benevolence of witnesses such as Mestre Manuel and even Quitéria, who the narrator describes as “mulher de uma só palavra” (19) (“a woman of her word” [3–4]).Obviously, Quincas's family does not believe in the story told by his friends, particularly because this version only confirms the dead man's negative image. Nevertheless, the family does not completely dismiss the possibility that Quincas may have played one last prank on them—faking the death in his room. Quincas's friends vehemently deny that this death occurred and remind themselves that Quincas had sworn he would only die at sea, as the “old sailor” he thought he was. It is true that there was a death certificate, but the doctor who had signed it was not seen as very experienced and was therefore an easy target for Quincas's practical jokes. At the wake, only Quincas's daughter hears his affronts, sees his mocking faces, and notices his restlessness. The narrator notes, however, that she is uncomfortable with the situation, with the heat of the room and the stuffy environment, and at a certain point, she asks herself, “Será que estou enlouquecendo?” (232) (“Am I going mad?” [35]). When the friends arrive, they are no longer inebriated, but they still question whether the man in fact died, and the more they drink, the less they believe he did. Gradually, the wake turns into a celebration, and as the day turns into night, the party moves from the room to the streets. Throughout the entire narrative, however, Quincas's behavior remains ambiguous: he spits out the cachaça they give him, he does not respond when they speak to him, he sprawls himself on the floor when they try to sit him, and finally, on the boat, no one knows how, but the narrator tells of “como Quincas se pôs de pé, encostado à vela menor” (265) (“how Quincas got to his feet and leaned against the aftersail” [95]) and how in the middle of the storm they saw him “atirar-se e ouviram sua frase derradeira” (266) (“throw himself overboard and heard his last words” [96]).Here again, ambiguity appears, as occurs with the fantastic, and the narrator is unable to clarify events, as he had warned he might not in the beginning. The second death, as is the case with the second death in Borges's tale, is the story of a desire, of identification with the group Quincas had chosen to spend the end of his life with, a marginalized social group, but one that is part of his city, of his land, of his culture and whose values he not only shares but mythifies. Quincas had grown tired of the hypocritical society in which he first lived and did not wish for his end to be inglorious, dead in a bed like any other citizen. Instead, he dreamed of an honorable death—at sea, such as the old sailors of the stories he heard on the docks of Bahia had. This is the end his friends give him, or perhaps the one he gives himself, as he participates in the festivities on Mestre Manuel's boat. The narrator, also a man of that land, tells the events of the story with the intent of uncovering the truth but frequently demonstrates sympathy for the story told by Quincas's friends. At the end, however, the narrator is incapable of arguing against the family's version and leaves the matter open. The tale ends with a critique against the family's avarice: to keep from losing the money they spent on Quincas's coffin, they try to sell it.The humor that crosses the entire book and completely imposes itself at the end is one of the fundamental pillars of the fantastic in the narrative. It largely contributes to the confrontation with a rationalist logic as the only and exclusive expression of the real. The family's version of the death reflects this logic, which is the perspective of members of the dominant social class who were educated as Europeans. The other version, the friends' version, is the perspective of the downtrodden, frequently identified with the Afro-descendant culture, and it provides alternative ways of understanding the real. The humor that permeates the text does not only denounce the dominant social class's hypocrisy but also demonstrates that these values are not the only ones, are not exclusive, and provides other possibilities present in the perspective of the less-favored, for example. Jorge Amado is a writer who has always shown great sympathy for the working class, and the type of humor he uses is a popular humor, a carnavalized humor, again in the Bakhtinian sense of the word. When, through this type of humor, one sees beyond death as the end, which is one of the pillars of rationalism, one acquires the ability to break through taboos and prejudices and consider the possibility of a new order in which pleasure allows people to choose how they wish to die and be buried.Amado's predilection for popular culture, manifested in his interest in storytelling and the Afro-Brazilian universe, makes him more similar to his other Spanish-American colleagues, such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. Nevertheless, what I have demonstrated here is that Amado's work does have an affinity with those Spanish-American writers whose work is seemingly very distant stylistically from his such as Borges's. Borges's work is highly intellectual and densely philosophical, contrary to Amado's, and yet they share certain concerns. They both avail themselves of the fantastic in their work, albeit by disparate means, to question rationalist logic as the only way of understanding the real in literature.