Brazilian Pastoral?: Nature, Nation, and Exile in Ana Maria Machado's Tropical sol da liberdade :
2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/isle/isu125
ISSN1759-1090
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoThe pastoral is not usually associated with contemporary Brazilian literary production. Nor is it the frame through which Ana Maria Machado's 1988 novel, Tropical sol da liberdade (“Tropical Sun of Liberty”), has been interpreted. But if this essay runs against the grain of recent literary production and criticism, it does so following the novel itself. Tropical sol da liberdade diverges from the most prevalent representations of the relationship between Brazilian nature and the Brazilian nation in twentieth-century cultural production, particularly in those texts that, like the novel itself, critically examine the military dictatorship (1964–84) and its legacy. Brazil's literary and social imaginary bear the weight of over 500 years of canonical discourse conflating the nation with tropical nature,1 and as such, representations of Brazilian nature have been directly linked to politics since colonization. As Flávia Paula Carvalho observes, praise for the exuberance of Brazilian nature often “serves as a pretext for patriotic exaltation” (21).2 For this reason, reexaminations of the ideology of Brazilian national identity have typically punctured, rather than indulged, the idyll of the nation as a New World Eden. From the failed farm experiment in Lima Barreto's classic satire of exaggerated nationalism, Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1911), to the ecological dystopia Ignácio de Loyola Brandão cast as the nation's grim future under totalitarian rule in Não verás país nenhum (1981), social novels have challenged the pastoral myth of Brazil as a nation in harmony with nature. On first glance, then, the most viable relation modern Brazilian literature maintains with the pastoral tradition appears limited to its negation: the antipastoral.
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