Os Retornos da Utopia: Histórias, Imagens, Experiências
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/utopianstudies.27.2.0364
ISSN2154-9648
Autores ResumoIn 2000 “Literatura e Utopia” (Literature and Utopia), a research group led by Ildney Cavalcanti, started working at the Federal University of Alagoas, including members from three other institutions (Federal University of Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro State University, and Oswaldo Cruz Foundation). Despite its namesake, the group focuses extensively on cultural as well as literary aspects of utopian thinking, with special regard for the colonial and postcolonial viewpoints of Latin America. The group has been responsible for two issues of the university's language and literature journal Leitura (issues 32, in 2003, and 41, in 2008). They also penned the 2006 volume Fábulas da Iminência. Ensaios sobre literatura e utopia (Recife: PPGLL/UFPE, 2006), edited by Ildney Cavalcanti, Alfredo Cordiviola, and Derivaldo dos Santos, mostly focused on the discourses of utopia and the connection among utopia, ideology, and history.This year the group published a new collection of multidisciplinary essays, edited by Alfredo Cordiviola and Ildney Cavalcanti and titled Os Retornos da Utopia: Histórias, Imagens, Experiências. The title itself is of great complexity for any translingual interpretation: The Returns of Utopia: Histories?/Stories?, Images, and Experiences?/Experiments?1 In fact, the book includes historical as well as narrative reflections and readings of experiences as well as of social experiments. The use of returns also brings forth multiple interpretations in Portuguese: Comebacks? Repetitions? Restitutions? Compensations? In a kaleidoscopic way, and regardless of the editors' strict initial intentions, the multiple essays account for all interpretations possible. Primary topics include the resonance of utopia in other literary genres, the relationship between utopian and national imagery and imagination, and the role of utopian thinking in modernity and its reading reconfigured by historical knowledge and by a contemporary setting that is debated as being either creator of or witness to a possible demise of utopian thinking. But the seventeen essays compiled also offer several direct readings of film, graphic, and literary creations, never completely abandoning the Latin American point of departure—despite other points of reference such as Cape Verde—and the intent of a release of utopia from “Eurocentric colonial webs” (11), as explained by the editors.Brenda Carlos de Andrade, who also contributed to the 2006 volume with a study on nation and the global world and the standing of utopia and ideology in the postmodern world, presents a relevant study titled “Descobrindo e fundando nações: Estratégias para transitar entre imagens de modernidade/colonialidade” (Discovering and founding nations: Strategies to transition to/from images of modernity/colonialism). Modernity is perceived as Alice's mirror, reflecting art on the one side and history and society on the other, while photography takes the role of narrative of both reality and longing in an extensive and detailed study of various photographers and their combined and unavoidable utopia.2Biagio D'Angelo's “América Eutópica. Escrever, reescrever, retornar” (Eutopic America. Writing, rewriting, returning) is a fascinating analysis of Haroldo de Campos's use of Utopia as a model for literary and cultural reinventing and of Latin America as a hybrid of Latin roots and American context in a contemporary context of rewritings, following Octavio Paz's notion of an “architecture of bridges.” The in-betweenness of Latin America extends also to its role in the East-West/Europe dialogue, as an intended fecund triple tropic.Ricardo Soares da Silva carries on from his 2006 study on the Latin American epos to the new “Por uma utopia realista: Liminaridade latino-americana e imaginário instituinte” (For a realist utopia: Latin American liminarity and instituting imaginary), a riveting study of the search for originality through language as a core factor in liberation from the Iberian past of Latin America, in balance with the thirst for distancing from folklore as an identity trait. The imaginary institutes an identity that extends beyond both colonial and pre-Columbian heritage—neither a simple extension of past or alien traditions nor their opposite. Silva pays attention to several contributions, particularly within Brazilian Romanticism, and reads into the Latin American identity flow and the attempt at an instituting self-knowledge designed in response to externally instituted knowledge.Juan Pablo Martín Rodrigues penned “José Inácio de Abreu e Lima e a batalha da utopia” (José Inácio de Abreu e Lima and the battle of utopia), an interesting study of the complex nineteenth-century general, son of the mythical Padre Roma, a revolutionary put to death in 1817 and titled “General das Massas” (General of the Masses). As thoroughly discussed by Martín Rodrigues, Abreu e Lima's mid-nineteenth-century O Socialismo (Socialism) puts forward a holistic utopian vision of nonmaterialistic socialism, which opposes Communism (as quoted by Rodrigues, for Lima communists are never philosophers) and allows for the defense of the stability and union of Brazil under imperial rule, the belief in the natural predominance of Caucasians, and the ecumenical Christian spirit, which would later be considered enough to deny burial to its author.Alfredo Cordiviola continues his exciting studies of utopian experiments inspired by Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon, focusing on the balance of individual pursuits and collective harmony in his noteworthy “O amor nos tempos da Colônia Cecília” (Love in the times of the Cecília Colony). Italian Giovanni (“Cardias”) Rossi's utopian project in Paraná (1890–94), named after Rossi's protagonist in his 1875 Un comune socialista, drew upon the tradition of alternative intentional communities. Cordiviola reflects on the extremely relevant balance of individual versus community, by focusing on love—family, possession, free love. The chapter includes a very interesting analysis of Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta's “El problema del amor” and Rossi's own 1893 “Un Episodio d'amore nella Colonia Cecilia,” with Rossi's conclusion that to love more than one person is a contemporary requirement of human nature.Gilda Vilela Brandão and Ari Denisson da Silva's “Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma: Caminhos e descaminhos de um projecto utópico” (The Sad Ending of Policarpo Quaresma: Steps and missteps of a utopian project) provides a stimulating reading of the novel by Lima Barreto, a Brazilian engagé writer, as a depiction of the confrontation between the idealized nation and its real nature. Literature is read as having the utopian function of changing the country by re-creating reality, generating a journeyless utopia, but Barreto's sweet-and-sour text, riddled with caricatures and denouncements, ends with a defeated Quaresma unable to fulfill his visionary project.Murilo Alves provides a clear and even poetic reading of mythical Pasárgada, first coined by Manuela Bandeira, as the space for individuality in “Pasárgada bandeiriana: Do mito à utopia” (Bandeira's Pasárgada: From myth to utopia). The mythical land is a haven from progress in the attempt to retrieve the personal myth of individual identity, away from anonymity, in a land called after the Persian term for both field and treasure. However, Alves pays detailed attention to the original poem “Vou-me embora para Pasárgada” and explains how our longing for primordial simplicity is denied on its own terms, in a land of geographic distance and social hierarchy (“Lá sou amigo do rei” [There I am a friend of the king's]).Maria Gabriela Costa puts forward a splendid comparative reading of Manoel Camilo dos Santos's leaflet/tale “Viagem a São Saruê,” a mythical Cockaigne-like land of abundance with a twist of social criticism, and Graciliano Ramos's 1938 novel Vidas Secas and its depiction of northeastern misery in Brazil. Costa is able to retrieve the political responses from both texts and attribute a sense of project and an intent of motivation toward political action to the utopian verses in her “Utopias em trânsito: Vidas Secas e Viagem a ‘São Saruê’” (Utopias in transit: Dry Lives and Trip to “Saint Saruê”).Simone Cavalcante pens an accomplished study of Brazilian Modernism's interesting blend of aesthetic experimenting and social concerns in “Travessia pela poética utópica do romance Calunga, de Jorge de Lima” (Journey on the utopian poetics of Jorge de Lima's novel Calunga). The fight for power between Coronel Totô and the hero Lula, a resistant against what he perceives as the social atrocities of the day, is central in a book in which poetry, drama, and narrative are combined and local referents coexist with the myth of an original, untouched (and unbooked) language. The traditional writing of utopias is given a critical look as the troubled experience of a chaotic reality imposes itself.“A Sombra dos Homens, de Roberto Causo e a fantasy fiction” (Roberto Causo's The Shadow of Men and fantasy fiction) by Cristhiano Aguiar is an innovative reading of Causo's 2004 work in connection to the mythical history of Brazil. The apparently strictly creative sci-fi endeavor is shown to possess at its core a longing for escape to a paradise lost, together with the search for genuine national literature, thus becoming instrumental in the establishment of Brazilian fantasy, which is set in motion here in the dialogue of European descendants and Native Americans and in the choice of the Amazon forest.Ildney Cavalcanti, in “Da terra deslocada ao deslocamento da utopia: As mobilidades do experimento de Vik Muniz” (From displaced land to the displacing of utopia: Mobilities in Vik Muniz's experiment), studies in a fascinating way the work of artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961), including the 2010 documentary Waste Land, his 2008 series Pictures of Garbage, and the 2010 book Lixo Extraordinário (Garbage Extraordinaire) and its reinstatement of the Garbage Deposit in Gramacho Garden (Aterro Sanitário de Jardim Gramacho) as a dystopian locale, which includes madness and the notion of suburban hell. The intertextuality generated by Muniz and explored by Cavalcanti with Euclides da Cunha's 1902 Os Sertões is of particular interest.Fernando Guilherme S. Ayres provides an interesting comparison between Orwell's 1984 and Moore and Lloyd's V for Vendetta in “Distopias futurísticas: Aproximações e distanciamentos entre 1984, de George Orwell, e V de Vingança, de Alan Moore e David Llloyd” (Futuristic dystopias: Links and distancing between George Orwell's 1984 and Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta). The essay also ponders language—verbal and graphic—and includes references to past graphic adaptations of Orwell.Gustavo Henrique de Souza Leão's valuable contribution, titled “Transitória utopia: A fragilidade do não-lugar em Watchmen” (Transitory utopia: The fragility of the nonplace in Watchmen), pays particular attention to the fleeting notions of heroism and community under external and internal threats. The sense of transit is read both in terms of content and in terms of the visual characteristics of the graphic novel, with the latter adding to a deep understanding of the core nature of utopia.Marcos Vinícius Matias offers an innovative link in his essay “A gênese do mal: Distopia e violência na ficção detetivesca” (The genesis of evil: Dystopia and violence in detective fiction), by which the discovery/perception of evil and violence in new urban communities establishes the detective as the agent of correction and restoration of the utopian social contract. The romantic lawbreakers who attacked feudal propriety are now dangerous monsters threatening communities. In a thought-provoking twist, though, Matias studies the 2005 short story by André Sant'Anna, “A Lei” (The law), in which hyperrealistically described acts of sexual violence are attributed to law enforcers. Particular attention is granted in this fascinating essay to the utopian role of hyperreal dystopia as a restorer of clear ideals.Eliaquim Teixeira brings to the book a very engaging African-based study, “Evasion and antievasion: Facetas da utopia em Cabo Verde” (Escape and anti-escape: Facets of utopia in Cape Verde), in which he retrieves poetry published in Claridade (Clarity), a journal of nine issues in twenty-four years by authors such as Jorge Barbosa, Manuel Lopes, and Osvaldo Alcântara (pseudonym of Baltasar Lopes), and Baltasar Lopes's five poems on Pasárgada in the journal Atlântico (Atlantic, 1946). The longing for evasion mixed with a search for Creole identity is read together with the Marxist neorealism of the journal Certeza (Certainty), published twice in 1944 and later censured. Teixeira stirs up debate by pondering the thought-provoking possibility that there is no real ideological divorce between them but, rather, shared dissatisfaction and hope.Edson Luiz André de Sousa and Luciano Assis Mattuella's “Perturbar o universo: Adolescência e utopia” (Disturbing the universe: Adolescence and utopia) is a fascinating study on adolescence and its quest for separate identity and autonomous narrative. One cannot help but wonder whether their postcolonial standing influences the authors' perspective, as they equate the relevance of the appropriation of past narratives and alienation by role models and the relevance of thinking outside/against existing reality in utopian thinking.Ana Claudia Romano Ribeiro's innovative “Elementos para uma história das edições brasileiras da Utopia, de Thomas More” (Elements toward a history of Brazilian editions of Thomas More's Utopia) provides valuable data to all interested in not only More's work and reception but also the history of utopia in Brazil.As laid evident in the paragraphs above, Os Retornos da Utopia is composed of a multitude of texts with little retrievable axis of content other than that of utopia. For some, that might be a criticism, which would fit the current dread of proceedings and similar publications not tight-vested within clear and strict thematic boundaries, a trend financially imposed and often leading to mere manipulation of terms or even rejection of multiple angles in favor of that chosen by the editors. As any trend, this too will hopefully pass, leaving room again for the real, mature facing of the immense complexity of any topic and the myriad of perspectives (and objects) that can be brought about by it. Though having set sufficient lines of thought and method for their collective endeavor to be accepted by trendier readers, Cordiviola and Cavalcanti also offer a priceless contribution to those defending broad, open, collective volumes, making Os Retornos da Utopia: Histórias, Imagens, Experiências proof of the quality and advantages of not setting boundaries too strictly. Their joint claim of the return of utopia at the end of the book's preface is in itself a testament to the pair's (and the group's) truly utopian spirit of construction and belief.
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