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The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964–1985

2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-83-1-192

1527-1900

Idelber Avelar,

Linguistics and Education Research

In her well-documented The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964–1985, Nancy T. Baden offers a wealth of information feeding into two narrative sequences, namely the institutional trajectory of censorship in Brazil, and the fiction banned by or written in response to censorship. The two strands take turns in Baden’s chronologically organized chapters, in which she studies several contemporary Brazilian authors and presents information about the evolution of censorship in Brazil. This is supplemented by major authors’ reactions to it, as elicited in a questionnaire. Finally, Baden reproduces, as appendixes, the famous writers’ petition to Minister Falcão (1977) and important bio-bibliographic data on 31 Brazilian authors. The choice of authors included in this selection is based on how directly they were either censored or wrote in response to censorship, a criterion that also defines which pieces are analyzed.The reader unfamiliar with recent Brazilian literature and cultural history will have much to learn from Baden’s well-researched study. She devotes a few pages to a dozen works of fiction, and paragraphs on many more, including important narratives by luminaries such as Érico Veríssimo, Antonio Callado, Lêdo Ivo, Rubem Fonseca, José J. Veiga, Autran Dourado, Silviano Santiago, Loyola Brandão, and Lygia Fagundes Telles. This also means that the “analyses” are in fact little more than plot summaries. This analytic insufficiency becomes fatal for the book, unfor tunately: the configuration of reception today is such that this monograph is unlikely to have much of readership among nonspecialists in Brazil. And judged against the specialized knowledge already produced about postcoup Brazilian literature (the standards having been set by the likes of Silviano Santiago, Flora Süssekind, and Ítalo Moriconi), The Muffled Cries adds absolutely nothing. This is the reason why, in spite of its comprehensive bibliography, Baden’s study is unable to engage a single intertext, critical or fictional, other than through a diluted paraphrase.Baden’s “overview” is in fact unable to think even the nature of the link between the two narratives it sets forth, the tragedy of censorship and the epic of the fiction written against it. Since it is unable to interrogate that link, other than through mechanical generalizations, the book cannot see why—despite its seemingly all-encompassing overview of 1964–85—some of the period’s most radical, innovative, and provocative fiction (that investigates “censorship” on a much deeper level) necessarily falls through its fingers and receives no mention—for example, Paulo Leminski’s Catatau or Carlos Süssekind’s Armadilha para Lamartine, without going beyond examples taken from the 1970s. Needless to say, none of the more complex problems involved in the relation between censorship and writing (problems linked with the notions of allegory, overcodification, the unconscious, and so on) find room in The Muffled Cries.The specialist, who will not have much to profit from the book, will also have to correct several errors: Opinião did not feature “singer Nara Leão” (p. 24) but rather Nara Leão, João do Vale, and Zé Keti (the exclusion of the two working-class figures is significant); in the Brazilian electoral system the vice president was, but no longer is, elected separately (p. 12); Benjamin’s “work of art” essay certainly does not lament the loss of “humaneness [sic] and uniqueness of the artistic process,” but on the contrary explores the possibilities opened up by loss of aura in art (p. 10); Robert Schwarz is not an anthropologist but a literary critic (p. 3); and so on at the rate of one every few pages. Adding to the factual errors, the book abounds with gross analytic simplifications such as reading Sóter França Jr. or Tropicália as “devoid of political content” and “nonpolitical” (p. 27, 151). To give another example of the book’s conceptual poverty: if all one can say about poets as diverse as Augusto de Campos, José Paulo Paes, Sebastião Uchoa Leite, and Armando Freitas Filho (lumped together) is that they “moved away from concrete reality into more imaginative realms” (p. 159)—well, it is better not to say anything at all.The historicist cover-it-all urge that animates the book leads it to sweeping simplifications. Coupled with the inability to think through the relation that structures it—between the socio-psychological fact of censorship and the literary text itself—this historicist dilution proves fatal to the book as a contribution to the specialized literature. Due to its many archival and documentary merits, however, it will still prove useful as a broad introduction to nonspecialists, if it ever reaches their hands.