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A linguagem dos artesãos: 10 ensaios sobre o fim do mundo by Pedro Eiras (review)

2023; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/port.2023.a918437

2222-4270

Paulo de Medeiros,

Urban and sociocultural dynamics

Reviewed by: A linguagem dos artesãos: 10 ensaios sobre o fim do mundo by Pedro Eiras Paulo de Medeiros Pedro Eiras, A linguagem dos artesãos: 10 ensaios sobre o fim do mundo (Campinas: Pontes, 2022). 169 pages. Print. 'What is the end of the World?' This question, which opens Pedro Eiras's recent book of essays, tantalizingly named 'A linguagem dos artesãos' [The Language of Artisans], is a direct quotation from the poet Herberto Helder. As Eiras himself proposes, several answers are possible, from the destruction of our natural world through ecological catastrophes, the eradication of humanity for some other reason, such as nuclear war, or simply our own death. Seeing one's own death as the end of the world is supremely narcissistic — after all, even that extreme example of self-absorption, Petronius's Trimalchio, who staged his own funeral to enjoy what would be said about him after he was dead, obviously did not think of his death as the end of the world. And yet, despite that, or rather precisely because of that, it is as characteristic of our entropic age as the other two scenarios. Giorgio Agamben had occasion recently to reflect on the end of the world — certainly aided by the emergency conditions raised by the pandemic — and noted that it is a constantly repeated theme in the history of Christianity, with the difference now being that instead of it being necessarily a religious issue, it has been taken over by science, at least inasmuch as science itself has become a new kind of belief.1 There is much that could be said about that, but for the moment what interests me is the fact that in Pedro Eiras's reflections, the close link between the notion of the end of the world — even of 'end' in itself as a concept perhaps — and literature, or more accurately poetry, revolves continuously around religious concepts and texts. This is more than evident from the book's epigraph, by Herberto Helder in Os Selos (1989): 'Será que Deus não consegue compreender a linguagem dos artesãos? | Nem música nem cantaria. Foi-se ver no livro: de um certo ponto de vista de: | terror sentido beleza | acontecera sempre o mesmo — quebram-se os selos aparecem | os prodígios' (Eiras, p. 6). Does this mean that poetry, or, by extension, Eiras's analysis of (a certain type of) poetry, refuses to acknowledge the change as announced by Agamben? Not at all — and not because Eiras obviously also reflects on natural forms of apocalyptic catastrophe, for instance in his analysis of the poetry of Adília Lopes and the questions of ecology. Rather, what this book so well demonstrates is how important the link remains between forms of religious thought and feeling on the one hand, and art, certainly poetry, on the other. [End Page 221] A linguagem dos artesãos comprises ten discrete essays, organized in three parts, which mimic Helder's poem, which in turn mimics, or rather dialogues with the Book of Revelations, or John's Apocalypse: 'Quebram-se os selos [Breaking the seals], Interlúdio [Interlude], and 'Aparecem os Prodígios' [The wonders appear]. The whole is framed by a useful Introduction and a Conclusion, besides an opening note that explains how Eiras has been working on the topic for an extended period of time. Indeed, some of these essays date as far back as 2013, while the most recent first saw publication in 2021. Compilations of loose essays are not uncommon. However, what distinguishes this one is precisely that although there is no common thesis running through the essays, their topic is the same, namely how poets have imagined and dealt with the questions raised by imagining the end of the world. So, rather than just conveniently uniting disparate essays, usually hard to access, this book actually builds a case, so to speak, as it demonstrates how widespread the question of the end of the world has been in modern and contemporary Portuguese poetry, rather than just a reflection of contingency or a response to a particular emergency. Another noteworthy fact about this book is that it is published...