By MARCELO GUIMARÃES LIMA*
Commentary on the new edition of Graciliano Ramos' book
There is an art of lying, wrote Mark Twain, since lying is more than a fact; it is a necessity of life in society. We all lie, says the famous American writer in a text entitled “On the Decline of the Art of Lying” (1). The point, according to the author, is that we should lie judiciously, gracefully, and, above all, with detachment, that is, lie not for self-interest, for petty or even criminal reasons, but always for the good of others…!
The countryman Alexandre, born to a wealthy father, from whom he inherited a fortune but who now lives impoverished, recalls, with the help of his wife Cesária and his friend Das Dores, his past as a wealthy man, owner of cattle and lands, he recalls his experiences, his affairs, not for the sake of bragging or boasting, but to entertain his friends: the blind Seu Firmino, the poet and singer Seu Libório and his erudite companion, a helpful, serene man, a great sage and also a healer, Seu Gaudêncio.
The narrative of past deeds is an occasion for emotional exchanges between friends, forming a captive audience, entertained and admiring the stories in which Alexandre narrates some feats, experiences of situations that are sometimes extraordinary, unusual, but always “conceivable” given the context, that is, the land and the creatures of the backlands. The backlands with their dangers, challenges and eventual rewards for men of composure and courage, intelligence and moral resources, the backlands of everyday life are also a land of possibilities, of events and enchantments where the everyday borders the extraordinary, where the ordinary of places, characters and situations can emerge, at any moment, the unexpected, the surprising, the wonderful.
In this context, Alexandre’s narrative is always straightforward, without frills or detours: the countryman narrates the events as they actually and legally happened, with the help of Cesária’s memory and Das Dores’ asides. The interruptions and questions, somewhat incisive but always measured and respectful, from the blind Firmino, as a man who pays attention to words and therefore demands a minimum of coherence in the stories and between them, even if they cause momentary irritation in the narrator, also serve to develop the story, to unravel the “stories” and their developments: that’s exactly how it happened according to the narrator hero.
In this regard, the character of Graciliano Ramos precedes another character from the backlands and fabulists in Northeastern literature, a liar by necessity and pleasure: João Grilo, along with his companion Chicó, also a teller of stories told and happened, remarkable characters in Ariano Suassuna's Auto da Compadecida (2). On the other hand, as a hero of deeds and misdeeds of cunning, strength and courage, and in the naturalness and fluency of the testimony of what he did and witnessed, however unusual it may seem to the listeners and the reader, Alexandre presents himself as our very Brazilian and Northeastern Baron Munchausen.
In “The Storyteller – Considerations on the Work of Nikolai Lcskov”, Walter Benjamin (3) contrasts narrative and novel: the first is the fruit of experience, it is a sharing of experience, that of the narrator or storyteller and that of his listeners, which implies a present community, and even something like common authorship, an exchange between the narrator and his listeners, in the common field of shared experience, an exchange that directs the narrative, always the same (the story is told to be retold, as Benjamin rightly observes) at the same time preserved, revived and also renewed.
This survival of the narrative implies a relationship to time, the time lived and the time remembered, which contrasts with the experience of time in modernity: on the one hand, in the stories told, a time of recurrences, and also of communications between different temporal dimensions. On the other hand, a homogeneous time of linear progression. The decline of the narrative, of the narrator and his art, is for Walter Benjamin, the mark of time that is evident on the one hand with the development of the novel in the bourgeois era, on the other with information, the development of the press and journalism.
The novel, which was born with the diffusion of writing through the printed word, according to Benjamin, does not require experience insofar as this is, inextricably, expression and sharing. The origin of the novel is the isolated individual and, therefore, what the novel expresses is not something copy as in narrative (in this sense, the narrator always has something to offer that is of the nature of wisdom) but it is always, even in the richness and depth of the representation of life in the novel, something “immeasurable”.
Narrative also contrasts with information. The latter carries within itself its “immediate” intelligibility, without gaps, and, in this sense, without either past or future. In news, Benjamin observes, the fact is accompanied by its explanation and is exhausted there. Narrative, in the example of Nikolai Leskov’s stories examined by Benjamin, avoids explanations and can thus, by being “exact” in its accounts, vividly embrace the unusual, giving way, in the same disposition, to the marvelous. In Leskov’s stories, according to Benjamin, nothing is imposed as meaning or explanation on the reader; the author’s narrative freedom is mirrored in the reader’s receptive freedom.
In the micro-society of the backlands centered on the figure of Alexandre, among the concerns of the blind Firmino, the considerations of the wise Gaudêncio, the story-hungry imagination of the singer Libório, the admiration and encouragement of Das Dores, and the narrative complicity of Cesária, true co-author of Alexandre's stories, everyone participates in what we can designate, in the narrative construction of Graciliano Ramos, as, at the same time, the narrator's delirium and/or poetic truth.
Thus it was, thus it happened, these are the facts that occurred that the narrator Alexandre presents. In the face of the facts, explanations are superfluous, unnecessary, and add nothing to the narrator's art or to the interest of his listeners. In Auto da Compadecida, we can remember, responding to João Grilo's doubts, asides, and requests for explanations, Chicó, the teller of intricate stories, stated: “I only know that it was like this.” It was like this, and that's enough.
In response to the concerns of the blind Seu Firmino about possible inconsistencies in the narrated and repeated plots, Cesária pedagogically states: “When we tell a story, we tell the essential.” The essential, that is, the narrative’s own, indisputable truth. In the plot of the stories, Seu Firmino’s questions, as a kind of alter ego of the reader between unaware and attentive, serve for Cesária to reaffirm from within the narrative the own dimension of narrative truth. On the other hand, they serve to dimension the plans of the narrative and ingeniously point to the literary construction of the plot and the characters.
Graciliano Ramos' writing in Alexandre's stories contrasts the nuanced verisimilarity, the "realism" of the types, the contexts of the characters, the language, the natural and human landscape of the backlands with the unusual, the improbable, the impossible, the marvelous bursting into a short circuit in the stories, subverting the common image, the familiar representation of the backlands characters and their actions.
The plots and fabulous outcomes of the stories assertively narrated by the hero Alexandre generate comic effects of sudden perplexity: the reader for a moment sees himself as just another member of the circle of listeners, caught between the narrator's cunning and the manifestly improbable nature of the narrated deeds.
In Alexandre's backwoods scene, imagination, delirium, irony, credulity, affable skepticism, complicity, fantasy and, above all, the narrative passion of the storyteller and his listeners are mixed together.
*Marcelo Guimaraes Lima is an artist, researcher, writer and teacher.
Reference
Graciliano Ramos. Stories of Alexandre. Commemorative edition of the 80th anniversary of the original edition. São Paulo, Literary Praxis Publishing House e Editor Anita Garibaldi, 2024.
REFERENCES
Twain, Mark (1882). “On the Decay of the Art of Lying” – The Stolen White Elephant Etc. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company.
Suassuna, Ariano, (2017, 36th edition) The Auto da Compadecida, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira.
Benjamin, Walter (1987). “The Narrator – Considerations on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” in Walter Benjamin – Selected Works, Volume 1: Magic and Technique, Art and Politics, São Paulo: Editora Brasilense.
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