By ALESSANDRO ATANES*

A book of philology and comparative literature published by a researcher in exile in 1946 and a book of fiction with characters in exile released in 1982

Spring with a broken corner, a beautiful title by Mario Benedetti reminding us that the victory of the Broad Front in Uruguay does not change much in this Latin American spring full of broken corners and broken mirrors.

The novel is set during the last Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-1984) and follows the journey of a political prisoner and his family in exile. The narrative is divided into chapters in the first and third person and is divided between the perspectives of the political prisoner, his father, his wife Graciela and his daughter Beatriz, who is about seven or eight years old.

I really like the chapters narrated by the child in this book, like Stations, in which Beatriz suspects the existence of autumn.

“Graciela, that is, my mother, insists and insists that there is a fourth season called autumn. I tell her that it might be, but I have never seen it. Graciela says that in autumn there is a great abundance of dry leaves. It is always good for there to be a great abundance of something, even if it is autumn. Autumn is the most mysterious of the seasons because it is neither cold nor hot, and so a person does not know what clothes to wear. That must be why I never know when it is autumn. If it is not cold, I think it is summer, and if it is not hot, I think it is winter. But it was autumn. I have clothes for winter, summer, and spring, but it seems that they will not fit me for autumn. Autumn has just arrived where my father is, and he wrote to me very happily because the dry leaves pass through the bars and he imagines that they are little letters from me.”

in the chapter Wounded and bruised (Political Actions), the conversation between mother and daughter is interspersed with history. Written in the form of a dialogue between the two, it begins like this:

– Graciela, said the girl, with a glass in her hand. – Do you want some lemonade?
[...]
– I already told you not to call me Graciela.
– Why? Isn't that your name?
– Of course that’s my name. But I prefer you to call me mom.
– Okay, but I don’t understand. You don’t call me daughter, but Beatriz.
– It's different.
– Okay, do you want some lemonade?
– Yes, thank you.

The chapter is short, three pages long. After this initial dialogue, the author follows with a description of the mother (thirty-two, thirty-five years old), who returns to the book she was reading before her daughter interrupted her. The latter leaves her mother's room, but returns shortly after to tell her that she had gotten into a fight at school with her friend Lucila. It wasn't the first time, but this time it was serious. Lucila said at school that Beatriz's father must be a delinquent since he was in prison. Beatriz reacts by saying that her father was a political prisoner, to which her friend replies that her father had said that political exiles take away people's jobs. It is then that, without further response, Beatriz hits Lucila. Upon hearing the story, Graciela comments: "That way her father will now be able to say that the children of exiles hit his little daughter."

The mother tells her daughter that she shouldn't have done that, although she adds that Lucila's father shouldn't have said those things, especially because he has a "political background." In this conflict narrated by the daughter – a simple school fight between children under 10 years old – we glimpse the entire historical burden of a time marked by dictatorships in the Southern Cone (Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay), but above all we see the impact that historical facts have on people's private lives.

The daughter must grow up to take the vacant place in the family nucleus. That is why she calls her mother by her name and why she takes the initiative to make lemonade to console Graciela, as if the impact of the loss had made them equal, even though they were in the role of victims.

– Go, bring me some lemonade.
– Yes, Graciela.

These two points of language (the daughter calling her mother by name in both the first and last words of the chapter) form the knot, that is, the point of intersection between literature and history. And this only occurs because Mario Benedetti uses language in a more efficient way than simply denouncing or explaining the historical moment. It is there, in these moments, beyond the message, that fiction speaks to the world.

Literature and exile

The inspiration to point out a single scene – the daughter calling her mother by name – to draw connections between history and literature has a first and last name: it came from reading the chapter “The Brown Stocking”, by Mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature, a 1946 classic by German Erich Auerbach. In “The Brown Stocking”, Erich Auerbach also deals with a family relationship, in which Mrs. Ramsay, the protagonist of to the lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf, puts on and measures socks for her youngest son James, aged about six, which would be destined for the child of the family that takes care of the lighthouse. In this simple act, an entire universe unfolds.

But the opposite is also true: we invert the relationship and we can read the mimesis through the lens of Spring with a broken corner. The theme of exile in Benedetti's book illustrates the conditions in which the book published in 1946 was produced, since, a German Jew, Auerbach was exiled in Istanbul after losing his position at the University of Marburg in 1935 with the rise of Nazism.

Auerbach was unable to take his personal library – only a small part – to Turkey, and he also no longer had access to the libraries where he could have expanded his research. Thus, the limitations brought about by exile became part of the very configuration of the work. Let us see what the author wrote in the book's epilogue.

“There is no well-stocked library for European studies here; international communications were at a standstill; so much so that I had to give up almost all periodicals, most of the most recent research, and sometimes even reliable critical editions of my texts. It is therefore possible and even probable that much has escaped my notice, much that I should have considered, and that I may sometimes assert something that has been refuted or modified by more recent research. I hope that among the probable errors there is none that affects the core meaning of the ideas presented. It is also a result of the scarcity of specialized literature and periodicals that this book contains no notes; apart from the texts, I quote relatively little, and this little was easily incorporated into the text. Indeed, it is quite possible that this book owes its existence precisely to the lack of a large specialized library; if I had been able to inform myself about everything that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have come to write it.”

A book on philology and comparative literature published by a researcher in exile in 1946 and a book of fiction with characters in exile released in 1982, as almost always happens, ended up talking to each other simply because they were close together on the shelf or because they were chosen together for some reason to be taken on a weekend trip. Who knows…

*Alessandro Atanes is a journalist and has a master's degree in social history from USP. Author of Corners of the world: essays on history and literature from the port of Santos. [https://amzn.to/3BLimAU]

Reference

Mario Benedetti. Spring with a broken corner. Madrid, Punto de Lectura, 2008. [https://amzn.to/3VQyWGc]

REFERENCES

Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2007. [https://amzn.to/3VVI1gV]

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