'A Confissão da Leoa', Mia Couto

já não lia Mia Couto há muito, desde que tentei traduzir os seus textos jornalísticos para inglês, no princípio dos blogues. muito mudou no panorama. já há Mias "lá fora", embora talvez não tanto como devia haver (é sempre pouco). penso que bastante se deve ao tradutor David Brookshaw. nunca li uma tradução, mas ainda hei-de espreitar alguma, especialmente os primeiros livros, aqueles que sempre achei intraduzíveis.

dou por grandes diferenças na escrita - menos bruxuleante; nas história - menos desviantes e com maior estrutura, uma estrutura que mostra ter sido pensada antes e em que não há muitos caminhos secundários (diria: mais firme) e, acima de tudo, uma novidade bem-vinda: a ironia.

para quem consiga ultrapassar o rendilhado e as cores sem sombra de África, nos antípodas do minimalismo; para quem lê sem sentimentalismo, Mia Couto é agora uma maior referência do que era há quinze anos. ele existe num país ressuscitado, numa transversal ao passado, entre-línguas e entre histórias nacionais, fazendo reviver o presente do mato, mas existente por ser já um futuro: o escritor que pertence a várias nações e que atravessa culturas. é muito interessante.

entretanto, passeamos pela explosão de máximas que é (era) em parte base ou substituto do conhecimento escolar. estas mesmas máximas que o escritor usa para brincar e que Jenny Holzer ironiza, projectando-as (sem sentido) em fachadas de prédios e outras construções.

o mundo construído sobre uma estacaria de máximas só pode ser um mundo de opostos: bem e mal, pobre e rico, caçado e caçador, fora e dentro, vivo e morto. o mundo de Mia Couto é este mundo dos opostos que convivem, aqui não há meias realidades nem gradação de cinzentos, o que para mim foi tão estrangeiro como ler Toni Morrison.

- - -

"O homem vê o cacimbo; a mulher vê a chuva. Provébio de Kulumani."

"Todas as manhãs a gazela acorda sabendo que tem de correr mais veloz que o leão ou será morta. Todas as manhãs o leão acorda sabendo que tem de correr mais rápido que a gazela ou morrerá de fome. Não importa se és um leão ou uma gazela: quando o Sol desponta o melhor é começares a correr.  Provérbio africano."

"Só há um modo de escapar de um lugar: é sairmos de nós. Só há um modo de sairmos de nós: é amarmos alguém. Excerto roubado aos cadernos do escritor."

Mia Couto em A Confissão da Leoa.

(até porque sabemos que nada é assim: tudo é possível, tudo se mistura, tudo é incerto)

defining moment [e a caça]

"Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved - from a distance, though - and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhapiness.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn't go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self - the cocoon that was "personality" - gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn't see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself. There was nothing here to help him-not his money, his car, his father's reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact, they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone: his suitcase with the Scoth, the shirts, and the space for bags of gold; his snap-brim hat, his tie, his shirt, his three-piece suit, his socks, and his shoes. His watch and his two-hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch-and some other sense that he knew he did not have: the ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on.

(...)

He could still hear them-the way they had sounded the last few hours. Signalling one another. What were they saying? "Wait up?" "Over here?" Little by little it fell into place. The dogs, the men - none was just hollering, just signaling location or pace. The men and the dogs were talking to each other.In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things. That long yah sound was followed by a specific kind of howl from one of the dogs. The low howm howm that sounded like a string bass imitating a bassoon meantsomething the dogs understood and executed. And the dogs spoke to the men: singleshot barks - evenly spaced and widely spaced - one every three or four minutes, that might go on for twenty minutes. A sort of radar that indicated to the men where they were and what they saw and what they wanted to do about it. And the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeee's of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass cords. It was all language. An extension of the click peope made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn't they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter. It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for-he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning though his fingers."

em Song of Solomon de Tony Morrison.
para fechar o livro, no dia do mais completo fazer nada de nada.

e nem foi Pecola

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” em The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison. parece que finalmente cheguei a algum presente. aqui reconheço o canal mulher, séries, mini-séries, sérieB e reality shows. tinham de se alimentar algures. (algures sendo Wuthering Heights e o seu oposto simultaneamente)

Morrison - Faulkner

"William Faulkner reprised: isolation in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon'"
Lorie Watkins Fulton
daqui, onde se pode ler todo o artigo. e também neste livro.


A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF ALMOST ANY AUTHOR IN CONJUNCTION WITH modernist giant William Faulkner risks treating Faulkner's work as a master text. This potential for privilege perhaps accounts for Toni Morrison's sensitivity to such comparisons early in her writing career. One can practically hear the irritation in her voice when she stated in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay, "I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense" (152). Morrison has elsewhere said, "I'm not sure that he [Faulkner] had any effect on my work" and "I don't really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner's" ("Faulkner and Women" 296-97). However, Morrison has also expressed praise and admiration for Faulkner's work, particularly for his unique style. (1) She once described teaching a class in which she traced for her students the way that Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! forces readers "to hunt for a drop of black blood [by trying to ascertain Charles Bon's lineage] that means everything and nothing." Morrison elaborated, "No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care, but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this" ("Art of Fiction" 101). She developed that fascination early on; as she told the audience at the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, "in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell." Morrison added, "there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect" ("Faulkner and Women" 295-96).

Critics have already identified several facets of Morrison's Faulknerian influence. Typical comparisons point out structural similarities such as syntax and cadence, and thematic similarities centering in historical concerns and social codes. Two pairings repeatedly emerge as scholars generally read Beloved with Absalom, Absalom! and Song of Solomon with Go Down, Moses. (2) However, Morrison's thesis, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated," also provides the basis for drawing thematic comparisons between Quentin Compson's story in the two Faulkner novels that it considers, Absalom, Absalom / and The Sound and the Fury, and Morrison's own bildungsroman, Song of Solomon. (3) Only Alessandra Vendrame has made a concerted effort to connect Morrison's interpretation of Faulkner in the thesis to her own body of work and I would argue that doing so affords valuable insight into her fiction, and into Faulkner's as well. (4) Morrison begins her thesis by defining "alienation," which she seems to use interchangeably with "isolation," as the predominant literary theme of the twentieth century ("Treatment" 1). After establishing this working definition, she analyzes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the Faulkner novels in light of their differing approaches to isolation. Essentially, Morrison determines that Woolf's characters can only become self-aware and honest with themselves in isolation, and that Faulkner's characters can never attain this sort of self-knowledge when isolated (2-3). That her thesis privileges Faulkner's insistence on the need for communal connection becomes apparent when she reads Faulkner's stance as the "antithesis" to Woolf's position, rather than vice-versa (4). Her chapter on Faulkner also seems more fully developed than the one on Woolf, and, after all, Morrison's later writings reveal where her sympathies lie. In her thesis introduction she writes, "Alienation is not Faulkner's answer" to the problems of modernity (3). Nor is it Morrison's.

- - -

John Leonard

"That's luck. These are special books. About them, a reviewer tends to feel touch and possessive."
sobre Song of Solomon e outros que tais. (John Leonard)

na Trama, o Oeste. a minha novidade: Gary Snyder. [eu é que não sei se ainda cá vou estar]
para além de tudo gostaria de deixar expressa a minha desafectação e desafeição profunda por maiores de quarenta usando álcool ou ansiolíticos ou semelhantes para qualquer função nas suas vidas. que além do mais causam tristeza de quem está no cimo da paisagem a ver as suas terras em baixo, de cima para baixo. as caras gosto delas em frente à minha.

e essa esperança seca do amor.

written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point, Margared Atwood sobre Beloved. aqui a comparação que procurava.

e não se mistura tudo assim por ordem roughly cronológica. ou roughly o que sucede, umas coisas no topo de outras e cruzando-se.



neste link.

se fosse dar nome à imagem, outra experiência, diria instável, queda, torre de londres. pedaço despedaço (lame). tentativa instável. aqui passa-se alguma coisa, nem que seja o fim.

"Black Matters"

em Playing in the Dark (1992)
Toni Morrison


I am moved by fancies, that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
T. S. Eliot, "Preludes, IV"

These chapters put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature into what I hope will be a wider landscape. I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World – without the mandate for conquest. I intend to outline an attractive, fruitful, and provocative critical project, unencumbered by dreams of subversion or rallying gestures at fortress walls.

I would like it to be clear at the outset that I do not bring to these matters solely or even principally the tools of a literary critic. As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the ways all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner's Benjy, James's Maisie, Flaubert's Emma, Melville's Pip, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – each of us can extend the list.

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from – and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer's imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work,
becoming.

My project rises from delight, not disappointment. It rises from what I know about the ways writers transform aspects of their social grounding into aspects of language, and the ways they tell other stories, fight secret wars, limn out all sorts of debates blanketed in their text. And rises from my certainty that writers always know, at some level, that they do this.

For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence – which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture – has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature. Moreover, such knowledge assumes that the characteristics of our national literature emanate from a particular "Americanness" that is separate from and unaccountable to this presence. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, [meu sublinhado] those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States. This agreement is made about a population that preceded every American writer of renown and was, I have come to believe, one of the most furtively radical impinging forces on the country's literature. The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.

These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature – individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell – are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population. Just as the formation of the nation necessitated coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with the racial disingenuousness and moral frailty at its heart, so too did the literature, whose founding characteristics extend into the twentieth century, reproduce the necessity for codes and restriction. Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness. And it shows.

My curiosity about the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence has become an informal study of what I call American Africanism. It is an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served. I am using the term "Africanism" not to suggest the larger body of knowledge on Africa that the philosopher Valentine Mudimbe means by the term "Africanism," nor to suggest the varieties and complexities of African people and their descendants who have inhabited this country. Rather I use it as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people. As a trope, little restraint has been attached to its uses. As a disabling virus within literary discourse, Africanism has become, in the Eurocentric tradition that American education favors, both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability. Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom. The United States, of course, is not unique in the construction of Africanism. South America, England, France, Germany, Spain – the cultures of all these countries have participated in and contributed to some aspect of an "invented Africa." None has been able to persuade itself for long that criteria and knowledge could emerge outside the categories of domination. Among Europeans and the Europeanized, this shared process of exclusion – of assigning designation and value – has led to the popular and academic notion that racism is a "natural," if irritating, phenomenon. The literature of almost all these countries, however, is now subject to sustained critiques of its racialized discourse. The United States is a curious exception, even though it stands out as being the oldest democracy in which a black population accompanied (if one can use that word) and in many cases preceded the white settlers. Here in that nexus, with its particular formulations, and in the absence of real knowledge or open-minded inquiry about Africans and African-Americans, under the pressures of ideological and imperialistic rationales for subjugation, an American brand of Africanism emerged: strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. For excellent reasons of state –because European sources of cultural hegemony were dispersed but not yet valorized in the new country – the process of organizing American coherence through a distancing Africanism became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony.

These remarks should not be interpreted as simply an effort to move the gaze of African-American studies to a different site. I do not want to alter one hierarchy in order to institute another. It is true that I do not want to encourage those totalizing approaches to African-American scholarship which have no drive other than the exchange of dominations – dominant Eurocentric scholarship replaced by dominant Afrocentric scholarship. More interesting is what makes intellectual domination possible; how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice; what ignites and informs the literary imagination, and what forces help establish the parameters of criticism.

Above all I am interested in how agendas in criticism have disguised themselves and, in so doing, impoverished the literature it studies. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape. It is important to see how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view.

What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary "blackness," the nature – even the cause – of literary "whiteness." What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as "American"? If such an inquiry ever comes to maturity, it may provide access to a deeper reading of American literature – a reading not completely available now, not least, I suspect, because of the studied indifference of most literary criticism to these matters.

One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate. The situation is aggravated by the tremor that breaks into discourse on race. It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference. To enforce its invisibility through silence is to allow the black body a shadowless participation in the dominant cultural body. According to this logic, every well-bred instinct argues against noticing and forecloses adult discourse. It is just this concept of literary and scholarly moeurs (which functions smoothly in literary criticism, but neither makes nor receives credible claims in other disciplines) that has terminated the shelf life of some once extremely well-regarded American authors and blocked access to remarkable insights in their works.


These moeurs are delicate things, however, which must be given some thought before they are abandoned. Not observing such niceties can lead to startling displays of scholarly lapses in objectivity. In 1936 an American scholar investigating the use of Negro so-called dialect in the works of Edgar Allan Poe (a short article clearly proud of its racial equanimity) opens this way: "Despite the fact that he grew up largely in the south and spent some of his most fruitful years in Richmond and Baltimore, Poe has little to say about the darky."'

Although I know this sentence represents the polite parlance of the day, that "darky" was understood to be a term more acceptable than "nigger," the grimace I made upon reading it was followed by an alarmed distrust of the scholar's abilities. If it seems unfair to reach back to the thirties for samples of the kind of lapse that can occur when certain manners of polite repression are waived, let me assure you equally egregious representations of the phenomenon are still common.

Another reason for this quite ornamental vacuum in literary discourse on the presence and influence of Africanist peoples in American criticism is the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim – of always defining it asymmetrically from the perspective of its impact on the object of racist policy and attitudes. A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects. There are constant, if erratic, liberalizing efforts to legislate these matters. There are also powerful and persuasive attempts to analyze the origin and fabrication of racism itself, contesting the assumption that it is an inevitable, permanent, and eternal part of all social landscapes. I do not wish to disparage these inquiries. It is precisely because of them that any progress at all has been accomplished in matters of racial discourse. But that well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it. It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject. What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.

Historians have approached these areas, as have social scientists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and some students of comparative literature. Literary scholars have begun to pose these questions of various national literatures. Urgently needed is the same kind of attention paid to the literature of the western country that has one of the most resilient Africanist populations in the world – a population that has always had a curiously intimate and unhingingly separate existence within the dominant one. When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum – or a dismissal mandated by the label "political." Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery. A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only "universal" but also "race-free" risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.

I am vulnerable to the inference here that my inquiry has vested interests; that because I am an African-American and a writer I stand to benefit in ways not limited to intellectual fulfillment from this line of questioning. I will have to risk the accusation because the point is too important: for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive.

Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. What is fascinating, however, is to observe how their lavish exploration of literature manages not to see meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy – an informing, stabilizing, and disturbing element – in the literature they do study. It is interesting, not surprising, that the arbiters of critical power in American literature seem to take pleasure in, indeed relish, their ignorance of African-American texts. What is surprising is that their refusal to read black texts – a refusal that makes no disturbance in their intellectual life – repeats itself when they reread the traditional, established works of literature worthy of their attention.

It is possible, for example, to read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding mention, much less a satisfactory treatment, of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in What Maisie Knew. Never are we invited to a reading of "The Beast in the Jungle" in which that figuration is followed to what seems to me its logical conclusion. It is hard to think of any aspect of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives that has not been covered, except the exploratory and explanatory uses to which she puts the black woman who holds center stage in that work. The urgency and anxiety in Willa Cather's rendering of black characters are liable to be missed entirely; no mention is made of the problem that race causes in the technique and the credibility of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. These critics see no excitement or meaning in the tropes of darkness, sexuality, and desire in Ernest Hemingway or in his cast of black men. They see no connection between God's grace and Africanist "othering" in Flannery O'Connor. With few exceptions, Faulkner criticism collapses the major themes of that writer into discursive "mythologies" and treats the later works – whose focus is race and class – as minor, superficial, marked by decline.

An instructive parallel to this willed scholarly indifference is the centuries-long, hysterical blindness to feminist discourse and the way in which women and women's issues were read (or unread). Blatant sexist readings are on the decline, and where they still exist they have little effect because of the successful appropriation by women of their own discourse. [meu sublinhado]

National literatures, like writers, get along the best way they can, and with what they can. Yet they do seem to end up describing and inscribing what is really on the national mind. For the most part, the literature of the United States has taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man. If I am disenchanted by the indifference of literary criticism toward examining the range of that concern, I do have a lasting resort: the writers themselves.

Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. The languages they use and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitations. So it is to them, the creators of American literature, that I look for clarification about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States.

My early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imagination of white American writers. Other than as objects of an occasional bout of jungle fever, other than to provide local color or to lend some touch of verisimilitude or to supply a needed moral gesture, humor, or bit of pathos, blacks made no appearance at all. This was a reflection, I thought, of the marginal impact that blacks had on the lives of the characters in the work as well as the creative imagination of the author. To imagine or write otherwise, to situate black people throughout the pages and scenes of a book like some government quota, would be ludicrous and dishonest.

But then I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer. Living in a racially articulated and predicated world, I could not be alone in reacting to this aspect of the American cultural and historical condition. I began to see how the literature I revered, the literature I loathed, behaved in its encounter with racial ideology. American literature could not help being shaped by that encounter. Yes, I wanted to identify those moments when American literature was complicit in the fabrication of racism, but equally important, I still wanted to see when literature exploded and undermined it. Still, those were minor concerns. Much more important was to contemplate how Africanist personae, narrative, and idiom moved and enriched the text in self-conscious ways, to consider what the engagement meant for the work of the writer's imagination.

How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the "work." As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing "happens": Africans and their descendants were not in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative – displays of the agile writer's technical expertise. I assumed that since the author was not black, the appearance of Africanist characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the "normal," unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people – no more than Uncle Tom's Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the large world. In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project. I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation. What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence. I have made much here of a kind of willful critical blindness – a blindness that, if it had not existed, could have made these insights part of our routine literary heritage. Habit, manners, and political agenda have contributed to this refusal of critical insight. A case in point is Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a text that has been virtually jettisoned from the body of American literature by critical consensus. References to this novel in much Cather scholarship are apologetic, dismissive, even cutting in their brief documentation of its flaws- of which there are a sufficient number. What remains less acknowledged is the source of its flaws and the conceptual problems that the book both poses and represents. Simply to assert the failure of Cather's gifts, the exhaustion of her perception, the narrowing of her canvas, evades the obligation to look carefully at what might have caused the book to fail – if "failure" is an intelligent term to apply to any fiction. (It is as if the realms of fiction and reality were divided by a line that, when maintained, offers the possibility of winning but, when crossed, signals the inevitability of losing.)

I suspect that the "problem" of Sapphira and the Slave Girl is not that it has a weaker vision or is the work of a weaker mind. The problem is trying to come to terms critically and artistically with the novel's concerns: the power and license of a white slave mistress over her female slaves. How can that content be subsumed by some other meaning? How can the story of a white mistress be severed from . a consideration of race and the violence entailed in the story's premise? If Sapphira and the Slave Girl neither pleases nor engages us, it may be enlightening to discover why. It is as if this last book – this troublesome, quietly dismissed novel, very important to Cather – is not only about a fugitive but is itself a fugitive from its author's literary estate. It is also a book that describes and inscribes its narrative's own fugitive flight from itself. Our first hint of this flight appears in the title, Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The girl referred to is named Nancy. To have called the book "Sapphira and Nancy" would have lured Cather into dangerous deep water. Such a title would have clarified and drawn attention immediately to what the novel obscures even as it makes a valiant effort at honest engagement: the sycophancy of white identity. The story, briefly, is this.

Sapphira Colbert, an invalid confined to her chair and dependent on slaves for the most intimate services, has persuaded herself that her husband is having or aching to have a liaison with Nancy, the pubescent daughter of her most devoted female slave. It is clear from the beginning that Mistress Colbert is in error: Nancy is pure to the point of vapidity; Master Colbert is a man of modest habits, ambition, and imagination. Sapphira's suspicions, fed by her feverish imagination and by her leisure to have them, grow and luxuriate unbearably. She forms a plan. She will invite a malleable lecherous nephew, Martin, to visit and let his nature run its course: Nancy will be seduced. The purpose of arranging the rape of her young servant is to reclaim, for purposes not made clear, the full attentions of her husband.

Interference with these plans comes from Sapphira's daughter, Rachel, estranged from her mother primarily for her abolitionist views but also, we are led to believe, because Sapphira does not tolerate opposition. It is Rachel who manages to effect Nancy's escape to the north and freedom, with the timid help of her father, Mr. Colbert. A reconciliation of all of the white characters takes place when the daughter loses one of her children to diphtheria and is blessed with the recuperation of the other. The reconciliation of the two key black characters is rendered in a postscript in which many years later Nancy returns to see her aged mother and recount her post-flight adult narrative to the author, a child witnessing the return and the happiness that is the novel's denouement. The novel was published in 1940, but has the shape and feel of a tale written or experienced much earlier.

This précis in no way does justice to the novel's complexities and its problems of execution. Both arise, I believe, not because Cather was failing in narrative power, but because of her struggle to address an almost completely buried subject: the interdependent working of power, race, and sexuality in a white woman's battle for coherence.

In some ways this novel is a classic fugitive slave narrative: a thrilling escape to freedom. But we learn almost nothing of the trials of the fugitive's journey because the emphasis is on Nancy's fugitive state within the house before her escape. And the real fugitive, the text asserts, is the slave mistress. Furthermore, the plot escapes the author's control and, as its own fugitive status becomes clear, is destined to point to the hopelessness of excising racial considerations from formulations of white identity.

Escape is the central focus of Nancy's existence on the Colbert farm. From the moment of her first appearance, she is forced to hide her emotions, her thoughts, and eventually her body from pursuers. Unable to please Sapphira, plagued by the jealousy of the darker-skinned slaves, she is also barred from help, instruction, or consolation from her own mother, Till. That condition could only prevail in a slave society where the mistress can count on (and an author can believe the reader does not object to) the complicity of a mother in the seduction and rape of her own daughter. Because Till's loyalty to and responsibility for her mistress is so primary, it never occurs and need not occur to Sapphira that Till might be hurt or alarmed by the violence planned for her only child. That assumption is based on another – that slave women are not mothers; they are "natally dead," with no obligations to their offspring or their own parents.

This breach startles the contemporary reader and renders Till an unbelievable and unsympathetic character. It is a problem that Cather herself seems hard put to address. She both acknowledges and banishes this wholly unanalyzed mother-daughter relationship by inserting a furtive exchange between Till and Rachel in chapter 10:

. . . Till asked in a low, cautious murmur: "You ain't heard nothin', Miss Rachel?" "Not yet. When I do hear, I'll let you know. I saw her into good hands, Till. I don't doubt she's in Canada by this time, amongst English people."
"Thank you, mam, Miss Rachel. I can't say no more. I don't want them niggers to see me cryin'. If she's up there with the English folks, she'll have some chance."'

The passage seems to come out of nowhere because there has been nothing in a hundred or so pages to prepare us for such maternal concern. "You ain't heard nothin'?" Till asks of Rachel. Just that — those four words — meaning: Is Nancy all right? Did she arrive safely? Is she alive? Is anybody after her? All of these questions lie in the one she does manage to ask. Surrounding this dialogue is the silence of four hundred years. It leaps out of the novel's void and out of the void of historical discourse on slave parent—child relationships and pain. The contemporary reader is relieved when Till finally finds the language and occasion to make this inquiry about the fate of her daughter. But nothing more is made of it. And the reader is asked to believe that the silence surrounding the inquiry as well as its delay are due to Till's greater concern about her status among dark-skinned "field" niggers. Clearly Cather was driven to create the exchange not to rehabilitate Till in our readerly eyes but because at some point the silence became an unbearable violence, even in a work full of violence and evasion. Consider the pressures exerted by the subject: the need to portray the faithful slave; the compelling attraction of exploring the possibilities of one woman's absolute power over the body of another woman; confrontation with an uncontested assumption of the sexual availability of black females; the need to make credible the bottomless devotion of the person on whom Sapphira was dependent. It is after all hers, this slave woman's body, in a way that her own invalid flesh is not. These fictional demands stretch to breaking all narrative coherence. It is no wonder that Nancy cannot think up her own escape and must be urged into taking the risk.

Nancy has to hide her interior life from hostile fellow slaves and her own mother. The absence of camaraderie between Nancy and the other slave women turns on the device of color fetish — the skin-color privilege that Nancy enjoys because she is lighter than the others and therefore enviable. The absence of mother love, always a troubling concern of Cather's, is connected to the assumption of a slave's natal isolation. These are bizarre and disturbing deformations of reality that normally lie mute in novels containing Africanist characters, but Cather does not repress them altogether. The character she creates is at once a fugitive within the household and a sign of the sterility of the fiction-making imagination when there is no available language to clarify or even name the source of unbelievability.

Interestingly, the other major cause of Nancy's constant state of flight is wholly credible: that she should be unarmed in the face of the nephew's sexual assault and that she alone is responsible for extracting herself from the crisis. We do not question her vulnerability. What becomes titillating in this wicked pursuit of innocence — what makes it something other than an American variant of Clarissa - is the racial component. The nephew is not even required to court or flatter Nancy. After an unsuccessful reach for her from the branches of a cherry tree, he can, and plans to, simply arrive wherever she is sleeping. And since Sapphira has ordered her to sleep in the hall on a pallet, Nancy is forced to sneak away in the dark to quarters where she may be, but is not certain to be, safe. Other than Rachel, the pro-abolitionist, Nancy has access to no one to whom she can complain, explain, object, or from whom she can seek protection. We must accept her total lack of initiative, for there are no exits. She has no recourse — except in miserable looks that arouse Rachel's curiosity.

Nor is there any law, if the nephew succeeds in the rape, to entertain her complaint. If she becomes pregnant as a result of the violence, the issue is a boon to the economy of the estate, not an injury to it. There is no father or, in this case, "stepfather" to voice a protest on Nancy's behalf, since honor was the first thing stripped from the man. He is a "capon," we are told, given to Till so that she will have no more children and can give her full attention and energy to Mistress Sapphira.

Rendered voiceless, a cipher, a perfect victim, Nancy runs the risk of losing the reader's interest. In a curious way, Sapphira's plotting, like Cather's plot, is without reference to the characters and exists solely for the ego-gratification of the slave mistress. This becomes obvious when we consider what would have been the consequences of a successful rape. Given the novel's own terms, there can be no grounds for Sapphira's thinking that Nancy can be "ruined" in the conventional sense. There is no question of marriage to Martin, to Colbert, to anybody. Then, too, why would such an assault move her slave girl outside her husband's interest? The probability is that it would secure it. If Mr Colbert is tempted by Nancy the chaste, is there anything in slavocracy to make him disdain Nancy the unchaste?

Such a breakdown in the logic and machinery of plot construction implies the powerful impact race has on narrative — and on narrative strategy. Nancy is not only the victim of Sapphira's evil, whimsical scheming. She becomes the unconsulted, appropriated ground of Cather's inquiry into what is of paramount importance to the author: the reckless, unabated power of a white woman gathering identity unto herself from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others. This seems to me to provide the coordinates of an immensely important moral debate.

This novel is not a story of a mean, vindictive mistress; it is the story of a desperate one. It concerns a troubled, disappointed woman confined to the prison of her defeated flesh, whose social pedestal rests on the sturdy spine of racial degradation; whose privileged gender has nothing that elevates it except color, and whose moral posture collapses without a whimper before the greater necessity of self-esteem, even though the source of that esteem is a delusion. For Sapphira too is a fugitive in this novel, committed to escape: from the possibility of developing her own adult personality and her own sensibilities, from her femaleness; from motherhood; from the community of women; from her body.

She escapes the necessity of inhabiting her own body by dwelling on the young, healthy, and sexually appetizing Nancy. She has transferred its care into the hands of others. In this way she escapes her illness, decay, confinement, anonymity, and physical powerlessness. In other words, she has the leisure and the instruments to construct a self; but the self she constructs must be – is conceivable only as – white. The surrogate black bodies become her hands and feet, her fantasies of sexual intimacy with her husband and not inconsiderably, her sole source of love.
If the Africanist characters and their condition are removed from the text of Sapphira and the Slave Girl we will not have a Miss Havisham immured or in flames, We have nothing: no process of deranged self-construction that can take for granted acquiescence in so awful an enterprise; no drama of limitless power. Sapphira can hide far more successfully than Nancy. She can, and does, remain outside the normal requirements of adult womanhood because of the infantilized Africanist population at her disposal.

The final fugitive in Cather's novel is the novel itself. The plot's own plotting to free the endangered slave girl (of no apparent interest, as we have seen, to the girl's mother or her slave associates) is designed for quite other purposes. It functions as a means for the author to meditate on the moral equivalence of free white women and enslaved black women. The fact that these equations are designed as mother–daughter pairings and relationships leads to the inescapable conclusion that Cather was dreaming and redreaming her problematic relationship with her own mother.

The imaginative strategy is a difficult one at best, an impossible one in the event – so impossible that Cather permits the novel to escape from the pages of fiction into nonfiction. For narrative credibility she substitutes her own determination to force the equation. It is an equation that must take place outside the narrative.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl turns at the end into a kind of memoir, the author's recollection of herself as a child witnessing the return, the reconciliation, and an imposed "all rightness" in untenable, outrageous circumstances. The silenced, acquiescent Africanist characters in the narrative are not less muzzled in the epilogue. The reunion – the drama of it, like its narrative function – is no more the slave characters' than their slave lives have been. The reunion is literally stage-managed for the author, now become a child. Till agrees to wait until little Willa is at the doorway before she permits herself the first sight she has had of her daughter in twenty-five years.

Only with Africanist characters is such a project thinkable: delayed gratification for the pleasure of a (white) child. When the embrace is over, Willa the white child accompanies the black mother and daughter into their narrative, listening to the dialogue but intervening in it at every turn. The shape and detail and substance of their lives are hers, not theirs. Just as Sapphira has employed these surrogate, serviceable black bodies for her own purposes of power without risk so the author employs them in behalf of her own desire for a safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, in justice.

But things go awry. As often happens, characters make claims, impose demands of imaginative accountability over and above the author's will to contain them. Just as Rachel's intervention foils Sapphira's plot, so Cather's urgent need to know and understand this Africanist mother and daughter requires her to give them center stage. The child Cather listens to Till's stories, and the slave, silenced in the narrative, has the final words of the epilogue.

Yet even, or especially, here where the novel ends Cather feels obliged to gesture
compassionately toward slavery. Through Till's agency the elevating benevolence of the institution is invoked. Serviceable to the last, this Africanist presence is permitted speech only to reinforce the slaveholders' ideology, in spite of the fact that it subverts the entire premise of the novel. Till's voluntary genuflection is as ecstatic as it is suspicious.

In returning to her childhood, at the end of her writing career, Cather returns
to a very personal, indeed private experience. In her last novel she works out and toward the meaning of female betrayal as it faces the void of racism. She may not have arrived safely, like Nancy, but to her credit she did undertake the dangerous journey.


--
Notes
1 Killis Campbell, "Poe's Treatment of the Negro and of the Negro Dialect," Studies in
English 16 (1936), p. 106.
2 Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), p. 49.

da net

Entrevista a Harold Bloom: Saramago, "quase" Shakespeare
Ana Marques Gastão

Harold Bloom é uma das mais provocadoras e consistentes presenças na cena literária internacional. E um dos maiores estudiosos de William Shakespeare.

De onde parte a crítica: de uma grande paixão pela leitura?
Vou fazer 71 anos. Cresci em Nova Iorque e fui, sendo o último de cinco filhos, criado numa família que falava o yiddish. O inglês não o aprendi de ouvido, e cedo me tornei num leitor obcecado. Aos oito anos, apaixonei-me por dois poetas: William Blake e Hart Crane. Nesse tempo, havia uma rede de bibliotecas públicas que eu passei a frequentar. Sempre soube que queria ler poemas, peças, romances, histórias, ensaios... Um tio meu, dono de uma loja de rebuçados, em Brooklyn, perguntou-me, um dia, em yiddish, que gostaria eu de fazer na vida. E eu respondi-lhe: quero continuar a ler, a escrever, a falar sobre o que leio... Harvard e Yale poderiam ser o meu destino, disse-me. Levei metade de um século a cumprir essa profecia. A crítica literária e o ensino têm de surgir do amor. Da mesma paixão que sentimos pelos seres humanos.

Qualquer que seja o posicionamento que adopte um crítico sobre um poema, deverá ser sempre uma abordagem poética?
Certos críticos e intelectuais acreditam que podem ser científicos, históricos, moralistas, ideológicos, políticos, religiosos. Não se pode falar sobre um romance de Saramago, um poema de Pessoa, uma história de Hemingway, uma peça de Shakespeare, sem usar, mesmo inconscientemente, metáforas.

Isso é incómodo para muitos?
Ah, sim. Estou numa situação difícil. Continuo a ensinar a tempo inteiro em Yale, há 47 anos. E nos últimos 40, também na Universidade de Nova Iorque. Gosto de me considerar o pária da minha profissão. Demiti-me há 25 anos da Modern Language Association e do English Institute, por considerar que não estavam interessados em literatura. Vejo-me sempre a chamar a atenção para tudo o que está a ser destruído e a lutar vigorosamente contra a abolição dos valores estéticos nos estudos literários. São os académicos ou os jornalistas - que vêm da mesma origem político-ideológica - a escrever sobre os meus livros, que têm sido muito criticados, nomeadamente O Cânone Ocidental, Shakespeare: A Invenção do Humano ou Como Ler e Porquê. Não importa. Aprendi não só a lutar, como a ir à rádio, à televisão e a percorrer o país onde posso chegar a milhões de pessoas interessadas na leitura. Trata-se, no fundo, de uma extensão do que faço enquanto professor. Tudo o que é dito pelos académicos é uma mentira. Quem me ouve e compra os meus livros, novo ou velho, pobre ou rico, originário das mais diversas profissões, constitui um exército. Um exército de gente interessada pela leitura.

Fala da crítica na universidade como uma espécie de estalinismo sem Estaline...
São comissários. Comissários do politicamente correcto, do feminismo - num sentido que nada tem a ver com a igualdade de direitos e de oportunidades das mulheres, e de outros ismos... São políticos académicos.

São aquilo a que chama a Escola do Ressentimento - provavelmente baseado no conceito definido por Scheler - composta por feministas, marxistas, novo-historicistas de inspiração foucaltiana, os desconstrutores?
Estão a afundar-se e a destruir a profissão. Ensina-se Foucault e Derrida sem alguma vez se ter lido Shakespeare ou Cervantes.

Em "O Cânone Ocidental" - no qual escreve sobre 26 autores que se tornaram representantes da nossa cultura literária - fala de anarquia, chegando mesmo a dizer que em breve os departamentos incluirão nos seus currículos Batman, propaganda mórmone, TV e rock em vez de Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wallace Stevens. Está a ser irónico ou demasiado pessimista?
Não, em Yale, já não se ensina poesia, romance, teatro americanos. Estudam-se movimentos sociais, comic strips, cinema, programas de televisão, etc. Isto seria uma tragédia cultural se não fosse uma comédia.

Que pensa da ficção de supermercado?
Somos amigos, Toni Morrison e eu. Acho, porém, que no princípio da sua carreira, ela escreveu livros poderosos como Song of Solomon. É uma mulher de talento, mas recebeu o Nobel por aquilo que considero ser um romance de supermercado, Beloved. Trata-se de uma obra ideológica. Os Lusíadas, do grande Luís Vaz de Camões, dir-se-ia também um texto épico-ideológico, mas tem uma imensa inventividade, exuberância, algo que se assemelha à mestria de Virgílio.

Saramago tem também a vertente socio-política...
Saramago é extraordinário, quase um Shakespeare entre os romancistas. Não há nenhum ficcionista vivo nos Estados Unidos, na América do Sul ou na Europa que tenha a sua versatilidade. Dir-se-ia tão divertido como pungente. Sei que é um marxista, mas não escreve como um comissário e opõe-se aos impostores da Igreja Católica. O seu trabalho ultrapassa tudo isso. Os escritores sempre se comprometeram com a sociedade. Mas há algo mais: se ele só tivesse o marxismo para dar, quem lhe prestaria atenção?

LOUVOR DE QUATRO FERNANDOS PESSOAS E DA "ODE MARÍTIMA"

Escreveu sobre o "Memorial do Convento", mesmo antes de José Saramago ter o Nobel. Trata-se de um romance que alia história e ficção com uma textualidade algo barroca...
É uma obra encantadora e também engraçada e comovente. Baltasar e Blimunda são parecidos, mas não há felicidade para ambos. Serão destruídos, embora Blimunda não o possa ser completamente, é uma bruxa. Há poucos livros que tenham conseguido tratar a figura de Cristo. Em O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, José Saramago fê-lo. D.H. Lawrence também. Norman Mailer não tanto, não gosto muito do seu livro. Kazantzakis tem algumas coisas interessantes. Saramago é, por outro lado, um escritor demasiadamente inteligente para escrever peças de teatro: ele sabe que precisa de prosseguir com imensas vozes, o que não seria possível no palco.

Por que escolheu Cervantes e não Camões para o "Canône"?
Li Camões, acho-o fascinante, mas a influência de Cervantes é maior, comparável mesmo à de Dante e Shakespeare. Estou a escrever um livro que se chama Genius and Genius no qual abordo 115 figuras. Não têm que ser poetas, romancistas ou dramaturgos, podem ser visionários religiosos como Joseph Smith ou Santo Agostinho. Incluirei nessa obra vários portugueses, entre os quais Almeida Garrett com as suas Viagens na Minha Terra. Fascina-me por tentar dizer algo sobre a tristeza da sua vida erótica. Penso que isso será muito português, o que só lentamente começo a entender, até em Fernando Pessoa. Saramago parece lutar contra isso, nomeadamente em História do Cerco de Lisboa.

Uma visão diferente daquela dos "Lusíadas"...
Os Lusíadas têm aquela visão apocalíptica e extraordinária da Ilha dos Amores, mas que não se vive no quotidiano. Na minha leitura inadequada de António Lobo Antunes, de romancistas e poetas portugueses, mesmo na lírica camoniana, há sempre subjacente uma imensa dor.

Define como, Pessoa: como um Whitman renascido?
De alguma maneira. Há imensos Pessoas, quatro no mínimo, e há imensa coisa que não entendo. Álvaro de Campos, o engenheiro naval, é o mais extraordinário enquanto poeta. Faz uma pequena aparição no romance de Saramago O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis. Gostaria que houvesse mais. Num outro texto, aquele homem curioso e estranho, diz a Whitman qualquer coisa como isto: "Walt, não penses que te estou a imitar, não penses que me pareço contigo, de facto eu sou tu". É espantoso. Mais ninguém se teria lembrado disto.

A "Ode Marítima" é, a seu ver, um dos mais espantosos poemas do século?
Sem dúvida nenhuma.

"CAMÕES É MAIOR DO QUE PESSOA"

Pessoa poderia ser, como diz, uma invenção de Borges?
Sim, é uma invenção borgesiana. Pessoa é uma máscara, uma persona. Há imensas vozes em Browning e Pessoa leu Browning muitíssimo bem. Em algum sentido, teve ter pensado que se ele havia conseguido ser vários poetas, talvez ele pudesse também sê-lo. Pessoa ele próprio dir-se-ia um heterónimo, mesmo na Mensagem, poema estranho, cheio de ansiedade na tentativa de o seu autor ser um Super-Camões...

É a luta agonísta de que tanto fala na sua obra...
Sim, uma luta na qual Pessoa não vence, de modo nenhum. Camões é maior do que Pessoa porque tem uma visão sublime, nomeadamente na criação do Adamastor, na concepção tremenda das musas, na tempestade terrível que ocorre quando o navio dobra o Cabo das Tormentas. O épico esteve sempre na história do sublime, e pede ao leitor para deixar um prazer mais fácil em benefício de um outro mais difícil. Pessoa não tem esse prazer difícil que existe nos Lusíadas. Na Jangada de Pedra, esse livro louco de Saramago, escreve-se com o sentido da totalidade da tradição.

Acha que o Nobel lhe foi bem atribuído?
Entre os mais recentes, o único Nobel bem atribuído foi o de Saramago, que o honrou mais do que o Prémio o honrou a ele. Não há romancistas no Novo Mundo, Brasil, Argentina, Colômbia, Estados Unidos, Austrália, mesmo na Europa Ocidental, tão modernos como ele. O Nobel foi tantas vezes dado a pessoas absurdas! Proust nunca o recebeu...

Pode ensinar-se alguém a amar a grande poesia ou o grande romance? Pode ensinar-se - como diz - a solidão?
É muito difícil, mas não devemos desesperar. Falho todos os dias na Universidade. Dei recentemente uma conferência no âmbito dos 300 anos de Yale a um vasto público - nesse contexto, o nosso terrível presidente Bush, Bush II, recebeu agora um honroso grau académico - e fiquei muito sensibilizado porque estavam na assistência alunos meus de há 47 anos. Depois de todo este tempo, senti que valeu a pena: têm sido leitores toda a vida, embora seguissem outras profissões: médicos, engenheiros, etc. Sempre me esforcei por falar com as pessoas, novas e velhas. Apesar do desastre das universidades, a leitura está, porém, muito viva. Há milhões de leitores, no sentido do common reader do dr. Johnson e de Virginia Woolf, por esse mundo fora, mesmo entre os jovens que vivem na idade da informação, do visual, do e-book. O Homem evoluiu do pergaminho para o códice. O que está a suceder neste momento é o regresso ao pergaminho.

Tem sido considerado um apóstolo da influência. Alguma vez sugeriu, como refere certa crítica, que o escritor é um devorador do pai, ou seja, que acontece uma espécie de canibalismo tendo como cenário as páginas?
Não, nunca. É uma blasfémia. Escrevi 25 livros e o mais mal entendido foi A Angústia da Influência. A minha ideia fundamental tem a ver não com um efeito emocional no novo escritor, mas retórico.

Quis falar da influência do precursor no sentido em que o autor, o poeta, tem a angústia da dívida em relação a um seu "mestre"?
Shakespeare é provavelmente, como James Joyce disse, o mais extraordinário de todos os escritores. Até Shakespeare teve de absorver Marlowe mesmo ao ponto de eventualmente o ter engolido e nada dele restar.
 
Os pais regressam na poesia dos filhos?
Regressam com cores diferentes.

Somos uma voz com muitas vozes. Há uma certa melancolia em tudo isso?
Poderiamos dizê-lo desse modo. Hoje, se pudesse refazer o título, fá-lo-ia. Ficaria melhor: A Angústia da Contaminação.

Fala do fascínio do incesto a propósito da poesia?
Shelley disse que o incesto era o mais literário dos temas. E é o coração da tragédia grega.

Por que motivo diz, em "Como Ler e Porquê" que lemos para fortalecer o nosso Eu?
Lemos porque estamos sós. Sou casado, tenho um casamento feliz há 43 anos. Por mais reconfortante possa ser uma relação amorosa, com os filhos, com os alunos, os colegas, nenhum de nós nunca conhecerá o número suficiente de pessoas que compense a falta da leitura. Lemos para estar vivos, porque senão a solidão matar-nos-ia.

Ler, escrever sobre os livros dos outros, é estar consciente da nossa mortalidade?
Que mais poderia ser? É interessante como Saramago tratou esse assunto No Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis na relação entre Pessoa, que morreu, e Reis. Pessoa aparece mais tarde e diz: "Chegou a hora". E Ricardo responde que tem de tirar o chapéu. Fernando diz que ali não se usam chapéus. E saem juntos. É uma brincadeira sobre a mortalidade. Uma das minhas colaboradoras, espécie de filha adoptiva, tem um terrível tumor no cérebro. Não sabemos se voltaremos a vê-la quando regressarmos. É uma pessoa delicada, generosa, talentosa. Que dizer? Nada nos cura da dor, o sentimento da perda é insuportável. Temos um tempo limitado, isso dir-se-ia evidente. Então tudo se torna urgente.

O sentido terrífico do vazio passa pela obra de inúmeros escritores, Kafka, por exemplo. Acha que poderíamos seguir o exemplo de Shakespeare, o de tornar a dor e o riso mais leves?
Ah, claro.... Novamente admiro Saramago por ser tão shakespeareano, porque tenta o mesmo efeito, embora não tão bem.

Após quatro séculos, Shakespeare está mais presente do que alguma vez esteve?
Vi representá-lo em todo o mundo nas mais diversas línguas. Costumo perguntar às pessoas que aderem a Shakespeare, no riso e nas lágrimas, o porquê dessa adesão. E elas respondem-me: "Porque ele me pôs no palco, a mim, ao meu amigo, ao meu amante."

"NÃO CEDER A UM MUNDO ONDE IMPERA O ROCK"

Samuel Johnson disse que o teatro de Shakespeare é uma espécie de espelho da vida...
Sim, mas Shakespeare faz mais do que isso pela sua acuidade cognitiva, pelo seu poder inventivo, também no domínio da palavra.

Freud: um codificador de Shakespeare? Por que não da tragédia grega?
Freud leu incessantemente Shakespeare, que esteve sempre à frente dele. Shakespeare iluminou a psicologia de Freud.

Considera a visão de Shakespeare mais crucial do que a de Ésquilo, Sófocles, Dante, Racine?
Dante é quase tão crucial como Shakespeare, Cervantes também, talvez Chaucer, Proust, Joyce, Balzac. Racine é um dramaturgo trágico, mas com limites. No meu livro Shakespeare: A Invenção do Humano, escrevi que, pela primeira vez na história da literatura, as personagens ouvem o que estão a dizer. Sei que os seres humanos existiam antes de Shakespeare, mas algo na representação da Humanidade muda para sempre com Hamlet, Macbeth, Otelo... Há uma consciência de si que nunca havia sido representada.

Considera Shakespeare mais nuclear para a cultura ocidental do que os filósofos. Porquê?
Porque Shakespeare faz-nos ver coisas que não nos atreveríamos a enfrentar. Os filósofos mudam a forma como pensamos sobre a consciência de si. Mas não nos dão o furor, o fulgor.

Acredita que as profecias da morte da arte individual são as de Hegel, Marx e Freud. A literatura não pode ter também um "background" social e político?
Está-me a oferecer um fruto envenenado que não vou morder. Shakespeare vive e escreve ao mesmo tempo que 50 autores sujeitos às mesmas condições sociais, políticas, económicas, culturais. Estudamos e lemos Shakespeare e não os outros. Porquê? A resposta é personalidade, génio individual. Lobo Antunes é um bom romancista, um bom contador de histórias. Saramago e Antunes: o mesmo contexto. O primeiro quase shakespeareano na variedade do que faz; o outro, poderoso, mas faz uma única coisa. Nada disto se explica pela ideologia.

Em "Abaixo as Verdades Sagradas" - e sabendo que sempre foi contra a ideologia teocrática de T.S. Eliot - há um espanto perante a transcendência. Há um Deus? E havendo, pode ser definido como o sublime? O Deus de Borges, de Schopenhauer?
Ou do Deus dos gnósticos... Sou judeu herético.

É a terceira fase da sua carreira, a da crença gnóstica...
Sou uma pessoa religiosa. Acredito, como os gnósticos, como Emerson, que Deus se fragmentou em duas metades; uma delas está a vaguear no espaço interestelar, que não conseguimos alcançar, e a outra está dentro de nós, feita de rocha e de lama. Temos dificuldade em lidar com ela.

Steiner fala da ausência de Deus e do seu eterno peso...
Pois fala. Há um vazio, vivemos num vasto deserto, que encontramos em Nietzsche, Novalis, Kleist e Nerval, no Blood Meridian, de Corman MacCarthy.

Fazer crítica é, para si, a única forma civilizada de autobiografia, como disse Wilde?
As pessoas que me detestam dizem que esse é o meu defeito. Mas o divino Oscar tinha razão.

"Eu sou o vosso verdadeiro crítico marxista, na esteira de Groucho em vez de Karl, e tomo por meu lema a grande advertência de Groucho: "Seja o que for, estou contra!" Está contra quê?
Contra tudo. Também não seria membro de nenhum clube que me quisesse como membro.

É um pessimista?
Humanamente sou um pessimista. Social e politicamente também. Jamais no campo da imaginação.

Conselhos para o novo século?
Não ceder aos media, ao visual, ao gosto das massas, a um mundo onde impera o rock. Deveríamos lembrar-nos de que há milhões de leitores que estão à procura de um livro autêntico, de algo que cure a violência e a solidão.

Toni

Morrison com Charlie Rose.



e outros clips de som, aqui.



[Well, we can walk out...] e -claramente- Paul Auster mentia.

blackberries

Toni Morrison (wow): feeling like Milkman in Pilate's wine room for the first time.

ouvir os pássaros (2)

"Her house sat eighty feet from the sidewalk and was backed by four huge pine trees, from which she got the needles she stuck into her mattress. Seeing the pine needles started him thinking about her mouth; how she loved, as a girl, to chew pine needles and as a result smelled even then like a forest." Toni Morrison em Song of Solomon.

assim à partida tem lógica

"Wouldn’t you rather be known as a great exponent of literature rather than as an African American writer?

MORRISON

It’s very important to me that my work be African American; if it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too."

Toni Morrison para a Paris Review.
compará-la com Pynchon é uma coisa monumental.

com nozes

num queimar de pestanas desgraçado, comecei hoje Song of Solomon de Toni Morrison -"One of dese mornings, bright and fair,/ take my wings and cleave de air":  (embora com vontade de pegar em César Vallejo e ler tudo do princípio ao fim como se fosse uma história; Me moriré en París con aguacero). fiz scones, acrescentei-lhes nozes. falta de luz, entre o início em que abro a janela e a manhã já com capa cinzenta e o ar de aquário onde crescem líquenes e as cinco da tarde em que o pouco dia cai na escuridão. nem comprei nada ainda, a evitar com horror e pressa os -espaços comerciais- no caminho entre duas divisões de trabalho, quase cubos, perco por vezes o fio da meada.