Gabriel Estides Delgado

The conceptual apparatus of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, built on an analysis of modern Western social classes, allied with the materialist tradition, is revisited here as a fundamental contribution to assess the literary theory that Bourdieu wrote at his maturity in The Rules of Art. Its objectification of the symbolic production places the autonomization process of the literary field, from the French case, as a critical path to be followed for the formal unveiling of literary works.

Composed by thirty-eight narratives, the novel Inferno provisório, by Luiz Ruffato, yearns for the formal deduction of the socioeconomic precariousness that inspires it. These stories of the Brazilian proletariat, which can be read independently, also perform a whole. Among multiple characters and their voices, and, indeed, before the many fractures that constitute the linguistic conscience of such fictional subjects, a general narrator is identified, who is responsible for the orchestration of the choir. Instrument of authorial intentionality, this narrator adheres to the linguistic and discursive variations of those who he represents, and gives the novel readers an image of popular language, responsible for what is poetically productive in his narrative conduction.

Jean-Paul Sartre, a materialist in his last and most radical phase, developed both in Search for a method and in Critique of dialectical reason, theoretical assumptions of elaborate relevance to a Marxist literary criticism. It is a question of following the formal consequences of the social process in its geometric breadth and depth, resorting a “hierarchy of mediations” only amenable to reconstruction from modern “auxiliary disciplines” such as sociology and psychoanalysis. The heterodox dialogue proposition renews the Marxist survey of superstructures, although also retaining traces of Sartrean existential philosophy. We will see the dilemmas and limits of this itinerary.

With a poetics based on African cultural transplant, Ana Maria Gonçalves carries out in "Um defeito de cor" the titanic task of recounting Brazilian black resistance from a feminine and black point of view. In the report of a former octogenarian Jeje nation slave, the monumental breath of the novel fulfills a thorough experience of native cultures, incorporating lexicons of trafficked ethnic groups and totemic rituals, in an attempt to represent the importance of such a legacy for black integration in Brazil. The originality that emerges therefrom is capable of contradicting one of the Brazilian critical sociology milestones, the thesis "A integração do negro na sociedade de classes", by Florestan Fernandes. This fundamental complementation to consecrated historiographies on Afro-Brazilian populations depends on the possibilities of the fictional record, which, however, are obstructed by conservative formal choices that limit, without annulling it, the literary power of the work.

Narrative expedients by Chico Buarque and Rubens Figueiredo are analyzed in order to reveal how Brazilian social burden makes itself present in its constitution. Not just because they make the violence of inequality their subject in Leite Derramado (2009) and Passageiro do fim do dia (2010), but by the poetic confrontation of the matter that, each author in his own way, assumes. To draw an affiliation line of the criticism present in both works, we returns to the poetics of Machado de Assis, as well as to the marks that the European social conflagration had begun to impose on the most relevant of his contemporaries.

György Lukács’s itinerary of philosophical maturation has clear consequences in the Hungarian thinker’s aesthetic theory, and his mature works surpass in complexity and comprehensiveness his youthful endeavors, which were developed in a climate of romantic and sectarian idealism. The path towards objectivity, which Lukács would travel in the course of his systematic contact with the work of Karl Marx, boosts the author’s artistic conception, bringing him significantly closer to a historical reality to which he formerly had been hostile. The resulting theory of realism is capable of sustaining an all-encompassing interrogation related to the poetics with asymmetrical operational reasons and, therefore, remains current.

Ainda que não se reconheça a identidade nacional sem a formatação que o grande ensaísmo de 1930 conferiu ao país, é hora de atualizar as fontes eminentemente “culturalistas” de tal avaliação. A premência da matéria se dá pelo avançar da modernidade precária instalada, que sem dúvidas impõe configurações sociais e culturais mais complexas, das quais as velhas imagens dos “intérpretes do Brasil” não podem seguir dando conta. Entendemos que além da modernização brasileira extrapolar as tentativas de explicação arquetípica, insistir nesse enfoque é ignorar a profissionalização da pesquisa universitária no país, bem como da sociologia que deriva com rigor de Florestan Fernandes. É imprescindível agregar tal experiência sociológica “dura” como contraparte aos voos livres da tradição ensaística consagrada. É o paralelo com tal sociologia da modernidade brasileira que queremos traçar ao ler a literatura produzida no Brasil e, de modo mais detido, a literatura brasileira contemporânea, num recorte que recua aos anos 1990. Não seria com imagens dúplices ou tríplices que poderíamos ler uma literatura que deve seus melhores momentos justamente à elaboração da complexidade social que a origina. “Chaves-interpretativas” não dão conta, a nosso ver, nem da forma de romances tão distintos como, por exemplo, “Joias de família”, de Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares (1990) e “Cidade de Deus”, de Paulo Lins (1997), nem muito menos do problema de autoria, tão marcado no caso de “Cidade de Deus”, mas que, a sua maneira, deve propriamente definir também o modelo de literatura encampado por Tavares. É até nas limitações poéticas e narrativas dos dois romances, para além do feito estético reconhecido em ambos os casos, que a matéria brasileira vai sugestioná-los amplamente, deixando a marca provisória de uma evolução social cujo dinamismo e eficácia atualizada no campo da dominação a igualmente moderna sociologia brasileira soube captar.

In Inferno provisório, Luiz Ruffato foregrounds the physical characterization of his migrant and marginalized characters. The incorporation of social structures is visually embodied both in the physical hexis, which maintains similarities with the historical constraints of the carrier, as well as in the universe of consumed objects, which act as indices of the conditions (and relations) of classes portrayed by the Mineiro writer. By amplifying the importance of the characters’ desires for social mobility and the power to consume, their bodies appear as saturated spaces of symbolic power and language. For this analysis, stories from the last two books (volumes IV and V) of Ruffato’s literary series – O livro das impossibilidades and Domingos sem Deus – were chosen as representative narratives of other poetic moments from Inferno provisório.

In a decentered and collective poetic, Conceição Evaristo narrates the bitterness of exclusionary Brazilian modernization process, directly linked to slavery cleavage that exceeds the Slavery Abolition (1888). Under strong capital speculation, configured in urbanizing impulse (understood as “sanitary”), we see a shantytown dismantling occurring in a central high-value area of Belo Horizonte. The collective figuration that emerges in Becos da memória points to the modern transformation of domination, which is no longer personal and direct, and passes to the effectiveness of its liberal exercise, an efficacy that appears to be rationally justified. To analyze the formal arrangements used by Evaristo in contemporary literary scene, this article will discuss some fictional production characteristics of Luiz Ruffato, especially his novel in fragments Eles eram muitos cavalos. The comparative analysis purpose seeks to show continuities and differences in the working classes representation of the projects undertaken by these authors. In the case that the analysis is successful, the formal choices that were outlined should themselves highlight the diversity in the range of possible poetic directions when dealing with such demanding referential dynamics.

In  the  short  story  “Crônica  de  um  vagabundo”,  Samuel  Rawet  not  only sheds the spotlight on a wandering character but also seeks some pulsional contact with  the  writing.  The analysis  provided  by  this  article  focuses  on  elucidating  the mechanisms that forge the work’s unsteady structure. Nevertheless, even though I recognize  the  fruition  of expression  of  a  more organic language,  unconstrained  to assume itself as an arbitrary instrument, I also assess the limits of such approach. While on one hand it unsews the straightjacket of traditional narrative nexuses, on the other it fails to abstain from the rhetoric of denial.

In Guia Afetivo da Periferia, Marcus Vinícius Faustini makes use of literary narrative expedients in order to build the account about his youth as a dweller in Rio de Janeiro's West Zone. Starting from the identification of the material contingencies that conform the sensible experience of the autobiographer, this analysis, by taking the concept of mimesis in literature as an interested and productive representation, tries to identify the original treatment provided to the extralinguistic references in Faustini's narrative. By not recognizing servilely the previous element from which it departs, but at the same time assuming it as the foundational point for the condition of his account, the author gives birth to a singular work of resignification of the juvenile experience in the outskirts of a big brazilian city – even though for that he needs to make use of conventional cultural and esthetic filiations.

This article proposes the reading of the novelette “Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você”, by Luiz Ruffato, in the tradition of literary criticism inaugurated by Georg Lukács in his The Theory of the Novel. In creating a character who is an immigrant giving an account of his misadventures, the author from Minas Gerais remarkably confers individual limits to the common experience, updating the historical-philosophical reasons of structural determination of the novelistic genre. It is taken as a formal gain, related to contemporary literature, the mensuration of the world according to the character’s interiority that is turned immiscible.