Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martín Hopenhayn is Social Development Researcher for the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile. While he is the author of numerous books in Spanish, this is the first English language collection of his writing. Cynthia Margarita Tompkins is Associate Professor of Spanish at Arizona State University. Elizabeth Rosa Horan is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University.

Silviano Santiago is Professor of Brazilian Literature at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói. He is a novelist, poet, translator, and theorist whose books include the novel Stella Manhattan, also published by Duke University Press.

Ana Lúcia Gazzola is President and Professor of English, Romance, and Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.

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"These essays constitute a refreshing approach to cultural and literary studies by the most courageous and forward-thinking critic in Brazil. Silviano Santiago's breadth of knowledge and critical acumen stem from the erudition and perspicacity of a highly intelligent mind."--Nelson H. Vieira, Brown University

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THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN

Duke University Press

Contents

Introduction: Silviano Santiago, a Voice In-Between...................................................11. Why and For What Purpose Does the European Travel?.................................................92. Latin American Discourse: The Space In-Between.....................................................253. Ea, Author of Madame Bovary.......................................................................394. Universality in Spite of Dependency................................................................535. The Rhetoric of Verisimilitude.....................................................................646. Worth Its Weight: Brazilian Modernist Fiction......................................................797. The Permanence of the Discourse of Tradition in Modernism..........................................938. Repression and Censorship in the Field of the Arts during the 1970s................................1119. Literature and Mass Culture........................................................................11910. The Postmodern Narrator...........................................................................13311. Worldly Appeal: Local and Global Politics in the Shaping of Brazilian Culture.....................147Notes.................................................................................................175Index.................................................................................................185

Chapter One

FOR RENATO

I consider invalid the opinion of those who search, having already found. -Paul Valry

The last book by Umberto Eco published among us, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, is useful for asking once again a question that always occurs in the discussion of the relationship between the Old and the New World, ever since the latter was revealed to Western European consciousness: Why and for what purpose does the European travel?

Years ago, it was fashionable for American historiography to try to explain the reason why the New World did not manage to discover the Old one. Among many hypotheses, one was most seductive because it pointed to the scientific superiority of the Occident. It was said that discovery had not taken place because our pre-Columbians did not know the compass. Gradually, with the recent studies of political anthropology carried out or inspired by Pierre Clastres, we will discover that there must be other reasons, or at least different reasons from those dictated by victorious European ethnocentrism. But let us consider, for the time being, the classical question formulated above.

FIRST RESPONSES

Cames told us that, when the European traveled, it was to propagate Faith and the Empire, and he was right. But, rather than making the Portuguese responsible for the colonization of other peoples, he gave the responsibility for the job to the pagan gods. This was a decoy pointed out by Voltaire in the Essay on Epic Poetry (1733): "The main goal of the Portuguese, after the establishment of their commerce, was the propagation of their faith, and Venus sees to the success of the enterprise. Seriously, such an absurd marvel disfigures the entire work in the eyes of sensible readers." Antnio Jos Saraiva adds one more contradiction to this one: in the epic poem, the humans behave like gods and the gods like humans. The Portuguese argonauts, such as, for example, Vasco da Gama, are decent, perfect, Olympian, while the gods engage in merely mortal intrigue, victims of their own feelings (love, hatred, etc.). This is why Saraiva could come to the conclusion that mythology, in Cames, is the transposition of historical reality.

At any rate, Cames's answer has at least one major advantage: it does not emphasize the gratuitous aspect of the journey, that of pure and simple curiosity for what is different, for the Other (for the aboriginal, different from and symmetrical to the European). The emphasis on curiosity would reduce the whole question of the discovery and colonization, of the conquest, to a mere intellectual exercise on the dissatisfaction of the white man, "naturally" inclined to universalism, with his own civilization. It would result in a mere variation on the manner in which the European searches for knowledge: he travels because he is curious about what he does not know. The unknown is what instigates his knowledge. Cames insists, to the contrary, on the expansionist and colonizing goal of the journey. So much the better.

The navigators and the colonizers were not truly curious about the Other and dissatisfied with the European reality of the time; this was true in relation to those who remained in Europe, with the burden of religious intolerance and the Inquisition, such as Montaigne. As far as I know, Montaigne never traveled outside Europe, but he had the brilliant idea of taking from the Other (or, more specifically, from the anthropophagous who visits Europe) his potential to contest the organization of the modern European state, conferring on it the status-here, surely-of an object of knowledge, of intellectual curiosity (read the chapter "Des cannibales" in his essays).

The point is not that the Portuguese had not felt in their own skin the outrages of the Inquisition. They were not insensitive, as Cames was not, to the "rough, dark, and vile sadness" the nation was going through. But they were unable to understand and criticize the wave of religious intolerance that ravaged the continent with the religious and social standards opened up by the maritime discoveries. Diego Bernardes, for example, tells us, in "An Answer to Dr. Antnio Ferreira," of the atmosphere prevailing in Portugal, but he does not establish Montaigne's enlightened counterpoint. So he says:

A medo vivo, a medo escrevo e falo, hei medo do que falo s comigo, mas inda a medo cuido, a medo calo. [I live in fear, I write and speak in fear, I even fear what I only tell myself, but still in fear I take care, in fear I keep silent.]

On the other hand, S de Miranda, at least in the turns of comparison, abandons the European frontiers and enters Egypt, where he finds in the behavior of thirsty dogs on the banks of the Nile the way to survive those negative times:

Farei como os ces do Nilo que correm e vo bebendo. [I will do as the dogs of the Nile that run as they drink.]

This is stated in a "Letter to the King D. Joo III." Isn't he the clever fellow?

Even the Puritans, who moved to America once and for all, and who could at first be considered dissatisfied with European intolerance, did exactly the same, as they took to the other place the intolerance that had victimized them, rearming it even more vigorously because the historical and social obstacles existing in Europe were lacking. Thus, the contact with the New World does not change the Puritans' world view; on the contrary, it provides them with a guarantee-legitimized by the theory of predestination-that they are making the right journey. It is no coincidence that the "bible" of the American Puritans, Pilgrim's Progress, presents salvation through faith by means of an allegorical...