Luciano Duarte | Literature and philosophy

The Homeland of Letters

I was in Paris in mid-2019. As soon as I disembarked, I deliberated: I will use my stay to buy some works that I have difficulty finding in Brazil.

Well, It was my first time in Paris. They advised me to search for the books in small tallows on the edge of the River Seine, near the Louvre, to find the best prices. There I went and arriving, you see, I found not one, but twenty tents lined up, all of them full of books. “I am in the homeland of letters” — I thought.

So I started doing math: I did not have the space or the money to take everything I wanted to buy. I would have to choose, say, four or five authors and that’s it. I desired, anyway, a physical version of Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal; Aveux et anathèmes, by Cioran, was another indispensable purchase. I therefore decided and asked the first seller, “Avez-vous quelque chose de Baudelaire, Cioran, Flaubert ou Maupassant?“. The quelque chose sounded to me like insolence. There would certainly be the complete works of all the authors…

The salesman searched, searched, searched and returned the answer: “Non“. I went to the next tent; again the answer: “Non“. So I passed in each of the stalls, always asking the same question, and always getting the same answer. When I received the last “non” and noticed that the tents had run out, I just did not believe it, I thought it was impossible the scene I had just experienced.

There were, as I said, about twenty tents, each with two, maybe three hundred books. How did none of them have a single work by Charles Baudelaire, the greatest poet of the 19th century? I understand the French do not read Cioran, but Baudelaire? Flaubert?

Then the obvious question popped into my head: “If there is no Cioran, Flaubert, Maupassant or Baudelaire, what are these tents full of?” And, believe it or not, sweeping the nearest shelf with my eyes, there I found, in a prominent position, L’alchimiste, by Paulo Coelho.

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Talent is a Long Patience

Some interesting words from Guy de Maupassant, in my translation:

Later Flaubert, whom I sometimes saw, took affection for me. I dared to send him some essays. He read them kindly and said to me, “I don’t know if you will have talent. What you have brought to me proves a certain intelligence, but don’t forget that, young man, that talent — in Chateubriand’s words — is nothing but a long patience. Work.”

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Luiz Felipe Pondé and the Genomic Problem

In the essay Da ciência e do medo, arranged in his Do pensamento no deserto, Luiz Felipe Pondé makes an interesting reflection about what we can call the “genomic problem”.

He says that once, “walking through the campus of one of the largest and richest universities in the so-called first world,” he talked about genomics and the risks of genetic engineering with a group of technicians in genetics and molecular biology. Here is what happened:

One of the techniques stated that she did not understand the paraphernalia that philosophy and ethics invented about science in general, more specifically criticizing the blah blah blah about the possible social developments of the concrete and daily activity of the genomic laboratory.

So Pondé proceeds in the essay as if he were responding to the esteemed proletarian of science, undermining all the impacts that a robust genomic industry would bring in ethical, social and moral terms. It is a scary scenario.

We are talking about genetic engineering, artificial insemination, gestation through artificial wombs, —who knows? — incubators and everything that cannot be imagined of the evolution of this gait applied on large-scale.

Pondé shows us how inevitable the process is and how it will attack the human being in its most intimate dimension, destroying inwardly important meaning-forming fulcrums, all driven by an unstoppable desire for emancipation. With morality buried by the gains of the technique, there will finally be the vacuum, exposed and inconsolable.

But what to do? How to avoid disaster? There is nothing to do. Science will serve as a support to the process, depending on its many wonders.

Here is how Pondé ingeniously presumes the advancement of the genomic industry:

The trend, as in the case of our genomic social agent, will be bureaucratic mediation operated by competent institutions. On the psychopragmatic and sociopragmatic level, what will be at stake is the continuity of the emancipatory process —and here we should take into account more seriously the advertising pragmatics: “Give your child the best of you!”, or “Are you not worrying about the future of your family?” “Social security is the keyword.” A tendency to social reorganization on a bionomic basis is irreversible. (…) A broad front of normalization will be put into practice: normalization of security insurance (inclusion of genomic goods in health insurance policies), legal normalization (definition of genomic rights), pedagogical normalization (definition of the pedagogical goal as the production of individuals horizontally psycho-bio-socio-happy), psychological normalization (definition of integrated personality as the right to guiltless biohappiness), social normalization (combating the privatization of genomic goods), political normalization (campaign against biofundamentalist prejudices — platonic root naturalistic dogmatism at the service of fear and guilt — and against genism, understood as discrimination based on the lower genomic capital of individuals excluded from preventive practice).

We are left, as always, with the resignation and the cynical smile to stamp on our faces…

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The Basis of Literature

Charles Bally, Swiss linguist, makes a very virtuous reflection in his Traité de stylistique française. He is extolling the importance of the spoken language, with all its subjective burden, for literary language: he says the literary language feeds and rejuvenates the spoken language. He then says the aesthetic pleasure derived from the literary form is directly related to the spoken language, since such pleasure is nothing but the capture of a “sublime deformation” operated by the artist, which is only perceived through comparison. Bally reinforces that emotion, the quality of ideas or its organization were never enough to consecrate a literary work, not allowing us to quote a single masterpiece that obtained its consecration by abstaining from the form. Charles Bally then concludes, in other words, that the day when there is no form, and there is no contrast between the spoken language and the literary language, there will be no more literary language, and literature will be dead. Excellent, excellent! Now let us analyze the progression of poetry and prose over the centuries and draw our conclusions…

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