Tag: literature

Perhaps the most intricate problem facing Brazilian novelists is whether or not to portray colloquial language. Assuming this necessity, there is the very complicated problem of measurement, for which there seems to be no sure solution. That is to say: the gulf between the Portuguese spoken in Brazil and the cultured language is so immense, but so immense, that there is no possible conciliation, but rather tolerable, or perhaps necessary betrayals, which are interspersed in the chosen model. Cultured language, compared to colloquial language, is artificiality and ridicule in Brazilian Portuguese. Colloquial language, on the other hand, does not fit into formal Portuguese except as an infinite set of spelling, prosodic and syntactic errors, which, if portrayed faithfully, make the language almost unrecognizable. How, then, to solve it? The novelist, if he really sees the situation he is narrating, will naturally feel restrained from putting into the mouth of a character a speech that is inconceivable to him. At the same time, he is a novelist, not a speaker; he therefore handles—and hopefully loves—the written language and tradition. From all this, there is only one certainty: the easiest thing is not to be a novelist in Brazil.

There is a piece of advice that would please readers very much, but has never been given to any writer, and it consists of the following: the author whose pages of the books he has are not enough to satisfy his need to comment on them does well to allocate the excess, or the whole of his comments to a work designed specifically for this purpose. By doing so, he avoids, firstly, these comments getting in the way of a narrative that has nothing to do with them, interrupting it and hindering it. Secondly, if such a work exists, it will be good for the author himself, who will have a stimulating store of comments in it, if he does not have a friend or any other real person to perform this function.

The advantage of a novel with a well-defined dramatic arc, even if the succession of events, being exaggeratedly cohesive, borders on artificiality, is that it keeps the sense of the whole alive and intense in the reader’s mind, something that, in short, sustains his interest. On the other hand, novels that are, say, more “natural”, that reflect the natural futility of the characters and the natural triviality of their lives and concerns, quickly become tedious and, even if they appear less forced, often they do not resist the constant temptation to close them.

The most difficult thing about portraying the temporal circumstance in a literary work is to specify it to the point where it becomes special, while at the same time synthesizing its action as an external agent in a scheme that goes beyond time. Tend to either side, and the artist will fail to make the work arouse lasting interest, which is only possible when different but inseparable layers of meaning are built up, connecting the comprehensive to the particular.