Introduction by Sílvio Lôbo Júnior
In the face of repression where censorship controls the media and stifles freedom of expression, people tend to express themselves through alternative means. Literature is the primary medium for this expression.
Since the dawn of human history, humans have created abstract texts, using and abusing symbolism to convey the ideal of freedom to the persecuted group or to denounce reality.
Many texts have been written with the aim of denouncing reality during times of repression. The most well-known of these is undoubtedly the Book of Revelation, found in Holy Scripture. In it, a supposed John, imprisoned on the Island of Patmos, writes to the leaders of the churches in Asia to denounce the abuses of the Roman government. In an environment of persecution and censorship, the author of this book uses abstract language full of symbolism. The leaders of Christian communities are called angels, Emperor Domitian, who after his coronation began to sign himself "Domicinianus Dominus" (Domitian Lord and God), is described in this book as the Beast who claims to be God, and is followed by another Beast who launches fire upon the cities to display his power, namely Nero in his spectacles where he ordered villages in lower Rome to be set ablaze.
As can be seen, abstract texts, symbolism, and artistic struggle for Revelation (unveiling what is covered) are not new, but rather a human reaction to fight against censorship where freedom of expression is non-existent.
This work begins with the same focus. With the aim of describing the artistic symbolism employed in a work of hidden beauty, which denounces events that occurred recently, whose characters still walk among us, and which much needs to be understood for justice to be served.
Hail, Weapons!
Darcy França DENÓFRIO
Master in Literary Theory. Poet,
essayist, and Adjunct Professor (retired) of the Department of Letters at UFG.
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The montage (hail+weapons) expressed in Avarmas, which names a collection of short stories by Miguel Jorge, published by Ática in 1978, points to one of the many poetic resources that he and other Brazilian short story writers, especially from the 1960s onwards, began to incorporate into narrative texts. But, until then, the short story had gone through a long process of transformation.
The traditional short story _ as a story that unfolds linearly before the reader's eyes, with a beginning, middle, and end; containing a conflict that is almost always very clear to the reader; a reduced number of characters without any psychological depth; a short lapse of time and restricted space; absolute objectivity, with emphasis on the characters' actions and not on what can be inferred from them _ already appeared in Brazil in the 19th century, around 1840. From early precursor experiments in newspapers, around 1836, the short story gradually gained literary dimensions. However, according to Herman Lima, "if the literary short story did not begin with Machado de Assis, it was consolidated with him, receiving from his hands a treatment that none of the others before him had given it (...)". Regarding short narratives, Machado's first publications are from 1860. His first published work in the genre, Contos fluminenses, is from 1870, a hundred years therefore before the phase of intense experimentation that the Brazilian short story went through.
Assis Brasil considers that only with the publication of Samuel Rawett's work, Contos do imigrante, in 1956, did the course of Brazilian short narrative deviate. For him, this Jewish-Polish writer, who came to Brazil at the age of six, "breaks the Machadian tradition among us," being the inventor of the "flagrante" (snapshot) short story, in the style of Chekhov. And Antônio Hohlfeldt, in Conto brasileiro contemporâneo, lists, also seeking the opinion of esteemed critics, the characteristics of Rawett's short stories, the first of which is that they are centered on characters. Summarizing, the other characteristics would be the destruction of the plot, or the presence of a tenuously constructed plot, which would inevitably destroy the clear notion of time and space; the syncopated sentence, appropriate to the harshness and anguish of the situation that envelops his text and character; the fabulistic poverty compensated by a richness of inner action, expressed through certain narrative techniques, such as interior monologues and soliloquies; the revelation of the "human animal," its solitude, and its difficulty in communicating or even its incommunicability. Among these are some of the main characteristics of the so-called experimental short story, that is, of that short story in which its creators experimented with new forms or processes of writing short narratives.
For Alfredo Bosi, however, it was Alcântara Machado, son of a traditional São Paulo family, "who was the first to show sensitivity to the turning point of fictional prose, dedicating himself entirely to renewing the structure and pace of the short story." And this, it is worth noting, almost 30 years before Rawett's experiments. His short story collections Brás, Bexiga e Barra Funda, from 1927, and Laranja da china, from 1928, are indeed built on the paths opened by the experimental prose of Mário and Oswald de Andrade. The interesting thing is that both he and Rawett brought the immigrant to the scene. And often our memory betrays us: when speaking of "Gaetaninho," a short story by Alcântara Machado, we remember "Gringuinho," by Samuel Rawett, sometimes even confusing the title of one with the other.
A scholar of Brazilian short stories, Professor Vera Tietzmann Silva conducted, in 1991, one of the most complete studies on the narratives of Laranja da china, noting, for the first time in criticism, this stylistic peculiarity of the São Paulo author that does not escape a critical reader: the approximation of his literary art to cinematography, an art that was developing at that time. Professor Vera thoroughly analyzes, among other stylistic peculiarities, the cinematic montage technique that Alcântara Machado so skillfully transferred to his short stories. This essay, titled "Montagem e humor em Laranja da china," was published in Cadernos de Letras da UFG, série Literatura Brasileira, number 06, in 1991. And later in Passando dos limites, a work published by the Federal University of Goiás Press in 1995.
Sensitive to the new artistic languages that emerged around Modernism, such as cinema, fiction writers, including short story writers, began to incorporate them into their texts, radically altering the structure of the narrative genre. Over time, the dilution of the plot, in short, of the fable or story; the absence of clear character contours; the indefiniteness of time and space, led fiction to invade the boundaries of the lyrical genre, also incorporating poetic characteristics. Indeed, Emil Staiger, when theorizing about genres, demonstrates that they do not function, as the classics wanted, in separate compartments, isolating themselves into lyrical, epic, and dramatic. Today, they are, in fact, like communicating vessels, with the lyrical and dramatic flowing into the epic, meaning that characteristics of poetry or theater can be present in a narrative text, or vice versa, in perfect intercomunication.
Avarmas, released by Ática in 1978, is an excellent example of a work that takes literary experimentation techniques to the extreme. Gilberto Mendonça Teles, in the preface he wrote for this book, places Miguel Jorge within the "universalist" line, alongside José Veiga, and states that the author of Avarmas "has known how to introduce the most audacious modifications in the language of his short stories." Furthermore: contrasting this work with Miguel's debut book (released almost 30 years ago), titled Antes do túnel, Gilberto points out in the latter, from 1967, some imperfections typical of a debut author, but states that in Avarmas, written no less than ten years later, "hesitations give way to a well-thought-out language construction, and the awareness of language as a game assumes its full manifestation." The critic also perceives, very clearly, the artistic language techniques present in the work in question (such as cinema), but considers that "it is undoubtedly the appeal to poetic language that is visible in all the short stories."
In the series of short stories in Avarmas, one can indeed verify what Emil Staiger theorizes: all genres, in one short story or another, more or less radically, coexist or interpenetrate. The narrative "Macro Micro," for example, which examines labor relations, is structured entirely under the influence of cinematic language. The short story "Putein," on the other hand, incorporates dramatic language to such an extent that, with slight adaptations, it was transformed into a play, included in the work Teatro contemporâneo, published by Miguel Jorge in 1981. The very title of the short story collection in question is a form of poetic montage, with good expressive yield. In Avarmas, an agglutination of ave(s) (bird(s)) and armas (weapons), there is already the ambiguity proper to the lyrical genre, offering several possible readings, which we come to understand better after reading the work or within its context. Even better: after "reading" the author's worldview, understanding how he sees the world and, within it, man. In the aforementioned preface, Gilberto Mendonça Teles, understanding the poetic climate that permeates the short stories, offers the first reading of the title in a metaliguistic direction, stating that "Avarmas, (...) a mixture of birds and weapons, suggests the encounter (the game) of the winged language of poetry with the armed language in these narratives: it soars to arm; or arms itself to soar. It matters little."
Trying to look at the human depth captured by Miguel, through the poetic, we believe that at least three more readings can emerge from the depth of the text to the title. One, of an ironic nature, would be: "Hail, weapons!" Perhaps a cry of resistance and mockery in the face of a dehumanized world, in which we are no more than fragile birds to be shot down in existential flight. Or a kind of cruel and ironic form of greeting, reminiscent of that "Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute you," uttered by condemned men before death in the arena, for the delight of the Romans, in the era of the Caesars. At the same time, a "Hail, weapons!" underlies it, sounding like a formula to exorcise evil: God save us from them! It is not without reason that the short story "Avarmas," eponymous with the work, unfolds in a terrifying atmosphere, suggesting the 1964 Revolution. The illustrator of the two editions of Avarmas, Aderbal Moura, captured this sense very well, materializing this idea throughout the pages of Gilberto Mendonça Teles's preface, where these two elements (birds and weapons) are juxtaposed. There, through a prescient optical stratum, the reader can see disoriented birds that have passed through the line of fire (one of which, already hit, plunges into the abyss), and the double barrel of a heavy-caliber weapon, exploding towards others outside our field of vision, yet showing the shooter's hand firm on the trigger. Another reading would be the possibility of an antinomy or two opposing poles: bird x weapons. On one hand, the fragility of the human being; on the other, the force of institutions, "the web of constraints," as Italo Calvino would say, which destroy man or the humanity of man.
Most of the short stories in this book, recalling Cortázar when referring to the modern short story, "shoot Descartes in the back": almost nothing can be rationally explained, and the relationships of causality disappear, as does everything known in the decalogues of the so-called traditional short story. The first narrative, "Décima Quarta Estação" (Fourteenth Station), for example, is structured within "a fog or nebula," to use the author's own expression. The first difficulty for the beginner reader is that this short story is built through intertextualization, that is, it is built upon a pre-text (or an existing text), which are biblical passages of Christ's passion or fragments of these passages. These, in turn, serve as the basis for the "via-sacra" ritual, instituted by the Catholic Church, or, more precisely, by the people of Jerusalem based on the memory of this passion.
There is a fable or plot, but as if it were a frayed fabric or one that presented the empty spaces of lace. The fabulation, the plot, or more simply, the author's way of weaving his nebulous text, leaves not a compact fable fabric, but only hints, fragments of action here and there. The reader is invited to participate in the creative process, filling in the gaps, joining the threads to form the story's fabric.
The main character, an unnamed "I," apparently begins to experience his scourging in an interior monologue. In the third line, he expresses himself thus: "and here is my image ignited." This is the moment of eruption of this anonymous character into the text. To ignite means to erupt suddenly, to catch fire with intense flame, sparks, or explosions. This is also the author's method of composition _ flashes of scenes, here and there, make up the short story. "Behold the shouts the crowd the voices the multitude in progressive anger moving in a spot in a fog or a nebula." It is not the multitude in progressive anger, in biblical chords, but the crowd. The millennial and the modern intertwine, and what moves in a nebulous spot, in a fog, is both an ancestral biblical time and a new time within a narrative that is being generated. In a fog, established by a consciously sought semiological indecision (everything is and is not what discourse seems to say), a condemned and sentenced man performs a ritual, interweaving death on the gallows and on the cross. Crucifixion, a practice the Romans inherited from the Carthaginians to subjugate the peoples under their dominion, especially the Jews, was the slowest and most painful form of execution. At the end of the short story, it prevails. The two forms of execution should take on a symbolic meaning in the short story. The illustrator, attentive, also captured the duality of the ordeal, illustrating the bottom of the page preceding the "Tenth Station" with a sinister gallows and the character, in the foreground, with a crown of thorns on his head, in the style of Christ.
This man, who endures a double ordeal, suffers a triple punishment: that of the "condemned man walking with his hands tied in the middle of the street," that of the enraged crowd accompanying him to witness the sacrifice, and that of the hundreds of eyes watching him through the window _ all of them severe forms of torture and condemnation, in which man has specialized.
In the first, second, third, and fifth stations, there are clear references to the double ordeal, with expressions like "I am before the gallows," "rope and cross," "rope around my neck," and "rope tied to my neck," respectively. But the ritual that predominates is that of crucifixion, with the scourging, the ordeal already recorded in our Christian memory. Fragments of scenes narrated in the Gospels mingle with those of an ordinary man, who, by analogy, could be any one of us. A man who suffers deprivation of human freedom; cannot prove his innocence of a supposed transgression; endures the betrayal of a friend, a kind of biblical Peter who, however, equates to Pilate, washing his hands to absolve himself of responsibility for that crime. He has, like Christ, a mother who suffers for him and with him, and a father (powerful-absent) who does not remove the cup of agony. Differently, this man (a doctor? a pharmacist?) who also heals, but not by extraordinary means, has a wife and child and a childhood (Christ's only period of life for which there is no record), a paradisiacal childhood, where he learned about confinement and the leap to freedom.
The short story, in an atmosphere of "A rally, a procession, or something similar, if it weren't for the blood wetting the ground," seems to end with the man's crucifixion and the agony that precedes his death: "this asking for water, for water, for water, water, water." This thirst is not physical. In the symbolic sphere, thirst can be the desire for human completeness. But does the character's life really end this way? Does he literally die on the cross?
The beginner reader might imagine that the story of a character who actually relives Christ's scourging, going through another via-crucis, unfolds here. In truth (if one can speak of truth in fiction), the action is internal and not external. A product of psychological pressure, everything happens in the character's mind, who, within a very limited space _ the prison _ for a reason we do not know, imagines such an ordeal. Therefore, in the First Station, in a kind of delirium, "which comes and (...) flees," the character sees everything "in a fog or nebula" or "through shadows," even saying "I have a vision," referring to the hanging. The dilution of the plot, constructed in a tenuous and discontinuous way, contributes to the reader who is not accustomed forgetting information that, when put together, gives us the keys to the puzzle. This type of narrative is indeed built as a game. It is indeed an interactive art, similar to some computer games.
There are two modalities of time in this short story. Several expressions connote that the time in which the narrated events, with the diffuse episode of crucifixion, take place is conventionally called psychological time. This is internal, subjective, immeasurable, created by the imagination of that anonymous character who lives a drama we do not know and which needs to be deciphered. We cannot measure how much time she spends in her "deliriums," in the form of interior monologues, although they extend to the fourteenth station. Expressions such as "and you felt yourself walking" (II station); "Scenes succeeded each other and you tried to machine-gun memory with successive scenes" (IV station); "and the sound of hammers (...) could be a vision solely mine" (V station); "The memories" (VI station); "placing recollections in each place" (VIII station); "The thing [the delirium] came back slowly (IX station); "The agony again" (X station); The agony of the night. (...) "And you have nothing left (...) but to think and be alive through thought" (XII station) all of these, among others, are indicators of purely interior or psychological time.
However, there is also, in this short story by Miguel, another time: chronological time. But instead of being external, objective, measurable, perceptible to the reader, with allusions to the hours of the day or other explicit temporal markers, as happens in traditional narratives, it is not easy to grasp its duration. One gets the impression that it, as usually happens in any short story, encompasses no more than a day in the "prisoner's" life, as there is a reference to the morning, in the First Station, and to the "agony of the night" in the Twelfth. These are data seemingly thrown in randomly, but, even so, they are markers of this chronological time.
A psychological space is also noted, created by the imagination or delirium of the narrator-character (the street, the path, where a scourging similar to Christ's is re-enacted) and a physical, "concrete" space, where he finds himself, apparently awaiting the judgment of a crime we do not know, a space that, in a first reading, can be understood as that of a prison.
The action, consequently, is also purely internal. There is nothing that can be called external action. The man (anonymous) is confined and perhaps immobile in a prison, or a kind of prison, all the time, going around "within himself," which means lost in his speculations. He does not move within this space. Only his memory, or his psyche, travels. However, it is in the "Third Station," when the character's sense of anguish intensifies, that he refers, in the first person, to "the fetid cold, ugly floor of this prison." Later, changing the point of view to the second person, a narrative voice states in the "Eighth Station": "You are again in that prison." And it reaffirms, within the same narrative focus, in the "Tenth": "Your prison was like your childhood home." Finally, in the "Thirteenth," changing the point of view back to the first person, the character herself confirms: "the sound (...) reached me through the iron bars of a fifty-year-old window." Fifty-year-old window. Here again is the ambiguity proper to the poetic. Besides being a physical object tied to a chronology, this qualified window can refer to a mature being (fifty years old) who, from his human prison ("iron bars"), can self-evaluate. Perhaps for this very reason the character, through the vision of a second person, admits that he has nothing left to do "but think and be alive through thought."
Note, incidentally, that the author uses, from the beginning to the end of the narrative, these two angles of visualization of the story: first and second person. This latter modality has never appeared in conventional narratives. It is an experimental resource. The alternation of these two focal modalities seems to assume a symbolic sense of complicity. A certain way of saying that the "I" and the "other" look at each other and identify with each other.
The ending, in the traditional short story, represents the solution of a conflict. In a first reading, we may not grasp the character's true conflict or its cause. But we easily perceive that there is a conflict, and it is expressed in the anguish and solitude of a man alone in prison, who hugs his own arms and legs, closing himself in a fetal position, anguish and solitude that lead him to a kind of delirium. Thus, unlike the traditional short story, there is no proper solution. When the narrative closes, we do not know if he is finally being crucified, if he has reached the threshold of madness, or if he will remain a prisoner, including of his own deliriums. If he is mad, he is an episodic madman, as he writes his visions inside prison, which can, as we have already admitted, be human prison or the prison of the "self," pushed into the abyssal depths of being.
More than once, we have references to the act of writing. In the "Eleventh Station," the character (and here a metalinguistic game comes in) refers to the words he records in his "notebook," "words with the force of poetry." There is a moment, within the narrative, when it becomes particularly clear that the character writes or records his story within the prison (human or not). It is in the "Thirteenth Station" where we read: (...) "and a whirlwind of things and colors projected before me and I had a pen in my hand and some words in my mind (...) and I could engrave them on that wall creased with moss and green streaks and small creatures and one could now see a snail slowly climbing its path and I too in a slow walk that is still mine have the wall and the pen and the words and the agony and I write without hesitation without trembling without thinking of the men who patrol the prison and ask for my body (...) and I still write." At this point, a fragment in the form of poetry appears. But the poetry is less there than here. Or as much here as there.
This asyntactic language, present in Miguel's text, and without punctuation marks, when the narrative focus is in the first person, is due to the interior monologue the character indulges in, and is so called because it takes place in the character's interior or psychic world, where they talk to themselves. The words, in this case, contain "various levels of consciousness before they are formulated by deliberate speech," as Robert Humphrey states. It is as if we were writing an essay without letting the ideas pass through the censor's filter of reason. Well, interior monologue and especially stream of consciousness are techniques used by modern fiction writers, under the influence of psychoanalysis, to depict psychological, interior time, based on associative memory: "memory pulls memory." The interior monologue is constructed in the preverbal area of consciousness, and the text appears as if it were a record of speech according to emotion. Hence the legitimacy of this asyntactic language and absence of punctuation. The same does not happen when the narrator appears in the second person, as if it were a voice of the narrator's own consciousness. There, correct syntax and all punctuation marks appear. Nothing in the work of a true literary creator, like Miguel Jorge, happens by chance. There is a reason for the choice of alternating narrative focuses. If this entire narrative had a distanced third-person focus, the result would evidently have been completely different.
It is appropriate to clarify to beginners that metalanguage is a technical term without any complexity. It means a language about another language. For example, poetry, or rather, poetic discourse, constitutes metalanguage because it is built upon denotative or common language. But there is the metalinguistic poem or metapoem, that is, one in which the poet speaks about the very essence of poetry, about poetic creation. In the case of the author of Avarmas, by creating the short story in question (and also others in this book), he often provides us with the coordinates of how he carries out his literary exercise. By insinuating that the character he created writes his story, Miguel (or the creator) introduces information about the nature of his own fictional text, stating that this character chooses "words with the force of poetry," when it is he himself who does this. This is effectively what happens in his narrative. Language, through which the author speaks about his own creation, revealing his creative consciousness, is also called metalanguage. And, incidentally, it is one of the tendencies of contemporary narrative that has even invaded children's and young adult fiction. This critical attempt of mine to understand Miguel Jorge's text is also considered metalanguage. Or rather, metametalanguage. There are other species and other levels of metalanguage, which we see no point in elaborating on here. The parenthesis is to avoid an "intellectual affectation," which Eduardo Portella speaks of, that generates incommunicability or blocks communication.
A contemporary short story is generally made to say something about the existing being, even if it seemingly says nothing. And this one, as it is anchored in the poetic, points to a possible allegorical path. The prison, for example, can be the human condition. The via-crucis, the one undertaken by man in this world. It is common to say: everyone has their cross. And, by extension, their Pilate, their Judas, their Peter, their executioners; but also, their Simon of Cyrene, their Veronica, their Joseph of Arimathea, and, who knows, even a self-interested good thief, and so on the analogy goes.
In the Eleventh and especially in the Thirteenth Station, we learn that the character writes his story, using "words with the force of poetry." Julio Cortázar, in his essay "Situação do romance" (The Situation of the Novel), states something equally valid for the contemporary short story: "the novel enters our century with evident manifestations of formal restlessness, of an anxiety that will lead it to finally take a step of incalculable importance: the incorporation of poetic language, the language of immediate expression of intuitions." But he warns that this evolution, which implies the advance of poetry over prose, does not liquidate the novel (nor the short story) as such, because most of its objectives remain outside poetic objectives. What it allowed was a deepening, because according to him "what we call poetry implies the deepest penetration into being that man is capable of. Only it 'crosses the superficial layers without fully illuminating them, focusing its attention on the 'deep' dimensions of being."
Indeed, this narrative by Miguel Jorge is built with words that can ignite a sub-jacente semantic load _ revealing of the human _ which is found in the depth of the text and not on its surface. The words hold a symbolic meaning that needs to be sought further. And the presence of the continuous metaphor that leads the short story to the path of allegory is also noted. What is said is certainly not what is meant. For Angus Fletcher, "Simply put, allegory says one thing and means another." Tzvetan Todorov, who considers this concept too broad, recalls a more modern and restrictive meaning of the term, stating that "allegory is a proposition of double meaning, but whose proper (or literal) meaning has completely faded." For example, in the short story in question, the character, sentenced in a public square, is arrested and subjected to a double ordeal: death on the gallows and on the cross. Does this literally happen? Or in other words: is this really the story being told? We will notice that the literal meaning has faded in favor of another, much richer in meaning, which will not exist without our effort to understand.
Let us begin, then, with the symbolism or metaphor of the gallows. This means of execution, by strangling the throat, can represent the instruments that prohibit or repress speech and, by extension, thought, and which can be represented by family, religion, school, in short, by all those forms of social control that end up imposing an ideology, almost always traumatically. Speech is the mark of the human and also of our existence. Through it, we exercise fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression and thought. In the short story, mechanisms of coercion prevent the character from speaking, from defending herself, as in the Third Station: "I sought at every moment to say a word, just one word, but the word did not come, did not come, did not come." The same impossibility of speech occurs in the Sixth Station: "You know more, that you can cry out your innocence. But you feel a lump in your throat and your tongue will stick to the roof of your mouth." Or in the Ninth: "and my voice sticks to my throat." "Lump" (travo) sends, by sound association, to the word "trava" (brake), which takes on the meaning of brake.
If the gallows are associated with the prohibition of speech, the cross, or crucifixion, refers to the ordeals of the flesh and, in this case, to the restraint of human passion. As a form of subjugation, the flagellum or whip was used by the Romans in the scourging of the flesh during the crucifixion ritual, including Christ's. The hair shirt was used by priests, especially (but not only) in the Middle Ages, to curb carnal desires. The act of crucifying can take on deeply symbolic dimensions: nails in the hands, feet, sword in the chest (or heart). Symbolically, the instruments of caress (hands), of going and coming (feet), and what is conventionally considered the seat of human sentiment (the heart) are manacled (or crucified).
In summary: the fiction writer has created a narrative that, on a superficial reading, seems to speak of a condemned man. But in its depth, it speaks of the existing being, of the castration process of his speech and the manacling of his feelings. Mind and body are subjugated throughout the history or biography of each of us. There is only, and this is also clear in the narrative, a paradisiacal moment in our lives: childhood. Numerous poets and even philosophers speak of this magical or Edenic moment. Miguel Jorge's tortured character tries to "machine-gun memory with successive scenes of good childhood." But this paradise, like the other, does not withstand transgression. "The leap to freedom" came. And this is usually the moment when almost all of us succumb. From here on, we bear the guilt. Avarmas carries, as a mark of human fall, this stigma throughout its pages, although the author is often visibly ironic about religion. Especially Christian-Catholicism, which imbues us with the bitterness of this feeling, so ancient that it is lost in the night of time.
Social control is necessary. A society where its members each exercise unlimited freedom cannot be conceived. It would be chaos. But there are societies, including some primitive ones, that achieve this control in a less traumatic way. They say that an indigenous person never hits a child or says no to a child. Little by little, the necessary limits are imposed on the members of the community and their own scale of values is created, in a more natural way, it seems. The character created by Miguel, at a certain point in the narrative, exclaims: "In the beginning, the beginning, the beginning." That is, in the beginning, the precept, the rule, the law. The repetition of the word may seem like mere wordplay. But those who think so are mistaken. This discourse has the force of poetry.
To understand this short story by Miguel Jorge, it will be necessary to look at man in our time. Far from the Theocentrism of the Middle Ages, the Anthropocentrism of the Modern Age, and closer to Rationalism, which comes from afar and enters the Contemporary Age with one foot, the man of Avarmas coincides with the Technologism of the Cybernetic Era. Similar to the machine, which de-centers him and makes him go "around within himself," this man, always searching for himself and the meaning of life, struggles in the "no sense" of a totally dehumanized existence. Hence hatred in place of fraternity: "the multitude in progressive anger (...) in an oscillation of bodies and teeth" (I); "all of them [the doors] harbored hatred, injustice, infamy (...) bloody insults" (II); "my torturers are always with me (...) lashes and insults (...) all involved in their own anger" (III); "and the words of insults and spitting returned" (V). Everything progresses in hatred and inhumanity, "insults (...) scourges" (XII), until the character is trampled, which precedes "the dry sound of the hammer hammering nails" in the Fourteenth Station, which closes the narrative. The short story suggests that there are other modern ways of crucifying the Other. And hatred, stemming from the emptying of fraternity, from the dehumanization of our historical time, is perhaps the cruelest and most effective of these forms.
Avarmas shows a flagrant inversion: man is a beast, wicked, devoid of human content; the animal, in turn, is anthropomorphized, humanized, good. The narrative "A vendedora de selos" (The stamp seller) illustrates this very well, if we compare it with "Décima Quarta Estação" and the one called "Avarmas," which open and close the book, respectively. In these two short stories, but not only in them, we have refinements of human malice. The view of the animal in "A Vendedora de Selos" is already much more generous than that of man in the aforementioned stories. Let's see: "The pairs demonstrate the most intense friendship and never part, in an endless exchange of caresses. When one dies, the other remains singing its useless plea, the mournful chirp of inconsolable birds."
Throughout the work, themes are reiterated, such as the massacre of the human in man; the process of liquidation of human freedom; human solitude; human emptiness; the millennial feeling of guilt that we inherit, via Christianity.
Miguel does not usually refuse themes. He even ventures into the underworld, reaching the extreme limits of human degradation with "Putein," where there are even indications of the desacralization of the sacred, with allusions to the Last Supper amidst a context involving human degradation. By capturing sordid human aspects, the author is in tune with Virginia Woolf's thought, who stated in an essay in 1929: "As long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and how centuries may pass, or hours, no one can say. But to sacrifice a hair of your opinion, a nuance of your colour, in deference to some God the Giver, or some Priest the Master, is to be so abjectly terrified of the Gods and the Priests that I can only think of it as a suicide."
Furthermore, Miguel Jorge freely moves across the boundaries that delimit the various species of short story, jumping, for example, from the allegorical in "Décima Quarta Estação" to the characteristic hesitation between the strange and the marvelous, or that hesitation between the real and the imaginary proper to the fantastic, about which Tzvetan Todorov speaks, present in "Véspera de Pânico" (Panic Eve) and "Vendedora de Selo" (Stamp Seller); from this to the absurd of "Numa Gota D'água" (In a Drop of Water), with total abolition of logic; from there to apparently fantastic narratives, created, for example, under the dreamlike or hallucinatory climate of a post-operative state still with the narrator character under the effect of anesthesia, as in "Jogo de argolas" (Ring Toss); or to others conducted by the stressed or shocked narrator's voice, "shackled between words," of a college entrance exam candidate, as can be seen in "Branco Sobre Branco" (White on White); or even by the voice of a woman with psychic disorders, searching for her dead son (in a visible atmosphere of the 1964 Revolution), as happens in the short story "Avarmas."
The experimental short story corresponds to the triumph of form _ its greatest successes, as someone has already said, were formal, and its apex, in Goiás, was in the 1970s. But a good short story writer does not stop at formal experimentation alone. We can trace an evolutionary line that begins with the apologues and stories in the style of Trancoso, always with a moral lesson to be drawn at the end, passing through the idea short story with Voltaire, the snapshot with Chekhov, until it flows, later, into the experimental. However, the phase of intense experimentation has already passed among us. In the United States, for example, where fiction writers began the experimental phase before us, these short stories began to disappear from 1930 onwards, with the tough writers, who are interested in action itself, "the active manifestation of man himself."
What cannot be ignored is that Miguel Jorge's book illustrates and well represents a moment in the history of Brazilian literature. And if this type of short story does not please many of our readers, this is not an isolated case. The critic and fiction writer Julio Cortázar, one of the best representatives of the fantastic short story, was harsh with those who demanded literary facilities in a study titled "Alguns aspectos do conto" (Some Aspects of the Short Story), when he states: "Contrary to the narrow criterion of many who confuse literature with pedagogy, literature with teaching, literature with ideological indoctrination, a revolutionary writer has every right to address a reader much more complex, much more demanding in spiritual matters than improvised writers and critics imagine, convinced that their personal world is the only world that exists, that the concerns of the moment are the only valid concerns." And he further warns: "Beware of the easy demagoguery of demanding a literature accessible to everyone. Many of those who support it have no other reason to do so than their evident inability to understand a literature of greater scope." And recalling Mayakovsky, who recommended school to the people when the party asked him for more popular art, the critic-writer concludes, in another memorable passage: "You do the people no favor if you offer them a literature that they can assimilate effortlessly, passively, like going to the cinema to watch cowboy movies. What needs to be done is to educate them, and this is, in a first stage, a pedagogical task, not a literary one."
Miguel Jorge's task is literary. And he has fulfilled it very well, representing his historical-literary moment and giving our fiction, alongside José Veiga and other contemporaries, the universal reach that was missing from Goiana literature.
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