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.
