Fiction and metafiction in Paulo Scott's Habitante irreal

ABSTRACT

Going against the grain of the pervading trend toward neo-naturalism in contemporary Brazilian literature, and forsaking realism for fabulation, Paulo Scott's Habitante irreal revisits and updates, through an astute combination of fictional and metafictional elements, the foundational narrative of the encounter between white and indigenous peoples, while, at the same time, chronicling the growing disenchantment of the generation that came of age with redemocratization. Skirting a definitive resolution, the novel presents alternative narratives of hopeful reconciliation and helpless disillusionment. The ambiguous ending produces an alienating effect, designed to actively engage the reader in the challenges and choices currently confronting Brazilian society as it struggles with its own identity and uncertain political future. Thus the novel self-consciously underscores that literature is not just representation, but also has a critical and possibly transformative function.

KEYWORDS:

• Fabulation
• foundational narrative
• metafiction
• national identity
• transformative

Notes

1. Explaining his reason for bringing back the forgotten term “fabulation” in the context of new trends in contemporary fiction, Scholes states: “It is of course a gimmick, an attention-getter. But I think it is also an honest attempt to find a word for something that needs one; to find a word, moreover, that needs only a little tinkering to adapt it to its new function” (Fabulators 6).

2. See Gass's now classic essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”

3. This definition is reproduced verbatim from the first book (Fabulators 11).

4. See my article “Distopia e utopia nas letras brasileiras da pós-modernidade,” especially pages 267–72. Consider, as well, Flora Süssekind's questioning of the predominant naturalist tradition in Brazilian fiction in Tal Brasil, qual romance?

5. I would like to clarify that by no means do I subscribe to Frederic Jameson's peremptory definition of all Third World literature as allegory: “The story of the private individual is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (69). Unlike Benjamin's definition of allegory, Jameson's somewhat patronizing generalization contributes little to our understanding of how literature is produced, disseminated, and consumed in the global South.

6. In this respect I entirely concur with the following comment by critic Naomi Stead:

Benjamin's conception of the ruin is as a means of laying bare a truth buried beneath layers of false romantic aesthetics. It provides the basis for further examination of the interrelations between aesthetics and politics, allegory and symbol, monument and ruin, criticism and myth. This is the lasting value and relevance of Benjamin's idea of ruin and ruination. (64)

7. For Shklovsky and his Russian Formalist colleagues, defamiliarization is what makes artistic objects unique: “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important” (“Art as Technique” 12). The distinction between story and plot will resurface among French Structuralists in their opposition between récit and discours. See, for example, Tzvetan Todorov's “Les catégories du récit littéraire.”

8. While discussing parody in classical literature, Bakhtin states that “parody here was not, of course, a naked rejection of the parodied object” (127). Similarly, in Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance, Thomas M. Greene proposes that “every creative imitation mingles filial rejection with respect, just as every parody pays its own oblique homage” (46), and in A Theory of Parody Linda Hutcheon says: “I see parody as a method of ascribing continuity while permitting critical distance” (20). Hutcheon convincingly establishes the close ties between modern parody and metafiction.

9. Similarly, much of the biography of Paulo Scott, who hails from Porto Alegre, was a left-wing militant, and studied law, has found its way into this novel. To some extent, the character Paulo—or characters, as I point out below—functions as a kind of alter ego of Scott.

10. Linking individual and national identity, Paulo Scott, in a 2012 interview for Gazeta do Povo, indicated that “a temática do livro gira em torno da noção de identidade, do controle dessa identidade…. Penso que nós, brasileiros, temos grande dificuldade em assumir a própria identidade” (“Menos iludido”).

11. In a 2011 interview with Paulo Werneck for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, the late theater critic and scholar Barbara Heliodora (1923–2015) lamented the precarious state of Brazilian experimental theater: “Às vezes, as pessoas se iludem um pouco, e o que fazem não chega a ser uma experiência válida. Falta um domínio do teatro tradicional. As pessoas experimentam sem conhecer o que veio antes, então fica um pouco falso, apenas ilusoriamente experimental.” She also insisted on the difference between writing for television and writing for the theater: “São veículos completamente diferentes. A dramaturgia de telenovela é uma coisa, escrever para o teatro é outra coisa, e cinema é outra coisa. São caminhos diferentes” (“Lady Heliodora”).

12. The official model for the construction of the Brazilian national symbolic system was defined by the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute, under Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius's inspiration. According to von Martius, in Como escrever a história do Brasil (1845), the Brazilian people had been predestined by Divine Providence to be the offspring of the unique synthesis and harmonious integration of three races: the European White, the African Black, and the native American Indian.

13. For an extensive discussion of Brazilian racial ideology, see Thomas E. Skidmore's Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, which remains the most comprehensive study of the interconnections between race and national identity in Brazil.

14. For a more detailed treatment of these questions, please see my article “Brazilian Literature and Citizenship: From Euclides da Cunha to Marcos Dias,” particularly pages 12–13.

15. I am borrowing this terminology from Doris Sommer's influential and much quoted Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, which includes a chapter on Alencar.

16. See, for example, the critical texts by Ria Lemaire, Silviano Santiago, Regina Zilberman, and and my own “Alencar's Flawed Blueprints.”