Mimesis and Justice: The Realism of Vidas Sêcas

Abstract

The novel and film Vidas Sêcas (1938, 1963) are counted internationally as classics of Brazilian realism. In their different media and in their different artistic movements – the modernist regionalism of the one, the Cinema Novo of the other – the novelist Graciliano Ramos and the film-maker Nelson Pereira dos Santos have produced works that are readily categorised as realist. Does the realism common to them depend upon a suppression of the imaginative character inherent in them as works of art? Does their realism therefore figure in the control of the imaginary that the contemporary Brazilian literary critic Luiz Costa Lima proposes as a characteristic of the modern period? This article questions the definition of realism as the self-effacing documenting of an independently existing reality, and contends that the reception of realism has often neglected the latter's construction of truths and its practice of showing a world open to the imaginative interventions of justice.

Notes

¹‘Only because truth and untruth are, in essence, not irrelevant to one another, but rather belong together, is it possible for a true proposition to enter into pointed opposition to the corresponding untrue proposition’ (Heidegger 1998: 146).

²Graciliano Ramos has been an object of Costa Lima's critical attention since his first book, Por que literatura (1966). In a recent interview on this work, Costa Lima expresses regret for his heavy-handed, youthful treatment of Ramos's São Bernardo (1934): ‘The analysis of São Bernardo, deplorably, took an unpromising route inasmuch as [the character] Paulo Honório was taken as an incarnation of what Marxist thought calls “alienation”. Even if there were some truth in this, if Graciliano's novel restricted itself to doing this, it would be only the illustration of a previously established concept’ (Lucia Helena 2010: 53; my translation). It is therefore not against Costa Lima but rather with him that we ask in the following pages if the reality of Ramos's realism is similarly not previously established.

³More literally: ‘And the sertão would continue to send people there. The sertão would send men to the city, men who are rough and strong, like Fabiano, Sinha Vitória and the two boys.’

⁴In an interview with Italo Moriconi, Costa Lima makes the same point: ‘The sertão and the destitution of the retirantes [migrants from the drought-stricken areas of northeastern Brazil] are shown in Vidas Secas by Graciliano Ramos by means of the fittingly deprived language, without any right to qualifying adjectives or expressions of tenderness’ (Moriconi 2010: 67; my translation).