São Paulo - This year, the annual prize of the Paulista Association of Art Critics (APCA) broke new ground by highlighting an increasingly important trend in literature which is breaking down the barrier between genres which separated prose from poetry: one of the prizewinners this year cultivates the mixture of the two genres, which was classified as "poetic prose.” That is, neither simply prose, nor simply poetry, nor even poetry in prose, which is already recognized, but rather the mixture of characteristics from the two, in such a way that the final amalgam is recognized as being just fine, whether as prose, or as poetry. The winner of the innovative prize is the poet and prose writer, Carlos Nejar, a gaúcho who lives on the coast of the state of Espírito Santo, author of O Poço dos Milagres (The Well of Miracles).
Not that writers who stand out in both genres are unheard of. The epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to the pioneer Homer in ancient Greece, were read and adapted later as if they were novels or adventure stories. The carioca Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, regarded as the greatest of Brazilian writers of prose, was also a poet, perhaps not at the level of his prose, but at least among the greats. Among contemporary writers, Lêdo Ivo, from Alagoas, who, in contrast to Machado, is recognized as a poet of genius (his colleague from Pernambuco, João Cabral de Melo Neto, used to see that his was "the greatest of Brazilian lyric poetry"), also has important fiction to his credit. Nejar, like Ivo and Cabral, is also more highly regarded as a poet. In his prize-winning book of fiction, the skill of the poetry serves to capture our attention and change the cadence of the reader's breath: not the sequence of invented facts, nor even the stream of consciousness which has become canonical in this post-James Joyce age (Joyce, the inventor of the "bibelôs de Pandora" which make up contemporary prose in the novel), but the enchantment of the word, its rhythm, its magic.
From the book to the botequim
On the same path, but arriving from the opposite direction, the poet, lyricist, and writer Bráulio Tavares (from Paraíba) has come quite close to the same point. In a course on “literatura de cordel” which he gave for public school teachers as part of the program of the Teatro Brincante of Rosana and Antônio Nóbrega, he defended the autonomy (here one could almost use sovereignty) of narrative as a separate genre, no longer a subgenre of the art of writing. Telling a good story, he repeated, in launching the book which presents his lectures, Contando Historias em Versos (Telling Stories in Verse, published by Paulistana 34 in São Paulo), is not something exclusive to writers of prose, but also characteristics of playwrights, film directors, epic poets, poets of literatura de cordel, graphic artists of comics, and the simple, but priceless artists of the genre: those who tell funny stories in the botequim.
Critics turn up their noses at Paulo Coelho, but he is the best-selling author in the world, retelling stories: his best seller The Alchemist is a retelling of a story found in various cultures, among them the Arabic, in the celebrated Thousand and One Nights. Jorge Amado, of Bahia, and the gaúcho Érico Veríssimo, whose centenary has just been celebrated, were never unanimous favorites of the critics, but readers loved the style with which they put their stories onto the printed page.
Jokes and teacakes
In contrast, the stories told by Clarice Lispector (Brazilian, born in Ukraine), as in the case of The Passion According to GH, are minimal, almost non-existent, though her prose is magnificent. Marcel Proust built a monumental work In Search of Lost Time, not out of facts, anecdotes, or events, but from the memories recalled and recreated when he sensed the aroma of madeleines baking in the oven.
If this has been taking place on the prose side, canonical patterns have been challenged in poetry as well. René Carr (France) and Fernando Pessoa (Portugal) brought to a pinnacle the undefined mold of poems in prose. One of the greatest poets of the last century, Jorge Luís Borges (Buenos Aires), issued a challenge to prose writers more stimulating than the breaking down of linguistic barriers carried out by James Joyce: the end of the boundary between the truth of erudition and the lies of fantasy. Here, perhaps, lies the fiction of the future. And the poetic prose of Carlos Nejar, recently lauded by the APCA, is the path which poets with narrative talent can travel, as is the case for Alberto da Cunha Melo (Pernambuco), in Yacala, or prose writers with a musical ear, such as the carioca Adriana Falcão, with Luna Clara e Apolo 11, Deonísio da Silva (Santa Catarina), in Avante, Soldados, para Trás! and Moacir Japiassu (Paraíba), in Quando Alegre Partiste.
Didn't Gabriel García Márquez and his Latin American magic realism gang teach us that logic and verisimilitude should be replaced by the enchantment of fable? Well then! Why stimulate a spat between prose and poetry if consecrated writers like Julio Cortázar have already registered the breakdown of genres; if Lautréamont and Michaux revealed a new world through words alone; and if these genres can co-exist without problems in the same text, as The Well of Miracles shows? "We no longer live in a particular genre, but in language," says the author. And who can deny it?
Translated from the original Portuguese by Tom Moore. Tom is a classical musician and translator who lives in Rio de Janeiro. His most recent CD of trio sonatas by Boismortier is available from A Casa Estúdio.
