Cordel by Numbers: Basics of Brazilian Chapbooks

For more than a century those chapbooks have been widely read by the people of Brazil's Northeast, surely one of the poorer parts of the country. Because of its poverty, the Northeast remains an archaic society, in more than one sense; and the whole system of writing/publishing/selling of the cordel is a vestigial counterpart of European popular literature: the British "chapbooks," the French littérature de colportage, the Spanish pliegos sueltos, and the Portuguese literatura de cego.

The name cordel (string) arises from the fact that sometimes these small booklets (called folhetos) are displayed, in small-town markets, hanging on horizontal strings - the way some newsstands still do with magazines. The size of the folhetos is around 16x10 centimeters; they have, typically, 8, 16 or 32 pages.

They are always written in verse, and they employ basically the sextilha (six lines, with XAXAXA rhymes, with X standing for blank verses) and the décima (ten lines, with several rhyme-patterns, the most common being ABBAACCDDC). Both types of stanza are of Iberian origin, and the sextilha is, by far, the most frequent. Each page of a folheto contains either five sextilhas, or three décimas. As to the verses, the most common are those with seven or ten syllables.

The cordel is clearly an oral type of literature, the folhetos being only a means of recording and transmitting the text. The seller or folheteiro is supposed to sing aloud the verses to his customers: often the same individual writes, prints, sings and sells the folheto.

The cordel is cultivated among poor and illiterate people, most of them living in farms or small villages; thus, the traditional use is that somebody buys a folheto and, back home, reads it aloud while the others listen.

There are folhetos about almost anything. They can be journalistic, narrating and making commentaries about current facts. They can tell the life of a saint or the adventures of the cangaceiros (outlaw gunslingers in rural areas); stories about cowboys and cattle; stories about hard life in the big cities (unemployment, inflation, etc.). They can be serious or satirical, moralistic or pornographic. They sometimes retell traditional tales like "Sleeping Beauty" or "Romeo and Juliet"; and there is also a great deal of fantasy tales.

If you are interested in more information, a very good introduction in English is Candace Slater's "Stories on a String - The Brazilian Literatura de Cordel."

For French-language readers, two books are outstanding: "La Littérature de Cordel au Brésil -- Mémoire des voix, grenier d'histoires," by Idelette Muzart Fonseca dos Santos (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997, ISBN 2-7384-5827-0) and "La Littérature de Colportage au Nord-Est du Brésil -- de l'histoire écrite au récit oral," by Julie Cavignac (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997, ISBN 2-271-05379-X).

Fantasy folhetos

The fantasy in the cordel is very close to the universe of traditional European folktales. There appear, again and again, the youngest of three sons; the quest; the three magical objects or musical instruments; the talking animals; the breaking of a charm; the final marriage with a princess. The preferred set is a medieval one, with castles, kings and queens, magicians, dragons and monsters. On the other side, this setting is often full of typically Brazilian elements (clothes, food, plants, animals, toponyms - aside from the way the characters talk), and this gives the stories a very peculiar flavor.

Like any other folk literature, the cordel endlessly retells a cluster of basic plots and employs recurrent motifs; we might see it as a kind of "quantitative literature" whose importance can only be properly evaluated if we consider the bulk of its output - not only isolated titles. Brazil is still a country in which a good-selling mainstream novel is one that sells 5,000 to 10,000 copies (in a country of 160 million people).

In the domain of cordel, however, a journalistic folheto like "The death of Presidente Getúlio Vargas" (1954) reportedly sold over a million copies in less than a year; on the other hand, some "classical" folhetos have been continuously in print for over 80 years. It is certainly impossible to know the real figures of such a widespread and underground business, but those figures, if compared with those of "real literature," would be smashing.

Unfortunately, most of the studies published so far about cordel are mainly focused in its literary and sociological aspects, and a history of its publishing/selling network remains largely to be written.

Being such a "quantitative" literature, the cordel is, by all means, subject to Sturgeon's Law. A great deal of the folhetos is the mere retelling of some well-known story, with minor changes (proper names, etc.); the concept of "individual" authorship is often ignored.

As to the fantasy-related themes, the wide range of the cordel may become clear through the reading of some typical titles of folhetos (I tried to maintain the folhetos' peculiar style of phrasing):

There have been a number of attempts to classify the cordel in thematic cycles. Some of those acknowledged cycles involve fantastic elements. There is, for example, The Bull Cycle, stories of a wild and untamed bull who fights and eludes the bravest cowboys. This thematic bull appears under a large variety of names and disguises, and sometimes its deeds and clearly of a fantastic nature.

Another cycle is mixed with what is generally called the "journalistic", or the "news" cycles (more or less what in French is called divers those are folhetos about crimes, accidents, and other extraordinary events that make the headlines. Mostly, they are the age-old retelling of crimes, or the sensationalist chapbooks of the last centuries. But there are also fantastic events told in the folhetos: stories about supernatural entities (ghosts, apparitions in general), and stories about bizarre creatures that are born (six-legged calves, two-headed goats, and so on).

The is a small but visible category of folhetos about space travel. They can be roughly divided in two categories: folhetos about actual space travel (e.g., about the Skylab or about Project Apollo) and folhetos about UFOs and aliens.

One of the most interesting categories of fantastic folhetos are the folhetos about "Marcos" ("Marks") - that is, about inexpugnable fortresses that a poet conceives in the most baroque terms. The name "Marco" means "landmark, boundary mark, milestone"; but in this case it is generally used with the meaning of "fortress," or "something inexpugnable and unassailable, a symbol of his poetical superiority over his peers." (Atila Almeida)

The Marks may be seen as part of Utopian literature, in the sense that they share some qualities with conventional utopian texts. They are ideal constructs, self-consciously artificial. They do not purport to be "realistic" or even "plausible": in fact, their strength lies in their effective use of exaggeration, hyperbole and fantasy.

Then, they purport to be a "model," an embodiment of desirable or ideal qualities (in the case of the "Marks", military or strategic ones). And, like most Utopian texts, they consist primarily of description, with little space given to action (a Mark folheto is never a story, it is a catalogue of features).

The Marks frequently include aspects of classical, Eden-like Utopias. Often a Mark consists of a ring of fortifications (high walls, deadly traps, warriors, weapons, beasts, etc.) keeping in its center a peaceful site (a garden, a castle, a wood) full of fruit trees, birds, etc., as a dwelling place where people can live happily.

Inspired in that tradition, and in all the speculations that arose from the Cydonia photos from the planet Mars, I wrote with Lenine the song O Marco Marciano.

Links

Jornal de Poesia - Banco do Cordel

Read columns by Braulio Tavares on BrazilMax