A Escrituracao da Escrita: Teoria e pratica do texto literario.
Teixeira, Vera R.
A Escrituracao da Escrita: Teoria e pratica do texto literario (The
Accounting of the Written Word: Theory and Practice of the Literary
Text) is Gilberto Mendonca Teles's ninth book of essays, his third
on literary theory, and many of the works are already in their third and
even twelfth edition. One of the first, O Conto Brasileiro em Goias (The
Brazilian Short Story in Goias), was reviewed in the pages of Books
Abroad (Summer 1970). Since that time, readers of Portuguese, French,
and Spanish have also discovered A Raiz da fala (The Root of Speech;
1972), Saciologia goiana (Socio/Leprechaunology from Goias; 1982), and
Cone de sombras (Shadow Cone; 1995) in numerous Brazilian and Portuguese
editions of the author's poetry as well as in French and Spanish
translations. A number of Mendonca Teles's poems are currently
being translated into English for "Under the Southern Cross:
Contemporary Brazilian Writing and Graphic Art," a book issue of
TriQuarterly: An International Journal of Writing Art and Cultural
Inquiry to be published by Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois. In short, with A. Bosi and Haroldo de Campos, whom he mentions
in his study, Mendonca Teles is one of the most accomplished men of
letters in Brazil today, a scholar, poet, and humanist also known for
his superb editions of the work of some of his older contemporaries:
Tristao de Athayde, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, Carlos Drummond de
Andrade, and many others (see also Jose Alcides Pinto, "Literatura
brasileira," "Livros" in O Sabado, Fortaleza, Ceara, 7
September 1996). Just recently, Mendonca Teles received an honorary,
doctorate from the Universidade Federal do Ceara, and on two occasions
he has been proposed as a candidate for the Brazilian Academy of
Letters.
In our age of professional self-analysis it is not surprising that
Mendonca Teles explains his reflexive title in the introduction to his
book: "As we read in a dictionary of the Portuguese language,
escrituracao is the action of systematically registering the deeds of a
financial transaction or an estate as well as the act of drawing up a
document, and also the collection of commercial books, such as diaries,
daybooks, and cashbox accounts. Hence the meaning of manuscrever, the
art of handwriting these books well, the ability to write clearly and
correctly italics and notarial and chancellory type styles in longhand
that computers are making a thing of the past. For this reason
escrituracao (account/drawing up a deed) also points to a escrita
(accounting) as well as to escritura (registering a title or a claim),
terms which have different meanings in Portuguese but, through the
common stem they share, may be taken as synonyms." The main parts
of A Escrituracao da Escrita - "O Lugar da Critica e da
Historia" (The Role of Criticism and History), "A Contemplacao
do Poetico" (The Contemplation of the Poetic Process), "As
Margens da Ficcao" (On the Edge of Fiction) - reflect all the
concerns I have mentioned: language, literature, theory, poetics, and
criticism. The examination, explication, and reception of a significant
part of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian and Latin
American canonical texts also rank high: Cruz e Sousa, Machado de Assis,
Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima, Mario and Oswald de Andrade, Drummond,
Abgar Renault, Rachel de Queiroz, Graciliano Ramos, and Cassiano
Ricardo.
As such, it is appropriate that the essays range from "Some
Problems of Literary Theory" (terminology, language, generic
concerns, literary figures, et cetera) to the eponymous essay "A
Escrituracao da Escrita: Uma leitura dos romances de Graciliano
Ramos" (The Accounting of the Written Word: A Reading of the Novels
of Graciliano Ramos). "Criticism and History," "The
Process of Modern Brazilian Poetry," and "Surrealism in
Brazilian Literature," three essays from the first part, also place
Brazilian literature in the mainstream of critical theory as well as in
the wider context of the European and Latin American avant-gardes at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, they define the nature
and range of modernismo brasileiro, an inventory of the linguistic,
literary, and theoretical contributions of Brazilian modernism, and
conclude with an analysis of the various experimental movements of the
fifties such as concrete poetry and Brazilian poetry in the decade of
the nineties. "Criticism and History" and "The Process of
Modern Brazilian Poetry" first appeared in Tubingen (1993) and
Paris (1979) and were revised in their present format for a lecture at
the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Chicago (March
1990), when Mendonca Teles served there as Tinker Professor.
In short, A Escrituracao da Escrita is an ambitious, significant,
carefully crafted work by an author who is always attentive to the
philosophical, philological, and esthetic implications of technical,
legal, or archaic verbal constructs. Now that the Princeton University
Press has published Antonio Candido's On Literature and Society,
translated by Howard S. Becker. a translation of Escrituracao da Escrita
should not be far behind. Both of these books are bound to help open the
eyes and minds of North American and English-speaking readers to the
language, literary tradition, and point of view of over 180 million
speakers of Portuguese strategically located on three continents:
Europe, Africa, and America. They also correspond to the point of view
of a lesser-known Latin American reality, one of whose writers might
well merit the next Nobel Prize in Literature.
Vera R. Teixeira Northwestern University
