the ethics of the object in modern brazilian literature

THE ETHICS OF THE OBJECT IN MODERN BRAZILIAN LITERATURE

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF IBERIAN &

LATIN AMERICAN CULTURES

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Ami Schiess August 2020

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/rg851tg2486

© 2020 by Ami Schiess. All Rights Reserved.

Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

ii

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Vincent Barletta, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Hector Hoyos

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Marilia Librandi

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Stacey F. Bent, Vice Provost for Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.

iii

Schiess iv

Abstract

The Ethics of the Object in Modern Brazilian Literature examines the status and function

of objects in Brazilian literary works spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Each work registers and contends with an uncanny encounter with the object—be it a

thing proper, an artistic construction or a disciplinary formulation—through a turn to the

aesthetic. “The ethics of the object” describes the process by which these objects-as-

agents interrupt and impact the creative process by forcing their observers to negotiate

with them as something other than passive recipients of the descriptive gaze. By reading

works across various genres—poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose and essays—I show that

the attempt to pack a disconcerting experience with agential objects back into language

results in the emergence, and even mobilization, of literary techniques that confuse and

muddle subject and objects, and place the ontological status of the writing subject in

doubt. In focusing primarily on the trouble that many different kinds of encounters with

alterity wreak upon narration, and by extension on the reader, this dissertation offers a

new mode for analyzing the ways in which Brazilian authors contend with difference.

Schiess v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was a feat that took many hands to produce. I would like to

thank, first and foremost, my advisors and professors in the Department of Iberian

Languages and Cultures for their unwavering support and encouragement of my work as

I navigated the many challenges of undertaking a Ph.D. over a decade after completing

my Master of Arts Degree. Thanks to Vincent Barletta for caring deeply about every

aspect of my writing, from conceptual questions of alternative ontologies to the minutia

of sentence structure, and for gently nudging me back “in my lane” when the breadth of

my intellectual interests threatened to lead me off-track; to Héctor Hoyos for his astute

and surgical eye that helped me to hone in on the larger implications of my research

while “cutting the fat” from my writing; and to Marília Librandi for introducing me to

contemporary research on Amerindian thinking and for her dedication to my project

throughout. Thanks also to Lisa Surwillo and Ximena Briceño, who were both wonderful

mentors over the course of my studies in ILAC, and to Cintia Santana for the depth of her

knowledge in Translation Studies and for her encouragement of my own translating

endeavors.

I would not have walked through the doors of Pigott Hall as a doctoral student

had it not been for the many mentors I encountered in earlier times. My indebtedness to

Joan Brown at the University of Delaware goes back many, many years. Without her

particular guidance, I would never have imagined that a person could make a career out

of reading, and would not have had the courage to turn away from the field of

international politics to that of literature. Thank you to my co-advisors in the Graduate

Program at the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, Daphne Patai and Nina Scott, for

Schiess vi

taking a chance on an International Relations major; and to Márgara Russotto for

encouraging me to submit my first article for publication at age twenty-one. Finally, I

extend my gratitude to the professors at the University of California-Berkeley who

welcomed me into their doctoral classes as an extension student—Francine Masiello and

Candace Slater. Without those experiences I would never have imagined that the path of

academic literary study was still a possible avenue. The same is true for the friends and

colleagues that I met there: Alex Brostoff, Ashley Brock and Yael Segalovitz. Without

Yael’s warm encouragement at the After Clarice conference in Oxford, UK in 2016, my

writing on Clarice Lispector would not have been a part of this study.

The writing of a dissertation is an arduous and lonely task. I will always

appreciate my Stanford writing partners, Monica VanBladel and Callie Ward, who mixed

blinding intellect with warm support, and for whom no draft was ever too messy to share.

The same is true for my writing support partners through the Unstuck Program, Meredith

VonNatta and Margaret Bostrom (without whose editing suggestions I would not have

made it through the forest of Chapter 1). The Unstuck Program itself was also invaluable,

surpassed in payoff only by the Writing in the Pandemic Series. Both of these, coached

by the wonderfully irreverent Kel Weinhold, were a lifeline in practical and personal

strategies for managing academic writing.

Last, I can only have completed this degree with the loving support of the people

in my personal network. I am grateful for the serendipity that brought Liliam Perez Ávila

to our household for the first year of my studies and for her intermittent support of our

family, always there when we most needed it, in the years since. Thank you to all of the

friends and fellow mothers who watched my children while I met deadlines and sat for

Schiess vii

exams. Thank you to those beautiful children, Jack and Tucker, who grew from

preschoolers to middle-schoolers over the course of this endeavor. And thank you to my

ever-supportive spouse and partner, Andy Peay, who never once questioned my decision

to undertake this degree and who was at my side every step of the way.

Schiess viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1

The Orders of Things .............................................................................................. 6

The Object as Pivot ................................................................................................. 7

Readers on the Storm ............................................................................................ 10

Chapter 1: Nature in the Active Voice: Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato ................................ 28

Stories of Thwarted Progress ................................................................................ 36

Animacy and Stagnancy: Ingredients of an Interpretative Suspension ................ 48

Nature’s Interruption: Voice, Noise and the Fading Subject ............................... 60

The Deixis of the Real ........................................................................................... 67

Chapter 2: Reflections in the Porta-espelho: Clarice Lispector’s Literary Theory of the

Object .................................................................................................................... 74

The Hidden in Things and the Hidden in Humans ................................................ 85

From Objects to Ethics? ....................................................................................... 94

The Porta-espelho .................................................................................................. 96

Chapter 3: Cannibals in Translation (Studies) ................................................................ 111

Cannibal Translation .......................................................................................... 114

Cannibal Relations in Translation (Studies) ....................................................... 126

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 147

Can the Object Speak? ........................................................................................ 147

Notes ............................................................................................................................... 154

References ....................................................................................................................... 159

Schiess ix

Appendix 1: Original Translation of “matriuska” ............................................. 159

Appendix 2: Original Translation of “googlemap” ........................................... 160

Appendix 3: Original Translation of Cobra Norato ............................................ 162

Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 189

Schiess 1

INTRODUCTION

What is the status of the object in modern Brazilian literature? What are its limits

and possibilities? How does the object manifest itself in works written between the 1922

Semana de Arte Moderna and the present day? How does it differ from the writing

subject and what power does it exert over this subject? These seemingly naïve questions

cut to the core of a literary tradition filled with a wide range of objectified “others”—

from material objects and tools to nature to the millions of marginalized and overtly

racialized people that make up the overwhelming majority of Brazil’s population. As

Roland Greene (Unrequited Conquests) has argued in his account of the first decades of

Portuguese colonization, Brazil is a place where objects commonly overshadow their

subjects.

To get a more concrete sense of what Brazil’s complex relation to objects might

look like in a literary text, it is worth turning to Sidney Rocha’s “matriuska,” a micro-

narrative published in 2009 as part of a collection by the same name. Focused on female

characters from Brazil’s Northeast and published just at the threshold of widespread

smartphone technology and increased internet access, the stories in matriuska explore

themes of interpersonal and interregional connectivity—or the lack of these—against a

backdrop of social inequality.

The short story “matriuska” consists of only 516 words, and it reads as an

extended prose poem in a single paragraph. The story begins abruptly, “foi naquela vez

que nos vimos que me mostrou todas suas importâncias” ‘it was that time we saw each

other, that she showed me all of her personal importances,’ and this small bit of context is

Schiess 2

all we learn over the course of the narrative about the unnamed characters (23). Instead of

context or circumstance, the narrative gives the reader an ebb and flow of pocketed

clauses, detailing a list of objects taken by the woman from a purse and displayed to the

narrator. Like its title, the narrative of “matriuska” contains no capital letters and few

periods; instead, its short phrases are connected by a series of commas. These commas

both link and separate, creating a daisy chain of items and phrases as the character

extracts and names each one. The story’s unconventional punctuation thus serves to

mimic a continuous flow of both objects and spoken words:

Uma ametistazinha adormecendo como um olho num pedaço de veludo

cor de abacate, sem serventia que se saiba, uma cartela de lexotan que

confessou nunca usar, que coisa sem uso dá mesmo charme, uma fivela

com forma de peixe, mas ela não gosta de peixe [...] Duas carteiras de

estudante sem validade, daquele bolso de tempo em que viveu com um

cara (23)

[a tiny amethyst sleeping like an eye in a piece of avocado velvet, role

unknown, a pack of lexotan, never used, but unused things still give off

charm, a fish-shaped buckle, but she doesn’t like fish […] two student i.d.

cards, invalid, from that pocket of time when she had lived with a guy]

What is the status and function of the objects in this stuttering string of language? The

question is initially unclear. The piece builds tension toward a final reveal: “o tesouro, o

seu tesouro, […] algo que realmente valesse a pena a existência da bolsa” ‘the treasure,

her treasure, […] something that would truly validate the existence of that bag’ (24). As

this moment approaches, it becomes clear that the process of self-revelation is both

Schiess 3

arduous and risky. As the paragraph proceeds, the sentences begin to trail off, changing

direction rapidly or simply fading away:

,,, e foi somente depois disso que ela me apresentou ao que sem dúvida

nenhuma e sem qualquer risco de erro sairia mais caro mostrar, o que

somente algumas pessoas conhecem, mas antes havia um recorte de jornal,

tinha que conseguir aquele emprego, três sementes de pau-brasil, não sabia

onde fora parar o relógio com bracelete quase de ouro, Deveria estar aqui

perto da. Uma piranha com dois dentes a menos, sim, sim, estava

procurando algo que realmente pudesse valer a pena a existência da bolsa,

e lá estava, finalmente, como numa matrioska ou nas tantas camada du’a

cebola o que podia lhe valer mais que uma vida, que é o que vale uma

lembrança para sempre (24)

[,,, and it was only then that she introduced the thing that without a doubt,

with a zero-percent risk of error would cost the most to show, what only a

few people know, but first there was the newspaper clipping, she had to

get that job, three brazilwood seeds, she didn’t know where that

wristwatch with an almost-gold band had gone, It should be here next to

the. a piranha missing two teeth, yes, yes, she was looking for something

that would truly validate the existence of that bag, and there it was finally,

as if in a Russian doll or the layers of an onion there could be something

worth more to her than her life, which is what a souvenir is always worth]

As the passage progresses, cristiane’s rising anxiety passes to the reader by way of

stutters and starts. She is looking for something specific, a specific thing that she cannot

Schiess 4

quite grasp; as dialogue fails her, the objects in her purse step in to translate her

experience.

In Rocha’s story, the litany of objects stands in for an expressive breakdown: the

character’s inability to articulate an ambivalent anxiety about the “value of a life,” her

own life. As the bag becomes progressively empty, these items encircle a central void:

her desire to be seen by the story’s narrator and to be validated by his reception of her

narrative. The narrator’s telling of the story—or better, his (literary) retelling of her

(material) telling of her life—reflects his dawning realization of her need, and of his

inability to fill it. The narrative itself becomes his attempt to compensate her for a

relation they will never have. Objects meet the (writing, narrating) subject and the latter

finds only its limitations, its never-ending responsibility to the former.

Beyond the matter of subjective and symbolic limits, Rocha’s “matriuska”

underscores key elements of what I consider to be an “ethics of the object” in modern

Brazilian literature. The textual muddling of subjects and objects I describe over the

course of the present dissertation is by no means a simple matter, but it can be boiled

down to three central claims. In the first place, these texts all contain objects that take on

some form of agency. Second, these counterintuitive object-agents provoke discomfort in

the writing subject, a discomfort that inevitably points (as smoke points to fire) to

something outside the text itself. Finally, the discomfort that the object-agent causes the

narrating subject gives form (intentionally or unintentionally) to the text and passes this

sense of ontological estrangement on to the reader. As I see it, the ambivalent literary and

ontological terrain of modern Brazilian literature has tended to mix personified objects

and objectified people. Like the objects in cristiane’s purse and cristiane herself, it is

Schiess 5

nearly impossible to determine the point of separation between self-disclosure and a bare

list of items: “a tiny amethyst sleeping like an eye in a piece of avocado velvet, role

unknown, a pack of lexotan, never used, [etc.]” This charged locus of encounter and

doubt likewise serves as the ground for an intra-textual ethics that does not rely on

similarity, assimilation, or even understanding; here what is different does not have to be

discarded for the relation to proceed.

The phrase “ethics of the object” also encompasses the project’s meta-aesthetic

function, which records the influence of shifted subject-object relations on the formal

features of the text. That is, I argue that these works produce their effect (at once

performative and referential) primarily through a culturally situated, experimental poetics

rooted in ontological confusion and radical alterity. Finally, this meta-aesthetic function

shades into what I perceive as the pedagogical functions of the poetics I describe: these

formal attributes, which I associate with aesthetic experiences of the sublime and the

uncanny, create a mirror-experience that recreates in the reader precisely the sensations

of disquiet, disorientation and curiosity experienced by the narrating subject. By way of

this particular approach, any claims I make for the “ethical import” of literary objects for

the reader have to do with affects, like attraction, frustration, and wondering, that arise

from encountering and decoding the unusual objects and unconventional formal features

of these texts. The following sections of my introduction dig deeper into Rocha’s

micronarrative in order explore each component of “the ethics of the object” in greater

detail.

Schiess 6

The Orders of Things

Throughout the texts I analyze in the present dissertation, different categories of

“object” emerge as textual agents. Sometimes the “object” in question denotes physical

objects, sometimes artistic ones; sometimes the object is a text to be translated, and

sometimes it is a disciplinary “object” (such as the “native informants” that form the

object of early ethnographic work) that asserts its subjectivity. This “agency” takes many

forms across the texts I examine, and some of these emerge in Rocha’s “matriuska.”

Within that story, material objects translate for a character having a hard time naming her

experiences and desires. She wishes to defend her life and her self-worth after having

been discarded by the narrator. In this way, her objects actively mediate a fraught

interpersonal exchange.

We might also say that the objects in Rocha’s story communicate more about

relations than either cristiane or the narrator has in mind. Some of them readily call up

pre-established categories of agentive things—it is easy to recognize, for instance, the

likeness with a fetish (the “tribal” variety, not the commodity kind) of a “sachê de

sândalo que inclusive afasta coisas do ciúme” ‘a sandalwood sachet that also protects

things from envy,’ or even “uma amestitazinha adormecendo como um olho” ‘a tiny

amethyst sleeping like an eye’ (23). One also finds a collection of the detritus of capitalist

relations such as tourism (“a [dried] piranha missing two teeth”), or imported values

(“she doesn’t like fish, but she would like to see what sushi tastes like, but where do they

sell that?”) that highlight the character’s “thrownness” into global structures of exotic

tourism and taste brokering. These objects throw the commodity fetish into disarray by

Schiess 7

way of an imperfection (missing two teeth) or an unattainability (where do they sell that?)

that pokes a hole in the aura of exchange value.

The unused anxiety medication, (a pack of lexotan, never used, but unused things

still give off charm) for its part melds both variants of the fetish, in that it embodies the

webs of pharmaceutical production and affect regulation that characterize late capitalism,

while at the same time it would seem that cristiane carries it (if we understand the phrase

“dá charme” in light of the etymological meaning of “charming,” and also if we believe

her assertion that she does not take the pills,) more as a talisman than as a chemical

intervention. Still other textual “objects” that cristiane takes from her purse have no

concrete form (“dois sonhos já desistindo, ir a cuba e comprar com o suor do rosto um

fiat uno que fosse” ‘two dreams giving up the fight: going to cuba and buying, with the

sweat of her brow, a fiat uno that runs’) precisely because they are material aspirations

that will never take form.

The Object-Agent as Pivot

The potpourri of lively objects on display in “matriuska” is an apt metaphor for

the eclectic collection of objects that emerge in the works studied in the present

dissertation. In each case, the agency of the object acts as a pivot point that provokes

questions of curiosity and responsibility toward entities that tend to be viewed (whether

in philosophical inquiry or through force of habit) as outside the field of ethical concerns:

an ethics of the object. That is, the corpus of work I examine in the present dissertation,

which ostensibly deals with different orders of objects, ultimately makes de-objectifying

moves. By questioning the status of their textual objects, these works challenge the

Schiess 8

extratextual objectification of different forms of life. In “matriuska,” as cristiane narrates

by means of objects and then struggles in vain to find an object that would “be worth

more than a life,” the narrator comes finally to see her as an individual to whom he has

some responsibility. He stops her as she moves to show him an unnamed object (“the

treasure, her treasure”), and he seems to understand that this revelation would render her

too bare: “Não o faça, guarde para si, eu disse, e ela olhou-me como para quem a

salvasse” ‘Don’t do that, save it for yourself, I said, and she looked at me as if at

someone who had just saved her’ (25). Rocha’s use of the imperfect subjunctive (“como

para quem a salvasse”) reveals that the narrator holds no illusions over the insufficiency

of his gesture to “save” cristiane, but his own footing has nonetheless been altered: “e o

seu silêncio redesenhou algo em mim, que não sei direito, e todas aquelas coisas foram

lentamente para o sus bolsa e em mim outras coisas se ordenaram e se mediram” ‘and her

silence redrew something inside me, I don’t know exactly what, and all those things went

slowly back into her bag and within me other things were ordered and measured’ (25).

The narrator in Rocha’s story is moved by the objects cristiane puts on display.

Likewise, the different orders of objects described in this dissertation “move” subjects

out of position, knock them off-kilter, or ask them to switch places. In Chapter 1, I

describe how a visitor to the Amazon region wrestled for decades with a poetic creation

that could never convey, to his complete satisfaction, his experience of immersion in the

lively animacy of the rainforest. Raul Bopp was so impacted that even as his diplomatic

career removed him from Brazil, overran his literary pursuits and required him to take a

utilitarian view of the forest as a commodifiable resource, he continued to revisit and

revise his poetic work Cobra Norato. Not incidentally, I argue, Bopp’s modifications of

Schiess 9

the poem’s verb phrases quite often make the grammatical subjects more agentive. These

observations beg the question in regards to subject and object, poet and forest: which

acted, and upon whom?

In Chapter 2, I describe Clarice Lispector’s artistic preparation for the ethical and

representational dilemmas that inhere in writing an Other subjectivity. As if in a

Barthesian process of preparation du roman, Lispector undertakes an extended

examination of artistic representation in her novel Água viva (1973). The questions that

invade Água viva’s narrator as she paints/writes and that shape her visual representations

of caves, doors, mirrors and finally, a wardrobe, are precursors to those that reappear in

her later novel, A hora da estrela (1977). This, the final novel that Lispector publishes

before her death, is the one in which the author finally brings to fruition her previously

latent desire to write a social novel. By way of an artistic wrestling with questions of

objecthood, Água viva serves as the author’s training ground for addressing the ethics of

representing social alterity.

Chapter 3 offers an altered view of processes of cultural and disciplinary

representations of radical (human) alterity. I do this first by summarizing some of the

major stopping-points in the evolution of cannibal tropes. Since the times of First

Encounters, the word-concept cannibal has functioned as a marker of the nearly-

inhuman; the colonial Other whose abhorrent anthropophagic practices make him unlike

enough to warrant his colonial subjugation.

These cannibal tropes tell us a lot about what the West thinks about relationships

with extreme alterity. They also reveal much about how much we desire or fear

communication with such an alien subjectivity, or whether we even believe such a thing

Schiess 10

to be possible. Perhaps this is why cannibalism serves as such an apt metaphor for

processes of translation of all kinds. But, as I explore in this chapter, “cannibals” may

well have their own ideas about that proposition. As ethnography among lowland

Amerindian tribes over the last forty years has shown, the “meaning” of the cannibal rite

within cultural groups presumed to have practiced anthropophagy in the past is founded

upon very different configurations of same and different, self and other, human and

nonhuman, than those that for centuries have shaped European interpretations of the

cannibal act. From this, it follows that such differences between Amerindian and

European conceptual thought will drive very different concepts of translation. This

chapter finally asks what kind of result we might obtain if “the cannibal”—the object of

colonial description, including ethnography—were to become an agent of literary

translation theory.

Readers on the Storm

My third claim has two parts. In the first place, I maintain that an anxiety over the

status of objects emerges as literary form in the texts studied here. Second, I argue that

these textual features produce an analogous effect in the reader. I read all of these works

from the “bottom up;” that is, carefully analyzing at the level of language the sometimes-

subtle, sometimes-blatant shifts in subject-object relations I just summarized. Often, this

language portrays more than “mere” representations of objects as agential: it also

registers textual ripples and quirks that betray a discomfited negotiation on the part of the

narrating subject.

Schiess 11

It is true that my analysis in the present dissertation focuses intently on the intra-

textual dynamic occasioned by the object’s agency; however, I also write from the

assumption that texts are written and read by people. Given this fact, it is reasonable to

conclude that texts both register and provoke feelings and attitudes. Since Ludwig

Wittgenstein and John Austin, literary criticism has largely accepted the view that

literature “does things” to the reader and that these things have extratextual

consequences, positive or negative. If writing can create and reinforce largescale societal

structures and biases (as both Michel Foucault and Angel Rama claim), it follows that

these attitudes gain critical mass in a society because they have become lodged in the

hearts and minds of individuals. My analysis thus aligns with the corpus of literary

criticism that holds out hope, even as the disciplinary “ethical turn” of the early twenty-

first century fades from view, that individual encounters with literary texts can also

produce ameliorative effects and attitudes. Within this camp, my own position inclines

less toward a procedure based on humanistic principals such as those defended by Martha

Nussbaum and Wayne Booth, and more toward the deconstructively inflected process

described by Gayatri Spivak. Nussbaum and Booth speak of literature as a process of

identification, one that helps us to make ethical judgments by imagining ways that

different characters Spivak, on the other hand, defines reading in the following way: “to

learn to read is to dis-figure the undecidable figure into a responsible literality, again and

again” (Death 72).

The view I take from these debates is that literature is not ennobling so much as

enabling. Following Spivak, I understand an “ethics of reading” to be a theorization of

the attempt, always incomplete, of trying to reckon with something ultimately

Schiess 12

indecipherable (be it a literary figure or some textual form) through the process of

reading. That is, the literary figure must be approached and calls out for interpretation,

yet there is never any definitive comprehension possible. One might think here of that

that mercifully withheld “treasure” in cristiane’s bag: it has no name and is never

revealed, and yet it is undoubtedly “there” and stands as the very axis of the narrative

itself. Approaching the figure in literature in this way, over and over, is the exercise that

trains the imagination.

My concern with materiality and object-agents in Brazilian literature is part of a

broader current in literary studies that focuses on questions of materiality, the concrete,

and the status of the nonhuman in literary works. Often, but not always, such analyses

also contain an interrogation of social relations (Lezra; Giorgi; Daly; Hoyos) of

environmental concerns (French; Murari; McNee). Of this corpus of studies, three recent

studies elaborate perspectives that particularly inform the present dissertation. The first

two, Rachel Price’s 2014 study of “concreteness” in The Object of the Atlantic and

Héctor Hoyos’s formulation of “transcultural materialism” in Things With a History

(2019), share the premise that Latin America, as a region both steeped in the business of

things and occupying a place on the “dependent edges” of world capitalism, is a

privileged site for intellectuals to think through issues related to “thingness.”

Price and Hoyos maintain that the pronounced literary preoccupation with

“concretud/concretude” ‘concreteness,’ or “materia” ‘material’ in Latin American letters

derives from the region’s specific and historical place in the development of a world

economy. Price attributes the region’s pronounced artistic preoccupation with “the

concrete” over the course of the twentieth century to the increasing virtualization of

Schiess 13

material life. Price describes a transition whereby a physical Atlantic traversed by Iberian

ships loaded with gold and slaves converts to an “incipiently virtualizing Atlantic,” with

neo-colonial power wielded increasingly from the United States through complex

networks of economic domination and consumer dependency. As exploitation and

subjugation become more virtual, Price argues, a world of invisible forces began steadily

to replace the world of things. Objects and concreteness step into art and writing as a

counterweight: the material enclosure around an inner void representing the attempt to fix

in a tangible, visible form that which threatens, to paraphrase Marshall Berman, to

dissolve into thin air.

The paradigms of global capitalism and economic dependency that are so

important to Price’s argument also undergird Hoyos’s more recent study, which turns

explicitly to an examination of the region’s “default mode” of economic development:

extractrivism. Seeing the region’s approach to “stuff” as fundamentally shaped by its

history as the source of raw material for the European capitalist machine, Hoyos analyzes

the eclectic and yet, for him, particularly Latin American expressions of materialist

preoccupations in literary works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Hoyos argues that dominant contemporary modes for theorizing materialism do

not adequately encapsulate the “material thinking” of Latin American writers. Looking at

historical approaches founded on the writings of Karl Marx, for example, Hoyos argues

that these ultimately deal with stuff through the anthropocentric prism of human social

relations. For Hoyos, “the language deployed in the region’s fiction [is] one of the realms

where different material paradigms clash” and, as a result of this clash, new forms

emerge both for “language” and for “material paradigms” (loc 207). With respect to the

Schiess 14

latter, Hoyos formulates a “third materialism” that for him more adequately accounts for

the array of human-nonhuman relations to be found in the region’s literary corpus:

transcultural materialism, to describe a set of relations that precisely “cuts across” (like

the prefix trans-) both nature and culture.

The historical conditions underlying the corpus I study here are undeniably the

same as those detailed by Price and Hoyos, which is to say that a differential relation to

“stuff” occasioned by a history of extractivism and an awareness of economic

“dependence” also informs the works I examine, most notably Cobra Norato. I also share

their view that a troubled and troubling encounter with objects drives a turn to language

and that language emerges transformed. Reading his sources as a ground where differing

configurations of human-nonhuman relations meet and compete, Hoyos detects the

imprint of this conflict on the form of the text: “Here language is material in the first

order: a thing. And in the second order, it is a thing that summons other things. The

instability and plasticity that new materialist thinkers celebrate in stuff is also present in

language” (loc 245).

Price argues in a similar vein when she finds that the thread connecting works as

diverse as José Martí’s chronicles and his Versos sencillos (1891), Augusto de Campos’s

“Caracol” (1960) and “Código” (1973), Severo Sarduy’s “Espiral negra” (1970), and

Alejo Carpentier’s Concierto barroco (1974) is a drive to use language to create a

tenuously concrete exterior, one that imperfectly encases within the emptiness of a

virtualizing world: “words become objects whose hollowness seems to allude to the

dreams that commodities both feed on and promise to satisfy” (172).

Schiess 15

My analysis focuses far less on economic relations as the source for the strange

encounter with things and more on estrangements of an ontological nature. Hoyos, for his

part, also sometimes describes the transversal nature-culture dealings explored by Latin

American writers in terms of a kinship with Bruno Latour’s formulations of human-

nonhuman actor networks, or again with Latour’s notion of individual entities as human-

non-human hybrids. The core assumption of such a framework, however, is not that

humans and non-humans might be ontologically indistinct, but rather that humans and

nonhumans are deeply interactive in ways that are not always acknowledged or

understood. In contrast, the language in the works studied in the present dissertation

persistently questions whether subjects and objects are really distinct, a claim that neither

Price nor Hoyos makes.

In this way, my approach is closer to that taken by Tara Daly in Vital

Materialisms and the Andean Avant-Garde (2019), particularly in regard to her reading

of the work of Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Writing on Vallejo’s poetry collection, Trilce

(1922), a highly experimental work that is notoriously impervious to interpretation, Daly

writes:

Vallejo’s stumbling poetics points to the relative newness of language as a

human tool (and even newer as a theoretical cornerstone of humanity).

Because language has been naturalized as what differentiates the human

from other species, Vallejo undermines this difference by partially

negating that which makes humans different from other animals: the

ability to reason and conceptualize the world through language (27).

Schiess 16

By frustrating interpretation, Daly argues, Vallejo turns language into one more kind of

material rather than a tool of human exceptionality. In doing so, he launches his reader

into “a poetic ecosystem that forces us to reorient before the materials in which we are

embedded,” both inside the poem and out of it (28).

When Daly contends that in Trilce, “each poem brings new materials into an

ethical fold—that is, into something readers sense and approximate—as witnesses to, and

agents alongside, the human,” she thus argues for a poetic reconsideration of human-

object relations that comes to envelop the reader (27-28). Daly’s stress on the textual

cohabitation of human and nonhuman elements, as well its implications for readerly

involvement and affect, are also fundamental to the claims I make in this dissertation.

The artistic mixing of human and nonhuman traits in order to stage a politico-

aesthetic confrontation of dominant, dehumanizing discourses is not necessarily unique

the authors I study, nor to Brazil more generally. Cary Wolfe has argued in various

contexts against what he calls the “institution of speciesism,” a phrase he uses to denote

the systematic discrimination against others through the association with generic

nonhuman traits; in Animal Rites he calls on literary criticism to unearth an “alternative

discourse of species” that protects humans and nonhumans alike (9).

Mel Y. Chen’s study of animal tropes and queer affectivity in contemporary art

aligns with Wolfe’s premise that the association of marginalized human groups with

animal traits serves as a rhetorical device for dehumanization and discrimination. Just as

language qua rhetoric has the power to naturalize discriminatory representations, so

language qua art holds the power to startle; to call attention to buried biases and shake

them loose. Chen’s focus on language—what it conjures, what it reveals—circulates

Schiess 17

around poetic language that startles the reader with its unexpected animacy. Thus, the

unsettlingly “hybrid” human-nonhuman forms that populate this study, animated as they

are through the force of poetic language, are necessarily artistic interventions in the

political:

Language tells us of shared priorities (cognitive or not) and material-

linguistic economies, in which some “stuff” emerges and other “stuff”

remains ineffable, unmaterialized. The sentience of a noun phrase has

linguistic and grammatical consequences, and these consequences are

never merely linguistic and grammatical, but also deeply political. (53-54)

Chen’s concern for the political consequences of animated language, so crucial to the

framework of my first two chapters, is also shared by a number of critics writing in the

field of the ecological humanities, or ecocriticism. From this vast body of literary

criticism, the present study finds most affinity with the more speculative branch best

exemplified by the work of Timothy Morton. In the first two chapters, which focus

explicitly on literary representations of the nonhuman environment, for example, I find

the uncanniness of Cobra Norato’s Amazonian forest or Água viva’s vibrant wardrobe to

resemble what Morton has called “the object-oriented sublime” (“Why Ambient Poetics”

52). For Morton, this refers to “a poetic enactment” that surfaces in works that question

the relation between humans and nonhuman environmental objects, relations “of nondual

awareness that collapse[…] the subject-object division” (52). Importantly, this mode

begins with poetics and gestures toward ethics (or what Morton calls “solidarity”): it

wraps the reader and writer (qua sublime) into a common affective experience and

Schiess 18

provokes a feeling, “however temporary in experience, [and] howsoever weak,” of

“warmth toward one’s world, in which one is included” (52).

In speaking of an “ethics of the object,” my goal is to describe a linguistic

procedure that can be located, I argue, in a diverse array of textual forms—thus, the

corpus of works that I study here crosses genres. Chapter 1 places a canonical poetic

work of Brazilian modernismo against the new relief of an understudied corpus of the

poet’s nonfictional writing. Chapter 2 examines a series of prose works by one of Brazil’s

most eminent mid-century writers, Clarice Lispector. In Chapter 3, I trace the evolution

of a trope—the cannibal—in texts on literary translation written over the course of the

last forty years.

Across this varied textual terrain, I describe how textual objects are invested with

agency in these writings and how that investiture impacts the humans who contemplate

them. That is, while my analysis includes texts from various genres and time periods,

each chapter explores the ways in which works both create and debate new categories of

subjectivity by way of a constant reverberation between the categories of subject and

object. In Chapter 1, for example, the Amazonian forest depicted in a 1920s modernista

poem becomes an agent that interrupts the poem’s subject as the poet attempts to enact

rather than represent a living natural environment. In Chapter 2, a series of material

objects that Lispector’s narrating subject depicts in painting serve as a training-ground for

questions of ethics and representation as Lispector herself prepared to turn her attention

to social relations in her work. In Chapter 3, translators write about translating through

the prism of the most ambivalent of subject-object (or is it subject-subject?) relations: the

one embodied by the act of cannibalism. That is, the interaction between the

Schiess 19

translator/reader and the textual object is figured as a relationship between two subjects,

where one subjectivity will be acted upon decisively (and fatally) by the other.

Because I read such varied sources for their differentiated manifestations of

subject-object oriented phenomena, each chapter falls within somewhat different,

although often overlapping, theoretical coordinates. However, insofar as the

subject/object ambivalence on view in these works of literature and criticism explicitly

foreground the breakdown of Humanist Enlightenment conceptual distinctions, they all

also partake implicitly in critiques of the category of the human as self-identical with

subjecthood, and of the figure of the white European male as the subject par excellence.

This critical basis, shared among the texts that I analyze, also aligns my dissertation with

a vast corpus of scholarly work over the last several decades, developed in the social

sciences, ecology, speculative philosophy, and of course literature, that increasingly

views the assumptions of traditional Humanism with skepticism. Each chapter brings a

slightly different disciplinary expression of this skepticism into the fold of the analysis.

In Chapter 1, “Nature in the Active Voice,” I analyze Brazilian writer Raul

Bopp’s Cobra Norato (1931) in light of this work’s uneven approach to the Amazon in

the early twentieth century. This work is best-known as a canonical example of the

stylistically experimental work associated with the antropofagia movement, a collection

of literary and visual art produced by a small group of artists in 1920s São Paulo.

In this chapter I present Cobra Norato as an early twentieth-century intervention

in debates over the status and function of Brazil’s natural environments; debates that

continue with increased urgency today. The recently intensified deforestation of the

Amazon has thrown competing views of the region into stark relief: Is the Amazon region

Schiess 20

a planetary resource or national territory? Or do both of these approaches to the rainforest

miss the mark? Today there is also a growing tendency among scholars and activists to

view the forest as a collective entity, comprised of human and nonhuman life, that

possesses an inherent and inalienable right to persist.

I argue that while many competing strains of modern thinking are evident in

Bopp’s depiction of Amazonia, the poem mainly encounters the forest as a disconcerting

natural environment: one that is animated (that is, “alive” and “aware”) in ways related

to, but also not fully consistent with, Amerindian cosmologies. Thus, this chapter also

addresses questions of whether, and to what extent, “outsiders” to the Amazon can

become allies to its human and nonhuman communities on their own terms. My central

claim here is that Raul Bopp’s struggle to contain the unexpected agency of the

Amazonian rainforest within the poetic form, to resolve his primary experience of the

landscape and pack it back into language, produces an early example of Morton’s

“ambient poetics” that is, a legitimate poetic reckoning with radically different modes of

human and nonhuman being implications of this approach for how we might understand

both poetry and the natural world.

In Chapter 2, a series of material objects that culminates in a mirrored wardrobe

becomes a field site for developing an ethical position for describing characters from

socially marginalized sectors of society. Central to the chapter are questions of social

visibility, artistic representation and ethics. What are our responsibilities to the social

groups inside our own society that remain inscrutable to us? What is the role of artists

and writers in times of social repression and hardline political control? “Reflections in the

porta-espelho,” I read works from the late phase of the most-read Brazilian author of the

Schiess 21

twentieth century, Clarice Lispector. Although Lispector is most often characterized as a

subjective and introspective writer, recent scholarship suggests that the emphasis on self-

writing that dominates her early work increasingly makes way for social critique as

Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) hardened its stance at the expense of civil and

human rights. Such studies document Lispector’s response to the political and social

conservatism that both enabled and benefitted from the invisibility of the poor (Sanchís

and Pola; Dalcastagnè) and the social repression of female and LGBT sexuality

(Moriconi).

My analysis brings contemporary object theory (Brown, A Sense of Things,

“Thing Theory”; Lezra) to this discussion of Lispector’s engagement with social alterity

and representation. I argue that in “The Hen and the Egg” (1964), Água Viva (1973) and

Hour of the Star (1977), Lispector’s descriptions of physical objects become tropes for

the difficulties inherent in seeing, knowing and confronting the realities of people who

are strangers to us. Seen in this light, Lispector deploys the philosophical impenetrability

of the thing as the basis for a literary ethics that is attuned to the strangeness of the

stranger, while nevertheless reaching toward her.

Both Raul Bopp’s rainforest and Lispector’s painted objects are uncanny, hard to

decipher, and viscerally unsettling. There is a strangeness in their suggested subjectivity

that at once attracts and repels interpretation. Chapter 3, “Cannibals in Translation

(Studies),” represents a pivot. This chapter situates the work of one of Brazil’s most

prominent critics and literary translators, the poet Haroldo de Campos, within a broader

corpus of writings on translation published over the last forty years as I trace a series of

Schiess 22

changes that take place, as the role taken by this figure of extreme human alterity in

works that probe the dynamics of power and meaning inherent to acts of translation.

Yet the essays on the theory and practice of translation that I read in this chapter

also engage, I argue, in the same textual dance with the uncanny figure that I describe in

the earlier chapters. The difference is that a different order of objects that shift into view

as potential subjects. Rather than belonging, like trees and wardrobes, to the umbrella

category of material “stuff,” these objects—both the “cannibal” himself, a figure for non-

European people and cultural practices to be translated as objects of colonial

representation, and the texts that are understood to be translated in a “cannibalistic”

way—are both unavoidably wrapped up in the human.

I examine the first of these, the cannibal, as a rhetorical object that represents,

within the sphere of the Western imaginary, an ambivalent category of the human. He is,

on the one hand, the radical other of the European colonial enterprise: a “savage” or

“primitive” human, perhaps, but undeniably a human. On the other hand, the very

savagery or primitiveness conveyed by the word-concept cannibal relies precisely on the

“inhumanity” of his presumed anthropophagy. What could be less social, less civilized,

less human (and more beastly), than the act of eating like kind? What could be more

confusing of group solidary and identity than the uncanny reversal of insides and outsides

on view as we envision the cannibal making his feast? What, for that matter, makes a

subject into an object more summarily than eating him, or makes the object of colonial

domination into the subject of resistance more clearly than the cannibal’s revenge upon

the colonizer? As recent scholarship on early modern, colonial and contemporary sources

strongly suggests, however, it is precisely the fact that “the cannibal” stands in the murky

Schiess 23

territory between self and other; between the human, the inhuman and the nonhuman that

makes him so useful a bulwark for establishing such divides according to the shifting

priorities of ideology and rhetoric (Hulme; Chambourleyon and Bombardi; Boucher;

Sanborn; Freire; Bratlinger). In this way the cannibal, a word-concept thrown into motion

by the meeting of European and American cultures over five hundred years ago, comes to

stand as a caricature of the not-quite-human colonial Other that shades into contemporary

structures of political and cultural power (Bergman; Root; Rice; Bergland).

In the context of twentieth-century Brazil, one can hardly speak of the cultural

function of “the cannibal” without accounting for antropofagia and its cultural afterlives.

This aesthetic and philosophical paradigm was first developed in the 1920s by Oswald de

Andrade as a nationalistically-inflected reaction against European cultural imposition. As

one of the major aesthetic formulations to emerge from the Brazilian avant-garde

movements, it is also arguably the most widely-circulated Brazilian theory that explicitly

addresses the questions of just who—and what—finds expression in formulations of

Brazilian culture.

As the group’s name suggests, the antropófagos (anthropophagi) sought to claim

and instrumentalize the figure of the indigenous cannibal in order to redefine Brazilian

cultural and artistic identity. This was, as many critics have noted, a problematic

endeavor given both the cultural rooting of the movement’s engineers in the very

European traditions and viewpoints that they wished to decenter with the “cruel integrity

of the savage,” and their limited knowledge of the native cultures that they sought to

represent (Castro-Klarén, “A Genealogy”; Madureira, “A Cannibal Recipe”; Sá,

Rainforest Fictions). Roberto Schwarz has characterized the movement as only

Schiess 24

superficially progressive, its revalorization of the native a thin cover for a bourgeois

formulation that sought to revivify the elitist values of “true” art and high intellectualism.

Nevertheless, even for Schwarz (and for many of antropofagia’s defenders, both inside

and outside of Brazil, the specifically Brazilian reclamation of the cannibal represented

by the formulations of antropofagia represents a turning point in Brazilian cultural

theory:

Oswald de Andrade advocated cultural irreverence in place of subaltern

obfuscation, using the metaphor of ‘swallowing up’ the alien: a copy, to be

sure, but with regenerative effect. […] Modernism therefore brought about

a profound change in values: for the first time the processes under way in

Brazil were weighed in the context of the present-day world, as having

something to offer that larger context. Local primitivism would give back

a modern sense to tired European culture, liberating it from Christian

mortification and capitalist utilitarianism. Brazil’s experience would be a

differentiated cornerstone, with utopian powers, on the map of

contemporary history. (Schwarz 9)

It is precisely this play of self and other against a backdrop of colonial power that makes

the cannibal such an apt figure for acts of cultural and literary translation.

In Chapter 3, I review several such formulations of “cannibal translations” that

highlight broader disciplinary transformations taking place around the turn of the century:

George Steiner’s “Hermeneutic Motion,” (1975), Haroldo de Campos’s “Da razão

antropofágica” (1983), and Spivak’s “The Politics of Translation” (1993). Each of these

texts is exemplary of a different version of what is understood through references to

Schiess 25

cannibals, and the trajectory established between them reflects the scholarly trends put in

motion by what is called the postcolonial turn.1 Steiner employs a traditional trope that

reveals the desires and anxieties of a colonial self, who is attracted by the force of the

exotic but fears “being eaten”—succumbing to its force. Campos reverses and transvalues

this colonial threat, arguing for the creative force of a metaphorical antropofagia cultural

(cultural anthropophagy), whereby works of literature that travel from Europe to Latin

America will be consumed and transformed, rather than piously revered, by the New

World intellectuals that encounter and translate them (whether in a strictly linguistic

sense or an artistic one). Spivak’s essay, in turn, gives us a cannibal as a figure of almost-

unreachable alterity: a cultural and temporal other from whom we can learn only if we

adopt the alternative version of knowing that the figure comes to embody in the essay.

To these texts that ask, implicitly or explicitly, how a certain configuration of the

cannibal figure can illuminate procedures of linguistic translation, I add examples from a

more recent work that asks similar questions but from an opposite vantage point: Eduardo

Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled

Equivocation” (2004). Unlike the literary and cultural theorists who precede him in the

chapter, Castro is an anthropologist. Since the 1990s, the theories he derived from his

field work in Lowland Amazon has helped to foment (along with that of Marilyn

Strathern) a major shift in disciplinary paradigms that can be most neatly summed up as

the reconsideration of anthropology’s traditional “object”—the “native”—as no longer an

object of ethnographic description but rather as a co-producing participant in a new wave

of anthropological theory. [ontological turn, if it hasn’t been done in the intro]

Schiess 26

The juxtaposition of Castro’s work with that of these translation theorists,

particularly Spivak’s, is especially productive due to the similarity of their intellectual

objectives across divergent fields. Both Spivak and Castro are concerned with

establishing conceptual bridges between the patterns of thought inherent in a Eurocentric

academy, and the alternative ways of thinking and being that characterize the vast

segments of the world’s population that often constitute the object of academic

disciplines such as political theory, economics, sociology and anthropology. The fact that

Viveiros de Castro openly frames the anthropological endeavor as a multi-layered act of

translation is also a key element of the work that I consider here:

[T]he comparison of which I am thinking is a constitutive rule of the

discipline. It concerns the process involved in the translation of the

“native’s” practical and discursive concepts into the terms of

anthropology’s conceptual apparatus. I am talking about the kind of

comparison, more often than not implicit or automatic (and hence

uncontrolled), which necessarily includes the anthropologist’s discourse as

one of its terms, and which starts to be processed from the very first

moment of fieldwork, if not well before. Controlling this translative

comparison between anthropologies is precisely what comprises the art of

anthropology (“Perspectival Anthropology” 4-5)

In an endeavor that is aligned with Spivak’s defense of non-Western subjectivities, then,

Viveiros de Castro uses examples of linguistic (mis)translation to highlight the

differential meanings of concepts—in this case, the concept of translation itself—across

cultures.

Schiess 27

Thus, my reading of “cannibal translations” over the course of this chapter moves

across the time and space of the colonial and post-colonial arena, documenting an

evolution of the cannibal figure from “object” to “subject”—from a mask of colonial

making that fully obscures the human behind it, to a subjecthood-seizing figure for the

resistance of the postcolonial intellectual, to the concept-forming and differential

subjectivity Viveiros de Castro describes as a relational co-producer of a new

anthropology. The diachronic and intertextual approach that I take in this last chapter thus

complements the intra-textual readings I perform in the first two chapters: each

vantagepoint illuminating another angle on the shifting status of the object as performed

by language.

Schiess 28

CHAPTER 1

Nature in the Active Voice: Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato

In the summer of 2019, a series of events related to Brazil’s Amazon region

sparked an exchange of barbs and accusations between the leaders of Brazil and France, a

contentious back-and-forth that usefully underscores the themes of this chapter. In the

months prior to this exchange (between June and August), fires in the tropical rain forest

devastated an area equal in size to the U.S. state of Texas. While large-scale fires in the

region are a cyclical phenomenon and often result from smaller fires set for the purpose

of clearing land for agriculture, the rate of uncontrolled burning spiked significantly in

2019. By June, the acreage burned that year represented an 80% increase over the same

period the year before. These fires burned for several months without the intervention of

local or national government, and this prompted many to speculate that Brazilian

President Jair Bolsonaro tacitly supported the large-scale destruction of forest in order to

clear the way for national mining and agribusiness interests (Londoño, et al.).

By August, the Amazon fires had set off a storm of international press coverage

that attracted the attention of world leaders. Just prior to the Group of 7 conference on

climate change in Biarritz, France, French President Emmanuel Macron used Twitter to

refer to the fires as an “international crisis” in terms that drew the ire of many Brazilians

(including the country’s president): “Our house is burning. Literally”

(@EmmanuelMacron). While Bolsonaro’s supporters tweeted angrily that Macron should

“[ir] cuidar da sua casa” ‘[go] take care of [his] own house,’ the Brazilian president

asserted that Macron’s comments constituted “ataques descabidos e gratuitos à

Schiess 29

Amazônia” ‘false and gratuitous attacks on the Amazon,’ and that the French president

had chosen to “disfar[çar] suas intenções atrás de uma ‘aliança’ dos países do G-7 para

‘salvar’ à Amazônia, como se fôssemos uma colônia ou uma terra de ninguém” ‘disguise

his intentions behind an “alliance” of the G-7 countries to “save” the Amazon, as if we

were a colony or a no-man’s land’ (@jairbolsonaro). The precise language of Bolsonaro’s

objections, “as if we were a colony or a no-man’s land,” strongly suggests that what

bothers Bolsonaro is what he perceives to be Macron’s explicitly internationalist, and

perhaps even neo-colonial, framing of the Amazonian fires as much as the latter’s

designation of them as a “crisis.”

The Macron-Bolsonaro Twitter exchange raises many questions at the center of

Brazilian history and culture. Is the Amazon region a planetary resource or national

territory? Is it a bulwark against the rising temperatures that endanger human life across

the globe, or a much-needed source of economic development for a sovereign (and

inarguably post-colonial) nation? The exchange also illustrates two opposing views of the

Amazon region that are quite familiar to citizens and scholars of Brazil. Bolsonaro’s

statements are typical of the view that frames the Amazon as fuel for Brazil’s economic

machine; consequently, it takes an appropriative and openly objectifying attitude vis-à-

vis the region. On the other hand, while Macron’s position is clearly predicated on a

concern for the conservation of the rain forest, it is indicative of a view that is no less

appropriative and objectifying, only more subtly so. Here, Amazonia appears as an

exceptional landscape that is somehow supranational: its crucial role in regulating

planetary balance means that it ostensibly “belongs to all of us,” with the implied hope

that its preservation will save us from ourselves.

Schiess 30

This very recent debate between Macron and Bolsonaro is just one instance in a

long war of words over the Amazon. In the over five hundred years since Europeans first

recorded their impressions of the region, the superlative exuberance of its vegetal and

animal life has provoked many overlapping and competing characterizations, from the

persistent Green Hell/Earthly Paradise binary to more temporally-specific visions such as

El Dorado, the land of the mythical Amazonian warrior women, and the Terra do Sem-

fim/Last Frontier (Slater; French; Pizarro; Murari and Monteleone; Silva).While each of

these tropes values the Amazon differently, they all emerge from and thus represent a

visitor or outsider’s point of view of the rainforest. Because of this inherent separation

between the viewing/interpreting subject and the physical environment, these tropes are

implicitly vulnerable to, if not explicitly based upon, the objectifying impulses that also

undergird the Macron-Bolsonaro exchange.

In the present chapter, I examine Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato (1931), a book-

length narrative poem that constitutes an early twentieth-century literary intervention in

these debates. As I demonstrate over the course of the present chapter, Bopp offers an

alternative to the poles of rarefication and utilitarianism that most commonly shape views

of the Amazon. At the time he first composed the poem, Bopp, a Southern-born Brazilian

writer and diplomat, was himself a visitor to the Amazon, having decided to travel

through Brazil by completing each year of his law degree at a different federal university.

The kernels of poetry that he wrote over the course of the year spent in Belém do Pará,

where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean, would eventually become Cobra

Norato—an important work of Brazilian modernism that was also Bopp’s primary

literary achievement. Based loosely on plots and characters from local oral tradition and

Schiess 31

Amerindian myths, Cobra Norato relays the journey of an outsider through an

Amazonian forest populated by a variety of human and nonhuman entities.

In Cobra Norato, Bopp crafts a complex matrix of contrasting views of the

Amazon. This matrix, together with the field of criticism surrounding the poem and its

author, offers a particularly rich case study of competing characterizations of the Amazon

region over the course of the last century. As a text formally impacted by the encounter

with an alien and assertive physical environment, Cobra Norato subtly interrupts

accounts of the Amazon that alternately rarify the region as a pristine, primitive

environment, or codify it as so many resources to be marshaled for economic

development. What makes this intervention particularly useful in surmounting the

present-day dispute over who “owns” the Amazon is that, while the poem was written by

a visitor to the region, its representation of the forest is not wholly circumscribed by the

objectifying impulses characteristic of outsider perspectives. Like Macron’s and

Bolsonaro’s back-and-forth, the poem is riddled with contradictory views over who or

what the Amazon is “for,” and yet Cobra Norato also works to reveal another mode of

relationality that troubles both types of objectification and offers an alternate way

forward.

Despite the experiential “interruption” at the heart of Cobra Norato, researchers

have mostly operated within the same romantic/developmentalist binary one finds in the

Macron/Bolsonaro Twitter debate. For the most part, critics have read Bopp’s poem as an

integral part of the antropofagia movement, Brazil’s most celebrated avant-garde

movement. Given the thematic, stylistic and historical affinities between Bopp, his poem,

and the small cadre of artists that comprised the antropofagia group in 1920s São Paulo,

Schiess 32

it is logical to contextualize Cobra Norato in this way. As the group’s name suggests, the

antropófagos (anthropophagi) sought to claim and instrumentalize the figure of the

cannibal, an aim that also encompassed a modernist reevaluation of mythology,

indigenous languages, popular culture, and rural landscapes. Cobra Norato, a literary

work that prominently features these very elements, often assumes in the critical tradition

an isomorphic relationship with the antropófago movement as its “porta-voz”

‘mouthpiece’ (Averbuck 88) or its “poema-símbolo” ‘symbol-poem’ (Esteves 75).

This tight affiliation leads, on the one hand, to scholarly readings that co-celebrate

the work and the cultural-artistic program for a “poetic nationalism” that valorizes the

previously devalued category of indigenous culture (Mendes; Inojosa; Garcia; Averbuck;

Olivos Santos). On the other hand, because Cobra Norato is so closely associated with

antropofagia, the poem is subject to the same critical reassessments that recognize

Brazilian primitivist nationalisms, even the progressive antropofagia, as overtly

universalizing and romantic—not unlike Macron’s view of the Amazonian environment

in the exchange above.

As a movement that explicitly sought to convert the particular and the local (the

cannibal relation) into a new universal (a model for a non-subalternizing mode of

intellectual and artistic production), antropofagia sought to subvert the inside-outside

dynamic described above by theorizing Brazil from within. The problem with these aims,

as critical assessments of antropofagia have noted, is that they fall prey to neo-colonial

re-enactments of “inside” vs. “outside.” As Sara Castro-Klarén and Luís Madureira

(“Cannibal Recipe”) have pointed out, antropofagia as an artistic-philosophical

construction remains mired in the historical limitations of its urban, coastal, and

Schiess 33

cosmopolitan founders. As outsiders to indigenous cultures themselves, they could only

envision a “cannibal relation” or “contacto com o Brasil Caraïba” from a viewpoint based

within European models of thinking and never as the “anthropophagi” see themselves

(Andrade 3). This basic observation has spurred Madureira to assert that Cobra Norato’s

“ethico-political foundation” is “brittle” (Cannibal Modernities 82), undermined by the

same ideological blind spot that Jacques Derrida locates in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Writing

Lesson: “an ethnocentrism thinking itself as an anti-ethnocentrism, an ethnocentrism in

the consciousness of a liberating progressivism” (130).

Building on such insights, two more recent studies unmask the ethical limitations

inherent in Cobra Norato despite its progressive intentions. One of these, Lúcia Sá’s

Rainforest Fiction (2004), demystifies the long-held view that the poem represents a

straightforward adaptation of Amerindian myth by identifying the overwhelming

mediation of a nonindigenous point of view. The other, Madureira’s Cannibal

Modernities (2005), reads Cobra Norato as a complex allegory of Brazil’s peripheral

modernity, a paean to the country’s indigenous roots that is nevertheless driven by a

latent desire for development. Ultimately, both studies argue that Bopp’s poem articulates

the developmentalist, nationalist, and rationalist discourse of Brazilian coastal elites that

it purports to critique. In other words, they claim that Cobra Norato expresses an earlier

iteration of the same desire that motivates Bolsonaro’s discourse about the Amazon in the

twenty-first century: the desire to pull the Amazon into the grid of national development.

Where do these contradictions leave the relationship in Cobra Norato between

human and nonhuman, outsider and local, the poetic voice and the forest in which it

moves? In this chapter I move beyond the developmentalist/universalist binary that

Schiess 34

currently structures critical readings of Cobra Norato. My reading outlines a third poetic

presentation of the forest, one that offers important insights into the relationship between

poetry, experience, and the natural world. My objective in doing so is broadly ecocritical,

in that it responds to environmental philosopher Val Plumwood’s early twenty-first

century call to poets and humanists to read and depict “nature in the active voice, the

domain of agency” (451). In this reading, then, I follow Plumwood’s urging to be “open

to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and

dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter” (451). My analysis

acknowledges that this endeavor depends equally upon recognizing the “intentionality”

conveyed by Bopp’s poetic language, and on my own willingness and “ability to use an

intentional vocabulary” in this analysis (Plumwood 451).

To this end, in analyzing the formal and thematic features of Cobra Norato, I

detail the myriad ways in which the experience of a face-to-face with the nonhuman

physical world interferes with Bopp’s writing, leaving us with a poem that is an uneasy

co-production between poet and environment. I begin by linking two facets of the poem

that in my view have been inadequately interpreted: the first of these is the presence of a

very curious narrative stagnation that contradicts the conventions of the poem’s supposed

frame, the epic, as well as the conventions of an epic hero; the second is the widely-held

view that the poem’s images of talking frogs, birds and trees are instances of

anthropomorphism. Complicating these earlier interpretations of the poem’s flora and

fauna, I argue that these sometimes endearing, sometimes uncanny images participate in

the larger pattern of artistic challenges to the modern(ist) objectification of the

Amazonian environment and its indigenous peoples that Bopp enacts in Cobra Norato. In

Schiess 35

this view, Cobra Norato is the record of a visceral and immediate experience, one that

defies the cognitive and linguistic capacities of the poet—a specifically Amazonian

instance of the sublime. This specificity owes to that fact that the poem’s most powerful

challenge to the subject takes the form of a lively and disconcerting natural environment:

an Amazonian forest that is animated in ways related to, but also not fully consistent

with, Amerindian cosmologies.

My principal contention in this chapter proceeds from two basic premises. In the

first place, Cobra Norato is the record of a visceral experience: more a prolonged artistic

and ontological reckoning and less a product of a specific cultural movement. I support

this premise by analyzing selections from Bopp’s extra-poetic writings, including

autobiographical reflections and diplomatic dispatches, as well as the long publication

history of Cobra Norato, which Bopp revised repeatedly, ultimately issuing twelve

editions between 1931 and 1984. The consequence of this reading of Cobra Norato

realigns the poem within Brazilian literary history by easing its tight association with the

antropofagia movement.

In the second place, I understand the visceral experience that Bopp struggles to

represent in his poem as that of an encounter with a forest that breaches the Western

category of “matter.” By this I mean that Cobra Norato’s forest is not inert and passive

but invested with a form of mind that makes itself felt and that consequently violates

acceptable terminology for the nonhuman in European languages. As such, the poem

presents a powerful alternative to the utilitarian framings of the region that pervade the

Amazon’s representations both in national artistic and intellectual circuits of the 1920s

Schiess 36

and 30s, and in the more globalized arena reflected in the 2019 Twitter dispute between

Bolsonaro and Macron.

It is precisely the poet’s genuine struggle to resolve his disconcerting experience

with nature into poetry and to square this project with existing figurations of the Amazon

that produces the beautiful forms and images of Cobra Norato while also generating the

work’s many fault lines and flaws. These fault lines and flaws include the poem’s

deviations from the formal and thematic characteristics of the epic, and the subtle ways in

which Cobra Norato diverges from and disrupts the artistic and political vision of the

movement it is most associated with, antropofagia. In the poem, Bopp works to articulate

his own interruption by the forest. In so doing, Bopp renders the forest as a relational

ecology, one that emerges in Cobra Norato as radically Other. Once we acknowledge the

presence and force in Cobra Norato of a forest invested with some form of mind, we can

also acknowledge the ways in which the encounter between the poetic voice and the

environment stages a prolonged interruption that undermines both the romantic myths of

national identity and the latent rhetoric of modern development that critics have shown to

direct the poem’s narrative thrust. The most explicitly political outcome of analyzing

Cobra Norato’s subversive elements in this way, then, lies in its potential as a model for

interrupting the rhetorical stalemates that reinforce the continued objectification of the

Amazon region, with disastrous environmental-political consequences.

Stories of Thwarted Progress

My reading of Cobra Norato as a poem that records the prolonged interruption of

its poetic speaker by his environment—an assertive, dynamic Amazon forest—

Schiess 37

recontextualizes Bopp’s long narrative poem in relation to several of his extra-poetic

writings, including texts that are often overlooked by scholars and critics. Until now, the

many reviews and introductions to Bopp’s poetic work that reference his nonliterary

writing, as well as the one scholarly study that does so (Averbuck), all focus on

autobiographical passages describing the poet’s 1921 sojourn to the Amazon. These

writings are relevant for an analysis of Cobra Norato; however, their formal and thematic

features, combined with their prominence in critical and scholarly literature, reinforce

narrow interpretations of Bopp’s poem as the “porta-voz” ‘mouthpiece’ of the

antropófago movement (Esteves 75). Furthermore, these memoirs, which are closely

linked to Bopp’s self-fashioning as an antropófago poet, also reinforce romanticized

visions of Amazonian landscapes and cultures.

In this section, I challenge the narrowed outcomes of these interpretations by

placing Bopp’s memoirs from his time in the Amazon within a broader panorama of his

extra-poetic texts. This panorama includes a short comparative reading of multiple

editions of Cobra Norato itself, as well as the introduction of lesser-known diplomatic

texts, specifically Bopp’s economic dispatches from the mid-1930s, a collection titled,

Sol e banana. What emerges from this examination is a more complete picture of Bopp’s

varied and ideologically complex representations of the region across genres, as well as a

more nuanced understanding of Bopp as a multifaceted figure within Brazilian literary

history. Reading Bopp’s poem within this larger constellation of extra-poetic texts

illuminates the diverse and competing constructions of human-nonhuman relations in

Cobra Norato, a strategy that serves ultimately to reveal complexities obscured by

interpretations that overstress the poem’s relation to antropofagia. In more specific terms,

Schiess 38

I focus on a pattern of editorial changes visible across later editions of Cobra Norato:

instances in which Bopp revises his original language and syntax in ways that invest the

poem’s rendering of the environment with more agency and dynamism. My reading also

underscores the unique capacities of poetry to capture experiences that tend to escape

other forms of expression.

In his autobiographical writing, Bopp’s primary objective in recalling his travels

in Amazonia seems to be to stress the conditions of immanence under which he

composed the original segments of Cobra Norato. During the year he studied in Belém,

Bopp took at least three extended trips by canoe and other small craft, piloted by local

fisherman, in and around the lower Amazon River and its delta. His plans to travel up the

Rio Negro to Manaus were thwarted by a case of malaria, but not before he had spent

many days navigating the famously shifting shores and fluvial whims of the great river

and its many tributaries, and many evenings listening to the stories of the canoe pilots,

who would draw their boats together for the night. The poet’s recounting of this period is

captivating, often written in an impressionistic style that stresses immanence, immersion

and even bodily porosity: “Canoa de vela. Pé no chão ouvindo aquelas mil e uma noites

tapuias. Febre e cachaça. O mato e as estrelas conversando em voz baixa. [...] Instinto

puro. Bruto.” ‘Sail-driven canoes. Feet on the ground listening to those Thousand and

One Tapuia Nights. Fever and cachaça. […] Pure, brute instinct’ (Bopp, Poesia completa

218). Bopp’s reminiscences convey the sense of being rocked by the river’s waves,

invaded by its microbes, and infiltrated by the soundwaves of ambient noise and

storytelling. In these writings, Bopp’s immersion in the environment bleeds into

identification with the presumably nonhuman: “brute instinct.”

Schiess 39

Vicky Unruh has pointed out that passages such as these, in which rural

landscapes figure as “a telluric body-content rooted to ancestral origins, a body for which

the new American artist will provide a voice,” are quite typical of Latin American

vanguard programs (27). This observation points out a secondary objective in Bopp’s

memoir-writing: its function as an explication or a defense of his role in antropofagia.

According to the author’s prefaces, Movimentos modernistas no Brasil is compiled from

an invited talk (in two parts) that he gave at the Instituto Brasileiro de Estudos

Internacionais in the early 1960s, and from notes in reply to an interview questionnaire

from a journalist at the Correio da Manhã. These repurposed writings were then

published more or less as-is (17). Bopp passado-a-limpo por ele mesmo (1977) is, as the

title suggests, a defense against the accusations by the journalist Paulo Haeker Filho that

Bopp had used such speaking and publishing opportunities to inflate the importance of

his participation in the Brazilian avant-garde (12). A critical approach that focuses

exclusively on these texts, then, runs the risk of operating in a closed circuit of mutually-

reinforcing representations.

By contrast, my consideration of Bopp’s published archive begins with the least-

discussed of his writings: a collection of diplomatic dispatches that, unlike his memoirs,

appears to be completely detached from recollections of his poetic process. Sol e banana

is the title of a series of communiqués on international trade that Bopp penned between

1934 and 1938 from his posting in Yokohama, Japan, where he served as a young

member of then-president Getúlio Vargas’s diplomatic corps in the years preceding the

Second World War. Originally published in a monthly publication called Correio da Ásia

and sent to 5,000 Brazilian subscribers and news outlets, these short dispatches were

Schiess 40

intended to awaken Brazilian readers to concerning disparities between Brazilian

production and that of other nations, particularly those with similarly emerging

economies.

Insofar as these short texts focus explicitly on the very capitalist themes that

Madureira (and to a lesser extent Sá) find to be implicit in Cobra Norato, they offer a

stark counterpoint to the romanticized vision of nature emphasized in Bopp’s memoirs

and poetic texts. The following passage from Samburá: notas de viagens e saldos

literários is indicative of the style and content of the latter:

Ao chegar à Amazônia, senti que estava ante um cenário diferente, de uma

violência desconcertante. A linha constante da água e mato era a moldura

de um mundo ainda incógnito e confuso. A impressão que me causava o

ambiente, na sua estranha brutalidade, escapava das concordâncias. Era

uma geografia do mal-acabado. As florestas não tinham fim. A terra se

repetia, carregada de alaridos anônimos. Eram vozes indecifradas. (21)

[Upon arriving in the Amazon, I felt I was confronted with a different kind

of scenery, one of a disconcerting violence. The unbroken line of water

and forest was the measure of a world still in disorder and confusion. The

impression that the environment caused in me, in its strange brutality,

escaped all commensurability. It was a barely-finished geography. The

forests were endless. The land repeated itself, full of anonymous

screeches. They were undeciphered voices.]

Schiess 41

When one compares this passage from Bopp’s memoirs with the Amazon he constructs in

the following excerpt from his economic dispatches in Sol e banana, a significant

contrast emerges:

Temos ainda um sem número de plantas taniferas, como o angico, o

barbatimão e o mangue vermelho, que se estende por alguns milhares de

milhas na faixa litoral norte do Brasil. Em determinadas regiões da África

Ocidental; em Borneo; em Madagascar; nas Celebes ou na Venezuela,

extrae-se a casca do mangue para a exportação. O Brasil exportou em

1936 apenas 9 contos da casca dessa planta. Por outro lado importou de

extrato de quebracho paraguayo e argentino 3,566 contos. (50)

[Furthermore, we have [growing naturally in Amazonia] innumerable

species of tanniferous plants, such as angico, barbatimão and red

mangrove,2 which grows over an area of many thousands of miles of

northern coastline. In certain locations of East Africa; in Borneo; in

Madagascar; in the Celebes and in Venezuela, mangrove bark is extracted

for export. Brazil exported a mere 9 contos of this plant bark. On the other

hand, we imported 3,566 contos of Argentine and Paraguayan quebracho

tannins.]

In the first excerpt, Bopp renders the Amazon as an “endless,” “undecipherable,”

“disconcerting” and “confused” landscape that defies containment. In the second, the

Amazon appears to be, at least rhetorically, entirely reducible to quantification. The vast

exuberance one finds in Bopp’s memoirs—which conjures up a place animated by

Schiess 42

mysterious “voices” and seemingly without end—finds itself reduced in Sol e banana to

a series of interchangeable and commodifiable resources.

Despite their differences in tone, style, and audience, a strange analogue occurs

between the two preceding descriptions. This subtle correspondence emerges from

Bopp’s confrontation, in both texts, with an environment whose scale, variety, and

dynamism escape and exceed human description and control. When Bopp writes in his

memoirs of an “impressão que […] escapava das concordâncias” ‘impression that […]

escaped all agreement,’ this fugitive lack of “agreement” gestures toward an

incommensurability, in this case between the lived experience of a place and the measure

of the cognitive categories provided by language to describe or capture that experience.

Bopp’s language, in effect, acknowledges the breakdown of description and an overflow

of experience that escapes through the gaps between this “impression” and any

previously encountered phenomenon.

Sol e banana is also driven by the desire to corral an escaping excess, and it is

also populated by “voices” clamouring to be deciphered, but these voices are of a very

different order than those Bopp evokes in his memoir’s phenomenologically-intoned

descriptions. In his passage on Brazil’s “plantas taniferas” ‘tannin-rich plants’ from Sol e

banana, this excess slides into focus through verb choice: Bopp’s use of “temos” ‘we

have’ indicates a wealth that occurs spontaneously, without cultivation or management.

As Bopp notes, only a small portion of this naturally occurring abundance—a mere nine

contos of mangrove—is successfully exported from Brazil as a tanning material. What

remains is uncountable: the rest of the “sem número” ‘innumerable’ lies untouched and

unmarshalled, escaping quantification. In Bopp’s view, this uncountable abundance is

Schiess 43

troubling, because it is representative of Brazil’s failure to generate wealth from the latent

value of its natural resources. Making matters worse, the small fraction of this material

successfully captured for international sale is grossly off-balance with the nearly-four-

hundred-times greater amount (nine contos to 3,566 contos) of a substitutable product

imported to Brazil from Paraguay and Argentina. In this estimate, Brazil falls behind by

sitting still; its potentially mobilizable environment lies fallow while the country slips

quietly behind its Latin American and African competitors.

In the entries of Sol e banana, the Amazon “speaks” in a very different way from

what one finds in Cobra Norato. In the former, Bopp mobilizes a litany of trade statistics

and commodity descriptions to tell the story of Brazil’s historical moment as a series of

mathematical figures. Correspondingly, the flora and fauna of Brazil, and often

specifically of the Amazon, become resources to be charted and catalogued, converted

into units of measure with a quantifiable exchange value. He then presents these figures

in a terse, staccato prose, without commentary, as in this excerpt detailing Amazonian

exports:

A Amazônia repousa sua economia em dois únicos produtos: a borracha e

a castanha do Pará. São dois artigos, como se sabe, de largo consumo

internacional. A borracha silvestre, porém, não pode competir com a

cultivada, e caiu recentemente de preço, […] A castanha, em sua vez, valia

em fevereiro de 1938 apenas 60$000 o hetrolitro, quando, pouco tempo

antes, era cotada a 180$000. (Bopp, Sol e banana 80)

[The economy of the Amazon rests on two sole products: rubber, and

Brazil nuts. It is well known that these two items have a large

Schiess 44

consumption overseas. The harvest of naturally-occurring rubber has not

been able to compete, however, with the cultivated variety. The price of

Brazil nuts […] was valued in February 1938 at $60,000 per hetroliter,

while just a short time earlier, it had been at $180,000.]

Pedro Leão Veloso Neto, who served as Brazil’s ambassador to Japan during Bopp’s

tenure as consul in Yokohama, wrote the preface to Sol e Banana. In this preface, Veloso

suggests that Bopp’s ostensibly objective prose allows the facts to speak for themselves:

“One must not dramatize facts. The truth is that the careful examination of the figures

contained within this volume tells the most eloquent story” (ix). Indeed, beyond gesturing

toward the collapse of the Amazonian rubber trade, Bopp mostly leaves out the broader

economic context for the contracting trade figures that surface above, and that repeat

incessantly from entry to entry.3 The figures that reflect slipping prices and decreasing

tonnage instead tell the story of implicit social and economic anxieties: a regression by

stagnation; a standing still while other nations move ahead into modernity.

Working backward through this rhetorical chain, one might say that Bopp

transforms nature into figures in Sol e banana, and that these figures morph into “facts.”

For the reader, these facts are meant to be instructive, given that they seemingly have the

power to speak (“eloquently” and for themselves) to the consequences of Brazil’s lagging

production. According to this language of eloquent facts, Brazil’s trade deficit is driven

by the underdevelopment of domestic resources and an insatiable taste for luxury

imports. For Bopp, these factors present a threat to Brazil’s well-being early in the

twentieth century.

Schiess 45

The awareness of a temporal gap between Brazil and Europe is nothing new in

Brazilian cultural studies. In fact, the consideration of “belatedness” and related concepts

underscores the vast majority of not only Brazilian but also Latin American (and Iberian)

cultural critique from the twentieth century onward. But the sense of a shrinking world, in

which Brazil not only has to chase the European metropole but also vie with other former

colonies for a slice of the global market is particularly acute in Bopp’s treatment of

Brazilian nature in Sol e banana. Consider the symbolic importance of the banana in the

following excerpt: “A Formosa, que é 92 times menor do que a Amazônia, exportou para

o estrangeiro, em 1935, mais que 36 milhões de yen; isto é, mais do que o Pará e a

Amazônia no mesmo ano. […] De bananas, a Formosa exportou duas vezes mais do que

o Brasil” ‘Formosa, which is 92 times smaller than Amazonia, exported more that 36

million yen in products in 1935; that is, more than the states of Pará and Amazonia

combined. […] In bananas alone, Formosa’s exports totaled more than twice the amount

exported by all of Brazil’ (Bopp, Sol e banana 81). If the small Japanese island of

Formosa could surpass Brazil in banana production (and bananas were then Brazil’s most

iconic crop, if not its greatest source of export revenue), what could that mean for the

latter’s place in the world, or even among other developing nations?

The communiques in Sol e banana make clear that Bopp was thinking through a

range of economic and geopolitical questions. For this reason, adding Sol e banana to the

constellation of extra-poetic texts that inform Bopp’s literary oeuvre provides a more

nuanced image of the poet, one that recognizes him as a historical figure steeped in

ideologically conflicted characterizations of the Amazon region. The dispatches included

in Sol e banana speak openly to anxieties that Madureira teases out of Cobra Norato’s

Schiess 46

narrative structure. They reveal that if Bopp presents the Amazon as an eternally

“undeciphered enigma” in his memoirs (Bopp passado 12), he was also quite capable of

viewing the forest as a commodifiable (national) resource: not as a source of vitality in its

own right, but rather a source of prime materials for the development of a thriving

national economy.

Opening Cobra Norato scholarship to Bopp’s more utilitarian work underscores

the shifting transhistorical web of values and associations toward Amazonian nature in

the early twentieth century. It also highlights the extent to which the poet was caught up

in these contradictions over the course of his lifetime. The fact that these are later texts

likewise brings Cobra Norato’s prolonged editorial history to the fore, and analyzing

later editions deepens the already more nuanced and complete view of the poet we gain

from reading the poem alongside Sol e banana. This history lends additional credence to

Madureira’s against-the-grain reading of Cobra Norato. Bopp authorized the publication

of twelve editions of Cobra Norato in his lifetime, the first of which was re-issued in

1937, while Bopp was still posted in Japan—the same period during which he was

composing the dispatches that comprise Sol e banana. This edition, as well as the next six

(published between 1947 and 1969), show varying degrees of authorial editing that are

meticulously documented in Averbuck’s 1985 study. This means that Bopp’s disparate

Amazons, emerging across genres and over decades, cannot be relegated to specific

periods. Instead, we might look at the romanticizing and commodifying tendencies in

Bopp’s various texts as an alternating current of discourses; one that is ultimately short-

circuited by the lingering effects of an encounter with the physical environment as radical

alterity.

Schiess 47

Examining the alterations Bopp makes across Cobra Norato’s many editions

helps to explain what kept him tinkering with his text for over thirty years. In general

terms, the editorial changes that Bopp makes over time tend to invest the environment

with more agency. As the poet selects new adjectives and crafts new verbal constructions,

his nonhuman entities show more visual movement, and that movement occurs with

greater intentionality. Plants become more animal-like or, along with the forest’s animals,

more human-like, as in the example where “Sapos escondidos espiam no escuro” ‘Hidden

frogs spy in the dark’ in Canto II later become “sapos beiçudos” ‘thick-lipped frogs’

(Averbuck 225). In another example from Canto IV, the line “raízes inflamadas estão

mastigando lodo” ‘inflamed roots are chewing mud’ from the poem’s first edition

becomes “raízes desdentadas mastigam lodo” ‘toothless roots chew mud’ in the fourth

edition (Averbuck 226).

In another example from the fifth canto, the description of a riverbank undergoes

many successive mutations across later editions. As Bopp works and reworks his imagery

and syntax in this section, the original image becomes increasingly invested with

liveliness. What in the third edition is rendered as “Terra esverdeada, lisa de lama com

maceguinhas ao redor” ‘Greenish earth, mud-smoothed, surrounded by tiny weeds,’

passes through slight variations in each of the following four editions (Averbuck 227).

One intermediary verse from the fifth edition shows a move toward intentionality through

the insertion of a reflexive verb: “um plasma visguento se descostura como uma seda

murcha” ‘a slimy plasma unravels itself like a withered piece of silk’ (Averbuck 227).

Despite this, the mud remains associated with inert material via a simile that likens its

self-unraveling to that of a limp cloth. By the poem’s seventh edition, however, Bopp

Schiess 48

eventually opts to reinforce the agency of the first verb with an active second verb,

turning the mud into an actant that modifies the shape of the riverbank: “um plasma

visguento se descostura e alaga margens rasas debruadas de lama” ‘a slimy plasma

unravels itself and dissolves the riverbank’ (Averbuck 228). These changes suggest that

what the poet is after in these revisions is the same thing that the poetic voice struggles so

mightily to describe in the poem: a forest in some way invested with mind.

Animacy and Stagnancy: Ingredients of an Interpretative Suspension

I what remains of this chapter, I focus intently on the language of animacy that

Bopp so continuously revisited in what, I argue, is a poetic return to questions of mind

and agency of the physical environment. This process of linguistic return, initially visible

by way of the alterations between editions examined above, is a powerful driver of both

the curious narrative circling and the eerie tone conveyed in the poem as a whole.

My revised reading of Cobra Norato revolves a re-reading of two complementary

aspects of its poetics: 1) the active character (read as agency) of its environment; and 2)

the corresponding stalling (read as incapacity) of its poetic subject. In doing so, my

analysis modifies standing readings of two important textual elements: its imagery of the

natural environment, often described as “anthropomorphic,” and its narrative structure,

commonly characterized as “epic.” In the case of the former, Bopp’s renditions of

scheming trees, whispering stars, and embracing vegetation should not be read as

examples of anthropomorphism or personification but rather as part of a sincere account

to express the lived experience of a forest in some way invested with mind. In the case of

Schiess 49

the latter, I argue that the poetic subject’s experience in the forest serves to undermine the

poem’s ostensibly epic form.

It is common for readers of Cobra Norato to see the work as an epic; however,

this often occurs without a thorough investigation of the premises for classifying it as

such (Holanda 61; Garcia 43; Cavalcanti 64).The poem indeed shares certain narrative

features with the trajectory of the classic epic form: a hero on a journey, the facing of

trials, the achievement of an objective and a final resolution in which the hero rests at

last. At least initially, the poem’s quest-structure seems to conform to certain conventions

of the epic narrative form, the most important of which is a setting-in-motion of the hero:

in the poem’s opening lines, the lyric subject sets out through a “cyphered forest” to look

for a kidnapped princess, whom he hopes to marry. To do this, he first murders a local

enchanted entity, the eponymous “Snake Norato,” and assumes both his name and his

identity by slipping into the mythical snake’s “silken elastic skin” (I.16). He then

proceeds to strike a deal with the spirits of the forest, who outline the trials he must

undergo, before setting off in search of the object of his desire.

Despite a seemingly epic setup, little happens throughout much of the poem (Sá

209). The ostensible hero eventually succeeds in liberating the princess from her captor,

the evil Boiuna or Big Snake; however, for most of the poem he is remarkably un-heroic.

In twenty-two of the poem’s thirty-three sections, he is given to wandering, losing his

way, and indulging in fits of lyric pining. He finds himself mostly adrift in a

disconcerting environment where trees reach upward, roots bite down into the earth, birds

and animals chatter, voices reverberate, and the river surges, displaces, destroys and

rebuilds. In contrast to this background of action, the narrator merely meanders, often

Schiess 50

lamenting having lost his way, a fact that conveys a lack of agency and competence.

Given the reliance of developmentalist rhetoric in Brazil on narratives of progress,

Bopp’s contortion of linear progress throws notions of advancing modernity into doubt.

Madureira and Sá have underscored the tension between motion and stasis in

Cobra Norato, and they have pointed out how this tension undercuts any claim to epic

heroism in the poem. I am certainly indebted to their readings; however, I am more

interested in linking the tension to which they point to deeper ontological and descriptive

crises. Madureira, for example, offers a reading that is distinct from my own in two

specific ways. In the first place, he focuses on a stasis that sets in at the end of the poem,

after the hero has rescued the princess and his journey has ended. Madureira identifies the

hero’s journey through the forest as a quest for modernity, according to which the hero’s

progress through a chaotic landscape (associated with peoples of the past) sends him

toward a bright new future of order and management. He considers the hero to be moving

capably until he is seduced by the princess and by preguiça, the latter an eroticized torpor

associated with the tropics. an undercurrent of skepticism toward the atavistic and a

related, eugenically-inflected distrust of the native. The hero’s journey, then, results not

in a triumphant homecoming but in failure: in the Homeric terms used by the poem’s

early critics, we might say that he reaches the land of the lotus-eaters and never leaves.

There is a good deal to be said about the hero’s journey in Cobra Norato;

however, I am most interested in the many verses of aimless wandering. I see these as the

poem’s gravitational center, even if readers tend to be put off by the sense of narrative

stalling that occurs in them. By lingering over these long delays in the journey, where the

Schiess 51

forest blocks any conventional sense of forward movement, we may in fact come to

understand what it is that the poetic voice labors to render into language.

Sá is perhaps the only critic to have addressed the poem’s narrative stagnation,

and she quite rightly links this to Bopp’s near-obsession with referentiality and

description: “[the] parts of the poem that narrate the travels of the poetic ‘I’ are for the

most part taken up by descriptions of the Amazon at various times of day and night, and

under various atmospheric conditions; […] one could be justified in thinking that

Norato’s epic journey is just an excuse to present the reader with forest landscapes” (212-

15). Bopp’s own reflections on the poem’s composition confirm Sá’s hunch: “A

impressão da vida vegetal amazônica formou uma das primeiras sementes do poema […].

Numa desordem de ideias, fui dando forma às impressões colhidas em frequentes

viagens, de canoa, rio-abaixo, rio-acima, procurando representar a floresta no seu sentido

telúrico” ‘My impressions of Amazonian vegetal life sowed the first seeds of the poem

[...] In a disordered environment of ideas, I began giving form to the impressions I had

collected over my frequent canoe trips up and down the river, trying to represent the

forest in its telluric sense’ (Vida e morte 60). In another setting, Bopp points out that

“depois de preparar cenários mágicos, que tomam parte nos próprios episódios do poema,

tratei de compor a sua trama” ‘After first creating the magical scenes that take part in the

various episodes of the poem, I undertook to create its plotline’ (Movimentos 133-34).

Together with Bopp’s recollections, Sá’s assessment brings an important detail to the

fore: the poem’s narrative stagnation and the poetic voice’s fraught attempt to pack the

forest into language are, in essence, two sides of the same coin—unable to be able to

describe what he sees, the narrative voice remains suspended in a state of thwarted

Schiess 52

interpretation. Put another way, the environment shifts from object to subject and

effectively interrupts and even confounds Bopp’s poetic voice.

In speaking of the forest as poetic subject, it is important to move past

conventional notions of anthropomorphism, although this concept holds an outsized place

in the critical tradition on Cobra Norato. It is perhaps understandable that critics might

see Bopp’s poetic animation of the forest as an example of anthropomorphism.

Throughout the poem, after all, the forest and actors within it routinely engage in activity

normally reserved for humans: trees dream, frogs spy on passers-by, and stars whisper to

each other. A close reading of such passages, however, reveals anthropomorphism to be a

highly reductive and even deceptive concept.

Briefly stated, anthropomorphism designates a narrative technique by which the

human author imposes their own form, or breathes their own essence into the nonhuman

environment, while simultaneously conveying that this is done inappropriately. The

talking, reasoning animals of the Amazonian stories recorded by Amorim operate

unproblematically in this way, just as they do in the Pañcatantra or Kalila wa Dimna. So

what is meant by “inappropriate”? The terms by which this is determined are often

contradictory and overly dependent on the subjective (and often ideological) whims of

the reader. In posthumanist critique, to take a contemporary example, there is a consistent

critique of representations of the nonhuman world that are imagined too closely through

the lens of the human. By casting nonhumans as humans in animal clothing, these

representations assumedly maintain (arrogant) humanity as the universal form for

animacy.4 As a corollary of this, the use of anthropomorphism often functions as a

policing term that sidelines agentive depictions of non-humans into nonrational

Schiess 53

categories like the fantastical, childish, “primitive,” or folk, and their associated

subgenres: fable, myth, cartoons, satire, science fiction and magical realism (Huggan and

Tiffin 152).

Even bracketing off the troubles that seem always to accompany

anthropomorphism, it is worth questioning whether such a technique even finds

expression in Cobra Norato. Let us take as an example, a brief description of daybreak:

“A madrugada vem se mexendo detrás do mato / Clareia / Os céus se espreguiçam”

‘Dawn comes stirring itself beyond the forest / It brightens / The skies stretch and yawn’

(XXI.1-4). Here Bopp sketches out the shapes and events of the physical environment in

terms that give motion and voice to the forest’s nonhuman entities, but without

constraining them to uniquely human forms. One finds another example of this in Bopp’s

earlier account of the tidal phenomenon of pororoca: “O mar está se aprontando / para

receber as águas vivas / de contrato com a lua […]/ o mangue pediu terra emprestada /

pra construir aterros gosmentos / brigam raízes famintas” ‘The sea prepares itself / to

receive the live waters / in a deal with the moon [...] the mangroves asked to borrow land

/ to build slimy dumping grounds / hungry roots bicker’ (XX.2-9). Here again, what is at

stake are not the human attributes of the forest, or even some fully-formed or a priori

mode of action and interaction. What one finds in these passages, and throughout Cobra

Norato, is Bopp’s deep engagement with the very question of subjectivity, and of who or

what can speak for itself within the bounds of a modern(ist) poem. In literal terms, Bopp

calls the very notion of “subject”—its parameters, its ontological and pragmatic scope—

into question.

Schiess 54

There is, perhaps logically, a very tight and well-established link between

“anthropomorphism,” understood as a figurative device that gives nonhumans attributes

judged to be proper only to humans, and non-Western world views. Given Bopp’s

extensive use of Tupi vocabulary and the important role played in the poem by characters

borrowed from Amazonian myth, it makes sense to explore further the question of

subjectivity and representation in terms of Cobra Norato’s relation to indigenous

ontologies. This is Sá’s main task as she details the many important differences between

representations in the poem and the human-like characters that populate Upper Rio Negro

mythology that are the presumed source of the title character.5 In particular, Sá questions

long-held assumptions in the critical tradition that Bopp’s non-humans “function as

primary characters” (Garcia 22), and that they somehow represent “the native expression

of Nheengatu mythology, translated in its pure form” (Averbuck 87).

There are two main ethnocentric tendencies running through readings that see

Bopp’s representation of the non-human as a more or less “pure” expression of

indigenous thought. The first of these, as Sá notes, is that these readings accept Bopp’s

moving, speaking forest as an unproblematic representation of what anthropologists now

refer to as relational ontologies. The second emerges through a subtle or even explicit

dismissal of these ontologies by non-indigenous observers. In the case of Lígia Averbuck,

her analysis is generally positive with respect to emergent and non-rational points of

view. That said, her classification of Cobra Norato’s “anthropomorphism” as a hinge

linking an “inoffensive tale for children” to the expression of the “simplicity” of an

indigenous culture “in the infancy of humanity” also invokes, like early theories of

cognition, a conflation of animist thought and infantile psychology (Averbuck 110).6

Schiess 55

Abílio Guerra’s defense of what he sees as the critical and rational character of Bopp’s

poetic processes is even clearer in emphasizing what he sees as a necessary separation

between artist and the “Other” point of view he consciously seeks to recreate through

poetry. Guerra avers that Bopp “consciously employs the language” [of animism,]

“because it effectively expresses the primitive mentality. At its root, it is a very realist

and conventional choice” (183). By stressing the rational creative processes of realist

representation, Guerra displaces multispecies relationality as a belief held by

“primitives;” and argues forcibly against any notion that Bopp himself was taken in by

this or any other irrational mental process.

Sá’s careful analysis of the Upper Rio Negro myth cycles involving Cobra Norato

ultimately discredits any close relation between “[t]he dialogic and human-like behavior

of nature in Cobra Norato” and indigenous sources; she finds, for example, that the

poem’s primary animal character, Compadre Tatú, behaves more like a page in a

medieval knight’s tale, à la Sancho Panza to Don Quijote, than like an armadillo. For that

reason she finds the relationship between the animal character and Cobra Norato to be a

stock trope from European literature, rather than reflecting the “complex and varied”

relations between humans and nonhumans to be found in the mythology of the Upper Rio

Negro (Sá 213). This then leads Sá to follow Guerra and consider Bopp’s imagery as

essentially mimetic; and these representations are, in her opinion, fundamentally visual.

As she puts it, the purpose of rendering trees as “pregnant” and “napping,” for example

(“onde as velhas árvores prenhas cochilam” ‘where the pregnant old trees doze’), has

more to do with conjuring the still shape of their bulging silhouettes (such as that of the

thick-trunked ficus) than with investing them with “higher” animacy traits. Such a

Schiess 56

reading subsumes the possibility of an authentic poetic engagement with alternative

understandings of mind and matter into questions of metaphorical representation.

Sá sees the object of Bopp’s fascination to be the exotic forest of travel literature

and landscape photography. My argument moves in quite the opposite direction. Bopp’s

imagery is more fascinating than exoticized, and more eerie than luxurious. Indeed, the

distanced stance of the photographer helps us to imagine everything that this voice lacks:

his safe remove behind the lens of his camera; the mechanical ease with which his

representative machine can point, focus, and record; the confidence with which he snaps

a shot, and moves on. All of these features are precisely what Cobra Norato loses, or

cedes, as he immerses himself in the forest.

Sá’s and Guerra’s approach to Cobra Norato and indigenous Amazonian culture

rests on the notion of a writing/poetic subject who maintains a critical and disconnected

stance with respect to their environment. I disagree with this framing, in large measure

because I see in Cobra Norato a deep immersion in the environment that is not merely

figurative or even disinterested. In the end, Bopp sets out not to conjure with images of

Amazonian otherness but rather to explore in a serious way the subjectivity of objects.

Put another way, Cobra Norato is perhaps closest to alternative ontologies when it is not

attempting to translate Amerindian myth but rather when it records the experience of a

Western subject as that subject comes to realize that they are surrounded by other forms

of subjectivity. He is slowed up by a forest that will not “let [him] through:”

Erva-picão me arranhou

Caules gordos brincam de afundar na lama

Galhinhos fazem psiu

Schiess 57

Deixa eu passar que vou pra longe

Moitas de tiririca entopem o caminho [...]

O resto da noite me enrola

A terra perde o fundo

Um charco de umbigo mole me engole. (III.2-6, 12-14)

[Prickle-grass scratches at me.

Thick stalks play at sinking in mud.

Thin little branches say psssst.

Let me through, I have far to go.

Thickets of tirirca enclose the path. […]

The rest of the night envelops me.

The earth loses its floor.

A soft-naveled swamp swallows me whole.]

This short section from the poem’s third canto illustrates several of the ways in which the

forest detains the subject. The forest physically impedes him at times: “Thickets of tirirca

enclose the path” and, more threateningly, “a soft-naveled swamp swallows me up.”

Even so, the more pervasive mode of delay is enchantment—a more metaphysical, yet

nonetheless active, process of involvement.

Signs of the imposter’s diminished puissance appear immediately as the voice

proceeds into the forest in the guise of his victim. In the closing lines of the poem’s first

canto, the fading power of the poetic subject is figured as a loss of the “strength” of

contact between his body and the material world: “O sono escorregou nas pálpebras

pesadas / Um chão de lama rouba a força dos meus passos” ‘Sleep slips over my heavy

Schiess 58

lids / A floor of mud steals the strength of my steps’ (I.21-22). A corresponding loss of

sight and consciousness mirrors this (sleep slips over my heavy lids), while the opening

line of the second canto further amplifies the subject’s difficulty in discerning and

decoding his environment: “Começa agora a floresta cifrada” ‘This is where the ciphered

forest begins’ (II.1). The correspondence between problems of vision and a difficulty in

progressing persists throughout the poem. Beyond these problems of vision, however,

Bopp also frequently invokes the more visceral senses of smell, sound, touch and, more

to the point, a sixth sense: a sense of eerie disquiet, of being watched or of being in a

place where things are not what they seem.

Turning back to line twelve of canto three (“O resto da noite me enrola” ‘The rest

of the night envelops me’), it is worth focusing on the verb enrolar, which encodes a

diffused intentionality that matters for the sense of disquiet that Bopp produces. Literally

meaning “to roll up” or to wrap into a ball or coil, when used as a transitive verb it also

colloquially designates a complex action of deception and evasion toward its grammatical

object, similar to the English “to dupe X” or “to give X the run-around.” The indirect but

effective impediment conveyed by enrolar brings to light a particular use of the concept

of agency currently in circulation in literary studies and the ecological humanities. In this

view, agency is not merely the capability of producing a physical effect (the way a

barking dog, a hunting jaguar, or a light-seeking plant might all be said to be agents in an

environment). Instead, much as the use of the word “agent” in economic theory muddles

the concept of action by designating someone who acts on behalf of another, the human

and nonhuman agents in Cobra Norato:

Schiess 59

[…] are no longer the agents/authors of action. [Rather,] they are also

caught up in a system of relations that shifts the place and authority of

action and modifies (or even completely muddles, [as] in its use in

economic theory), the definition of action. In its contemporary uses,

‘agency’ is thus the point where the dualisms action/passion and

agent/patient are erased, and also where the subject/agent is defined in a

new way. (Balibar and Laugier 17)

The diffused construction of agency throughout the poem, clearly in view in the segment

from canto three that I have discussed here, goes a long way toward re-routing the most

common rubric for assessing Bopp’s poetics: the device of anthropomorphism. Like the

term “anthropomorphic” itself, the few existing studies addressing the presence of Bopp’s

active images deflect the notion that the poet earnestly experienced the forest as

unsettlingly, eerily, actually animate in ways that breach the Western category of matter.

This leads one to speculate that the avoidance or re-domestication of poetic devices that

“level up” the agency of nonhuman entities is similar to the “critical embarrassment”

noted by Jonathan Culler regarding the study of lyric apostrophe. Culler notes that the

reluctance on the part of critics to discuss apostrophe, where the poet “addresses the

objects of the universe [as] potentially responsive forces,” reflects a desire to give wide

berth to a “categorical mistake” regarding the former’s ability to respond (139). As Culler

puts it, apostrophe is a “mistake” that, if taken seriously, risks stripping the poet of their

rational faculties (139). The concern here is with a device that regards the nonhuman

world as potentially responsive, and so it is even more a matter of apprehension for a

poetic device like Bopp’s that has the “objects of the universe” quite clearly talking back.

Schiess 60

Plumwood similarly notes the delegitimizing power of anthropomorphism, noting

that authors’ “attempts to apply intentional terms for the non-human” are often

characterized by critics as “presenting [non-humans in unduly humanlike terms” (452).

This particular formulation of anthropomorphism underscores the extent to which our

perceptions of human vs. non-human capabilities are encoded in language; that the types

of predicate that we deem appropriate for any given grammatical subject are weighed

according to (culturally specific) continuums dictating the degree of intentionality that

may be attributed to different categories of matter. In a recent study of contemporary art

and pop culture, Mel Y. Chen re-emphasizes the importance of language to assessments

of animacy, noting that the first studies to propose and map the “animacy hierarchies” as

continuums were ethno-linguistic ones (2). Chen then goes on to speak of “animacy

transgressions,” or strategic moves, in art and rhetoric, that present the viewer/reader with

a critical confrontation between presumably human and nonhuman traits (2). Chen

stresses the discomfort experienced by a viewer or reader when faced with the

incongruous pairing of animal/human or animate/inanimate traits, and it makes sense to

view Cobra Norato not as (yet another) experiment in anthropomorphism but as an

artistic transgression that questions the objectification of marginalized regions and

populations.

Nature’s Interruption: Voice, Noise and the Fading Subject

One of the most radical ways in which Cobra Norato stages the confrontation

between animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman is through a strategic confusion of

voice and noise. Bopp’s forest is a noisy place, where the onomatopoeia of animal sounds

Schiess 61

and vegetal rustlings mixes with dialogic voices emitted by trees, rivers, frogs, and the

narrator’s traveling companion, the tatu-da-bunda-seca or dry-bottomed armadillo. In

addition, there are many questions and commands that seem to be disembodied, ambient

to the forest itself. Enmeshed in this atmosphere of sonic confusion, the poetic voice is

subject to enchantment in the most literal, etymological sense: in-cantare. The forest

sings out a (noisy) spell that worries and interrupts the poetic subject, rendering him an

enrolado.

A detailed description of the web of communication present in the poem reveals

that it is one of the most politically radical aspects of Cobra Norato. One reason for this

claim is that there is no clear division between the types of entities that can communicate

with one another, and even more importantly, no clear distinction between symbolic and

other types of expression. There is likewise no distinction between the “voice” that

speaks in language and the “noise” produced by other vocalizations. One begins to see

this confusion in the following lines, typical of the poem’s many constructions of non-

dialogic voice:

Sapo sozinho chama chuva

No fundo

uma lâmina rápida risca o mato

Trovãozinho ronca: já vou

Vem de longe

um trovão de voz grossa resmungando (VII.15-20)

[A forsaken frog requests rain.

Deep within,

Schiess 62

A quick blade cuts the forest.

A thunder-rumble rasps: Here I come.

It comes from far away,

A thick-voiced thunderclap grumbling.]

In the thirteenth canto, a similar feature emerges: “Rios escondidos sem filiação certa /

vão de muda nadando nadando / Entram resmungando mato adentro” ‘Hidden rivers of

uncertain lineage / Carry on changing, swimming, swimming, / Move muttering into the

jungle’ (XIII.8-10). In these lines, muttering, rasping and complaining are all forms of

communication in which affect can be conveyed without words. Nevertheless, these

terms denote purposeful, if not necessarily linguistic (and therefore presumptively

“human”) communication, a fact that orients these sonic images away from mere mimesis

and toward a broader poetic construction of voice. As I show below, the radical aspect of

the forest’s sonic vortex comes more clearly into view as it entangles not only human and

nonhuman communication but also European and Amerindian languages.

A second feature of the poem supporting the notion of the importance of voice is

that the forest constantly addresses the narrator, slowing him down and forcing him to

attend to its strange call. From the very first sections of Cobra Norato, the voices of the

forest call out to the poetic subject, catching him up in a web of call and response that

leaves his subject position uncertain. At times these voices tempt, interrogate, or

command the narrator: “—Onde vais, Cobra Norato? / Tenho aqui três arvorezinhas à tua

espera” ‘Where are you headed, Cobra Norato? / I have three young trees, and they’re

waiting for you’ (II.30-32). At various stages along his journey, the poetic subject

overhears language in the forest; in others, he comes to suspect that he is being

Schiess 63

addressed: “Correm vozes em desordem / Berram: não pode!/ --Será comigo?”

‘Disordered voices come running / Shouting: No, you can’t! / “Are they talking to me?”

(VI.15-17). At other moments, forest creatures hail the narrator in suspicion: “Espia-me

um sapo sapo / ‘Aqui tem cheiro de gente / --Quem é você?’” ‘A froggy-frog spots me. /

“Smells like people here: / Who are you?”’ (IV.17-20). The forest, that is, sees him as an

intruder (or, one might say, smells him out), and it demands an explanation.

Such a reading reverses Schüller’s argument that in Cobra Norato “trees and

rivers […] speak because the poet interrogates them” (Bopp, Mironga 3). To the contrary,

the masculine-gendered poetic subject finds himself addressed in the second person, his

privileged subject position upended by a forest that interpellates him. This observation

leads one to ask whether Bopp’s representation of nature as animate and vocative is a

mere poetic device linked to the European tradition (prosopopeia), or is it expressive of

something deeper and more immediate, an experience had or affect felt by the poetic

voice that is related to, though not wholly consistent with, Amerindian forms of thought.

When taken as a whole, the semiotic continuum within Cobra Norato subtly

undermines the distinctions that separate human from nonhuman communication and

recalls current anthropological work conducted among indigenous Amazonian peoples.

Bopp’s provocation of the human-nonhuman divide is particularly resonant with Eduardo

Kohn’s formulation, based on his study of the Runa in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, of an

“ethnography of the nonhuman.” Rather than reconfiguring this distinction based on the

biological embeddedness of the human within a greater ecology (a stance that is familiar

within the environmental conservation movement), Kohn takes the opposite approach,

arguing in a Peircian vein that representing the world in thought and in communication is

Schiess 64

not a humans-only activity: “the recognition of representational processes as something

unique to, and in a sense synonymous with, life allows us to situate distinctively human

ways of being in the world as both emergent from and in continuity with a broader living

semiotic realm. […] [L]ife and thought are one and the same. Life thinks, and thought is

alive” (15-16). As Kohn puts it, it is within the non-linguistic modes of communication

where humans and nonhumans inhabit the same semiotic space and relating becomes

possible: “Semiosis (the creation and interpretation of signs) permeates and constitutes

the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic properties that multi-

species relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensible” (9).

The artistic and philosophical provocation caused by the communicative web in

Cobra Norato is thus doubly political. On one hand, the poem’s semiotic continuum

allows that alternative constructions of the human-nonhuman relation, like the one

described by Kohn in relation to the Runa, are not merely the “infantile” representation of

a world that is misapprehended by the “primitive” mind. On the other, the fact that the

poem’s web of address also entwines European and Amerindian languages means that the

poem’s critical confusion of voice and noise maps onto a long history of colonial power

relations in which indigenous languages were demoted to the level of “mere sound.” In

Brazil, the figuration of indigenous language as noise dates at least back to the

seventeenth-century sermons of Padre António Vieira: “Por vezes me aconteceu estar

com o ouvido aplicado à boca do bárbaro, e ainda do interprete, sem poder distinguir as

sílabas, nem perceber os vogais ou consoantes de que se formavam” ‘At times it

happened that I placed my ear near the mouth of a barbarian, and also near that of the

interpreter, without being able to distinguish the syllables nor pick up the vowels and

Schiess 65

consonants from which they were formed’ (A. Vieira 7). For Vieira, the utterances of

“the barbarian” are so devoid of semiotic content that they not only lack the constituent

parts of spoken language (syllables, vowels and consonants); they cannot even be forced

sufficiently into the structure of another language by an interpreter to make them

comprehensible to the listener.

The incorporation of indigenous and popular speech patterns and linguistic tokens

is admittedly a common feature of many works of the Latin American vanguard.

Although this practice sought to create a new and unified national voice by bringing

together the divergent expressions of social strata and marginalized ethnic groups at the

dawn of a new century, Vicky Unruh underscores that its revolutionary aspect was not

limited to the spirit of class and ethnic inclusion that it was meant to conjure. Instead, the

incorporation of these words that were “designated on one level as familiarly and

collectively ‘ours,’ into profoundly unfamiliar literary contexts and to readers for whom

they would be strange” creates sonic and cognitive dissonance that “call[s] to attention

language’s foreign substance” (247-48). The result is a defamiliarization of all language.

In the case of Cobra Norato, Bopp’s specific procedure of navigating the boundaries

between European and native languages, between local variances and national norms,

effects a productive confrontation between the sound and the sense of language.

The poem’s many examples of un-glossed and untranslated Tupi words for local flora,

fauna, cultural practices and divine beings take part in a signifying hide-and-seek, where

the phantasm of fugitive meaning plays ambivalently on colonial power relations of

language. Such an interplay of sound and sense is evident in these lines, where the

grammatical scaffolding of Portuguese allows the non-local reader to skate along while

Schiess 66

the full mimetic impact of the lines remains muted: “Alarmam-se tiriricas / As

saracurinhas piam piam piam/ Guariba lá adiante puxa reza” ‘The tiriricas send up an

alarm / Little saracurinhas cry piu piu piu. / Up ahead a guariba prays. (VIII. 10,12). For

the coastal reader, Bopp’s images remain partially veiled by the obscurity of his Tupi

vocabulary: knowing that tiriricas are a type of flexible reed would allow for a visual and

audio appreciation of the plants swaying and hitting one another; while understanding

that a guariba is a type of monkey would produce an image of the animal seemingly bent

in prayer.

Throughout Cobra Norato, the forest’s voices interrogate the visitor (both directly

and indirectly), demanding that he slow himself down and attend to its strange call. The

poet’s procedure for incorporating Tupi vocabulary enacts a similar experience upon the

reader. Meaning slips away from the poet’s lettered audience as Tupi terms become mere

noise to the Portuguese-speaking reader: they are sensible and call for interpretation but

cannot quite be apprehended. Such a procedure deliberately sidesteps the “necessarily

Baroque” solution to the problem of cultural-linguistic interpretation described by Alejo

Carpentier:

The word pino is enough to show us a pine; the word palmera is enough to

define, to show a palm. But the word ceiba—the name for an American

tree that Cuban blacks call, ‘the mother of trees’—does not allow people

from other latitudes to see the rostral column of that gigantic tree. […]

This can only be accomplished through the precise polarization of various

adjectives, or to elude the adjective, by the adjectival use of certain nouns

so that these take on a metaphorical character. If one has luck—now

Schiess 67

speaking in literary terms—the purpose will be achieved. The object lives,

it is contemplated, it allows itself to be weighed. But the prose that gives it

life and consistency, weight and measure, is baroque, necessarily baroque.

(35-37)

In contrast to Carpentier’s formulation, Bopp’s poetics eschews the weight and measure

of excessive linguistic scaffolding. Instead, his election to leave these signifiers

deliberately opaque points emphatically to the desire to use these words as they are, at the

risk and with the intention of being unclear; and it leaves readers, not unlike Bopp’s

poetic persona, to fend for themselves among unknown terms.

The Deixis of the Real

I have argued so far that Bopp’s particular use of the vocative and sonic

confusion, the circling—both spatial and descriptive—of its poetic voice, and its uncanny

imagery are indices of a source of disquiet. The forest’s persistent interruption of the

poetic subject, its immanence, and the poetic subject’s awareness that he is the object of

its scrutinizing gaze all interfere with that subject’s ability to move through the poetic

environment. In this concluding section, I show that these relations also interfere with the

poet’s ability to represent that environment in language. For if the forest has its many

eyes on the poetic subject as he shuffles through its space, the latter also gazes intently

back at it. And despite his inability to “see” clearly, the subject labors repeatedly to

present what he sees in poetic language.

The poetic subject’s frustrated labor manifests itself in a series of poetic quirks

that are likely the best indication that Cobra Norato is indeed the record of an ontological

Schiess 68

crisis. These textual flaws and repetitions, jarring disruptions of the “smooth continuity of

representation” constitute what Aaron Dunckel refers to as a “deixis of the real,” a phrase

Dunckel uses to describe strips of text that point to an expressive anxiety. As he presents

it: “We know we are in the presence of the real when mimesis breaks down—that is to

say, the real is precisely that which is not represented but rather indicated by

representation’s failure” (217). Cobra Norato manifests so many such representative

breakdowns that one is hard-pressed not to see these as a “pointing-to” a phenomenon

that outstrips semantico-referential meaning. Read in this way, Cobra Norato’s glitches

and flaws point to something outside the poem; to an affect or experience that refuses to

be packed back into language: specifically, the experience of the nonhuman environment

as radical alterity (Dunckel 211).

These flaws manifest primarily as a series of repeating and shuffled terms

throughout the poem’s descriptive scenes. Significantly for my argument, the shuffling

takes place exclusively between grammatical subjects that are nonhuman, such as plants,

animals and waterways, and predicates that are usually reserved in Western cultures for

human actors. Over and over, these nonhuman subjects and (assumedly) human

predicates are repeated and recombined in a fugue of iterative images. In just one group

of examples, we see “um fio de água atrasada lambe a lama” ‘A stream of water running

late licks the loam’ (II.6), while further on “raízes desdentadas mastigam lodo”

‘Toothless roots chew on mud’ (IV.6), “raízes com fome mordem o chão” ‘hungry roots

bite at the ground’ (VII.8) and “o charco desdentado rumina lama” ‘the toothless bog

ruminates on mud’ (XVII.6). At one point, it is the narrator who chews on the forest:

“me misturo no ventre do mato mordendo raízes” ‘blending into the belly of the brush;

Schiess 69

biting roots’ (I.4), while shortly the tables turn and he is consumed: “um charco de

umbigo mole me engole” ‘a soft-naveled swamp swallows me whole’ (III.14).

These slightly altered repetitions of particular words and images suggest that

Bopp’s so-called anthropomorphism is in fact a literary manifestation of wonder, doubt,

and ultimately of the interplay between descriptive failure and compulsion. On a

structural plane, these repetitions with variation come to suggest both an overlapping of

space (as in travelling in a circle) and an elasticity of time (as in déjà vu.) The circular

path constructed by these repetitions recalls the man wandering through the forest who is

unsure of his bearings, questioning whether he has already seen this tree, this bog, this

stretch of river, who may well be traveling in circles, and who has lost track of time.

Formally, they recreate ontological and descriptive uncertainty: Bopp’s repetitive,

reshuffled, and animated figurings of nature reveal a node of expression at work, a stone

in the shoe of the poet that produces an expressive blister.

In Cobra Norato, there is a ghost in the machine of representation that can’t be

fixed by human techné. Just as the poetic persona is unable to move properly across the

terrain he encounters, so too does the poetic voice falter and repeat itself, effectively

stuttering as it circles an unnamed center of gravity. “Nothing but this circulating around

an unnamed middle could convey such ambivalence,” wrote the poet Rosmarie Waldrop

(58). Cobra Norato’s ambivalent circling traces the return of the poetic subject to a site of

unease, a disquiet whose source is the linguistic ineffability of the object but also of the

subject’s relation to that object. The uncanny effect of Bopp’s pairing of nonhuman

subjects with predicates of human behavior, then, is not only produced by the cognitive

dissonance that comes from these juxtapositions, but by the fact that the reader is swept

Schiess 70

up with the poetic voice into a spiraling temporal, linguistic and visual disorientation that

circles around the status of the nonhuman.

A final return to Bopp’s published archive reinforces such a notion. In 1932, he

had again taken to the road; this time on an international trip to Asia, Africa, and Europe.

In a letter posted in Mombasa, he wrote to friends in Brazil including the author Jorge

Amado, consigning to them a new group of poems for publication. But like a spurned

lover, even as he details the qualities of his new literary relationship, he cannot resist

returning to the subject of Cobra Norato:

Não reneguei a Norato, apesar do seu fracasso, porque para mim ela vale

como a tragédia da maleita, cocaína amazônica. Com toda a indiferença

que teve (salvo um grupo num perímetro pessoal), ela é meu Don Quixote

de la Mancha. Eu quero é a filha da rainha Luzia. Obsessão sexual.

Druídica. Esotérica. Ela tem um ar de livro de criança. Quente e colorido.

Mas no fundo representa a minha tragédia das febres. A maior volta ao

mundo que eu dei foi no Amazonas. Canoa de vela. Pé no chão ouvindo

aquelas mil e uma noites tapuias. Febre e cachaça. O mato e as estrelas

conversando em voz baixa. Esse outro [Urucungo] é um livro fácil.

Fracionado. Consciente. O outro [Cobra Norato] não fui eu que fiz.

Instinto puro. Bruto. (Poesia completa 218)

[I never renounced Norato, despite its [critical] failure, because for me it

weighs with the tragedy of an affliction; Amazonian cocaine. With all the

indifference it inspired (except within a small group of acquaintances, it is

my Don Quijote de la Mancha. What I want is Queen Luzia’s daughter. A

Schiess 71

sexual obsession. Druidic. Esoteric... It has the feel of a children’s book...

Hot and flushed. But at its root it represents my fevered tragedy. The

greatest trip around the world I ever took was in the Amazon. Sail-driven

canoes. Feet on the ground listening to those Thousand and One Tapuia

Nights. Fever and cachaça.1 The stars and the sky whispering together.

This book [Urucungo] is facile. Fractured. Conscious. The other one

[Cobra Norato]—it wasn’t me who wrote it. Pure, brute instinct.]

Though not quite the sinister vortex of José Eustacio Rivera’s Amazonia, the textual

forest that emerges in Cobra Norato still exerts a centripetal force that acts upon the

poetic subject. He can neither tame the forest by traveling safely through it, nor can he do

so by fixing it definitively in writing. Nature’s active voice exerts itself, inserts itself into

poeisis: “it wasn’t me who wrote it.”

Seen in this light, Bopp’s Cobra Norato emerges as a record of the speaking

subject’s active involvement in and by an Amazonian environment not in the service of

human material needs or rhetorical deployments. Nor is it an “alterity” that remains

framed, distant, and distinctly unknowable, like the image of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s

Mont Blanc that Dunckel examines. This is the nonhuman environment as the immanent

Other: one that moves, touches, queries, commands and enmeshes the human; that draws

even Western man out of his privileged subject position and allows him the flickering

perspective of what it is like to be an “object.” At the very same time, the face-to-face

with an agentive environment reminds us of the need to respond to its vulnerability:

“nothing but this circulating around an unnamed middle could convey such

ambivalence.”

Schiess 72

The Amazon emerges as a force of creative and metaphysical transformation in

Cobra Norato. In place of familiar renderings of the region as an inferno verde or paraíso

terrestrial, here we see an alien “Nature” acting upon modern man and his culture;

shifting his very experience of reality and imprinting itself upon his expression of that

reality. This is not a case of precious reason slipping away (as in Rivera’s Voragine or

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) Instead, it is a case of a local environment pressing

itself upon the visitor, putting pressure on his ability to express his experience. This

pressure on expression forces a turn to the aesthetic, and it gives aesthetic expression a

form that is, ultimately, an uneasy co-production between self and other, human and

nonhuman, Nature and Culture, between the modernista poet grounded in just such

divisions, and the nonmodern place he encounters.

Coda

Cobra Norato is primarily the story of a shifted (and shifting) relation between

the poetic subject and the various kinds of objects that populate the poem: the object of

his quest, the objects of his description, and the Amazonian forest of the early twentieth

century, an increasingly objectified region that is viewed by a

nationalist/developmentalist apparatus as a collection of exploitable resources. Seen in

this light, the poem gives the attentive reader a model for interrupting familiar, utilitarian

views of the natural world.

The backlash in Brazil against Macron’s 2019 tweet focused, among other points,

on the French president’s use of the word “house”: “Our house is burning.” Reading

Cobra Norato in the “active voice,” that is, “being open to experiences of nature as

Schiess 73

powerful, agentic and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility

and vocabulary” (Plumwood 451), forces us to take stock of notions that the Amazon

region is primarily “for” us. It also urges us to ask ourselves what kind of “house” it is

that we have set on fire. Is it the kind of house that Sigmund Freud evokes in his

etymology of the term Heimlich (homey); a set of “not strange, familiar, tame” physical

surroundings (126), vast and powerful but yet ultimately in our service? The Amazon-as-

house image evoked in the Twitter wars, whether its function is to provide “our” oxygen

or fuel “our” economic machine, would seem to assume so.

But if this public debate construes the Amazon as a house, Cobra Norato cautions

against making ourselves at home. Freud’s figure for the uncanny hinges upon the

interplay between what is effortlessly seen and named and the notion that the familiar

walls of the house obscure something more sinister, “removed from the eyes […] hidden,

secret”—something we might wish had remained unseen (133-34). Pivoting on this sense

of unease, Cobra Norato flips the homely environment to reveal its unnerving counter-

face: the poem’s “unnamed middle,” the one that causes all the circling, is the sense that

the physical environment may have something to say on its own terms regarding the

long-term interactions between our species and the planet. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has

suggested in his discussion of the distinction between historical and geological time, it is

in many ways unthinkable to us that the planet may be indifferent to the scale of human

life and human history (6-9). The forest that Cobra Norato encounters as alterity, that

imprints itself in the text as an unevenness of form, hints at this planetary indifference:

the unthinkable thing, this unnamed entity inside of the house that we thought was

familiar.

Schiess 74

CHAPTER 2

Reflections in the Porta-espelho: Clarice Lispector’s Literary Theory of the Object

“I must study the wardrobe before painting it. What do I see?

I see that the wardrobe appears penetrable because it has a door.

But when I open it, I see that penetration has been put off:

since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door”

(Água Viva 74)

One of twentieth-century Brazil’s foremost literary figures, Clarice Lispector

(1920-1977) is also perhaps the best known Brazilian writer outside of the Portuguese-

speaking world (Moser). A prolific writer whose work spans over three decades (from the

1942 publication of her first novel at age twenty-two to her untimely death in 1977),

Lispector would express by the 1960s a keen frustration with a perceived shortcoming in

her work: for failing, in her own view, to use her fiction to address Brazil’s deeply

entrenched social inequalities. In an autobiographical addendum to the 1964 short-story

collection A legião estrangeira (The Foreign Legion) Lispector confesses her personal

consternation over, as she puts it, “não saber como me aproximar de um modo ‘literário’

(isto é, transformado na veemência da arte,) da ‘coisa social’” (149) ‘not knowing how to

approach in a “literary” fashion (that is, transforming into the vehemence of art), “the

social thing.”’ She further laments:

Desde que me conheço o fato social teve em mim importância maior do

que qualquer outro: em Recife os mocambos foram a primeira verdade

Schiess 75

para mim. Muito antes de sentir "arte,” senti a beleza profunda da luta.

Mas é que tenho um modo simplório de me aproximar do fato social: eu

queria era fazer alguma coisa; como se escrever não fosse fazer. O que não

consigo é usar escrever para isso, por mais que a incapacidade me doa e

me humilhe. O problema de justiça é em mim um sentimento tão óbvio e

tão básico que não consigo me surpreender com ele — e, sem me

surpreender, não consigo escrever. E também para mim escrever é

procurar. O sentimento de justiça nunca foi procura em mim, nunca

chegou a ser descoberto, e o que me espanta é que ele não seja igualmente

obvio em todos. Tenho consciência de estar simplificando primariamente

o problema. [...] É que não se trata de querer, é questão de não poder. Do

que me envergonho, sim, é de não “fazer,” de não contribuir com ações.

(149-50)

[As long as I have known myself the social fact has been more important

to me than any other: in Recife the slums were the first truth for me. Long

before I felt “art,” I felt the profound beauty of the struggle. But I have a

foolish way of approaching the social fact: what I wanted was to “do”

something, as if writing was not doing. What I can’t manage is to use

writing for that, as much as my incapacity hurts and humiliates me. The

problem of justice is in me a feeling so obvious and so basic that I can’t

surprise myself with it—and, without surprising myself, I can’t write. And

also because for me writing is searching. The feeling of justice was never

a search for me, it never had to be discovered, and what astounds me is

Schiess 76

that it is not just as obvious for everyone. I’m aware of oversimplifying

the problem. [..] It’s not a question of not wanting [to contribute to social

justice through writing] but of not being capable of it. What I am ashamed

of, however, is not “doing something,” not contributing with my actions.]

Despite her apparent resignation, Lispector expresses in this passage her previously latent

desire to “do something” with writing that will bear upon matters of social justice. In the

present chapter, I take an approach to the question of alterity and social consciousness in

Lispector’s writing that diverges from those developed over the last few years. Rather

than focusing on Lispector’s works explicitly foregrounding social relations, I analyze

some of her less representational texts for the ways in which they illuminate the

dilemmas of art and social engagement that Lispector describes in the statements above.

My principal concern here are deeper questions of artistic representation and writerly

ethics that might inform our sense of whether, and how well, Lispector was able to

overcome her ambivalence regarding fiction and the “social thing.”

In light of Lispector’s recognition of a gap between her art and her social

conscience, several recent studies have investigated the representations of social

otherness that begin to erupt with increasing intensity in Lispector’s work throughout the

1970s (Moriconi; Kahn; Cabanilles and Lozano de la Pola; Dalcastagnè). Lispector’s

oeuvre, broadly categorized, focuses on the internal experiences and impressions of

female narrators; Ítalo Moriconi has called it a body of work that “stages the limits, the

exhaustion [of the] progressive radicalization of self-reflective writing” (215). In the

1970s, however, her work takes a clear turn. Still as thoroughly self-referential and

subjectivist as ever, the last fictional works that Lispector publishes before her death—A

Schiess 77

via-crucis do corpo (The Via crucis of the Body, 1974) and A hora da estrela (The Hour

of the Star, 1977)—vacillate openly between metanarrative and a new concern with

marginalized figures. Understandably, these are the works that tend to garner the most

critical attention when it comes to Lispector’s social or ethical disposition in her fiction.

A via-crucis, for example, is a collection of short stories that offers a parodic

exposé of sexual desire that is sympathetic to forms of diversity and variation categorized

as deviant (transvestitism, polyamorism, same-sex attraction) or merely aberrant (strong

sexual desire felt by older women, nuns, and unmarried women) in 1970s Brazil. For

Moriconi, the collection signals Lispector’s new willingness to address “the darker

aspects of existence—evil, sin, crime—as the privileged, though not exclusive topics for

literature and art in general” (214). If one draws an analogy between marginalized forms

and marginalized sexual desire, Lispector’s decision in this collection to parody “low”

genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, might also be read as a further

defiance of the exclusion of difference from the normative spheres of both life and

literature.

Neiva Pitta Kadota suggests, however, that “the social thing” is woven into the

structural fabric of Lispector’s work, less a question of its content than its narrative form:

“A concern for social questions manifests itself in the author’s body of work, as glimpses

of submerged coagula of social perturbances that traverse her fiction” (21). Significantly,

Kadota’s analysis leaves out A hora da estrela, focusing on the “introspective” phase that

Moriconi deems prior to Lispector’s pivot toward social questions. Kadota considers

Lispector’s stylistic “transgressions” to be indicative of a rebellion against gendered—

i.e., social—codes of expression: “[Lispector’s] constant employment of rupture from the

Schiess 78

language of power, perhaps responsible for some critics’ classifications of her prose as

intimist, subjectivist, or alienated, is precisely what causes one to question whether this

constitutes an aesthetic positioning that points toward questions of a social nature” (20).

Ana Aparecida Arguelho de Souza agrees, extending Kadota’s analysis of the social

implications of Lispector’s formal choices to Lispector’s most recognizably “social”

novel, A hora da estrela.

Moving back within Lispector’s oeuvre, Gabriel Giorgi detects an ethical impulse

in Lispector’s depictions of female bodies as “less-than-humans,” as “not-yet-humans,” a

designation that crosses class distinctions and unites women with other categories of the

nonhuman. In A paixão segundo G.H. (1964) both the absent maid Janair and the

protagonist herself—whose recollection of a past abortion evokes two “broken bodies,”

her own and that of the fetus—are likened to the crushed cockroach that occupies a

central place in the novel’s narration. As Giorgi has it:

Between the feminine body (evidently defined by the coordinates of class and

race) and the animal body, in this alliance that is also a war or an agonic link, this

individual body-form, this individuality present to itself, isolated and closed, in its

essence, all exterior—is undone. If “human life” is measured in relation to this norm of

individuality, the bios interrogated by Lispector desires to make every return to this

biopolitical measure and norm impossible” (116-17).

Lispector’s unconventional narration, Giorgi suggests, in which the narrating

voice constantly circles and questions itself, is a formal enactment that wraps the writer

into her own interrogation of biopolitical norms:

Schiess 79

Autobiography vs. bio-graphy, the writing of the bios: the question is at

once philosophical and formal, one of the writing of a life without a form,

a life that never ceases to form itself, to conclude itself or to form itself

(determinarse) into a subjectivity, into an I as a privileged form of life.

[…] The bios that Lispector’s writing constantly interrogates is at once the

void and the relation, absence and enmeshing, the passage to a virtual

plane in which the fragility and the power of bodies in relation come into

play. We do not see the living as an interior crease, or as the basis of an

individual body, but rather as the contours of a relation, as an adherence,

as a zone of enmeshing between bodies and between materialities. (117)

Building on these concerns, I trace the extension of this “enmeshing between bodies and

between materialities” beyond the sphere of biological life in Água viva. Moriconi

considers Água viva to be the text that initiates the final phase of Lispector’s work:

having “exhausted” the project of self-writing, “the social thing” moves increasingly into

view. Água viva, then, pushes Lispector’s self-writing to new levels of abstraction, and it

is also ground zero for new concerns.

If one were to attempt to historicize the shift in Lispector’s authorial perspective,

the increased militarization of Brazil’s civil sphere following the 1964 coup would be an

obvious point of departure. In early 1968, the new military president, Arthur Costa e

Silva, began to implement increasingly oppressive tactics against university students, and

while Lispector’s literary and journalistic writing had to this point been notably

apolitical, she now wrote openly in support of students’ rights in her weekly newspaper

column in the Jornal do Brasil. On June 26, 1968, Lispector went even further in her

Schiess 80

efforts to “contribute with actions” by participating in the March of a Hundred Thousand,

a peaceful protest against the killing of a 19-year-old student during a clash with police

over cuts to the subsidized meal program for poor university students. Despite

Lispector’s increasingly visible political stance, the political cartoonist Henfil made her

the object of derision in 1972 by portraying her as “a simple writer about flowers, birds,

people, the beauty of life,” an accusation that Moser has suggested stung Lispector (325).

Whether or not this is true, this moment coincides with the shift in Lispector’s work

toward a more notably social thematic.

It is also tempting to link Lispector’s concern with the social to her own

biography. Born in a rural portion of Ukraine to Jewish parents forced to flee Eastern

Europe to escape widespread pogroms, Lispector spent most of her childhood in Recife, a

former colonial city on the Northeastern coast with an established Jewish community. In

Recife, Lispector’s father worked in the informal economy, mainly as a clothing peddler,

and the author and her two sisters grew up on the precarious edge of poverty. When

Lispector was ten years old, her mother died of syphilis—a disease that had debilitated

her for years and that Lispector’s biographers speculate may have been contracted as a

result of rape at the hands of Russian soldiers (Moser 25-95). Lispector’s childhood

experiences as other—Jewish, immigrant, motherless, poor—offer a suggestive point of

departure for considerations of the writer’s later literary explorations of social exclusion.

The social protection afforded by the Jewish community in Recife, along with

formal instruction at a rigorous Hebrew primary school, offered Lispector and her sisters

the potential for upward social mobility. All three attended prestigious secondary schools

and earned university degrees. Lispector later married a young diplomat, Maury Gurgel

Schiess 81

Valente, and she spent over a decade residing in Europe and the United States. One might

readily speculate that far from assuaging any sense of non-belonging, these experiences

would only serve to amplify it.

My aim in the present chapter is neither to question nor to explain Lispector’s

social conscience but rather to describe how she prepares herself, as a writer, to manage

the intertwining aesthetic and ethical conundrums of representing social alterity. In what

follows, I examine the material objects of Lispector’s “hinge” novel, Água Viva (1973),

as precursors to the objects and representational strategies of A hora da estrela (1977),

her most explicitly “social” work of fiction.

The narrator of Água Viva presents her reader with a paradox: in a novel that

explicitly begins by striving to do away with representational art in the traditional sense,

the narrator nevertheless returns repeatedly to a series of objects that she represents in

painting.7 Caves, a collection of flowers, a church portico, a mirror and eventually, a

wardrobe, all serve as indices for a constellation of artistic and ontological questions

concerning seeing and knowing the nature of the world that lies outside of the self.

Working through Lispector’s earlier exposition of the object-as-such in her short story “O

ovo e a galinha” (The Egg and the Hen), which forms part of her 1964 collection, A

legião estrangeira (The Foreign Legion), I present the last of Água Viva’s objects, the

wardrobe with its mirrored door (the porta-espelho), as particularly emblematic of the

Clarician “theory” of what it is to look at the object and what the nature of that object

itself might be.

In “O ovo e a galinhaLispector traces a theory of art that insists on the integrity of

the object as essentially opaque. My central claim in this chapter, once again, is that

Schiess 82

Lispector’s approach to the artistic object in the mid-1960s can help readers to

understand how she works to prefigure the more explicit ethics of representation that

emerges in her later work, such as A hora da estrela. More or less from Água Viva

forward, Lispector’s object-as-such remains inaccessible beneath (or beyond) its visible

surface; it withdraws or flees under the scrutinizing gaze of the observer. By repeatedly

figuring a general failure to solve the enigma of the object, Lispector prepares her writing

for an ethics of trial-and-error that emerges fully through her complex (in part because it

is deferred) portrayal of Macabéa in A hora da estrela.

The wardrobe in Água Viva that anchors my analysis has a telling antecedent. It

appears in the very first paragraph of Lispector’s debut novel, Perto do coração selvagem

(Near to the Wild Heart, 1944):

A máquina do papai batia tac-tac…tac-tac-tac…O relógio acordou em tin-dlin

sem poeira. O silêncio arrastou-se zzzzzz. O guarda-roupa dizia o que? Roupa-

roupa-roupa. Não não. Entre o relógio, a máquina e o silêncio havia uma orelha à

escuta, grande, cor-de-rosa e morta. Os três sons estavam ligados pela luz do dia e

pelo ranger das folhinhas da árvore que se esfregavam umas nas outras radiantes.

(9)

[Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack... clack-clack-clack ... The clock awoke

in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say?

clothes-clothes-clothes. No, no. Amidst the clock, the typewriter and the silence

there was an ear listening, large, pink and dead. The three sounds were connected

by the daylight and the squeaking of the tree’s little leaves rubbing against one

another radiant. (3)]

Schiess 83

The play of sounds that opens this novel is portentous: the “three sounds” collected here

(the clock, the typewriter, and the silence) announce themes that will provide perceptible

structure to much of Lispector’s work in the years to follow: the fleetingness of time, the

act of writing, and the impossibility of capturing the ineffable in language.8 But amidst

the onomatopoeia of typewriter clacking, clock ticking and silence droning, a fourth

object briefly appears to have a voice: the wardrobe.

Does the wardrobe also speak, the narrator implicitly asks herself, and if it does,

what does it say? The answer is mundane: “Roupa-roupa-roupa” ‘clothes-clothes-

clothes.’ This conjecture is immediately followed by a “No, no” that closes off any

further questioning: whether negating the wardrobe’s capacity to speak or simply

sidelining its contribution as banal, Joana’s response eliminates this object from the

afternoon’s chorus. This wardrobe dutifully fulfills its function (“roupa-roupa-roupa”);

but because it is nothing but what it does, it fails to warrant “listening to.” Thus, while the

questions of literary creation that accrue to the typewriter, the clock, and the silence

become perhaps the central themes of the author’s body of work, the question of what a

wardrobe might have to say resurfaces in Lispector’s work only decades later, when the

wardrobe appears as an uncanny figure for the obscurity of the non-self.

In an important sense, one might see Lispector’s theory of the artistic object as an

extension of her career-long quest to pursue the aspects of existence that cannot be

captured in language: as the child Joana concludes in the opening scene described above,

(14) ‘She would never allow herself to say, even to her father, that she never managed to

catch ‘the Thing.’ Precisely the things that really mattered she couldn’t say’ (6).

According to this view, the category of the object is akin to Lispector’s many enigmatic

Schiess 84

phrases (“as entrelinhas” / the ‘between-the-lines’; “o indizível” / the ‘inexpressive,’ “o

intervalo” / the ‘interval,’ “o It” / the ‘It,’ and “o X” / the ‘X’) through which the author

attempts to represent the non-representable aspects of existence. Plínio Prado sees such

phrases as a mark of Lispector’s commitment to the sublime, and her return to them

across various texts as a gravitation toward “the impalpable, the incomprehensible, the

un-nameable, [in a] tormented attempt to encircle that which simultaneously repulses”

(28). Prado goes on to characterize these repeated attempts to “encircle the un-nameable”

as an “aesthetic of failure” (28).

If “precisely the things that can’t be said” about direct experience preoccupied

Lispector for the bulk of her career, in her late phase the author came to grapple with

aspects of the world outside the self that cannot be shown directly in representation. Água

Viva’s narrator formulates this problem clearly: “Quando se vê o ato de ver não tem

forma—o que se vê às vezes tem forma e às vezes não. O ato de ver é inefável. E às vezes

o que é visto também é inefável” (89) ‘When you see, the act of seeing has no form—

what you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is ineffable.

And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable’ (81). In my analysis, what Lispector’s

rendition of objects in “O ovo e a galinha” and Água viva does for representation (and

eventually for ethics) is what the rest of her “failed” writing does for language: it

performs the limits of knowing and expression as a practice of renewed attempts and

always-partial failures.

Schiess 85

The Hidden in Things and the Hidden in Humans

What do we call Although the wardrobe seemingly lacks the rich trove of

philosophical associations of the object-as-such that accrue to other objects like the jug or

the mirror, Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 Poetique de l’espace (Poetics of Space) stands out

for its brief yet pointed exposition of the psychological functions of boxes, drawers, and

wardrobes in poetry. These, Bachelard tells us, often represent canny, just-so spaces of

order and intimacy, such as in these lines by Colette Wurtz: “Ordonance. Harmonie. /

Piles de draps dans l’armoire, / Lavande dans le linge” ‘Orderliness. Harmony. / Piles of

sheets in the wardrobe / Lavender in the linen’ (Paroles pour l’autre, 26). This is the

function of Lispector’s first wardrobe, the one from Perto do Coração Selvagem that

opens this chapter: a presence so familiar, in fact, that its mundane existence fails to

excite Joana’s interest at all.

Let us return to Bachelard, however. As another example of the just-so pleasure

of boxes, he cites these lines from Arthur Rimbaud: “A box-top that is in good

condition…should have no other desire than to be on its box” (original SOURCE,

French). Bachelard quickly notes, however, that when Rimbaud’s box-top closes over its

contents, the familiar aspects of these spaces shade quickly into the uncanny.9 As he puts

it, “The poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme; namely, that

there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open box” (88). Just a few lines

later, Bachelard goes even further with this idea, directly linking the closed interiors of

the human psyche to those of the objects that surround it. It is for the poet, he suggests, to

open up these interiors: “the hidden in humans and the hidden in things fall under the

same topo-analysis as soon as one enters this strange region of the superlative, a region

Schiess 86

barely studied by psychology” (116). From this, one might ask: on what ground does

Lispector’s concern for “the hidden in humans” intersect with her equally vital concern

for “the hidden in things”?

For Bachelard, a philosopher of science, it would seem that the only shared terrain

between people and things is poetic, tropological: to enter this terrain, we must “écouter

les poètes” ‘listen to the poets’ (89). Is the same also true for Lispector? How might the

analysis of objects in her work from the 1960s prefigure the question of ethics so central

to her work in the 1970s? Can object theory help? Can one consider ethical the expansion

of this theory to the depiction of a human personae? How might one avoid the trap of

dehumanizing or even objectifying a character like A hora da estrela’s Macabéa, a young

woman from an oppressed sector of Brazilian society, when comparing her to the

nonhuman objects that run through Lispector’s work? In the end, as Lúcia Sá has argued,

such comparison merely re-inscribes the objectification of the poor, and particularly the

Northeastern migrant, by Brazil’s elites: “For many generations of Brazilians, especially

those in urban centers, the Northeastern migrant par excellence” is characterized by “the

extreme incapacity for communication […] a lack of vocabulary, limited experiences,

lack of imagination, and the inability to understand or to make oneself understood:” in

short, as a semi-person who is mostly devoid of language and consciousness (58). In Sá’s

view, literary representations of characters like Macabéa and the migrant family in

Graciliano Ramos’s novel Vidas secas (Barren Lives, 1934) are largely responsible for

the perpetration of such stereotypes; it is therefore important that literary criticism avoid

doing the same.

Schiess 87

Before turning directly to Lispector’s texts, it is worthwhile to question the nature

of the relation I propose between Lispector’s literary sketches of objects and her forays

into representing social alterity. Over and above any similarities that one might rightly

draw between Macabéa’s characteristics and those of an object (her relative “muteness,”

for instance, or what the narrator describes as her lack of self-awareness), my reading

focuses instead on the similarities between the procedures Lispector undertakes to see

and represent these two orders of literary “objects.” Second, while it is possible to object

(pace Sá) that such parallels serve to dehumanize Macabéa, I would argue that this is

only partially true, or perhaps only part of the story.

The question of how Lispector’s approach to non-human alterity converges with

her concern for the human other is a timely one. Since the 1990s, there has been a

growing concern, in both the humanities and the social sciences, with establishing a non-

metaphorical ground of correspondence between people and things, often with the

implicit or explicit aim of reformulating our concept of ethics. This has led to a

systematic rethinking of hierarchical human/nonhuman relations from areas as varied as

new materialisms, object-oriented ontology, ecological philosophy, animal studies, and

Amerindian perspectivism. The preoccupation with the relation between the human and

“everything else” is such that Jacques Lezra argues it constitutes the general mood of our

intellectual moment and ‘the current disposition in Anglophone as well as European

academic culture” (14).

Why so much thinking about things? Timothy Morton has described this trend as

a deep- seated “churning” that is indicative of an ontological malaise; a repetitive return

to a site of trauma. But to what trauma exactly? For Lezra, our interest in things

Schiess 88

represents an expression or even a fortification of our interest in ourselves, whereby

categories “such as ‘things,’ ‘objects,’ ‘matter,’ and companion terms rise up like

positive, real conditions to designate the finitude of the human animal” (13-14). For

Morton, quite to the contrary, the return represents “a kind of Stockholm syndrome” vis-

à-vis the tyranny of human-style thought and consciousness; by returning to it time and

again, we betray an underlying rejection of the line that separates humans from the

nonhuman world” (Humankind 54). In quite a different vein from Morton’s speculative

realism, Bill Brown asserts that the allure of things for literature lies in a “vertiginous

capacity” of a thing to be both itself— a useful, uncomplicated material object whose

appeal is a respite from theorizing—and to serve as a “sign (symbol, metonym or

metaphor) of something else” (“Thing Theory” 11).

These brief quotations illustrate some of the fundamental conundrums that arise

when we theorize the thing. Does our current intellectual preoccupation with things

represent a self-serving concern for the human, or are we truly engaged in a

reconsideration of what separates us (or not) from the material world around us? Do

things serve as figures or as exempla that help us to concretize abstract phenomena, or do

they allow us a respite from thinking? The debates surrounding our concerns for “things,

objects, matter, and companion terms” suggest that these questions are, in the last

instance, unresolvable.

Lispector’s objects in Água Viva, and their uncanny similarities to the protagonist

of A hora da estrela, embody many of the same dilemmas. If the literary in general is

more amenable to contradiction than philosophical expositions, which must make clean

distinctions and adhere to principles of non-contradiction, the slippery nature of

Schiess 89

Lispector’s prose works makes them even more capacious for housing the different

orders of concerns and contradictory responses that characterize current debates in thing

theory. Água Viva’s indeterminable genre, one that slides continually between the lyric,

the epistolary and the mystical while only flirting with the narrative, makes room for

many types of relations between the writing subject and the object of her address.

Similarly, Lispector’s deployment of material things as images of the object-problem

likewise leaves room for a variety of ontological relations between subjects and objects.

In Água Viva and elsewhere, Lispector opts not to draw hard distinctions between

different philosophical categories of alterity and existence. In this way, Lispector’s

literary style is a model for her literary theory: the object that is a subject and the subject

that is an object continually spin a web around one another that, as Héléne Cixous has

observed of the novel’s narration generally, defies unraveling (Reading 16).

Beyond its capacity for housing competing concerns, the question of genre in

Lispector’s fiction also allows her to employ literary form to re-enact concerns about

things. Not unlike the philosophical “churning” described by Morton, Lispector’s literary

approach to things is structured by returns and contradictions. Her narrators continually

revisit the question of the object, figuring and re-figuring it in a fugue of varying themes:

while the text’s specific object shifts and morphs, Lispector’s literary sketches of objects

enact a spiraling concern that is more significant than any single figure.

The identification of such a formal mimesis recalls Prado’s “aesthetic of the

sublime,” and it also echoes Carlos Mendes de Sousa’s analysis of Lispector’s

posthumously published Um sopro de vida [A Breath of Life]. This text, assembled after

the author’s death from fragments of writing, maintains an “unfinished” quality that

Schiess 90

Sousa reads as “not a puzzle, but the very figure of destabilization, of chaos [...]. What is

offered in [Lispector’s] presentation of the unfinished is the non-figure, or the

impossibility of figuring)” (359). In an analogous way, Lispector’s narration in Água

Viva mimics the approach of the unknowable: a study in obscurity that also underscores

the limits of the self’s own capacities.

Disentangling the Object

The words objeto and its variants appear in Água viva twenty-nine times, and

designate different orders of objects that become entangled over the course of the novel.

Given Lispector’s multiple uses of the term, it would seem that “object” names a

problem, or a series of problems, rather than a single concept: it is the node where

apparently heterogeneous concerns converge. In this sense, Água viva’s object aligns

with Brown’s characterization of the thing’s vertiginous capacity to be both itself and a

sign of other things.

The word “object” first appears in the Água viva’s epigraph, which Lispector

takes from Belgian painter and art critic Michel Seuphor (1901-1999): ‘tinha que existir

uma pintura totalmente livre da dependência da figura—o objeto—que, como a musica,

não ilustra coisa alguma, nado conta uma história e não lança um mito. Tal pintura

contenta-se em evocar os reinos incomunicáveis do espírito, onde o sonho se torna

pensamento, onde o traço se torna existência” ‘There must be a kind of painting totally

free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing,

tells no story, launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable

Schiess 91

kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.’ In

Seuphor’s words, the desire to do away with the object seems definitive.

Água Viva comes very close to Seuphor’s ideal in that the narration does away

almost entirely with traditional objects of literary representation such as people, places

and events. In fact, the epigraph’s last phrase (“where dream becomes thought, where line

becomes existence”) comes very close to a line from Lispector’s A cidade sitiada (The

Besieged City, 1949) that is often employed to sum up her own artistic aims: “Nela e

num cavalo a impressão era a expressão” ‘In her and in a horse, impression equals

expression’ (19). If Clarice Lispector has an ars poetica, it is this: to produce a

temporally and affectively immediate work of art, where expression cleaves as closely as

possible to experience (Librandi; Moser; Prado). The author’s intention of creating a

nonrepresentative work of literary art in Água Viva may well constitute the apex of a

progressive move toward avant-garde abstraction, in the service of her aims for

immediacy.

Lispector’s nonrepresentative aesthetic concerns intersect with Brazilian

concretismo, a late avant-garde movement in both the plastic and literary arts of which

Lispector was a contemporary. Librandi notes the striking similarities between Água

viva’s narration and this statement by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica in 1968, just a few

years before the novel’s publication:

The Object is seen as an action in the environment within which objects

exist as ‘signs” and not merely as “works.” It is the new phase of the pure

vital exercise, where the role of the artist is to propose creative activities.

The Object is the discovery of the world, and each instant. It does not have

Schiess 92

any a priori established existence but rather is the creation of what we

would like it to be: a sound, a scream can be an object (qtd. in Librandi,

114)

Oiticica’s declaration of the ephemerality of the artistic object conjures several parallels

in Lispector’s novel and also elicits a second understanding of the word “object” in this

text. The first of these parallels is the theme of disposability, a motif that Lispector

applies at various moments in her prose to the act of looking, the use of language, and to

her writing. In “O ovo e a galinha,” for example, the narrator declares that “olhar é o

instrumento necessário que, depois de usado, jogarei fora” ‘Looking is the necessary

instrument that, once used, I shall discard’ (56). In Água Viva, the narrator similarly uses

“a palavra como isca: a palavra pescando o que não e palavra. […] Uma vez que se

pescou a entrelinha, pode-se com alívio jogar a palavra fora” (22) ‘So writing is the

method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. When this

non-word— between the lines—takes the bait, something has been written’ (15). Água

Viva’s narrator poses her text not only as an object, but also as one that will be thrown

away: “Nunca leerás o que escrevo. E quando eu tiver anotado o meu segredo de ser—

jogarei fora como se fosse ao mar” (73) ‘You will never read what I’m writing. And

when I’ve noted down my secret of being— I’ll throw it away as if into the sea’ (66). The

gesture of disposal, of the concrete text as an ephemeral thing whose use is exhausted in

its production, speaks to the notion of an artistic object-as-event, over one that is a closed

and durable entity.

The disposable character of writing raises a fundamental question for Água Viva,

namely, why a text so averse to referentiality and mimesis nonetheless contains such

Schiess 93

detailed representations of external objects. Brown argues that the emergent questioning

of the role of literature in the modern era is precisely one of the dilemmas that is

“hypostasized” by the literary treatment of things: “the question of things [in literature]

becomes a question about whether the literary object should be understood as the object

that literature represents, or the object that literature has as its aim, the object that

literature is” (Sense of Things 3). In short, the confrontation in Água Viva between the

text as object as the text as object-free stages the modernist and avant-garde debates

about the nature of art; an observation that resonates with Prado’s assertion that in

Lispector’s work “A escritura, como a música (mas também como ‘a coisa’), deve ser

index sui” ‘Writing, like music (and also like “the thing”) should be index sui’ (21).

Finally, the narrator uses the term “object” to refer to herself: “se tenho que ser

um objeto, que seja um objeto que grita” (87) ‘if I must be an object let it be an object

that screams’ (79). In the context of Água viva’s many objects, however, it is worth

noting the link between this phrase and the disposability motif just outlined. Objeto

gritante, (translated in some critical studies as “Loud Object” but meaning literally

“screaming object”) names an earlier and much more extensive manuscript of the novel.

Marta Peixoto and others have noted that in addition to this title, what was cut from that

manuscript in the editing process were its autobiographical details (Peixoto 66-68; Sousa

348-49). In excising a title that appears to refer to herself, it is as if the author wished, in

some way, to get out of her own text—even if that proved possible in name only.

Schiess 94

From objects to ethics?

A hora da estrela is Lispector’s most radical examination of the self-as-writer and

the novel, and it is also her clearest attempt to confront the problem of social inequality in

Brazil. In this novel, Lispector creates a writerly alter ego, Rodrigo S.M., who in turn

creates the fictional character Macabéa. The girl, a poor and uneducated migrant living

precariously as a typist in Rio de Janeiro, remains as stubbornly opaque to her creator as

her own existence, he presumes, remains to her. A hora da estrela thus revolves around

the problematic representation of an “object” that is neither fully a what nor a who.

Rodrigo S.M. battles a profound anxiety over putting into words a character that

requires “a criação de uma pessoa inteira” ‘the creation of a whole person’ (11) and a

story “ que nunca […] viveu” ‘that he has never lived’ (40). This anxiety makes it nearly

impossible for him to begin his narration, and it results in a tug-of-war between the

“facts” of his story and his recurrent self-doubt. How does a writer “create” a wholly

other person? How does a member of the privileged classes represent the impoverished

sectors of his or her own society? How to build a character that is realistic, give her a

modicum of dignity, and yet be unflinchingly honest about the disdain of the dominant

classes? How to presume to know experiences that are utterly alien and yet refrain from

projecting one’s own subjectivity onto the blank screen of the other’s interiority?

The narrative poses these questions both explicitly and implicitly, while leaving

undecided Rodrigo’s capabilities for sincerely engaging with his class guilt. Sá doubts the

narrator’s desire to transcend class divisions: “Pre-disposed to speak for the poor, he does

not want to hear them, nor get to know them up close” (“Mal-estar” 61). Dalcastangné

agrees that Rodrigo’s shortcomings “prevent him from making [Macabéa] speak but say a

Schiess 95

lot about the difficult relationship between the intellectual and a great majority of

Brazilians” (58). She nevertheless detects an ethics of sorts, one that manifests precisely

in the narrative’s “deficiencies” (58). In the formal clumsiness of Rodrigo’s narration, in

his inability to begin, in the constant frustration he feels trying to decipher his character,

in the prejudices toward her that he inadvertently lets slip, Dalcastagné sees the formal

replication of a “deep discomfort in [the] face of his object of writing” (58). Fueled by

the contradictory impulses of empathy and self-distancing, this discomfort is at least

baldly, unflatteringly revealed.

In a similar vein, Daniela Mercedes Kahn argues that Rodrigo’s stuttering

narration “mirrors the conflict between the culture of the elites and that of the

marginalized within a country that is itself peripheral” (120). However, Dalcastagné’s

idea of a discomfort that arises from the face-to-face affirms that what she describes is

not only the replication of a political problem but also an ethics: a discomfiting encounter

that imprints itself on the form of the novel by hijacking narration, and that discloses the

subject’s attitudes as flawed. It is, in other words, an ethics comprised of narrative

failures. Working back from Lispector’s social concerns in A hora da estrela to her

earlier work, it becomes increasingly clear that the objects in her earlier texts, and more

specifically how they are (or are not) seen, pave the way for Rodrigo’s ambivalent

presentation of his character. Macabéa should enjoy full subject status; however, insofar

as she remains stubbornly inscrutable to the narrator, she is but a heightened form of the

same gaze-defying objects one encounters in “O ovo e a galinha” and Água Viva.

Schiess 96

The porta-espelho

In a work that is so explicitly concerned with the writing of the self, the narrator

of Água Viva nevertheless presents the reader with three related external objects of

representation: the church portico, the mirror, and the wardrobe. The narrator focuses on

their physical properties: the solidity and opacity of the wooden surfaces of the portico

and the wardrobe, the unfulfilled promise of interior space suggested by the presence of

doors, and the equivocal capabilities of the reflective face of the mirror as emblematic of

the problems of looking that characterize any approach of the object. The wardrobe with

its half-ajar door, also hung with a mirror, functions as a fusion of these qualities:

Mas eu também quero pintar um tema. E este tema será—um guarda-

roupa, pois que há de mais concreto? Tenho que estudar o guarda-roupa

antes de pintá-lo. Que vejo? Vejo que o guarda-roupa parece penetrável

porque tem uma porta. Mas ao abri-la, vê-se que se adiou o penetrar: pois

por dentro é também uma superfície de madeira, como uma porta fechada.

Função do guarda-roupa: conservar no escuro os travestis. Natureza: da

inviolabilidade das coisas. Relação com pessoas: a gente se olha ao

espelho da parte de dentro de sua porta, a gente se olha sempre em luz

inconveniente porque o guarda-roupa nunca esta em lugar adequado:

desajeitado, fica de pé onde couber, sempre descomunal, corcunda, tímido

e desastrado, sem saber como ser mais discreto, pois tem presença demais.

Guarda-roupa é enorme, intruso, triste, bondoso.

Schiess 97

Mais eis que se abre o porta-espelho—e eis que, ao movimento que

a porta faz, e na nova composição do quarto em sombra, nessa composição

entram frascos e frascos de vidro de claridade fugitiva. (82)

[But I also want to create a theme, I want to paint an object. And that

object will be—a wardrobe, for what is more concrete? I must study the

wardrobe before painting it. What do I see? I see that the wardrobe looks

penetrable because it has a door. But when I open it, I see that penetration

has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door.

Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature: that

of the inviolability of things. Relation to people: we look at ourselves in

the mirror on the inside of the door, we always look at ourselves in an

inconvenient light because the wardrobe is never in the right place:

awkward, it stands wherever it fits, always huge, hunchbacked, shy and

clumsy, unaware of how to be more discreet, for it has too much presence.

A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive, sad and kind.

But suddenly the door-mirror opens—and suddenly, in the

movement that the door makes, and in the new composition of the room in

shadow, into that composition enter flask after flask of glass of fleeting

brightness. (74)]

“I also want to paint a theme, I want to create an object,” Lispector begins, “and that

object will be—a wardrobe, for what is more concrete?” As I established in this chapter’s

second section, the narrator in Água Viva openly intends for her text to relay, above all

else, an unmediated expression of her own experience. The episode’s introductory

Schiess 98

conjunction (“But I also”) alerts the reader to an alternative, namely that the wardrobe’s

superlative concreteness serves as a late-arriving counterweight to the text’s famously

subjectivist perspective. The theme of the concrete, then, allows that which is external to

the narrator to begin to contend for narrative space.

“Quero pintar um tema, quero criar um objeto,” Lispector’s narrator has just

declared, and she continues, “tenho que estudar o guarda-roupa antes de pintá-lo. Que

vejo?” (82) ‘I want to paint a theme, I want to create an object. I must study the wardrobe

before painting it. What do I see?’ (74). The second sentence of the guarda-roupa section

reinforces the notion that the wardrobe is the nexus of themes of seeing, knowing, and

representing: the verbs pintar and criar in the first sentence leave no doubt that the

problematic addressed here plays out on the ground of the artistic act; while ver and

estudar figure the difficulties to come in terms of a gaze seeking knowledge of the sort

that ostensibly precedes representation. But the third sentence quickly runs up against the

problem of appearances, of insides and outsides: “Vejo que o guarda-roupa parece

penetrável porque tem uma porta” (82) ‘I see that the wardrobe looks penetrable because

it has a door’ (74). Finally, although the presence of a door suggests the possibility of

accessing an interior essence, the wardrobe’s apparent penetrability is (at least

temporarily) thwarted: “Mas ao abri-la, vê-se que que se adiou o penetrar: pois por dentro

é também uma superfície de madeira, como uma porta fechada” (82) ‘But when I open it,

I see that penetration has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed

door’ (74).

What will define Lispector’s object in Água Viva, then, is its intransigence. This

wardrobe is no longer the mundane, utilitarian cabinet that Joana disdains in Perto do

Schiess 99

coração selvagem; it thwarts the seamless relation between user and used, seer and seen.

Brown makes the point that such an intransigent object, one that will not make itself

available for our practical or conceptual aims, initiates a shifted power dynamic between

subject and object:

We look through objects because there are codes by which our

interpretative attention makes them meaningful as facts. A thing, by

contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the

thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks,

when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy [...]. The story of objects

asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to

the human subject. (“Thing Theory” 4)

Whether it is the car engine that refuses to start or the philosophical thing that blocks the

view of the concept, what defines the thing in Brown’s analysis is precisely the moment

at which it reveals that it was never “for” us. The object that will not let itself be used, be

known, be properly seen, is an object that both demands and defies our attention.

Lispector had already begun to explore this play of sight, surfaces, and depths in

an earlier exposition of the object. In “O ovo e a galinha,” the formal dynamic between

object and sight is so prevalent that Regina Pontieri reads the story as essentially

structured by the polarity “Egg vs. Eye” (210-12). In it, problems of looking and knowing

are framed in terms that specifically problematize the gaze, especially a penetrating one:

“O que não eu sei do ovo é o que realmente importa, o que eu não sei do ovo me dá o ovo

propriamente dito, [...] Quem se aprofunda num ovo, quem vê mais do que o superfície

do ovo, está querendo outra coisa: está com fome” (56) ‘What I don’t know about the egg

Schiess 100

is what matters. What I don’t know about the egg gives me the egg properly speaking...

Whoever plunges deeper into an egg, whoever sees more than the surface of an egg, is

after something else: that person is hungry’ (277). But in the face of the penetrating gaze,

the object stages a retreat: “ovo visto, ovo perdido” (55) ‘an egg seen is an egg lost’

(276). One is reminded at this point of Brown’s formulation of surfaces and depths, that

the allure of the thing is precisely the challenge it presents to our interpretative habits:

that the heuristic mind “imagines, deep within the surface/depth dichotomy, overcoming

it. However intriguing the inside might be, a sophisticated intelligence will make it

disappear” (Sense of Things 11). In the end, we cannot resist reading things, even if—or

precisely because—they resist being read. We are attracted to the enigma, even if it

refuses to offer itself up.

The egg that disappears upon capture, the reticent opacity of the wardrobe’s

receding wooden surfaces—all designate a robustly independent object that exceeds the

sum of the human observer’s knowledge. Morton describes the object’s capacity to

exceed apprehension as “withdrawal,” a term that he uses to designate the limits of

knowledge: “a single mode of access can never exhaust the thing; [...] the more we know

about a strange stranger, the more he (he, it) withdraws” (“Here Comes Everything” 166).

The idea of an object that withdraws from the totalizing gaze of the subject takes on an

ethical cast when the object of observation is no longer a what, but a who. In A hora da

estrela, Rodrigo complains: “tenho um personagem buliçoso nas mãos e que me escapa a

cada instante querendo que eu o recupere” (22) ‘I have a fidgety character on my hands

and who escapes me at every turn expecting me to retrieve her’ (13). But at the same time

as she withdraws from Rodrigo’s attempts to describe her, Macabéa will not leave him

Schiess 101

alone. She has invaded even his physical space in her passive demand for attention: “ela

se me grudou na pele qual melado pegajoso ou lama negra […] pois a datilógrafa não

quer sair dos meus ombros” (21-22) ‘she’s stuck to my skin like some sticky treacle or

black mud […] the typist doesn’t want to get off my shoulders’ (13). The elusive object

nevertheless gets under the skin.

What Lispector’s object theory in Água Viva offers to the discussion of

withdrawal is two-fold. First, even before the introduction of a clearly human “object” in

A hora da estrela, the description of material objects in Água Viva strongly implies that

behind its surface of apparently inert material, the object might feel. In the pages

preceding the wardrobe passage, Lispector describes the act of painting a church portal,

whose wooden doors offer a precursor to the porta-espelho. This earlier description of

wooden surfaces also begins with metaphors of impassibility: “sinto uma longa estrada e

poeira até chegar ao pouso do quadro. Mesmo que os portais não se abram. [...] Crio o

material antes de pintá-lo [...] Compacto, fechado como uma porta fechada” (77) ‘I feel a

long road and dust until I reach the resting-place of the painting. Even though the portals

don’t open […] I create the material before I paint it […] Compact, closed like a closed

door’ (70). Despite the resistance offered to the gaze by the opaque impenetrability of

this material, Lispector tells us that beyond the apparent finality wooden surfaces, there is

something much more vital than a void. The portal’s matter itself bears the mark of what

might be hidden beyond the closed doors: “Mas no portal foram esfoladas aberturas,

rasgadas por unhas. E através dessas brechas que se vê o que está dentro de uma síntese,

dentro da simetria utópica. Cor coagulada, violência, martírio, são as vigas que sustentam

o silêncio de uma simetria religiosa” (77) ‘But onto the portal openings were flayed,

Schiess 102

scratched out by fingernails. And it’s through those openings that you see what is inside a

synthesis, inside the utopian symmetry. Coagulated color, violence, martyrdom, are the

beams that sustain the silence of a religious symmetry’ (70). There is surely something

behind the church door, behind the inner wall of the armoire: beyond the visible surface

of the object, beyond its representation, lies affect; fury, desperation, nails scratching;

“violence, martyrdom.” But we can only glimpse this “beyond,” if we can see it at all:

“Função da guarda-roupa: conservar no escuro os travestis. Natureza: da inviolabilidade

das coisas” (82) ‘Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature:

that of the inviolability of things’ (74).

Second, the wardrobe passage offers, at least provisionally, the possibility of a

deferral for interpretation: “vê-se que adiou o penetrar” (82) ‘I see that penetration has

been put off’ (74). Rather than ending in aporia (“an egg seen is an egg lost”), the use of

the verb adiar (“to put off”) suspends the interpretative dance in mid-act. The question of

seeing inside the wardrobe, of making the interior “disappear” through exposition or

through understanding, is left indefinitely unresolved. This deferral also guarantees that

the interpretative cycle of attraction-repulsion will always renew itself. Just because the

object-Other is uninterpretable, does not mean that we ignore it utterly; and yet we

approach it knowing that the heuristic act will never be consummated or completed:

“Nature: that of the inviolability of things.”

If, as Brown’s formulation suggests, the story of the object’s resistance to

penetration by the hungry gaze is “the story of a changed relation to the human subject,”

what is the alternative relation that will arise between subject and object now that the

Schiess 103

wardrobe has asserted its capacity to withdraw? Lispector comes explicitly to the

question of relation at this point in the guarda-roupa passage:

Relação com pessoas: a gente se olha ao espelho da parte de dentro da sua

porta, a gente se olha sempre em luz inconveniente porque o guarda-roupa

nunca esta em lugar adequado: desajeitado, fica de pé onde couber,

sempre descomunal, corcunda, tímido e distraído, sem saber como ser

mais discreto, pois tem presença demais. Guarda-roupa é enorme, intruso,

triste, bondoso. (82)

Relation to people: we look at ourselves in the mirror on the inside of the

door, we always look at ourselves in an inconvenient light because the

wardrobe is never in the right place: awkward, it stands wherever it fits,

always huge, hunchbacked, shy and clumsy, unaware how to be more

discreet, for it has too much presence. A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive,

sad, kind. (74)

Here, the narrator endows the material object with sensibility: “a wardrobe is enormous,

intrusive, sad, kind.” And precisely because the armoire has subject-like characteristics

(awkward; standing wherever it fits; shy and clumsy; unaware of how to be more

discreet), it makes itself inconvenient to its observer. The object’s quiet self-assertion is

perhaps what leads Hélène Cixous to observe of Água Viva’s objects: “the thing is

standing upright, despite the torment inflicted upon it. [...] Matter is riddled with the hope

of something” (Reading 48). The subjective object, inconveniently present to the

observer who wishes to see herself, passively disrupts her self-contemplation. Perhaps we

have seen the armoire, and it is Macabéa.

Schiess 104

The alternative subject-object relationship that arises at this point in the guarda-

roupa passage hinges upon an apparent change in the value of the mirror. Up until this

point in Água Viva, and also in other instances in Lispector’s work, the mirror is

presented as a foil to seeing the non-self. Tenuously capable of revealing infinite depths,

the mirror also frequently represents the dangers of self-projection: “Ao pintá-lo precisei

de minha própria delicadeza para não atravessá-lo com minha imagem, pois espelho em

que me vejo já sou eu” (78) ‘When painting it I need my own delicateness in order not to

cross it with my own image, since a mirror in which I see myself is already I’ (71). This

problem is re-enacted in A hora da estrela, when Rodrigo is famously unable to wrest his

narration away from a description of his own personal and artistic struggles in order to

conjure his character. Over the many pages of “warm-up” that begin A hora da estrela,

Rodrigo’s attempts to portray Macabéa and her story in any detail slide repeatedly back

into first-person narration: “Desculpai-me que vou continuar a falar de mim que sou meu

desconhecido” (15) ‘Forgive me but I’m going to keep talking about me who am

unknown to myself’ (7). When Rodrigo finally manages to imagine Macabéa’s physical

appearance as she gazes at herself in a mirror, however, the image of her face is

supplanted by his own: “Vejo a nordestina se olhando ao espelho e—um rufar de

tambor—no espelho aparece o meu rosto cansado e barbudo” (22) ‘I see the Northeastern

girl looking in the mirror and—the ruffle of a drum—in the mirror appears my weary and

unshaven face’ (14).

An object that performs the role of self-affirmation resonates in Kahn’s analysis

of the role of alterity in Lispector’s short fiction. Kahn pinpoints the persistence of “a

particular kind of Other, whether person, animal or thing, that takes the passive role of

Schiess 105

serving merely as an index of the protagonist’s self-recognition” (69). Kahn’s description

of alterity in Lispector’s work thus recalls Lezra’s critique of post-humanist disciplines

that sees categories like “things,” “objects,” and “matter” as proxies for ‘the finitude of

the human animal” (13-14). In Kahn’s analysis, Lispector’s objects take the role of

mirrors that merely display the contours of the self.

How has the mirror come to have a different value, and how has the relation that

it incites with the viewer shifted from one of self-affirmation to one of awkward

inconvenience? The key to this shifted relation is a question of angles. As an alternative

to the direct or penetrating gaze, the narrator of Água Viva repeatedly claims her point of

enunciation from the sides and in the shadows: “Por que não abordo um tema que

facilmente poderia descobrir? Mas não: caminho encostada a parede, escamoteio a

melodia descoberta, ando na sombra, nesse lugar onde tantas coisas acontecem. Às vezes

escorro pelo muro, em lugar onde nunca bate o sol” (81) ‘Why don’t I tackle a theme that

I could easily flush out? but no: I slink along the wall, I pilfer the flushed-out melody, I

walk in the shadow, in that place where so many things go on’ (73). The peripheral gaze,

arriving at an angle from the margins, becomes a mark of respectful distance:

A vida oblíqua? Bem sei que há um desencontro leve entre as coisas, elas

quase se chocam, há desencontro entre os seres que se perdem uns aos

outros entre palavras que quase não dizem nada. Mas quase nos

entendemos nesse leve desencontro, nesse quase que é a única forma de

suportar a vida em cheio, pois um encontro face a face com ela nos

assustaria, espaventaria os seus delicados fios de teia de aranha. Nos

Schiess 106

somos de soslaio para não comprometer o que pressentimos de

infinitamente outro nessa vida que te falo. (70)

[Oblique life? I am well aware that there is a slight detachment between

things, they almost collide, there is a detachment among the beings that

lose one another amongst words that almost don’t say anything anymore.

But we almost understand one another in this light discord, in this almost

that is the only way to stand full life, since a sudden face-to-face encounter

with it would frighten us, scare us off its delicate spider’s web threads. We

are askance in order not to jeopardize what we foresee is infinitely other in

this life of which I speak to you. (63)]

Standing askance to the Other, we are to understand, is another form of Lispector’s ethics

of failure. As we see in these two quotes, for Lispector it is the almost-but-not-quite

quality of the encounter, the sideways glance from the margins, that allows for any

encounter at all. Morton argues that this kind of partial encounter, the “light discord” of

Lispector’s “slight detachments between the beings that lose one another” is the only type

of encounter that is possible (Here Comes Everything” 165). “Objects,” he argues

(including the objects that we, as humans, also are), “encounter each other as

operationally closed systems that can only (mis)translate one another” (“Here Comes

Everything” 165).

At the same time, Água Viva’s narrator seems to suggest that by standing to the

side, we may finally manage a glimpse of an Other that is not a reflection of ourselves:

‘só uma pessoa muito delicada pode entrar no quarto vazio, e com tal leveza, com tal

ausência de si mesma, que a imagem não marca. Como prémio, essa pessoa delicada terá

Schiess 107

então penetrado num dos segredos invioláveis das coisas: viu o espelho propriamente

dito” (78-79) ‘Only a very delicate person can enter the empty room where there is an

empty mirror, and with such lightness, with such absence of self, that his image leaves no

mark. As a prize, that delicate person will then have penetrated one of the inviolable

secrets of things: he saw the mirror itself’ (71). This leaves the reader with a pressing

question: is the object accessible or not?

The conclusion of the guarda-roupa episode comes as close as possible to

achieving an answer to this question. In it, one finds a half-open door with a mirror

attached: “Mais eis que se abre a porta-espelho — e eis que, ao movimento que a porta

faz, e na nova composição do quarto em sombra, nessa composição entram frascos e

frascos de vidro de claridade fugitiva” (82) ‘But suddenly the door-mirror opens—and

suddenly, in the movement that the door makes, and in the new composition of the room

in shadow, into that composition enter flask after flask of glass of fleeting brightness’

(75). Up to this moment, the narrator has presented the reflective capacities of the mirror

mostly as a potential foil to seeing. In the porta-espelho episode, however, the angle of

the door permits the object to interrupt, and no longer with the lumbering presence of a

wooden wardrobe but with a luminous emission of its essence; of it-self. The verb in the

last sentence in this passage is not “reflect” or “project,” but “enter”; the construction is

active, not passive; and what enters are fragments of the material-made-ethereal: “flasks

of glass of fleeting brightness.” The object enters the creative space of the subject and

transforms it. The angled mirror permits the subject and object to be co-present and to

level, if only fleetingly, the exchange between them.

Schiess 108

After the conclusion of the porta-espelho episode, Água Viva ends with an

extensive rumination on subject-object elision. This shift in position, where the narrator

will bind herself to her typewriter, echoes an earlier formulation of subject-object (or

rather, object-object) solidarity when the narrator says of the mirror, “Não descrevi o

espelho. Fui ele” (79) ‘No, I did not describe the mirror—I was the mirror’ (72). In the

exhaustion of the project of looking, the narrator moves from the position of observer (“I

did not describe the mirror”) to one of a companion-object (“I was the mirror”). The

typewriter passage is even more unnerving, however, because it mixes a tone of solidarity

with strains of complicity and responsibility: “O que sou neste instante? Sou uma

máquina de escrever fazendo ecoar as teclas secas na húmida e escura madrugada. Há

muito já não sou gente. Quiseram que eu fosse um objeto. Sou um objeto. Objeto sujo de

sangue. Sou um objeto que cria outros objetos e a máquina cria a nós todos. Ela exige”

(78) ‘What am I in this instant? I am a typewriter making the dry keys echo in the dark

and humid early hours. For a long time I haven’t been people. They wanted me to be an

object. I’m an object. An object dirty with blood. That creates other objects and the

typewriter creates all of us. It demands’ (78). The subject becomes an object among

objects, and in the phrase’s penultimate pronoun, involves us—her readers, all of “us”—

in a great web of relations beyond our control.

In the face of the mechanism that “demands,” Lispector leaves her reader with

two resources. The first is the scream (“if I must be an object let it be an object that

screams”). This scream is at once a protest against the objectification of self and of others

by the “mechanism,” the anguished acknowledgement of the complicity of the writer in

that objectification, and, as Oiticica proposed, an object-event in itself. The second

Schiess 109

recourse is the oblique encounter of subject to subject, object to object, mirror to mirror:

“Não são precisos muitos [espelhos] para se ter a mina faiscante e sonambúlica: bastam

dois, e um reflete o reflexo que o outro refletiu, num tremor que transmite em mensagem

telegráfica intensa e muda” (77) ‘You don’t need many [mirrors] to have the sparkling

and sleepwalking mine: two are enough, and one reflects the reflection of what the other

reflected, in a trembling that is transmitted in an intense and mute telegraphic message’

(70). By placing herself to the side and looking into the mirror at an indirect angle, the

narrator becomes the second mirror that reflects infinity. This is what she asks of her

readers, as well.

In taking care not to overpower or obscure the object itself, the object is free to be

itself, to maintain its “it-ness.” This peripheral approach is described by Cixous in terms

of non-intrusion: “Clarice Lispector’s endeavor consists in leaving the non-self alone”

(Coming to Writing 20). Água Viva discreetly allows the object its space; however, it

does not quite leave the non-self alone. In the repeated attempt to see past the object’s

opaque surface, and in their explicit failures; in the empathetic positioning of the self as

object, and the acknowledgment of the object’s disruptive potential; in the enduring,

uncomfortable curiosity for what lies within, Lispector traces the complexities and

ambivalences inherent in making an Other the object of representation. In the process, the

author has drawn together the poles of the human and the non-human Other (the material

and the sentient) to the point of co-contaminating their properties, without resolving

whether the space that separates them is any different from the one that separates humans

from each other: “We are askance in order not to jeopardize what we foresee is infinitely

other in this life of which I speak to you.” The result is a continuous field of alterity, of

Schiess 110

objects strange to one another (in which the narrator of Água Viva includes herself, “a

typewriter making the dry keys echo”) where the repeated enactment of an always-partial

encounter is seems to be the meeting point for aesthetics, ontology and ethics.

Schiess 111

CHAPTER 3

Cannibals in Translation (Studies)

In a lecture delivered in 1990 at the University of Cambridge, Guyanese novelist

Wilson Harris offers his audience an explicit account of translation and cannibalism in

the Caribbean. He speaks in particular of the role of the bone flute in Carib culture, an

early musical instrument crafted from the bones of one’s enemies:

The ancient Caribs possessed a bone flute that was made from the body of the

enemy. They consumed a morsel of the flesh of their enemy and they thought

thereby they would understand the secrets of the enemy, what the enemy was

planning to do, how he would attack them, how he would ravage their villages.

The peculiar thing is that the bone flute also became the seed of music. We have

here a very remarkable strategy which makes one wonder where music may

possess its seed, its birth. (22)

The flute and its music, Harris explains, are the Carib’s technology for making contact

with his other: for anticipating the enemy’s moves and intuiting his motivations. It is not

surprising, then, that he should link the flute—and by explicit extension, the

anthropophagic act that created it—to more modern technologies, such as fiction and

translation, that achieve the same end.

I begin this chapter with Harris’s ideas on cannibalism and translation because

they are emblematic of more recent theorizations of the cannibal and translational

practices both inside and outside of Brazil. Scholars of Brazilian letters will immediately

notice the resonance between Harris’s bone flute and Oswald de Andrade’s early

Schiess 112

twentieth-century Manifesto antropófago (1928). In Harris’s account of Carib

cannibalism and the origins of musical technology, one finds a reworking of one of the

Andrade’s main assertions: that Brazil’s “anthropophagous past” contains a “recipe for

the future,” a seed of alternative thought that has stowed away within European

interpretations of the Americas. And nowhere is there greater possibility for this than in

European “readings” of the practice of anthropophagy among indigenous peoples and the

translations—from the early sixteenth century to the present day—that emerged from

these.

In the present chapter, I focus on a somewhat different intersection of cannibalism

and translation—as both theory and practice—in works published over the past forty

years. During this period, authors and theorists working on Brazil, the Caribbean, and

Latin America as a whole have highlighted the “transubstantiation in reverse” that

characterizes both textual translation and the ceremonial ingestion of one’s enemy. This

raises the question: how are readers of Latin American literature to understand this

practice? What does “cannibal translation” entail? As we shall see, much of it consists of

taking translation itself toward what Alexandre Nodari describes as a reversal of Freud’s

classic formulation of cannibalism, or “the permanent transformation of Taboo into

Totem” (9-40). There is also the question of an irresolvable tension between meaning and

experience.

Writing on translation just three years after Harris’s Cambridge lectures, Gayatri

Spivak uses Harris’s literary flute as the figure for an aperture between two subjectivities:

what she calls a “surrender” on the part of a literary translation to a perspective other than

that of her home audience. Citing Harris directly, she begins to tease out how the flute’s

Schiess 113

“primitive” technology can help us now by teaching us to consume some of the harmful

biases inherent in modernity itself:

The Caribbean bone flute, made of human bone, is a seed in the soul of the

Caribbean. It is a primitive technology that we can turn around (trans-version?).

Consuming our biases and prejudices in ourselves we can let the bone flute help

us open ourselves rather than read it the other way—as a metonymic devouring of

a bit of flesh. The link of music with cannibalism is a sublime paradox. When the

music of the bone flute opens the door, absences flow in, and the native

imagination puts together the ingredients for the quantum immediacy of

unpredictable resources. (220)

What Spivak highlights in Harris’s telling is the “sublime paradox” of music and

cannibalism, ephemeral sound and durable bone, as the catalyst for a complex procedure

of ontological relationality. The materiality of the bone, and the physical traces of the

anthropophagic act that produced it as raw material to be converted into cultural artifact,

are subsumed into notes with the potential to pierce an immaterial membrane: the divide

that separates “us” from “them,” from the cannibals who produced the flute after they

presumably ate the flesh, and from “the native imagination” that conceived and theorized

those acts. Elsewhere, Harris refers to precisely this process as “transubstantiation in

reverse:” a “shar[ing] in the biases of the enemy” by way of inciting a “mutual psyche

[between] protagonist and antagonist” (23). A bias is, of course, a slanted view: a matter

of perspective. Harris’s literary formulation suggests (and more recent ethnography

confirms) that sharing in the perspective of the other is precisely what counts as

knowledge in certain Amerindian systems of thought, particularly in lowland Amerindian

Schiess 114

groups who are themselves the descendants of “cannibals.” In this chapter I tease out

some of the implications of Harris’s idea of “sharing a bias” for the topic of his talk:

cultural and linguistic translation.

Cannibal Translation

The 1980s witnessed an explosion of “cannibal studies” that corresponded with

the rise of post-colonial studies. This research suggests that from its first appearance in

European accounts cannibal, as a word-concept thrown into motion by the meeting of

European and Amerindian peoples, has always revolved around cultural translation as

mistranslation. The word recorded by Christopher Columbus was an exonym, used by the

Arawak people he first encountered to designate an enemy tribe. As the story goes, “the

noun ‘cannibal’ derives from the Arawak caniba, apparently a corruption of cariba,

which the Caribbean Indians of the Lesser Antilles gave to themselves. To their enemies,

however, the peace-loving Arawaks of Cuba, the name had a distinctly pejorative

connotation of extreme ferocity and barbarity” (Lestringant 15). Given the openly

inimical relationship between the Arawak and the Carib, a skeptical

By way of Columbus’s diary, the Spanish caníbal finds its way into European

languages with remarkably little change, a fact that causes Peter Hulme to comment:

[The word cannibal] was adopted into the bosom of the European family of

languages with a speed and readiness which suggests that there had always been

an empty place kept warm for it. Poor “anthropophagy,” if not exactly orphaned,

was sent out into the cold until finding belated lodging in the nineteenth century

Schiess 115

within new disciplines seeking authority from the deployment of classical

terminologies. (Hulme 19)10

As a linguistic artifact of the first encounter, cannibal accomplishes both the

etymological and the metaphorical applications of the word “to translate:” like the

remains of saints that were “transferred” (translatio) to new shrines from their original

resting place, it is “carried across” distances; while like the linguistic term, it transports a

cultural meaning that is inevitably reconfigured at its destination. The remarkable

persistence of this word, and the complex histories of its application, compels one to ask

along with Hulme, what, exactly, was the “place kept warm” in Europe for the cannibal?

From the perspective of post-colonial studies, the cannibal comes to stand for the

ambivalently human limit case created by colonial discourse: the nonwhite, “uncivilized,”

human-but-not-quite-“us” of European centers of power whose “savage” nature justifies

notions of an imperial “civilizing mission.” Textual descriptions and visual images of

anthropophagy circulating in Europe in the hundred years after Columbus’s encounter

shaped European ideas of the Americas for centuries; while accusations of

anthropophagy, real or constructed, were instrumental in Spanish and Portuguese

justifications for taking possession of land and people (Hulme, Bombardi, Freire). Images

of the cannibal also broke free of that original context. Even as the seat of imperial power

moved from the Iberian nations to Britain and then the U.S., and as anthropophagy itself

faded as an anthropological practice, the specter of the cannibal—his ferocity, barbarism,

resistance to civilization—conditioned perceptions of nonwhite, non-European peoples

across the world and created a political fiction that remained imbedded for centuries in

the logic of Empire. (Boucher, Bratlinger). “Taming cannibals or civilizing savages was

Schiess 116

oxymoronic,” argues Patrick Brantlinger, because “civilization was a goal that the

nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain, or at best, could only approximate as

‘mimic men’” (2). The figure of the cannibal as a category of life that straddles the line

between humanity and animality created a justification for a mission that need never end

because it could never be completed; a receding horizon of domination that shades into

contemporary structures of political and cultural power (Bergman, Root, Rice, Bergland).

Moving back in time, it is worth noting that it was precisely in response to

historical structures of cultural and racial domination that a reversal of the cannibal figure

emerged in twentieth-century Latin American letters. The earliest of these interventions

were the 1928 Manifesto antropófago by the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, as well

as Cuban critic Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán: apuntes sobre la cultura en

nuestra América (1971). In these works and in the vast corpus of works that they inspired

(some of which will be discussed in detail over the course of this chapter), the cannibal’s

ferocity is turned against the colonizer in a gesture of defiance against the cultural and

intellectual dominance of the former European metropoles. By the latter half of the

century, these two strands of the transvalued cannibal had taken hold in Brazilian theory

(B. Nunes; H. Campos; Castro-Klarén “Corpor-ización,” “A Genealogy”) and Hispanic

and Caribbean literatures (Joseph; Lopez Springfield; Jáuregui; Reyes; Loichot; Colas;

Githire; Basile).

The resurgence of interest in the figure of the cannibal in cultural and literary

studies since the 1970s has a parallel in the field of Translation Studies. In 1975, the

cannibal emerges as a shadowy threat to the authority of the translator in George

Steiner’s “The Hermeneutic Method,” chapter five of the author’s landmark work, After

Schiess 117

Babel. The Brazilian poet, translator and critic Haroldo de Campos resurrects the

anthropophagous figure of São Paulo’s 1920s avant-garde in his 1981 essay, “Da razão

antropofágica: Europa sob o signo da devoração.” 11 The essay by Spivak that opened this

chapter would appear in 1993. Spivak’s reading of Harris is especially important for

Brazilian Studies in that it appears to confirm some of Andrade’s assertions about the

viability of “native thought” as a transformative force within the Western intellectual

tradition. This vector only intensifies beginning six years later, when Campos’s writing

again appears in the field of Translation Studies, this time as the subject of essays

addressing his own work as a literary translator (E. Vieira, “A Postmodern Translational

Aesthetics,” “Liberating Calibans”; C. Andrade; Guerini, Mello and Costa). For Susan

Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, the editors of Postcolonial Theory and Practice, Campos’s

work as a translator belongs to a tradition of “anthropophagous” cultural practices in

Brazilian art and literature. They even single out Campos, and with him the metaphor of

the “cannibal translation,” as exemplary of procedures of what they define as post-

colonial translation.

The historical coincidence of interest in the ideological role of the cannibal in

cultural studies and the appearance of this figure in the still-coalescing field of post-

colonial translation is far from gratuitous. The importance of cannibal tropes for

narratives of colonial dominance is partially responsible for this; however, the cannibal

and translation are also imbricated in ways that remain to be fully articulated in the field

of cultural studies. In the present chapter, I draw out these connections by reading essays

on translation theory alongside work emerging from a third disciplinary pivot point—the

ontological turn in contemporary anthropology. Briefly put, this ethnographic current

Schiess 118

began at roughly at the same time (the 1990s) as the postcolonial turn, and has sought to

decolonialize the practice and applications of ethnography by considering indigenous

thought to be of equal weight and validity as those of the anthropologist. In other words,

the goal of the ontological turn is to attempt to place “Western” and “non-Western”

thinking on equal theoretical footing.

While the connections between anthropology and ideas of cannibalism may be

somewhat obvious; it is worthwhile to lay the groundwork for how these recent

developments in the discipline (which I will discuss in greater depth below) relate to

translation. As Tejaswani Niranjana notes, anthropology and translation are enmeshed by

a shared history in the colonial past. Translation, she points out, had long served in the

colonial context as a “significant technology of colonial domination” (21). As

ethnography began to coalesce into a new discipline in the early twentieth century, it also

relied on translation—of mostly oral culture—in a complex operation that was not only

linguistic but necessarily conceptual. Anthropologists, that is, not only translated

indigenous culture and history into Western languages (often via “native interpreters”)

but also translated “the savage mind” (Levy-Bruhl) into disciplinary language structured

by Western epistemic regimes. “The idea of translation in such a context,” Niranjana

continues, “is a metonymy of the desire to achieve transparent knowledge and provide for

a Western audience immediacy of access to ‘primitive thought’” (70).

As a large body of post-colonial work in the 1990s and 2000s came to show,

“cannibals,” as a liminal figure for humanity in the Western imaginary, already sit at the

site of translation between self and other and inhabit something akin to the outer

boundary between same and other. Due in large measure to the uncanny interplay

Schiess 119

between “insides” and “outsides” (both metaphorical and biological) that the

anthropophagic act seems to entail (Kilgour; Cottom) cannibals are particularly apt

figures for the work of establishing group identity: the dismemberment of the human

body for consumption makes external (human viscera) that which should remain internal,

and the act of eating further internalizes (human flesh) that which, by common

membership in a species, is already “inside.” Understood as a violation of group identity,

the cannibal exists just on the other side of what is acceptable to humanity, and yet, this

figure is still undeniably human. This conceptual crossing of “insides” and “outsides” is

why the cannibal can stand at the same time, as “a limit of the exotic” (Célestin 37) and

as a “metaphor of political inclusion” (Z. Nunes 23). It is also why Montaigne could use

the cannibal as the “outside ground” from which to launch a critique of French society,

while still expelling the American other from the “inner circle” of his essay’s closing

rejoinder: “ils ne portent point de haut-de-chausses” ‘they wear no pants.’ The power of

cannibal tropes is their ability to move, pointing to the line where self and other divide

and differentiate, but never clearly designating who is “in” and who is “out.”

Cannibalism’s mobility—and mutability—has given rise to various models for

conceptualizing its function in the European imaginary, many of which take recourse to

terms from linguistic semiotics. Zita Nunes calls cannibalism a “mobile metaphor” (23)

while Carlos Jáuregui denotes it a “palimpsestic sign” that often functions as “the

specular trap of difference” (28). Lestringant calls it a “universal symbol” (68) or a

“moveable sign, a signifier which can cover the most varied signifieds” (71). Sanborn

distinguishes between the two psycho-linguistic functions for the cannibal: “the warmth

of the savage symbol”—familiar notions of a cultural other that is safe because he is

Schiess 120

constructed as a caricature of otherness—and the “coolness of the savage sign,” which

promises a Lacanian “missed encounter” with an alterity that is genuinely alien to us and

hence always slipping from our grasp, unknowable and unreachable (Sign 175). Within

this field of signs, symbols and metaphors, why do I turn to translation?

One of the main reasons is bi-directionality. A sign, by definition, signifies within

a speech community.12 By contrast, translation as a procedure acknowledges by default

the possibility of meaning across both sides of a linguistic or cultural divide (and here I

use the term “translation” both in the specific sense of the interlingual literary translation

that is the object of study in the field of Translation Theory, and also in a broader

application for the cultural and conceptual (mis)encounters that occur in the meeting of

heterogenous actors and systems.) To translate, one must translate something; there is a

fundamental acknowledgement that a portion of text produced within a (linguistic,

cultural, conceptual) system that is different from one’s own is worthy of attention; that

is, it is valid.

The effort to rethink anthropological comparisons represented by the ontological

turn has yielded a variety of new conceptual tools for the process of doing anthropology.

As Castro (and the current generation of anthropologists who were influenced by him

along with Marilyn Strathern) moves from a traditional anthropological model based on

ethnographic description to the development of a procedure for comparing concepts, a

drastic shift of what constitutes anthropology’s object takes place. No longer the people,

but their thought, no longer description, but comparison; a process that undermines the

universality of concepts and thus creates a new concept of the concept. How might these

tools, developed in the discipline of anthropology for the process of cultural translation,

Schiess 121

come to bear on the analogous field of literary translation, particularly as regards

translations that require an encounter with an obscure cultural other?

In the decades that have followed the ontological turn, the research of

anthropologists working with Lowland Amerindian tribes in northwestern Brazil has been

responsible for some of the turn’s most ambitious and controversial theories. Among

these is Amerindian Perspectivism, a term coined by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and

Tania Stolze Lima to refer to an ontology founded not on a principle of Being (as is the

case with Western philosophy) but rather on position (i.e., perspective) within a diverse

community of selves belonging to different species. Perspectivism as a theoretical model

for an alternative, relational ontology has gone on to influence a new generation of

anthropologists, and not only those working among with Amerindian groups in the

lowland Amazonian context (Vilaça, Lima, Fausto, Saez) but also in the upper Amazon

in Ecuador (Kohn) and the Andes (Cadena). Not coincidentally, the theory of

Perspectivism arose from ethnographic elaborations of a complex cosmology behind the

social structures and practices, including endo- and exo-cannibalism, of surviving Tupi

groups.13

The growing body of ethnographic and theoretical work focused on Perspectivism

has provided a significantly revised understanding of what cannibalism “means” to those

who practice[d] it.14 A thorough examination of the methods and modes of fieldwork that

have produced this work lies beyond the scope of my dissertation; that said, there is good

reason to bring this current of ethnographic research to bear on my own ideas about

translation.15 In the first place, it is worth asking how recent theoretical tools developed

in the discipline of anthropology—a field whose foundational method comprises an act of

Schiess 122

cultural translation, often carried out by way of linguistic translation—might help Luso-

Brazilianists to articulate methods of literary translation.16 These “tools” consist largely

of reframing the cultural “Other” as a co-participant in the collaborative process of

theorizing what happens when people from different communities meet and interact. This

amounts to working not only in a reflexive way but also in a co-constructive one—to

move beyond merely wondering how the anthropological “object” sees the

anthropological “subject” to embedding the process of actively “working things out” into

the ethnographic text. This includes accounting for how native collaborators (whether

they live in San Francisco or the Amazon) view and interpret the process and making

sure the result of that process squares with the conceptual tools they bring to the table. To

take an example, one might say that E. E. Evans Pritchard’s mid-century studies of the

Azande and the Nuer are unquestionable landmarks of anthropological analysis (The

Nuer; Witchcraft), but they are also works from a now-distant disciplinary past

(Hutchison). What happens for Translation Studies when we listen to an alternative

idea—put together with the alternative concepts of “meaning” and “relation” that

underscore Viveiros de Castro’s descriptions of Araweté thinking—of what comprises a

translation? This is what the last section of this chapter asks. What would that sort of

“cannibal translation” look like?

Non-European cultures, it seems obvious to say, do not necessarily share Western

metaphysical descriptions about how the world works. What is most at issue for

anthropology’s ontological turn—and hence, as I will argue, for translation—is that non-

Western cultures who do not share Eurocentric points of view, even about the most

“basic” of concepts, like what a “world” and a “view” are, are not for that “bereft” of

Schiess 123

understanding. In fact, the alternative concepts of “world” and “view” that they possess

can help those steeped in European thought to understand better their own views of the

world and even modify those views along with corresponding disciplinary practices. It

follows from this that if one is to understand what “cannibalism” means (assuming that it

refers to a human self eating a human other), it is necessary to understand what a

“cannibal” understands by concepts such as “self,” “human,” and “other.” The same logic

applies also to “cannibal translation,” insofar as this involves the making of meaning in

relation to the verbal expression of an Other. Given this, Viveiros de Castro’s essay on

anthropology and translation is of particular value.

It is also worth pointing out from the outset that both theoretical and common-

sense notions of translation share an understanding of the process as “imperfect.” That is,

both notions openly acknowledge that there are gains and losses, and they assume that

translation necessarily involves the shifts and displacements of meaning: the truism that

“something is lost in translation” is precariously counter-balanced by the many residues

(both ameliorative and harmful) that are “gained” in that act. Translation acknowledges

its limits; it has theories for its own slippages and partial failures. Making the lack of

correspondence between cultural and linguistic systems the object of inquiry is the

advance of the postcolonial branch of Translation Studies in which Spivak’s essay

participates, as well as the “new anthropology” of the ontological turn in which Viveiros

de Castro’s anthropological theory of comparison intervenes. This means that there is

room within translation for the “partial fails” entailed by every communicative act, every

encounter. A true recognition of incommensurability requires a revised theory of

Schiess 124

translation; one that will rely, as we will see, on the facilitation of an experience rather

than on the calcification of a hermeneutics.

This aspect of “imperfection” is amplified to an extreme degree in the

epistemological schema that Viveiros de Castro attributes to Perspectivist thinking, where

he asserts that for the Araweté the basic building block of thinking is an awareness of all

semiosis (both what we would call symbolic and non-symbolic representation) as

essentially, inescapably based in “mis-translation.” Given all this, the question of why we

find the cannibal lurking around translation studies may have to do not only with its

mobility and mutability in the context of European thought. Instead, Viveiros de Castro’s

formulations would seem to suggest that cannibals and translations have always been

imbricated in ways that remain to be fully articulated in the field of cultural studies.

This reformulation is both ethical and theoretically effective. It is ethical, because

it re-theorizes a fundamental feature of the colonial encounter from the perspective of

those that had the most to lose from the “failures” of translation that ensued from it. It is

more effective because, as a concept explicitly derived from the site of the encounter

between anthropologist and indigenous groups and between Western and non-Western

thought, controlled equivocation explicitly theorizes those mistranslations rather than

viewing them as an unfortunate residue of an “imperfect” operation.

By using Viveiros de Castro’s work to illuminate a broader trajectory of

translations for the cannibal, I join contemporary anthropologists in treating “the

suppositions of Amerindian cosmology not only as demanding a critique of ostensibly

universal Western concepts but also as a possible and actual basis for our own thinking,

and thus too as the products of people(s) who ought to be acknowledged as having a

Schiess 125

status equal to that of practitioners of modern science” (Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics

12). This approach also makes some inroads with respect to the dilemma expressed by

Myra Jehlen in an exchange with Peter Hulme in 1993. It was at this time that the “first

wave” of reinterpretations of cannibal tropes threatened, in Jehlen’s view, to focus solely

on deconstructing the Western discourse of “the savage” rather than on the historical

reality of indigenous peoples. As she puts it, “if we do not join the undoing of the term

cannibalism with doing the history of anthropophagy, [then] the people whom the myth

of cannibalism misrepresents, instead of emerging more truly when the myth has been

dispersed, disappear altogether” (Jehlen 189). It is worth acknowledging here that there is

no monolithic or homogenous body of “indigenous thought,” and that the fifteenth-

century Caribs whose “rights” to self-definition Jehlen defends are not the same as the

twentieth-century Araweté whose self-narration gives rise to Viveiros de Castro’s

formulations. With this in mind, however, I wish to tease out a bit the implications of

Jehlen’s point.

At the end of his analysis of the evolving and intertwining application of cannibal

tropes in Latin America over the course of five hundred years, Carlos Jáuregui ends with

a concern similar to that of Jehlen. The “palimpsestic superimposition” (540) of several

species of tropological “cannibals” (colonial cannibals, Calibán, and antropofagia

cultural) and their many iterations in Latin American cultural production creates a “tejido

intricado” that requires, in the case of Jáuregui’s monograph, 600 pages to begin to

unravel. For Jáuregui, the true alterity of the cannibal (which he refers to as caníbal-

Calibán, in acknowledgment of the interconnected and transvalued representations that

create the Latin American “cannibal complex”), remains exterior to and inapprehensible

Schiess 126

by academic studies focused on what Jehlen terms “the European imaginary.” As

Jáuregui puts it: “That is why, after having exhauseted the cartographies of Canibalia, he

inevitably, fatally escapes us” (604). Jáuregui nevertheless ends on a utopian note, by

signaling “the usefulness of the Calibán-caníbal complex as a tool for instigating political

imagination, as a form for imagining the unsayable Others who are waiting, in some dark

corner, for their moment as the center of institutionalized academic study” (604). As the

figure of Otherness par excellence, Jáuregui suggests that the caníbal-Calibán skirts the

confines of “institutions of knowledge […] like a teasing, threatening figure [un

amenazador ñam ñam] from the exteriority that postmodernity negates” (604).

Jáuregui’s escaping cannibal—the figure for an alternative (to) modernity that the

author associates with “the elusive utopia” (604), has much in common with the cannibal

that Harris tries to conjure via “transubstantiation in reverse.” The remainder of this

chapter traces the appearance of the cannibal in the field of Translation Studies, from its

first iteration as colonial threat, to its appropriation as a figure for post-colonial defiance,

and finally as the suggestion of a Perspectivist Other—an alien subjectivity always just

out of reach, reminding us that all translation is at its core “mis-translation.

Cannibal Relations in Translation (Studies)

The first appearance of the cannibal in Translation Studies tracks closely to the

colonial tropes outlined above, where it circles around both the dangers and the allure of

the exotic. Despite the imperial overtones and explicit Eurocentrism that runs through

George Steiner’s After Babel (1975), contemporary scholars tend to view this

groundbreaking work of translation theory as a precursor to the development of the

Schiess 127

specifically post-colonial branch of Translation Studies. This is so because the study was

one of the first in the field of literary translation to problematize power relations between

texts and cultural traditions as a central feature of literary translation. Nevertheless, even

the names of the four steps of Steiner’s “Hermeneutic Motion,” the fifth chapter of his

book, figure the translational process in terms that mimic colonial desires, aggression and

fears. The first and final steps (“Trust” and “Restitution,” respectively) register both an

inclination toward alterity, a value that attracts and that will be “borrowed” from a text,

and a debt that this “borrowing” incurs. These two benign-sounding steps, however,

bookend the more violent processes at the Motion’s core: “Aggression,” where “the

translator invades, extracts and brings home,” and “Incorporation.” These two procedures

implicitly invoke the colonial threat of cannibalism.

As Steiner’s description of the “incorporative” step continues, he addresses the

asymmetrical relations of power by way of cultural examples that evoke the figure of the

savage while also expressing the colonial anxiety that anthropologist Gananath

Obeyesekere’s uses to distinguish between “anthropophagy” (“an actual practice which

may take place in all societies under conditions of stress or as a feature of rituals”) and

“cannibalism” (the “European fantasy the other is going to eat us”) (14). Expressions of

the allure of the exotic (acts of translation are said to “add to our means; we come to

incarnate alternative energies and resources of feeling” (Steiner 314) give way to the

risks of drawing too near to alterity: “The dialectic of embodiment entails that we may be

consumed […] we may be mastered and made lame by what we have imported. There are

translators in whom the vein of personal, original creation goes dry…because the voice of

the inhaled text had come to choke their own” (315-16).

Schiess 128

Steiner’s cautions his reader regarding the risk of foreign influence, and this is not

far from the complex that drove Andrade’s 1928 rebellion against a Brazilian literary

tradition that he read as subpar and subservient to European models. Andrade dates his

Manifesto in relation to the date on which the Tupinamba consumed the Bishop of

Sardinha. In doing so, he reminds us that the threat of cannibalism to the West is that the

colonial “prey” (the native that is to become the vassal of the Empire) will turn the tables

and become the hunter. The foreign vitality—text, land or people—that was to be

appropriated to fuel the home machine has the potential to overpower the Western self.

As scholars of the Global South began to assert a different position for the cultural

production of “subaltern” cultures, colonial models of understanding the cannibal in

relation to translation such as Steiner’s quietly evaporated, making way for the

transvalued cannibal proposed by Brazilian antropofagia. With “Da razão

antropofágica,” Haroldo de Campos gleefully revives Andrade’s vengeful cannibal: the

colonial subject who, sometimes playfully and sometimes pointedly, rejects not the “gift”

itself of European civilization, but the terms of the exchange.17 As Campos envisions the

legacy of antropofagia for his theory:

Oswald’s “Anthropophagy” is a theory proposing the critical devouring of

universal cultural heritage, formulated not from the insipid, resigned

perspective of the ‘noble savage’ […] but from the point of view of the

“bad savage,” devourer of whites – the cannibal. The latter view does not

involve a submission (an indoctrination), but a transculturation, or, better,

a “transvalorization:” a critical view of History as a negative function (in

Nietzsche’s sense of the term), capable of appropriation and of

Schiess 129

expropriation, de-hierachization, deconstruction. Any past which is an

“other” for us deserves to be negated. We could say that it deserves to be

eaten, devoured. (160)

Whereas Steiner ultimately neutralizes the threat to the translator of extreme alterity,

Campos seizes that threat, actualizes it and transvalues the outcome. Campos’s cannibal

stakes a place for himself in an alimentary system where relations between the consumer

and the consumed are not only leveled, but recursively circular. In doing so, he furthers

an important aspect of Andrade’s formulation, namely that original thought had long

been filtering to Europe from the Americas: “Sem nós a Europa não teria sequer a sua

pobre declaração dos direitos do homem” (Andrade 3).

Campos extends the fulfillment of the project of antropofagia cultural from fact

to awareness. As he argues, not only would “New World thought” continue to inform and

infiltrate the supposedly monolithic tradition, as it had done for centuries, but Europe

must inevitably become conscious of its role as cultural recipient: “Europeans must learn

to live together with the new barbarians who, for some time, in an alternative and

different context, have been devouring them and making them flesh of their flesh and

bone of their bone. They have long been resynthesizing them chemically, through an

impulsive and uncontrollable metabolism of difference” (173). Throughout the essay,

Campos uses extended metaphors of digestion to designate processes of artistic influence

that are non-hierarchical and non-ethnocentric. Rather than a model of intellectual

production that holds European art and philosophy as the gold standard of originality and

viability, with “new world barbarian” thinkers capable only of stale regurgitations,

Campos proposes that “old world” productions serve as the fuel for new and innovative

Schiess 130

artistic gestures. Finally, Campos declares, this New World differential otherness will be

force-fed to the center: “The logocentric writers, who imagined themselves to be the

privileged master of a proud one-way koine, must prepare themselves for the increasingly

urgent task of re-devouring the differential marrow of the new barbarians” (177). By

twisting the food chain into a knot, the ex-centric savage seizes subjecthood from the

European conqueror precisely by a sly remaking of that conqueror in his own

cannibalistic image.

Antropofagia, Translation, and Post-Coloniality

The resurgence in the 1990s of Antropofagia in the context of postcolonial

Translation Studies was notable, not only insofar as it represented a much-deserved

international recognition of Andrade’s work and the Brazilian artistic corpus it inspired,

but because one might propose that an international interest in a Brazilian theory of

cultural differentiation essentially fulfills one of the movement’s core predictions. In her

introduction to a 1999 essay describing Haroldo de Campos’s theory, Else Pires Vieira

presents the following lament about the critical re-interpretation of Antropofagia:

As with any rich offering, satisfaction can be accompanied by surfeit or

excess. Such may be the case for the world's digestion of the Brazilian-

derived metaphor of anthropophagy [...] Antropofagia has become a too

quickly swallowed body of thought, a word devoured literally and not

digested as a complex metaphor undergoing metamorphoses in different

contexts and critical perspectives. (95)

Schiess 131

In Vieira’s view, Andrade’s formulation of cultural anthropophagy has been mis-

translated when taken out of its home context. We are to understand that “the world’s

digestion of the Brazilian-derived metaphor” has resulted in interpretations that are over-

simplified, reduced to the “literal” referent of anthropophagy (presumably, in an idea to

which I will return later, that referent is “furious eating”) when in fact “Antropofagia,

[…] in Haroldo de Campos’ view, is a sign of the polyphonic identity of Brazil, [and it]

rings not a note of furious aggression but rather one of irreverently amorous devouring.

Deriving from a non-Eurocentric way of conceiving spiritual force as inseparable from

matter, related to the local natives’ animism, it ultimately entails a tribute to the other’s

strength that one wishes to have combined with one’s own for greater vitality” (96).

Somewhat paradoxically, Vieira’s essay takes part in (although presumably as a

corrective) the very “world digestion” of antropofagia that she questions. The essay

appears in English, in a volume specifically devoted to the politics of translating within a

context of hierarchical relations between cultures. In their introduction to this volume,

Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi choose Campos’s theory as a model for post-colonial

translation in general. The cannibal thus moves through this chain of interpretations and

re-interpretations to emerge as the post-colonial translator par excellence: the procedures

of a supposedly cannibalistic relation between texts and traditions plays out on the level

of the volume and on that of the essay. The conceptual impoverishment that (in many

ways rightly) alarms Vieira in the case of Antropofagia is but another instance of the

trajectory described in the first part of this chapter. As it turns out, the mis-en-abyme on

view in Vieira’s statement is part of a chain of infinite regress that, to paraphrase the old

commonplace, is nothing but mistranslations all the way down.

Schiess 132

Following Vieira, many studies have qualified the view that Campos’s

translational practices are demonstrably “anthropophagic.” Célia Andrade Prado points

out that it was Campos’s brother, fellow critic and concrete poet Augusto, who claimed

the term for his own relation to foreign texts: “My way of loving them is to swallow

them, according to Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Law” while Haroldo de

Campos never used the term to refer directly to his own translations (A. Campos 7; C.

Prado 95-6). Haroldo de Campos echoed his brother’s language in his essay on cultural

(mis)appropriation, calling literary production in Latin America a process of “deglutição”

‘swallowing,’ a term Vieira ties tightly to Campos’s descriptions of his literary

translational praxis as “transcriação” ‘transcreation,’ “transtextualização,”

‘transtextualization,” and “uma transfusão de sangue” ‘a blood transfusion,’ neologisms

that all invoke anthropophagic metaphors of creative consumption and vitality (Vieira 96-

97). Campos also borrows from his brother Augusto the idea that seventeenth-century

Bahian poet Gregório de Matos is Brazil’s first anthropophagic poet: “the first

experimental cannibal in our poetry” (H. Campos 165).

What makes Matos’s poetry (which is itself a translation or appropriation of a

long lineage of Iberian poetic forms) “anthropophagic,” Campos says, is its character as

“a double speech of the other as difference” (165). Campos also points out the poet’s

endeavor “to speak a code of alterities and to speak it in an altered state,” and his efforts

to speak “the difference in the gaps of the universal code” (165-6). For Campos, then, the

anthropophagic work carries the trace of difference in the body of its text. Is this process

analogous to Harris’s “transubstantiation in reverse?”

Schiess 133

Robert de Brose’s study of the Portuguese translation of Homer’s Iliad upon

which Campos worked between 1990 and 2007 offers a clue to this question. Brose seeks

to explore to what extent Campos’s Iliada, as the result of the translational practice

denominated “transcriação,” can help us “to understand aspects of the Homeric poem that

would otherwise remain obscure to the reader unversed in Greek” (loc. 2897, italics

mine). Campos’s version of the Iliad was initially criticized by Brazilian scholars of

Greek who remained “faithful to the principles of classical philology […] but [had] little

knowledge of the theoretical premise for Campos’s translational project” (Brose loc.

2880). These specialists found his “alternative reading” to be linguistically “inexact”

(Brose loc 2880). Departing from philological exactness, Campos focused instead on

creating what he termed an “isomorphic” version of the Iliad; one that recognizes the

cultural specificity of what Jakobson would call its formal plane: “For the Greeks,

‘poetry’ differed from ‘speech’ on account of the presence of rhythm and melody;

specifically, by the interplay of long and short syllables arranged according to sequential

patterns of contrast between the two” (loc 2914). Brose continues:

When Haroldo de Campos says that the source text and the translation will

“co-crystallize into a self-same system” he is alluding to the fact that the

translator must understand the rules governing said system, the ones that

are operative within the original text, in order to applky them to the

transposition of sense (which, to make a point, is never simply semantic in

poetry) into the receiving language. In order to do this, however, the

translator must know not only how to trace the delicate clockwork

mechanisms of the original (that is, to make use of its

Schiess 134

metapoetic/linguistic function), but more importantly, that he be capable

of listening to the rhythm of its gears, the velocity of its internal workings,

the machine work that gives it life. Elements such as these lie so far

beyond the sum of a text’s dictionary meanings, rooted instead in the deep

and silent waters of what, within the arrangement of its signs, is non-

verbal. (loc 2926)

What Campos translated, if not the “dead letter” of Homer’s text, was its music. He

privileges the structure and rhythm of the Portuguese lines, rather than the semantic

content of individual words or even full passages. And this produces a different kind of

“fidelity” to the original: an attempt to capture its escaping music. That is, the process of

transcriação captures something inherent to the text that over time became ephemeral, as

the context that produced it vanished into the past, the fading of the sung word into the

dead letter of the text. This is precisely what de Brose refers to as the elements that would

“remain obscure” to the reader “unversed in Greek;” they arguably also remain obscure

to the philological reader of the “dead text.” The new, “transcreated” text is, like Harris’s

bone flute, the result of a process of “transubstantiation in reverse,” where the ephemeral

becomes material and the material carries with it the seed of escaping alterity (the Greek

song, the cannibal’s music) with the power to transform the receiver.

If, as Brose proposes, Haroldo de Campos captures the essential alterity of the

Ancient Greeks—their reliance on oral, rhythmic language—by reproducing the interplay

of syllables and silence of Homer’s epic, Spivak focuses on a different music, namely,

what “in more workaday language I have called the obligation of the translator to juggle

the rhetorical silences in the two languages” (220). What Spivak calls a text’s

Schiess 135

“rhetoricity” refers to that which language performs outside of itself, in its interstitial

silences: “Poststructuralism has shown some of us a staging of the agent within a three-

tiered notion of language (as rhetoric, logic, silence). [As translators] we must attempt to

enter or direct that staging, as one directs a play, as an actor interprets a script. That takes

a different kind of effort from taking translation to be a matter of synonym, syntax and

local color” (203).

In many ways, Spivak’s concerns for the cultural specificity of the text parallels

the driving force of Campos’s transcreation of Homer. It is noteworthy, however, to

distinguish Spivak’s translational perspective from Campos’s, in that the former stands

on the “other end” of the relation between Europe and the Global South; from translating

non-European texts into European languages. Spivak’s main concern for what is “lost in

translation” is this: “without a sense of the rhetoricity of language, a species of neo-

colonialist construction of the colonial scene is afoot […] this happens when all the

literature of the Third World gets translated into a sort of with-it translatese that erases all

the differences between authors and identities” (203-04). When Spivak uses Harris’s

cannibal flute to conjure that which would otherwise remain obscure for the audience of a

translation, her concern is, like Jehlen’s, for the people misrepresented by the “colonial

fantasies” of the West.

Spivak’s invocation of the cannibal stands for the “traditions and situations that

remain obscure because we cannot share their linguistic construction […]. If we say

things should be accessible to us, who is this ‘us’? What does that sign mean?” (379-80).

Spivak’s use of Harris’s flute suggests that we can view the cannibal as another example

of the effort to communicate with alterity in extremis (Spivak elsewhere uses the example

Schiess 136

of the extraterrestrial), whereby “absolute alterity or otherness is differed-deferred into an

other self who resembles us, however minimally, and with whom we can communicate”

(370-71).

The historical specificity of Spivak’s Other points us back toward Roberto

Schwarz’s critique of Antropofagia: “How can one fail to notice that the Antropófagos—

like the nationalists—take as their subject the abstract Brazilian, with no class

specifications?” (9). Campos’s cannibal is similarly metaphorical. When he writes, for

example, that “for some time, the devouring jaws of these new barbarians,” among whom

he counts Gregório de Matos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Alfonso

Reyes, and Mário de Andrade, “have been chewing up and ‘ruining’ a cultural heritage

that is ever more planetary” (174), the ironic edge of his prose is that these historical

figures are clearly not “primitives,” only that they are “savage” in their refusal to bow

down to a Western tradition that would like to exclude their contributions or to insist that

the New World thinker is only capable of stale regurgitations of innovative European

thought. Campos uses “barbarian” ironically to point out European ethnocentrism;

however, he does so not out of any commitment to actual indigenous people or to the

objective of using native thinking to dismantle European power. His goal is to carry out a

European interpretation of indigenous practices; however, he inverts the perceived value

of both as a way to gain a foothold for elite Latin American intellectuals on the stage of

“universal” cultural production.

If Campos’s project of anthropophagic translation ultimately comes up short,

what of value is there in Spivak’s theories on the cultural translation that inheres in

linguistic transfer? Perhaps more to the point, how do these theories (developed in

Schiess 137

Manhattan) relate to the notion of translation derived by Viveiros de Castro from his

fieldwork in the Amazon? When we try, like Jáuregui, to imagine the perspective of the

historical cannibal and realize that he escapes us, or when Spivak urges us to imagine the

perspective of the effaced colonial Other through the figure of the cannibal while

realizing that one cannot quite do so, it is in fact tempting to say that we are practicing a

version of Viveiros de Castro’s controlled equivocation. Is this, however, the case?

Spivak’s explicit invocation of the cannibal in “The Politics of Translation” is

quite brief, consisting of the passage I cited in the introduction and a short, counter-

Hegelian interpretation of the relationship between the “spirit” (the flute music) and the

“bone” (the flute itself), to which I have already alluded. But the idea made clear in the

action of “turning the flute around” to “consume our biases” participates in a longer

series of formulations. These attempt in various ways to figure Spivak’s view of the

relationship a translator should have with her text (and with the subjectivity behind the

production of that text) as she enters into to the endeavor of creating with them a new

meaning. This is particularly true, as I stated in the introduction, when the source text

communicates a subjectivity that does not coincide with that of the translator’s audience,

and where the translation runs the risk of erasing or leaving behind the aspects that mark

that difference. Spivak’s attitude of concern, played out upon a background of the

remnants of the colonial regime—unequal material conditions and a disdain for

nonwestern modes of thinking—constitute the “politics” of her translation.

How should a translator relate to the text in this context? The “mutual psyche”

between self and other that Harris proposes as arising from cannibal music, and that

Schiess 138

Campos pursued in a more self-actualizing way, loses its aggressive edge in Spivak’s

essay:

Language is not everything. It is only a vital clue to where the self loses its

boundaries. The ways in which rhetoric or figuration disrupt logic

themselves point at the possibility of random contingency, beside

language, around language. Such a dissemination cannot be under our

control. Yet in translation, where meaning hops into the empty spaciness

between two named historical languages, we get perilously close to it […]

Although every act of reading or communication is a bit of this risky

fraying which scrambles together somehow, our stake in agency keeps the

fraying down to a minimum except in the communication of and in love.

(What is the place of “love” in the ethical?) The task of the translator is to

facilitate [a] love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits

fraying [of meaning], holds the agency of the translator and the demands

of her imagined audience at bay (202).

Not expecting that a translated text should speak the “with-it translatese” of World

Literature, while also not expecting that author, text, translator and audience should

belong to the same grand cultural tradition, the same world with the same concepts, is

how Spivak’s formulation takes us from Campos’s guiltless “deglutição” ‘swallowing,’

to what Viveiros de Castro calls controlled equivocation, then—to know (and show that

one knows) that the perspective of the Other is other. Spivak herself seems to point the

way: “Tracking commonality through responsible translation can lead us into areas of

difference and different differentiations” (216).

Schiess 139

A final example of how Viveiros de Castro defines controlled equivocation can

help to determine whether there is in fact some sort of practical application or footing

available to translators looking to incorporate perspectivism into their work. In

“Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Viveiros de

Castro explains the fundamental difference between Western and Perspectivist relational

systems—systems of translation—with an example of an equivocal homonym. As he

points out, the Cashinahua, indigenous people living in Western Brazil near the border

with Peru, use the word txai as a term of affinity. One might readily translate this term of

intimacy as “brother,” but Viveiros de Castro warns that this would be a mistake:

The powerful Western metaphors of brotherhood privilege certain (not all)

logical properties of this relation. What are siblings, in our culture? They

are individuals identically related to a third term, their genitors or their

functional analogs. The relation between two siblings derives from their

equivalent relation to an origin which encompasses them and whose

identity identifies them. This common identity means that siblings occupy

the same point of view onto an exterior world; deriving their similitude

from a similar relation to a same origin, they will have ‘parallel’ relations

(to use an anthropological image) to everything else. […] Two partners in

any relation are defined as connected in so far as they can be conceived to

have something in common, that is, as being in the same relation to a third

term. To relate is to assimilate, to unify, to identify. (18)

In a model built on the “brotherly” relation, “to translate is to isolate what the discourses

share in common, something which is only ‘in them’ because it is (and was already

Schiess 140

before them) ‘out there;’ the differences between the discourses amount to no more than

the residue which precludes a ‘perfect translation,’ that is, an absolute identificatory

overlap between them. To translate is to presume redundancy” (19-20). By contrast, “the

common word for the relation, in Amazonian worlds, is the term translated by ‘brother-

in-law’ and/or ‘cross-cousin.’ This is the term we call people we don’t know what to call,

those with whom we wish to establish a generic relation. In sum, ‘cousin/brother-in-law’

is the term which creates a relation where none existed; it is the form through which the

‘unknown’ is made known” (18). There are significant implications to this difference, as

Viveiros de Castro points out:

My relation with my brother-in-law is based on my being in another kind

of relation to his relation with my sister or my wife. The Amerindian

relation is a difference of perspective. While we tend to conceive the

action of relating as a discarding of differences in favor of similarities,

indigenous thought sees the process from another angle: the opposite of

difference is not identity but indifference (19).

What Spivak seems to be after, then, fits the model of an “affinal” translation where, in

the words of Viveiros de Castro, difference serves as a “condition of signification and not

a hindrance” (20). In an “affinal” translation based on the differential relation of the

brother-in-law, connections are based not on identity and equivalence, but on

approximation and difference:

The image of the social connection is not that of sharing something in

common (a something-in-common acting as foundation), but, on the

contrary, that of the difference between the terms of the relation, or better,

Schiess 141

of the difference between the differences which constitute the terms of the

relation—then a relation can only exist between what differs and in so far

as it differs. In this case, translation becomes an operation of

differentiation—a production of difference which connects the two

discourses to the precise extent to which they are not saying the same

thing, in so far as they point to discordant exteriorities beyond the

equivocal homonyms between them. (italics mine, 20)

In other words, my relation to a “brother-in-law” is predicated on a differential relation

both to him and to some third term. He may be the spouse of my sister, or he may be the

brother of my spouse. Here there is only relationality and ambiguity rather than the

implied base of sameness contained within a relation of brotherhood, fictive or not. It is

worth pointing out here that a feminist theorist such as Spivak will likely note the

absence of a female perspective in Viveiros de Castro’s formulation, where the wife

serves merely as the point of the differential relation between two “brothers-in-law.”

Nevertheless, the parallels with Spivak’s politics of translation—aimed specifically at

texts by “Third World” women—are clear insofar as difference and ambiguity becomes

the very “condition of signification” rather than an obstacle.

What are the practical implications of Viveiros de Castro’s differential cannibal

for the practice of translation? What are the contours of translational poetics of the

“brother-in-law”? Campos and Spivak each hold up an ideal for translation as the

creation of a text that defies the expectations of the home audience for a familiar

sameness and performs the task of crystallizing an escaping alterity. Campos’s

formulations seem to offer more certainty that the task can be achieved, while Spivak

Schiess 142

presents it as a goal to be pursued even if never completed. For both, however, the

cannibal stands as its (untranslatable yet visible) trace. Viveiros de Castro’s early

ethnography of Araweté culture provides another formulation that attends to the

importance of pursuing the perspective of the Other even as he argues that this project

relies upon an infinite array of deflections and differentiation to function. Like Gilles

Deleuze’s baroque folds, there are only constantly evolving acts of creation,

decomposition, and re-creation along other meridians.

A differential theory of “cannibal translation” inevitably leads one to an

unsolvable riddle. If this sort of translation requires one to privilege process over product,

how can that be squared with the translator’s responsibility to produce a translated text?

The cultural differences inhering in languages cannot be crystallized, and yet without the

concrete form of a new text in a new language, there is no translation. What is one to do?

Returning once again to Cobra Norato, we may examine what it means to try to

translate Raul Bopp’s experiential poetics, a poetics that attempts to take seriously

Amazonian modes of otherness, into English. It follows from this that any translation

must also take seriously these ideas and not work to resolve them into some

“comfortable” form based on the illusion of identity.

The challenge of capturing Cobra Norato’s “other voices” arises from its very

first lines. In these, “Um dia / eu hei de morar nas terras do Sem-fim” ‘One day / I’ll go

and live in those Lands of No-End,’ the last word may well underscore Bopp’s awareness

of participating in a tradition of Amazonian writing. In particular, one might note that the

phrase “terras do Sem-fim” ‘Lands of No-End’ parallels the observation made by

Euclides da Cunha in his posthumously published “Impressões gerais” ‘General

Schiess 143

impressions’ (part of his larger collection, À margem da história (At the Margin of

History, 1909). In that essay, he writes on his experience in the Amazon: “em poucas

horas o observador […] sente que o seu olhar se abrevia nos sem-fins daqueles horizontes

vazios e indefinidos como o dos mares” ‘within a few hours the observer […] feels that

their view is cut off in the endlessness (no-ends) of those empty and indefinite horizons

like those of the seas’ (3)18. In this case, sem-fim refers to the sensory overload (or

perhaps, underload) imposed by the sheer unchanging depths of the Amazonian

landscape. This is a singular experience, and it is one that Bopp shares in a nod to his

literary predecessor.19

The sem-fim reference also has another local referent beyond topographical

description. Sem-fim is one of a number of a popular names for the Tapera naevia

(striped cuckoo), a bird native to Amazonia whose calls resemble, for local inhabitants,

the voices of human spirits.20 The choice of this description for the world that the poem’s

narrator is about to enter may, in this case, prefigure Bopp’s creation of an interspecies

polyphony where the voices of humans, plants, animals and enchanted beings mix and

proliferate. Bopp’s original phrase performs something akin to Campos’s anthropophagic

transcreation: it wraps together a lettered tradition and local specificity, both of which

may easily be lost in the translation of his text into yet another language and cultural

context.

In the case of sem-fim, are the term’s ephemeral resonances in fact “mere”

information (intertextual references, local lore) or are they an index of something more

radically other, like the ñam-ñam figure that appears at the end of Jáuregui’s analysis and

points to “the elusive utopia”? In the end, they are both. In deciding how to signal these

Schiess 144

differences, the translator must decide how many steps to take for her reader in the

direction of alterity. One might take the approach of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “thick

translation”: a text that represents the translator's effortful attempt to capture the nuances

of contextual meaning with scores of notes and appendices and at the same time passes

the burden of lengthy interpretation on to the reader who must contend with their weight.

Conversely, one might follow the “abusive translation” of Lawrence Venuti that shares

with Campos’s transcreation a foundation in the premises of Walter Benjamin’s

translation theory: alterity is brought into the fabric of the receiving language, opening

the door to the Other by way of the reader’s sense of estrangement within her own

language. These are choices that all grapple with the differential aspects of cannibal

translation to varying degrees. The sem-fim opens up a threshold for us (not unlike for the

narrating poetic “I” of Bopp’s first line, who will someday live in its openness), and it is

up to the translator to devise a way to keep it open for the reader.

There is also the question of music and rhythm. As de Brose’s analysis of

Campos’s Iliada underscores, the internal music created by a poetic text is a common

casualty of interlinguistic translation. In Bopp’s Portuguese and Nhenhegatú (the local

term for the modern version of língua geral amazônica, Brazil’s pidgin Tupi), Cobra

Norato achieves this music through repetition, alliteration, and the irregular alternation of

long and short lines. The repetition of individual words and meanings (“andando

caminhando caminhando” ‘going along walking, walking;’ “afundando afundando”

‘sinking sinking’), for example, is typical of both Tupi speech patterns and the local

variants of the Portuguese language spoken in Amazonian regions (Buss). Lines such as

“me misturo no ventre do mato mordendo raízes” ‘I blend into the belly of the brush,

Schiess 145

biting roots;’ “faço puçanga de flor de tajá de lagoa” ‘I make a puçanga from the flower

of the tajá de lagoa;’ “sapos beiçudos espiam no escuro” ‘full-lipped frogs peer into the

darkness;’ and “um fio de água atrasada lambe a lama” ‘a string of slow-running water

licks the loam’ (among others) rely heavily on alliteration and assonance. Such poetic

features are challenging for the translator to maintain while also attempting to

communicate the semantic meaning of the words in these lines. My own English

translations attempt to recuperate some of the sonorous quality of the original, and I

deliberately leave the Tupi terms puçanga and tajá de lagoa as they appear in the original

Portuguese text, without qualification or glossing (a puçanga is a magical charm; the tajá

de lagoa is a flowering aquatic plant). The point of this is that for most readers of the

Portuguese original, these terms are likewise unknown and estranging. This, as I discuss

in the first chapter of the present dissertation, has much to do with the Bopp’s own poetic

project, but it also has to do with my own concern for the sort of cannibal translation that

works as transubstantiation in reverse:

“Transubstantiation in reverse” means that the bone flute can turn right around

and in our day and age one may suddenly be confronted with the necessity to look

deeply into oneself and to ask oneself, how can one begin to revise the images in

which one’s furies are planted, in which one’s biases are planted? How can one

begin to revise the technologies in which we lodge our furies, technologies that

we have planted around the earth and which seem immoveable? How can one

begin to revise them unless one looks very deeply into the capacity of fiction by

way of its imageries and textual perspectives to ‘consume our own biases’?

(Harris 23)

Schiess 146

Here, the Nhenhegatú deflects and bends the English as it does the Portuguese of the

original. Whether the reader trips over her own biases or consumes them, they are at least

on view.

Perhaps, then, the literary “cannibal translation” does not depend on the

production of a determined text, but on the creation of an experience: a “flickering pocket

of transcendence,” or “a transient identification of beings” (Cannibal Metaphysics 20,

187). Viveiros de Castro has used these phrases describe the meaning of the cannibal rite

for the Araweté: an incursion toward knowledge, via an ephemeral visitation of the

perspective of the Other. A perspectivist translation lies less in the textual object “out

there” (which will be in any case a different object for every reader), and more on the

disposition of the translator attuned to the impossibility of her task’s completion. To

perform something like Harris’s transubstantiation in reverse, the translator effects such a

visitation by leaving traces in the printed work that signal to the reader, like a flicker of

movement in her peripheral vision, the presence of an alterity that she cannot entirely

apprehend.

Schiess 147

CONCLUSION

Can the Object Speak?

The poetry, fiction, nonfiction prose, and essays that I bring together in this

dissertation all convey, in different ways, an uncanny object. Like the word “objeto” in in

Lispector’s Água viva, the objects in this dissertation point to similar problems but are

never restricted to a single type or category. Each chapter shows how different Brazilian

writers have used language to present an object that slips outside of the position of the

passive recipient and shows itself to exert an agency that, quite possibly, it has always

possessed.

The slipperiness of the objects examined so far in this dissertation might lead one

to ask what would happen if the object were to slip completely from view, leaving its

agency—in this case, the agency to withdraw—as its only remnant. A good case study of

such a fictional narrative is Sidney Rocha’s micro-narrative “googlemap,” a companion

story to the text with which I open the introduction of this dissertation and a fitting

bookend for its conclusion. In this story, which invites allegorical readings, it is quite

possible that its phantasmal objects are, to appropriate a formulation from Sharon Marcus

and Stephen Best, ghosts that are “presences, not absences” that we might just “let be

ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of” (13).

Insofar as “googlemap” is a sister-story to “matriuska,” Rocha composes it in a

style very similar to that of “matriuska;” however, it also contains a modicum of

connective narrative tissue supplied, for instance, by verb phrases and indicated dialogue.

The text is broken into three brief, numbered sections, and the prose is abrupt and

choppy, written in short sentences that often, like “matriuska,” eschew capitalization.

Schiess 148

It is only by a brief narrative spur, however, that one learns that these two

characters are the same people engaged in the purse scene that makes up the narrative

“matriuska”. In contrast to “matriuska,” the main preoccupations of this second text seem

to be the broader social issues of regional and class difference. This dynamic is

exemplified by the interactions between the story’s narrator, who is revealed to be a

writer from São Paulo, and cristiane, a maid in the hotel where the story takes place. In

“googlemap,” the reader learns the context for the purse scene that comprises

“matriuska:” cristiane has a job as a maid in a hotel, she desires to be a singer or to visit

São Paulo, she makes frequent trips to the roof of the hotel to glimpse the horizon, and

she sexually propositions the narrator (one presumes unsuccessfully), who is a writer and

guest in the hotel. The nature of this background material makes it tempting to read the

story as an allegory for the neglect and light disdain with which elite Brazilian urbanites

treat the Northeastern region: it is fine for a beach vacation, but one would not want to

live there.

One reason for the interregional disdain suggested in “googlemap” is a long

history in which the Northeast has been cast as a region characterized by lack: it lacks

rain, it lacks industry, it lacks infrastructure, it lacks opportunity. In “googlemap,” a story

named for digital technology, this motif of lack points to a void. In contrast to the super-

present parade of objects in “matriuska,” the objects in “googlemap” are absent. They are

the computers and digital devices that don’t appear in a story that is named after their

capabilities. Paradoxically enough, of course, the power of these devices is that, by way

of their physical presence, one can navigate absence. The title “googlemap” itself

suggests the all-seeing eye whereby with a computer, one can digitally access seas of

Schiess 149

virtual data without moving from a fixed site. Despite these new capabilities, cristiane’s

power to “travel the world without leaving the room” is undeniably analog: she collects

stories about other places from her lovers and from other guests in the hotel. At times she

sleeps with guests at the hotel (hence her willingness to proposition the narrator), and it is

after these trysts and conversations (categories that sometimes overlap) that she imagines,

from a vantage point on the building’s roof, that she can “connect” to the coastal cities of

the south by following the curve of the coast with her line of vision. “Sua cidade tem

mar” ‘Does your city have an ocean?’ she asks the narrator one day while cleaning his

room:

“Se tiver, posso qualquer dia ver, lá de cima.” assim foram os dias. “Aqui

no hotel ouço as viagens que me contam. com o tempo dá pra adivinhar

quem tem pra contar. homens feito o senhor tem, eu sei.” contei algumas.

na terça, entrou no quarto e pediu para sentar na cama, “Se não for

ousadia.” sentou. “Você transaria comigo?” (78)

[“If it does, maybe one of these days I can see it from up there on the

roof.” so passed the days. “Here at the hotel, I hear about the trips that

people take. after a while you can just tell who has stories to tell. men like

you. i know you do.” so i told her a few. on tuesday, she came into the

room and asked to sit down on the bed, “If it’s not rude to ask.” she sat

down. “Would you have sex with me?”]

In the absence of her own digital device, cristiane remains bound to an imaginary rooted

in the material presence of other bodies and of physical places. That she trades sex to

engage in this version of virtual travel and also risks her employment by neglecting her

Schiess 150

duties underscores the psychic importance for this character of the transcendence of

place. The sex and the horizon-gazing are “real” in concrete terms; however, they do not

quite go the distance. Just as in “matriuska,” cristiane’s treasure remains inside the bag,

and she remains fixed within the region “donde nunca saiu, nem nunca sairá” ‘that she

had never left, and never would leave’ (77).

Given the historically (and ongoing) asymmetrical relation between Brazil’s

Southern coastal cities and its Northeast, there is good cause to read “googlemap” as an

allegory for neglect on a national order. Rocha’s published works span a transitional

period for Brazil’s poorer classes that radically changed configurations of power.

Beginning with the presidency of Labor Party leader Luís Inácio da Silva in 2002, new

federal policies such as guaranteed basic income (the Bolsa Familia) and greater access

to higher education stoked real hope for greater social mobility and political relevance for

Brazil’s poor and working classes. At the same time, the federal expansion of electrical

service into the country’s vast rural areas, followed by the dawn of the Internet age,

smartphone technology, and increased cellular service suggested the integration of

overlooked places and populations into the grid of modern connectivity. In light of the

country’s subsequent economic retraction and far-right political swing, not to mention the

disproportionate fatality rate to COVID-19 in the country’s rural areas, the long-term

promises of greater social inclusion suggested in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first

century are increasingly uncertain.

Rocha logically knew nothing of the Brazilian elections of 2018 or the global

pandemic of 2020 when he published matriuska in 2009. Nevertheless, his prose registers

a prescient skepticism toward both social mobility and the notion that the Northeastern

Schiess 151

region would be truly “connected” to the urban south. He goes to great pains, for

example, to show that cristiane is aware that it is social class that most separates her from

the narrator. When the narrator is struck speechless by her sexual proposition, she puts

him on the spot: “Não transa comigo porque arrumo quartos nessa merda dum hotel, né

isso?...Sou cantora também, viu?...Transe comigo. Me carregue” ‘You don’t want to

sleep with me because I clean rooms in this shit hotel, is that it? I’m a singer too, you

know. Have sex with me. Carry me away’ (78). She astutely frames her geographical

isolation in terms of a literally embodied social habitus (Bourdieu): lacking the money

and the opportunity to leave her locale, she laments in corporeal terms “não sei na pele o

que quer dizer 100 quilómetros” ‘i can’t even feel in my skin what 100 kilometers would

mean’ (77).

The readings I perform over the course of this study would suggest, however, that

an allegorical reading of “googlemap” and “matriuska” (as stories in dialogue or that

reflect one another even if at an oblique angle) falls short of the mark. After all, which of

these presents the narrator’s shift in disposition? Which of the two short stories is more

moving to the reader? In “googlemap,” absent digital devices flicker into view like

holograms of a promised connection that is never realized. A hotel maid in Brazil’s

marginal Northeast looks out at a horizon that fades into emptiness, like the holes of a

net, and all the supposed promise of digital “connectivity” (a term that Silicon Valley’s

prophets conveniently never define) dissolves into smoke that points to no fire. In

“matriuska,” on the other hand, the physical objects of the purse speak, persuade, and act

upon the narrating subject. These object-agents work upon the narrator, altering his

stance, transforming the encounter into an ethics of the object.

Schiess 152

The works I examine over the course of this dissertation employ a variety of

tactics to convey this shifting object position, which is often just as much a matter of a

shifting subject position. These techniques include subtle shifts in grammatical

predicates, altered vantage points, different spatial or causal relations between subject

and object that drastically change the relation between them. This ethics of the object

shapes all the works I examine, regardless of genre, because it is precisely when texts

foreground the poetic function of language that this ethics comes into view (Jakobson).

One could similarly reverse the perspective of this causal relation and say that a writer’s

uncanny encounter with an object has a distorting effect on language; it forces a turn to

the aesthetic—the unusual, reflexive use of language—in order to pack a disconcerting

experience into words. The question of who acts as the agent in this process is a relevant

one for this study.

Many times, this change plays out through a question of angles, as an observing

subject moves from one spot to another in order to gain a different perspective. This is

the case for Cobra Norato, who perambulates in circles, and for the narrator of Água viva,

who chooses her vantage point carefully in order to paint “the mirror itself.” It is also true

for the anthropologist or the literary translator who tries to “turn the flute around,” using

“native” technology to engage the other and consuming her own conceptual biases in the

process.

In tracing the move from object to agent that is woven into the language of the

texts I examine, another throughline of this dissertation comes into view. This is a

dimension that I have referred to as “ethical” in reference to the intimate scale of the

intratextual relations presented in each text. As each object exerts an unaccustomed

Schiess 153

agency, their observers—be they literary narrators or academics performing their

disciplinary work—have to contend with the unexpected contributions of an object that

inserts itself into the creative process as a co-participant. In light of the many kinds of

objects encompassed within the works included here, my approach takes a non-

anthropocentric view of the ethical stance as something that encompasses both human

and non-human others.

Looking at texts’ language as something that can convey a new view of—a new

disposition toward—their various objects also allows us to read these works productively

as a sub-corpus of the Brazilian canon, united by common conundrums that cut across

Brazilian history and manifest in various literary periods and genres. Rather than being

circumscribed as examples of primitivist modernism, or avant-garde subjectivism, or

disciplinary description, for example, the corpus of works collected together here are seen

for the complex ontological negotiations with alterity that they are. This trans-textual

move also allows us to think of literary ethics in the contemporary Brazilian context in a

new way. A number of studies in the field approach questions of ethics in Brazilian

literature by focusing on narratives that thematize social concerns (Lehnen, Sá,

Dalcastagné, Williams); still others emphasize the importance of considering texts by

socially marginalized groups as part of a reconsidered canon (Brandallero; Librandi, “A

carta Guarani Kaiowá;” Dias, “Creativity as Transformation”). In focusing primarily on

the trouble that many different kinds of encounters with alterity wreak upon narration,

this dissertation offers a new mode for analyzing the ways in which Brazilian authors

contend with difference.

Schiess 154

In the end, textual ethics necessarily fades into politics. I cite Mel Chen in my

introduction, and it bears repeating that “the sentience of a noun phrase has […]

consequences, and these consequences are never merely linguistic or grammatical, but

also deeply political” (54). A forest that can speak must be encountered and not simply

burned to make way for mining equipment. A wardrobe mirror that reflects back onto the

narrator at an inconvenient angle reminds the reader that actions only have meaning when

one asks in an honest (and necessarily fumbling) way how the Other sees the self. An

Araweté person offers a radically different concept of this relation between self and

Other, and in the process they ask, doubly, to relate differently to them. These are shifts

that have consequences that reverberate in the reader, and through her, in the world.

NOTES

1 The beginning of this shift is most often traced to Edward Said’s publication of

Orientalism (1978). This work, which is framed as a critique against academic

Eurocentrism, is a detailed examination of the rhetorical othering of non-Europeans in

works of art and scholarship that is, in the words of Leela Gandhi, “party to—indeed at

the helm of—a new philosophical skepticism in some European and American scholarly

systems, with offshoots in counterpart postcolonial settings” (ix).

2 “Angico” is the common name in Brazilian Portuguese for tress of the family

Mimosecae, while “Barbatimão” refers to the legume Stryphnodendron adstringens.

3 This context includes the end of Brazil’s rubber boom after 1912; the bottoming-out of

coffee prices two decades later in the wake of the economic crash of 1929; the resulting

depressed international economy; and the rising military aggression in Europe and Asia

Schiess 155

that Bopp could not failed to have missed as he wrote to Brazil from his post in Japan.

For more on this, see Baer; Slater (25-28); and Pizarro (110-11).

4 See, for example, the debate between anthropologists Phillipe Descola and Marshall

Sahlins in HUA; or Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s distinction between

anthropomorphism and “animal genres” (150-54).

5 Bopp credits Antonio Brandão de Amorim’s Lendas em nheêngatú e em portuguez, a

transcription and translation of myth fragments originally collected as his source for the

mythical figure Cobra Norato, along with representations of dialogic nature and a series

of local expressions and speech patterns. Luiz da Câmara Cascudo describes the story of

Cobra Norato as “one of the best known legends in the further North of Brazil, Amazonas

and Pará. An Indian woman was bathing in the Paraná waterfalls, […] when she became

pregnant by the Big Snake. The mother gave birth to a boy and a girl, and, following the

shaman’s advice, threw them in the river, where they grew up as water snakes. The boy,

Honorato, and the girl, Maria Caninana were always together. Norato was good and

Maria was bad (271).

6 The first use of the term “animism” in anthropology can be found in the work of

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), who described the attribution of thought or intention

to nonhumans as “irrational, primitive and childish,” a characteristic of “the first stage of

[human] religion” according to an evolutionary model of cultural development (Praet 3).

Lucién Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939) developed an anthropological cognitive schema based

on a primitive/modern dichotomy that contradicts Tylor’s continuum. He also developed

the concept “participation” to describe the erroneous attribution of intention to animals

and objects by way of the subject’s projection of his own experience onto nonhumans, a

Schiess 156

concept subsequently taken up by psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). Piaget’s model

for developmental cognition effectively weds Tylor’s teleological model with Levy-

Bruhl’s participation in order to pose “animism” as a stage to be overcome on the way to

individual developmental maturity (Kohler 79-80).

7 I have taken English-language citations of Lispector’s novel from Stefan Tobler’s 2012

translation, which maintained the novel’s title in the original Portuguese, while

capitalizing the second word in accordance with English-language conventions for book

titles. Earl Fitz, the novel’s first translator to English, rendered its title as Stream of Life.

8 Marília Librandi’s study adds the act of listening, figured by the giant ear, to the list of

structuring concerns that is announced by the opening paragraph of Perto do coração

selvagem (5-6).

9 Sigmund Freud’s description of the uncanny famously hinges on this interplay between

the familiar and the alien, the seen and the unseen: “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the

terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar […]

Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merged with its antonym

unheimlich. The uncanny (das Unheimliche, the unhomely) is in some way a species of

the familiar (das Heimlich, the homely)” (134). Freud’s analysis, in its ambivalent

circulating around the walls of the home (homely/unhomely, open/hidden,

familiar/unfamiliar) is thus related to the return of the repressed: “the term “uncanny”

applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into

the open” (132).

10 For more on the uptake of this Amerindian loanword, see Erlendsdóttir 2017.

Schiess 157

11 Translated into English by Wolff (“The Rule of Anthropophagy”) and Cisneros

(“Anthropophagous Reason”).

12 For more on the idea of speech communities, see Gumperz; Cohen; Duranti (The

Anthropology of Intentions; Linguistic Anthropology); and Morgan.

13 Of the terms endo- and exo-cannibalism, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro notes in his

introduction to Aparecida Vilaça’s 1992 study, “Estes são rótulos, como [a autora]

reconhece, de conveniência; pois sua análise mostra justamente como o canibalismo

problematiza a separação entre o ‘dentro’ e a ‘fora,’ o ‘endo’ e o ‘exo’; e isto a meu ver

não é um dos resultados menos importantes deste trabalho” (xvii).

14 Vilaça, for instance, reports that when she began ethnographic research with the Wari’

in 1993, many elders still had clear memories of ritual anthropophagy, both funerary

(endocannibalism) and bellicose (exocannibalism). The Wari’ had been “pacified” by

local officials in 1961-62, after a decade of conflict that had begun when rubber tappers

in the area began massacring indigenous groups (Strange Enemies, 86-92).

15 In reduced form the cannibal rite, along with the practice of ritual warfare and the art of

shamanism, participate together in a system for gaining knowledge of others of various

kinds. For more on the specificities of different Amerindian groups’ understanding of

these processes, see (Viveiros de Castro, Araweté: os deuses canibais; Vilaça, O

canibalismo funerario, Comendo como gente; Fausto, War and Shamanism; Lima, Saez).

16 My focus in this chapter is on the evolving concept of “the cannibal” for Western

thinking, and the impact of these changes on theories of translations that use cannibal

tropes in their formulations. For a view from the opposite standpoint, that is, on how the

theories derived from Translation Studies and ethnopoetics can be modified in order to

Schiess 158

effectively and ethically translate Amerindian performative arts into the written form of

European languages, see Jamille Pinheiros Dias, “Peles de papel”.

17 Campos had, in fact, written on Antropofagia since the 1960s and 1970s: Oswald de

Andrade – Trechos escolhidos (Oswald de Andrade – Selected Passages) (1967) and

Morfologia do Macunaíma (Morphology of Macunaíma) (1973). This writing occurred in

the context of revitalizations of notions of national artistic movements such as Tropicalia

and Cinema Novo that also re-worked non-Brazilian artistic influences into distinctively

local forms, in a process that might be called anthropophagic (E. Vieira 1999).

18 Cunha’s collection was translated into English by Sousa (The Amazon: Land Without

History). The above translation is mine.

19 Bopp would not be the only Brazilian writer to use this reference: by the time of Cobra

Norato’s writing, Américo Facó had published Poesia da terra do sem fim, and in 1943

the novel Terra do sem fim was published by Jorge Amado.

20 The bird’s scientific name, incidentally, also follows a hybrid cultural construction:

“tapera” comes from the Tupi word for the class of songbirds that includes the cuckoo,

and “naevia” from the Latin for “marked, patterned.”

Schiess 159

REFERENCES

Appendix 1: Original Translation of “matriuska”

matriuska (Sidney Rocha, 2009)

That time we saw each other she showed me all of her personal importances: they were

photos in her wallet, the aloneness of an earring that had let its partner loose into the

world, a card with a few numbers from Manaus, in case of emergency, a pinginte di noir,

two dreams giving up the fight: going to cuba and buying a fiat (any one) by the sweat of

her brow, an airline ticket from a trip that her friend made (denmark-brazil) so as to never

go back to that gringo again, That son of a bitch, a sanitary napkin and two memories of

an abortion, a sandalwood sachet able to protect even objects from envy, a tiny amethyst

sleeping like an eye in a piece of avocado-colored velvet, use unknown, a pack of

lexotan, unused, but unused things can still give off charm, a fish-shaped buckle, but she

doesn’t like fish, though she’d like to know what sushi tastes like, But where do they sell

it? two student i.d. cards, invalid, from that pocket of time when she lived with someone.

In the outer slices of leather the little mirror that only holds the mouth’s reflex, the

lipstick a body in a hand-guilded coffin,,, and it was only then that she introduced the

thing that without a doubt, with a zero-percent risk of error would cost the most to show,

what only a few people know, but first there was the newspaper clipping, she had to get

that job, three brazilwood seeds, she didn’t know where that wristwatch with an almost-

gold band had gone, It should be here next to the. a piranha missing two teeth, yes, yes,

she was looking for something that would truly validate the existence of that bag, and

there it was, finally, as if in a matriuska or in so many layers of an onion there could be

something worth more than a life, which is what a souvenir is always worth, and that’s

Schiess 160

why she hunched over in pain and silence, that’s why even her breathing sounded of

abandonment, that’s why the voice falling down her throat landed dryly in the soul’s

abyss, but there it was at last, or almost, while the treasure, her treasure, sparkled, but still

she unraveled the fabric within the fabric within the and what could come into the world

as a trace or a cry, (and she is about to shatter into shards of glass over it,) and her

decision was a life-or-death decision, of giving in, of descent, that’s it exactly, of descent,

and that was when the tear fell invading the café we were in and part of the world was

liquidated in that motion, it was then that I caught her hand mid-movement, Definitively,

don’t, i said, don’t do it, save it for yourself, i said, and she looked at me like someone

who might save her and her silence redrew something around me, i don’t know what

exactly, and all of those things slowly returned themselves to her bag and within me other

things were ordered and measured, but there wasn’t a waiter in the world who would

smile at me.

Appendix 2: Original Translation of “googlemap”

Googlemap (Sidney Rocha, 2009)

1. after cristiane told me “I want to go away”, i started thinking. i was leaving that hotel

in two days. cristiane worked nights as a singer and her plan was to just disappear from

there, from that place she had never left, and never will leave. it had the sea, you could

stroll on the beach whenever you wanted, see the couples making love in the sunset over

the distant tide, but no: she needed to get out of there. “I don’t even know in my skin

what 100 kilometers means.” “A highway: I don’t know what that is.” she was with pedro

because he would tell her about a trip to são paulo, but she knew that one by heart.

“Could you tell me one?” “Any one,” she asked. “I need to go somewhere.” during the

Schiess 161

day, she cleaned rooms at the hotel. she’s been warned several times because they’re

always catching her on the roof, looking at the horizon-sea. “I keep looking for cities,

places, way out there. pedro said there’s no beach in são paulo, so i look for the river and

i just start going, going…” “Does your city have an ocean? if it does, maybe one of these

days i can see it form up there.” so went the days. “Here at the hotel, I hear about the trips

that people take. after a while you can just tell who has stories to tell. men like you. i

know you do.” so i told her a few. on tuesday, she came into the room and asked to sit on

the bed, “if it’s not rude to ask.” she sat. “would you have sex with me?”

2. i don’t know who would be prepared to answer her. i paused. “You don’t want to

sleep with me because I clean rooms in this shit hotel, is that it?” “No.” i explained with

all the words I had. “That’s not it.” “You’re embarrassed.” “I’m a singer too, you know.”

she smiled. “Have sex with me. Carry me away.”

3. “When are you leaving?” “In a week,” i lied. the next day a friend would take me to

the airport. I went down to the café, as early as i could. that’s when cristiane came in

through the lobby. she slid like a mermaid in an aquarium at the ocean park. she sat and

she told me her life, which became the story matriuska. never again will a woman keen

so much tenderness. i think she also wanted me to see her like this, at her best. and to be

sorry.

4. i remembered cristiane today, in this hotel in são paulo. looking out the window, i

linked my thought today to that other one, hers, saying she wanted to go away. i know

right now she’ll be at the top of the hotel, looking at the sea of possibilities in people.

from there, can she see me here? certainly. there’s no beach in são paulo, but the power

of cristiane has overcome these limits, that foolish thing the sea.

Schiess 162

Appendix 3: Original Translation of Cobra Norato Cobra Norato1 (Raul Bopp, 1931) I One day I’ll go and live in those Lands of No-End… I amble along, walking, walking Blending into the belly of the brush, biting roots. Later on I make a puçanga from the tajá de lagoa and send someone to get the Cobra Norato. “Let me tell you a story. Come walk with me in those low-slung river islands Pretend there’s moonlight. The night arrives gentle-like Stars chat in whispers I play that I’m tying a string round the snake’s neck, then I choke him. Now’s the time: I thread myself into his silken elastic skin and I’m off to see this world. I’ll pay a visit to Queen Luzia. I want to marry her daughter. “Then first you must close your eyes.” Sleep slips over my heavy lids. A floor of mud steals the strength of my steps. II This is where the ciphered forest begins. Shade has hidden the trees, Full-lipped frogs peer into the darkness. A slice of forest is being punished here. Saplings squat in a bog,

1 This translation uses the text from Poesia completa de Raul Bopp. 2nd edition, edited by Augusto Massi, Olympio, 2013. pp.166-211.

Schiess 163

A stream of water running late licks the loam. All I want is to see Queen Luzia’s daughter! Now I come to drowned rivers drinking up the path. Water slides through the quagmire; sinking, sinking. Far up ahead the sand still holds traces of Queen Luzia’s daughter. Now, at last I’ll soon see Queen Luzia’s daughter. But first you must pass through seven doors, See seven white women with unpeopled wombs, guarded by an alligator “All I want is Queen Luzia’s daughter.” You must give your shadow to the Creature of the Depths. You must perform mirongas under the new moon. You must drink three drops of blood. “Ah, but only if it belongs to Queen Luzia’s daughter!” The great forest is stricken with sleeplessness. Drowsy trees yawn. The night feels drier, the river’s water has broken. It’s time to move on. I vanish adrift in the depths of the forest where pregnant old trees doze. They call me from every side: “Where are you headed, Cobra Norato? I have three young trees, and they’re waiting for you.” “I can’t. Tonight I’ll sleep with Queen Luzia’s daughter.” III I quickly continue, wounding the sand. Prickle-grass scratches at me.

Schiess 164

Thick stalks play at sinking in mud. Thin little branches say psssst. Let me through, I have far to go. Thickets of tirirca enclose the path. “Ai,2 Father of the Forest; Who breaks me with their evil eye, twisting my path upon the ground? I search and wander, shrivel-eyed, from the search for Queen Luzia’s daughter.” The rest of the night envelops me.3 The earth loses its floor. A soft-naveled swamp swallows me whole. Where will I go? Poor me, already aching in the blood from the mirongas cast by Queen Luzia’s daughter. IV This is the forest of stinking breath giving birth to snakes. Thin rivers forced to work. The currents ruffle, peeling away at slimy berms. Toothless roots chew on mud. On a flooded stretch The swamp swallows the igarapê. A strong stench… The wind has switched spots. A whistle startles the trees, the silence bruised. Up ahead a piece of dry wood falls-- Boom.

2 An outburst of pain, lamentation or frustration. 3 The Portuguese verb enrolar means “to roll up or coil.” Colloquially, it means to cheat or to give someone the slip.

Schiess 165

A shout cuts through the forest, Other voices arrive. The river has choked itself in a ravine. A froggy-frog spots me. “Smells like people here: Who are you?” “I am the snake called Norato, And I’m going to find Queen Luzia’s daughter.” V Here is the school for trees. Today they are studying geometry. “All of you are blind by birth. You must obey the river.” “Ai! We are slaves of the river.” “You are condemned to your task, forever and ever making leaves to cover the forest.” “Ai! We are slaves of the river.” “You must drown man in shade: The forest is the enemy of man.” “Ai! We are slaves of the river.” I push through thick walls, Hear tiny cries of “ai-help-me” The birds are being punished. “If you don’t know today’s lesson you’ll be turned into trees.” “Ai, ai, ai, ai…” “Now what must you do way up there? “I must announce the moon’s arrival as she rises over the jungle.” “And you?” “I wake the stars on the Night of São João.”

Schiess 166

“And you?” “I keep time in the depths of the woods.” Ti-oo… Ti-oo… Ti-oo Twee. Twee-wee. VI I move along the edge of a boggy mess. Viscous plasma unravels itself And floods the mud-hemmed margins. I poke holes through soft walls and fall into the depths of a forest that is swollen, spooked, surprised. You can hear the whistles of a bate-que-bate They’re welding, sawing, sawing; It looks just like they’re making dirt. Why! They really are making dirt. Long banks of pacoema-mud creak. The rotten old scaffolding melts away. Quagmires amend themselves and the built-up jungle spills to the ground. Disordered voices come running, Shouting: No, you can’t! “Are they talking to me?” I pass under leafy arcades. Strange bushes ask, “Is it daytime?” Stains of light open holes in high canopies. Sisterly trees, secretly Spent the night embroidering leaves. A breezy-breeze blew, tickling boughs, Undoing coded writing. VII Ai, I’m in a hurry. I walk on pushing through taboca groves “Where am I?”

Schiess 167

Trees with idiot branches spy on me; Dead waters are awaiting their moment to rot. I slip into a labyrinth with imprisoned trees sitting in the dark. Hungry roots bite at the ground. Dirty carobas lift dresses like dripping sheets of mud. Thigh-high acaís Move slow leaves in heavy air Like spider legs stabbed on a stem. Miritis open up great sluggish stems. A forsaken frog requests rain. Deep within, A quick blade cuts the forest. A thunder-rumble rasps: Here I come. It comes from far away, A thick-voiced thunderclap grumbling. A portion of sky opens up. Mud walls tumble, crashing in the dark. Saplings dream of tempests… Shadows eat slowly at swollen horizons. VIII Rain tumbles, washing vegetation. Wind plunders the leafy trees, hands-up in the air. The great forest rattles. Black clouds gather. Squatting monsters cover thick horizons. Palm fronds snip at the sky. The tiriricas send up an alarm,

Schiess 168

Little saracurinhas cry piu piu piu. Up ahead a guariba prays. Lagoons rend themselves. Low water becomes tangled in trunks. Dry boughs roll over the ground. The bog belly-swells with tiny plants coming, coming, on the torrent. Stagnant trees cry for help Mata-paus embrace, “yes-I’m-fine.” The sky hides its face. It rains… and rains… and rains IX Ai, but I’m lost in the depths of the forest, frightened, forsaken. I am stalled in a muddy womb, The air has lost its breath. A cocoa scent spreads Mussels make merry in the mire. Behind stagnant trunks I hear the cries of a guachinim. I think someone coming through this exit-less dark. “Olelé. Who goes there?” “I am the tatú-da-bunda-seca.”4 “Ai, compadre Tatú, How good that you have come. Show me how to get out of this rotten gullet.” “Then hold on to my tail and I’ll pull you out.”

4 Literally, the dry-bottomed-armadillo.

Schiess 169

X Now, I want to bathe in a borrowed river. I want to sleep three days and nights The sleep of the acutipuru. “Wait for me here, and later I’ll tell you a story.” XI I wake. The moon has risen with sleepy eyes. Within the forest, silence aches. The stars open up and the great waters shrink down with sleep. The tired night stops. “Ai, compadre! I yearn for a soft song that stretches out through the blood as I listen; a song that tastes of the moon and the body of Queen Luzia’s daughter. One that makes me hear again the river’s chatter, grumblings from the road, and far-off voices whispering ai, ai, ai. I’ve crossed the Shiver-shiver Lands, Passed the house of the Minhocão, Left my shadow for the Beast of the Depths. All for Queen Luzia’s daughter. I wore a scented pussanga and a tinharão hull A fanfan of trevo leaves And mucura-caa root But none of it worked… I have a jurumenha,

Schiess 170

The kind that makes you ache a bit, And mixes slowly with the blood.” Ai, compadre Don’t make any noise. The daughter Of Queen Luzia May still be asleep. Oh where could she be, When I want only To see her wet green eyes Her long canarana-like body? Perhaps she wanders far from here And I’ve become a vagabond Just to earn a little love From the daughter Of Queen Luzia Ai. Don’t make noise. XII Dawn stirs from beyond the forest. It brightens; The skies stretch and yawn. Horizons roll themselves up. At the top of a cumandá a Maria-é-dia sings. Sleepy roots awaken. A little stream goes to school, studying geography. Crouching trees wash their uncombed branches in the current. Seagulls measure the sky. Green-crossed horizons call to me.

Schiess 171

“Compadre, Let’s move quickly to the Jaguar-poiema We have some distance to cover Before the low tide. The river is our road. “Ay, the pirixi reeds— “Row, row to this side-- I want to stretch out and lie among the pirixi. I’ll invite the evening To come over and stay.” XIII Childlike little sun grows fat and happy. Impatient saplings nurse on the light running down leaves “Move your hand. Don’t push!” The forest’s wombs call out: “Fill me!” Hidden rivers of uncertain lineage carry on changing, swimming, swimming, Move muttering into the jungle. Pieces of fallen earth make new homes up ahead in a geography under construction. Mamoranas on the riverbanks dream of travels; Melt themselves into the current: Elastic cities in transit. The sun tinges the path. There up ahead Swim swollen-lipped trees Moving long, contrarian boughs. XIV Slow-moving sky

Schiess 172

of mid-day The cry of an arapapá rips through the forest Slimy estuaries coagulate laid out in the sun to dry The bog wrinkles like a dried-out ovary A lone socó-boi stalks imbibing silence Far-off behind a trampled strip of forest horizons stretch out The sun nips the lake’s blue skin On the bank lined with canaranas armored lizards doze “I’m going to take a dip and cool off, Call me if I take too long. This water is sweet and smooth as a maiden’s leg, compadre!” XV Bluest sky A white egret flies and flies… He thinks it’s the lake up there The muggy air weighs down. The light hurts the eyes. The sun like a little mirror. Voices dissolve and fade A lone large bird scratches the surface of the bulging landscaper XVI “Is the sea far away, compadre?” “Sure is. It’s ten leagues through the forest plus ten leagues more” “Then let’s go”

Schiess 173

The light starts to dim The evening stretches its reddish wing Long trenches of capim-grass wave writing their shadows on the worn sands An inhambu startles The tired call of a pixi-pixi echoes in the dark to no response The light of the day slowly folds itself up “The dark is clogging up my eyes” “Good-bye, fat armadillo” “Good-bye, dark lake heron” The colors turn off their lights. Horizons sink down in a slow shipwreck As night runs aground on a shipment of stars XVII The forest comes walking toward me “Open up. I want to come in!” Roots move, their legs bogged down Full-bellied waters laze and stretch in the channels A toothless bog gums mud Well! Here comes a little streamlet of orphaned waters running away “Ah, glug-glug-glug Don’t tell anyone If the sun sees me he’ll swallow me up “Then ask someone to send the rain, compadre”

Schiess 174

Screams and echoes hide themselves struggling for breaths of air Hungry humpbacked trees chewing exploding amidst the snoring of unfurled wombs Oof, Compadre I’m getting hungry too “Then let me blow on your belly” This lake is feverish, swelling. The waters stalled. “Ay, I was a bachelor river Going along drinking up my path But the brush stopped me up Now I’ve got an aching uterus, ow” Alone in the mangroves cries a lost seriquara quara quara XVIII I’m going to stretch out here and listen to the sounds at the edge of the forest and feel the night, all inhabited by stars Who knows if maybe one of them has seen with its silver threads the luminous face of Queen Luzia’s daughter Distant rumbles dissolve in the depths of an anonymous forest I feel the beating cadence of the earth’s own pulse Immense silences reply… XIX A disheveled sea with elastic horizons spent the night with insomnia monologuing and grumbling Weary waves arrive

Schiess 175

Tired from the trip laying down their load of mountains Slices of sea dissolve in the sand It seems as if space has no end “Where does so much water come from, compadre?” XX Today the big tide begins The sea gets itself ready to receive the live waters it ordered from the moon “Let’s wander over to the banks of the Bailique To watch the pororoca arrive” The mangroves asked to borrow some earth to build up their slimy berms Famished roots fight for it The water gummy with mud slides slowly in the soft sediments Swamps full of philodendrons open into flooded clearings Barefoot roots sink into bogs Scrawled thickets tie up the path “Quick, compadre We have to beat the moon there” This low coast feels like summer The river shrugs, the waters retreat, The wind chews at the shore’s chapped lips Frowning mangroves walk a long while with us XXI Punctual night Full moon takes aim, the pororoca growls

Schiess 176

It comes on, coming like a swollen wave rolling and curling waters tumbling Vagabonding along the startled shores A piece of the sea switched places The littlest islands disappear beneath the fat-bellied wave tearing up vegetation Little forests vanish The lovestruck waters embrace the forest Trees explode guts-out from the force The pororoca brings back fugitive earth that emigrated downstream carried on the currents XXII Boggy landscape Thick moonlight calms the waters The trees are puffed up like birds Convoys of floating earth return slowly upriver matupás that will build up new islands in a silent feat of engineering The tail of water disappears Going away to rest under the moon at the tip of the Seriaca “Let’s take advantage of the flow of the flood” “Then hold on to this balsawood” High tide Low tide Wave that comes Wave that goes A heart that sits at the water’s side Has a low tide of its own “That smashed-up bit of forest is catching my eye” “Then point your raft over there, compadre”

Schiess 177

XXIII A big night… The bank at the water’s edge is so nice Today there’s a sky that goes on and on stretched out to that point in the distance I wish I could push out horizons see lands with low-slung forests on a night dressed up by the moon with tresses made of stars “I have a mussangulá” Inside the forest of nickeled trees the silence says tincuã Crickets send warning Up ahead they respond Sore-throated frogs say their lessons aloud The sky like geometry laid out in large font “There are so many things we don’t understand, compadre” “What d’you think is out there behind all those stars?” XXIV “Compadre, I’m hungry. Let’s go down to the putirum and steal some manioc” “Will we have to go far?” “Just a little bit more and we’ll be there Brother Tortoise knows the way.” “Then let’s go.” Let’s go down to the putirum Putirum Putirum. Let’s steal some tapioca Putirum Putirum.

Schiess 178

The Big House with great stores of grain Women working on manioc graters Gnawing the tips of their pipes. The caroeira squeaks in the thresher Manioc shavings in the tipiti. “Joaninha Vintém, tell us a story.” “Which story?” “Any one.” “Then I’ll tell the one about the Boto.”5 Putirum Putirum. “Love was raining, drizzling down. I was out washing clothes, When the Boto got me.” “Oh, Joaninha Vintém-- Was the Boto ugly or wasn’t he?” “Ah, sister. He was young, and blonde, And played the guitar. He grabbed me by the waist…” “What happened next?” “People, look! The tapioca is caught in the threshers!” “That Boto. Always after the girls.” Putirum Putirum. XXV The party looks lively, compadre. “Shall we turn human-shaped and go in?”6 “Let’s go.” “Good evening.”

5 In local tradition, the Boto is an enchanted river dolphin who takes human form (see Slater). 6 Amazonian oral tradition commonly includes enchanted shape-shifting beings who can change their outward appearance. Enchanted beings with other “natural” outward forms will often display an aggressive sexual appetite and exude a powerful attraction toward the opposite sex while in human shape. In the human species, this shape-shifting ability resides in shamanic individuals.

Schiess 179

“G’d evenin’.” “They don’t know me in there. They’ll ask, ‘Who could that be?’” “Come on in, if you mean no harm.” “Then I ask your permission to spin a verse for the head of the house.” Angelim little leaf What made you so sad? Tarumã The wind failed to bring News of one gone away Tarumã The titi-flower wilted away On the shores of the river Tarumã No name remained on the sand And the wind took the rest Tarumã “Strike up another sad one, compadre.” “Brother, take a shot of cachaça-- for strength.” “Now, watch this: Long-leafed tajá Don’t chirp next to me Tajá Mount Farewell-Maria Don’t take my love to your rise Tajá Night falls on the mountain I fear that she’ll leave Tajá She already has night In her forget-me-not eyes Tajá

Schiess 180

Bad-omen tajá Don’t chirp next to me Tajá “Move that old body, compadre. Twine your legs with the girl’s.” -Swing. Cross. -With your partner. -Back to the right. -Change position. I’m going to have some hot tacacá The tico-tico came back to his nest He went to the jungle to cut firewood Urmutum Boom-doo-doom The woodpecker knock-knocks Like my heartbeat Knocked his beak all night long Urmutum Boom-doo-doom These eats are delicious, Pass the farina gourd. Pepper fires up my mouth. Clear your throat with tequila. “Look, compadre: that girl is all in knots over you.” “It’s about time to go. Have a chiribita to warm yourself up. We still have a long way to travel.” “Let’s go!” “Compadre, Let me whisper to you: Joaninha Vintém wants to come along.” “No way. It’s getting late. Bring herbs for our hangovers, And let’s get back in the bodies we left outside.” XXVI The lovely night Feels enclosed in glass.

Schiess 181

Sororoquinhas sleep on the riverbank. Naked trees go for a dip. Alligators on holiday Chew on stars melting in the water. Between stands of macegas A susuarana passes a jaguar in silk slippers. A soft breeze combs the leaves of the embaúba. The pathway unravels like a cloth. Brother Tortoise took a different turn: “Send our regards to Mrs. Tortoise. As long as it’s night with this spacious sky and so many stars, Let’s keep walking. Hurting roads, always onward. XXVII Up ahead a shaman’s hut In the dark at a corner of a farm A shaman whistles long and low fiu…fiu. Calling the forest. “Forest! Maracá calls you. I want my jaguar.” The leopard arrived Jumped Entered the shaman’s body. “I want tafiá. I want to smoke and mimic-dance.” I don’t like fire. Master Paricá calls out to those Who are feverish and gut-swollen from espinhela. “The only one who can cure that is the Mother of the Lake.” “The vulture is the one who knows about body swellings.” The shaman makes a blessing like untwisting the evil eye. And then he smokes and unsmokes mucurana smoke,

Schiess 182

gervão tea with titica-vine leaves and cumaru beans. Then he picks up an Angola fig, Scratches a cross in the dirt And sweeps his body’s sorcery with the feathers of a great bird. The last caruana asks again for a mimic-dance, “And I want more diamba too.” “Compadre, should we have a smoke too?” Shaman grew dizzy… Squatted… Slowly disappeared… Then, He makes a deal with the forest to do magic. XXVIII The forest swells. Scarecrow monsters move their limbs, Scratching strange shadows on the ground. Hooded trees release ghosts with Birdlike faces. The moonlight softens the sleepy jungle. There up ahead Silence marches on like a music band. A ventriloquist forest makes believe it’s a city. Cubic bushes move about Beneath arcades of samaúma. Curly palm trees wave. Monocled jaburus sweet-talk myopic stars. A João Cutuca nibbles the trees. Down below the King of the Treetop’s entourage passes by Canaranas bow down. Anonymous sounds arrive from far away.

Schiess 183

“Who goes there?” “Here comes a train.” The black steam engine chuggachuggachuggas. The forest awakens. Vines play at intrigue in the treetops, Undoing themselves in giggles. One tree telegraphs another: Psst psst psst. Contraband voices disembark. Frogs spell out the laws of the forest. Up on high, A curió plays flute. The river stretches out. The forest accompanies it. Distances unravel Between stains of fog. “There goes a ship, compadre!” A cicada whistles A tree waves goodbye with the tip of its bough. XXX “Open up, wind. And I’ll give you a burned penny. I need to pass through quickly, Before the moon sinks into the forest.” “Pass, then, my grandson.” pereré pereré pereré bata-boom bata-boom bata-boom I want to reach the Far-Off Range “Duck-Shaman, my grandfather:

Schiess 184

Move to the side, away from the forest I need to get by. I’m taking a ring and a golden comb To the bride of the Big Snake.” “What else do you have?” “I have cachaça.” “Then leave me a little. You may pass.” A pitiro-pitiro sings in the depth of the forest The silence doesn’t answer. Matim-tá-pereira sidles up “Better leave a chunk of tobacco for the Curupira, compadre.” We’re getting close to the Slippery Point. An aracuã stands guard. Where the maidens bathe in a hidden spot “It’s a shame you’re in a hurry, compadre. If not we could peek at those delicious things.” “Keep going, it’s getting late.” “Slow down, The hard ground hurts me—owoooow.” “There’s only a sliver of moon up there.” “Slow down, The hard ground hurts me—oof oof.” “If the long-eyed witch agrees.” She scatters evil. “Go slow. The hard ground hurts, ugh.” “Hurry, compadre. I’ve caught sight of the Windy Range On the other side of the moonlight. The Lands of the Big Snake Begin after the swamps.”

Schiess 185

XXXI Here is the entryway to the Boiuna’s lair. Down below there’s a swamp. A cururu stands sentry. I descend through the immense depths of the grotto Through obscuring darkness. The hollow ground resounds; Silence cannot leave here. There are swollen-mouthed sewers. “Where do you think this leads?” “It leads right into a slippery gullet.” Here the belly itches with fear. There up ahead, In a haunted stretch of water A canoe floats along, filled with skeletons. Through this peek-hole You can see the Great Snake’s bride. “Compadre,” I shook with shock. My breath stopped. Do you know who that woman is down below? …naked as a little flower? “It’s the daughter of Queen Luzia!” “Then run with her, quickly. Lose no time, compadre, The Great Snake has awakened.” The bullfrog sounds. “Oh, Four Winds, help me. I wish for the strength to flee. The Great Snake comes, comes, is coming to get me. I’m gonna-get-you I’m-gonna-get-you “The Snoring Mountains unroll there down below. Cover my tracks for me.

Schiess 186

Put up three walls of thorns, and ouricuri-palm smoke.” “Throw these ashes behind you to cover more distance.” I’m gonna-get-you I’m gonna-get-you. “Tamaquaré, my brother-in-law. The Great Snake is coming, coming Run away and imitate my footsteps. Pretend to be me. Take my scent back to the Duck-Shaman’s house. Go, quickly, and throw him off track; The Bouina is coming behind us. Like a thunderstorm of stones, He comes gathering forest. Why! He passed by scratching the path Saplings strewn, necks wrung Others squeezed, and flung roots-up. The horizon’s gone flat. The wind ran and ran, Biting the tip of its tail. The Duck-Shaman points in the wrong direction: “The Cobra Norato, with a girl? He went to Belém. He went to get married.” The Big Snake bellowed all the way to Belém. He entered the Cathedral by way of the pipes, And got his head stuck under Our Lady’s feet. XXXII “And now, compadre I’m going back to the Lands-of-No-End I’m going there to the highlands

Schiess 187

Where the ranges raise themselves up Where the clear-watered rivers run Between thickets of molungu I want to take my bride I want to just be with her Live in a house With a lovely little blue door Painted by colored pencil I want to feel the heat of her come-hither body I want to be together Like lovers when they love well.. To rest in the shade of the forest and listen to the jurucutú, to the song of the waters flowing, lulling us as we lay. And as long as we are waiting for night to come again, I’ll have to tell her stories, and write names in the sand for the wind to play at erasing. XXXIII And so, well, compadre Go and follow your path Look for my godmother Maleita and tell her I’m getting married That I’m going to dress my bride in a dress made of sun. That I want an embroidered hammock, With herbs spreading their scent And a little carpet Made of irapuru feathers. On the way, Invite everyone for caxiri. We’ll celebrate For seven moons and seven suns.

Schiess 188

Bring Joaninha Vintém, the Duck-Shaman and the Complaining Bull. Don’t forget Both Xicos, Maria Pitanga and João Ternura. Augusto Meyer, Tarsila, Tatízinha I want the whole crowd from Belém, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. “Then I’ll see you soon, compadre. I’ll be waiting for you Beyond the range of the No-End.”7

7 The 1954 edition of Cobra Norato contains an additional two lines, absent from the original publication: “They knock at the door: boom boom boom. “It’s noon!” / The dream is shattered like the shell of an egg.”

Schiess 189

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pañcatantra. Translated by Patrick Olivelle, Oxford UP, 1999.

@EmmanuelMacron. “Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the

lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an

international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first

order in two days! #Act for the Amazon.” Twitter.

https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1164617008962527232?s=20.

@jairbolsonaro. “Não podemos aceitar que um presidente, Macron, dispare ataques

descabidos e gratuitos à Amazônia, nem que disfarce suas intenções atrás da ideia

de uma ‘aliança’ dos países do G-7 para ‘salvar’ a Amazônia, como se fôssemos

uma colônia ou uma terra de ninguém.” Twitter

https://twitter.com/jairbolsonaro/status/1165970376725319680.

al-Muqaffa’, Esin Atil and Ibn. Kalila wa Dimna: Fables from a Fourteenth-century

Arabic Manuscript. Smithsonian, 1981.

Andrade, Oswald de. “Manifesto antropófago.” Revista de Antropofagia (facsimile

edition), edited by Augusto de Campos, vol. 1, Abril/Metal Leve, [1928] 1975,

pp. 3,7.

Andréia Guerini, Simone Homem de Mello and Walter Carlos Costa. Haroldo de

Campos - tradutor e traduzido (Estudos). Kindle Edition. Perspectiva, 2017.

Austin, John L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford UP 1962.

Avelar, Idelbar. The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Averbuck, Lygia Morone. Cobra Norato e a revolução caraiba. José Olympio, 1985.

Schiess 190

Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l'espace. 5th edition, Presses Universitaires de France,

1957.

—. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Marie Jolas, Orion, 1964.

Basile, Teresa. El desarme de Calibán: debates culturales y diseños literarios en la

posdictadura uruguaya. U of Pittsburg P, 2018. Nuevo Siglo.

Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice.

Routledge, 1999. Translation Studies.

Berglund, Jeff. Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender

and Sexuality. U of Wisconsin P, 2006.

Bergman, David. “Cannibals and Queers: Man-eating.” Gaity Transfigured: Gay Self-

Representation in American Literature, U of Wisconsin P, 1991, pp. 139-62.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. U of California P 1998.

Bopp, Raul. Bopp passado-a-limpo por ele mesmo. Americana, 1972.

—. Mironga e outros poemas. Civlização Brasileira, 1978. Poesia hoje, vol. 22.

—. Movimentos modernistas no Brasil—1922-1928. José Olympio, 2012.

—. Poesia completa de Raul Bopp. José Olympio Editora, 1998.

—. Vida e morte da antropofagia. Civilização Brasileira, 1977.

Bopp, Raul, and José Jobim. Sól & banana: notas sobre a economia do Brasil. Museu

comercial do Brasil, 1938.

Boucher, Philip P. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763.

Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge UP, 1977.

Schiess 191

Brandallero, Sara. "Journeys of Resistence in Afro-Brazilian Literature: The Case of

Conceição Evaristo." Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil, edited by

Vinicius Mariano and Nicola Gavioli Carvalho, Routeledge, 2017, pp. 70-87.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Cornell UP, 2011.

Brose, Robert de. “Reimaginando Homero.” Haroldo de Campos - tradutor e traduzido

(Estudos), edited by Andréia Guerini, Simone Homem de Mello and Walter

Carlos Costa, Kindle ed., Perspectiva 2017.

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. U of Chicago

P, 2003.

—. “Thing Theory.” Things, edited by Bill Brown, U of Chicago P, 2004, pp. 1-16.

Buss, Alcides. Cobra Norato e a especifidade da linguagem poética. FCC Edições, 1982.

Cadena, Marisol de la. Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds. Duke

UP, 2015. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, vol. 2011.

Campos, Augusto de. Verso, reverso, controverso. Perspectiva, 1978. Coleção Signos 6.

Campos, Haroldo de. “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração.”

Boletim bibliográfico biblioteca Mário de Andrade, vol. 44, 1983, pp. 2-11.

—. Morfologia do Macunaíma. Perspectiva, 1973.

—. Novas: Selected Writings. Translated by Odile Cisneros, Northwestern UP, 2007.

AGM collection.

—. Obras completas de Oswald de Andrade. Civilização Brasileira, 1971 and 1972.

Critical Introduction to vols. 2 and 7.

Schiess 192

Campos, Haroldo de, and Maria Tai Wolff. “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under

the Sign of Devoration.” Latin American Literary Review, vol. 14, no. 27, 1986,

pp. 42-60.

Carpentier, Alejo. Concierto barroco. 4. edition, Siglo Veintiuno, 1974.

Carpentier, Alejo and Robert Desnos. Tientos y diferencias. U Nacional Autónoma de

México, 1964.

Carvalho, Vinicius M, and Nicola Gavioli, eds. Literature and Ethics in Contemporary

Brazil. Routeledge, 2017.

Cascudo, Luiz da Câmara. Dicionário do folclore brasileiro. Instituto Nacional do Livro,

1972.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “Corpo-rización tupi: Léry y el ‘Manifesto Antropofago’.” Revista

de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 23, no. 45, 1997, pp. 193-210.

Castro-Klarén, Sara. “A Genealogy for the ‘Manifesto Antropofago,’ or the Struggle

Between Socrates and the Caraibe.” Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 1, no. 2,

2000, pp. 295–322.

Célèstin, Roger. From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism. U of

Minnesota P, 1996.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Anthropocene Time.” History and Theory, vol. 57, no. 1, 2018,

pp. 5-32.

Chambourleyon, Rafael and Fernanda Aires Bombardi. “Descimentos privados de índios

na Amazônia colonial (séculos XVII e XVIII).” Varia Historia, vol. 27, no. 46,

2011, pp. 601-23.

Schiess 193

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Duke UP,

2012.

Cixous, Hélène. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Translated by Deborah Jenson,

Harvard UP, 1991.

—. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Translated by Verena Andermatt Conley, U of

Minnesota P, 1990. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 73.

Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. E. Horwood; Tavistock

Publications, 1985. Key Ideas.

Colas, Santiago. “From Caliban to Cronus: A Critique of Cannibalism as a Metaphor for

Cuban Revolutionary Culture.” Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the

Boundaries of Cultural Identity, edited by Kristen Guest, State U of New York P,

2001, pp. 129-48.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Owen Knowles and Allan H. Simmons,

Cambridge UP, 2018 [1899].

Cottom, Daniel. Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins

UP, 2001.

Culler, Jonathan D. The Pursuit of Signs—Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Cornell

UP, 1981.

Cunha, Euclides. Obras completas. Edited by Afrânio Coutinho, vol. 2, J. Aguilar, 1966.

Cunha, Euclides da. The Amazon: Land Without History. Translated by Ronald W. Sousa,

Oxford University Press, 2006. Library of Latin America.

Daly, Tara. Vital Materialisms and the Andean Avant-Garde. Bucknell UP, 2019.

Schiess 194

Derrida, Jacques and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Of Grammatology. Fortieth-

Anniversary Edition. Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.

Descola, Phillipe. “The Grid and the Tree: Reply to Marshall Sahnlins’ Comment.” HAU:

Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 295-300.

Dias, Jamille Pinheiros. “Creativity as Transformation in Amerindian Poetics: Toward

Literary Deterritorialization in Brazil.” Romance Notes, vol. 57, no. 3, 2017, pp.

407-13.

---. “Peles de papel: Caminhos da tradução poética das artes verbais ameríndias.”

Departamento de Letras Modernas, Ph.D. U de São Paulo, 2016.

Dunckel, Aaron. “Mont Blanc: Shelley’s Sublime Allegory of the Real.” The Greening of

Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, edited by Steven

Rosendale, University of Iowa Press, 2002, pp. 207-23.

Duranti, Alessandro. The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others.

Cambridge UP, 2015.

—. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge UP, 1997. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Erlendsdóttir, Erla. “Del Sur al Norte: el traycto del antillenismo caníbal.” Anuario de

Estudios Filológicos, vol. 40, 2017, pp. 25-45.

Esteves, Antônio Roberto. “Cobra Norato de Raul Bopp: Leituras possíveis.” Revista das

Letras, vol. 28, 1988, pp. 73-83.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political

Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford UP, 1940.

—. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Clarendon, 1937.

Schiess 195

Fausto, Carlos. Art Effects: Image, Agency and Ritual in Amazonia. Translated by David

Rodgers, U of Nebraska P, 2020.

—. "The Bones Affair: Indigenous Knowledge Practices in Contact Situations Seen from

an Amazonian Case." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 8, no. 4,

2002, pp. 669-90.

—. Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia. Cambridge UP, 2012.

Foucault, Michel. L'Archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, 1969. Bibliothèque des sciences

humaines.

Freire, José Ribamar Bessa. Rio babel: a história das línguas na Amazônia. Atlântica

2004. Coleção Brasilis.

French, Jennifer. Nature, Neo-colonialism, and the Spanish American regional writers.

Dartmouth CP, 2005. Reencounters with colonialism--New Perspectives on the

Americas.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

Translated by James Strachey, vol. 17, Vintage, 2001, pp. 219-52.

Freud, Sigmund et al. The Uncanny. Penguin Books, 2003. Penguin classics.

Garcia, Othon Moacyr. Cobra Norato: O poema e o mito. Livraria São José, 1962.

Giorgi, Gabriel. Formas comunes: animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. Eterna Cadencia,

2014.

Githire, Njeri. Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's

Writings. U of Illinois P, 2014.

Goffman, Erving. Forms of Talk. U of Pennsylvania P, 1981.

Schiess 196

Greene, Roland. Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. U of

Chicago P, 1999.

Guerra, Abilio. O primitivismo em Mario de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade e Raul Bopp:

Origem e conformação no universo intelectual brasileiro. Romano Guerra, 2010.

Gumperz, John J. Language in Social Groups. Stanford UP, 1971. Language Science and

National Development.

Harris, Wilson. “Cross-Cultural Crisis: Imagery, Language and the Intuitive

Imagination.” The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks by Wilson Harris,

edited by Alan Riach and Mark Williams, U of Liège, 1992, pp. 67-115.

Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de. “O bom dragão.” Diário Carioca, 1951.

Hoyos Ayala, Héctor. Things with a History: Latin American Literatures of Extraction.

Kindle ed., Columbia UP, 2019.

Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,

Environment. Routledge, 2010.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.

Methuen, 1986.

Hutchinson, Sharon E. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. U of

California P, 1996.

Inojosa, Joaquim. “Aventuras e poética de Raul Bopp.” Mironga, Civilização Brasileira,

1978, pp. 15-18.

Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language, edited by Thomas

Sebeok, Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1960, pp. 350-77.

Schiess 197

Jáuregui, Carlos A. Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y

consumo en América Latina. Iberoamericana; Vervuert, 2008. Ensayos de teoría

cultural, vol. 1.

Jehlen, Myra. “Response to Peter Hulme.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 187-

91.

Kadota, Neiva Pitta. A tessitura dissimulada: o social em Clarice Lispector. Estação

Liberdade, 1997.

Kahn, Daniela Mercedes. A via crucis do outro: identidade e alteridade em Clarice

Lispector. Humanitas, 2005.

Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of

Incorporation. Princeton UP, 1990.

Kohler, Richard. Jean Piaget. vol. 12, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Continuum Library

of Educational Thought 1-4-20.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think. U of California P, 2013.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard UP, 1993.

Laugier, Etienne Balibar and Sandra. “Agency.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A

Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, Steven Rendall, and Emily S.

Apter, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 17-22.

Lehnen, Leila M. Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2013.

Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of theCcannibal from

Columbus to Jules Verne. Translated by Rosemary Morris, Polity, 1997.

Schiess 198

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucién. How Natives Think. Translated by Lilian A. Clare, Princeton UP,

1985 [1926].

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucién. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. sixth edition,

Alcan, 1922 [1910].

Lezra, Jacques. On the Nature of Marx's Things: Translation as Necrophilology.

Fordham UP, 2018.

Librandi, Marilia. Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel. U of Toronto

P, 2018.

—. “A carta Guaraní Kaoiwá e o direito a uma literatura com terra e com gentes.”

Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea, vol. 44, no. Jul/Dez, 2014, pp.

165-91.

Lima, Tânia Stolze. Um peixe olhou para mim: o povo Yudjá e a perspectiva. Editora

UNESP, 2005.

Lispector, Clarice. Água viva; ficção. 1. edition, Artenova, 1973.

—. The Complete Stories. Translated by Katrina Dodson, New Directions, 2015.

—. Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler, New Directions, 2012.

—. A hora da estrela. J. Olympio 1977.

—. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser, New Directions, 2011.

—. A legião estrangeira; contos e crônicas. Autor, 1964.

—. Near to the Wild Heart. Translated by Alison Entrekin, New Directions, 2012.

—. A paixão segundo G.H. Autor, 1964.

—. The Passion According to G.H. Translated by Idra Novey, New Directions, 2012.

—. Perto do coração selvagem A. Noite, 1942.

Schiess 199

—. Um sopro de vida: pulsações. Nova Fronteira, 1978.

Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. U of

Minnesota P, 2013.

Londoño, Ernesto et al. “As Amazon Fires Become Global Crisis, Brazil’s President

Reverses Course.” New York Times, 23 Aug. 2019 2019.

www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/brazil-military-amazon-

fire.htmlwww.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/americas/brazil-military-amazon-

fire.html.

Madureira, Luís. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in

Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. U of Virginia P, 2005.

—. “A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course: Brazilian

‘Antropofagia’ and the Dilemma of Development.” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol.

41, no. 2, 2005, pp. 96-125.

Marcus, Sharon and Stephen Best. "Surface Reading: An Introduction." Representations,

vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1-21.

Martí, José. Versos sencillos. Ediciones La Tertulia, 1961.

McNee, Malcolm. The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment.

Mendes, Murilo. "De Murilo Mendes sobre Raul Bopp." Mironga e outros poemas,

Civilização Brasileira, 1978, pp. 11-14.

Morgan, Marcyliena H. Speech Communities. Cambridge UP, 2014. Key Topics in

Linguistic Anthropology.

Schiess 200

Moriconi, Ítalo. “The Hour of the Star or Clarice Lispector’s Trash Hour.” Portuguese

Literary & Cultural Studies, vol. 4-5, 2000, pp. 213-21.

Morton, Timothy. “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology.”

Qui Parle, vol. 19, no. Spring/Summer, 2011, pp. 163-90.

—. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Verso, 2017.

—. “Why Ambient Poetics: Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle,

vol. 33, no. 1, 2002, pp. 52-6.

Murari, Luciana. Brasil, ficção geográfica: ciência e nacionalidade no país d'Os Sertões.

Annablume, 2007.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial

Context. U of California P, 1992.

Nodari, Alexandre. “O indizível manifesto: sobre a inapreensibilidade da coisa na ‘Dura

Escritura’ de Clarice Lispector.” Revista Letras, vol. 98, no. jul./dez, 2018, pp.

83-113.

—. “A transformação do Tabu em totem: notas sobre (um)a fórmula antropofágica.” Das

Questões, vol. 2, 2015, pp. 8-44.

Nunes, Benedito. Oswald Canibal. Perspectiva, 1979. Coleção Elos, vol. 26.

Nunes, Zita. Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the

Americas. U of Minnesota P, 2008. Critical American Studies Series.

Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Beacon,

1995.

Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal

Education. Harvard UP, 1997.

Schiess 201

Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in

the South Seas. U of California P, 2005.

Olivos Santos, Luzia Aparecida. O percurso da indianidade na literatura brasileira:

matizes de figuração. Cultura Acadêmica, 2009.

Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice

Lispector. U of Minnesota P, 1994.

Piaget, Jean. The Language and Thought of the Child. Translated by Marjorie Gabain, K.

Paul, Trench, Trubner, Harcourt & Brace, 1926. International Library of

Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method.

Prado, Plinio W. Jr. “O Impronunciável: notas sobre um fracasso sublime.” Remate de

males, vol. 9, 1989, pp. 21-29.

Plumwood, Val. “Nature in the Active Voice.” The Handbook of Contemporary Animism,

edited by Graham Harvey, Routledge, 2013, pp. 441-53.

Pontieri, Regina Lucia. Clarice Lispector: uma poética do olhar. Ateliê Editorial, 1999.

Estudos literários, vol. 1.

Price, Rachel. The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain,

1868-1968. Northwestern UP, 2014. FlashPoints.

Proença, Manuel Cavalcanti. "Prefácio da sétima edição de Cobra Norato." Cobra

Norato, Leitura, 1967.

Rama, Angel. La ciudad letrada. 1st edition, Ediciones del Norte, 1984. Serie Rama.

Ramos, Graciliano. Vidas secas: romance. Olympio, 1938.

Retamar, Roberto Fernandez Calibán; apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América.

Editorial Diógenes, 1971.

Schiess 202

Rice, Thomas Jackson. Cannibal Joyce. UP of Florida, 2008.

Rivera, José Eustasio. La vorágine. Edited by Luis Carlos Herrera, Caja de Crédito

Agrario, 1974 [1924].

Rocha, Sidney. matriuska. Iluminuras, 2009.

Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of

Difference. Westview Press, 1996.

Sá, Lúcia. “A hora da estrela e o mal-estar does elites.” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira,

vol. 23, 2004, pp. 49-65.

—. Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture. U of

Minnesota P, 2004.

Sá, Olga de. A escritura de Clarice Lispector. Vozes, 1979.

Saez, Oscar Calavia. O nome e o tempo dos Yaminawa : etnologia e história dos

Yaminawa do rio Acre. UNESP, 2006.

Sahlins, Marshall. “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture.” HAU:

Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 281-90.

Sarduy, Severo. Obra completa. Edited by Gustavo Guerrero and Francois Wahl, vol. 1-

2, Colección Archivos, 1999.

Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Translated by John

Gledson, Verso, 1992. Critical Studies in Latin American Culture.

Schwarz, Roberto and Laura de Mello e Souza. Os pobres na literatura brasileira.

Brasiliense, 1983.

Sousa, Carlos Mendes de. Clarice Lispector: figuras da escrita. U do Minho Centro de

Estudos Humanísticos, 2000.

Schiess 203

Souza, Ana Aparecida Arguelho de. O humanismo em Clarice Lispector: um estudo do

ser social em A hora da estrela. UEMS; Musa 2006.

Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline. Columbia UP, 2003.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge, 1993.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford University

Press, 1975.

Strathern, Marilyn. Relations: An Anthropological Account. Duke UP, 2020.

Strathern, Marilyn and Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth.

Conference. Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge.

Routledge, 1995. The uses of knowledge.

Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,

Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. 1st American, from the 2nd

English edition, Estes & Lauriat, 1864.

Vallejo, César and Antenor Orrego. Trilce. Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría,

1922.

Vieira, António and Mónica Leal da Silva. António Vieira: Six Sermons. Oxford UP,

2018.

Vieira, Else Ribeiro Pires. “Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo

de Campos’s Poetics of Transcreation.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and

Practice, edited by Susan and Harish Trivedi Bassnett, Routledge, 1999, pp. 95-

113.

Schiess 204

—. “A Postmodern Translational Aesthetics in Brazil.” Translation Studies: An

Interdiscipline, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, Franz Pöchhacker and Klaus

Kaindl, John Benjamins, 1994, pp. 65-72. Translation Studies Conference.

Vilaça, Aparecida. Comendo como gente: formas do canibalismo Wariʻ. ANPOCS:

Editora UFRJ, 1992.

—. O canibalismo funerário Pakaa Nova: uma etnografia. Programa de Pós-Graduação

em Antropologia Social, 1990. Comunicação, vol. no 19.

—. Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes od Encounters in Amazonia.

Translated by David Rodgers, Duke UP, 2010.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Batalha Araweté: os deuses canibais. Zahar Editor, 1986.

Coleção antropologia social.

—. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-structural Anthropology. Translated by Peter

Skafish, Univocal, 2014.

—. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society.

University of Chicago Press, 1992.

—. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití:

Journal for the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, vol. 2,

no. 1, 2004, pp. 3-22.

Waldrop, Rosemarie. “Alarms & Excursions." The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and

Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein, Roof, 1990, pp. 45-72.

Williams, Claire. “Neither Here nor There: Unsettling Encounters in Paulo Scott’s

Habitante irreal.” Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil, edited by

Vinicius Mariano Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli, Routeledge, 2017, pp. 124-144.

Schiess 205

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe,

Blackwell, 1953.

Wrighton, John. “Reading Responsibly between Martha Nussbaum and Emmanuel

Levinas: Towards a Textual Ethics for the Twenty-First Century.”

Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2017, pp. 149-70.