Antropofagia and Beyond:
Patrícia
Galvão’s Industrial Park in the Age of Savage Capitalism
University
of
Wisconsin, Oshkosh
Other men will remain. Other women will remain.
Braz of Brazil.
Braz of the whole world.
P. Galvão
Introduction
This essay examines Patrícia
Galvão’s “proletarian novel”, Industrial Park, and
focuses on her radical reworking of the Brazilian Modernist antropofagista
(cannibalist) project of the 1920’s and
‘30’s as well as her movement toward, as precursor, tropicália
and Cinema Novo’s development of the
“aesthetic of hunger” in Brazilian film theory and practice of the
1960’s. The essay studies how
cannibalism, in this novel, not only presents itself as the
consumption-digestion-and-spitting-out
of something new, but also reveals other sides of the cannibalist
metaphor, for
example, that of the cannibalization/devouring of the working classes
by the
textile industry and, the terrible associated-opposite of consumptive
cannibalism, that of the hunger-starvation-poverty of those same
workers.
A
member of the Brazilian political and literary avant-garde - the
Modernists and
the Brazilian Communist party - Patrícia Galvão could be
said to
represent a paradigmatic case of the female politico-literary
intellectual of
twentieth-century
Antropofagia to Tropicália
In 1968 a group of Brazilian
musicians (1)
produced a groundbreaking and controversial album, Panis
et Circensis, which is considered to be the LP-manifesto of
the Tropicália cultural
movement. The Tropicália
movement gained inspiration from Oswald de
Andrade’s 1928
“Manifesto Antropofago”, one of the central defining texts
of the Brazilian avant-garde movement of the 1920’s and 1930’s, o Modernismo (2).
The "Cannibalist Manifesto" borrowed from
the cultural practice of certain Amazon tribes and proposed:
…cannibalism as metaphor and
method
for a primitive assimilation of the civilized Other, through the idea
of
assimilation and digestion of the useful powers of the colonial master
and his
epigones - the opposite of colonial domination of the white doutors
and the calamity that had
brought... (Rowe and Schelling 202-203)
The tropicalistas
reworked this central Modernista platform
in response to the Brazilian context of the 1960’s and 1970’s, a
historical moment marked by the repressive social conditions of a
military
dictatorship and its promotion of liberal economic policies. (3)
Included among the twelve songs on the Panis
et Circensis album is one of particular interest for this study, it
represents an important aspect of tropicália’s
communication with modernismo,
and is called “Parque Industrial”. The
song presents a bitingly ironic
critique of official discourses of Brazilian national progress
associated with
industrialization and development.
Written by Tom Zé and sung by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto
Gil, Gal
Costa and Os Mutantes, the music alternates between band and choral
voices
representing a popular festa or
circus atmosphere, and, smooth solo voices singing ironical elogies to
the alegria that capitalist development has
brought the nation. The subversive bricolage effect of the cannibalist tropicália strategy in the song
plays upon the alienating aspects of a savage capitalism as represented
in mass
production and advertising. But this founding tropicália
song, in particular, although humorous and
ironic, through its title offers no space for confusion, or
misinterpretation. The title is not
ironic. The title sets the stage,
gives the context, presents a target. “Industrial Park” as song, by
way of its title, projects back to another aspect of modernismo,
one which was highly politicized and did not leave room
for playful doubt: Patrícia
Galvão’s “proletarian novel”, Industrial Park.
In 1933 Galvão
published Industrial Park, an intensely poetic and
painful “proletarian novel” which combined aesthetic innovation
with revolutionary politics. French
surrealist Andre Bretón once described Mexican, Frida Kahlo’s
artistic production as, “a bomb wrapped in silk” (4),
perhaps we could say the same of Galvão’s novel.
The images she creates are
simultaneously beautiful and terrible in the reality that they portray,
and,
once “detonated,” they have the potential to change forever the
ideological landscape that the reader inhabits.
The novel provides no easy
escape to the
reader-viewer who is led into a sector of Brazilian society not
previously
represented in its national literature, that of the lives of the women
workers
of São Paulo’s ever growing industrial park.
The most intimate details of the women
workers’ lives, both public and private, are revealed in a poetic,
fragmentary, scathingly honest style, creating moments in which the
reader may
wish to turn down the lights so as not to see quite so clearly the
injustices
incurred by the factory workers and their families, all inhabitants of
Braz, a
working class neighborhood of São Paulo. At
the same time, in a continuous,
sometimes relentless manner, the reader is brought into direct
confrontation
with the lives of the urban Paulista bourgeoisie, those who benefit
most from
the exploitation and oppression of the women workers.
In the clashes that arise at the
convergence of the novel’s camera-eye views of moments of proletarian
life and moments of bourgeois life, one could say that those bombs are
set off,
startling the reader with the painful contradictions they represent,
even as the
fast-paced and poetic language of the novel seduces the reader,
compelling the
reader to continue on through the minefield.
The novel offers a brilliant
contribution
to the development of Brazilian Modernismo,
both on an aesthetic and a political level. It addresses directly the
moment of
crisis and transition that the changing social and economic reality
that
1930’s São Paulo presented to its citizens in which the
processes
of modernization, immigration, urbanization and industrialization
provoked a
fragmentation of the previously closely controlled agrarian commercial
economy
and Catholic patriarchal society and opened a space for change which
included
the roles of women, racial hierarchies, open class conflicts. Galvão’s novel addresses
this historical moment as it focuses in on the situation of those most
oppressed by the new socio-economic situation and organically
incorporates into
the novel elements of modern society related to: speed,
time, fragmentation, worker
resistance, montage, consumption, desire, hunger.
Perhaps we could say that just
as
Galvão’s novel presented its readership a “bomb wrapped in
silk”, Galvão herself cultivated the same sort of aura in her
very
“modernista” iconoclastic image and public persona. She was
acclaimed by journalist Alvaro Moreyra
to be ‘the girl with crazy hair…who abolished the grammar of
life. She is the latest product
from São Paulo…the shining announcement of Antropofagia.”
(Jackson 118) It has been
said that Galvão, more than anyone else embodied the antropofagist
creed to “constantly and directly consume
the taboo” or “to transform the taboo into totem.” (Besse 108
citing Campos)
Patrícia
Galvão’s
novel, Industrial Park, not only
contributed to the cultural and political project of the Modernista
movement during her life, but has had continued
influence in opening up a revolutionary path in the cultural and
political
development of Brazil. Galvão’s particular representation of antropofagia, as exemplified in her
novel offers inspiration not only tropicália,
but connections can also be made to Cinema
Novo’s “aesthetic of hunger”. In
Galvão’s novel, the
interplay between consumption and hunger, with emphasis on the hunger
of the
characters, distances her from modernista
antropofagia and directs her toward Glauber Rocha and other’s
filmic
work (for example, “Deus e o diablo na terra do sol” and
“Terra em transe”). Yet, Galvão’s novel could be seen
to project even farther into the future toward the development of such
now
classic Brazilian literary characters as Clarice Lispector’s lonely
rural-urban immigrant misfit, Macabea from A
hora da estrela or into dialogue with the plight of Latin American
women
workers of the maquiladoras, the
“granddaughters” of the women workers of the textile factories of
Braz, as represented in for example, Norma Iglesias Prieto’s classic
study-collective testimonio La flor
más bella de la maquiladora or Vicky Funari and Sergio de
la
Torre’s new documentary film “Maquilapolis”. Latin
Americanist historian, Francesca Miller has stated that Galvão’s
voice of protest against the poor living conditions and treatment of
São
Paulo factory workers, helped to set the stage for the emergence of
important
female political figures like Benedita da Silva. Brazilian literary
critic,
Thelma Guedes has suggested that Galvão’s Industrial
Park could be considered a precursor to such
contemporary works as Paulo Lins’ widely acclaimed “documentary
novel” Cidade de Deus,
(141-142) now made into an award-winning film. Thus, as we will see,
this is a
novel that goes beyond the constraints of time and space, it is both
particular
in its representation of a historical moment and social context and yet
capable
of projecting beyond those limits to a greater context, that is
globalization
as an international project of savage capitalism.
Novel-vision: lines-spaces, light-dark, and the
alienation effect.
The visual image in
“Galvão” takes center stage. Her
“wild” hair, her makeup,
clothing, rebellious practices all formed part of her personal
performance, her
public and personal declaration of radical resistance to societal norms. As one begins to approach Galvão
critically, it becomes clear that those who study her and her work tend
to
include photos and paintings of her in their studies. (5)
As a
historical figure, she seems to compel or provoke visual
representation, just
as she sought it. She didn’t
just write poetry, she performed it, both in the theaters and in her
everyday
life; she didn’t just write about politics, she participated in the
protests and strikes. She was also
a sketch artist of simple line drawings as exemplified in
her “O Album de Pagu,” a
mini-poetic and pictorial autobiographical fantasy text.
Industrial
Park, however, does not include illustrations by the author,
instead it
functions visually on a number of other levels in the content and the
form of
the novel. The visual is a
constitutive part of Industrial Park.
A first level of reception of
a novel,
that very first impression one has before even opening it up, is
created by its
cover. The image that a bookcover
produces has to do with attracting a consumer-reader from a marketing
standpoint, and, in the case of Industrial
Park, the cover can form an organic relationship with the content
and the
form of the narrative itself. In a
sense, it begins a dialogue between the reader and the narrative
through visual
image that will continue as the reader enters into the tex.
At quick glance, the “reader”
immediately observes the bleak interplay between dark and light
represented
there, it is not a warm romantic entrance to the world of the novel.
The
representation of the buildings of the city at sharp angles, the
factory with
its restrictive fencing on top (resembling a penitentiary, one of the
words
that Galvão uses to describe the factory in the novel), the
electric or
telegraph lines and the bridge are all stark black against the pure
white of
the sky which fills the gaps and shines through the cut-out words of
the title,
all in white. The author’s name, Galvão’s pseudonym Mara
Lobo, is represented as part black and part white. Perhaps as a
mediator
between the two levels of color, it is the author who will orchestrate
and
direct the dialogue between the black of the products of urbanization
and
industrialization and its accompanying-opposing white backdrop, the sky
or that
which is not industrialization and modernization. The bi-color
construction of
the author’s name could also connect to her dual location as
intellectual
vanguard in solidarity with the the urban proletariat, but not being
actually a
member of that social class, thus connecting her work to Walter
Benjamin’s famous line: “There is no document of civilization which
is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (256) As a modernist
example of poster art, the cover portrays the union and clash of
opposites that
together create an emblem of Industrial
Park as novel, São Paulo as modern industrial park of the
1930’s, just as, in its harsh and generic form, almost any industrial
center could be projected onto the space represented there.
The relationship between the
dark and
light on the cover is further thematized when one begins to read the
original
Portuguese version of the novel which is introduced by way of official
“Industrial Statistics of the State of São Paulo” which
detail the tremendous economic production of São Paulo’s growing
industrial sector in the 1920’s.
Those statistics, as a disembodied voice of capital, are then
followed
by Galvão’s contextualization of the statistics in human terms;
the plight of the actual human beings who produce those economic
statistics. She states:
The statistics and
the history of the human stratum that
sustains the industrial park of São Paulo and speaks the
language of
this book, can be found, under the capitalist regime, in the jails and
in the
slum houses, in the hospitals and in the morgues.
Thus, once again, in moving
from the
image on the cover to the narrative, through the clash of opposites
that form a
whole, the stage is set for the reader to enter into the world of Braz,
the
working class neighborhood associated with the textile industry of
São
Paulo. (6)
In her booklong study of Industrial Park, Thelma Guedes discusses the extraordinary way in which the original novel was set up and its possible functions through the use of very large letters and wide spaces between the “scenes” which could be connected to an attempted incorporation of a reading public that was perhaps not used to reading novels, the proletariat, but also, this visual aspect of the novel’s form is consistent with the modernist style cultivated by Galvão’s intellectual community. It is particularly interesting to note here, how Galvão employs this avant-garde literary style in order to address her new desired reading public, thus focusing on the utilitarian aspect of the style, while at the same time she contributes to and enters into dialogue with the Brazilian and international avant-garde of the period through her aesthetic innovations.
The
large spaces
between lines of text and the black triple slashes marking changes of
“scenes” within the novel (in the English version) could be seen as
a continuation of the cover of the original version of the novel in the
coexistence of dark and light, the black of the letters and slashes of
the text
and their accompanying-opposite, the white background of the paper. The
interplay here between words and spaces, communication and silence,
produce a
silence that communicates always in its relationship to the words, and
beyond
the text, the unity of communication between the words and the spaces
requires
the intervention of the reader, to read between the lines, to aid in
the
production of the communication of the white spaces of silence. Silence
is not
chosen as a language in itself here, in the case of the women urban
proletariat, their silence would not produce change. Instead,
Galvão
seems to propose a dialectic between words and silence that invites
readerly
intervention in the production of meaning.
An illustrative textual
example of this
interplay between silence and words in the production of meaning on the
part of
the reader is a “conversation” between one of the central
characters of the novel, Corina and her mother. Corina is a young,
beautiful mulata seamstress who lives with her
poor mother and abusive, alcoholic stepfather in the Braz neighborhood.
Corina
has a bourgeois lover, Arnaldo, whom she meets on certain afternoons
for secret
sexual adventures. Corina gets pregnant by Arnaldo and hopes that he
will marry
her and be a father to her child. This, of course, is an illusion. But,
one
afternoon when Corina is contemplating her growing figure in front of
the
mirror, her mother sees her and realizes what is going on. The scene
reads
thus:
She
starts to measure the size of her belly in the mirror.
-It’s
so enormous. Who couldn’t see
it, my God!
Her
mother surprises her. She reacts badly. Then she regrets it.
The
old woman sobs into the wash tank.
///
(41-42)
The three short, telegraphic sentences: “Her mother surprises her. She reacts badly. Then she regrets it.” are fully charged with meaning. Without realizing, it the reader imagines the entire seen, intervenes in the production of the novel based on the reader’s experience. Each reader will complete the scene in a slightly different way, but the pain, frustration, despair will be there for all, made even stronger in that it is the reader who provides the details of the image, who fills in the blanks, the white, who decodes the silences that accompany the words. This telegraphic, poetic style permeates the novel and draws the reader in to the simultaneous reading and construction of the novel. The novel provokes a process of consumption and production in the reader as both visual and intellectual-ideological activity.
In
her study of the relationship between literature and
technological-industrial modernization in Brazil of the 1880’s to the
1920’s, Flora Sussekind notes how literary form and content were
transformed by the incorporation of and coexistence with the new tools,
products, and “ways of life” of modernity, Numerous
critics have discussed or
commented on the visual cinematic effect of the novel, its construction
as
cinematic montage or as a series photographic snapshots (perhaps, I
would
suggest, it could be seen as another kind of prose-“O Album
de Pagu”, in this case a “prose-album de
São Paulo” or de Braz), others describe it as a social mural, a
literary and social documentary, a collage, others connect it to Cubist
or
Expressionist art. (7)
If we think in terms of an antropofagist combination of
elements of Eisensteinian
cinematic montage - represented as
brief, telegraphic scenes of proletarian life followed
by or juxtaposed with a
simultaneous and related scene of bourgeois life which coincides,
clashes, or
better, collides with the previous scene providing a dialectical
relationship,
a potential explosion, for which the reader must provide the synthesis
of
meaning (8) – and, aspects of the techniques of
the Brechtian
alienation effect of epic theatre, as Walter Benjamin has described it
in his
“What is epic theatre?”:
… the
art of epic theatre consists in producing astonishment rather than
empathy. To put it succinctly: instead of identifying with the
characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the
circumstances under which they function.
The task of
epic theater,
according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the
representation of conditions.(150)
We can begin to discern an
interesting
and important level of analysis of the novel. The interplay of silence
and
words, the black and the white, lines and spaces all aid in the
production of
those important “interruptions” in narrative progress, pulling the
reader into a productive relationship with the text.
In the form of its content, the montage
technique for example, the novel creates those moments of readerly
astonishment, of shock, that allow for critical distance and
contemplation,
association rather than identification.
And, on a level of pure content, as mentioned in my initial
discussion
of Galvão’s poetic literary style in the novel, in the jolting
simultaneity of beautiful images and painful realities the production
of this
alienation effect can be discerned.
An illustrative example comes in the first pages of the novel in
which
early one Monday morning the workers are heading through the Braz
neighborhood
on their way to the textile factories.
Colored slippers drag along
still sleepy
and unhurried on Monday. Wanting to
stay behind. Seizing the last small bit of freedom.
The girls tell about the
previous
evening’s dates, squeezing lunches wrapped in brown and green paper.
…The powerful cry of the
smokestack
envelops the borough. The laggards fly, skirting the factory wall,
gritty,
long, crowned with spikes. They pant like tired dogs so as not to lose
the
day’s pay. A small red slipper without a sole is abandoned in the
gutter. A shoeless foot is cut on
the shivers of a milk bottle. A dark girl goes hopping and crying to
reach the
black door.
The
last kick at a rag ball.
The whistle ends in
a blast. The machines shake in
desperation. The street is sad and deserted. Banana peels. The residue
of black
vapors vanishing. Blood mixed with
milk.
///(8-9)
The metonymic focus on the sleepy, colorful, playful, unprotected, then wounded feet of the women workers moving forward to their jobs-destiny combined with the desperation, dirt and looming gloomy darkness of the factory are summed up in the final image of the scene, the “Blood mixed with milk.” both life forces, both spilled upon entrance to the world of the industrial park. We don’t see faces with which to identify or empathize, but we see the conditions within which the girls function and feel the shocking pain of the cut “foot”. Montage and alienation effect take us into the world of the industrial park and the Braz workers and force us to face their predicament critically.
But it wasn’t just film, photography, gramaphones, and telephones that influenced in the production of literature in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. Imnune Simon’s study of the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the Modernist poets, highlights how new industrial processes began to penetrate everyday life and make their way into literature.
Industry achieved
efficiency through the development of
synchronization, automation, specialization of labor, and assembly
lines. Poetry
similarly strove for economy of expression through the techniques of
simultaneity, fragmentation, vignette, montage, and telegraphic style. (37)
Industrial Park in its poetic-prose
style certainly incorporates these modernist techniques, especially
with
respect to the notion of “speed” connected to modernization and
industrial production on the assembly line. As Robert Linhart notes in
his
memoir of his time working for the Citroen car plant, “The speed of the
line dictates everything without respite…”(48), the work that one
repetitively performs during the 8-12 hour or more work day necessarily
enters
into one’s everyday life away from the plant. One need only recall the
humorous yet terrible images of Charlie Chaplin in his classic film
“Modern Times” as he works on the assembly line. The issue of speed
becomes very apparent in the reading process of Industrial
Park. Not
only in the lives of the urban-dwelling characters does the notion of
speed
enter, almost as a character itself, but in the fragmented, telegraphic
style
that Galvão employs, which provokes a fast reading of the novel.
But, it
is that fast reading that the reader must resist. The
reader must allow the spaces in
white to interrupt the flow, allow the mini-explosions and collisions
between
vignettes to settle before moving on to the next. Like
the workers who drag their feet en
route the the factory, the reader must allow the visual aspects of Industrial Park to enter in dialogue
with the verbal and fight the constraints and the compulsion of
modern-time.
Antropofagia
and the “aesthetic of hunger”
During the years of her early
participation in the Modernista movement, as was previously stated,
Galvão was considered by her contemporaries to be the figure who
most
embodied the antropofagist credo, and
in her novel, Industrial Park there
are strong antropofagist elements. In
addition to the stylistic aspects I have already mentioned, she also
incorporates aspects of Brazilian popular culture (Carnival), bourgeois
culture
(cocktail parties), samba, journalistic references through newspaper
articles,
political pamphlet and union agitation, as well as references to
international
figures like Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx, and Frederich Engels, all three
of whom
are incorporated into the Braz reality as local characters. All of
these pieces
make their way into the creation of the novelistic reality where they
are
re-elaborated (consumed and digested) to produce the particular
narrative
reality of Industrial Park which
responds to and represents the Brazilian context. This is antropofagia
in its Oswaldian Modernista form. But, Galvão
doesn’t stop there, she takes antropofagia
further in that in Industrial Park,
antropofagia becomes highly and overtly politicized in its
critique of
capitalism and the inhumanity of the industrialization process in
São
Paulo. In Mário de Andrade’s classic modernista
novel, Macunaíma,
for example, the number one evil villain, the capitalist giant
cannibal, Pietro
Pietra, who has stolen Macunaíma’s beloved amulet and wants to
cook him up and eat him in a stew, is
vincible thanks to Macunaíma’s quick wits and a little magical
luck. Galvão’s
capitalist cannibal giant, however, is not nearly so easily beaten. In Industrial Park, the capitalist giant
cannibal could be seen to be the textile industry itself and that
particular
giant does succeed in devouring many
of the workers who enter its lair. They are chewed up, spit out and
left for dead.
The surplus value that is extracted from the workers’ labor goes to
feed
the giant who grows stronger and stronger everyday, as described in the
statistics that open the novel and in the representations of the
comfortable
bourgeois life of consumption and frivolous pleasure represented there
as
well: consumption of the products
of the exploited workers’ labor and the sexual consumption of the poor
female and male workers as prostitutes or as secret lovers to be
abandoned when
something better comes along…eaten up and spit out.
Karl Marx has described this terrifying
aspect of the capitalist system in his El
capital,
La producción
capitalista, que es
esencialmente producción de plusvalía, absorción
de
plustrabajo, produce, pues, con el alargamiento de la jornada de
trabajo no
sólo la atrofía de la fuerza de trabajo humana sino
también el agotamiento y la muerte de la misma fuerza de
trabajo.(287)
Poor, broken figures, like
Corina are
devasted by the beast. As the novel continues, Corina’s stepfather
throws
her out when he learns that she is pregnant; she loses her job due to
her
pregnancy (and status as unwed mother); her lover does abandon her and
she has
her baby alone in the hospital ward for the poor. The birth of the baby
proves
to be a tragic shock. It is born
without skin, open and bare to the world, and it seems that Corina
kills him, a
crime for which she is imprisoned. Some critics have suggested that
perhaps the
baby was born with syphillis, since Corina had turned to prostitution
in order
to eat and buy a cradle for her baby. While that is a possible
hypothesis,
another may be the industrial “diseases” that factory workers
develop due to the toxins, chemicals, poor ventilation, and generally
miserable
working conditions to which they were exposed. Projecting
forward from the 1930’s
context of Brazilian textile industry, the testimonials and studies of
the
working environment in Latin American factories and maquiladoras
from the 1970’s to the present highlight the
dangerous working conditions and elements to which workers were/are
exposed
causing illness in the workers themselves and birth defects in their
babies.(9) Citing testimony given
by a female maquiladora worker in Mexico, Norma
Iglesias Prieto writes:
The worst drawback of
maquiladora work is
all the damage we do to our health. Factory labor involves working with
acids
and solvents, handling hot materials…
In the sewing maquiladoras
they also have
problems. Workers always have irritated throats, they develop coughs,
and many
become asthmatic from the lint that comes out of the fabrics they work
with.
Their heads turn gray like little old ladies’ from so much lint. Think about it! If that’s how your
head looks, what must your lungs look like? (I21)
This capitalist form of
cannibalism is
clearly present in Industrial Park.
Not just in the case of Corina’s baby, but evidenced in a reference to
a
seamstress, Bruna, whose “coarse hair is powdered with silk” as she
works at her sewing machine.(9) Like the maquiladora
worker above, one wonders what Bruna’s lungs look
like.
In addition to devouring the
workers
through the extraction of surplus value, toxic working conditions and
sexual/emotional exploitation, the capitalist cannibal of the textile
industry
also eats up workers’ time. Once they become part of the industrial
system, workers’ time is no longer their own. Everything must be done
quickly
from the production of goods, to the eating of meals (“I have to eat
fast
and return to the shop.”17), to peeing at break time (“When we get
off we’ll ask. Gee! Time’s
almost over and I
haven’t pissed yet.” 11), to caring for one’s family
(“We don’t have time to get to know our families.”21). Every
minute is counted, and accounted for, no one may fall behind. Overtime
is
expected without question if the factory needs it. The factory’s needs
come before all else. Time is controlled and consumed by the industrial
system,
and the workers must run to keep up.
The rush of the workers’ lives
is
in direct contrast to the representation of the leisurely
pace of life kept by the
bourgeoisie. There are moments in
which the two worlds are set side by side and the stark contrast in the
experience of time for each group is telling of who benefits from the
system
and who is consumed by it. One revealing example is a moment in which a
young
political activist seamstress, Otavia, is delivering silk pajamas to
the wife
of a young bourgeois man, Alfredo Rocha. He is relaxed, reading Marx in
his
livingroom and invites Otavia in to wait for his wife’s return. He
would
like to observe her, he is interested in the working classes. At first
she
hesitates, then she enters. She stays a few minutes, but insists that
she must
return to work. Rocha is confused, thinking that she fears he wants
something
from her sexually. The two different ways of perceiving and
experiencing time
in the scene cause conflict, confusion, and discomfort.
Rocha’s time is his own,
Otavia’s minutes are counted by the atelier
boss.
Galvão’s radicalization
of
the capitalist cannibal giant of Macunaíma
to that of the cannibalism of the capitalist system as manifested in
the
urbanization and industrialization process in São Paulo offers a
preview
of director, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s 1969 Cinema Novo
radical reworking of Macunaíma in his film by
the same name. But,
Galvão’s move beyond Modernista antropofagia, I
believe, can be connected to an earlier phase of Cinema
Novo as she begins to cross over
into the terrain of what the practitioners and theoreticians of the Cinema Novo movement in mid-1960’s
Brazil called the “aesthetic of hunger” and tropicalismo. Of the
“aesthetic of hunger” acclaimed director Glauber Rocha has said,
…the hunger of
Latin America is not simply an alarming symptom: it
is the essence of our society. There
resides the tragic originality of Cinema Novo in
relation to world cinema.
Our originality is our hunger and our greatest misery is that this
hunger is
felt but not intellectualy understood….We know…that this hunger
will not be cured by moderate governmental reforms and that the cloak
of
technicolor can not hide, but only aggravates its tumors...(70)
Cinema Novo has
represented the theme
of hunger in numerous ways through film in order to declaim the truth
of a
Latin American reality marked by oppression, exploitation, social and
economic
injustice and hunger. The “aesthetic of hunger” presents a miserable
side of Andrade’s celebratory
cannibalism. Like the black and the white, the lines and the spaces, antropofagia as represented in
Galvão’s novel and discussed above is accompanied-opposed to the
inescapable and omnipresent theme of hunger in the novel. This is
hunger
associated with the masses of workers and the unemployed in the urban
space:
Poor people can’t even be
mothers! I dunno how I got this baby! I have to give him to someone, so the
poor thing won’t die of hunger.
If I keep taking of him how will I find a job?
I have to give him up to take care of
other people’s children! I’ll nurse the sons of the rich and I
don’t know how mine will get by.(74)
Galvão’s characters all
hunger for something, all lack something. On a most basic level it is
food. Physical
hunger is a constant presence in the lives of the workers, especially
that of
the most abandoned and unprotected of characters, like Corina, the
female
character upon whom most of my commentary has been centered. At one of
her
clandestine meetings with her bourgeois lover Arnaldo, she thinks to
herself:
Also so many
delicacies! So many luscious treats
for a stomach that burns from hunger.
An open bottle. It’s
so simple. An inexperienced head on
the pillows, drowsy. Sexual mouths
suck. Legs incite.(18)
Clearly
physical hunger for nurishment here is intertwined with sexual hunger
which, in
the case of Corina, is still connected to economics: sex with Arnaldo
is a
possible (illusionary) path out of poverty, out of hunger.
Arnaldo in turn takes advantage of this
situation to satisfy his own sexual hunger.
By the end of the novel, when
all else
has failed her, Corina turns to the church. It
seems there is no where else for her
to go.
Night again
finds
Corina’s starving stomach…
She heads for the Braz church.
She goes
in to rest. A thousand candles illuminate the altar covered with gold.
On her
fingers she counts all the money spent there. How many days she could
eat with
those wax tongues dripping down the silver candelabra…
Was St. Mary
Magdalene ever
hungry when she was a whore?…
She laughs.
A young priest wraped in a
cassock
appears in the round nave. He approaches.
-This pew is
reserved.
It’s forbidden to sit here.(112-11)
For the poor
and starving, the Catholic church offers no support in the world of
Braz’s industrial park, quite the contrary. Yet
even at this moment, which could be
the melodramatic climax to Corina’s sad life, she finds it within her
to
shake off the melodrama, and laugh at the thought of her role in the
Christ
myth, that of Saint Mary Magdalene.
One of the major aspects of
the novel
that keeps Corina and her milieu out of the realm of melodrama is the
persistent work of the proletariat to organize itself, to discuss
collectively
the workers’ situation, to make conscious the sources of their
exploitation and to protest publicly.
As Rocha describes, not all manifestations of hunger are
rational, but
in the case of Galvão’s novel, fortunately, there are those who
believe that there is a way to change their circumstances.
Hope, memory,
and truth in the age of savage
capitalism
…it can be shown that
Man’s Fate is made by men.
B. Brecht
In his discussion of Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel, Walter Benjamin highlights certain elements of Lukács’thought which are particularly compelling for the analysis of hope and memory in Industrial Park. Benjamin says that according to Lukács,
Only in the novel are meaning
and life, and thus the
essential and the temporal, separated; one can almost say that the
whole inner
action of a novel is nothing else but the struggle against the power of
time…And from this…arise the genuinely epic experiences of
time: hope and memory…Only in
the novel…does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the
object
and transforms it…The duality of inwardness and the outside world can
here be overcome for the subject ‘only’ when he sees
the…unity of his entire life…out of the past life-stream which is
compressed in memory…(99)
One could say that Industrial
Park ends rather pessimistically. The strong
Afro-Brazilian proletarian leader, Alexandre is killed at the
manifestation;
the Lithuanian proletarian leader, Rosinha Lituana is deported;
bourgeois
turned proletariat, Alfredo Rocha is expelled from the Communist Party
for
individualistic tendencies and thus he and the proletarian leader,
Otavia, end
their relationship; Corina, now out of jail and a prostitute who can’t
make enough to eat, meets up with Pepe, the informer, turned pimp, now
prostitute and the novel ends as they climb into bed together – two
lumpen-proletariat and a bag of popcorn. But, I believe, with
Lukács,
that those twin epic experiences of time: hope and memory, that can be
found in
the novel, offer an interesting other way of analyzing the narrative
denouement.
As we have seen from the
start, in Industrial Park we must study the dark
with the light, what the novel says and the spaces of silence, and now
perhaps
the elements of hope and the memory it presents will keep us on our
path. The
center of hope and memory in the novel, I believe, can be located in
the home,
family and life work of Alexandre, the illiterate, Afro-Brazilian
charismatic
proletarian leader and friend of Otavia. The main scene in which he is
involved
centers on a dinner prepared in his proletarian home.
Living in his home are his
children’s grandmother who is bedridden, Alexandre, and his two sons,
Carlos
Marx and Frederico Engels. The boys’ mother had been killed years
earlier
in a factory accident. Invited to
dine with the family are Otavia and her partner at the moment the
previously
bourgeois Alfredo Rocha. Thus within this family space at the gathering
are a
female probably ex-slave (slavery was not abolished in Brazil until
1880’s) and her free son, the two boys who carry the names of two
heroes
of the proletariat, a female white proletariat and and an ex-bourgeois:
colonialism, slavery, capitalism, proletarian struggle and the hope for
a
revolutionary future.
In the home they share what
Alfredo calls
“revolutionary food”, a simple meal. The boys are bubbling with
news. Carlos Marx is a newspaper boy, but that day he “didn’t sell
a single newspaper in order to nail red union manifestos onto posts in
the
early morning.”(94) The young
boys are already participating in the struggle, they already understand. As the two boys settle in for the
evening with a friend of theirs who has come to visit, Otavia begins to
tell
them about Rosa Luxemburg, “a German proletarian militant killed by the
police because she attacked the bourgeoisie.”(95) The boys then begin
to make
connections between Rosa Luxemburg, the German police and bourgeoisie
and their
own experiences of injustice and oppression in Braz. Later, in the
penultimate
chapter of the novel there is a rally, soldiers are called in and
Alexandre is
killed. In the final scene of that chapter, Carlos Marx runs in to his
house
and shouts to his grandmother, “They did to papa just like Rosa
Luxemburg!” The image and lifestory of Rosa Luxemburg serve as a
connecting thread, a part of the historical memory of proletarian
struggles,
one that she began in Germany, but had repercussions in the Brazilian
context.
She was alive again in Alexandre, and his sons will carry forward
his/her
legacy as well as that of their namesakes, Marx and Engels. During the
rally,
when Alexandre fell another proletariat picked up the banner he was
carrying
and when that worker fell another raised it up in his place. The legacy
is
carried forth, forging another kind of chain that is quite different
from that
of the assembly line. It should also be noted that this was not Rosa
Luxemburg’s first appearance in the novel. The character of Rosinha
Lituana is closely connected to the historical figure of Rosa Luxemburg. Although Rosinha is deported by the
middle of the novel, toward the end, at the rally in which Alexandre is
killed,
Otavia sees a woman who resembles Rosinha marching with them in
solidarity thus
presenting the continuity of the person of Rosinha and Rosa in the
struggle. Returning
to Benjamin, we are reminded that, “Memory creates the chain of
tradition
which passes a happening on from generation to generation.”(98) The boys will not forget, they are the
future, the keepers of memory and
the hope for change. For the unity of the proletariat’s life is not
just
in his own individual life-stream, but in the combination of the past
and the
present, the beautiful and the terrible, the dark and the light, the
lines and
the spaces, in the creation of a new future.
I open this section with a
brief
quotation from Brecht’s essay on “Writing the Truth:
Five Difficulties”. I think that
the quote is useful because
it has to do with responsibility and the human creation of history and
destiny. It also has to do with truth. Without truth, Brecht, would suggest,
there is no hope, there is no better future. He writes,
We must tell the truth about
the
barbarous conditions in our country in order that the thing should be
done
which will put an end to them – the thing, namely, which will change
property relations.
And to do this, he goes on, to
tell the
truth, takes great courage, because, often, he reminds us, “To
displease
the possessors is to become one of the dispossessed.” Patrícia
Galvão told the truth and she displeased power. For that she was
imprisoned, tortured and expelled from her socio-cultural and political
groups.
The truth represented in the content and the form of Industrial
Park, can be seen to create a space of hope for change,
but the novel Industrial Park itself
also creates a space of hope in its existence and persistence, in the
truth it
tells about the situation of the factory/maquiladora
workers beginning in 1930’s Brazil and extending to the present moment
as
they labor in national and global markets and seek to organize for
change. As
the narrator declares in the novel, “Other men will remain. Other women will remain. Braz
of Brazil. Braz of the whole world.”
(1).
The musicians
included in the production of this album and considered founders of Tropicália were Caetano Veloso,
Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, Nara Leão,
Rogério Duprat.
(2).
Brazilian Modernismo was a complex
and diverse cultural movement, not all “branches” of Modernismo
agreed with or followed the central tenets of Oswaldian antropofagia,
but it was the Oswaldian branch of Modernismo that
the tropicalistas took as their inspiration. (See,
for example, Antonio Candido and
J. Aderaldo Castello’s book, Modernismo,
for a discussion of the various manifestations of Modernismo.)
(3).
The tropicália movement also gained
inspiration from the filmic
production of Glauber Rocha. As
Caetano Veloso states in his autobiography, Verdade
tropical,
Se
o tropicalismo se deveu em alguma medida a meus atos e minhas
idéias,
temos então de considerar como deflagrador do movimento o
impacto que
teve sobre mim o filme “Terra em transe” de Glauber Rocha, em minha
temporada carioca de 66-7.”(99)
(4).
It is interesting to note that in
the same year that Galvão published Industrial
Park, Frida Kahlo completed her famous painting “My Dress Hangs
There” (1933), a painting that would offer an interesting dialogue with
Galvão’s novel.
(5).
See for example Jackson (1993),
Fulani, Guedes, Besse, Campos, among others and including especially,
director,
Norma Bengell’s 1987 film, “Eternamente Pagu”.
(6).
It is important to note here that
the novel’s cover included in this essay as well as the opening
citations
from the official statistics and Galvão’s human
contextualization
appeared in the original edition of the novel, whose publication was
paid for
by Galvão’s then husband, Oswald de Andrade (and then in the fac-similar re-edition of 1981). But,
in the re-edition of the novel in
1994 by Mercado Aberto which accompanied a growing resurgence in
interest in
Galvão, the cover was changed and the opening quotes were
omitted, even
though in the “Nota do editor” (that basically replaces those
opening citations) it is declared that “Esta edição de Parque Industrial reproduz fielmente a
primeira, de 1933, inclusive no referente ás plavras de outros
idiomas…” However, the
Jacksons’ 1993 English translation of Industrial
Park does include a copy of the original cover inside the book as
well as
the two opening quotes from the original version of the novel.
(7).
See especially Jackson (1993), Owens, Guedes for more indepth
analyses
of the cinematic elements in Industrial
Park, although almost all critics at least mention the cinematic
atmosphere
or style of the novel.
(8).
See David Bordwell’s The Cinema of
Eisenstein for an excellent discussion of Eisenstein’s film
techniques as forming part of a political and cultural praxis
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