Social Prejudice Examined in Dalton Trevisan's "O ciclista"

Social Prejudice Examined in Dalton Trevisan's "O ciclista" Karen Burrell Yale University The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which certain mechanisms and narrative techniques are employed in Dalton Trevisan's short narrative text "O ciclista."1 These devices function within the text to bring about its specific semantic value — its "message," as it were — a meaning that is not at all apparent on the first reading. It will be maintained here that a key aspect of this work is the changing relationship presented between the narrative voice and its object. Specifically, it will be shown that there is a progression in terms of narrative distance which reflects or expresses the main point of the text. It is this distance factor that will be focussed on in the remarks that follow. Before focusing on these elements of the internal structure of this work, however, a few comments should be made concerning its generic nature. "O ciclista" is an example of narrative in prose, certainly. But other than the general characteristics of being a narrative and being written in prose, it has little in common with "traditional" forms of narration. Its "aberrant" character stems from its extreme brevity: the text is, in its entirety, only nineteen lines long. And even the characteristics cited could conceivably be questioned. For example, in one standard work, Scholes and Kellog define the term "narrative" as "all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller."2 Although there is clearly a story-teller present in this work, one could argue that only by expanding the meaning of the term "story" beyond its usual sense could "O ciclista" be considered a narrative by Scholes and Kellog's definition. The "plot" consists of a highly schematic description of a day in the life of an urban ice cream seller, told in a markedly figurative and imaginative style. In fact, because of the constant use of "poetic" devices (principally simile and the use of repetitions and echoes on various levels) one could reasonably argue that this work in many ways approximates the traditional patterns of poetry. In addition there is one other 1.Dalton Trevisan, "O ciclista," in his Os desastres do omor (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilizaçâo Brasileira, 1968), pp. 101-102. It is the second of his "Os misterios de Curitiba." 2.Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 4. 112ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW aspect in which the work resembles a poem: it can be seen to be divided into five "stanzas" (its brief paragraphs) each of which is in a sense independent (the complete text of "O ciclista" is quoted at the end of this study). It is up to the reader to meld these five separate stanzas into a whole, into a unity that can be read as a story. It should be added parenthetically that this is not such an easy task, inasmuch as some of the segments seem mutually contradictory. This fact lends an eerie, almost surrealistic quality to the story, while at the same time it challenges the reader's ingenuity in reconstructing the narrated events. In order to avoid getting bogged down in the fascinating but complex area of genre classifications, it is perhaps best simply to refer to this work as a "microtext." This rather general term can be applied to "O ciclista" as well as to other works that share what is at least its most obvious characteristic, that of being extremely short. "Microtext" describes certain works well, such as Borges's "Borges y yo" (found in his Antología personal) or many of the texts contained in Cortázar's Historias de cronopios y de famas, to name just two examples. Finally, one more point should be made concerning the generic nature of this work. In the context of Brazilian literature, there is a canonized form that could be considered as a specific type of what is referred to here as "microtexts"; it is the crónica. According to Gerald M. Moser, the crónica is a type of journalistic prose that "covers the...