The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964-1985 (review)

The Muffled Cries: The Writer and Literature in Authoritarian Brazil, 1964-1985. By NANCY T. BADEN. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. xxv, 239 pp. Cloth, $55.00. Paper, $34.50.

In this well-documented book, Nancy Baden offers a wealth of information feeding into two narrative sequences, namely, the institutional trajectory of censorship in Brazil and the fiction banned by or written in response to censorship. The two strands take turns in Baden's chronologically organized chapters, where she studies several contemporary Brazilian authors and presents information about the evolution of censorship in Brazil. This is supplemented by major authors' reactions to it, as detected in a questionnaire prepared by the author. Finally, Baden reproduces, as appendixes, the famous writers' petition to Minister Falcão (1977) and important biobibliographic data on 31 Brazilian authors. The selection is based on how directly authors were faced with, or perceivedly wrote in response to, censorship, a criterion that also defines which pieces are analyzed.

The reader unfamiliar with recent Brazilian literature and cultural history will have much to learn from Baden's well-researched study. She devotes a few pages to a dozen works of fiction, and paragraphs on many more, including important narratives by luminaries such as Veríssimo, Callado, Ivo, Fonseca, J. J. Veiga, Dourado, S. Santiago, Loyola Brandão, and Fagundes Telles. This also means that the "analyses" are, in fact, little more than plot summaries. This analytic insufficiency becomes mortal. Unfortunately, this monograph is unlikely to have much readership among nonspecialists in Brazil. Judged against the specialized knowledge already produced about postcoup Brazilian literature (the standards for which having been set by the likes of Santiago, F. Süssekind, I. Moriconi), The Muffled Cries adds absolutely nothing. In spite of its comprehensive bibliography, Baden's study is unable to engage a single intertext, critical or fictional, other than through a diluted paraphrase.

Baden's "overview" is, in fact, unable to conceptualize even the nature of the link between the two narratives it sets forth, the tragedy of censorship and the epic of the fiction written against it. Since it is unable to interrogate that link other than through mechanical generalizations, the book cannot see why--despite its seemingly all-encompassing overview of 1964-1985--some of the period's most radical, innovative, and provocative fiction necessarily falls through its fingers and gets no mention--for example, Leminski's Catatau or C. Süssekind's Armadilha para Lamartine, not to go beyond examples taken from the 70s. Needless to say, none of the more complex problems involved in the relation between censorship and writing (problems linked with the notions of allegory, overcodification, and the unconscious) find room in The Muffled Cries.

The specialist who will not have much to profit from the book will also have to correct several errors: Opinião did not feature only "singer Nara Leão" (p. 24) but also Nara Leão, João do Vale and Zé Keti (the exclusion of the two working-class figures is significant); in the Brazilian electoral system the vice-president was, but no longer is, elected separately (p. 12); Benjamin's "work of art" essay certainly does not lament the loss of "humaneness [sic] and uniqueness of the artistic process", but on the contrary explores the possibilities opened up by loss of aura in art (p. 10); R. Schwarz is not an anthropologist but a literary critic (p. 3), and so on, at the rate of one every few pages. Adding to the factual errors, gross analytic simplifications, such as reading França Jr. or Tropicália as "devoid of political content" and "nonpolitical" (pp. 27, 151), abound in the book. To give another example of the book's conceptual poverty: if all one can say about poets as diverse as A. Campos, J. P. Paes, S. Uchoa Leite, and A...