The Real and Promised Brasília: An Asymmetrical Symbol in 1960s Brazilian Literature

To write about Brasília in the 1960s was to write about a dual city, part symbol and part reality. This dual city grew out of an impulse to oversimplify representations of the real city in order to preserve its mythic promise of national progress. The oversimplifications derived from a national desire to showcase how Brazil had found an authentic path toward its own progress, as opposed to copying preexisting models in other nations. Three texts from the 1960s challenge efforts to preserve the ideal vision of the new capital at any cost and alternatively expose the city's asymmetries and complexities, which were often glossed over in discourses that idealized the construction of Brasília as the definitive symbol of national progress. These texts are Clarice Lispector's crônica "Brasília: cinco dias" (1964), José Marques da Silva's Diário de um candango (1963), and José Geraldo Vieira's novel Paralelo 16: Brasília (1966).