3:AM Magazine

Trans. by Zan.

Ítalo Mariconi and Flávio Carneiro

Flávio Carneiro was born in Goiania in 1962, moving to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1980s. Writer, literary critic and also scriptwriter and lecturer in literature, Caneiro is one of the most significant authors of the 90s. In an interview for Jornal do Brasil, along with Italo Moriconi, Professor of Brazilian and Comparative Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, he talks about what has been called the ‘Generation 2000’ of Brazilian writers.

It’s fashionable to talk, in academia, newspapers, not to mention the numerous sites and blogs spread out in Brazil about the so-called Generation 2000 (Geracao 2000), whether it exists or not, only time will show, but it is a fact that a group of young authors publishing their books, moving the critics’ deep apathy and mainly, giving a lot to talk about, and talking very well too. There are those who take as an insult the expression “Literature of Blogs and Bloggers”, but, how would there be any other definition for Clarah Averbuck, for example? So, not simply to provoke new groundless debate, we invited the literary critics, and also writers, Flávio Carneiro and Italo Moriconi for a talk about what is going on in contemporary Brazilian prose.

Flávio Carneiro, from the start made his position very clear regarding Generation 2000 — “I don’t think that we should define Generation 2000, it’s only another label, it doesn’t help at all to understand what is going on in actual fiction.”

The compiler of the The Best 100 Brazilian Short Stories of the Century (Objectiva), Italo Moriconi disagreed with certain points and even tried some of the new writer’s characteristics — “It’s a generation linked to a literature which appears with the Internet’s support. Sometimes, not even having literary references, the inspiration might come from the writer’s own belly button, as in the bloggers’ case.”

But they both agree on a certain point: there isn’t the space for a new Clarice Lispector or a new Guimaraes Rosa anymore. This demand for a new “canon”, arises from the critics themselves, and by them, is condemned. There is no longer anexclusively literary intellectual culture, fertile ground for the rise of genius. Flávio Carneiro claims that those who complain about the lack of an original Brazilian fiction these days should revise their own innovative concepts, after all, there’s no shortage of good writers around.

Nelson de Oliveira, using the term “Generation 90″, provoked a huge debate. Without even ending this discussion, another label then appears, the “Generation 2000″. Is the idea of a literary generation still valid?

FC: The idea of a generation is very deceiving. It makes us understand it as a group, when, in fact, the group, doesn’t exist; what exists are writers who were publishing their novels around the same period, and this, doesn’t really mean much. Today, when diversity is the main characteristic of the fiction with writers following very different paths from each other, the idea of a generation is a vestige of a time when one would still believe in groups and collective projects.

IM: A literary generation, artistic or intellectual is not defined simply by age or chronological consciousness. A generation, in a strongest sense of the term, is a group, or diverse groups with a sort of aesthetic identity or ideology, even if this identity is pluralist, as it happens to be nowadays.

What makes a writer a generation 90s writer? And 00s?

FC: They had started publishing somewhere around the 90s, nothing else, simply because the rest is only diversity. I don’t think that we should define “Generation 2000″, as it is only another label, and doesn’t happen to understand what goes on in actual fiction. What is Generation 2000, is good and bad authors who started publishing from 2000 onwards.

IM: It’s difficult to establish a difference between the Generations 90 and 2000. They should themselves provide this differentiation. I have a certain tendency to see the young writers from the 90s, and also the new writers from 2000 onwards as part of the same moment in recent Brazilian cultural history. I’d offer, at a risk, a differentiation in the sense of seeing the so-called Generation 2000 linked to a literature arisen from the internet’s support, the blogs. A common linkage between these generations is that both don’t take as their absolute inspiration Clarice Lispector and Rubem Fonseca, who were the big masters of the 70s generation. I believe that references are more varied and some times there’s no literary reference, the inspiration might be coming from the writer’s own belly button, as in the bloggers of Generation 2000.

Clarice Lispector

The writer André Takeda claims that, for the literature to progress, what is needed is more sites, more publishers, more writers. Do you agree?

FC: No. We’ve got publishers and writers in sufficient numbers in Brazil. What we need is more readers, more book shops, more public libraries, more programmes of encouragement to read.

IM: I’d say that the quantity is a very important factor, but I also believe that literature progresses fundamentally through the impact caused by the most talented authors, for the quality factor. It’s down to the critics and public to discover over the years who are the really good authors within a certain generation.

Are blogs literature?

FC: It’s literature, even because the concept of literature is quite wide and under its generous ceiling we can host several forms of writing. Now, whether or not it is good literature is already another debate. Clarah Averbuck, the way I see her, represents a certain actual group, formed by authors who deeply believe that their own lives would lend themselves to a novel. You can make a novel, that’s fine, but a bad one. They’re authors who can’t master the task, who have minimum technique and maximum conceit. I was already told that blogs have their merits, as it points to a feature of contemporary culture etc. I would agree, if the matter is dealt with from a sociological point of view, or cultural studies perspective or something like that. But simply by virtue of being a legitimate manifestation of a certain moment of determinate culture is not enough to guarantee the quality of what is done.

Clarah Averbuck

IM: Blogs are potential literature. I strongly believe that the actual level of the technological civilization, marked by the computer age and virtual communications, is more favourable for reading and writing than the previous era, the televisual. Literature is an art that demands the person has learned how to take pleasure from the mental and physical discipline.

Academic critics tend to fight against the prevailing culture of the moment. Why?

FC: To talk about the present is always delicate. We were educated via the presupposed notion of traditional history, that privileges distance on the analysis of facts. But today new historians already stand up for a different idea: it is possible to talk about the fact at the same time we actually live through it. I believe that the matter here is different: the dominant approach of historians and literary critics is that they want to have the last word about a certain author or work and what’s actually required is some distance. They believe that their function is to judge, and for that, they need time. That’s why, under this wrong principle, critics don’t accord enough value to contemporary studies. The critic does not need to judge anything, though sometimes they can, but not actually being obligated to do so. What the critic should do, always, is to think about his object: the literary text. And why not think about the object that has been produced now? Why wait for it to become stale? Some critics, it seems to me, are afraid of making mistakes, for example, to praise certain books and in years hence academia might come to an altogether verdict: this book is bad. It would count against the person who praised the work. But even then, there’s a mistaken assumption in this, as the critic doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone but to his readers, who deserve to read an appropriate analysis. And who would guarantee that academia, given a second chance, wouldn’t re-evaluate its verdict, approving the book that was previously disapproved of? The critic doesn’t need to go through this, it would be madness.

IM: Your question brings up a negative myth. Actually, in a great number of Brazilian universities, as much in language and literature as in communications, there are many lecturers who take the actual literature to the classroom. There are some more traditional universities, like USP [University of São Paulo], that doesn’t even look to Clarice and Rubem in their graduate programmes. But we can’t make a fetish of this either, as the university can’t work in the same frenetic rhythm as news and TV. To the university, literature and art can’t simply be a novelty and news space. It’s for the cultural press and the extra-university artistic movement to agitate and mobilize around these new production techniques. Now, of course that would be wonderful to get back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the university was a fundamental place of innovation.

With the boom of this generation, can we say that this has created a new form of literature?

FC: No, it would be an exaggeration to think this way.

IM: I don’t know if it is creating a new form of literature by new generations. But I do know that the internet offers enormous experimental potential, yet the truth is we can see that many young authors are expressing themselves in a very traditional way, through a post-teenage confessional style (as in bloggers’ literature), or through reality accounts, a kind of journalistic text about life in the poorest peripheries (the so-called return-of-the-real). The way I see it, the strongest characteristic of recent literature is to fit the author’s autobiographic figure inside the fictional text. The most interesting texts in this line are those that the author’s figure is shown, but in a pretentious way, forging the confessional.

Many enquire about the lack of a new Clarice or a new Guimaraes Rosa, as if there were nothing new.

FC: There’s no other Clarice or new Rosa because it doesn’t fit today, such a personalised writing style as theirs. Clarice and Guimaraes Rosa were the last vestiges of the 20th century’s avant-garde. Each one in their own way created a strong work of language’s experimentation, sometimes shocking or, at least, annoying their contemporaries. There’s no space for it nowadays. Which is good. I adore Rosa, adore some of Clarice’s books (not all of them) but they created a fiction which wouldn’t fit the actual view. They wrote against certain specific standards, breaking down barriers, destroying role models. What I see today is what I used to call silent transgression, which avoids the fuss.

IM: We don’t have an exclusively literary intellectual culture anymore, for that, new writers don’t care about becoming literary geniuses, for the simple fact that none of them has with their own work that relationship, almost sacred, with the writing as the modernist generation had. Guimaraes Rosa, before he knew he was a genius, really wanted to be a genius. Besides, it is only possible to be a genius in literature if one has the guaranteed means of support, and today, our writers need to work to survive. Sometimes, several generations pass by without anyone appearing very special. I believe, the several centuries from Cervantes to Guimaraes Rosa produced a corpus laico of sacred books that could feed us for millennia.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Zan is the editor of 3:AM Brasil. Born in Santo Andre, São Paulo in 1978, she now lives in East London with her husband Andrew and son Rafael.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, May 15th, 2007.