Osman Lins: an introduction

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Resumo:
Osman Lins was a Brazilian writer of world renown but whose works have not received much attention in the US and is also quite
obscure in his own country. That he was the epitome of an outsider may explain why he was neglected in Brazil. His innovations and
experimentations in narration, textual time and space makes his works difficult but not inaccessible. His most well-known novel is
'Avalora,' also considered as his masterpiece.

Texto completo:
When he died of cancer three days after turning fifty-four, Osman Lins (1924-1978) was one of the most prominent figures of twentiethcentury Brazilian literature and a writer of international renown whose works had been translated into several languages and analyzed in
countless articles and several books and dissertations. Yet, in spite of being considered one of the major writers in Latin America, Lins
has not received much attention in the United States. He has even fallen into relative obscurity in Brazil, a situation that seems to have
reversed with the reissue of his works, begun in 1994, by one of the most prestigious Brazilian publishers (Companhia das Letras, Sao
Paulo). The literary establishment and the media have also found a renewed interest after marking the seventieth anniversary of his birth
and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Avalovara, the novel considered by many to be his masterpiece.
The paradox of a writer recognized and snubbed in his own country can be explained at least in part by the fact that Lins was always an
outsider, uncompromising in the pursuit of his art and his principles, never part of literary cliques or fads. In the postmodern era he was
an innovator experimenting with time, space, and narrative voice but holding an unfashionably religious view of literature and the mission
of the writer. He was also an unrelentingly difficult writer who demanded of his readers endurance, loyalty to literature beyond the mere
story, and the ability to follow him through the maze of his complex and painstaking prose. Perhaps the term difficult requires some
clarification: Lins is difficult only in the sense that, to be fully appreciated, his fiction requires some reflection on the part of the reader; he
is not by any means inaccessible. Like all great writing, his work can be approached and enjoyed on many levels, and Lins remains
foremost a great storyteller.
The son of a tailor, Osman Lins was born in a small town in the interior of the state of Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil. At sixteen
he moved to Recife, the state capital, studied business while pursuing his writing, and later began working at the Bank of Brazil. After a
year in France and the publication of his first two books, he moved to Sao Paulo, where he worked as a university professor and wrote for
newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV until he was financially secure enough to devote himself exclusively to literature. He believed that
the writer has a social mission to carry out, but "it must not, under any circumstance, be dictated by the State or by political parties,
because no institution can apply the laws and regulations designed for other types of activity to the writer's conduct. Every writer worthy
of his name must keep as far as possible from power and the powerful."
Lins's fiction can be divided into two phases: the first, in a more traditional and realistic vein, includes O visitante (The Visitor, 1955), Os
gestos (The Gestures, 1957) and O fiel e a pedra (The Balance's Hand and the Stone, 1962); while the second, with Nove, novena (Nine,
Novena, 1966), Avalovara (1973) and A rainha dos carceres da Grecia (The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, 1976), is characterized by
formal innovations reflecting the evolution of the author's poetics. At his death, Lins was working on a new project, A cabeca levada em
triunfo (The Head Carried in Triumph), which remains unpublished. (Excerpts from this novel appear in print for the first time in this issue.)
In addition to the works of fiction, Lins's production includes several theater pieces and essays, such as Guerra sem testemunhas (War
without Witnesses, 1974), one of his most polemical books and a systematic discussion of the task and role of writers, from their
relationships with their books, publishers, and readers to their position in society and the world.
According to Leyla Perrone-Moises, two main tendencies can be discerned in the Brazilian literature of the sixties, the years in which
Lins, with Nine, Novena, enters his most mature phase: on one side, regionalist writers in the nineteenth-century tradition, like Jorge
Amado; on the other, innovators of literary language, like Joao Guimaraes Rosa.(1) If we accept this rather broad distinction (which does
not take into account, for example, the confessional/psychological novel or writers like Adonias Filho, Autran Dourado, and Clarice
Lispector, also engaged in a certain degree of technical experimentation), Lins clearly belongs in the second group. In fact, although he
starts out with a regional referent, his sense of human experience is global and his vision of nature transcendent, and the local
component is dealt with in a creative and even cerebral manner. The colorful and the exotic are not ends for Lins; they are means. What
sets Lins apart from an innovator like Guimaraes Rosa, on the other hand, is his focus more on larger narrative structures, on the
ordering of events and the exploration of new techniques, than on minimal structures and the creation of words and expressions. Lins's
writing in its more mature phase consists of the fusion of an innovative literary practice with a concern for the mythic and the cosmogonic
aspects of existence.
Surprisingly, little or nothing has been written about Lins in relation to other authors or movements outside Brazilian letters. Absent, for
the most part, are references to the large and diverse number of Latin American writers often grouped under the umbrella term of
literature of the boom, many of whom were also exploring new narrative techniques in the fifties and sixties. This problem of exclusion is
common to most Brazilian authors, whose work is seldom included in the context of Latin American literature. Noteworthy exceptions to
Lins's relative isolation are comparisons to Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges. Outside Latin American literature, Lins's work, and
Nine, Novena in particular, has often been linked to the nouveau roman, a suggestive but not wholly suitable comparison, since although
there are similarities between Lins's technique and that of the nouveau romanciers, the authors' technical decisions do not reflect the
same preoccupations or ambitions. While the authors of the nouveau roman are interested in the phenomenology of self-recognition and
see reality as a product of this experience, Lins seeks an idealistic vision of the world in which his characters, his art, and his audience
become integrated with nature and the cosmos.(2) Lins himself pointed out this difference, defining himself as "a primitive, a man linked
to myths and the world. Grillet, Sarraute, etc. are intellectuals, 'men and women of Letters.' I have letters, but despite that, I'm still a man
bound to the underdeveloped world, with all its dramas."
Nine, Novena, a collection of nine narratives, represents a turning point in Lins's work as well as one of the most inventive moments in
modern Brazilian literature. Each of the nine texts has a specific literary configuration; nevertheless, all have in common a number of
strategies that are part of a precise and unitary narrative program serving Lins's aspiration to reinsert people into the universe with which
they have lost touch. Thus what gives unity to the nine pieces is not only the recurring themes of entrapment, search for self, art versus
life, and the mythic aspect of existence. All nine also fragment narration in a manner that privileges the human condition of discourse over
the heritage of stories, and they frequently employ ornamentation, lack of a central perspective, and graphic signals to identify the
narrators. These formal devices constitute Lins's distinctive cultural idiom and give shape to the reading experience.
Lins's poetics as conveyed in Nine, Novena constitutes the foundation of all his subsequent work and accounts for the way formal
innovations serve his complex project: to return us to the mythic through the discourses of culture and the human arts. The paradox
inherent in this project and Lins's way of solving it are suggested in his comments on his own work and the situation of the writer.
Particularly revealing is Lins's account of his exposure to stained glass cathedral windows and medieval art during his stay in Europe in
the early sixties. The art of stained glass - direct, synthetic and conscious of its limitations in the face of an overwhelming commitment to
spirituality - is for Lins the paradigm of what he strives for in his own writing. Another noteworthy feature of medieval art for Lins is its
aperspectivism, which, unlike the centralized anthropocentric perspective of the Renaissance, brings about a richer vision, one that is not
limited by our carnal condition. This lack of central perspective, if applied to the construction of fiction, enhances the reading experience
because it does not anchor the contemplation of events to any one narrator or to a definite point in space or time. Furthermore,
aperspectivism entails important philosophical consequences of relevance to Lins's concern with a mythical vision of the world and the
spiritual force inherent in words.
However, the stylization of reality in Nine, Novena, which takes the place of verisimilitude, is not strictly geometric; it has a strong
mythical basis and thus paradoxically functions to specify the human within the cosmic. This dialectic relationship of geometry and
idealism, order and disorder, art and life, which is one of the central points of Lins's poetics, is established in the title of this book, which
captures the interplay between the geometric and the spiritual sphere at work in the texts and is a leitmotif in his work.(3) In Lins's vision,
writing and art become instrumental in the passage from chaos to cosmos. The task of the writer/artist is that of a unifier, one who takes
on the once priestly religious function as agent of the reconciliation of modern people to the universe with which they have lost touch.

The apparent paradox of Lins's poetics, hinging on fragmentation on the one hand and elaborate patterns and schemes on the other, is
clarified by the philosophic vision that informs such poetics. Thus the fragmentation of discourse reflects the chaos of the world and the
geometric organization the cosmic order that can be achieved by art. It is in the context of this integrative project, then, that we are to see
the mythic overtones and the archetypal dimension of many of Lins's characters, which go beyond the here and now of the story.
Avalovara represents the logical development of many of the themes and narrative techniques of Nine, Novena. In this novel Lins
continues his exploration of the relationship between literature and society, the individual and the cosmos, with a multiple approach that
attempts to capture and unify fantasy and reality against the backdrop of the fixed laws of the universe, symbolized by sections
describing the mechanism of a clock.
Titled after an imaginary bird in turn deriving its name from Avalokiteshvara, one of the Bodhisattvas, or enlightened ones, of Buddhism,
the novel is structured around the Latin palindrome SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, which can mean both "The farmer carefully
maintains his plow in the furrows" and "The plowman carefully sustains the world in its orbit." This sentence provides the framework for a
rigorous geometric scheme in which each letter represents a segment of the novel through which the five main characters appear and the
action progresses. In addition, the novel is also governed by the signs of the spiral and the square, associated with time and space
respectively. The spiral is contained in a square, in its turn divided into smaller squares, each corresponding to a letter of the palindrome,
linked, as we have seen, to a narrative line recurring throughout the text. All of this translates itself on the most superficial level of the
narrative into the story of a man and the women he loved. On a deeper level, the timeless theme of the quest for unity and knowledge
and the use of universal motifs evoke a reality that imperceptibly blends into fantasy - at times lyrical, at times ironic, and only apparently
limited by the rigorous geometry of the overall structure of the novel.
In Avalovara, then, we find again Lins's concerns with structure and the unifying function of art, expressed this time in a project far more
ambitious than any of his previous endeavors, a novel in which the rigor and symmetry governing the cosmos (and the microcosm of the
novel or of the clock) become a metaphor for the creative process, an attempt to organize chaos, and a search for the center through
multiple paths.
Lins's last completed novel, The Queen of the Prisons of Greece, represents both a departure from and a continuation of his previous
books. A postmodern work in that it offers the invention of multiple allusions to a complex, ever-shifting reality that cannot be represented
in a definitive way, this novel is marked by a constant interpenetration of texts, influences, spaces, and times, as well as by its emphasis
on memory. Its several layers make it a meditation on literary creation, a work of social criticism, a love story of sorts, and more, all rolled
into one. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this multilayered text is the use of pastiche, whose synchronicity and domination of
space over time best describe the proliferation of discourses and the erosion of boundaries that characterize The Queen.(4) The effacing
of the old categories of genre and discourse, in fact, is rampant in the book, a story within the story and about the story, ostensibly
consisting of two primary texts, a diary and a novel, which in their turn spawn myriad texts and discourses, ranging from literary theory to
radio broadcasts.
Pastiche is present in The Queen in several forms, involving virtually every element of narrative, from genre and discourse to
characterization, from literature (texts and authors) to literary theory, from theme to space and time and the issue of authorship itself. But
the one example that neatly thematizes the issue of pastiche in the book as a whole is the Bacira, an imaginary protector the novel's
heroine creates by piecing together features and characteristics of twenty-seven other characters.
Lins's dissatisfaction with conventional definitions of genres was already beginning to surface in Nine, Novena, with its rejection of the
term short story in favor of narrative on the book's first page and the frequent recourse to techniques borrowed from theater.(5)
Avalovara, deliberately ambiguous and limitless as far as genres go, also escapes definition: as Antonio Candido stated in his
introduction to the first Brazilian edition, it could be termed poetry, novel, narratological treatise, and/or worldview.(6) The Queen, then,
represents the logical development of its premises under the aspect of genre as well as theme and narrative technique, and a
culmination of Lins's growing impatience with the limitations of old categories. The result is heterogeneity and intertextuality on multiple
levels, the displacement of the roles of reader, writer, and critic, and a text analyzing itself as it is being written, turning its own analysis
into the subject matter.
Again, there is only apparent contradiction in a text like The Queen, which seems to reject the totalizing narratives of the old tradition by
its fragmentation and yet quite clearly still aspires to be a total space of sorts. Pastiche, in fact, represents for Lins a more indirect and
subtle approach to the same urge to capture the ultimate name, the same aspiration manifested before - the reintegration of people with
the universe by means of art. Since the past cannot be destroyed, because that would lead to silence, it must be revisited with irony:
hence The Queen's emphasis on memory and its attempt to give us a synchronic image of every story and every memory to express
another version of continuity with the past, the desire to understand ourselves and our culture as the product of previous codings.
In The Queen, then, Lins (and the pseudoauthor and the reader with him) strives to attain the more authentic dimension of memory, that
of creativity. This "novel of permutations, in which everything invades everything," reaches its climax with the pseudoauthor's definitive
passage into the truer dimension of art and memory, a notion that, while constantly evolving as his narrative approach, has always been
at the center of Lins's writing, giving it depth and continuity amid (in spite of?) the eruption of meanings, times, spaces, and actions in his
stories.