And it was poetry that gave me the prose writer, João Guimarães Rosa. When I read him for the first time, I experienced a sensation I had already felt when listening to the storytellers of my childhood. I didn’t just read his text, but I also heard the voices of my childhood. Rosa’s books drew me out of the written word as if I had suddenly become selectively illiterate. To enter into those texts, I had to undertake an act beyond reading, requiring a verb that as yet has no name.
More than just his invention of words, what struck me was the emergence of a poetry that withdrew me from the world, that made me unexist. It was language in a state of trance, language that fell into a trance like the mediums in magical and religious ceremonies. It was as if there were some deep intoxication that was allowing other languages to take possession of it, just as a dancer does in my country, when he doesn’t limit himself to dancing. He prepares for possession by the spirits. The dancer only dances in order to create that divine moment when he can migrate from his own body.
To achieve that relationship with writing, one needs to be a writer. However, at the same time it is crucial to be a non-writer, to submerge oneself in the realm of orality and escape the rationality of the laws of writing, which present writing as the only system of thought. This is the challenge facing the practitioner of an unbalancing act: to have one foot in each world, that of the text and that of the word. It’s not just a matter of visiting the world of orality. One needs to allow oneself to be invaded by and fused with the universe of speech, legends, and proverbs. João Guimarães Rosa delayed his entry into the world of writing, and for much of his life, remained a non-writer. As a doctor and a diplomat, he was someone who visited literature but didn’t take up permanent residency there.
The storytellers of my country have to follow a ritual when they finish their narration. They have to “close” the story. In “Closing” the story, happens when the narrator speaks to the story itself. It is thought that historical accounts are taken out of a box left behind by Guambe and Dzavane, the first man and first woman. At the end of the ceremony, the narrator turns to the story — as if the story were a protagonist — and tells it: “Go back to the house of Guambe and Dzavane.” In this way, the story is shut away back inside the primordial trunk.
What happens when the story isn’t “closed”? The crowd of listeners falls ill, struck down by a malady known as dreaming sickness. João Guimarães Rosa is a narrator who didn’t close the story. We who listened to him, fell ill. What’s more, we fell in love with this illness, this magic, this gift for fantasy.
We are, in fact, in the presence not just of a creator of words, but of a poet who reinvents prose. It’s as if there were an earthquake in the heart of writing, a language in a state of trance, just like the African dancer preparing to be possessed. We catch this act at the precise moment when it has ceased being a dance and is becoming the vehicle for exchange between body and soul. A language creating disorder, capable of converting language into the state of initial chaos, is the bearer of the most fundamental upheaval because it is the founder of a new beginning. João Guimarães Rosa is a master: an educator in the unfamiliarities so necessary to us if we are to understand a world that is only legible beyond the borderline of the laws of writing.
Between the Sertão and the Savannah:
The Reinvention of Landscape
The sertão is an almost untranslatable word. Dominated by the arid plains and barren lands of the interior, it gives its name to one of the poorest regions of Brazil. Embracing more than a third of the country’s territory (larger than many European countries), the sertão is not, however, a geographical term. “The sertão,” Guimarães Rosa said, “is within us.”
The sertão is therefore a world in the process of being invented. All this can be said about the savannah, the space where the African landscape is not only constructed but also defined. The sertão and the savannah are thus worlds constructed in language. Within these territories the reader is both the journey and the traveller. However, although these territories invite us to walk within them, they are not spaces that one crosses. For Rosa, the sertão is, itself, the crossing (“crossing” in fact being the word that closes his novel, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands).
What grips us when we read Rosa is what he pursued in his writing, “that moving, intractable, disturbing thing that rebels against any logic,” that thing that declares itself in the silence of the sertão, in the portent of the path ahead, in the poetry that is a journey from the desert to the oasis.
It is important to place João Guimarães Rosa’s work in its historical context. Books such as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands were written as Brazilians witnessed the birth of a capital city, where previously there was nothing, right in the middle of the sertão (Brasília had just been built); this completed a process of centralized control over that multiple and elusive reality. In truth, the sertão was mythologized in order to counter certain aspirations toward homogeneity and modernization in the emergent Brazil. Rosa doesn’t write about the sertão. He writes as if he were the sertão. A sertão full of stories to counter the course of History.
One needs to abandon reason in order to look at this Brazil which Guimarães Rosa shows us, as if in order to touch reality, a certain hallucinatory gift were necessary, a madness capable of redeeming the invisible. Writing isn’t a vehicle for arriving at an essence. Writing is the journey, the discovery of other dimensions and mysteries that lie beyond appearances. “When nothing happens, there is a miracle that we cannot see.”
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands reveals a political positioning, not because it is constructed on the basis of an ideology, but because, in its very language, João Guimarães Rosa suggests a utopia, a future beyond what he denounces as an attempt at an “improved form of destitution.” His language, which mediates between that of the educated classes and that of the backlands country folk, didn’t exist in Brazil. Through his collective form of writing, João Guimarães Rosa presents a Brazil in which the marginalized might take part in the invention of its History.
And here, we reach a way forward that will enable us to share one of the few certainties that Rosa left us: what a writer gives us isn’t books. What he gives us through his writing is a world. We were unaware of that world, and yet it existed within us as a silent memory of some lost enchantment. The light and shadow of the page already lay dormant within us. In a sense, reading reawakens that enchantment for us. That is the sensation felt when we discover the written work of João Guimarães Rosa.
One Work Against the Whole Oeuvre
Guimarães Rosa turned his back on an oeuvre. He refused to make a career out of literature. What interested him without a doubt was the intensity of an experience that bordered on the religious. Three of his books were published posthumously. The important thing for Rosa wasn’t the books but the act of writing itself.
In his Poetics of Music, Stravinsky wrote: “We have a duty toward music, namely, to invent it.” The writer’s duty towards language is to recreate it, rescuing it from the process of trivialization established by common usage. For Guimarães Rosa, language needed to “flee from the inflexibility of commonplace expression, escape from viscosity, from somnolence.” It wasn’t simply a matter of aesthetics, but, as far as he was concerned, it had to do with the very meaning of writing. He wanted to explore the potential of language, by challenging conventional narrative processes, and allowing the written word to be penetrated by myth and by orality.