Paul M. Sneeds
AS PART OF NÉLIDA PIÑON’S VISIT TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA as the twentieth fellow of the Puterbaugh Conferences on World Literature, she served as writer-in-residence for a week-long seminar focusing on her works in translation. Throughout her stay in Norman, Nélida proved to be a passionate teacher with a tremendous capacity to engage and inspire her students. She graciously agreed to be interviewed by me for World Literature Today, and in August 2004 I went with my wife, Jeyla, to visit her in her lovely home in the Lagoa neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After a warm reception, involving fresh juice and some delicious homemade hors-d’oeuvres, we videotaped the interview that follows, which was conducted in Portuguese and is presented here in my own English translation. Several of the questions I asked Nélida that day were inspired by student questions that had provoked lively responses from her during the Puterbaugh seminar.
Paul Sneed One of the most provocative aspects of your works, in my opinion, is the presence of multiple narrative voices that often leap in time both backward and forward. How is this technique related to your view of the possibility of representing human life in art?
Nélida Piñon Well, this is exactly my intention. Look, I have learned through the years that one voice alone is insufficient. And I have realized that fiction tells a farce, a great lie of humanity. We lie in order to tell the truth. We lie, and when I say lie, it’s not a moral problem, we lie in order to tell many things at the same time, and, sometimes, just one voice is a collective voice. Depending on the abilities of the writer, in his or her art of narrating, he or she can make just one narrator speak as if that narrator were a Greek chorus. This is an artifice. It is a literary resource. One can still multiply these voices and make them appear individual, but in reality this voice represents a human group; that is, you can multiply these voices infinitely in search of the universality of the voices. In the end it’s all a choral movement, with all of us speaking at the same time.
But one must give order to the voices, discipline the voices, so that people understand what the voices are saying. So, when you tell a story, when you use these voices, you must impose some discipline, some order, because art is born of chaos, fortunately, because chaos is rich and fertile. So just because you provide some order, impose some discipline on these voices, it doesn’t mean that they lose the chaotic richness of the text that the text has imbued within itself. So, how is one to behave in regard to these voices? That’s where literary technique comes in. In other words, you can use many voices at the same time, you can make it so one voice hides and another voice appears, you can make it so that one voice is from a specific time period and another voice from another, and you can obfuscate the voices through your method. But there must be some literary method. When I obfuscate the voices, for example, what am I doing? The voices are visiting different time periods. The voices can visit different time periods, they can leap in time, they can say much more than one thing at a time, but always through a method. If not, no one will understand anything.
PS As an author who wrote before, during, and after the military dictatorship, has your idea of the role of the author in society evolved?
NP Well, I used to have a stronger notion of the writer having a more active role in society. Nowadays, I still believe that writers occupy this role, in the area of conscience, shall we say, a moral conscience, an aesthetic conscience, a conscience of the imagination, because the imagination has a conscience. So the writer, among other things, is the person who collects and brings together realities that were not always visible to the social sciences, for example. Because the great writer is one who opens pathways for the stories of feelings and emotions, for that story which, in the hands of a great writer, does not need clarity. Such stories are not always clear, but not being clear or concrete, they are wide and inclusive. Emotion is not concrete, feeling is not concrete, but through a great narrative, through some etchings, one can tell the most secret stories of human sentiment. So the role of a writer is this, to collect and legitimate emotions: to narrate them, if possible, or outline and sketch them and capture moments of history, capture an epoch, which can be done in a great novel, because the writer is someone who deals with the social landscape. The language a writer uses is a sociological resource, and with language the writer is using a social instrument.
So the writer is someone who forges consciousness, aesthetic and moral, and that of citizenship. So when a writer tells the stories of the downtrodden, for example, the writer captures on paper things that would go unnoticed if it were not for literature. But once these are transcribed to paper, these small human deeds take on extraordinary dimensions. These small deeds are what tell our stories. That’s why nowadays the great historians are taking up more and more the study of subjects like everyday people, prostitutes, and poor people in the Middle Ages, of women, of those who had been abandoned by the official exegesis. Literature, even in its use of indiscriminate language, is an art of intelligence, an art of memory, an art of narrating. When you narrate, you tell the lost stories. The writer has an extraordinary role, going into the subterranean, to where only the artist can go. Art has this role of opening up the sea and going to its very depths, so one can see the crystal-clear waters below. . . .
So when I write, when I include characters or choose a theme, I’m not only choosing one theme, I’m choosing a range of themes, and each theme is only sustainable if it is connected with some great human need. There is no one theme in literature. For you to build a story, you situate your story on the great social canvas. Only in this way can one write. An author’s literary production is not born from a small fragment but rather a large fragment. You sketch a small aspect, but this aspect is connected to a greater narrative cosmos. This is the vocation of the writer who really understands literature as a whole. Literature is geology. You are a geologist. You go studying all the layers of the Earth and the rock. I believe that the greater vocation is that which reflects an archaeology of feelings. A writer is an archaeologist; if not, he or she stays at the surface and is banal. Thus, such a writer can only tell a limited, trivial story.
PS How did you begin to write and what were some of your early literary influences?
NP I’ll have to be somewhat autobiographical in my response. When I was eight years old, I already proclaimed myself a “writer” without having the faintest idea of what that was. As an eight-year-old, what could I know? But I became a writer attracted by a sense of adventure. I thought the books that I read and came in contact with were so interesting and that they made life more original than the one I lived in my house. So I believed that writers, upon writing a story, must have lived their story. I imagined that writers were adventurers who traveled through Africa, through the American plains, that he or she rode horseback and hunted buffaloes, or that they went around like those authors in Venice, fleeing professional hit men. So this type of adventure story was exceptional for me. They planted in me the idea of being a writer so that I could lead an extraordinary life. I wanted to have a fascinating life. Starting then, I began taking notes. I made a little newspaper for my father. There was only the one copy of it for him, but I had a very pragmatic side: I sold it to him, and he bought it.
So I began writing, writing, writing, and when I was almost fourteen, I wrote a story that took place in Bahia, because I used to go there to visit family. So I wrote a story about a young man who falls in love with a prostitute, just think, a girl of thirteen years, which in that time was much younger than a thirteen-year-old nowadays, and there was a moment when the young man, following her, goes up a ramplike street, and she is fleeing up the ramp, and I wrote a phrase that will be difficult for you to translate into English, but anyway, I wrote, “There is a steep ramp,” or ladeira íngreme, and suddenly I felt a shock. I felt that this was banal, everyday, conventional, and I felt that literature had a poetic vision of the universe and that this was contrary to it. So I stopped telling stories for some two or three years. I just did writing exercises; poetic exercises, metaphorical exercises, until I finally began telling stories again. So this poetic rite of passage, through the sphere of metaphor, was fundamental for me because it liberated my imagination. To this day I have a liberated and courageous imagination because I have trained it since I was a little girl. I didn’t show it to anyone. No one censored me. I had no duty or obligations. So it was fundamental to my development to have no commitment to the narrative, to the story to be told. I just stayed in the universe of words. This was the foundation of my life.
At the same time, I began to read at a very early age because my father was a great lover of reading. So he would give me books, and then he did something that was somewhat beyond the limits of our social class. I had an open account in a bookstore called Freitas Mastos. Working in the bookstore was a gentleman, Mr. Oliveira, a northeasterner, I’m not sure if he was from Ceará, who treated me very well and with such delicacy. I would arrive and would say, “Show me the books, Mr. Oliveira!” and he would walk with me through the bookstore; it was an enormous bookstore over in the Largo da Carioca in those times, enormous and well known, and I could choose any book I wanted: if I wanted, I could choose a pornographic book or whatever drew my interest. And I started to reveal a great literary instinct. I would say, “Show me the writers of the past.” And he would show me. I read Balzac early in my youth. I read Romeo and Juliet when I was eleven. I detested Romeo. Now I know why. Back then, I didn’t know why. I found him silly, I found him frivolous. It was Juliet who ran the show. So I had an extraordinary reading foundation. Some of the readings that were most influential in my life were by Dostoevsky. Reading Crime and Punishment, I had a notion of the meaning of moral conscience. I owe this to Dostoevsky. And when I studied in my German school, I read the Bible a great deal because, even though I was Catholic, I had Lutheran influences. The Lutheran world studies the Old Testament a lot. The Catholic world studies more the New Testament. So I read a great deal of both the Old and the New Testament and have a well-accented biblical education. Afterward, I discovered Machado de Assis. I love to speak of the Americans— Mark Twain. I fell in love with Mark Twain. I fell in love early on with Faulkner. The French. Cervantes had an immense influence on me. Another powerful influence on me was that of the Greeks. I am in love with Greek civilization. I read Homer very early. First I read adaptations. I read Virgil, the Latin world. I had a very wide literary education, which was fundamental in my development and continues to be so.
PS What public do you have in mind when you write?
NP I honestly don’t think of any public when I write. It’s impossible to think of such a thing. I think about the text. Because the text, what is it really? Apparently it is a story that I’m telling, but for me to tell the story it is furnished with all that society can forge and create. Now, if I have at my disposal all these ingredients, I already have a natural public. I don’t have to give my reader a face. Besides, language, the instrument with which I work, has marvelously impure and unworthy origins. It’s been created as much in brothels as from street stables. The rich and the poor have created language. The birth of words, happily, is not pure, nor is it noble. So when I use the words I write, I am socializing my text. There is nothing more socializing than language, because of its origins and the uses we all make of language. Language is not a thing of the few; it is of everyone, and it only stands up when it belongs to collective society. By the mere fact of taking up a pen, I am destined to write for someone who has a face, but I don’t want to know what face that person has because if I choose one, it will be one whose aesthetics are elitist, who loves me, and who surrenders herself to my charms. This is not possible, because I need readers who come from all kinds of places in Brazil, or who have a universal vocation. Now, what I think is that the text represents the best I can produce, that I must give dignity to the text, that I turn it into a truly serious work. That’s my respect for my public, to give my best without fear.
PS Is there some cultural, political, or scientific event that has your attention at the moment?
NP If there’s one thing I’d like for people to know about me, people who want to know more about me, it’s that I am a woman with a great deal of curiosity about things. I like to look at the world as a lover and a beginner, as someone who is just beginning to observe. So, with this, I try to know about all kinds of contemporary expressions, what is going on and being created in the world, I try to understand science as much as I can. But I always get back to sentiments, to understand who we are.
This explains my great interest in history. For example, at the moment I’m enamored of the history of the fourth century. It is a fascinating moment in the story of humankind, a moment in which we were in between the pagan world and the Christian world. It was a time of great religious radicalism, in which the young Christians were fascinated by their new religion, living in the desert, the Desert Fathers. In a certain way—through their extraordinary personal sacrifice, in their incredible fasts, there in their caves—they implanted the monastic principles of the convents and monasteries to come. Afterward, it would be the monasteries that would preserve culture, preserve the manuscripts.
The twelfth century was an extraordinary century for women when the Marian myth crossed the Mediterranean and arrived in Europe. And for a man such as Bernard de Clairvaux, there in my painting on the wall, he was the great head of the Cistercian world, and he understood that the Marian world, and women, would come to be the object of religious adoration. So this gave a new dimension to women, this support from Bernard de Clairvaux. And another thing I find fascinating is the sixteenth century. It’s a world in which the European countries are emerging, and that of the discovery of the Americas. So I fall in love with life and all aspects of knowledge. Knowledge for me is an extraordinary pleasure. I love learning. Nothing pleases me more nowadays then learning. A learning that always brings me toward the carnal nature and spiritual nature of human beings.
PS What advice would you give to someone wanting to become a writer?
NP I don’t know if it is possible to advise people or to give advice, but what I would say is the following, from the bottom of my heart: live with daring, stimulate that original passion that is sometimes mistaken for wildness or savagery. Also, I believe that passion for everyday life, for the smallest details of everyday life and things that are beyond that which one is living, is a natural requirement, both for being a writer and for any other profession. This is fundamental. This notion of human history and our trajectory in history, where do we come from and where are we going, these are the classic questions. I believe it is fundamental to read. Not just reading, but seeing paintings, seeing theater, seeing movements of the body. What body do we have at our service? Images of the body and its gestures.
It is important to be well educated; I cannot imagine a writer who is not well educated. A person can very well write a book and have it be a success, but a writer who is not well educated will not be able to keep up his or her craft in a second book. So a writer should build his or her strength through meditation and reflection. One thing that I find essential for a writer is that he or she exercise the imagination, and not let the imagination become a bureaucratic act. The imagination frees itself to the degree to which you yourself set it free. The more you free your imagination, giving it subsidiaries and ingredients, the more the imagination grows. You must give it yeast, like the yeast you put in a cake for it to grow, in bread, to ferment the imagination. Life is yeast for the imagination. But you must also look at things with a new perspective, exercise your perspective. You must realize, “No, I’m not looking at what I am seeing. I must look beyond that. That which I see is more than meets the eye.”
It’s like looking at a family portrait. You see that it’s a family portrait, that it has five, six, seven, eight people. See that portrait of my family on the wall there? I must know why the pocket of my father, of his jacket, is bulging out. Why? I found out later, because I asked, that actually he had gone to eat at his uncle’s house, the brother of his mother, and he had eaten well there, but he was afraid of getting hungry later, so he stuck a piece of bread in his pocket for when he would get hungry again. He forgot to take out the bread when the picture was taken. At that time, a photographic portrait like that was expensive, it was a sacrifice. It was difficult for a family to pay for such a thing, and my grandmother had made sacrifices to take this picture. They lived in a small village and had gone on foot, or by wagon, to the place where the picture was taken, and they had carried their dress clothes in a little suitcase. So everything you see has a story. Everything you see has an explanation beyond conformity.
To write is also a rebellious act, an insurgent act taken against an established order. So my last piece of advice is to have the daring to create and to write and not be afraid of embracing your destiny as a writer.
Rio de Janeiro
PAUL M. SNEED is an assistant professor of Portuguese at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in popular culture and organized crime in Brazil. He is also president of the Two Brothers Foundation, an NGO based in Rio de Janeiro that seeks to provide educational opportunities for young people in low-income communities.
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