A mãe eterna (The eternal mother), by Betty Milan, and some observations concerning critical reception and ambivalence*
Claudio Willer
When A mãe eterna[1] (The eternal mother), Betty Milan’s latest novel, was published, I wrote two pages about it. After adding further material, I now present these observations here, on Academia.edu, in the form of a previously unpublished text. Although the book has sold well – 6,000 copies not long after release – the press has ignored Milan’s work this time. Is this perhaps because its ambivalence, its intentional muddling of reality and fiction, is troubling? Or is it simply a symptom of the gradual disappearance of literature from the press, as part of a broader crisis that is turning newspapers into mere news bulletins?
Betty Milan’s most recent novel bears a tight relationship to two earlier books of hers: Carta ao filho (Letter to my son)[2] and Consolação (Solace).[3] This is despite some obvious differences. While I once described Carta ao filho as a “broad panel,” the latest work is the most intimist of the three; it is chamber music, I would say, while Carta ao filho is symphonic. In Milan’s new book, the action takes place in two homes not far from each other in the city of São Paulo. The earlier one, likewise a travel narrative, takes place all over the world.
What runs through them or ties them all together? Besides their first-person narrators and recollections that may be grounded in biography, the answer is death. Or not just death exactly, but the tension between death and life. The subtitle of this memento mori – and a warning that we are all just passing through this world – is “dying is a right.” The same can be said of Consolação, albeit the latter differs greatly when it comes to the situations it recounts and the characters it reveals. In Consolação, death arrives at the end of extreme suffering; the latest title accompanies the natural physical decrepitude of someone who has reached the age of 98.
Enunciated in the subtitle, the right to die is asserted and demanded:
I don’t want to live with what will be left of me. This increased longevity of yours is damaging your life. Why have they instilled in us the idea that being alive is the only thing that matters and that we are alive so long as our bodies resist?
The narrator rebels against “the doctor’s perspective.” She fulminates:
Why can’t the doctor help you go? That would be caring for life as well. Why won’t he accept death? According to Greek mythology, Asclepius could not only heal, he could also bring back the dead. Zeus annihilated him because he didn’t want mortals to have power over death.
Censure falls to the priest as well, who feels that “it’s up to God to decide when and how we die.” The narrator raises her voice against authority. And against dualism, I would also say, against the separation of the two conditions, of death and life, so that one excludes or represses the other.
Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, by Norman O. Brown,[4] is a mammoth commentary on Freud, one that helps reveal the breadth of what Betty Milan has set about creating. Brown observes that man is the species that separates life from death, that “it is not the consciousness of death but the flight from death that distinguishes men from animals.” Milan says the same. Brown, crafter of a psychoanalytic theory of history, states further:
If death is a part of life, if there is a death instinct as well as a life (or sexual) instinct, man is in flight from his own death just as he is in flight from his own sexuality. If death is a part of life, man represses his own death just as he represses his own life.
Brown argues that the androgyny of Plato and of mythology also symbolizes the vanquishing of this duality between life and death. Perhaps this lends meaning to Milan’s insistence on androgyny and on her attraction to men who can be feminine (and vice versa), in Carta ao filho.
If we accept this argument (a complex one, which I have simplified, taking only some phrases from Brown), then the subtitle of Milan’s latest book could be, reciprocally, “living is a right.” And further comparisons with her literature in celebration of Eros, like A trilogia do amor (The trilogy of love), would be fitting.
Continuity. I cannot help but link what I see in A mãe eterna with some earlier comments of mine concerning memory in Carta ao filho. I cited one of T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “This is the use of memory: / For liberation.” I observed how Plato identifies anamnesis with knowledge and freedom. Speaking to the old woman, Milan – better, the narrator she created – reiterates: “You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing your greatest treasure: your memory.” Referring to the early loss of her father, she also says: “It was through remembering that you kept us from becoming orphans.”
Yet Plato was a dualist. His anamnesis is the memory not only of another life but another time, prior to our chronological frame. It was about the freedom to reach another realm. But in Freud (the early Freud and his studies of hysteria), the recovery of memories, the ability to remember a traumatic event, is the road to healing. Milan is a monist and a vitalist; she calls for the realization of life and for the corresponding, or consequential, recognition of death in the here and now, immanently.
In a subdued tone, A mãe eterna, a brief narrative, describes with unequivocal tenderness the tactics and ploys that the old woman uses to circumvent and negate her loss of energy and autonomy. It is fluent, written as if the author were talking. It grows and gains pathos and intensity in the final chapter, closing with a lovely poetic prose piece from which I cannot resist drawing an excerpt:
I didn’t know then that without any effort on my part, you would be reborn in my heart and we would continue together. You’ll be buried in a mahogany casket, as arranged, and will be placed in the family tomb to the sound of a magnificent silence – the silence of those who have never relinquished their independence.
I would stress “to the sound of a magnificent silence.” Through oxymorons and apparent paradoxes, the art of vanquishing is celebrated. One thing can be its apparent opposite. And death becomes a reaffirmation of life. At least through literary creation and poetry.
Betty Milan brought her mother, the real-life Dona Rosa, to the launching of A mãe eterna. Readers could note the difference between the affable 90-something, who was visibly pleased by the warm welcome afforded her daughter’s new title, and the other woman, much more decrepit, whose fragility the book describes. This episode, that is, the physical presence of the supposed character, served an educational purpose, showing how literature creates a world and how this world is at once real and not.
In considering the complex relations between “fiction” and “reality,” I am reminded of William Burroughs’ observations about works of Jack Kerouac’s, where Burroughs was allegedly one of the characters, as I am also reminded how much the author of On the Road falsified and fictionalized real events:
So, the question is not, “Did it happen like that?” but, “How would Jack have written it?”. . . .Each writer creates his own universe. When you buy a book, you are buying a ticket to travel in the writer’s time.[5]
Some time ago, in a reading circle for beginners, we explored Jorge Luis Borges’ masterful short story “The Aleph.” When some of the participants were commenting on and attempting to interpret what they had read, they referred to the protagonist as “he,” as if they presumed that the discovery of a point that contains all other places and times in the universe had actually happened to the narrator-protagonist – even within this frontal attack on mimesis. It may be that the challenge of separating out these two planes, “reality” and “fiction,” precisely because they intermingle and project themselves onto each other in such intricate, ambivalent ways, had a negative impact on the book’s reception, despite initial high sales – which perhaps included some hastier buyers who thought A mãe eterna would make a great Mother’s Day gift.
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[1] Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2016
[2] Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2013 (1st edition).
[3] Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2009.
[4] Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985 (2nd ed.).
[5] “Heart Beat: Fifties Heroes as Soap Opera,” published in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, edited by Holly George-Warren (Rolling Stone Press, 1999).