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Claudio Willer<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When A m\u00e3e eterna[1]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>(The eternal mother), Betty Milan\u2019s 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 After adding further material, I now present these observations here, on Academia.edu, in the form of a previously unpublished text.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 \u2013 6,000 copies not long after release \u2013 the press has ignored Milan\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n \n Betty Milan\u2019s most recent novel bears a tight relationship to two earlier books of hers: Carta ao filho <\/em>(Letter to my son)[2]<\/a> and Consola\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em> (Solace).[3]<\/a> This is despite some obvious differences. While I once described Carta ao filho<\/em> as a \u201cbroad panel,\u201d the latest work is the most intimist of the three; it is chamber music, I would say, while Carta ao filho <\/em>is symphonic. In Milan\u2019s new book, the action takes place in two homes not far from each other in the city of S\u00e3o Paulo. The earlier one, likewise a travel narrative, takes place all over the world.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> \u2013 and a warning that we are all just passing through this world \u2013 is \u201cdying is a right.\u201d The same can be said of Consola\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>, albeit the latter differs greatly when it comes to the situations it recounts and the characters it reveals. In Consola\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Enunciated in the subtitle, the right to die is asserted and demanded:<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n The narrator rebels against \u201cthe doctor\u2019s perspective.\u201d She fulminates:<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t the doctor help you go? That would be caring for life as well. Why won\u2019t 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\u2019t want mortals to have power over death.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Censure falls to the priest as well, who feels that \u201cit\u2019s up to God to decide when and how we die.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Life against Death:<\/em> The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History<\/em>, by Norman O. Brown,[4]<\/a> 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 \u201cit is not the consciousness of death but<\/em> the flight from death that distinguishes<\/em> men from animals.<\/em>\u201d Milan says the same. Brown, crafter of a psychoanalytic theory of history, states further:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s insistence on androgyny and on her attraction to men who can be feminine (and vice versa), in Carta ao filho<\/em>.<\/p>\n If we accept this argument (a complex one, which I have simplified, taking only some phrases from Brown), then the subtitle of Milan\u2019s latest book could be, reciprocally, \u201cliving is a right.\u201d And further comparisons with her literature in celebration of Eros, like A trilogia do amor<\/em> (The trilogy of love), would be fitting.<\/p>\n Continuity. I cannot help but link what I see in A m\u00e3e eterna <\/em>with some earlier comments of mine concerning memory in Carta ao filho.<\/em> I cited one of T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cFour Quartets\u201d: \u201cThis is the use of memory: \/ For liberation.\u201d I observed how Plato identifies anamnesis with knowledge and freedom. Speaking to the old woman, Milan \u2013 better, the narrator she created \u2013 reiterates: \u201cYou\u2019re not losing your mind. You\u2019re losing your greatest treasure: your memory.\u201d Referring to the early loss of her father, she also says: \u201cIt was through remembering that you kept us from becoming orphans.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In a subdued tone, A m\u00e3e eterna<\/em>, 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:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know then that without any effort on my part, you would be reborn in my heart and we would continue together. You\u2019ll be buried in a mahogany casket, as arranged, and will be placed in the family tomb to the sound of a magnificent silence \u2013 the silence of those who have never relinquished their independence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I would stress \u201cto the sound of a magnificent silence.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Betty Milan brought her mother, the real-life Dona Rosa, to the launching of A m\u00e3e eterna<\/em>. Readers could note the difference between the affable 90-something, who was visibly pleased by the warm welcome afforded her daughter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In considering the complex relations between \u201cfiction\u201d and \u201creality,\u201d I am reminded of William Burroughs\u2019 observations about works of Jack Kerouac\u2019s, where Burroughs was allegedly one of the characters, as I am also reminded how much the author of On the Road<\/em> falsified and fictionalized real events:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, the question is not, \u201cDid it happen like that?\u201d but, \u201cHow would Jack have written it?\u201d. . . .Each writer creates his own universe. When you buy a book, you are buying a ticket to travel in the writer\u2019s time.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some time ago, in a reading circle for beginners, we explored Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 masterful short story \u201cThe Aleph.\u201d When some of the participants were commenting on and attempting to interpret what they had read, they referred to the protagonist as \u201che,\u201d 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 \u2013 even within this frontal attack on mimesis. \u00a0<\/strong>It may be that the challenge of separating out these two planes, \u201creality\u201d and \u201cfiction,\u201d precisely because they intermingle and project themselves onto each other in such intricate, ambivalent ways, had a negative impact on the book\u2019s reception, despite initial high sales \u2013 which perhaps included some hastier buyers who thought A m\u00e3e eterna <\/em>would make a great Mother\u2019s Day gift.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n _______________________________<\/span><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2016<\/span><\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2013 (1st edition).<\/span><\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985 (2nd ed.).<\/span><\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.bettymilan.com.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/livro_a-mae-eterna.jpg\")
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