<\/p>\n
Manuel da Costa Pinto <\/p>\n Betty Milan is a prolific writer. Among her most recent books, I would like to highlight Consola\u00e7\u00e3o <\/em>(Consolation), a novel that left its mark in the history of Brazilian literature, especially for its fictional representation of the city of S\u00e3o Paulo. Likewise important to mention are her books in an autobiographical vein, such as A m\u00e3e eterna<\/em>\u00a0(The eternal mother) and Carta ao filho <\/em>(Letter to my son). She has also published numerous interviews, plays, and cr\u00f4nicas, <\/em>or short literary sketches. But Betty Milan is first and foremost a novelist. Of all genres, novels are undoubtedly where she best displays her literary prowess.<\/p>\n Released by Editora Record, Baal<\/em> follows in the long universal tradition of tales of immigration. There are some signs that this particular immigration experience recapitulates elements of the author\u2019s own family memories, although this is never made explicit in the book. To be clear, Baal <\/em>is not self-fiction, not part of the current trend in Brazilian and contemporary literature where the writer fictionalizes pieces of his or her biography, playing truth off against invention while assimilating and exploring memory lapses and partial views of lived experience \u2013 lapses and views that are quite present in Betty Milan\u2019s latest novel.<\/p>\n Why do I say Baal\u00a0<\/em>contains \u201csigns\u201d of a real family story? First, the book conveys something indefinable, felt almost intuitively: the authenticity of what is told, an affective empathy with the characters\u2019 cultural and intimate universes. Aromas and flavors, clothing and traditions hint at an autobiographical element that can be identified, extra-textually, with Lebanon, the country to which the author\u2019s family traces its origins.<\/p>\n While the novel Baal\u00a0<\/em>is part of a Brazilian narrative tradition about immigration (and we can name other contemporary Brazilian writers who belong to this tradition, like Milton Hatoum,\u00a0born in Manaus but of Lebanese descent, or Moacyr Scliar, a native of Rio Grande do Sul with Bessarabian Jewish roots), it is also part of a narrower, and somewhat peculiar, tradition: stories recounted by a dead narrator. In a way, Betty Milan \u201ccreates\u201d this tradition by casting a retrospective light on the threads shared by her illustrious predecessors \u2013 first, of course, The Posthumous Memoirs of Br\u00e1s Cubas,<\/em>\u00a0by Machado de Assis, but also O pirot\u00e9cnico Zacarias <\/em>(Zacarias, the pyrotechnist), by Murilo Rubi\u00e3o. Baal<\/em>, whose protagonist has also passed away, transforms the thread running between these two classic works into a transmission line, revealing the expressive potential of these narrators from beyond the grave \u2013 in Betty Milan\u2019s specific case, in order to explore tensions between memory and destruction.<\/p>\n But who is Omar, Baal<\/em>\u2019s deceased narrator? Betty Milan engages with the imprecision of memory, manifesting this imprecision in a refusal to explicitly name origins. We know that Omar is an immigrant who comes to a country in Amrika (Arabic transcription), more precisely, South America. He comes from a country beset by religious and ethnic strife, in a region ruled by an empire. The reader gradually realizes this country lies somewhere in the Middle East during the Ottoman reign. But Betty Milan never gives this away.<\/p>\n So Omar leaves the Middle East (the Levant, to be exact) and heads to Amrika, where an emperor has promised that immigrants will enjoy wonderful lives. It is not hard to figure out what country this is. After all, monarchies have governed only two nations in the Americas: Mexico, for brief, disastrous periods, and Brazil, where Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II had lengthy reigns. Omar arrives in a slave-owning society, where immigrants are invited to work in exchange for wages that fail to cover their food and housing, for which they end up owing their employees. These workers amass debts and are shackled to oppressive labor contracts, both common practices in Brazil at that time, when immigrants lived as semi-slaves (in due proportions).<\/p>\n Readers of Baal<\/em>\u00a0learn about this as Omar reconstructs his story. Only in chapter four do we discover he is deceased. At the start of the book, the story centers on Aixa, Omar\u2019s only daughter, who is already elderly, in poor health, and suffering from memory problems. Aixa lives in an old mansion called Baal, built by her father. In the story\u2019s present time, Omar\u2019s grandchildren, Henrique, Francis, and Lisa, are fighting over the mansion; two of them \u2013 especially the oldest, Henrique \u2013 want to sell and demolish it to turn a profit. Their mother, Aixa, feels an emotional bond to the mansion and opposes the idea, as does her sentimental middle child, Francis, who nurtures his familial and cultural roots and his family\u2019s bonds to the mansion built by the patriarch. This is Baal<\/em>\u2019s narrative framework, which serves as a point of departure for a number of reflections.<\/p>\n Does the fact that Betty Milan is a psychoanalyst influence the story in any way? It is a tricky matter to factor in an author\u2019s extra-literary background when analyzing his or her works; one always runs the risk of gross simplification. This is especially true when we are talking about a psychoanalyst; we are easily led to believe that her fiction will automatically encompass something psychological, featuring inner analyses or streams of consciousness. But none of this happens in Betty Milan\u2019s literature, much less in\u00a0Baal<\/em>. All human concerns are of course psychoanalytical concerns, but the author\u2019s psychoanalytical perspective is felt more in the story\u2019s structure and in the overall design of the fictional discourse than in her characters\u2019 psychology. For example, the vagueness of time and geography mentioned earlier seems to be intentional; it mimics or resembles the narrative material, the gaps within the unconscious that are inscribed in any story of remembrance. Other themes central to the book have to do with psychoanalytical questions, such as a child\u2019s troubled relationship with his or her paternal figure, or the psycho-social forms that manifest in repetitive family behavior patterns.<\/p>\n When the novel opens, Omar, the narrator, tells us that his son-in-law Dib, married to his daughter Aixa, has drawn up a will benefitting solely his male heirs. This is extremely upsetting to Lisa, Aixa\u2019s only daughter and Omar\u2019s granddaughter. Over the course of the tale, the reader comes to understand that the narrator is less concerned about the strained relations between Aixa and her three children, stemming from the granddaughter\u2019s disinheritance, than the ways in which he himself excluded his own daughter. In other words, in his narrative from beyond the grave, Omar is tormented by the fact that he lent continuity to a kind of family narrative chain that repeats itself over and over \u2013 and as psychoanalysis teaches us, this type of repetition buries things that have been repressed over the generations through discursive gaps. In this novel by a Lacanian psychoanalyst, this tendency is reproduced in the complementary structure of Omar\u2019s relationship with his daughter Aixa and her relationship with her own daughter, Lisa. And the paternal figure always embodies the tenets that perpetuate female exclusion, in a kind of \u201cmacho-centrism\u201d that connects with another web of relationships, that is, the social and cultural relations common to Levantine and Brazilian patriarchalism.<\/p>\n Another unusual element in Baal<\/em>\u00a0is Betty Milan\u2019s subtle transition between narrative times. Every chapter begins with a stage in Omar\u2019s journey and his move to Brazil; it then switches to actions and attitudes where we see his grandson Henrique \u201crepeating\u201d his grandfather (here again, the dynamics of repetition), emulating his destructive nature by engaging in predatory behaviors that will destroy family memory. In almost every chapter, the reader finds a time shift that ties Omar\u2019s past to his descendants\u2019 present, producing a resonance chamber for these psycho-familiar forces.<\/p>\n These time shifts, achieved in only a few paragraphs, are also remarkable in stylistic terms. In chapter twenty-four, for example, Omar witnesses the mistreatment of a black wet nurse and is shocked by the brutal practices of Brazil\u2019s slave-owning society. He makes an immediate connection between this scene from his earlier life and another, which he narrates: that of his grandson Henrique sexually abusing a young girl, in an act of \u201cmanly\u201d sadism. While the novel never slips into sociologistic discourse, Omar draws an association between the aggressive virility of contemporary Brazilians and how he saw women and their bodies brutally treated during his lifetime. He also associates this behavior with the most horrifying elements of Brazil\u2019s slave-owning society and its historical imagination, which left an indelible impact on affective, social, sexual, and spousal relations.<\/p>\n Slavery is not the center of the story, but it is present throughout Baal\u00a0<\/em>as a subtext, with Betty Milan touching on other delicate social issues traceable to the scar of slavery. For example, there is a former governess of the mansion, N\u00e1dia, who becomes something of a lady-in-waiting to Aixa. In a way, N\u00e1dia is a contemporary reconfiguration of the Machadian \u201cagregado<\/em>,\u201d or dependent, a very familiar character in Brazil. The agregado <\/em>lacks his or her own social place and thus orbits a family like a satellite, living off the good will of others inside a structure where the exploitation of labor reproduces forms of servitude. As Roberto Schwarz\u00a0 taught us in A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism<\/em>, the figure of the agregado<\/em> is part of the \u201cstructural reduction\u201d (the words of Antonio C\u00e2ndido) observable in nineteenth-century Brazil and present in Machado de Assis\u2019s fiction: \u201cOn the one hand, owners and property (which has a mercantile form); on the other, free men, with no property and no wages \u2013 work falls to the slaves \u2013 who only partake of social wealth through the good will of the former.\u201d<\/p>\n This status quo persists after the abolition of slavery, as demonstrated in Baal<\/em>, a novel with one foot in each moment, before and after abolition. Society moves away from a slave-owning regime to a regime of free labor, but this change transforms neither the exploited masses nor the acolytes of the exploiters into an autonomous working class that enjoys representativity. So the agregado<\/em> gravitates around power, remains in a state of dependency, and survives off favors from the powerful.<\/p>\n A number of elements from Brazilian literature and history \u2013 the deceased author\/narrator (with his mournful nature); slavery; patriarchalism; the exclusion of women, along with actual or symbolic violence against them \u2013 make Baal<\/em>\u00a0a sort of meditation on Brazilian savagery, revolving around the theme of the destruction of family memory, which is a form of oblivion that constantly expresses itself violently, or as a violent eruption of what has been repressed.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause things are forgotten, history doesn\u2019t stop repeating itself. . . .Only remembrance can prevent so much repetition and obstruct evil.\u201d In a way, this sentence, coming at the close of chapter one, announces the theme that runs through this novel. Both in the narrator\u2019s portrayal of the tense Middle Eastern social relations from which he fled and in his microscopic relation with his children, we find a categorical imperative: Evil must be remembered in order to avert it. In Baal<\/em>, the destruction of family memory must be avoided so a deeper story of exclusion, injustice, and oppression is not perpetuated.<\/p>\n Lastly, we would do well to remember that the title Baal<\/em>\u00a0is an allusion to a divinity from the ancient Phoenician culture, the god of fertility but also of destruction. The book deals with the demolition of the mansion Baal, and this mansion embodies memory. Memory thus harbors within itself the seed of its own destruction, metaphorically concentrating in the name Baal all the tension running through this remarkable novel by Betty Milan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n __________________<\/span><\/p>\n * This is the text of a talk by the journalist and literary critic Manuel da Costa Pinto, who spoke at the launch of the novel Baal<\/em>, held at Livraria da Vila bookstore in S\u00e3o Paulo on June 18, 2019.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Baal, the savagery of memory destruction* Manuel da Costa Pinto Betty Milan is a prolific writer. Among her most recent books, I would like to highlight Consola\u00e7\u00e3o (Consolation), a novel that left its mark in the history of Brazilian literature, especially for its fictional representation of the city of S\u00e3o Paulo. Likewise important to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortuna-critica"],"yoast_head":"\n
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