Graciliano Ramos: biography, works, characteristics

Writer, journalist and political prisoner, Graciliano Ramos is considered the most important prose writer of Generation of 30. The unique style of its narrative, without flourishes, dry and simple, provides a direct and profound approach to the situations and characters portrayed. A great novelist and short story writer, the author stands out for his ability to address human interiority, human psychological reactions and human relationships with the environment that imposes itself.

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Biography of Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos de Oliveira born on October 27, 1892, in the city of Quebrângulo, alagoas. The eldest son of Sebastião Ramos de Oliveira and Maria Amélia Ferro Ramos, he lived his first childhood at Fazenda Pintadinho, in Buíque (PE) and, from 1889, in Viçosa (AL), where he entered the boarding school.

Graciliano Ramos portrait with open book. [1]

Graciliano Ramos' literary activities began in 1904, when he published his

first tale in the boarding school newspaper, entitled "The little beggar". In 1906, Graciliano began to publish sonnets in the Rio magazine the mallet, using the pseudonym Feliciano de Oliveira. In 1910, he became a contributor to Jornal de Alagoas, also using pseudonyms, and moved to Palmeira dos Índios (AL).

In 1914, Graciliano Ramos left for Rio de Janeiro, then the federal capital, to continue his career as a journalist, but death of three of your brothers, the following year, takes him back to Palmeira dos Índios, where he starts to work in commerce and marries Maria Augusta Barros, with whom he had four children until he became a widow in 1920.

In 1927, is elected mayor of Palmeira dos Índios, and the following year completes his first novel, the same year he marries again. In 1930, he resigned from the city hall to take over the directorship of the Imprensa Oficial de Alagoas, in Maceió, when he established contact with other writers, such as Rachel de Queiroz, Jorge Amado and José Lins do Rego. In 1933, he assumes the position of director of the Public Instruction of Alagoas.

As a result of the operations of the Constitutional Government of Getúlio Vargas, Graciliano Ramos is arrested in 1936, on the charge of being communist. He remains incarcerated and hostage to the most diverse humiliations and injuries for almost a year until he is acquitted for lack of evidence, a period that served as inspiration for the autobiographical novel prison memories, of posthumous publication.

Also know: What was the Vargas era?

Ruins of the prison in Ilha Grande (RJ), where Graciliano was imprisoned. (Photo: Renata Tizzo) [2]

After his release, he took up residence in Rio de Janeiro, where he assumed a new public position in 1939, this time as Secondary Federal Inspector. He joins the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in 1945 and is dedicated to literature until his death in 1953, victim of lung cancer. Having written more than twenty books between edited and posthumous works, in addition to two translations of foreign novels, Graciliano Ramos is considered one of the most important Brazilian novelists.

It's biographical data that I can't get, because I don't have a biography. I was never literate, until recently I lived in the countryside and traded. Unfortunately, I became mayor in the interior of Alagoas and wrote some reports that disgraced me. See yourself how seemingly harmless things make a citizen useless. After I wrote these infamous reports, the newspapers and the government decided not to leave me alone. There were a series of disasters: changes, intrigues, public office, hospital, worse things, and three novels made in horrible situations: Caetés, published in 1933, S. Bernardo, in 1934, and Angústia, in 1936. Of course, this doesn't make for a biography. What should I do? I should decorate myself with some lies, but maybe it's better to leave them to romance.

Excerpt from a letter sent in November 1937 by Graciliano to Raúl Navarro, an Argentine translator, to be attached to a short story about to be published in Buenos Aires.

Works by Graciliano Ramos

published works

1933 – Caetes (romance)

1934 – St Bernard (romance)

1936 – Anguish (romance)

1938 – Dried lives (romance)

1939 – the land of naked boys (infant)

1942 – Brandão between the sea and love (novel in partnership with Rachel de Queiroz, José Lins do Rego and Jorge Amado)

1944 – Alexander Stories (infant)

1945 – Childhood (memoirs)

1945 – Two fingers (Tales)

1946 – Incomplete stories (Tales)

1947 – Insomnia (Tales)

posthumous works

1953 – prison memories (memoirs)

1954 – Travel (chronic)

1962 – Crooked lines (chronic)

1962 – Alexander and other heroes (infant)

1962 – Living in Alagoas (chronicles, essays and fictional texts)

1980 – Cards (correspondence)

1992 – Love letters to Heloisa (correspondence)

2012 – scribbles (chronicles, articles, speeches and unpublished texts)

2014 – Cangaços (Chronicles and other unpublished texts)

2014 – conversations (interviews)

Translations

1940 – memories of a black, by Booker T. Washington

1950 – The plague, by Albert Camus

Literary Characteristics of Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos is one of the main exponents of the so-called Second Modernism, or Modernism of 1930. Marked by the pessimistic awareness of underdevelopment, the authors of this movement had as their horizon the understanding that Brazilian social problems were structural. Therefore, they developed a literature that resumed thetraditional forms of realistic romance, whose ideological project proposed a denunciation of social contrasts in Brazil.

Read more:Brazilian modernism and its phases

Commemorative stamp of the centenary of Graciliano Ramos. [3]

The works of Graciliano Ramos, in general, are marked by a deep pessimism towards man. He creates situations where the characters are always in constant concerns as to the issues of human existence. Each character corresponds to a social type that actually exists, and its elaboration comes from the junction between the research of the psychological interiority human allied to typessocial Brazilians.

Fabiano, protagonist of Dried lives, is the completely invalid; Paulo Honorio, of St Bernard, O capitalist, O self-made man from the periphery; Luis da Silva, in Anguish, is the grandson of the decadent aristocracy who becomes a civil servant, extremely angry because he lost his bossiness, your social place.

For the author, man is the result of his social relationships. Society makes up the subject, and the bourgeois society, fundamentally formed by the idea of ​​competition and the incessant search for money, ends up generating a social evil.

However, there is no Manicheism in the works of Graciliano Ramos. unlike Jorge Amado, also a writer for Geração de 30, Graciliano builds his characters in such a way that this social evil is not found in an individual, since everyone is marked, rotten, imprisoned.

Full of psychological analyzes and written in a strict language, very concise and without flourishes, Graciliano's literature is realistic and engaged, portraying life as it is, based on a critical posture of society. It emphasizes the problems of rural workers, the drought in the Northeast, poverty and the dilemmas faced by human beings in relation to the hostile environment, whose social conditions do not offer a solution.

Regarding his creative procedure and his work with language, Graciliano comments:

It must be written in the same way as the laundresses from Alagoas do their work. They start with a first wash, wet the dirty clothes at the edge of the pond or stream, wring the cloth, wet it again, and wring it again. Put the indigo, soap and wring it once, twice. Then rinse, give another wet, now throwing the water with your hand. They beat the cloth on the slab or on the clean stone, and give it another twist and another, twist it until a single drop does not drip from the cloth. Only after all this is done do they hang the laundry on the rope or clothesline to dry. For anyone who starts writing should do the same thing. The word was not made to beautify, to shine as false; the word was meant to say.

Excerpt recorded by journalist Joel Silveira and published in the book Crooked lines (1962).

Sentences by Graciliano Ramos

Statue of Graciliano Ramos in Ponta Verde, Maceió. [4]

“We can only put our feelings, our lives on paper. Art is blood, it's flesh. Also, there is nothing. Our characters are pieces of ourselves, we can only expose what we are.”

(Excerpt from letter sent in November 1949 to his sister Marili.)

“Fabiano got along well with ignorance. Did he have a right to know? He had? He did not have.

- Are you there.

If I learned anything, I would need to learn more, and I would never be satisfied.”

(Dried lives)

"Ordinarily the family said little. And after that disaster they all lived silently, rarely uttered short words."

(Dried lives)

“The article I was asked to do is far from the paper. It's true that I have cigarettes and I have alcohol, but when I drink too much or smoke too much, my sadness grows. Sadness and anger. Air, sea, laugh, weapon, anger. Stupid hobby.”

(Anguish)

“What is Marina doing? I try to get this creature away from me. A trip, drunkenness, suicide..."

(Anguish)

“The tram reaches the end of the line, comes back. Miserable neighborhood, straw houses, sick children. Fishing boats, the chimneys of ships, far away.”

(Anguish)

“Undefined emotions stir me—terrible restlessness, mad longing to go back, chatter again, as we did every day at this hour. Longing? No, it's not that: it's despair, anger, a huge weight in the heart.”

(St Bernard)

“Today I don't sing or laugh. If I look at myself in the mirror, the hardness of the mouth and the hardness of the eyes makes me unhappy."

(St Bernard)

Curiosities about Graciliano Ramos

• He was the first child of sixteen siblings.
• He married twice. In 1915, with Maria Augusta de Barros, with whom he had four children. Maria Augusta died in 1920 from complications in childbirth. Widowed, he remarried in 1928 to Heloísa Leite de Medeiros, with whom he had four more children, one of whom died prematurely, at six months of age.
• The book prison memories was adapted for film by Nelson Pereira in 1984.
• He presided over the Brazilian Association of Writers in 1951.
• Graciliano Ramos greatly disparaged his work. According to Antonio Candido, Graciliano showed constant irritation with what he wrote, practically apologizing for the publication of each book. It is common for the author to refer to the texts themselves as “disgrace”, “horrible thing”, “crap”, “awful drug”.
• Graciliano wrote much of the novel St Bernard in the sacristy of Nossa Senhora do Amparo Church, in Maceió (AL).

• The author traveled in 1952 to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, France and Portugal. The book Travel it is a collection of accounts of this trajectory.

Image credits

[1] Legacy600/commons

[2] Renata Tizzo / Shutterstock

[3] rook76 /Shutterstock

[4] Flaviohmg/commons

by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher

Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/literatura/graciliano-ramos.htm