Murilo Rubião was born on June 1, 1916 and died on September 16, 1991. His best known and most commented work is his first book of fantastic tales, entitled the former magician, 1947. In addition to being a writer, he was a professor, editor, director of radio station Inconfidência de Minas Gerais and chief of staff to the governor Juscelino Kubitschek (1902-1976).
The writer is included in the third generation modernist (or postmodernism). Named by critics as the precursor of fantastic realism in Brazil, his stories present situations and characters inserted in a magical, wonderful or extraordinary context. Thus, his first work was received with strangeness by readers and critics, but the author knew and, for this, he declared that “the glory, the immediate consecration, never led to a classical awareness of the work literary”.
Read too:Clarice Lispector – author of important chronicles and short stories of Brazilian literature
Murilo Rubião's Biography
![Complete work by Murilo Rubião (in the cover photo), published by Companhia das Letras. [1]](/f/47453106896f5438b8b729aeced42af7.jpg)
The writer from Minas Gerais MuriloRubião was born on June 1, 1916. In 1940, he had his first short story published — Elvira, other mysteries — in the magazine Message. His first book of short stories was published in 1947 — the former magician. Alongside his writing career, he also pursued other activities:
- Vice President and President of the Student Directory of the Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG);
- One of the founders of the magazine Attempt;
- Interim President of the State Union of Students of Minas Gerais;
- Editor and acting director of Sheet of Mines;
- magazine editor Belo Horizonte;
- Director of the Association of Professional Journalists of Minas Gerais;
- Director of Inconfidência radio station in Minas Gerais;
- President of the Brazilian Association of Writers in Minas Gerais;
- Governor Juscelino Kubitschek's official and chief of staff;
- Director of Official Press;
- Head of the Advertising and Commercial Expansion Office of Brazil in Madrid;
- Secretary of the newspaper's literary supplement Minas Gerais;
- Director of the School of Fine Arts and Graphic Arts of Belo Horizonte, Escola Guignard;
- President of the Ouro Preto Art Foundation;
- President of the Madrigal Renaissance Foundation;
- President of the State Council of Culture of Minas Gerais.
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In September 1949, the author made this ironic self-portrait:
“I started earning a living early. I worked in a whaleboat, sold scientific books, was a teacher, journalist, director of a newspaper and a radio station. Today I am a civil servant.
Bachelor and without religious belief. Two serious flaws in my character. However, I have a solid hope of converting to Catholicism before death comes.
I could tell a lot about my preferences, my loneliness, my sincere appreciation for the human species, my persistence in wearing little hair and excessive mustaches. But my biggest boredom is still talking about my own person.”
Murilo Rubião received the following tributes:
- Othon Lynch Bezerra de Melo Award (1948);
- Commendation Isabela the Catholic (1960) — Spain;
- Luísa Cláudio de Souza Award (1975);
- Medal of the Order of Legislative Merit (1983);
- Medal of Honor of Inconfidência (1983);
- Cultural Personality of the Year (1986).
The writer, who died on September 16, 1991, therefore had a life marked by his involvement in the politics, art and culture Minas Gerais, in addition, of course, to the production of fantastic tales, a unique literature in Brazil of its time.
Read too: Mário de Andrade – great name of the first phase of Brazilian modernism
Murilo Rubião's main works
Murilo Rubião published the following books of Tales:
- the former magician (1947);
- the red star (1953);
- Dragons and other tales (1965);
- The pyrotechnician Zechariah (1974);
- The guest (1974);
- the house of the red sunflower (1978);
- The man in the gray cap and other stories (1990).
→ “The former magician of Taberna Minhota”
The writer's first book was received without much fanfare and with strangeness by readers and critics. Its importance is mainly due to the fact that it presents a Brazilian author primarily committed to the fantastic tale, as the title of the work: “O ex-magico da Taberna Minhota”.
In this tale, the narrator is an ex-magician who, at the time of narration, Work as public agent. In his narrative, he presents the first fantastic element of the work:
"One day I came across my hair slightly gray, in the mirror of Taberna Minhota. The discovery did not surprise me, nor was I surprised by the take out the restaurant owner from his pocket. He yes, perplexed, asked me how he could have done that”.
The narrator then starts working at Taberna Minhota as a magician, but this job is short-lived:
“The man, however, did not like my practice of offering spectators free lunches, which I mysteriously extracted from inside my jacket. Considering that it is not the best business to increase the number of customers without the consequent increase in profits, he introduced me to the manager of the Circo-Parque Andaluz, who, aware of my abilities, offered to hire me. Before, however, he advised him to be on guard against my tricks, as no one would be surprised if the idea of distributing gracious tickets to the shows occurred to me.”
The magician experiences the taste of success:
“The audience, in general, received me coldly, perhaps because I didn't show off in my coat and top hat. But when, unintentionally, he began to extract rabbits, snakes, lizards from his hat, the assistants would vibrate. Especially in the last issue, in which I made an alligator appear through my fingers. Then, compressing the animal by the ends, he transformed it into an accordion. And he ended the show playing the National Anthem of Cochinchina. The applause roared from all sides, under my distant gaze.”
The protagonist is a melancholy and bored man because had neither birth nor past. Furthermore, your spells are involuntary, he has no control over them:
“If, distracted, he opened his hands, strange objects would slip out of them. To the point of surprising me, once, pulling one figure out of my shirt sleeve, then another. Finally, he was surrounded by strange figures, not knowing what to do with them”.
Being a magician, for the narrator, is a condition, not a choice. The fantastic elements, then, are present throughout the story, from the involuntary phenomena that surround the protagonist:
“Also, at night, in the midst of a peaceful sleep, I used to wake up with a start: it was a noisy bird that had flapped its wings as it left my ear.
On one of those occasions, irritated, willing to never do magic again, I mutilated my hands. To no avail. On the first move I made, they reappeared new and perfect at the tips of the arm stumps. Event to despair of anyone, especially a jaded magician.”
He try to kill yourself, but the magic prevents it, until:
“A phrase that I had overheard by chance in the street gave me new hope of making a definitive break with life. I had heard from a sad man who to be a civil servant was to commit suicide little by little.
I was not in a position to determine which form of suicide suited me best: whether slow or fast. That's why I got a job at a Secretariat of State.”
Instead of death, however, the narrator is faced with an even greater suffering:
“1930, a bitter year. It was longer than the ones after the first manifestation I had of my existence, in front of the Taberna Minhota mirror.
I didn't die, as I expected. Greater were my afflictions, greater my heartache.
When he was a magician, I had little dealings with men—the stage distanced me from them. Now, thanks to the constant contact with my peers, I needed to understand them, disguise the nausea that caused me.”
From the beginning of the story to working as a civil servant, the narrator is only three years old, since she started at Taberna Minhota, when he saw himself in the mirror. Therefore, the protagonist lives tormented for not having memories. To complete his suffering, he risks losing his job. But when he tries to do a spell so he doesn't get fired, he finds that she doesn't exist anymore: “I had to confess my defeat. I had trusted too much in the faculty of doing magic and she had been nullified by bureaucracy”.
Now your unhappiness is caused by the opposite reason, namely, it is no longer magical:
“Today, without the ancient and miraculous gifts of a wizard, I cannot abandon the worst of human occupations. I lack the love of my work partner, the presence of friends, which forces me to walk in lonely places. I am often seen trying to remove with my fingers, from the inside of clothes, anything that no one sees, no matter how hard you look at it.”
It is curious to note that the protagonist comes from nowhere; although, create your world by looking in the mirror and taking the restaurant owner out of his pocket, which leads to plot development. also shows owner of your destiny by opting for the monotonous life of a civil servant, when he loses the ability to do magic, perhaps because he is unworthy of it.
In this way, with a lot of irony, the narrator presents two opposite worlds; however, the only one in which he has the power to choose is the so-called real, monotonous and everyday world. In addition, the protagonist carries with him the dissatisfaction inherent to the human species, the existential emptiness so associated with postmodernity.
He is dissatisfied as a magician as well as a public servant, and only comes to value magic when he loses it definitively - something also typical of the human species, which only appreciates what it doesn't may have. Finally, being an artist is a condition. Choosing to be an ordinary man represents the death sentence for art, which, in its essence, is fantastic.
Read too: Sagarana - collection of short stories by Guimarães Rosa
Literary Characteristics of Murilo Rubião
The works of writer Murilo Rubião, due to the time of their production and characteristics, are located within what is conventionally called third generation modernist or, for some scholars, postmodernism. Therefore, they have the following characteristics:
- Fantastic realism: presence of magical or extraordinary elements;
- Non-conventionalism: freedom in structuring the text in prose;
- Intimate prose: streams of consciousness;
- Abandonment of the social theme as a guide for the plot;
- nonsense: apparent lack of meaning.
Murilo Rubião's works are commonly associated with the surrealism, but the label of criticism that stands out is that of fantastic realism, a characteristic that does not depend on the style of the period, since authors like Joaquim Manuel de Macedo (1820-1882), in the magic spyglass (1869), or Machado de Assis (1839-1908), in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881), for example, used this resource. Therefore, what differentiates Murilo Rubião from the others is that the fantastic, in his works, is recurrent and essential, not just an accessory; anyway, the nonsense stands out at the expense of the rational sense.
See too: Dadaism – modernist avant-garde that preached the rupture of conventional art
Reviews on the work of Murilo Rubião
Sérgio Milliet (1898-1966), in the State of São Paulo, in 1947, speaks of the strangeness that Murilo Rubião's first work provokes:
“I would like Mr. Murilo Rubião had given his book of short stories a slightly different title. Not the "Ex-magician", but "The magician", because his prose is very much that of one of those guys who grind the clock of the spectator inside a glass and, when they discover the container, a carrier pigeon comes out with the letter from beloved in the beak. turns out that the spectator doesn't know what to do with the letter, doesn't understand and demands, prosaically, back your watch..."
Alexandre Eulalio (1932-1988), in the newspaper The globe, in 1965, says that the author's work is postmodernist:
"Classic of postmodernist fiction, “Os dragões e other tales” by Murilo Rubião brings together, in new clothes, [...], the two previous books by the writer, “O Ex-magico” (1947) and “A Estrela Vermelha” (1953).”
Ayres da Mata Machado Filho (1909-1985), in 1965, considers Murilo Rubião a conscientious and original writer:
“If the undeniable search for perfection was worth it, we are faced with the work of conscientious writer, gentleman with a fine stylistic ear, besides original. Nor is the debt to the processes and language of the Bible without special mention. Also in this, the author presents himself as a model to those who struggle and last, in the practice of the elusive art of writing, whose learning never comes to an end.”
Benedito Nunes (1929-2011), in the magazine colloquy, in 1975, speaks of the approach to allegorical in the author's works:
“[...] Murilo Rubião's narrative has its roots in the figural style that Auerbach referred to in the epilogue of Mimesis: style close to the parable and allegory neighbor. But, as in Kafka's stories, the allegories of the writer from Minas Gerais they represent, in an ambiguous way, the current and possible form of the human condition; the parable “without doctrine” they enclose describes a frightening and undefined trajectory.”
Fabio Lucas, in The state of Sao Paulo, in 1983, argues that the critic had not yet understood the work of Murilo Rubião:
‘The unexpectedness of the narrative line of the author of O Ex-Mágico [...], a solitary experience in the aftermath of the war, led critics to apply already worn designations to it, which ended up not exactly determine the nature of your report.. Thus, we spoke of the use of the "imaginary" by the short-story writer, of his deviation from realistic prose, of the "fantastic", of the “supernatural” and the “wonderful”, labels applied to a very large family of fiction writers contemporaries.”
Vera Lúcia Andrade and Wander Melo Miranda, in the newspaper State of Minas, in 1986, point out in the writer's work the “obsession of the look”:
"Hide revealing and reveal hiding, cards of the fantastic game in general, specifically, in the game Murilian textual, the relationship between passion for seeing and passion for knowing, often permeated by passion sexual. O obsessive urge to look, which triggers the process of revealing a possible knowledge, both desired and feared, as in “The Guest”, always bumps into in an enigma that will have to be deciphered: the expectation of deciphering the world looked at simultaneously calls into question the subject who look. THE curiosity of the two brothers about the enigmatic identity of the “Man in the gray cap”, in the tale of the same title, is never satisfied. The progressive disappearance of the object being looked at, at the very moment that the scrutinizing gaze takes place, reinforces invisibility — man becomes literally transparent — and it leaves an irremediable void in the circuit of the gaze, as one of the brothers “reduces amazingly” and reduces, in the other's hand, to a “black ball”, until it disappears to ever."
Antonio Olinto (1919-2009), at Press Tribune, in 2007, compares Murilo Rubião to Franz Kafka (1883-1924):
"The position of Murilo Rubião is worthy of attention because in him the leap beyond the language and emotion contained in it is, not only voluntarily sought in everything he wrote, but also understood as the only way to do literature. If I link him to Kafka, I don't mean that they are similar at all, but just that Murilo Rubião wants to explain what we are through nightmares, from distances and lack of understanding between one person and another, in such a way that from this arises a new understanding and an at least different way of seeing the reality."
And, finally, Davi Arrigucci Júnior considers the author a precursor of the suprareal gender:
“From the point of view of originality, judgment is easily verifiable. Conceived against the general framework of a fiction based mainly on observation and the document, scarce in games of imagination, Murilo's fantastic narrative appears doubly unusual. Unlike what happened, for example, in Hispanic-American literature, where the fantastic narrative of Borges, Cortázar, Felisberto Hernándes and many others, found a strong tradition of the genre, from the works of Horácio Quiroga and Leopoldo Lugones or even before, in Brazil it was always rare. [...], in fact, we are faced with an almost complete absence of Brazilian antecedents for the case of Murilo's fiction, which gives him the precursor position, in our midst, of the suprareal probes.”
Phrases by Murilo Rubião
Next, let's read some sentences by writer Murilo Rubião, taken from interviews he gave to the magazine writing (RE), in 1979, to the newspaper Tribune de Minas (TM), in 1988, and the Brazilian mail (CB), in 1989:
"We all know that glory, immediate consecration, has never led to a classical awareness of the literary work." (RE)
"I find any type of literature that is not a social approach, participation and engagement impossible." (RE)
"All art is mainly linked to women." (RE)
"Once in a while, we are amazed by everyday things." (TM)
"The reader is a bit like that, he discovers things." (TM)
"The writer does not separate life from literature, life and literature are one and the same." (TM)
"We don't have much sensitivity to literature other than that of our time." (CB)
“Until now, literature has been a game for me, which I played seriously, but if I lost there would be no problem.” (CB)
Image credit
[1] Company of Letters (Reproduction)
by Warley Souza
Literature teacher
