limeBarreto it is a Brazilian writer pre-modernist born on May 13, 1881 and died on November 1, 1922. descendant of slaves, felt social exclusion due to its origin, including in academic circles. In addition to alcoholism, he faced several health problems in his life and was hospitalized more than once.
Memories of the Registrar Isaiah Caminha it was his first book published, in 1909. Nonetheless, Sad end of Policarpo Lent (1915) is favored by literary critics. His works are realistic and bring a critical view of Brazilian society. The writer works, with irony, not only on the nationalist theme, but also discusses social differences and the issue of racial prejudice. as he wrote in his intimate diary (1953): “The mental capacity of blacks is discussed a priori and the white one, a posteriori”.
Read too: Euclides da Cunha – another important name in Brazilian pre-modernism
Lima Barreto Biography
Writer Lima Barreto (Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto) was born on May 13, 1881, in the city of Rio de Janeiro
. He was black and from a poor family. Her maternal grandmother, Geraldina Leocádia da Conceição, was a freed slave. His mother was a primary school teacher and died of tuberculosis when Lima Barreto was 6 years old. His father was a printer, but he suffered from mental illness.The author, however, had a godfather with possessions – the Viscount of Ouro Preto (1836-1912) –, what allowed the writer to study at Colégio Pedro II. Then he joined the Polytechnic School, but he did not complete the Engineering course, as he needed to work. In 1903, he took a competitive examination and was approved to work with the Directorate of Expedient of the Secretary of War. Thus, concurrently with the I work as a civil servant, he wrote his literary texts.
in 1905, worked as a journalist at Morning mail. In 1907 he launched the magazine floral. In 1909, his first novel was published in Portugal: Memories of the Registrar Isaiah Caminha. already the romance Sad end of Policarpo Lent was first published in 1911 in the Jornal do Comércio, in serial form. In 1914, Lima Barreto was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the first time.
According to Shyrley Pimenta, Master in Applied Psychology:
“The writer's health was not going well. In this respect, from the age of twenty-five, the writer's private ordeal began: he acquired a general weakness and his health deteriorated. At the age of twenty-nine he suffers from malaria and polyarticular rheumatism. He had suffered from childhood ailment, and the disease had recurred in his thirties. At thirty-one, already with some symptoms of alcohol dependence, he manifested hyperkinesis heart disease, also due to alcohol abuse, and at the age of thirty-three, depression and neurasthenia. At thirty-five, he has pronounced anemia, and at thirty-seven, he breaks his collarbone and is stricken with the first attacks of epilepsy. toxic, also common to alcohol dependents, when he is considered "invalid" for public service and retired, in December 1918.”
Lima Barreto, which applied three times for a place at the Brazilian Academy of Letters, received from her, according to Francisco de Assis Barbosa (1914-1991)|1|, only an honorable mention in 1921. He died on November 1, 1922.
Read too: Machado de Assis – main Brazilian author of realist aesthetics
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Literary Characteristics of Lima Barreto
Writer Lima Barreto is part of Pre-modernism. Works by Brazilian authors published between 1902 and 1922 are part of this period. Is transition phase between the Symbolism and Modernism. Therefore, during this period, it is possible to perceive influences from previous period styles, such as the Parnassianism and Symbolism (in poetry) and the Naturalism (in prose).
In addition to this feature, elements of nationalist stamp, which already preannounce the modernist aesthetic Brazilian. Thus, there is no more romantic idealization and there is a critical nationalism, in which Brazil's social problems are exposed, in which political criticism is wide open. Realism in these works is predominant.
The works of Lima Barreto, therefore, have such characteristics. However, they are also printed, in his texts, elements that refer to the author's life experience, marked by exclusion and prejudice, due to their poor origin, their blackness and the health problems they faced.
Thus, his novels, memoirs, chronicles and short stories bring the image of a Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, from the very critical view of a man and artist excluded from society and academia. In novels like Memories of the Registrar Isaiah Caminha (1909) and clear of the angels (1948), the theme of racial prejudice is focused, the vision of a just and tolerant country does not hold.
These two novels also criticize Brazilian politics, when, in the first, it is evidenced the political power of the press and, in the second, state powers are criticized for not bothering to solve the suburban troubles. His work, therefore, is characterized by the denunciation of social inequalities, which remained due to individual political interests to the detriment of the community. Thus, the writer, ironically, pointed out the hypocrisy of Brazilian society of his time.
And finally, according to Portal Literafro:
"Another indelible mark of his work resides in the Afro-identified point of view, which constitutes a a place of supportive speech to the subaltern and sensitive to the dramas of the underprivileged, be they men or women. The latter, in particular, received a different treatment from the dominant stereotypes at the time, especially with regard to black women's sexuality, reduced in many nineteenth-century writings to a mere object of white and masculine desire and fantasies—an erotic animal devoid of reason and feelings."
Main works by Lima Barreto
Lima Barreto's main books are:
- Memories of the Registrar Isaiah Caminha (1909): novel.
- The Adventures of Dr. Bogoloff (1912): novel.
- Sad end of Policarpo Lent (1915): novel.
- Numa is the nymph (1915): novel.
- Life and death of M. J. Gonzaga de Sa (1919): novel.
- stories and dreams (1920): short stories.
- the bruzundangas (1922): chronicles.
- trifles (1923): chronicles.
- clear of the angels (1948): novel.
- fairs and mafuás (1953): articles and chronicles.
- marginalia (1953): chronicles.
- things from the kingdom of jambon (1956): satire and folklore.
- Urban life (1956): articles and chronicles.
- The underground of Morro do Castelo (1997): novel.
- intimate diary (1953): memoirs.
- the cemetery of the living (1956): Memories.
See too: Anguish: novel written by Graciliano Ramos
Sad end of Policarpo Lent
![Cover of the book Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma, by Lima Barreto, a novel highly critical of naive nationalism. [1]](/f/30bbe42e0cd9d658afff73fa8a2ecf50.jpg)
His best known and most appreciated work by critics is Sad end of Policarpo Lent. In this book, nationalist and critical, the narrator shows various elements of national culture, both positive and negative. Start by presenting the guitar as part of Brazilian culture– instrument that, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, was disliked and marginalized:
“Those were his habits; lately, however, it had changed a little; and this provoked comments in the neighborhood. In addition to his friend and his daughter, the only people who had visited him so far, in recent days, were seen entering his home, three times a week and on certain days, a short, thin, pale man, with a guitar wrapped in a leather bag. suede. For the first time, the case intrigued the neighborhood. Such a respectable home guitar! What would it be?”
The nationalist Policarpo Quaresma studies the Tupi Guarani, because, for him, this would be the original language of Brazilians. Therefore, it is nicknamed Ubirajara:
“There was a year in this part that was dedicated to Tupi-Guarani. Every morning, before the "Dawn, with its pink fingers made way for the blond Febo", he would dock to the lunch with Montoya, Arte y diccionario de la lengua guaraní o más bien tupí, and I studied the caboclo jargon with zeal and passion. At the office, the small employees, clerks and clerks, having heard of his study of the Tupiniquim language, gave no known reason to call him — Ubirajara.”
Later, Policarpo will even send a request to the National Congress to decree Tupi-Guarani as “the official and national language of the Brazilian people”. That's why, will be mocked. Furthermore, among the numerous defenses of the nationalism, made by the protagonist, is also the criticism of the overvaluation of Brazilians in relation to what is foreign:
“And in that way he went on with his life, half in the office, without being understood, and the other half at home, without being understood either. On the day they called him Ubirajara, Quaresma was reserved, taciturn, mute, and only came to speak because, as they were washing their hands in a room near the office and getting ready to leave, someone, sighing, said: “Ah! My God! When can I go to Europe!” The major could not contain himself: he looked up, fixed his pince-nez and spoke fraternally and persuasively: “Ungrateful! You have such a beautiful, rich land, and you want to visit others! If I ever can, I will go through mine from beginning to end!””
A characteristic of Lima Barreto's works is the suburb as a space for action and social criticism. In the book, this author's political choice remains:
“Municipal care is also variable and capricious. Sometimes, in the streets, there are sidewalks, in certain parts and not others; some communication routes are paved and others of the same importance are still in a state of nature. Here you will find a well-kept bridge over the dry river, and steps beyond that we have to cross a stream on a pingue of poorly joined tracks.
[...]
In addition, the suburbs have more interesting aspects, not to mention epidemic dating and endemic spiritualism; the rooming houses (who would suppose them there!) constitute one of them quite unprecedented. Houses that would barely fit a small family are divided up, subdivided, and the tiny rooms thus obtained are rented out to the miserable population of the city. It is there, in these human boxes, that the least observed fauna of our life is found, over which poverty hovers with a London rigor.”
Also present in this work, and in others by the author, is the appreciation of colloquial language, a characteristic that the modernist movement will embrace in its defense of a Brazilian identity:
“—Yo-yo knows! Do not know? What, you know!
— I don't know, sing. If I knew I wouldn't come here. Ask my friend Major Policarpo here if I know.
Quaresma nodded and the old black woman nodded, perhaps with great nostalgia for the time when she was slave and mistress of some great house, full and rich, she raised her head, as if to remember better, and she intoned:
Come Tutu
behind the murundu
To top, little one
With a mouthful of angu.”
Thus, the storyteller presents a popular song as part of a Brazilian tradition, which must be preserved. In this regard, Quaresma considers a sign of weakness not keeping traditions, because, according to him, powerful countries value their own culture:
“Lent was discouraged. How is it that the people did not keep the traditions of the past thirty years? How quickly did your fun and songs die in your memory? It was quite a sign of weakness, a demonstration of inferiority before those tenacious peoples who guard them for centuries! It became necessary to react, develop the cult of traditions, keep them always alive in memories and customs...”
Furthermore, the romance is marked by the irony and by passages in which the sense of humor, how are you doing:
“[...] they knocked on his door, in the middle of his work. He opened it but didn't shake his hand. He broke down crying, screaming, pulling his hair, as if he had lost a wife or a child. The sister ran from inside, Anastácio too, and his friend and his daughter, as it was they, were stunned on the threshold of the door.
— But what is it, compadre?
"What is it, Polycarp?"
— But my godfather...
He even cried a little. He wiped his tears and then explained very naturally:
— There it is! You have no idea about the things of our land. They wanted me to shake hands... This is not ours! Our greeting is to cry when we meet friends, that was how the tupinambás did.”
Or when Quaresma is considered crazy for write an official document in tupi; an attitude, for him, nationalist:
"- Which is?
— Quaresma is crazy.
- But... which? Who told you?
'That man with the guitar. He's already at the nursing home...
— I saw it right away, said Albernaz, that application was crazy.
"But it's not just that, General," added Genelicio. He did an office in Tupi and sent it to the minister.
— That's what I said, Albernaz said. — Who is it? asked Florencio.
— That neighbor, employee of the arsenal; do'nt know?
"A pince-nez bass?"
— This one, confirmed Caldas.
"You couldn't have expected anything else," Dr. Florencio said. Those books, that craze for reading..."
This association of madness with the development of intellectuality seems, therefore, to be typical of Brazilian culture, who sees in knowledge a risk to mental health, which, in a way, seems extol ignorance, of which, by the way, Policarpo Quaresma becomes a victim, as can be seen throughout the work. From this perspective, we also have:
“He didn't receive anyone, he lived in monastic isolation, although he was courteous to the neighbors who they thought he was weird and misanthropic. If he had no friends nearby, he had no enemies, and the only disaffection he had deserved was that of Dr. Segadas, a renowned clinician in the area, who could not admit that Quaresma had books: “if not formed, for what? Pedantism!””
O racial prejudice it is also shown, as a negative part of Brazilian culture, when the character Ricardo Coração dos Outros is bothered with the fact that “a Creole had appeared singing modinhas and whose name was beginning to gain strength and was already mentioned alongside the your":
“It's not that he had a particular dislike of blacks. What he saw in the fact that there was a famous black man playing the guitar was that such a thing would to decrease even more the prestige of the instrument. If his rival played the piano and so became famous, there would be no harm in it; on the contrary: the boy's talent lift your person, through the instrument considered; but, playing the guitar, it was the opposite: the prejudice that surrounded the person, demoralized the mysterious guitar that he loved so much.”
Furthermore, this work by Lima Barreto draws a diverse and complex profile of the Brazilian people, in order to show your cultural identity and your social problems. Thus, Policarpo Quaresma defends the modinha (popular urban and sentimental song) as national poetry. And the narrator shows a culture formed by indigenous and African influence, in addition to Portuguese and from other nations that were beginning to influence Brazilian culture, represented by the Italian Coleoni.
The work too deconstructs the romantic vision from the interior of Brazil:
“What most impressed her on the tour was the general misery, the lack of cultivation, the poverty of the houses, the sad, dejected air of poor people. Educated in the city, she had the idea of the farmers that they were happy, healthy and happy. With so much clay, so much water, why weren't the houses made of bricks and roofs? It was always that sinister thatch and that “sopapo” that showed the weave of sticks, like the skeleton of a patient. Why, around these houses, were there no crops, a vegetable garden, an orchard? Wouldn't it be so easy, working hours? And there were no cattle, neither big nor small. A goat was rare, a sheep. Why? Even on the farms, the spectacle was no longer exciting. [...]. It couldn't be just laziness or indolence. For his own use, for his own use, man always has energy to work. [...]. Was it the earth? What would it be? And all these questions challenged his curiosity, his desire to know, and also his pity and sympathy for those outcasts, ragged, poorly housed, maybe hungry, moody..."
Social problems that pre-modernists decided to debate and fight, frankly opposition to idealization romantic, and some of them, contrary to the naturalistic ideas, who argued that poverty was a kind of “natural phenomenon”. In the description of the interior, moreover, there is the issue of unproductive lands, which contributed to national poverty. Thus, Policarpo Quaresma, a romantic in his essence, as he nurtured a boastful nationalism, begins to question this reality:
“Furthermore, his military education [from Floriano Peixoto|2|] and his weak culture gave more emphasis to this childhood conception, bordering it on violence, not so much for him per se, by its natural perversity, for his contempt for human life, but for the weakness with which he covered and did not repress the ferocity of his assistants and minions.
Quaresma was far from thinking about all that; he, with many honest and sincere men of the time, were taken by the contagious enthusiasm that Floriano had managed to arouse. He thought of the great work Fate had in store for that placid and sad figure; in the radical reform that he was going to lead to the annihilated organism of the motherland, which the Major had come to believe the richest in the world, although, for some time now, already had doubts about certain aspects.”
In this way, the disillusionment by the romantic Policarpo Quaresma finally brings the protagonist to the reality, when he writes a letter to the dictator, in which he says what he thinks, and so he is arrested:
“That must be why he was there in that dungeon, caged, locked up, isolated from his fellows like a beast, like a criminal, buried in the darkness, suffering dampness, mixed with his debris, almost without eat... How will I end? How will I end? And the question came to him, in the midst of the flurry of thoughts that that anguish provoked to think. There was no basis for any hypothesis. The Government was of such irregular and uncertain conduct that everything it could hope for: freedom or death, more this than that.”
By the end of the novel, it is clear that Polycarp is an imperfect hero, subject to sorrow and frustration. His nationalist spirit and desire to see the country grow are annihilated. In this point, Lima Barreto's work is by no means optimistic, as it demonstrates a Brazilian reality in which the political and social situation contributes not to growth, but to the annihilation of a nation:
“Since eighteen years that such patriotism had absorbed him and he had done the folly of studying useless things. What did the rivers matter to him? Were they big? Because they were... How would it contribute to your happiness to know the names of Brazil's heroes? In nothing... The important thing is that he had been happy. Was? Not. He remembered his Tupi things, his folk-lore, his agricultural attempts... Was all of that left in his soul a satisfaction? None! None!
The Tupi found general disbelief, laughter, mockery, mockery; and drove him crazy. A disappointment. And agriculture? Nothing. The lands were not wild and it was not easy as the books said. Another disappointment. And when his patriotism became a combatant, what did he think? Disappointments. Where was the sweetness of our people? Has he not seen her fight like wild beasts? Didn't he see her killing prisoners, countless? Another disappointment. His life was a disappointment, a series, better, a chain of disappointments.”
See too: The representation of black people in Brazilian literature
Phrases by Lima Barreto
We are going to read, below, some sentences by the writer Lima Barreto; some, taken from your book intimate diary (1953); others, from some of his chronicles:
"It's sad not to be white."
"What is true of the white race is not extended to the rest."
"I, mulatto or black, as you like, am condemned to always be taken for a janitor."
"The mental capacity of black people is discussed a priori and the white one, a posteriori.”
“In the future, I will write to History of Black Slavery in Brazil and its influence on our nationality.”
"The protectors are the worst tyrants."
“We already had husbands who killed adulterous wives; now we have the grooms who kill the ex-fiancees.”
"Let the women love freely."
"This obsolete bully-domination of man over woman is such a horrible thing that it fills with indignation."
"Worse than adultery is murder."
"There are always curious contradictions in the State."
"I like Death because it is the annihilation of us all."
"I'm tired of saying the freaks were the reformers of the world."
"It was never the men of common sense, the honest bourgeois around the corner or the secretaries chics who made the great reforms in the world.”
“Brazil's mental and moral cowardice does not allow for independence movements.”
"Who, like me, was born poor and doesn't want to give up a line of his independence of mind and intelligence, just have to praise Death."
“Dante was a bit of a bum; Camões, idem; Bocage too; and many others that appear in biographical dictionaries and have a statue in the public square.”
“When I judge myself —I am worthless; when I compare myself, I'm big.”
Grades
|1| biography author The life of Lima Barreto (1952).
|2| Floriano Peixoto (1839-1895) was president of Brazil from 1891 to 1894.
Image credit
[1]L&PM Editors (Reproduction)
by Warley Souza
Literature teacher
