Working Papers - a graduate publication of the UPenn Department of Romance Languages

Lucy Swanson
University of Pennsylvania

Les Scènes de la vie de bohème¹, l’ouvrage d’Henry Murger, a créé un mythe bohémien qui perdure jusqu’à nos jours grâce aux adaptations dramatiques de l’histoire, mais le texte reste peu considéré dans des cercles académiques, et aucun critique n’a examiné l’importance de la fraternité qui en forme le socle. Pourtant, entre ceux qui ont redécouvert les Scènes, Sandrine Berthelot écrit que « [l’]on pourrait avancer l’idée que la bohème marque le passage du romantisme au réalisme, en même temps qu’elle est l’indice d’une prolétarisation et une démocratisation de l’art au milieu du siècle »², tandis que Elizabeth Wilson voit dans cette représentation de la bohème son rapport avec son audience bourgeoise, à la fois choquée et fascinée par la vie bohémienne³. Jerrold Seigel voit dans les Scènes l’expression de sa théorie qui rapproche bourgeois et bohème, ce dernier étant une expression chez le premier des tensions inhérentes dans son identité sociale⁴. Le livre consiste de vingt-trois chapitres, dont vingt ont été publiés originellement en feuilleton dans le Corsaire-Satan entre 1845 et 1849, qui exposent la formation d’une organisation fraternelle et bohémienne par quatre jeunes artistes ou intellectuels (Rodolphe, Marcel, Schaunard, et Gustave Colline), et de leurs problèmes subséquents d’amour et d’argent. Au fur et à mesure, il se révèle une tension formelle et thématique entre les chapitres écrits pour sa parution originelle en feuilleton, et les trois chapitres rédigés pour la première édition en 1851. Il est difficile de dire avec assurance si cette dernière est une étude de mœurs—comme Murger atteste dans le premier chapitre⁵—ou bien un roman-feuilleton à une chronologie plus ou moins expérimentale, étant donné la multiplicité d’intrigues et la temporalité souvent vague due en partie à la relation ambiguë entre elles. Sur cette question se superpose celle de la fraternité, telle qu’elle est représentée et ensuite désagrégée dans les deux catégories de chapitres, feuilleton ou non. A cet égard il est essentiel d’engager le concept freudien du « roman familial »⁶. Cette fantaisie d’un individu qui s’imagine un lignage amélioré, ou exclusif de ses frères ou sœurs, a été réinterprétée à diverses fins par de nombreux critiques, comme Christine van Boheemen-Saaf qui comprend l’intérêt contemporain pour le roman familial comme l’expression de l’importance des origines⁷. Il est également nécessaire de s’interroger sur le sens politique du terme « fraternité » à l’époque, même s’il est rarement question de politique dans les Scènes, car la devise « Liberté, égalité, fraternité » qui a figuré dans la révolution de 1789 réapparaît lors de la révolution de 1848, mais elle n’a certainement plus le même sens après soixante ans, la chute de la Première République, un empire et deux monarchies.

Dès le début des Scènes, il est possible de voir l’importance de la métaphore familiale, qui révèle la tension inhérente à la vie de bohème entre le désir du renom et la marginalité qui est une source d’authenticité⁸. Dans la préface écrite par Murger pour la première édition en 1851, l’auteur construit une généalogie bohémienne⁹, et malgré le fait que la conceptualisation de la « Bohème » tel qu’il la conçoit ne date que des années 1830¹⁰, il raconte leurs racines artistiques de la période antique des grecs jusqu’aux précurseurs du 18^e siècle comme Rousseau, et explique que « La Bohème dont il s’agit dans ce livre n’est point une race née d’aujourd’hui, elle a existé de tout temps et partout, et peut revendiquer d’illustres origines » (29). Les termes « généalogie » et « aïeux » qui apparaissent dans le même paragraphe, ainsi qu’une référence à la « grande famille d’artistes pauvre » (35), ne font qu’augmenter le sens que cette introduction est un « roman familial »¹¹. Pourtant, si ce terme désigne une réécriture de l’arbre généalogique chez Freud, car il explique que l’enfant cherche à renier ses parents à cause de sa désillusion envers eux, chez Murger la préface est une écriture initiale, une tentative d’établir une histoire qui n’a pas encore été écrite. Les bohémiens sont peut-être des orphelins artistiques, cherchant à reconstruire ou à rêver la parenté qu’ils ignorent, ou plutôt des enfants bâtards qui révèlent (ou inventent) leurs origines, jusqu’alors cachées, aux autres.

Cette généalogie bohémienne fonctionne aussi comme un redressement des préjugés que le lecteur (bourgeois) pourrait avoir envers ces artistes. Murger met le lecteur en garde contre les images des bohémiens que « les dramaturges du boulevard ont fait les synonymes de filous et d’assassins » (29), et il explique au « bourgeois timoré » que « La Bohème, c’est le stage de la vie artistique »¹² (34) ; aussi se distancie-t-il du lecteur, en établissant une opposition entre l’artiste bohémien et le lectorat largement bourgeois. La vie de bohème étant donc une période de production—de l’artiste, qui doit passer par cette initiation, ainsi que de ses œuvres—elle trouve ses propres origines dans sa complémentarité avec la vie bourgeoise¹³. Pour Seigel, cette opposition souvent faite entre le bourgeois et le bohémien¹⁴ atteste moins de leur différence que de leur interdépendance, un point de vue qui se trouverait validé déjà dans la relation établie par Murger entre artiste et consommateur d’art. Mais Seigel pousse le rapport encore plus loin quand il écrit « [Bohemia is] the appropriation of marginal life-styles by young and not so young bourgeois, for the dramatization of ambivalence toward their own social identities and destinies », alors effectivement tout bohémien est d’emblée bourgeois (11). Son interprétation de ce dernier terme rend pourtant la question plus compliquée. Car à l’époque, remarque Seigel, « bourgeois » est aussi flou que « bohème », malgré les connotations d’avarice, de vieillesse, et de conformisme. Il est possible néanmoins d’exclure le prolétaire et l’ancienne noblesse de cette catégorie, quoiqu’il reste alors une grande partie de la population qui peut se dire « bourgeois », des marchands jusqu’à la haute bourgeoisie (8-9). Murger admet en quelque sorte cette ambiguïté : dans sa préface il écrit que certains « fils de famille », cette expression qui connote richesse et respectabilité, font partie de la « Bohème ignorée », mais que n’ayant ni l’art comme but ultime ni l’intelligence qu’il faut pour survivre sans argent, seulement un désir d’aventure, ces bourgeois sont exclus de la vraie bohème dont ils sont incapables de faire partie (40). Pour sa part, les vrais bohémiens ont la modestie d’origine qui leur donne l’intelligence pratique qu’il faut pour survivre à la pauvreté extrême. S’il existe un « roman familial » fantasmé par l’individu bohémien autour de sa parenté (au sens propre du terme), ce n’est pas un mythe d’ascension sociale, mais plutôt une revendication de ses humbles origines ; pour le bourgeois bohémien, le roman familial est la construction de ses humbles origines artistiques, sa « misère d’artiste » comme Murger l’appelle.

La construction d’une famille ou d’un lignage imaginés n’est pas limitée à la préface, au contraire ce qui distingue les bohèmes des bourgeois dans les Scènes est leur « association fraternelle », ce groupe fondé par les quatre amis protagonistes. Mais le lignage hiérarchique et chronologique présenté dans la préface, et la fraternité égalitaire qui est une partie intégrale des Scènes, sont très différents : dans le chapitre « Donec gratus », le narrateur dit que « pendant six mois [la] plus loyale fraternité se pratiquait sans emphase dans ce cénacle, où tout était à tous et se partageait en entrant, bonne ou mauvaise fortune » (237). Cependant, le concept de fraternité, toujours problématique puisque ce mot qui connote l’amour égalitaire s’emploie souvent sans l’idée de la rivalité entre frères, le devient encore davantage au 19^e siècle, quand il devient un tiers de la devise révolutionnaire « Liberté, égalité, fraternité ».

Dans son livre The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt révise le concept du roman familial pour la raccommoder à l’inconscient politique des français autour de la Première Révolution¹⁵ (12-13). Plus spécifiquement, Hunt établit un parallèle entre la bande de frères dans Totem et tabou de Freud¹⁶, dont elle appelle le meurtre du père et l’usurpation de sa position « le premier roman familial », et de la Révolution où les Français établissent une fraternité républicaine en exécutant le roi, leur patriarche. En dépit de la violence du moment historique, Hunt écrit que le concept était envisagé tour à tour comme menaçant ou innocent. Son étude de La Philosophie dans le boudoir révèle jusqu’à quel point l’imagination de Sade a poussé les idées de « République » et de « fraternité ». D’un côté, le pamphlet à l’intérieur du texte prône la sodomie et l’inceste comme une source de solidarité entre les frères républicains, de l’autre, il explique qu’il faut tolérer le meurtre dans une république. Si les liens fraternels chez Murger ne sont point violents, ils ne sont pas inclusifs non plus¹⁷. Les bohémiens sont égalitaires entre eux, mais souvent à l’exclusion d’autres. Quand Carolus Barbemuche veut devenir le cinquième membre du cénacle dans « Un café de la bohème », il doit passer par une période de bizutage avant d’être admis. Par ailleurs, les femmes qui sont si importantes aux bohémiens restent toujours moins importantes que leurs frères artistiques¹⁸ ; le genre même des femmes les exclut de la fraternité. Un autre groupe important est exclu (à l’exception peut-être de Carolus) de ce « clan bohème »—dont le nom même rappelle les frères de Freud—c’est-à-dire les bourgeois, qui sont d’ailleurs souvent associés avec la paternité par titre (le père Médicis qui achète la peinture de Marcel), par extension des relations familiales normales (l’oncle Monetti) (81), ou parce qu’ils sont de vrais pères, comme le « père de famille » qui tient compte des décès pour la mairie et exprime son désir à Rodolphe pour « [u]n journal qui dirait tout simplement la santé du roi et les biens de la terre », un marque du peu d’importance qu’il attribue à la politique et à l’art qui paraît dans les journaux sous forme de feuilleton ou de critique (71).

Il est possible alors de lire le texte de Murger à travers la théorie de Hunt, mais avant il faut l’accommoder à la période historique pendant laquelle les Scènes sont publiées en feuilleton ; c’est-à-dire à la fin de la monarchie de juillet, au moment de la Révolution de 1848, et pendant la Deuxième République. La fraternité égoïste que Sade présente comme une alternative à l’idéal anticipe mieux la perception du terme en 1848 quand l’idéalisme de la première révolution a été largement diminué par les multiples changements politiques de la cinquantaine d’années précédentes. Mona Ozouf note que la présence de la devise révolutionnaire n’est que superficielle en ce moment, car « la Constitution de 1848 […] en a conservé les mots plus que les idées, tant elle s’est préoccupé d’en amortir le tranchant et d’en assourdir l’écho ».¹⁹ Les souvenirs de « la fraternité-fraternisation de 1793, la fraternité-terreur, élection et exclusion mêlées » étaient trop vifs (610). La monarchie n’est plus absolue, Louis-Philippe est « le roi bourgeois » (Graña 10), et le fait qu’il partage son pouvoir avec les bourgeois²⁰ est une explication possible pour leur présence paternelle dans les Scènes. Néanmoins, ce paternalisme, quoique souvent ridiculisé, est indispensable pour les bohèmes. Ils sont souvent une source d’argent, comme le père Médicis qui offre des choses matérielles, « des cigares contre un plan de feuilleton, des pantoufles contre un sonnet, de la marée fraîche contre des paradoxes » ; mais son rôle en tant qu’intermédiaire entre artiste et public est essentiel (247). Quand Marcel apprend que ce bourgeois a vendu sa peinture à un « marchand de comestibles » et que l’on avait ajouté un bateau à son tableau, il n’est pas déçu, au contraire il est « ravi de ce triomphe, et murmura : La voix du peuple, c’est la voix de Dieu » (253). Curieusement, cette citation, aussi pleine d’humour qu’elle soit, est peut-être le meilleur exemple d’un sentiment presque fraternel d’un bohème pour des individus à l’extérieur de son « clan ».

Dans le chapitre « Épilogue des amours de Rodolphe et de Mimi », Marcel dit « on renverse une dynastie plus facilement qu’un usage, fût-il même ridicule » (375), et de son côté, apparemment Murger partageait cet ambivalence envers l’idéalisme républicain, ou ressentait même une hostilité envers la révolution.²¹ Cette ambivalence envers la politique peut se lire dans les Scènes malgré le succès de la fraternité chez les protagonistes, notamment dans un feuilleton qui a paru dans la première édition, mais effacé pour la deuxième (apparemment pas pour des raisons politiques malgré sa coïncidence avec le coup d’état de 1851)²² : dans « Son Excellence Gustave Colline », ce dernier gagne un poste d’ambassadeur en jouant aux billes, tandis que dans « Comment fut institué le cénacle de la bohème », le concierge est payé à annoncer la date et le gouvernement chaque matin, une réponse ludique aux fréquents changements politiques que les bohémiens ont subi. Comme le dit César Graña, après tant de tumulte, il est normal de réagir avec humour.²³

En contraste avec la précision des dates données par le concierge est la temporalité généralement indéterminée des Scènes. Si la chronologie devrait être claire, puisque chaque chapitre de l’oeuvre commence par une indication temporelle, ces indices sont généralement vagues, comme par exemple « Les Amours de carême » qui commence « Un soir de carême Rodolphe rentra chez lui avec l’intention de travailler » ( 91) ; sinon, elles font référence à un autre événement non daté.²⁴ Les quelques scènes qui donnent une indication temporelle précise sont soit dans le premier chapitre, écrit pour l’édition en volume et donc impliqué avec la romanisation des Scènes, soit ayant une relation importante avec l’argent :

C’était le 19 mars… Et dût-il atteindre l’âge avancé de M. Raoul-Rochette, qui a vu bâtir Ninive, Rodolphe n’oubliera jamais cette date, car ce fut ce jour-la même, jour de Saint-Joseph, à trois heures de relevée, que notre ami sortait de chez un banquier, où il venait de toucher une somme de cinq cents francs en espèces sonnantes et ayant cours. (128)²⁵

La précision temporelle de cette citation démontre combien l’argent, devenu une nouvelle religion, est rare mais puissant chez les bohémiens, car ce moment prend un ton même religieux par la référence au « jour de Saint-Joseph », la figure paternelle terrestre pour Jésus-Christ et un patriarche important au Torah (ainsi qu’un personnage dans Cinq-Mars de Vigny). Ces dates exactes sont liées au pouvoir politico-paternel aussi, comme celle qui est annoncée par le concierge, le père Durand : « c’est aujourd’hui le neuf avril mil huit cent quarante… il y a de la boue dans les rues, et S. M. Louis-Philippe est toujours roi de France et de Navarre » (77). Mais la qualité concrète de la date est éclipsée par l’inconstance politique de l’époque, car cet exemple est un commentaire ludique sur le caractère éphémère du gouvernement. Il est nécessaire de préciser qui est roi puisque le sceptre peut changer de main à n’importe quel moment ; d’ailleurs, le chapitre d’où cette scène est tirée est écrit par Murger pour la première édition des Scènes, donc après la révolution de 1848 (Robb 439). Même les dates qui paraissent précises peuvent mettre en relief l’incertitude de la période historique.

L’instabilité politique n’est pas la seule source de cette qualité vague, qui est due en grande partie à la forme originelle des Scènes en feuilleton. Chez Murger, l’aboutissement de cette publication en feuilleton est un livre plus ouvert où les éléments peuvent se lire tous seuls, mais qui en même temps coexistent dans les Scènes comme les bohémiens, c’est-à-dire en égalité et avec une certaine continuité malgré leur indépendance.²⁶ Dans les Scènes, le narrateur rappelle parfois au lecteur des détails qu’il aurait oubliés. Par exemple, le chapitre « Les fantaisies de Musette » commence « On se rappelle peut-être comment le peintre Marcel vendit au juif Médicis son fameux tableau du Passage de la mer Rouge » (301). Le format même du feuilleton exige ce style d’écriture, qui rend chaque publication accessible au plus grand lectorat. Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz écrit que le roman-feuilleton était construit de parts distinctes à cause de la mode de consommation, et que cette innovation permettait aux écrivains d’introduire des personnages ou des intrigues supplémentaires.²⁷ Berthelot note un phénomène similaire chez Murger mais sans pourtant les attribuer au roman-feuilleton : « Faisant fi des règles, Murger rend flous les contours du roman—d’ailleurs s’agit-il d’un roman ?—, mélange les genres en insérant, par exemple, dans le texte des chansons, varie les tons en faisant coexister des histoires légères et divertissantes avec d’autres récits franchement pathétiques » (226). Si ces détails ajoutent une certaine insouciance, mêlée bien sûr d’une part de regret, ils vont de pair avec la chronologie également libre. Pourtant, les dates absentes peuvent indiquer quelque chose de plus grave. Sandrine Berthelot voit dans « Le cap des tempêtes » un écho avec la politique, quand Rodolphe essaie d’assister à un banquet qui est fermé : « Ce banquet, quoique volontairement non daté, n’est pas sans rappeler, bien sur, les banquets interdits de 1847 qui entraînent l’insurrection de 1848 » (222). Si la date originelle de sa publication, juillet 1846, pourrait affirmer cette thèse, il est possible que Murger ait altéré le texte pour son édition en 1851. En tout cas, il faut noter que Rodolphe s’intéresse davantage à manger qu’à faire la révolution.

La relation entre politique et littérature n’est pas limitée aux pages du feuilleton ; le développement de cette mode de transmission est dû en partie aux changements tumultueux de régime. La modération de Louis-Philippe envers la presse n’a rien de surprenant²⁸, comme il est souvent supposé que la censure a eu une grande influence sur la révolution de 1830 et le détrônement de son frère Charles X (Graña 7). En interprétant l’avènement au pouvoir de Louis-Philippe à travers Totem et tabou, ce « roman familial originel » d’après Hunt (6), il est possible de voir le roi bourgeois comme « père déifié », c’est-à-dire un père symbolique qui restaure l’ordre patriarcal après le parricide originel, sans pourtant dérober les frères des libertés qu’ils ont gagné (Freud 185). Évidemment, une de ces licences est celle de la presse, dont le développement est de plus en plus lié à la littérature. Lise Queffélec explique que « la libéralisation du régime de la presse après la Révolution de Juillet (plus de censure, seul un cautionnement est nécessaire pour fonder un journal), provoqua une expansion dans laquelle le roman feuilleton jouera un rôle, et non des moindres : il permet d’abaisser le prix de l’abonnement en augmentant la clientèle » (11). Cette réduction des prix désigne une plus grande accessibilité qui est un de plusieurs indices de la démocratisation croissante de la presse et de la lecture plus généralement pendant la monarchie de Juillet, une autre étant la loi Guizot de 1833, qui donne accès libre à une éducation primaire à tous les enfants mâles (Adamowicz-Hariasz 161-2). Tous les Français ne sont pas contents de cette transition vers une littérature produite et distribuée en masse : pendant cette période, le roman-feuilleton est critiqué pour indécence par certains critiques cherchant à blâmer les bourgeois au pouvoir du gouvernement²⁹, et impliqué dans la révolution de 1848, s’il est difficile de prouver ce fait (35-6). Mais la Deuxième République, dont la forme gouvernementale est en principe plus démocratique, censure davantage la presse que sous le roi Louis-Philippe (Adamowicz-Hariasz 177).

Pour Murger, ces changements sont probablement synonymes de travail, car la quantité de journaux a haussé largement entre la fin du premier quart de siècle et la vingtaine d’années suivantes, les abonnements multipliés par quatre entre 1824 et 1846, quoique ce chiffre représente bien sûr une augmentation chez les grands journaux ainsi que la création de nouveaux journaux (161).   Il n’est pas seulement une question de chiffres : le nouveau style qui est entraîné par le feuilleton provoque alors une transformation chez l’écrivain, qui doit alors plaire au public. Si le feuilleton représentait un moyen pour l’écrivain moins connu³⁰, peut-être bohémien comme Murger, de trouver une audience ainsi qu’une source de revenu plutôt stable, tandis que des écrivains établis comme Balzac ont lutté avec le format (avant d’avoir un grand succès et de devenir « le grand ancêtre » des feuilletonistes qui le suivent), qui avait donc d’autres exigences que le roman publié dans un format classique (Queffélec 23-4).

Chez Murger, cette tension formelle se révèle pleinement dans les Scènes de la vie de bohème, dont la troisième édition paraît en 1852. La multitude de personnages, le va-et-vient des intrigues cycliques qui tournent autour de l’argent ou des femmes, tout ce qui va à l’encontre d’une histoire cohérente et linéaire, demeure dans les chapitres venant des feuilletons, mais ils sont encadrés par trois chapitres qui imposent un bouclage romanesque au texte. Dans l’avant-dernier chapitre, Marcel proclame qu’il voudrait avoir soixante ans : « nous avons fait notre temps de jeunesse, d’insouciance et de paradoxe. Tout cela est très beau, on en ferait un joli roman ; mais […] tout cela doit avoir un dénouement » (375). Ironiquement, ce chapitre commence le « dénouement » dont Marcel parle. La vie de bohème, que Murger a proclamé, dans la préface, « la préface de l’Académie, de l’Hôtel-Dieu ou de la Morgue » (34), est devenue la matière de tout un roman, mais elle n’est plus propre à vivre. Si le personnage secondaire Jacques a pris le chemin de la Morgue dans le chapitre « Le Manchon de Francine », les protagonistes choisiront la stabilité économique, sous forme de succès artistique (Rodolphe, Marcel, et Schaunard) ou par héritage (Gustave Colline). Marcel conclut son monologue : « La vraie liberté, c’est de pouvoir se passer d’autrui et d’exister par soi-même ». Les anciens bohémiens quittent la fraternité pour cette nouvelle liberté qui est économique plutôt que sociale ou politique, et où la vie commune cède la place à l’autosuffisance. Il pourrait paraître que l’ordre littéraire (le roman) et l’ordre paternel (l’indépendance économique, la reconnaissance artistique) s’imposent au même moment de l’histoire. Pourtant, il n’y a rien qui marque les anciens bohémiens comme paternels, sauf peut-être Gustave Colline, dont l’héritage et le mariage signalent sa continuation d’un lignage. Ce dénouement est étonnant justement parce qu’il est conventionnel, tandis que le titre (Scènes) indique que Murger n’essaie pas de faire un roman, plutôt des nouvelles individuelles. En outre, le narrateur dit en guise de conclusion du premier chapitre que « [t]els sont les principaux personnages qu’on verra reparaître dans les petites histoires dont se compose ce volume, qui n’est pas un roman, […] car les Scènes de la vie de bohème ne sont en effet que des études de moeurs » (Murger 82). Si Murger ne modifie pas les feuilletons « pour les couler dans un classique moule romanesque », comme Loïc Chotard indique³¹, toutefois il crée autour d’eux un cadre plus ordonné (ordonnant ?).

Le produit final est un roman, mais un roman-feuilleton, dont les « contours flous », tels que Berthelot les décrivent, correspondent aux innovations romanesques expliquées par Adamowicz-Hariasz (autonomie des feuilletons, possibilités d’élargir les limites du roman en ajoutant des personnages ou des intrigues secondaires). Cependant, au lieu de « transcender l’hétérogénéité de son livre » ou de témoigner d’une nouvelle sorte d’unité, comme Chotard le comprend, en changeant peu les feuilletons originaux, les Scènes révèlent une rupture, celle des bohémiens de leur ancienne fraternité, de la jeunesse, mais aussi de la pauvreté.  Seigel voit la bohème comme une expression de l’ambivalence de certains bourgeois envers leur identité sociale ; la forme et le dénouement des Scènes mettent en scène l’ambivalence de l’ancien bohémien envers son passé. Le dernier cri de Marcel, « Je suis un corrompu. Je n’aime plus que ce qui est bon ! » (397), montre jusqu’à quel point cette société consommatrice a pénétré la vie de ces artistes, dont autrefois « [l’existence] de chaque jour [était] une œuvre de génie » tant il manquaient les biens nécessaires à vivre (41). La fraternité du cénacle bohémien s’avère alors aussi dépassé que la fraternité républicaine. Malgré la révolution de 1848, l’espoir politique et social de la devise « Liberté, égalité, fraternité » est transformé en un espoir de liberté économique dans les Scènes et d’une plus grande égalité sur le marché littéraire due à la démocratisation de la presse pour Murger, d’autres écrivains et beaucoup de lecteurs aussi. Quant à la fraternité, elle est échangée contre l’individualisme, qui a une plus grande valeur sur le marché capitaliste.

Aaron Lorenz
Tulane University

“Only intellectuals enjoy poverty. (Quem gosta de miseria é intelectual)” Joãozinha Trinta. Quoted in “Traficando Informação.” MV Bill

The novel, Cidade de Deus (1997), by Paulo Lins, can be seen as a landmark in the shift towards a new aesthetics of poverty in Brazil and marks the massive entry of a range of major and minor protagonists from the favela in Brazilian literature.¹ The author has a long relationship with Cidade de Deus. In addition to growing up in Cidade de Deus, Lins also worked for many years with the anthropologist Alba Zaluar interviewing Cidade de Deus’ gangsters. Critics of the novel have invariably framed their interpretations of the novel within the extra-literary context of the author’s relationship to Cidade de Deus. In response to this pervasive critical approach to the novel, the current essay looks at the critical reception of the novel Cidade de Deus in the context of testimonio literature. ²

Paulo Lins, alongside numerous critics like João Cesar de Castro Rocha, Roberto Schwartz, and others, have linked Cidade de Deus to naturalism with Aluisio Azevedo’s O Cortiço, to social realism with Jorge Amado’s Capitães de Areia and José Lins do Rego’s Fogo Morto, to autobiography with Cuarto de Despejo by Menina Carolina de Jesus and to Brutalism with Ruben Fonseca’s O Cobrador. While this is the first essay that looks at Lins’s novel in the context of testimonios in Spanish, de Jesus’ Cuarto de Despejo has been examined in that context in ways that parallel and precede my interpretation of Cidade de Deus. Else Vieira, Eva Paulino Bueno, and Steven Hunsaker have respectively discussed Menina Carolina de Jesus’s diary in the context of testimonio literature. Rarely considered in testimonio criticism, Bueno complains that the absence of Cuarto de Despejo from the canon indicates a prejudice on the part of testimonio critics who are uninterested in the book because it doesn’t correspond to their ideas of a transparent and noble subject. Steven Hunsaker argues that Cuarto de Despejo exceeds many of the parameters of testimonio through Maria Lugones’s notion of “thickness.”³ Rather, De Jesus’s conflictive approach to her neighbors makes her unique and unrepresentative of the community. In fact, much of her discourse is a determined negation of the cruel hypocrisy of “the apparent act of charity” such as the “donation” of rotting food to the favela(Hunsaker 44).

Similarly, Cidade de Deus’s use of irony exceeds notions of a unified subject who could represent and imagine a coherent community. While Lins’s novel and de Jesus’s autobiography make no claims to representing the community “truthfully,” as did testimonio literature, they were nevertheless received as such by critics and readers in interesting ways. Just as feature films have been experimenting with documentary film traditions within an economy of suspense, so too does Lins’s social realist novel make use of a number of qualities of testimonio literature and of anthropological description, though for different effects. In this respect, the novel’s numerous points of contact with testimonio justify the use of the term post-testimonial discourse. In fact, the novel’s insistent irony places it squarely within Elzbieta Sklowdowska notion of the term. She argues that “post-testimonial discourse… is in reality a metadiscourse that through parody, demystifies the contradictions of testimonio that critics have not yet been able to catalogue” (Sklowdoska, 1992: 101. Trans. A.L.).

Despite Cidade de Deus’s obvious use of parody, the novel and testimonio’s most obvious similarities can be found in the critical discourses surrounding them. Like the criticism of Cidade de Deus, the criticism of testimonio literature suggested that in texts like The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, and I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala, a new type of literature was emerging which would give voice to oppressed, subaltern groups who have historically been silenced. For instance, in their essay, “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America,” Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney affirm that “people who were taken as objects are now insisting on being subjects, the distinction between them being that whereas the former are spoken about, the latter speak for themselves. This breakdown of what was the firmly structured distinction between subject and object reveals the deeply politically and culturally constructed nature not only of anthropology but also of the ‘knowledge’ that it produces” (1991: 7).

The criticism of testimonio literature and Cidade de Deus celebrate the transformation of objects of anthropological study into the subjects of new texts where they speak directly to an audience without the filter of anthropological framing. This new voice in testimonio is structured as a collective voice whereby the “witness” speaks in the name of a community. “Whereas the Western writer is definitely an author, the “protagonist” who gives testimony is a speaker who does not conceive of him/herself as extraordinary but instead as an allegory of the many, the people (1991: 8). Cidade de Deus too provides an allegory of the people, but the hundreds of minor protagonists and narrators leads to a different kind of collective subject made of competing and conflictive voices. Testimonio also has a specific political objective of “denunciation” in relationship to official ideology, and acts as a way of “exorcising and setting aright history.” The theoretically complex use of realism also effectively checked the discourse of post-modernism and led to the creation of a new terminology to describe the phenomenon in relationship to other literary forms. “John Beverly called it a post fictional discourse (1989: 11-12), and George Yúdice has correctly placed it in the mode of writing which arms itself against the increasing postmodernist attempts to abolish representational discourse for a ludic discourse… Barbara Harlow has characterized it as ‘Resistance Literature’” (Gugelberger, 1991, 10-11). In the context of Cidade de Deus, a similar move can be seen in João Cesar de Castro Rocha’s argument for the use of the term “aesthetics of marginality,” to define what he perceived of as an emerging genre.

The criticism of Cidade de Deus can be summarized in two trends. The dominant trend essentially follows the paths laid by Roberto Schwarz’s pioneering essay.⁴ Schwarz argued that Cidade de Deus is an “event” in Brazilian literature that marked the arrival of previously excluded subjects from literature. The other trend, sustained by Wilson Bueno, Germana Sousa and Luis Felipe Miguel, claims that that the novel is clumsy in its narrational styles. In addition, Miguel complains that it is only Schwartz’s bullying essay that convinced critics and popular audiences of the novel’s value. Interestingly, both trends suggest that Lins is the voice of the favela and that Cidade de Deus is something more than a novel. His origin as a favela resident and his anthropological research with Alba Zaluar form a contextual frame that establishes the dual credentials of his critiques of the structure of the favela. As confirmation of this hypothesis, Lins frequently appeared in the press as a public intellectual representing the favela in numerous contexts. The confusion over the “real” and artistic elements in the novel further extended into Lins’s life after the success of the film unleashed a lawsuit by angry residents who claimed that Lins misrepresented their stories when he chose to maintain their real names.

In fact, many critics of Cidade de Deus were influenced by their desire to find a realer truth reserved for the favela resident and ignored the novel’s nagging doubt as to the power of language to correct injustices. Elzbieta Sklodowska has suggested that testimonio criticism’s desire to celebrate the act of subaltern speech was perhaps influenced by “testimonio-seeing” eyes that overlooked literary effect in favor of naive notions of authenticity and truth. She writes, “if definitions of testimonio are indeed symptomatic of what we look for when we read with testimonio-seeing eyes, this brief re-reading of The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave tells us also what we tend to overlook. Yúdice, Beverly, and Zimmerman find testimonio’s authenticity in the voice of the victim, who has the unquestioned power to “summon truth,” “denounce,” “exorcise,” and “set aright.” But they also tend to overcompensate for the internal discord we may find in specific texts, and they direct our attention away from the problematic inscription of the differend. For these critics, the testimonial word that emerges from oppression is perceived as natural, pure, uniquely insightful, and immune to ideological blindness (Sklodowska 1996: 97). In other words, the focus on the act of enunciation in the testimonial overlooks the silences.

As a framework for understanding Cidade de Deus in the context of testimonio, it would be useful to revisit François Lyotard’s notion of the differend. He writes that “in the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the invention of a new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to their profit the quantity of information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to institute idioms which do not exist” (Lyotard 1988: 13, cited in Sklodowska 1996: 97). In response to the uncritical approach towards the use of persuasion and literary license by the editors/transcribers/authors, Elizabeth Burgos Debray and Miguel Barnet, Elzbieta Sklodowska and Doris Sommer have insightfully analyzed the ways in which Burgos-Debray and Barnet’s texts are aesthetically constructed to create a realist discourse of truth that “hides” its rhetorical strategies. In Sklodowska’s analysis of Esteban Montejo’s rhetorical strategies, she reveals an internal system of self-questioning whereby Montejo “inoculates” his story against external critique”(95). Sommer’s essay, “Rigoberta’s Secrets” similarly examines the ways in which rhetorical silences are used to emphasize the power of the speaker to withhold information, thereby feeding the desire to “know” her story on the part of the reader.

The majority of the critics of Cidade de Deus similarly approached the novel with “truth-seeking” eyes that draw attention away from the silences the book theorizes. Just as the emergence of speech by historically silenced subjects is by no means guaranteed and necessitates a reordering of literary priorities, the urgency of poverty and urban violence theoretically frames the novel in terms of speech and its alternative, violence: “speech balks: the bullet talks” (Lins: 11). Lins radicalizes the relationship between enunciation and silence and indicates an understanding of violence as a nonverbal communication that comes to inhabit the space of the differend in favelas like Cidade de Deus. Violence has none of the redemptive qualities of a guerrilla struggle that they have in Menchú’s narratives where there was a clear system of oppression constituted by the landowning elite and the government’s oppression of local indigenous communities through systems of sharecropping, dispossession, relocation, and conscription policies. Rather, in Cidade de Deus, violence substitutes speech, whereby the witnesses and protagonists are helpless to stop the systematic slaughter of the community’s youth. The novel further complicates the ethical stance of the reader by contextualizing the actions of murderers and executioners (both the police and the gangsters) within the hardships endured during childhood and the struggle for survival and dignity.

In her analysis of Lyotard in the context of testimonio literature, Elzbieta Sklowdowska suggests that a number of steps are necessary in order to understand testimonial narrative’s mediation of reality and truth.

Four premises are needed, according to Lyotard, to constitute a phrase universe of testimonial contract as a truth-believing paradigm, First. an addressee – someone not only willing to listen and accept the reality of the referent, but also worthy of being spoken to. Then there is an addressor, a witness who refuses to remain silent. Third, a language capable of signifying the referent. Then there is a “case" or the referent itself that "asks to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away" (Lyotard 1988, 13). The referent, continues Lyotard, may be obliterated if silence results from the denial of one or several of the preceding three instances (14). In other words, testimony takes place only if the reality of a referent is established and in order for this to happen all silent negations must be withdrawn and the authority of the witness, addressee’s competence, and language’s ability to signify must be assured (Sklowdoska 1996: 97.)

Sklodowska highlights the leaps of faith necessary for a relationship of solidarity between reader and speaker to be successful. The relationships outlined by Lyotard suggest a number of links in a chain of knowledge and which include the eyewitness quality of a speaker who has been wronged, a sympathetic addressee willing to listen and who has some power to correct the problem, and the belief that language can communicate reality objectively. As Sklodowska remarks, testimonio also adds another link in the form of the editor who faithfully transmits and shapes the speaker’s story according to aesthetic and literary criteria. The failure of any of these conditions “obliterates” the speaker and transforms them from witnesses into “victims.”

While the urgency of the wrong perpetrated against residents parallels the truth-speaking paradigm, Cidade de Deus calls attention to the failure and breakdown of testimony in other ways. Not only is the narration undermined by irony, the status of the protagonists as criminals erodes their credibility as speaking subjects. If in the classic example of I, Rigoberta Menchú: an Indian Woman in Guatemala, the indigenous Mayans are conscious agents in a political and military struggle for change against a repressive state apparatus, the gangsters in Cidade de Deus occupy a more ambiguous relationship to the state. They are not witnesses but violent agents of a variety of different crimes including armed robbery, rape, and murder. They actively suborn and corrupt the police, and are in turn victimized by corrupt cops and forced to pay bribes to operate their illegal business. Rather, the gangsters in Cidade de Deus lack a political awareness that would allow them to fully understand their subordinate relationship to the city as second-class citizens. In fact, their violent acts are a determined negation of subaltern status in their struggle to be both feared and famous.

Another difference between Cidade de Deus and testimonio literature is the author’s corrosive irony and a nagging doubt about language’s ability to faithfully communicate the truth of an entire community that has been historically stigmatized as the locus of crime. Cidade de Deus stands in direct relationship to Brazilian crime TV programs like Linha Direita and Cidade Alerta as a kind of parodic commentary on the “moral panic created in the press,” and as a way of contextualizing violence beyond the perversity of a few deranged individuals.⁵ Cidade de Deus denounces the historical presentation of a reality preconfigured by hegemonic discourse as marginal, and through this denunciation, it reframes the favela as central. In this way, the novel calls attention to the way language frames truth through its depiction of the news and mass media. On the one hand, the news frames the way Cidade de Deus is understood by the larger city as part of a “crime” problem. However, the news and the mass media are also consumed and interpreted by favela residents, thereby complicating the relationship between the community and the tools used to understand them. This reframing of the media in the novel and film calls attention to the power and the limitations of the media, as well as the potential of fiction as a corrective and denunciatory tool. The author’s use of irony also corrodes the over-dramatized and sensationalistic calls of the press for more repression in the favela.

Rather than a naive presentation of the truth as a call to action, the use of irony as a rhetorical tool in the narrative adds another filter through which truth is understood. The novel claims that truth is always mediated, and what is understood as “truth” in the narrative of the novel, is really the consciousness of the mediative power of language and silence. Unlike testimonio discourse, which posits a witness seeking retribution and a counter discourse that corrects official accounts, Cidade de Deus displaces the locus of truth towards a multiplicity of competing voices locked in a struggle to contest geographic and symbolic space. As testimonio invokes the many through the single story, seamlessly transcribed such that editor and speaker become one, Cidade de Deus too presents the multitude, but corrosively fragments the unitary discourse of a single narrator, discipline or genre capable of describing the totality of the favela.

Finally, Cidade de Deus casts doubt on the readers’ sympathy towards the favela. The novel calls attention to the readers’ fascination with crime by adopting the frame used to stigmatize the favela, and turning it inside out in numerous ways. For example, in the opening pages, the narrator presents numerous children’s games that animate the early years of the government project. Suddenly, in one of the few moments that the narrator addresses the reader, it is to remind him or her that “the subject here is crime. That’s why I am here.” In other words, the narrator has been summoned to talk about crime – not childrens’ games, implying that that is what the reader wants. Lins indeed gives them crime, but presented in unexpected ways.

Cidade de Deus then is an odd mirror of testimonio. Because secrecy and informing are such central security concerns to these gangsters living in semi-clandestine conditions, the notion of testifying in a juridical sense against state injustices loses its transparency amidst the criminal practices of numerous individuals and groups within the favela. Rather, to return to Lugones’s notion of “thickness,” the opaque relation to truth is emphasized in the novel through the ironic oscillation between narrational registers as well as in the parody of genres and discourses. As Roberto Schwarz suggested at the novel’s publication, Lins’s novel rearticulates anthropology, social realism and naturalism, the historical novel, the press, samba, and police discourses in “a discursive web that has no final word; and that operates, in turn, as an element in a wider mystery, formed by the huge business of crime, with its amorphous boundaries, and by the laws of motion and contemporary society – on whose effective shape such explanations have nothing to report” (Schwarz: 2005:10).

Cidade de Deus is both a historical document and a subversion of popular entertainment. First, the novel documents the evolution of a government project on the west side of Rio de Janeiro from the perspective of its gangsters and youth in a tradition of “social inquiry” (Schwarz: 2005: 9). Featuring hundreds of protagonists, the novel portrays a dense network of informal economic practices ranging from street vending to armed robbery. Following a pattern developed by naturalism and social realism in Brazil, the novel diverges from these approaches through its anthropophagic approach to popular language, the mass media, and academic discourse. The novel also works on a register of suspense that makes it a page-turner, while maintaining an unconventional approach to the plot development. The gangsters indeed die as the reader fears, but “before the projected climax, from adventitious hands, for half-forgotten reasons” (Schwarz: 2005:11).

The novel is structurally divided into three sections that historically mark the favela: the 1960’s, the early 1970’s, and the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Each period corresponds to a single gangster that forms the locus of the action despite the participation of hundreds of discrete characters. The first section relates the establishment of the project as a moment of idyllic hope for hundreds of working class black and northeastern families who had been displaced by drought, floods, and arson. At its foundation, Rio de Janeiro’s natural beauty frames the government project and animates the children’s games, the gangsters daring surprise hold-ups, and the cultural traditions that the residents bring with them to their new neighborhood. The second section, “A Historia de Bené,” introduces the theme of drug trafficking as Bené and his partner Zé Pequeno take over the local drug trade. This section documents the consolidation of their power as they settle old scores and take over another favela with the help of soldiers from the local barracks. The operations of the drug trade are explained and documented as the new standard for gangsters who had historically survived through armed robbery. The final section, “A Historia de Zé Pequeno,” documents the transformation of the government project into a “neo-favela.” The consolidation of military and economic power leads to a protracted war between neighboring gangs. The rape of Mané Galinha’s girlfriend by Zé Pequeno unleashes the conflict, but soon the causes of the war are forgotten as the main protagonists die, are arrested, or are forced into hiding and their lieutenants take over the management of the operations.

Following through on some of the many directions that Roberto Schwarz indicated in his original review, Wellington Augusto da Silva has thoroughly analyzed the use of the narrator in the novel to create a range of distances and registers through which the reader identifies with the protagonists. The novel accomplishes the shift in the readers’ perspective through the oscillation between a “malandro narrator,” seen in the indirect free speech of the gangsters and a “refined narrator,” seen in the indirect discourse used in the descriptions. As Silva has demonstrated concisely, the novel achieves a powerful alienation effect through the tension in the narration between refined and street discourse. Cinematically, the internal monologues of the gangsters act like a close-up or voice-over, while the “refined” and lyrical descriptions by a more traditional third person omniscient narrator act like pans to reveal the interconnections between the characters and the overlapping spheres of influence. Each of these techniques introduces critical distance, as the indirect free speech of the gangsters is parodied to reveal particularly ridiculous beliefs, or as the indirect speech parodies anthropological protocols or the division of labor into legal and illegal activities, when the majority of residents participate in the informal economy.

Lins uses the dynamic tension between narrational styles to reveal the gangsters’ incipient racial and class-consciousness, as well as to critique the gangsters’ misogynist attitudes. These incipient and variable layers of consciousness reproduce what Raymond Williams refers to as the division between “official” and “practical consciousness.” As Williams writes,

Practical consciousness is almost always different from official consciousness, and this is not only a matter of relative freedom or control. For practical consciousness is what is actually lived, and not only what is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alternative to the received and profound fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined are then exceptionally complex. (130-131)

The novel employs a number of interesting strategies to document the “practical consciousness” of the gangsters and favela youth. The malandro narrators place the reader in the shoes of the gangsters, often speaking in their words, and permitting the reader a window into their thoughts. The refined narrators create ironic distance and historical context, and parody the “official consciousness,” the press, anthropology, crime fiction, westerns, and other mass media texts. In fact, if testimonio builds up its narrators into truth speakers, Cidade de Deus actively casts doubt on its narrators’ ability to perceive the world beyond their subjective experience.

Silva also notes the importance of the character Busca-Pé as an internal narrator who historically frames the first two sections of the novel. His failure in straight jobs and in crime affirms his choice of photography in a doubling of the author’s own artistic choices. Busca-Pé’s disappearance in the final third of the novel indicates the irony through which the author self-reflexively views the potential of art to redeem favela youth in the systemic proliferation of violence. Just as violence sensationally rivets TV viewers, it forms the underlying logic of the novel that determines the focus of the narration. In fact, in one of the only times the narrator addresses the reader, the narrator ends a long digression about Busca-Pé’s childhood games in the forest and rivers surrounding Cidade de Deus by reminding the reader of their joint purpose: “the subject here is crime – that’s why I’m here.” The narrator’s interjection can be interpreted as a momentary flash into another relationship between the reader and the text. Like an anthropological or police informant, the narrator is summoned to reveal the favela to the reader. Just as TV viewers watch sensationalist press, the novel too fulfills this function of stimulating the audience by partially confirming their voyeuristic desire to read violence and crime. Because of the complex relationship between reader and narrators, many critics were falsely cued into a contextual reading of the novel that saw it as the emergence of an unmitigated favela voice, forgetting that Busca-Pé’s choice is ironically framed in the novel as a digression from the focus of violence. This choice indicates the author’s doubt at the limitations of literature/photography to effect change and deter urban violence.

The author’s doubt as to the power of art is inverted by an enthusiastic critical reception that elevates Paulo Lins to the triumphant status of an emblem of the favela. Critically, there is a general acceptance that the novel speaks a reality which had until then been denied about the Brazilian ghetto. This course would be followed by proponents and opponents of the novel and would soon frame Lins as an organic intellectual in affairs relating to the favela and urban violence. According to Schwarz, Cidade de Deus represents the fictionalization of Alba Zaluar’s study, “from the perspective of the objects of study – and (without promoting any political illusions) with a corresponding activation of a different class’s point of view” (Schwarz, 2001: 109). Rocha echoes this perspective when he suggests: “an important point to remember is the complexity and ambiguity of the narrator [of Cidade de Deus], who does not convey a particular viewpoint, but rather tries to embody the many layers, which comprise the fabric of the shantytown itself. Lins’s text is not the expression of his particular voice, but rather the articulation of a social stratum, which implicates Brazilian society as a whole” (62).

The link between anthropology and literature is often brought to the fore in the criticism of the novel. Lacerda writes that “perhaps this book is the very first ethnographic novel of Brazilian literature” (Lacerda. Trans. A.L.). Jagaribe also suggests that the dual role of former resident and researcher was a truly novel situation in Brazilian literature. “As Zaluar’s research assistant and as a resident of the favela, Lins acquired a dual role as anthropological researcher-informant and as a community member. Both the legitimacy of his authorship and the subject matter of a new, radically violent drug culture within the favela offered middle-class readers an insider’s view of an unknown terrain”(333). Beatriz Resende also champions this approach when she suggests that a new current of literature is emerging in Brazil that would speak from the perspective “of the excluded.” As opposed to earlier approaches such as Clarice Lispector’s Hora da Estrela, that poeticized poverty, “what seems new is that in literature, the poor now appears not only as a socio-economic condition, but as a subjectivity, an alternative position to be revindicated (Resende: 29. Trans. A.L.). In Resende’s opinion, Cidade de Deus is the paradigmatic example of this new current: “the strongest expression of what it is to formulate one’s own discourse, without external mediators in our recent cultural production. And the story of poverty, created from ‘within,’ emerges in a new form, much different from the one created by ‘realist’ narrators and their powerful omniscient voices, sure of themselves and neutral” (Resende: 33. Trans. A.L. Italics hers).

The excitement generated by the emergence of a subaltern voice in Brazilian literature puzzled some critics. Luis Felipe Miguel, for instance, claims that it was only its reception as the voice of the favela that accounted for its critical success – despite its formal flaws.

For someone with Paulo Lins’s background, who is not an innate member of the cultural elite, the rise to literary success is extremely difficult. But there is always the possibility to invert the parameters, presenting as an advantage what was once a handicap. And that is what the author of Cidade de Deus does. As a favela resident, he would have access to a realer reality, from which middle class intellectuals have been barred… Paulo Lins does not want, however, to be read as a deposition about the favela. He wants to be a novelist, not a Carolina Menina de Jesus in pants… For that reason, he mixes the codes of the literary and the ‘authentic.’ (Miguel 8. Trans. A.L. Italics his).

In Miguel’s opinion, Paulo Lins’s success is the result of bad faith: namely, his ability to invert the rules of the game by trading on his origins for critical recognition. His naive desire to become a novelist is expressed through his mixture of literary references and street slang. This condescending approach to the novel exclusively attributes Cidade de Deus’s almost instant success to Roberto Schwarz’s glowing essay. He sardonically remarks, “by investing his prestige, in the way that he did, in a work with so many defects and that so obviously deviates from the standard of good taste, Roberto Schwarz shows his influence” (8. Trans. A.L.). Germana Sousa also takes this direction in her critique of the novel when she suggests that Lins’s lyrical pretensions were falsely understood as the legitimate voice of the favela. She sarcastically remarks,

The master of the voice, the one who juggles erudite discourse, who tries to poeticize grammar – “kill… a verb requiring a bloody object’ — is the suspect/subject Paulo Lins, resident of Cidade de Deus, voice of the periphery who makes himself heard in the media. And that is the reason the novel justifies itself and finds its place – as the spokesperson for this pain. Now, we simply need to discuss the authenticity of the voice. Where, for example, are the other components of this complex web of relationships from the favela? Paulo Maluco, as he was called by his friends, becomes a writer, but gives little voice to the working class and women (2 Trans. A.L. Italics mine).

In the italicized examples above, Sousa’s sarcastic critique implies that the “dono da voz” that “tries,” and fails, to poeticize grammar is the “the subject,” Paulo Lins. “Sujeito,” which can be translated into “subject” as well as “suspect” doubles with its meaning in Portuguese police jargon, often referring to criminals. The use of the reflexive to indicate that the author “se faz ouvir” and that the novel “se justifica” also removes the agency from both and rather situates the novel in a passive relationship with the literary establishment rather than as an intervention in literary theory. The condescension is paralleled through Sousa’s reference to Paulo Maluco, Lins’s nickname and poetic pen name, who “vira escritor,” as though in a kind of lottery.

In the context of Wellington Augusto da Silva and Lívia Lémos Duarte’s analysis of the innovational use of narration, Sousa and Miguel’s condescending critique of Lins’s use of indirect free speech in the narration as an accidental flaw can be summarily discarded. The often times jarring mix of lyricism and street slang is in fact one of the main innovations of the novel alongside its pastiche of literary and extra-literary references and parodies. Nevertheless, Sousa and Miguel rightfully question the triumphant reception of Lins as an “authentic” voice of the favela.

This question of “authenticity” is one of the most riveting points of contact with testimonio literature. Doris Sommers and Elzbieta Sklowdoska have insightfully addressed this question with regard to testimonio collaboration and the literary and rhetorical techniques that form the basis of the book’s “reality effects.”⁶ Yet, with Cidade de Deus, a book that purports to be a novel (on the cover), the notion of authenticity reemerges uncritically. As mentioned earlier, the notion of the book’s authenticity is based on Lins’s own prior experience as a resident and the dozens of interviews Lins conducted as a research assistant to anthropologist, Alba Zaluar. This leads to a kind of doubling of Lins’s role as author: on the one hand, he is an eyewitness; on the other hand, he is the editor and compiler of the many interviews, which he synthesizes in the novel. Obviously, his experience interviewing gangsters for anthropologist Alba Zaluar informs the novel in ways similar to testimonial discourse and makes it a kind of historical document. Yet, the novel exceeds and contests the ability of anthropological description to document “practical consciousness.”

The breakdown of the anthropological paradigm can be seen in Alba Zaluar’s reflections on her project with Paulo Lins in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. In her account, there is an erosion of the anthropological model that she employs, due to the realization of the insurmountable chasm between herself and her subjects, and which necessitated her utilization of Lins and other assistants to act as her prostheses, cultural guides, interpreters, and informants.

In the second [series of interviews], completed in the last years of the decade, the barriers were so strong that the facts could no longer be understood and I was faced with lies (Zaluar: 1992). I returned here, and there, I left research assistants… I dodged the lies, but the passage between here and there was restricted to the ear that listened to the recordings of the interviews made by another, or to the eye that read the texts of others (Zaluar 2004: 11. Trans. A.L.).

Zaluar’s description of her role as an anthropologist divorced from her objects of study by an incommunicable gulf becomes one of compiler, mediator, and translator. Through the prostheses of her assistants, Zaluar is able to ask questions, probe answers, without revealing her irreducible difference from the subjects being interviewed. She describes difference in geographical terms: in the “here” and “there” which depend on the absoluteness of difference. The anthropologist dodges the “lies” through these prostheses, tricking her subjects into revealing the other truth, the one reserved for other young black men from the ghetto, as opposed to the lie which is reserved for the white, middle-class woman anthropologist.

The thorniness of Zaluar’s dilemma is located in the obscurity which separates these two locations so far from Gilberto Freyre’s vision of a unified Brazil⁷ – where combinations of power, race, gender, class and legal distinctions determine which side is which and that complicate a traditional anthropological approach through the lens of culture. Rather, she imagines a new role for the anthropologist in this post-Freyrean universe: as a mediator able to break down discriminatory stereotypes and translate opposing positions that erase one another and that feed hatred and resentment.

After the first interviews in which obstacles created a discourse addressed to someone from the outside, from superior race and class, of the opposite sex, that is, me, but also in a lying discourse, since in it, the relationship between the speaker and the act of speech was not sincere. This became clear in the last interview I did with a boy who told me that he had not committed any of the crimes of which he was accused by the neighborhood and the police, which made me believe that I was faced with excellent material to denounce the injustice present in our institutions. As always, in this second interview, I was accompanied by assistants; young university students who were residents of the area and who had known some of the gangsters since they were kids. When we left, and I expressed my enthusiasm over the interview, one of my assistants said: “but he was lying the whole time!” From then on, the hermeneutics of distrust in relation to the interviews we had already completed was so great that I was simply prohibited from using any of the information in them and concluded that, given the research conditions surrounding the targets of extreme and continuous repression, associated with illegal practices that must remain secret in order to maintain material and symbolic privileges, the communication with the researcher from the outside was seriously damaged. Later, from one of my assistants who lived there, I discovered that I had also almost been raped in one of the visits to the house of a young man with whom I thought I had made friends in the first stage of the research (Zaluar 2004: 11 – 12. Trans. A.L.).

Zaluar’s attempt at a political alliance between the misguided captains of Cidade de Deus stumbles across other less convenient desires: those of criminals determined to utilize discourse to advocate for themselves on their own terms – and which Zaluar is able to identify through the translation of Lins and her other “assistants” as lies. A great interview is revealed as fiction by a native interpreter, transforming an attempt at epic discourse into one of comedic failure. The interviewer becomes a puppet of her object, a naive advocate, taken in by a bunch of lies, intended to shield the interviewee from potential persecution. In addition, we have the complete reversal of the anthropological paradigm, something akin to the anthropophagic moment in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (1971) when the anthropologist who has gone native is eaten at the end of the film. Here, Zaluar is informed retrospectively of her vulnerability to rape by her interviewees.

These assistants are then more than assistants. In addition to administering structured and unstructured interviews with street and prison gangs, they also act as witnesses of the veracity or mendacity of the interviewees’ statements. Despite Zaluar’s obfuscation of the identities of these important collaborators in her scholarly work, it is quite clear from Zaluar’s statements the absolutely fundamental role of these assistants as collaborators, and vice versa. There are a number of interesting points of contact between Zaluar and Lins’s respective projects that relate to questions of adaptation, translation and anonymity. In Zaluar’s project, the interviews that form the basis of her work are alimented by a statistical analysis, translated into a terminology foreign to its emergence, and applied to a discussion of larger issues of violence, criminality, and security. With Cidade de Deus, as well as Paulo Lins’s later work in film and TV, there is a shift to the literary and cinematic even when an anthropological and sociological framework is retained within the structure of the narrative. While Zaluar denies naming even her assistants, cloaking them as well as her subjects under the guise of anthropological anonymity of informants, Lins employs the real identities of subjects like Zé Pequeno, who are historic local figures, as well as the dozens of secondary characters that form the tableaux vivant of Cidade de Deus.

Part of the anthropological dilemma that Cidade de Deus poses involves the depiction of a fragmented and plural notion of citizenship in relation to the lived experience of historical race and class inequality. Retrospectively, Lins evokes the dissident political ramifications of the novel in ways that refer back to Bahktin’s notion of the political function of the novel.

My commitment as a writer was to look for the imaginary of those who were socially segregated. And for the sake of verisimilitude, it was to call attention to the appalling inequities of income distribution in Brazil, to spur the creation of forums about racism, to reprove the abandonment of aged people, to rebuke the government’s continuous disregard of children, pervasive violence, police arbitrariness and corruption, and to challenge the lack of public, social and cultural policies (Lins: 2005: 129).

Despite his idealism, Lins often expresses doubt over the vehicle of literature to affect change and the class composition of his potential audience. The intended favela audience is illiterate and the middle class audience consumes the novel without understanding it. In a joint interview with the author Ferréz, Lins claims “our books are published and nothing will come of it. Maybe one or two read them. But there are millions that don’t even read the newspaper. They only watch TV, which is commercial (Paiva: 2000. Trans. A.L.).

Minimizing the novel’s status as a best-seller, Lins instead focuses on the absence of favela readers, who are only exposed to commercial TV. In other interviews, he compares cinema and literature as vehicles for reaching a favela audience. In response to the question, “Cancino – and do you think that favela residents will go see the film, Cidade de Deus? Lins – the film, yes. Film, even with its limited reach, has more than literature. No one bothered to read the book” (Cancino. Trans. A.L.). Cidade de Deus residents expressed confusion during the writing of the novel as well, often imagining that Lins was working on a film. “I had a film club there. And because of that, when I started interviewing the guys, the real gangsters, for the book, they would invariably say: ‘You’re going to make a great film!’ No one saw the book when they spoke with me, just a film” (Lins and Buarque de Holanda. Trans. A.L.). In fact, the use of real names of residents and historical figures from Cidade de Deus is a key element of the confusing blurring of fact and fiction. For example, prior to the lawsuit, there is a kind of festive attitude to Lins’s role as favela griot. In an interview shortly after the publication of the novel, Lins remarks “the main character of my book ended up being poverty, the favela,” while his interviewer, Paulo Roberto Pires, narrates that Lins is “constantly being interrupted by acquaintances, and speaking to all about the long anticipated book of which they are the protagonists" (Pires, Trans. A.L.).

The film adaptation of the novel acted as a watershed that drastically changed Lins in relationship to the community of Cidade de Deus. Ironically confirming Lins’s rumination that literature had almost no impact in the favela, a lawsuit was filed by residents after the success of the film. Alba Zaluar for example, was among the numerous critics of the veracity of the film. She affirms that, "in my research, I never saw school children with a gun. And it wasn’t Zé Pequeno who killed all those people in the motel. It was another one we interviewed" (Folha 1/13/2003. Trans. A.L.). Dona Bá claimed that the use of her name in the novel was a form of defamation. A member of the lawsuit against Lins, she declares, "I found nine pages saying I was a prostitute and the manager of a brothel. I’ve done many things wrong, but I’ve never been a prostitute" (Folha 1/13/2003. Trans. A.L.). Given the title of the first edition of the novel, Cidade de Deus, Romance (novel), it is odd that Lins would have to explain the difference between novel and reality: “I wrote a narrative based on reality. But it is not reality” (Folha 1/13/2003. Trans. A.L.). The case was ultimately dismissed in 2005 on the grounds that Lins’s novel was obviously a work of fiction and not a biography, and that the distinguishing characteristics of the character, “Bá,” were quite commonplace (Erdelyi).

In retrospect, Lins reminisced about the causes of the lawsuit and attributed them to his own naïveté. He claimed,

There were some names that I put that were true. But they weren’t those people. I was in a very silly situation. I love books and wanted the community to read. So, this guy comes up and said, ‘OK Paulo Lins, you’re going to write a book, but no one reads here.’ ‘And what if I put some of their names in it?’ and he answered: ‘yea, put some of their names in it.’ I said: ‘but its not that person, I created a character.’ ‘Put the names, put the names, so that they read it.’ The guy is a reader, a writer, a lawyer, believing that people would read it… I don’t want people to just read Cidade de Deus, that they only read leftist books, I want them to read Fernando Pessoa, Machado de Assis, Maiakóvsky, Baudelaire, Heidegger… but no one read it, it didn’t get us anything, just the lawsuit (Lins and Amaral et al: 35. Trans. A.L.).

There is a profound ambiguity in Lins’s responses towards his role as cultural ambassador of the favela to the middle classes. In many ways, Lins’s interviews and his malandro narrator approaches Paul Gilroy’s redeployment of W.E.B. Dubois’ notion of “double consciousness.” As Gilroy puts it, “striving to be both European and black requires some specific forms of double consciousness… where racist, nationalist, or ethnically absolutist discourse orchestrate political relationships so that these identities appear mutually exclusive, occupying the space between them or trying to demonstrate their continuity has been viewed as a provocative and even oppositional act of political subordination”(1). Dubois saw this as the emergence of Black Americans as a “world-historic” people: “the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in the American world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Dubois: 3, cited in Gilroy: 134). Given the novel’s frequent portraits of gangsters who are conscious of racial and class discrimination directed against them, their criminal activities are often reframed as vengeance in a class and race war. In numerous provocative interviews, Lins challenged the relationship between the favela and the larger city in terms of the causalities suffered by the favela and exemplified by his mother’s death.

Marina Amaral – But do you think that Marcinho VP is a potential revolutionary with that political performance of his or do you think it is all a lie?

Paulo Lins – No. Marcinho is my friend.

Marina Amaral – Do you think that movement of his was real?

Paulo Lins – I think so. Marcinho VP is a person who spoke of society with a very great clarity, and there are a lot of angry people out there. There was some shooting just now at two hotels in Gloria and at the Meridien, and I saw an interview with the head of a hotel chain saying that Rio de Janeiro had lost 30 million. Where was this money going? To the ones shooting? To the favela residents? Not likely, therefore, my friend, the man/black man is indignant and outraged and I think that it is justifiable to rob and kidnap, the conditions in which people live, hunger justifies the shots…

Ferréz – Do you think it is justifiable to rob the rich?

Paulo Lins – I think so.

Natalia Viana – And kill?

Paulo Lins – I think so. I am saying something politically incorrect. The bastards will attack me for this and I know it. And I won’t answer. But that’s the way it is. Go to the public hospital! My mom died for lack of medical attention, she went to the hospital and made an appointment for one or two years later and died of a heart attack. They gave those generic pills to her in two minutes and sent her home. There is no medical care, there is no food, there is no dignity whatsoever, and there are no houses, there is nothing.

Natalia Viana – And weren’t you angry? Did you think about killing?

Paulo Lins – I did. I wrote Cidade de Deus. (Lins, Amaral, et al.: 34 Trans. A.L. Italics mine).

In the above interview, Lins defends armed robbery and murder on the part of the poor as legitimate survival strategies in the context of absolute poverty, yet maintains his own choice of using literature as a vehicle of change, despite the death of his mother. Lins’s strategy ironically doubles that of the narration in Cidade de Deus, oscillating between a refined and a malandro discourse. Responding to a barbed question referring to Marcinho VP, the protagonist of numerous police operations, gang wars, and also of the novel Abusado, O Dono do Morro by Caco Barcellos, Lins completely changes the tone of the question by first stating that he is Marcinho’s friend.⁸ The response checks the tone of the question, making it clear that Lins won’t speak badly of a friend, and then continues to explain the positive contributions of Marcinho VP in the conceptualization of Rio de Janeiro’s drug wars in a context of desperate poverty. The rhetorical question, “para onde ia esse dinheiro?” is answered in a twist towards Rio’s malandro street slang and the provocative assertion that armed robbery and murder are legitimate tactics in a class and race war, “nego está revoltado, e acho que é de direito o sujeito pegar e seqüestrar, a situação que o sujeito vive, que passa fome, é de direito o cara dar tiro.” Finally, in another reversal, Lins refers back to his mother’s death as a way of justifying murder and kidnapping as the poor’s response to prior injustice.

Paulo Lins’s provocative literary and rhetorical strategies have successfully transformed Lins into a complex representative of the favela. Since the publication of the novel, Lins has worked on numerous government literacy projects, co-directed the award-winning music video clip, A Minha Alma, by the Hip-Hop Reggae fusion group O Rappa, and has co-directed two episodes of the award-winning TV series, Cidade dos Homens. He appears in the press as a dissenting and critical voice towards government repression in favelas, and even advised Cacá Diegues unfortunate remake of Orféu. His artistic choices since the publication of Cidade de Deus have confirmed Lins’s view as to the limitations of literature as a vehicle for a broader audience that would include the favela. Thus, Cidade de Deus addresses the central dilemma at the heart of the testimonio narrative: its readership. It is for this reason that the narrative of Cidade de Deus makes such effective use of suspense and the literary adaptation of cinematic techniques in a naive attempt to engage a broader audience that is only semi-literate even in audio-visual technology.

To conclude, Cidade de Deus and testimonio literature share numerous points of contact. First of all, these texts have focused national and international attention on the relationship between poverty, unemployment, and systemic violence of which, the poor are the primary victims. Second, these texts employ a realist discourse of truth and authenticity that are manifested through literary and rhetorical strategies. Finally, the criticism of these texts has understood them contextually and politically as the emergence of unmitigated subaltern voices in the literary sphere.

Despite these parallels, Cidade de Deus exceeds the already uncertain contours of testimonio through its use of pastiche, irony, and an unconventional approach to the dramatic suspense of popular entertainment in ways that make it post-testimonial. These techniques have the effect of undermining a unitary discourse that could speak for the favela and rather point to an erosion of the potential for witnessing in cases of chronic and systemic violence and poverty. Part of this is due to the position of the protagonists in Cidade de Deus and the necessity of creating empathy between the reader and extremely violent subjects. Just as Zaluar confronts the “lies” of the ghetto, so too Cidade de Deus corrodes its own discourses, calling attention to the inability to understand the “practical consciousness” that guides the actions of Cidade de Deus’s residents. Like the “practical consciousness” of the gangsters, Cidade de Deus calls attention to and elaborates Lyotard’s notion of the differend in such a way that violence is reconceptualized as a form of nonverbal speech.

Cidade de Deus’s floating narrator constantly displaces and shifts the relationship between the reader and the text across disciplines and genres. Like the uncanny moment when the eight year old Filé com Fritas boasts, “’look man, I smoke, I snort coke, I bin beggin’ since I was a baby, I’ve washed car windows, shined shoes, killed, stolen… I’m not a kid. I’m a man!’”(Lins 2006: 334), the reader and the narrator are only partial allies, consumed by a logic of mistrust that places the reader simultaneously in the shoes of the victims and the assailants. The masterful quality of the narrative lies in its ability to incite the desire of the reader to understand crime from the perspective of the criminals, thereby denying his or her own position as a potential victim of crime. The hermeneutics of suspicion that the novel encrypts between reader and narrator is paralleled in Lins’s interviews where he provocatively reframes violence in terms of desperate poverty and class warfare, even to the point of justifying kidnapping and murder.

Lins’s complex rhetorical and literary strategies betray his skepticism over the possibility of a testimonial contract in a context where the favela is consistently stigmatized. The solidarity necessary for such a contract to take place and for victims to become “witnesses” would require a complete re-evaluation of criminality and poverty. Lins’s statements constitute a challenge to the reader to confront his or her own prejudices about the favela. For instance, Rigoberta Menchú’s story hinges on the readers’ positive vision of indigenous Mayans. While Elizabeth Burgos-Debray minimizes differences between her and Rigoberta Menchú’s respective positions and emphasizes the equivalence of Rigoberta Menchú’s story with other Mayans, Cidade de Deus calls attention to race and class difference through the multiplication of varying forms of practical consciousness that simultaneously implicate the reader in uncomfortable and pleasurable ways.

Another point of failure in Lyotard’s contract occurs on the level of the transmission of truth through language. Just as Zaluar is unable to distinguish truth from lies, language ceases to be a neutral referent, but interacts with gender, class, race and power. Cidade de Deus rehearses this on numerous levels, in each case revealing a limitation of each discourse it employs in an elaborate and subtle parody. In this way, Cidade de Deus is far more self-reflexive about the limitations and potential of discourse to convince or effect change than testimonio narrative. It actively casts doubt on its own discourses of “truth” and questions the ability of any academic discipline or artistic medium to fully do justice to a representation of the favela.

To end, I would like to question the relationship between testimonio and Cidade de Deus as messianic and utopian texts. In this regard, Rigoberta Menchú’s work as a peasant union organizer and liberation theologist forms the basis for her testimony. The text itself becomes another tool in her fight for social justice. Esteban Montejo too must be understood in the context of post-revolutionary Cuba where an ex-slave could now speak and be celebrated by the post-revolutionary literary establishment. Cidade de Deus occupies a much different place with regard to popular movements. While it could be said that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Lula’s presidential victory was accomplished through a cultural shift that valued investment in education and poverty eradication, goals that Lins shares, the novel’s publication in 1997 briefly punctuated an escalating war between paramilitary self defense groups, two major criminal gangs and prison syndicates, and official state forces. Like MV Bill’s song “Traficando Informação,” Cidade de Deus doesn’t present the reader with transparent or noble heroes. The world is just too complicated for nobility or heroism. Rather the gangsters struggle against a system designed to destroy them, often choosing perverse and cruel paths. The chaotic gunfire effectively pulverizes a notion of unitary discourse, particularly due to the behind the scenes collaborations and alliances between the above groups. It is therefore essentially a distopian universe that is characterized by apocalyptic violence, with a minor current of utopian hope, expressed in the children’s games, in the rich reservoir of Afro-Brazilian culture, and in the character of Busca-Pé. This tension between different poles can be seen in the final pages of the novel. After Zé Pequeno’s death in a singularly anti-climatic scene, the novel presents an image of hope in the resiliency of a child’s kite flying.

Notes

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