The Hairy Leg Strikes: The Individual Artist and the Brazilian Literature de Cordel

Abstract

ONE SUNDAY MORNING shortly before the nationwide Carnival celebration in 1976, popular poet Jose Francisco Soares happened upon an article in the city of Recife's largest newspaper, The Pernambuco Daily. The account, which dealt with the exploits of an imaginary Hairy Leg (a single, free-standing and decidedly hirsute limb), was the work of a university-educated journalist named Raimundo Carrero. Having heard rumors about the Leg on radio and television, Carrero decided to devote his weekly column, Romance Policial (Fictional Police Blotter), to the terrible creature a joke, purely for fun.1 Soares, who had encountered similar reports, took the journalist's account as indisputable proof of the Leg's appeal. Convinced that the Hairy Leg would generate interest among his own considerably less educated readers, he quickly composed a new version of the monstrous limb's adventures. As Soares had hoped, his story became an immediate bestseller. Spurred both by the Recife-based poet's success and by the growing interest in the rumors among their own customers, a number of poets in neighboring cities began writing their own folhetos or cordel stories about the Hairy Leg.2 This paper examines three of these Hairy Leg tales in an attempt to better understand the interplay between the individual artist and his audience, which makes certain demands on him despite the fact that his is not necessarily a faceto-face performance.3 It also touches on the exchange between the mass media and thefolheto tradition. Educated observers in various countries, and especially in Brazil, have often denounced the mass media as antithetical to folk creation, insisting that it destroys or, at best, imposes a certain sameness upon art forms such as the literatura de cordel.4 I shall show here first through textual analysis, then through cordel authors' own comments, that the folheto news