To Shake the Hand of Happiness: Luiz Ruffato's Inferno Provisório

Abstract

To Shake the Hand of Happiness:Luiz Ruffato's Inferno Provisório Marguerite Itamar Harrison To shake the hand of happiness, as Seu Sebastião's family does at the beginning of "O Ataque," is always a short-lived accomplishment in Luiz Ruffato's hellish world. In Inferno Provisório, the sense of marginality, of living life on the periphery, derives from the author's decision to register in panoramic, five-volume form a raw and heart-rending history of the working class in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century. Correspondingly, his narrative lens captures factory workers who strive for upward mobility and get entangled in consumerist cravings. Yet he also portrays the lowly lower classes, the truly down and out: the unemployed, the sick, the unstable, the suicidal, the insignificant, misfits living in makeshift quarters, those excluded, exploited and discarded by society. This essay addresses this extremely marginalized sector of the populace in Ruffato's Inferno Provisório. I focus in particular on several stories on its third segment, Vista parcial da noite, set in the 1960s and 70s during the Brazilian dictatorship. Luiz Ruffato's attention to marginality paradoxically takes aim at the center, at that which is most sacrosanct in the stories Brazil tells about itself: the nation and the family. He uses fiction to point to Brazilian society's pervasive flaws, mostly by way of intimate vignettes of families on the outer fringes. In Marilena Chaui's "Comemorar?" from Brazil: Mito fundador e sociedade autoritária (89-95), she aptly draws correlations between Brazil's colonial framework and its post-colonial makeup as an authoritarian society, linking public and private spheres. In Chaui's mapping of Brazil's authoritarian profile, she stresses an overall societal arc within which political totalitarianism manifests itself (90). Within what Chaui terms "social authoritarianism," inequalities abound, rooted in a colonial pattern of socioeconomic imbalance. With a landholding master in command through the privilege and power of racial, gender and class "superiority," "naturally" inferior beings such as women, [End Page 377] blacks, indigenous peoples, and immigrants become unremittingly relegated to the role of servitude (92). In similar fashion, Luiz Ruffato's fiction addresses these same structural parallels in Brazil's society: its hierarchical, top-down sociopolitical composition and the economic ramifications that historically and unremittingly polarize the country into "haves" and "have-nots." Within the family, this draconian configuration forces the disenfranchised into desperate, dog-eatdog situations that often reproduce the same oppressive model on an intimate scale. In Inferno Provisório, therefore, to fight for legitimacy or entitlement is an uphill battle that pits subaltern individuals–even family members or bosom buddies–against each other, in a cutthroat race for survival that often ends in defeat. Ruffato's work thus portrays alienated human beings, cut off from citizenship and lineage. Violent mechanisms of exclusion In Chapter One of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature (23-71), scholar Leila Lehnen expertly examines Inferno Provisório in light of the quest for citizenship, or civic entitlement, many times seemingly within reach, yet rarely attainable. According to Lehnen, the stories in Vista parcial da noite (originally published by Record in 2006, and to which "O Ataque" belongs) point to an inequitable society that is incapable of incorporating a downtrodden class of individuals into its fold. Within the five-tome set (subsequently published by Companhia das Letras as a single volume in 2016),1 Vista parcial da noite, set in the 1960s and 70s, contains elements of sociopolitical critique grounded in its timeframe. In other words, in keeping with Chaui's analysis, Ruffato's narrative thread in Vista parcial da noite registers a palpable undercurrent of oppression, stemming from several interrelated axes of power: political, of course, in its underlying representation of the dictatorship period, yet also economic, social and familial. Leila Lehnen's analysis confirms these multiple layers of coexistent oppression or, in her words, "modalities of violence" (25), found within both [End Page 378] "internal and external frameworks" (47). According to Lehnen, Ruffato's work points to "violent mechanisms of exclusion that permeate the Brazilian social fabric" (25), which she probes by examining specific stories and characters...