Writers in Aprons

Abstract

In a disconcerting essay written in 1978, Brazilian critic and writer Silviano Santiago addresses the systematic gap between literature and the popular classes, including the so-called populist literature from the 1960s and 1970s, in a country like Brazil where the book persisted as a luxury cultural artifact. Given the forceful editorial pressures, and “economic censorship” (Pellegrini, Despropositos 44) from a fast-expanding book market, Brazilian writers, according to Santiago, felt compelled to cater to the tastes and interests of the leading consuming class of cultural products—namely, the urban bourgeoisie. In other words, regardless of their own aesthetic and political agendas, these writers “spoke to one specific class under the assumption that this class would applaud and bestow deepest meaning through reading, a reading that became a pleasant echo of (self-)revelation and (self-) knowledge” (“Vale quanto pesa” 28).1 Even modernist writers like Graciliano Ramos or Guimaraes Rosa, who managed to expand the national canon with a sort of “literary-ethnographical” fiction (37) or “transcultural narrative” (in Angel Rama’s terms) failed to reconcile literature and a wide multisocial readership. According to Santiago, Brazilian writers did nothing more than expose the problems of the dominant classes and, even worse, were fixated on their own “rear-view mirrors, driving an old jalopy down the paved road with blinders on.