Arménio Vieira - The author explains in a note that he wanted to give the protagonist a mystery to solve, “that of his own identity.” And so he puts him, amnesic, on an island, locked in a house, filled with books

Arménio Vieira, No Inferno.

Arménio Vieira (b. 1941) was born in Praia and is a Cape Verdean journalist, poet and novelist. He belongs to a generation of Cape Verdean writers who rose to maturity during the 1960s, that is, while the colonial wars that were raging through all the former Portuguese colonies. He also contributed for many Cape Verdean and Portuguese magazines and newspapers. In 2009 he received the Camões Prize, awarded to Portuguese-language writers for their oeuvre. Speaking about the decision, he declared himself happy but surprised given that Cape Verde is not a major country. “It’s small in relation to the immenseness of Brazil, which has hundreds of great writers. And Portugal too. It’d have been too difficult for Cape Verde to grab the award.” Nevertheless he became the first Cape Verdean to receive this honour.  

Although he’s mainly famous for his poetry, we’ll leave it for the final post. Vieira is also a prose writer and has written a novella and a novel. No Inferno was written in 1999. The alluring title captivated me; I’m a sucker for literature that deals with the concept of hell, like The Third Policeman and No Exit. A few years ago I read my first Cape Verdean novel and felt disappointed. I thought that the novel was too conventional. Although I didn’t fall in love with Vieira’s novel, at least I can’t accuse it of conventionality. No Inferno is as post-modern as it gets, it’s so inter-textual it induces nausea and is full of screaming meta-fiction. It’s a novel written by a novelist who thinks the novel is dead, making this a sort of zombie novel. For Vieira, the novel reached its apogee with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and there’s nothing else to do afterwards. To him, the last three greats were Flaubert, Joyce and Borges; “the last of the great fiction writers,” he says apropos of Borges, “preferred not to write novels but to elaborate instead synopses of hypothetical novels and comment them.” Well, saying that the novel is dead will not endear him to me, considering most of my favourite novelists came after dull Joyce, not to mention No Inferno is a trifle compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Vieira certainly has a comical imagination that serves him well when he’s weaving his absurdist poems; but when he attempts to write prose, every line comes unpolished, simplistic and loaded with stock phrases. I’ve seldom read a novel so devoid of aesthetic beauty, so embracing of total linguistic banality and carelessness. It’s like a novel written by a man who never heard of ostranenie, which is horrifying to imagine in a poet. In spite of the repulsion the novel provokes in me, I’ll attempt to explain what it is about.

The author explains in a note that he wanted to give the protagonist a mystery to solve, “that of his own identity.” And so he puts him, amnesic, on an island, locked in a house, filled with books. A mysterious warden explains to him the unusual conditions of release: he must finish a good novel in order to learn his identity and regain his freedom. It’s like a precursor of Old Boy and Lost. But our protagonist opts not to write a novel and instead writes short-stories that jump around from idea to idea, without nexus. And this allows him to shift genres, mock styles and pay lots of homages to past writers. Only towards the end does he reveal his debt to Lawrence Sterne. “Reader, convince yourself once and for all that this fiction is not like the others. It is crazy, it doesn’t make sense. At least I advise you to suspend its reading right now, unless you’ve read from start to finish Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy.” You see, the joke is that the advice comes before the final pages, so it’s too late to stop reading. Ha ha, get it?

I dislike Sterne too.

The novel starts with a prologue where a fan of a poet meets him in Cape Verde, where he’s writing a novel on order for an admirer. “I was astonished: it was hard to believe someone could still give money to poets,” the fan says. But the poet isn’t thrilled because the job is a bore and he’s not a novelist. Next they have a conversation about James Joyce and the death of the novel, and the poet gives the fan the manuscript to read. And I don’t know if the novel the fan is reading is the manuscript, but things get very unhinged next. We start with Leopold Bloom leaving his house to buy livers only to die stabbed in the guts by a butcher after he makes a faux pas at the butcher’s shop. Then Leopold, or someone with that name, wakes up in a room decorated with infernal and demonic motifs. Incidentally, Leopold dreaming where he goes buy livers and dies in some horrible way becomes a sort of recurrent joke in the novel; another time he’s turned into a rat that is devoured by cats. Anyway, Leopold wakes up from his first dream. He’s amnesic and disorientated. He leaves the room and stops being Leopold and becomes Robinson, “for it’s time for the character to change his name.” And because he’s Robinson, he must of course be on an island, from where he can’t get out. He discovers a recorded message telling him that he’s there to write a novel, and if it’s good, he’ll be released and his memory will be returned to him. He also has the option of trying to find the combination to a series of lockers that could grant him freedom, but the recording estimates that that would take forty years. Writing a novel is easier and faster, unless you’re William H. Gass. In order to help him write his novel, “for only readers write,” the mysterious warden has a huge library with a telling selection: The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, the short-stories of Edgar Allen Poe, The Songs of Maldoror, The Book of Job, The Book of Disquiet, Goethe’s Faust, A Season in Hell, The Flowers of Evil, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s The Trial and The Metamorphosis, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Waiting for Godot, The Waste Land, Journey to the End of the Night, 120 Days of Sodom, and more. In other words, books about evil, entrapment, death and hell, in its traditional or metaphorical sense. The author’s cards are showing, though, because he doesn’t list the most obvious one, Sartre’s No Exit. Anxiety of influence?

But the recording doesn’t take into account the fact that Robinson may prefer to stay on the island. “Who did he wish to see? Nobody. Who or what place could he miss? Nobody, nothing.” And he’s taken care of in the house, he has everything he needs. “Could the outside world offer attractive motives that made him want to abandon a house that so far had been his shelter and where he lived in complete tranquillity? Wouldn’t that old mansion be the possible paradise?” But he needs a comparison from the outside world to make up his mind. So he watches the tapes on the island containing the horrors of history and the modern world: wars, drug traffic, sexual exploitation, hunger, epidemics. “Yep, this is enough to evaluate some things. It seems I’m far better here.” But he fears running out of food and energy and dying in that fortified mansion, so he continues to search for a way out. He even worries about running out of toilet paper and wondering if he has the courage to use the books to wipe his ass. Vieira is really making it hard for me to like him.

After making sure there’s no way out, he resigns himself to writing a novel; so he starts reading the library, making a new discovery: he’s read them all and he has memories of them, in fact he knows them all by heart, he just can’t remember anything about his own life. And there’s another problem: he can’t write a novel; instead he writes short-stories that don’t add up to anything. And this is when the novel gets all loopy. There are parodies of many genres and writers. There are allusions to detective novels, Proust, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Kafka, and Coleridge, just to name a few. It mixes prose with poetry and theatre. There are pastiches of The Castle and Hemingway’s “The Killers.” There are also autobiographical allusions to the author’s life, as he explains in the note.

There are certainly other novels with similar structures, for instance Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. This is a novel on the crossroads between Modernism and Post-Modernist: on the one hand it declares that there’s nothing original anymore, things can only be recombined and rewritten, old myths in new ways; that’s why he invokes Joyce and Borges. “That overload of books in his memory, instead of helping him, perhaps harmed him,” the narrator says about the protagonist’s inability to write a novel. Is that why he fails to write it? Are we held prisoners to influence and history, do they stop us from doing anything new? It’s possible to discuss it, but I do not think they do. On the other hand, the novel is full of post-modernism’s irony and self-awareness, worst, there’s a streak of self-congratulation to it that puts me off: at the same time the author decries originality he thinks he’s really making something so radically bizarre and out of the ordinary here, although I don’t think his achievements have a lot more merit than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

There’s a final problem, the biggest one to me: the fact that the author puts explanatory footnotes in every allusion and reference he makes. Now I did not like Lawrence Sterne’s novel a single bit, it’s not my idea of novel, but I’ll say something in its defence: whatever my limitations to appreciate it, at least the good reverend had enough faith in me to let me wonder through that hodgepodge of a novel without help. Vieira, I’m shocked to write it, thinks the reader is so dense he can’t get a reference to The Castle without a footnote telling him The Castle was written by one Franz Kafka. Seriously, are you kidding me? And he doesn’t do this once or twice, there are dozens of such idiotic footnotes, for Robinson Crusoe, for The Trial, for Pierre Menard, for Hemingway. It’s a novel written by a man who’s read a lot and thinks his reader has read nothing. It’s embarrassing, to him.

Fortunately he doesn’t bully novels in his poetry, which is far more interesting too. - storberose.blogspot.com/2014/05/armenio-vieira-writes-zombie-novel.html

 

 

After my unfortunate experience with Arménio Vieira’s novel, No Inferno, it seemed to me that I should at least try his poetry, since the praise he’s earned has come from his poetic career. I’m glad I did because I discovered some very good poems. There are two qualities I liked about them: first of all, they had a cosmopolitan, bookish spirit; of all the poets I’ve read for this project, no one revelled in inter-textuality with more intensity than him. His poems start at Dante and Camões, Rimbaud and Apollinaire, and the surrealists too. And from André Breton’s merry circle of pranksters he obviously inherited irreverence for classicism and stuffy literary authority. Incapable of kneeling in adoration of ancient idols, his references come up like guillotines to cut their targets down to size with gentle mockery. For that reason, no other poet had me laughing as hard like Vieira. As I may have written before, I like a poet that makes me laugh.

I consulted the three books of poetry currently available in Portugal: O Poema, a Viagem, o Sonho; MITOgrafias; and Poemas. Although he received the Camões Prize in 2009, publishers have been slow to promote his work here. Of the three books, MITOgrafias was the most thrilling and whimsical to me, and so I got all the following poems from it.

1

With small matches

You can build a poem.

But beware: the use of glue

Would ruin your poem.

 

Don’t tremble: your heart,

Even more than your hand,

Can betray you. Watch out!

A poem like this is hard.

Without glue and vertical,

It can take an eternity.

 

When it’s concluded,

Doesn’t sign it, it isn’t your poem.

2

When a man dies,

The resulting silence,

Being not of a song

That reaches its end,

Nor of night

Falling over a village

And having nothing to do

With the silence preceding the instant

When the stonemason hammers the stone,

Find its symbol only,

(never its face, its full picture)

In somebody’s mask

Whose hand (contrary to the hammer)

Prefers the muteness

Found in the rope

Given that the trade

Of whoever lowers the coffin

Is owed to fate

(more than to will),

Let’s say that the man

Whose face is veiled

Can do nothing against the word,

Its oath,

Which, solemn and sealed,

Is fulfilled in silence.

3

If ruin is to come,

Let it come by airplane. It’ll be

Just one more, I’m used to it.

In any event, if elephants,

Like redskins, live in reserves,

It’s not my fault,

I didn’t produce the apple

Adam screwed himself with.

As far as I know, I was never in paradise.

When they killed Christ it wasn’t me

The prefect in Rome. Who said

I used napalm in my fights?

Who said I was in France

During the bloody night of the Huguenots?

In 1939-45 I was in diapers

And sucked my finger. At Nuremberg

I wasn’t mentioned, no one gave

Me the rope. Not guilty!

LES DAMES D’ARTAN

It’s them, the shadows.

They were women, a long time ago.

Cool, they came,

Like morning roses.

From carnations they had the colour

Carnations tend to have

When seagulls return.

They were brides offering themselves,

The sweetest of fruits

Between the tongue and the palate.

One after another they came,

Red and sonorous

In their perfumed robes.

 

Look at them now. In black,

Silent, like a puddle,

They used to be rivers.

 

They’re not brides, they sing no more.

It’s them, the shadows.

ANTIPOEM

I know eternity: it’s pure orgasm.

How so, my dear Drummond,

If what follows semen

Are the leftovers of an orange

Cut in half, being that

One of the halves is only rind

Resembling the skin mummies

Tend to have, while the half

That insists in staying round

Is only the half of a geometry

That used to be sweetness and pulp,

Now bitter and more murderous than knife,

Next to which it lies, definitely shrunken,

Since the flies themselves, scared, flee.

EPICS

 

Arma virumque cano… Now let’s

Cut the crap! These verses were written

In the past, when Aeneas and Ulysses,

In little paper ships, pulled out eyes from

The Cyclopes, laughing under Neptune’s

Nose, a king in glasses and cane

Needing Viagra. Ezra Pound,

Cow-boy and poet, wanted to resurrect.

Thinking of whom? It was clear

Not Mussolini. He was a fat little dwarf,

Similar to the ones found in circuses

Amusing the kids. Between a critter

Like that and a man called Achilles

The distance was a league.

Canto l’arme pietose e ‘l capitano…

Let’s cut the crap! We, most

Of the times, are tigers pretending

To be bears. Arms and the heroes…

That was in the past, when the Lusos

Laughed at Bacchus’ expenses, king

Without merit, wine drinker.

READ THE NEWSPAPERS

Next to the place where the

Legend of a pyromaniac god started

Who hurls and vomits laws, there’s the Red

Sea, which isn’t red anymore

Nor blue, for the sea was only blue

When Ulysses heard the song

Of the sirens and stopped being red

When Teach, the pirate,

Gave the Devil the ribbons he

He dressed his beard with It’s an expression,

For the sea, in fact, was never

Blue nor red.

 

APOLLINAIRE AT THE TRENCHES

1

He declared war on the comma. The Kaiser

Declared war on the French.

Russia declared war on I don’t remember

Whom. In 1914-1918 they were all

Fighting. Europe seemed like a mushroom

Plantation, you only saw steel helmets.

Apollinaire said goodbye to Calligrammes

And boarded a train full of recruits.

We don’t know how many commas

Died in the Great War.

Apollinaire didn’t kill any,

He’s the one who died.

                        2

In 1914-18, ladies

Didn’t go to war, they stayed

At home taking care of children.

In that case, why didn’t you ask

Your grandma to loan you

A black dress and a silk

Hat? If death were to kill you

For real, at least you could

Have died without having to kill anyone.

In this pandemonium of comets

And drums it’s normal that you

Were deaf. Even if I shouted,

How would you hear that a silk

Hat is worth a thousand steel

Helmets, that the trenches

Are only good for moles?

BAUDELAIRE

If there’s a bird

In the soul of every poet,

In Baudelaire there were three:

A raven, obviously dark,

A swallow dying of tedium

And an albatross – three

Despairing birds, which one

The most atrocious?

RIMBAUD

 

A butterfly called poetry

Flew like no bird

Had done it. Still stuck in

Its cocoon, it invented

Colours for vowels.

A thousand times illuminated,

A thousand times tormented,

He lost his leg at the age of 37,

He was 19 when he died.

SURREALIST POETS

In fact Rimbaud was a seer:

Voici le temps des assassins.

The guys, that is, Breton,

And the crew went out

And shot at the crowd.

The cops didn’t give a damn,

It was just poetic freedom.

In 68, month of May, De Gaulle

Hit the roof. It was surrealism

De pacotille, it cost three pennies.

And finally a poem about Hell. Obviously the novel No Inferno was no fluke; he clearly likes this topic:

OTHER HELLS

 

Hell, as it is described

In certain books, with terrible

Coloured pictures, nobody

Believes it, clown routines

To amuse folks. Even love

Which was once hell, when Petrarch

And Dante saw Beatriz and Laura in bed

With other guys – if they didn’t,

Then they heard – even lost love,

So close to Paradise after all

While the illusion persisted that a kiss

Is an exorcism capable of scaring

The exterminating angel, even that,

Is an excellent hell for newspapers.

It’s boring like hell, it makes one weep

Sometimes and then it’s thrown out, painless.

There are those who find treasures weeping.

Others see themselves beautiful

Princes even, fairy-tales read asleep.

And yet there serious hells,

Frightening, like the wind, cyclonic,

They don’t fit in books, nobody paints them.

I hope you enjoyed these poems as much as I did. I tried to save the best for last. This is the last post of the Portuguese-Language African Literature Month. Be here tomorrow for the wrap-up post. - storberose.blogspot.com/2014/05/armenio-vieira-has-fun-with-poetry.html