Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Contemporary in Current Brazilian Literature
- 2 Realisms in Question
- 3 A Paper World—Reflections on the Realism of Luiz Ruffato
- 4 Brazilian Literature and the Market
- 5 The Victorious Return of the Self in Contemporary Writing
- 6 Criticism from the Periphery—for Another Misplaced Idea
- 7 The Challenge of the Sensible and the Sublime Revisited
- 8 Farewell to the Contemporary!
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Brazilian Literature and the Market
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Contemporary in Current Brazilian Literature
- 2 Realisms in Question
- 3 A Paper World—Reflections on the Realism of Luiz Ruffato
- 4 Brazilian Literature and the Market
- 5 The Victorious Return of the Self in Contemporary Writing
- 6 Criticism from the Periphery—for Another Misplaced Idea
- 7 The Challenge of the Sensible and the Sublime Revisited
- 8 Farewell to the Contemporary!
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 2002, the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño published in the Las Últimas Notícias (Breaking News) newspaper a short story titled “Sobre la literatura, el Premio Nacional de Literatura y otros consuelos del oficio” (On literature, the national literature award, and other tricks of the trade), on the occasion of the granting of this award to the writer Volodio Teitelboim. With his usual irony, Bolaño, who certainly does not hold much respect for his colleague Teitelboim, author of a biography on Pablo Neruda, suggests that a national award would soon be given to Isabel Allende, the post-boom best-seller writer par excellence, before they give her the Nobel Prize. Bolaño's argument is irresistible:
Made to choose between the frying pan and the fire, I choose Isabel Allende. Her South American glamor in California, her imitations of Garcia Márquez, her unquestionable courage, her writing that goes from the kitsch to the pathetic and that somehow resembles, in a Creole and politically correct version, that of the author of The Valley of the Dolls, a result which though seemingly difficult, is far superior to the literature of born public servants such as Skármeta and Teitelboim.
If authors earlier faced the schizophrenia of opting between critical recognition and market sales, Bolaño's satire is directed at the fact of encountering, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new agreement between literary awards and honors, on the one hand, and the public's preferences, on the other. In the 1980s, this dilemma was still discussed in Brazil as a conflict between the market and the critical recognition of a generation that arose in the previous two decades. For the first time, the market thus seemed to promise growth indexes that were enough to make it possible for the fiction writer to professionalize, and in the 1984 essay titled “Prosa literária atual no Brasil” (Current literary prose in Brazil), Silviano Santiago advises that “the Brazilian novelist today needs to professionalize before becoming a professional of letters” ([1984] 1989, 29), that is, the writer needs to be prepared to face the dangers of a new commercial relation to the trade so as not to succumb to the temptation of assuming the digestible formats of market taste and abandoning the literary project and the quality standards of coherence and experimentation inherited from modernism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Affect and Realism in Contemporary Brazilian Fiction , pp. 61 - 70Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020