9 - Brazilian prose from 1940 to 1980

Summary

Any pattern which the literary historian discerns in the last half-century of Brazilian prose-writing is bound to be somewhat speculative and imposed on a very heterogeneous mass of material, but three conclusions at least seem inescapable, and can act as preliminary markers.

First, no-one can doubt that the political events of the 1960s and 1970s – the military coup of 1964, the ensuing repression, and censorship (gradually removed in the 1970s) – had a profound effect on the manner of, and the subject-matter tackled by, many writers. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the whole period, one of widespread and often traumatic change in all spheres, not simply political, changed the whole climate in which authors wrote. On the most immediate level, writers had to battle with censors: if, like Antônio Callado (b. 1917), they had already established a reputation, this could mean a cat-and-mouse game of novels printed then impounded, then allowed again (as happened with Bar Don Juan, his novel about middle-class guerrillas); in other cases, like that of Zero by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (b. 1936) it could mean banning and even publication abroad (though for obvious reasons this was not such a frequent outlet as is the case in Spanish America). More important than such dramatic “cases,” censorship also meant a general clamp-down and curtailing of possibilities. On a deeper level, the imposed silence, and the events of the 1960s themselves, produced the sensation that nothing could, or should, be the same again: when censorship was lifted, fiction looked very different. There was a spate of novels and stories, hardly removed from documentaries, which tried to tell “the real story,” and some of these achieved an immense popularity, leading to what was described as a kind of Brazilian "Boom," very different, however, from its Spanish American model.