If the lyric mode classically inscribes the poet as individual, the Brazilian writer Francisco Alvim is, in Cacaso’s nice phrase, ‘the poet of the others’: finding his own voice by ceding the right to speak to all the rest—to the extent of transforming this attentiveness towards them into a new poetic technique. There is, of course, an element of irony in this depiction of the writer as good Samaritan: such close concern for one’s neighbours can also be, as Cacaso himself insists, a literary device for catching them in flagrante. For the ‘others’ here are not the abstract figures of philosophical discourse. We should think rather of the ‘Brazilians just like me’ of whom Mário de Andrade wrote in the 1920s; his eponymous hero Macunaíma also the ‘little heart of the others’. Or of the atmosphere, saturated with familiarity, to which Carlos Drummond referred with cordial ambivalence when he wrote in 1930: ‘at least we know everyone’s rubbish around here’.footnote¹

In other words, three quarters of a century after the modernist movement began in Brazil, the investigations carried out by its leading figures into the peculiarities of national life—its speech, its rhythms, the interactions of its people and their unspoken pacts—re-emerge in Alvim’s new book, Elefante. Quite a few things have changed since the twenties, and the poet’s historical and aesthetic sense for these shifts is one of his fine qualities. The essence of his approach can be conveyed in four words:

Want to see?

Listenfootnote²

This is the work’s poetic; more complex than it seems, once its shifting grammatical coloration taken into account. The ill-disciplined slippage (a very Brazilian habit) between third and second-person modes of address, from the polite Quer? to the more intimate Escuta; the informality of treatment; the Oswaldian modernism, its brevity not without a glint of humour—all jar with the universalist tone of the maxim. In fact, without the colloquialism and grammatical licence, this would be an impersonal, lapidary lesson about the relation between desire, vision and the spoken word. But the poem is not timeless in this sense: the social and cultural particularities of its intonations pull it towards a specific world setting, just as they destabilize its meanings. The poem’s equivocal placing within the collection also needs to be taken into account. It can be read either as the last of a series of verses dominated by lyrical feeling, or as the first of another set, marked by a critical-realist note and a shrewd sense of specifically Brazilian absurdities. Fitted between these two, the ‘Want to see?’ of the title-question could as easily be an invitation to poetry, or the mocking humour of someone well acquainted with the beast of which he speaks—and in whose belly he belongs. The same words might, on one reading, be those of any intelligent person who recommends the humility of listening; of a poet, learned and concise; or again, of an unillusioned Brazilian, advising his interlocutor on what to expect. Importantly, this three-in-one is sustained within everyday speech, with no sense of the interiorized conflict of the Romantic ego, or of exceptional beings or situations. Its context is the complexity, the peculiarity of Brazil’s daily life—and here, I think, lies the secret of the work. Its language and contexts are rigorously commonplace, but they pertain to a specific social formation that is itself at odds with the conventions of contemporary civilization.

The book’s consistency of tone lies in its dramatization—through the multiple freedoms modernism establishes—of a central, enduring concept: that of Brazilian interrelations between norms and informality; a heterodoxy that can be seen either as a manufacturing defect or a gift from the gods. Much has been written on the theme of informality; the point here is that its systematic transposition into the structure of these poems forms the watermark of Alvim’s book.footnote³ The dissonances corresponding to this mismatch can be detected in every aspect of national life. They can be collected as anecdotes that encode a historical condition; reduced to diagrams or modules with variabilized powers of explanation; or invented, constructed so as to explore the extremities of the concept. Alvim, who has a devilish ear for these things, has done some of all three. The variety of which he is capable runs from the apparently innocent—

Argument