The Celebration
The Celebration
by Ivan Ângelo
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in March 1970; published in Portuguese (as A Festa) in 1976, in English in 1982.
SYNOPSIS
Organized loosely around events that take place on a single day, the novel presents a series of texts, documents, episodes, vignettes, and stories that paint a mural of the situation and historical antecedents of Brazilian society under post-1964 military rule.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Ivan Ângelo (b. 1937) was part of an important intellectual generation that formed in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the 1950s, and that included such notable writers as Fernando Gabeira, Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, and Sil-viano Santiago. A practicing journalist throughout his literary career, Ângelo began writing short stories in the 1950s. His first volume of short stories, Homem sofrendo no quarto, won the City of Belo Horizonte Award in 1959. Other works include Duas faces (1961), A casa de vidro (1979; The Tower of Glass, 1986), A face horrível (1986), all of which are collections of short stories, and the novella Amor? (1995). He has also published numerous works of fiction for young people. The Celebration, his only novel to date, concerns Brazilian society at the time—or very shortly before—Ivan Ângelo wrote the work.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
The Celebration deals with fictional events that take place in the city of Belo Horizonte on the evening of March 30 and the early morning of March 31, 1970. But it is much more than a snapshot of such a brief moment. By including episodes set in different time frames as well as multiple historical, political, and cultural references, Ângelo’s work offers a succinct and incisive background of the social and historical genesis of the problems depicted: the poverty of Brazil’s Northeast and its attendant causes and consequences, including the authoritarianism, violence, and repressive tactics of the Brazilian military government; migration from the countryside to the cities; the student movement; and the oppositional role of intellectuals. The novel, in short, deals with the social, political, cultural, and personal implications of authoritarianism and injustice in modern Brazil.
The authoritarian legacy
The novel’s concern with authoritarianism is made clear in the first two of its four epigraphs, from Nicolo Machi-avelli’s The Prince and W. H. Auden’s “Herod,” respectively. Machiavelli’s affirmation that the “appellation of cruel, however, should not matter to a prince striving to maintain the unity and faith of his subjects” suggests that repression in the name of order is justified (Machiavelli in Ângelo, The Celebration, p. 6). Auden’s citation refers to the difficulty of forcing “the masses to be sensible” when vital forces at work in human beings do not always fit into the rationalist designs of authoritarian leaders (The Celebration, p. 6). The words of both Machiavelli and Auden’s Herod find significant resonances within Ân-gelo’s novel, particularly in the actions of the police—both in the streets and in later interrogations—and in the figure of the police commissioner, who echoes Machiavelli’s words and Herod’s perspective: “The time has come to unleash the means of crushing all disorder, though the future may judge me cruel. For I have learned: the appellation of ‘cruel’ should not trouble a prince striving to maintain unity and order” (The Celebration, pp. 110-11).
Brazil has a long history of authoritarian government. From 1500 until 1822, the country was a colony of Portugal, and its inhabitants had limited political rights. From Independence in 1822 until the declaration of the Republic in 1889, it was ruled by a monarchy that was often enlightened, but autocratic nonetheless. The nation was defined not by the totality of its population, but rather by those eligible to vote: male—and usually white—landowners.
During the First Republic (1889-1930), Brazil had a formal democracy, but in reality the ideals of political liberalism were never able to overcome the forms of clientelism (the exchange of political support for tangible benefits) that resulted in fraudulent and corrupt electoral processes. By the end of the 1920s, democratic liberalism was largely discredited, since the reality did not conform to the ideal, and political extremes of the left and right (communism and fascism) had tremendous appeal. The Revolution of 1930, which carried Getúlio Vargas to power, initiated a 15-year period of authoritarian rule that hardened in 1937 into what is known as the Estado Novo, or New State, which indelibly marked Brazilian culture and society through its institution building. A new labor code in 1943, for example, permitted unions to organize at the local level, though they were prohibited at the state and federal levels. After a democratic interregnum starting in 1945, which saw such remarkable accomplishments as the construction of a new federal capital—Brasilia—a military coup d’état in 1964 initiated a 21-year period of military rule.
Authoritarianism is not just a political system or mode of government—it permeates the very foundations of society. A rigidly hierarchical system limits upward mobility and sustains itself through complex mechanisms such as clientelism, the exchange of favors, and the various myths of national identity. In a very influential essay, Robert Schwarz discusses mechanisms of domination in nineteenth-century Brazil, when both slavery and patron-client relations contradicted liberal ideas. The granting of favors by the powerful, for example, placed the grantee in a dependent relationship in which he or she had to repay the favor in accordance with the interests of the grantor (Schwarz, p. 22). The persistent myth of racial democracy in fact sustains racism by suppressing debate on the issue. The legacy of slavery has been reconfigured in relations between the privileged and their domestic servants, as in the case of lawyer Jorge Paulo de Fernandes and his maid Maria in The Celebration. The tradition of patriarchy, with its inherent intolerance and violence, continues in marital relations—such as those between Candinho and Juliana, Cléber and Lenice, or Jorge Paulo and Monica—and through the objectification of women such as Andrea. Unequal power relations are embedded in the social relations of everyday life.
Prelude to dictatorship
The Celebration is set almost six years to the day after the Brazilian military overthrew the democratic government of João Goulart, initiating 21 years of military dictatorship. Events leading up to the coup d’état are multiple and complex. In 1945 Getúlio Vargas, who had ruled Brazil in authoritarian fashion since 1930, was removed from power, and the country returned to a democratic form of government. Vargas regained the presidency through electoral processes in 1951 as a populist reformer. He was not well liked by the military and other conservative sectors of Brazilian society. In August 1954 an assassination attempt was made on the life of conservative politician and Vargas opponent Carlos Lacerda, and it was soon learned that the head of Vargas’s security detail was involved. In the midst of a growing political scandal, Vargas committed suicide. Interim presidents held power from then until January 1956, when Juscelino Kubitschek took office.
Kubitschek promised 50 years of progress in his five years in office, and he embarked on an ambitious plan of industrial development and economic expansion. He was one of only two presidents between 1930 and 1964 to remain in office legally through his designated term, partially because of his ability to rally the Brazilian people around his plans. Brasilia, with its ultramodern architecture, is perhaps the most perfect symbol of Kubitschek’s views. His brand of developmentalism, however, was fraught with contradiction: although it was indeed a means of mobilizing support and guaranteeing the system’s stability, it was also an effective tool for controlling social and political tensions. It toyed with the people’s nationalist sentiments, for example, yet based its program of industrialization on foreign investment.
Kubitschek was succeeded by former São Paulo governor Jânio Quadros, another populist leader who campaigned against political corruption. Quadros took office as president in January 1961, only to resign on August 25, a mere eight months later. His vice president, Vargas protege and former Minister of Labor, João Goulart, was out of the country on an official visit to communist China. Because of Goulart’s absence, the president of the Chamber of Deputies was sworn in as acting president. Goulart returned quickly to assume his constitutionally guaranteed position, but he found himself in the midst of a political crisis brought on by the fact that the military and conservative political sectors thought that he was too closely aligned with leftist forces. Congress approved a change in the Constitution, creating a parliamentary form of government, in which the president was to share the executive position with a council of ministers, and Goulart took office with weakened presidential powers on September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day.
Goulart faced numerous serious problems while in office, such as high inflation, a growing foreign debt, and an increasing cost of living for the Brazilian people. A plebiscite held on January 7, 1963, returned the country to a presidential system of government, and Goulart finally gained the powers that had been denied him in 1961. Supported by political parties of the left, labor unions, students, and other progressive social sectors, Goulart sought to implement large-scale social reforms, including agrarian reform and the nationalization of foreign enterprises, particularly in the impoverished Northeast. Conflicts between his government and the opposition—both military and civilian—increased rapidly.
A number of events unleashed the military’s move against Goulart. At a large rally held in front of Rio de Janeiro’s central train station on March 13, 1964, Goulart signed two decrees, one nationalizing all private petroleum refineries in the country, and the other creating a government agency to advance the process of agrarian reform. Both of these measures further displeased the conservative opposition. On March 19, some 500,000 people, organized by women’s religious groups, marched through the streets of São Paulo in a counter-demonstration to Goulart’s rally of the 13th. Opposition continued to grow, including the governors of Brazil’s largest and most powerful states, such as Magalhães Pinto from Minas Gerais, in whose capital, Belo Horizonte, The Celebration is set.
On March 20 the Association of Sailors and Marines (a labor union of enlisted men), in a clear violation of military hierarchy, demanded the firing of the Minister of the Navy, Silvio Mota, who had attempted to discipline one of the organizers of this illegal association. Goulart conceded to the demand and replaced the minister with an admiral who met the approval of labor leaders. This agitated officers in the military and increased fears among them that Goulart was using the armed forces for his own radical political ends. The generals warned the president that he would have to choose between the support of the armed forces and that of the labor unions and that they would no longer tolerate breakdowns in discipline. The army took action against Goulart on March 31, 1964, and easily removed him from office.
VICTIM OF THE 1958 DROUGHT
“[W]herever we traveled we found him starving, ragged, sad-eyed, and skeletal, in search of help that is not forthcoming. Already without hope, though his only ambition be the smallest provision of manioc flour, to ease the hunger which day by day devours his system. . . . Here in Brazil, where we seem quite proud of ourselves, singing out with paeans of self-praise…, it is estimated that more than two million people live in the most abject state of malnutrition and poverty possible to human beings…”
(Colonel Orlando Gomes Ramagem. . . personal observer for President Juscelino Kubitschek of the drought of 1958. His report. . . was suppressed by the Kubitschek government . . .)
(The Celebration, pp. 19-20)
Agrarian reform and internal migration
One of the most volatile issues in Brazil during the Goulart period—and one that is as yet unresolved—was that of agrarian reform, particularly in the northeastern part of the country. The Northeast is one of the most impoverished regions in Brazil. Often called the country’s “drought polygon,” the region comprises three distinct ecological zones: the humid coastal zone known as the zona da mata, the intermediate or transitional zone called the agreste, and the arid backlands or sertão. The zona da mata, which includes coastal cities and state capitals such as Maceió (Alagoas), Recife (Pernambuco), and João Pessoa (Paraíba), cultivates one major crop: sugar. The cheap labor that has sustained sugar production has contributed to the wealth of a few Brazilians, namely plantation owners, while doing little to improve the workers’ standard of living. The agreste is dryer than the zona da mata, and it is dominated economically by cotton and livestock. Although inhabitants of the zone, and particularly small farmers, may often be better off than those who live in slums along the coast, they are still quite poor. The sertão, which is covered by a thin, scrub forest called the caatinga (“white forest,” in indigenous terms), has low and variable precipitation and suffers cycles of torrential rain and devastating drought. The dry season, which generally persists from July to January, may last for more than a year in periods of drought, which have been recorded since early in the colonial period (it is said that the drought of 1877-79 may have killed upwards of 500,000 people).
Not only do the poor face harsh climatic conditions in the Northeast but also an economic system characterized by an extreme concentration of land ownership that dates from the colonial period. The lack of land has led to an exploitative system of agricultural labor in which tenant farmers and menial farmhands work to earn subsistence or low wages from a landowner who has them trapped in a cycle of debt. This situation, combined with periodic droughts, often prompts peasants to flee toward the coastal cities of the Northeast or to the South in search of a better life. Such is the case with the Northeastern migrants in The Celebration.
Banditry and peasant leagues
The rural poor in the Northeast are not always passive victims of an unjust socio-economic system and a harsh climate. They have resisted in many ways, including participation in millenarian movements such as that which surrounded António Conselheiro at Canudos in the late nineteenth century and which is the subject of two very important books—Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands (1902; also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s War at the End of the World (1981). The character Marcionílio de Mattos in The Celebration embodies two other forms of resistance: the social banditry that existed in the Northeast up until the 1940s, and the peasant leagues that were organized to struggle actively against the region’s system of land tenure in the 1960s.
In his youth, says the novel, Marcionilio had been an outlaw or cangaceiro, “but that was at a time when to be an outlaw was the only means of survival in the drought-beleaguered lands” of the Northeast (The Celebration, p. 21). Cangaceiros operated in the Northeastern sertão during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and represented a threat to local political bosses and landowners. Since the most famous of such bandits, Lampião, was killed in 1938, cangaceiros have taken on almost legendary dimensions in Brazilan literature and film.
Later in his life the novel’s Marcionilio joins the peasant leagues and takes part in the seizure of a sugar refinery. Peasant leagues began to form in the late 1940s to defend the interests of small farmers and rural workers. In the 1950s the peasant movement acquired a new vigor under the leadership of Francisco Julião, who mobilized students and politicians along with rural workers. The movement gained national notoriety when it forced the government of the state of Pernambuco to divide the lands of a large sugar plantation—Galiléia—among peasants. Clearly the peasant leagues represented a threat to the traditional power structure in the Northeast. In fact, partially because of the leagues U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress made the region a test case for policies designed to counter the threat of revolution. The peasant movement was brutally repressed by the military after the coup d’état of 1964.
The military in power
After seizing power the military moved quickly to squash social reforms then underway in the country and also to repress those sectors—labor unions, peasant leagues, progressive political parties, students, intellectuals—actively involved in the process of social transformation. To override the constitution and increase their control over the nation, the military invoked special decrees or “institutional acts.” The initial Ato Institucional or First Institutional Act (known as AI-1; April 9, 1964) suspended job security in civil service for six months, thus allowing the government to dismiss “subversive” employees; the act also authorized the military president to suspend the political rights of citizens for ten years and to cancel the electoral mandate, or term in office, of public officials. This decree resulted in a purge of the leadership of the political opposition as well as of labor unions and peasant leagues. It also affected many intellectuals and military officers who had supported the previous democratic administration, who had not backed the coup d’état, or who had criticized the military regime. Such measures would eventually extend to intellectuals, such as sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso (a future President of Brazil, elected in 1994). In the wake of the overthrow of Goulart and the implemen-tation of the First Institutional Act, more than 10,000 people were called for interrogation, over 6,000 were indicted, and around 4,500 were forced to retire from civilian and military government service.
The Second Institutional Act (October 27, 1965) abolished all existing political parties and determined that Congress would henceforth choose the country’s presidents. A supplementary act issued the following month established guidelines for forming new parties, resulting in the creation of the pro-government ARENA (National Renovating Alliance), and the opposition party, the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement). Given the limited space for political action, these artificially established parties were often referred to jokingly as the parties of “Yes” and “Yes, sir!”
Doing away with the popular vote, the Third Institutional Act (February 5, 1966) required the indirect selection of state governors by state legislatures, and eliminated elections for mayors of capital cities. They would henceforth be chosen by the military regime.
From the beginning of the dictatorship, hardliners and moderates within the military disagreed about the necessity of working within a legal framework and about the degree of repression needed to attain their goals. The first two military presidents, Marechal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco (1964-67) and General Arthur da Costa e Silva (1967-69), were seen as relatively moderate. Between April 1964 and 1968 the hard-liners increasingly gained the upper hand, resulting in the decree of the AI-5, or Fifth Institutional Act, on December 13, 1968.
The AI-5 gave the president the authority to disband Congress and legislative bodies throughout the country, to cancel elective mandates and remove individuals’ political rights, and to suspend legal guarantees of civil service tenure. It also abolished basic human and political rights, such as habeas corpus. Repression and censorship intensified, and torture of political prisoners became common. Brazil entered a dark and brutal period of authoritarian rule during which thousands of people were arrested, and many were tortured, killed, or exiled under the watchful eye of hard-line general Emílio Garrastazu Medici, who held the reins of power from 1969 until 1974. The Celebration is set precisely during this period, and it is within this context that the novel’s violent repression of the Northeasterners outside the train station and other interrogations and abusive actions by police and military officials must be seen.
From student power to armed resistance
Prior to the military coup d’état, university students throughout the country were mobilized in such organizations as the National Students’ Union, the Center for Popular Culture in Rio de Janeiro, and the Movement for Popular Culture in the Northeast. All of these student organizations developed alliances with the political left—unions, peasant leagues, and progressive political parties—in an attempt to transform Brazilian society and end the violence, injustice, and exploitation that had long characterized class relations in the country.
The 1964 coup presented activist students with few options: divert energies from politics to other areas of activity, forget politics and go back to the classroom, sell out to the right wing that had supported the move against democracy, or join forces with the political resistance being mounted by parties of the left. This was a moment in which vigorous discussions about the viability of armed struggle against the regime were underway, resulting, in 1962, in a split in the Brazilian Communist Party and the formation of other splinter parties, such as the Marxist Revolutionary Organization, which is referred to as “Radical Action” in the novel (The Celebration, p. 57). Many students and intellectuals joined such movements and participated in the armed struggle against the military regime, a struggle that was particularly active in the period between 1968 and 1971. The actions of Carlos Bicalho and Samuel Aparecido Fereszin in The Celebration are suggestive of such involvement.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
The Celebration has no central plot line, no main character, and no single narrative voice or perspective. Indeed, its very genre is ambiguous. The bibliographical information included in the volume’s front matter refers to it as a romance, contos (novel, short stories). The work consists of nine chapters or sections, ranging from four to 85 pages in length in the English translation. The first seven may be read as a group of relatively autonomous short stories that often seem to have little connection to one another. Some contain references to characters in other sections, but in no case does one section determine or necessarily lead into the next. The eighth chapter brings the events and characters of the previous sections together, at least to the extent that it explains how some of those events develop and what the characters are doing at different moments of the same day. The final section, printed on blue paper in the first edition and with black borders in the English translation, offers an explanatory index of the characters mentioned throughout the text, providing a fictional contextualization and background and informing the reader about subsequent turns in their lives. This section fills in some of the gaps in episodes related in previous segments.
The novel revolves around two events, neither of which is directly narrated. The first is a violent disturbance that takes place near the train station in downtown Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The violence erupts as the police and military try to force poor migrants from Brazil’s impoverished Northeast to return to their homeland on the same train that had just brought them to the city in search of a better life. The second is the party, or “celebration,” that gives the novel its title. Although references to it occur throughout and we eventually learn of certain things that take place at the party or in its wake, none of the chapters has the party as its setting. In fact, the novel’s last two sections are titled “Prior to the Celebration” and “After the Celebration,” respectively. Through not fully developed in narrative terms, the party and the violent disturbance give the novel coherence by linking some of its seemingly disparate elements.
Although The Celebration is set at a precise moment in time—March 30-31, 1970—its different perspectives and its insistence on historical contextualization offer a broad panorama of modern Brazilian society. The novel, therefore, does not simply narrate events that take place in 1970; it also provides the historical and social elements necessary for understanding Brazilian society and culture at a particularly critical moment in history—when the country was suffering the darkest days of the repressive military dictatorship that had been in power since March 31-April 1, 1964. The fact that the novel takes place precisely six years to the day after the military coup d’état is certainly not coincidental. The work’s title may even be understood as a bitterly ironic comment on the sixth anniversary of the coup. The sections or chapters are as follows:
“A Short Documentary (the city and the interior, 1970).” Through real and fictional texts, the initial section of The Celebration documents the disturbances of March 30, 1970, and their after-math, as well as the historical background necessary for understanding those events. The section compiles fragments of newspaper reports, books, almanacs, journalistic dispatches, official documents, police interrogation reports, songs, leaflets, business association reports, and presidential speeches. It also includes a brief section composed entirely of names of towns in Brazil’s impoverished Northeast.
Four broad, interwoven narrative lines can be identified in the chapter. The first, largely made up of newspaper articles and police reports about the interrogation of Marcionílio de Mattos, the leader of the Northeastern migrants who have arrived in the city, provides “documentary” information about the disturbance that took place on March 30: “The turmoil began at 1:45 a.m.… A riot truck… had been sent there to quell any disturbance ...” (The Celebration, p. 11). The second narrative line offers information about Mattos’s background in the Northeast, including his involvement with the cangaceiro Lampião and the peasant leagues. A third line provides social and historical background information about the Northeast. A final line concerns the history of resistance and revolt in the Northeast.
“Thirtieth Anniversary: Pearls (of love in the 30s).” The novel’s second part is divided into two subsections—one from the perspective of the husband, the other from that of the wife—providing two views of a marriage that began with passion but has degenerated into mistrust, betrayal, suspicion, and madness. The husband, a university professor named Candinho, believes that it is time for the couple to fulfill their youthful promise to die together. The wife, Juliana, relates her husband’s previous attempts to kill her (and presumably himself). She is having an affair with a younger man named Carlos. On their anniversary, the married couple shares a cake that Candinho had made for the occasion. Juliana takes the first bite of the delicious cake, notices Candinho hesitating before eating his, and braces “for the onslaught of its poison” (The Celebration, p. 46). Her lover Carlos turns out to be Carlos Bicalho, who is involved in the violent events outside the train station.
“Andrea (a girl of the ‘50s).” The Celebration’s third section is described as a “BIOGRAPHY: discovered by the author among the papers belonging to one of the characters in the book, who should perhaps be identified at some point later on” (The Celebration, p. 47). The chapter consists of ten sections tracing Andrea’s life from her teens in the 1950s until the evening of March 30, 1970. Andrea was an attractive, middle-class Catholic girl raised in Rio de Janeiro. Her one desire is to be completely in love Yet that desire is continually frustrated. In Belo Horizonte she becomes involved in high society, which uses her for its own ends, and later mixes with journalists and intellectuals, who find her amusing but a bit “dense upstairs” (The Celebration, p. 56). She leaves the city for several years, and when she returns, she starts going out with the “latest young painter of the city,” Roberto Miranda, who is described as vain, egotistical, mannered, and quite possibly homosexual. At one point they believe themselves to be marriageable, but in a game of “To Tell the Truth” at Roberto’s infamous party (the “celebration”), he publicly humiliates her by revealing, among other secrets, her sexual problems.
“Corruption (of a triangle in the ‘40s).” The triangle to which the subtitle of this chapter refers is not a traditional love triangle, but rather a triangle that develops between a father, mother, and their son who is born in 1941. The corruption is not political but personal, as father and son increasingly marginalize the mother from their relationship. Ângelo structures the chapter with alternating narrative voices that present the diverse perspectives in a chronology of the five-year period from 1941 to 1946. The father’s segments are relayed in the third person; the mother and son’s in the first. The son is Roberto Miranda, who hosts the celebration on the evening of March 30, 1970.
“Sanctuary (insecurity, 1970).” The “sanctuary” is the apartment of one Jorge Paulo de Fernandes, “age thirty-one, successful young lawyer, former budding author until age twenty-five, whereupon the defect was wholly corrected by a law degree” (The Celebration, p. 77). Narrated largely in the third person, this chapter describes Jorge Paulo de Fernandes’s thoughts and actions from the time he arrives home until he leaves to go to the celebration several hours later. The portrait is one of a vain, selfish, uncouth, and politically reactionary individual who thinks of little but his own image. Shortly before he leaves for the party, he receives a phone call about the arrest of Carlos. “Carlos who?… Yes, I know him. What’s the problem?… Arrested for what?… Friend nothing. Look, you want to know something? It’s just as well, it’ll get rid of him for a while” (The Celebration, p. 89).
“Class Struggle (vignette, 1970).” This brief section, only four pages long (including the title page), draws a contrast between two characters, the working-class Ataide, and the middle-class Fernando. A brief confrontation between the two occurs at the Plaza Station, where both of them had gone after work to have a drink at the bar. Ataide inadvertently knocks over Fernando’s glass. Fernando insults him, and Ataide slugs Fernando.
“Preoccupations (obsessions, 1968).” This part is divided into two subsections, the first narrated by the worried mother of a college student (Carlos), the second by a commissioner of the political police (DOPS—Departamento de Ordem Política e Social), which played a key role in the political repression of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The two discourses, although from different perspectives, are ultimately similar in their moralism and conservatism. They both long for hierarchy and order. The widowed mother casts her lament in personal, emotional, and religious terms, constantly evoking the name of God in her desire to protect her son from the evils he faces on the street, from the police, and from the counterculture and girls with loose morals in miniskirts. She is particularly concerned about her son’s involvement in student politics and potential conflicts with the police. She sees danger everywhere, but she does not truly understand the underlying causes for the turmoil in which her son is caught up. All of the social problems youth confront could have been avoided, in her mind, if there had been more repression and censorship.
The police commissioner’s section is an answer to appeals such as that of Carlos’s mother. In contrast to her emotionalism, his discourse is based on reason, much like that of Machiavelli’s Prince and Auden’s “Herod” of The Celebration’s epigraphs. His belief in reason and order justify, in his mind, any measure he may need to take against those who threaten that order. He is the novel’s incarnation of the authoritarian military regime. “From the very heart of my people,” he thinks, “I can sense a growing cry: protect us; for our own sakes do what must be done to dispel this mounting anguish, this new fanaticism, this mystic madness among the younger generations” (The Celebration, p. 109).
“Prior to the Celebration (victims of the ‘60s).” This section, one of the longest of the novel, consists of multiple textual fragments that narrate actions by different people on the evening of March 30 and the early morning of March 31. Each fragment is identified by the time and place the action takes place—for example, “New Moon Bar and Restaurant, 7:00 p.m.” (The Celebration, p. 115) —but they are not arranged in spatial or chronological order. In addition to these fragments, brief texts in parentheses and italics, titled “Author’s notes,” are interspersed throughout the section. The most important segments of this chapter trace the movements of journalist Samuel Aparecido Fereszin from 6:00 p.m.—when, in front of a bookshop, someone tells him that he will like “the crowd” who will be at the party later on that evening—until shortly after 1:00 a.m.—when he decides that he must do something to help the Northeastern refugees and he readies himself “for what will have to be done” (The Celebration, p. 148).
“After the Celebration (index of their fates).” The final section of The Celebration is described as “a cross-index of the characters, in order of appearance or reference, with additional* information regarding the fate of those who were alive during the events of the night of March 30” (The Celebration, p. 149). The asterisk remits to the following list of questions: “necessary? surprising? useful? corroborative? unnecessary? useless?” (The Celebration, p. 149). The chapter ties up loose ends and provides further information about characters in the novel’s previous chapters. It also clarifies the sometimes obscure connections between segments presented earlier.
For example, in this section we learn that the professor, Candinho, of “Thirtieth Anniversary: Pearls,” had been Carlos Bicalho’s teacher and that he is one of the people whom Samuel Aparecido Ferezsin called in his efforts to get the student out of jail. Candinho’s wife’s affair is with this same Carlos Bicalho. We also learn that the fictional biography that constitutes “Andrea” was apparently written by her fiancé, Roberto Miranda, in order to help his friend Samuel write a novel about her. Parts of Samuel’s sexually explicit novel were confiscated by the police, leading to Andrea’s humiliating interrogation in the aftermath of the disturbances outside the train station. Ataide, the working-class character from “Class Struggle,” was arrested during the disturbance near the train station and held for a month and ten days, although he had no direct involvement. During his imprisonment the police extorted sex from his wife in exchange for promises to release him. In one of the most curious segments, the novel offers a popular version of the life of the leader of the Northeastern migrants, Mar-cionilio, in which he has been transformed into the devil.
On writers and writing
A salient feature of much of Ivan Ângelo’s fiction is the infusion of the author into the story—or at least a fictional author—who comments on the work in the process of composition. The Celebration does this in a number of ways, particularly through “Author’s notes” and conversations among writers and intellectuals who have gathered at the New Moon Bar and Restaurant in the chapter “Before the Celebration” and in segments of “After the Celebration.” The “Author’s notes” are entirely outside the fictional frame developed through the narrative, while the writers and intellectuals are fictional characters. Authorial interventions and the insistent presence of writers draw attention to the artificiality of narrative conventions; they also bring the social role and function of writers and intellectuals to the foreground.
The “Author’s notes” provide commentaries not about the action narrated in the novel, but rather about the work’s structure or process of composition. One of them, in fact, talks about the “Author’s notes” themselves:
Include in ‘Before the Celebration’ vanous ‘author’s notes’ (including this one). Projects, phrases, ideas for stories, literary problems, quick sketches, preoccupations. In that way, the author would become, together with Samuel [the journalist], the other main protagonist of the story he’s wnting.
(The Celebration, p. 127)
Unlike traditional realist novels, which create an illusion of reality, The Celebration breaks down reader expectations of realism while at the same time providing ample information about the motivation, strategies, and processes of the narrative’s construction. One such note outlines the research undertaken to describe the phases of Roberto’s childhood from birth until the age of five or six. The note also provides an indication of the author’s compositional strategy: “In italics or parentheses, place concepts that cannot as yet be grasped by his intellective sphere; by the end of the story, the italicized words are reduced to a minimum, because by then he has mastered language” (The Celebration, pp. 122-23).
This technique causes the reader to reflect on the process of novelistic creation and perhaps to situate that creation in a specific historical time frame. Beyond its aesthetic and narrative dimensions, the novel becomes a symbolic form of intervention in the social and historical circumstances that gave it birth. It is intentional, and it was written with a specific purpose in mind. The same may well be said of all novels, but whereas The Celebration foregrounds its intentions and its motivations, most traditional novels seek to hide or efface their intentionality through their narrative strategies. By being forced to consider the author’s choices in the construction of his text, readers must also consider questions of choice and responsibility in a broader sense.
The Celebration’s use of writers as characters offers, on the one hand, an ironic perspective of writers’ self-importance; on the other, it raises questions of intellectual commitment and limitations in unjust and repressive political situations such as that of post-1964 Brazil. Writers are, above all else, writers, and sometimes they react virulently to pressures to be politically engage or to adopt the “appropriate” stance of cultural nationalism. Thus, in the novel’s New Moon Bar and Restaurant, one writer complains, “Literature isn’t economics. You can’t go and establish national priorities for literary investment...” (The Celebration, p. 133). The fact of the matter is that writers are not always free to choose their subjects. Social and historical circumstances inevitably shape the concerns of the literary field at a given moment in time, despite the creative freedom writers may assert. This has been a particularly salient issue in Brazil, where writers and intellectuals have often proclaimed their crucial role in processes of national construction.
Prior to The Celebration, Ivan Ângelo had published several books of short stories. He has explained that before 1964 he had another idea in mind for the novel. After the coup d’etat, however, he stopped writing fiction for ten years. When he resumed work on the novel in 1974, he modified the original project. According to Ângelo, at that time writers and other artists had several different possible attitudes concerning the political situation:
1) Political oppression and social injustice exist, and they represent a good theme for my work;
2) Political oppression and social injustice exist, but they are subjects for politics, not art;
3) Political oppression and social injustice do not exist
4) Political oppression exists, but only for the purpose of doing away with social injustice;
5) Yes they exist, but worrying about it is only for squares, so what’s the big deal?
(Ângelo, “Nos que amavamos tanto a literatura,” p. 71; trans. R. Johnson)
Ângelo himself clearly adopted the first attitude. His novel deals with political oppression and social injustice even as it implicates the reader in the circumstances described, transforming him or her into an accomplice.
Sources and literary context
The Celebration is one of several novels published in the mid-to late-1970s that discuss the period of military rule in Brazil. In 1971, during the most repressive period of dictatorship, Antonio Callado wrote Bar Don Juan, which deals with the tragedy of the young students and intellectuals who became engaged in the armed struggle. That same year, Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro presented a fascinating and brutal portrait of authoritarianism in his Sargento Getúlio. Between 1977 and 1979 a number of fictional works dealt with issues related to the armed resistance against the military regime. Notable among the novels in this current are Renato Tapajos’s Em Câmara Lenta (1977), Antonio Callado’s Reflexos do Baile (1978), and Marcio Souza’s Operaçao Silêncio (1979). The Celebration shares with all of these works a concern with reassessing the impact of military rule through a fragmented, self-reflexive narrative style. Ivan Ângelo apparently decided to resume his novel, which had been suspended since shortly after the 1964 military coup d état, during a trip to Europe in 1972 in which he was able to get away from Brazil’s stifling political climate and have renewed contact with freedom of expression and creation. That experience gave him a new sense of hope that, despite military repression, he could find a way to say what he felt was necessary to say (Medina, p. 9). This attitude resulted in The Celebration.
Reviews
The Celebration has been very well received in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. Writing in Chasqui, Katherine Delos refers to The Celebration as “a complex, multiform novel” whose diverse segments “are carefully positioned for cumulative effect” (Delos, pp. 106, 107). Critic Emir Rodriguez Monegal writes that Ân-gelo’s novel is a “model of seriousness and suggestion”; its “somewhat elaborate construction makes the reader complete the puzzle and reconstruct the celebration himself (Rodriguez Monegal, p. 40; trans. R. Johnson). Nelson Vieira has described it as “a tour-de-force of language and narrative structure as well as a mirror of the fear, injustice, and repression of Brazil of the early 1970s” (Vieira in Stern, p. 29). Robert DiAntonio suggests that the novel, “through its skillful use of mythic and narrative impulses, portrays the underlying quotidian realities that evoke and define true history” (DiAntonio, p. 15).
—Randal Johnson
For More Information
Ângelo, Ivan. The Celebration. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Avon, 1982.
_____. A Festa.3rd ed. Sao Paulo: Summus, 1978.
_____. “Nós, que amavamos tanto a literatura.” In Brasil: O Trânsito da Memoria. Ed. Saúl Sosnowski and Jorge Schwarz. College Park/SaoPaulo: University of Maryland/EDUSP, 1994.
Delos, Katherine. “A Festa.” Chasqui VI, no. 2 (February 1977): 106-07.
DiAntonio, Robert E. Brazilian Fiction: Aspects and Evolution of the Contemporary Narrative. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1989.
Medina, Cremilda. “Literatura, a maneira de Ivan Ângelo entender o seu poro.” Minas Gerais, Suplemento Literario, no. 967 (April 20, 1985): 9.
Page, Joseph A. The Brazilians. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
Rodriguez Monegal, Emir. “Escribir bajo los ojos de la censura (Tres novelas brasilenas).” Vuelta 4, no. 28 (January 1980): 37-40.
Schneider, Ronald M.“Order and Progress”: A Political History of Brazil Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991.
Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Ed. John Gledson. London: Verso, 1992.
Skidmore, Thomas E. Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964: An Experiment in Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
_____. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964- 85. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Stern, Irwin, ed. Dictionary of Brazilian Literature. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.