Baal, the savagery of memory destruction*
Manuel da Costa Pinto
Betty Milan is a prolific writer. Among her most recent books, I would like to highlight Consolação (Consolation), a novel that left its mark in the history of Brazilian literature, especially for its fictional representation of the city of São Paulo. Likewise important to mention are her books in an autobiographical vein, such as A mãe eterna (The eternal mother) and Carta ao filho (Letter to my son). She has also published numerous interviews, plays, and crônicas, or short literary sketches. But Betty Milan is first and foremost a novelist. Of all genres, novels are undoubtedly where she best displays her literary prowess.
Released by Editora Record, Baal follows in the long universal tradition of tales of immigration. There are some signs that this particular immigration experience recapitulates elements of the author’s own family memories, although this is never made explicit in the book. To be clear, Baal is not self-fiction, not part of the current trend in Brazilian and contemporary literature where the writer fictionalizes pieces of his or her biography, playing truth off against invention while assimilating and exploring memory lapses and partial views of lived experience – lapses and views that are quite present in Betty Milan’s latest novel.
Why do I say Baal contains “signs” of a real family story? First, the book conveys something indefinable, felt almost intuitively: the authenticity of what is told, an affective empathy with the characters’ cultural and intimate universes. Aromas and flavors, clothing and traditions hint at an autobiographical element that can be identified, extra-textually, with Lebanon, the country to which the author’s family traces its origins.
While the novel Baal is part of a Brazilian narrative tradition about immigration (and we can name other contemporary Brazilian writers who belong to this tradition, like Milton Hatoum, born in Manaus but of Lebanese descent, or Moacyr Scliar, a native of Rio Grande do Sul with Bessarabian Jewish roots), it is also part of a narrower, and somewhat peculiar, tradition: stories recounted by a dead narrator. In a way, Betty Milan “creates” this tradition by casting a retrospective light on the threads shared by her illustrious predecessors – first, of course, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis, but also O pirotécnico Zacarias (Zacarias, the pyrotechnist), by Murilo Rubião. Baal, whose protagonist has also passed away, transforms the thread running between these two classic works into a transmission line, revealing the expressive potential of these narrators from beyond the grave – in Betty Milan’s specific case, in order to explore tensions between memory and destruction.
But who is Omar, Baal’s deceased narrator? Betty Milan engages with the imprecision of memory, manifesting this imprecision in a refusal to explicitly name origins. We know that Omar is an immigrant who comes to a country in Amrika (Arabic transcription), more precisely, South America. He comes from a country beset by religious and ethnic strife, in a region ruled by an empire. The reader gradually realizes this country lies somewhere in the Middle East during the Ottoman reign. But Betty Milan never gives this away.
So Omar leaves the Middle East (the Levant, to be exact) and heads to Amrika, where an emperor has promised that immigrants will enjoy wonderful lives. It is not hard to figure out what country this is. After all, monarchies have governed only two nations in the Americas: Mexico, for brief, disastrous periods, and Brazil, where Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II had lengthy reigns. Omar arrives in a slave-owning society, where immigrants are invited to work in exchange for wages that fail to cover their food and housing, for which they end up owing their employees. These workers amass debts and are shackled to oppressive labor contracts, both common practices in Brazil at that time, when immigrants lived as semi-slaves (in due proportions).
Readers of Baal learn about this as Omar reconstructs his story. Only in chapter four do we discover he is deceased. At the start of the book, the story centers on Aixa, Omar’s only daughter, who is already elderly, in poor health, and suffering from memory problems. Aixa lives in an old mansion called Baal, built by her father. In the story’s present time, Omar’s grandchildren, Henrique, Francis, and Lisa, are fighting over the mansion; two of them – especially the oldest, Henrique – want to sell and demolish it to turn a profit. Their mother, Aixa, feels an emotional bond to the mansion and opposes the idea, as does her sentimental middle child, Francis, who nurtures his familial and cultural roots and his family’s bonds to the mansion built by the patriarch. This is Baal’s narrative framework, which serves as a point of departure for a number of reflections.
Does the fact that Betty Milan is a psychoanalyst influence the story in any way? It is a tricky matter to factor in an author’s extra-literary background when analyzing his or her works; one always runs the risk of gross simplification. This is especially true when we are talking about a psychoanalyst; we are easily led to believe that her fiction will automatically encompass something psychological, featuring inner analyses or streams of consciousness. But none of this happens in Betty Milan’s literature, much less in Baal. All human concerns are of course psychoanalytical concerns, but the author’s psychoanalytical perspective is felt more in the story’s structure and in the overall design of the fictional discourse than in her characters’ psychology. For example, the vagueness of time and geography mentioned earlier seems to be intentional; it mimics or resembles the narrative material, the gaps within the unconscious that are inscribed in any story of remembrance. Other themes central to the book have to do with psychoanalytical questions, such as a child’s troubled relationship with his or her paternal figure, or the psycho-social forms that manifest in repetitive family behavior patterns.
When the novel opens, Omar, the narrator, tells us that his son-in-law Dib, married to his daughter Aixa, has drawn up a will benefitting solely his male heirs. This is extremely upsetting to Lisa, Aixa’s only daughter and Omar’s granddaughter. Over the course of the tale, the reader comes to understand that the narrator is less concerned about the strained relations between Aixa and her three children, stemming from the granddaughter’s disinheritance, than the ways in which he himself excluded his own daughter. In other words, in his narrative from beyond the grave, Omar is tormented by the fact that he lent continuity to a kind of family narrative chain that repeats itself over and over – and as psychoanalysis teaches us, this type of repetition buries things that have been repressed over the generations through discursive gaps. In this novel by a Lacanian psychoanalyst, this tendency is reproduced in the complementary structure of Omar’s relationship with his daughter Aixa and her relationship with her own daughter, Lisa. And the paternal figure always embodies the tenets that perpetuate female exclusion, in a kind of “macho-centrism” that connects with another web of relationships, that is, the social and cultural relations common to Levantine and Brazilian patriarchalism.
Another unusual element in Baal is Betty Milan’s subtle transition between narrative times. Every chapter begins with a stage in Omar’s journey and his move to Brazil; it then switches to actions and attitudes where we see his grandson Henrique “repeating” his grandfather (here again, the dynamics of repetition), emulating his destructive nature by engaging in predatory behaviors that will destroy family memory. In almost every chapter, the reader finds a time shift that ties Omar’s past to his descendants’ present, producing a resonance chamber for these psycho-familiar forces.
These time shifts, achieved in only a few paragraphs, are also remarkable in stylistic terms. In chapter twenty-four, for example, Omar witnesses the mistreatment of a black wet nurse and is shocked by the brutal practices of Brazil’s slave-owning society. He makes an immediate connection between this scene from his earlier life and another, which he narrates: that of his grandson Henrique sexually abusing a young girl, in an act of “manly” sadism. While the novel never slips into sociologistic discourse, Omar draws an association between the aggressive virility of contemporary Brazilians and how he saw women and their bodies brutally treated during his lifetime. He also associates this behavior with the most horrifying elements of Brazil’s slave-owning society and its historical imagination, which left an indelible impact on affective, social, sexual, and spousal relations.
Slavery is not the center of the story, but it is present throughout Baal as a subtext, with Betty Milan touching on other delicate social issues traceable to the scar of slavery. For example, there is a former governess of the mansion, Nádia, who becomes something of a lady-in-waiting to Aixa. In a way, Nádia is a contemporary reconfiguration of the Machadian “agregado,” or dependent, a very familiar character in Brazil. The agregado lacks his or her own social place and thus orbits a family like a satellite, living off the good will of others inside a structure where the exploitation of labor reproduces forms of servitude. As Roberto Schwarz taught us in A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, the figure of the agregado is part of the “structural reduction” (the words of Antonio Cândido) observable in nineteenth-century Brazil and present in Machado de Assis’s fiction: “On the one hand, owners and property (which has a mercantile form); on the other, free men, with no property and no wages – work falls to the slaves – who only partake of social wealth through the good will of the former.”
This status quo persists after the abolition of slavery, as demonstrated in Baal, a novel with one foot in each moment, before and after abolition. Society moves away from a slave-owning regime to a regime of free labor, but this change transforms neither the exploited masses nor the acolytes of the exploiters into an autonomous working class that enjoys representativity. So the agregado gravitates around power, remains in a state of dependency, and survives off favors from the powerful.
A number of elements from Brazilian literature and history – the deceased author/narrator (with his mournful nature); slavery; patriarchalism; the exclusion of women, along with actual or symbolic violence against them – make Baal a sort of meditation on Brazilian savagery, revolving around the theme of the destruction of family memory, which is a form of oblivion that constantly expresses itself violently, or as a violent eruption of what has been repressed.
“Because things are forgotten, history doesn’t stop repeating itself. . . .Only remembrance can prevent so much repetition and obstruct evil.” In a way, this sentence, coming at the close of chapter one, announces the theme that runs through this novel. Both in the narrator’s portrayal of the tense Middle Eastern social relations from which he fled and in his microscopic relation with his children, we find a categorical imperative: Evil must be remembered in order to avert it. In Baal, the destruction of family memory must be avoided so a deeper story of exclusion, injustice, and oppression is not perpetuated.
Lastly, we would do well to remember that the title Baal is an allusion to a divinity from the ancient Phoenician culture, the god of fertility but also of destruction. The book deals with the demolition of the mansion Baal, and this mansion embodies memory. Memory thus harbors within itself the seed of its own destruction, metaphorically concentrating in the name Baal all the tension running through this remarkable novel by Betty Milan.
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* This is the text of a talk by the journalist and literary critic Manuel da Costa Pinto, who spoke at the launch of the novel Baal, held at Livraria da Vila bookstore in São Paulo on June 18, 2019.