Memoirs, fiction, letters, dialogues, and other works by Betty Milan*

by Claudio Willer

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Betty Milan’s writings are vast and varied, encompassing narratives, essays, plays, the Brazilian short-short stories known as crônicas, and interviews. This corpus forms an intricate web of relations where every book ties in with and refers to every other one, parts of a whole, microcosms within a macrocosm. These works thus require a special reading, one that captures shifts, multiple meanings, and cross-references.

These interconnections are most evident in Carta ao Filho (Letter to my son), published in 2013.[1] This narrative is a retrospective reflection, an inventory, of much of what Milan has written and lived. Take, for example, what she observes in its pages about “prolonging life in vain,” in reference to the narrator’s deceased husband, devoured by cancer. This too is the central theme of the earlier Consolação (2009; Solace), an account of mourning made more intense because it accompanies incommensurate suffering. The demand for the right to shorten one’s life reappears in the more recent A mãe eterna (2016; The eternal mother), a demand declared directly in the subtitle: “Dying is a right.”

A morbid author with a penchant for gloom? Hardly. Admittedly, Milan affirms and demands the right to die: “I don’t want to live with what will be left of me. This increased longevity of yours is damaging your life. Why have they instilled in us the idea that being alive is the only thing that matters and that we are alive so long as our bodies resist?” But the demand is inseparable from the demand to live fully.

In Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History,[2] Norman O. Brown observes that man is the species that separates life from death, for “it is not the consciousness of death but the flight from death that distinguishes men from animals.” According to Brown, “if death is a part of life, man represses his own death just as he represses his own life.” The journey in Consolação, from a cemetery surrounded by the wretched to a Dionysian celebration at a theater stands as a parable.

Some societies vanquish or supersede the life-death dichotomy through magic, through the shaman, the tribal wise man, one of whose powers is to come and go between the world of the living and the world of the dead, an intermediary between the two realms, as between the realms of nature and culture, of human and non-human.

The spinning of themes or symbols allows us to identify other polarities found in this corpus, besides life and death: word and meaning, talk and listening, union and separation, masculine and feminine, courtly love and the culture of play. All of these interact, contrasting and merging along two-way streets. As I have pointed out elsewhere,[3] William Blake’s well-known proclamation from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” pertains here: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” The great visionary poet was reiterating what he had read in the mystics and what finds expression in the Taoist spinning of Yin and Yang (in which each hexagram implies or assumes its opposite), in the Ouroboros, and in similar symbols representing the movement and the creation of the universe.

I offer as an example of these polarities two characters of particular symbolic weight who are often evoked by Milan: Jacques Lacan, central in O papagaio e o doutor (1991; The parrot and the doctor),[4] and the carnavalesco Joãozinho Trinta, prime inspiration behind Os bastidores do carnaval (1994; Behind the scenes at Carnival). These two perhaps represent the couch and the samba school, introversion and extroversion, maybe even the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Some might feel it necessary to choose between one and the other, between what is represented by Joãozinho and by Lacan. But the relation between opposites is more complex, with one driving the other. “Meeting [Joãozinho] was as important as meeting Lacan,”[5] Milan writes in Carta ao filho. Moreover, she says that if she hadn’t met Joãozinho, she wouldn’t have written O papagaio e o doutor, where Lacan is the main character and the object of her admiration (albeit in the context of a narrative that does not refrain from irony or even carnivalesque treatment).

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The three works mentioned above – O papagaio e o doutor, Carta ao filho, and A mãe eterna – can be examined as a triptych, the particularities of each notwithstanding. While I once called Carta ao filho a “broad panel,”[6] the most recent title, A mãe eterna, is the most intimist; I would say it is chamber music, whereas Carta ao filho is symphonic. The action in A mãe eterna basically unfolds in two homes not far from each other in São Paulo, although allusions to other places run through it. In Carta ao filho, there is a missing setting: the apartment to which the son withdraws, isolating himself. But while this book is confessional literature and an autobiographical retrospective, it is also a travel account that takes place all over the world. In O papagaio e o doutor, the main setting is Paris, a Paris that the author grows to know, that she unveils, anticipating Paris não acaba nunca (1996; Paris Never Ends, 2013) and Quando Paris cintila (2008; When Paris sparkles), but with constant references to her homeland and her Brazilian tongue, along with evocations of the Lebanon of her ancestors.

In these stories, someone speaks in the first person; the narrator is the protagonist. Some of these narratives, including those explored here in greater detail, seem to be autobiographical. But their author casts doubt on this. In Carta ao filho, Milan has this to say about O papagaio e o doutor:

She is a heroine in which I recognize myself, but I am not Seriema. I made up her story as I wrote it; it is not mine.

I wrote it knowing that readers would identify me with the heroine and that some of those who were close to me would see themselves in those who were close to her. . . .Orhan Pamuk[7] has always combined the imaginary and the real. He knew his readers would take one of his characters for him and, in fact, he wanted them to. He’d conceived the novel to be considered a work of fiction… but he also wanted his readers to believe it was a true story.

In my view, the effort to draw a precise link between fictional narrative and autobiographical account stems from a rather naïve belief in imitation and in a linear relationship between words and things, between signs and “reality.” These complex relations between “fiction” and “reality” call to mind William Burroughs’ observations concerning works by Jack Kerouac, where Burroughs himself was presumed to be one of the characters: “So, the question is not, ‘Did it happen like that?’ but, ‘How would Jack have written it?’. . . .Each writer creates his own universe. When you buy a book, you are buying a ticket to travel in the writer’s time.”[8] From the most factual of narratives to those grounded most heavily in fantasy – say, from Jorge Semprún’s The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez to Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus – the reader is in contact with the writer’s voice and universe; he travels in the writer’s time.

Betty Milan could not fail to comment on literary creation. This is patent in Quem ama escuta (2011; To love is to listen), an epistolary work, the register of an advice column, where books are cited as models or examples to help readers understand what’s happening to them. In point of fact, this is how Lacan himself viewed literature, not as an object of interpretation but as a paradigm; this is especially clear in what he wrote about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.”

Observations about readings and about authors who in one way or another have been Milan’s tutelary figures pervade her other books as well, in the company of further forms of metalanguage. One of these figures is Oswald de Andrade, author of Manifesto Antropófago, who provides a vital counterweight to the dark and funereal metropolis uncovered in Consolação and who is also a rather implicit interlocutor in other of Milan’s works. But in the final passages of Carta ao filho, the figure is James Joyce, who moved from a confessional, autobiographical account in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, followed by the somewhat fictionalized reminiscences rendered in fine literary style in Dubliners, to a labyrinthine allegory in Ulysses and then to the ultimate celebration of the autonomy of language in Finnegan’s Wake. According to Milan, Joyce was the author who she “spent her teen years reading and re-reading,” driven by the “vain hope of understanding everything” in Ulysses. The tensions and intersections of literature and life enriched her visit to Dublin and her interview with Joyce’s nephew, spawning a reflection on the Irishman’s family where we can observe a symmetrical opposition to everything she has written about her own family.

Critics have devoted some attention to the question of whether or not Milan’s characters are “real,” since they blend biographical traits with traits assigned by the author, and events that really happened are interwoven with those forged by the imagination. I believe a prime illustration of this tension between the world of so-called facts and the world of symbols is Milan’s decision to bring her own mother, purportedly the book’s central character, to the launching of A mãe eterna. Milan demonstrated that this woman, nearly 100 years old, is and yet isn’t the character from the book. In a disturbing game of mirrors, she faced one off against the other: the physical mother, a most affable lady, visibly pleased by the warm reception afforded her daughter’s book, and the penned mother, who shows much greater signs of aging. Similar yet not identical, which of the two is more real? If we accept Burroughs’ line of thought, both. The mother-character who was created and perpetuated with the publication of the book has acquired her own standing; she exists in the writer’s time, traveled by her readers.

This is why Betty Milan’s stories have been labeled autobiographical fiction, or autofiction.[9] The triptych examined here could be similarly classified. This is less true of Consolação; the return to São Paulo following her husband’s suffering and death is real in the sense of being factual, as is the pain of loss. But at some level the voices that speak to the protagonist are not. Other works, especially O papagaio e o doutor, also feature hallucinations or the entanglement of the factual realm with subjectivity. Paixão de Lia (1994; The passion of Lia) is most assuredly not real. Or perhaps it is, given that the desires and fantasies laid bare in this series of accounts do indeed exist.

In the end, the label “autofiction” does not preclude other ways of viewing this corpus and highlighting its uniqueness and autonomous characteristics. One applicable category would be epistolary narrative. Milan embraces this genre in Carta ao filho, where the narrator voices her admiration of Madame de Sévigné on her visit to the castle and where she describes the French woman’s letters as driven by passion. In Sévigné’s case, it is a passionate love for her daughter, in another specular relation: letters to a daughter commented on in Carta ao filho, opening a dialogue between the two authors and between reading and writing.

Two of Milan’s books are epistolary in the strictest sense, told through the medium of letters. In both, the central theme is love and passion, with all its vicissitudes and triumphs. One of these is the collection from an advice column mentioned earlier (Quem ama escuta), which Milan wrote for both a newspaper and a major magazine, realizing a wish and becoming a non-fictional version of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, or the incarnation of Suzana Flag, a pseudonym adopted by Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodrigues. The other is O amante brasileiro (2003; The Brazilian lover), an exchange of messages between two lovers, her and “Oswald,” evidently grounded in reality. Milan’s most frankly epistolary work is thus the one most tightly bound to a real relationship of love, to one that actually happened.

Fale com ela (2007; Talk to her): a title that could be applied to Milan’s oeuvre as a whole. The author is consistent when she chooses to express herself through dramaturgy, through speech directed right at the audience, relinquishing the intermediation of the page. Epistolary narrators pursue speech; letters cement dialogue. “I write to an imaginary companion,” she says in A mãe eterna. But this statement holds true throughout her work, for her interlocutors are always imaginary, no matter how real.

O amante brasileiro reveals this same proclivity for paradox. In its pages, the Brazilian protagonist, a woman, exchanges messages with a Frenchman who gains renown by paying tribute to Oswald de Andrade, the modernist author of Poesia Pau Brasil. What does this inversion of roles and nationalities mean? Both are the Other, for loving means overcoming the limits of individuality, of social role, conventional identity, and nationality. Love creates its own geography.

Whether imagined or real, interlocution demands reciprocal listening. The pleasure of expressing oneself is empty, a soliloquy, if not corresponded by the pleasure of listening. And that includes listening to oneself. This is especially true in Quem ama escuta, where Milan always advises her readers to listen to their subconscious. Complementing these letters are newspaper interviews conducted by Milan, transcriptions of the speech of the Other, direct records of the act of listening, which gave birth to two other books: A força da palavra (1996; The power of words), which centers on writers, and O século (1999; The century), featuring experts from a gamut of fields who had something to say about the turn of the millennium.

As an author of auto- and epistolary fiction, Betty Milan is first and foremost a memorialist, here again in a paradoxical sense, as her reminiscences of the past are more a call to live the present fully than a record of what has been lost. It is as if remembering were the passport to forgetting, to freeing oneself from what has been. These are memoires that occupy different planes and levels simultaneously. This is particularly apparent in O papagaio e o doutor, which, even though it was the fourth book published by Milan, following on the heels of essays and another biographical-fictional narrative, is a beginning, a source work. It contains the seed of future books, which in turn will take up or contain references to this title.

O papagaio e o doutor is one of Milan’s narratives that merges personal memory, relative to her own biography, with collective memory, with that of the “tribe” of immigrants, of those who banished themselves voluntarily, endogenous, preserving habits and traditions and yielding the “incredible the tyranny of the tribe, of the name!”[10] But a banished tribe within another society, which abandoned its own language and cast aside that which is central to its worldview or identity.

Take the following excerpt:

The passport from Lebanon to the West was the French language. Could Seriema not speak French? And her ancestor required it in order to find a home in the New World. Get to work, Seriema, and without suspecting that I was acting to please that ancestor, I translated unceasingly.

This one paragraph holds within it many affirmations and questions. The protagonist will master French and yet has to speak Brazilian Portuguese in order to be a descendant of the Lebanese who kept their traditions but gave up their language. To be is to translate, but translation is infinite, for every symbol translates into another symbol, tracing out a circular path, as observed about Milan’s decision to translate Lacan himself (a decision that yielded the Brazilian edition of the first volume of Seminars): “Let the little Brazilian fend for herself with her crazy obsession to translate, switching back and forth between languages, insisting on an impossible identity and swallowing the many impossibilities.” Many impossibilities? Countless, I would venture. But isn’t that what being Brazilian is all about? Someone in transit, mutating, living on shifting ground? Someone who has a mobile language, in the process of making or remaking itself, requiring ongoing, infinite translation?

An abyssal experience – mise en abyme is the term used to describe these specular writings. Indeed, Milan’s stories in general and O papagaio e o doutor in particular are self-referential, self-reflective. Their focus is not only on the narrator but on her creation. As writing that contemplates itself, it contemplates language. There is recurring doubt about meaning, about the relation between words and their referents. The instability of this relationship is illustrated by word games like this one, where the protagonist is trying to understand the meaning of her analysis with the master: “Was I using his renown to own my own name?” Or when she is mulling over ruptures with orthodoxy and subsequent banishment from psychoanalytical societies of both analyst and analyzed: “From this came a different typology: the perverted, the converted, and the submerged.” In this and other passages of O papagaio e o doutor, the signifier takes the lead and starts to generate meanings. This includes the central episode, the interpretation of a hallucination about rats, whose key lies in a single phoneme: “ra.” This phoneme harkens back to the banished word, to the word that “had taken on corporeal form in the imaginary rat” and that has to do with her father’s name, Raji – a name that is always omitted because it reveals origins that the character wants to forget, in order “to escape being the victim of xenophobia.” A name that is likewise the name of her grandfather, who didn’t make it across the ocean: “He died on board and was buried at sea.”

Accepting the autonomy of the signifier lies one step from imbuing it with magic value – for example, when we voice a word like abracadabra or draw a symbol, intone a chant, or use a talisman while assuming that these actions have the power to intervene in reality or trigger events, thereby subverting or inverting the relationship between symbols and things, as postulated by the Aristotelian idea of mimesis. This step has been taken. There is a lost amulet in O papagaio e o doutor, a fetish. Is it “real”? Does it belong to the realm of beliefs and superstitions; does it truly have magical powers? We observe that the protagonist has an ambivalent relationship not only to this object but to magic in general, especially when it comes to Brazilian syncretism. Milan calls syncretism to mind while playing up the melody of words:

My aunt who in childhood danced the dabke, the belly dance, was first a spiritist and afterward a follower of Umbanda, a complete Brazilian who sang: My Jurema, my Juremá… / Permission, mother Oxum / Aiê Ieu… Permission, mother Oxum / Our father Oxalá / Epê epê Babá / Our father Oxalá.

Passages written in poetic prose reinforce the ties to poetry, madness and magic. Gérard de Nerval, mad poet, devotee of esotericism, referred to his last narrative, Aurélia, as an “outpouring of the dream world into real life.” This outpouring characterizes O papagaio e o doutor. And not just because the dream world is so very present (so much so that the narrator feels that Louis XIV dreamt Versailles for her), but because events seem to obey the logic of dreams. The narrative is in its entirety hallucinatory and therefore ambivalent; everything can be something else, for “the Doctor’s [Lacan’s] dialectic was to give equal value to all statements and to their opposite.” In Carta ao filho, Milan has the following to say about Carlito Maia, her friend and character, to whom she pays tribute in O Clarão (2001): “Carlito cared little about the logic of contradictions.” This man of sweeping language – who for this reason was a major figure in the world of communication and who liked to send flowers accompanied by brief messages – inspired a book about the period preceding his death, during which he became aphasic. Milan was moved not only by the gradual loss of her friend, the register of his leaving, but by the paradox that someone so expressive and communicative lost his ability to communicate and could barely express himself.

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If ambivalence rules and everything can be something else, this also holds for gender or sex. For Betty Milan, what does it mean to be a woman? A movement, a process, obviously that which is not the role assigned to women in a patriarchal society built around the nuclear family within an omnipresent culture that discriminates against women. And so, in the confessional Carta ao filho, she proclaims her “sexual ambiguity” and reports that she “didn’t take part in the sexual revolution as a woman, but as a man.” She adds: “Conception was also made difficult by my inability to identify with the female sex.” Making things clearer still, she opens Carta ao filho with these words:

As a result of this androgyny, I have always got along well with gay people, including during the era in which, in addition to being marginalized, they were routinely killed in Brazil. When I was eighteen years old, Michel Foucault, who was in São Paulo as a conference speaker, told me, “You are as affable as a young man.” It took me a long time to understand what he meant. Because he was particularly sensitive, in addition to being homosexual, he had noticed that there was a man in me. That explains why I have always fallen in love with men with delicate features, true androgynes. We fall in love with those who mirror our souls, and the greater the mirroring, the more delirious the passion.

Yes. But we can go further in interpreting this multiple (hers and her partners’ and friends’) identification with androgyny, given its tremendous symbolic weight. Not only in Plato’s Symposium but in countless myths from a broad range of peoples, the adrogyne, a bisexual being, represents completeness, perfection. Man before the fall, the Adam Kadmon from texts parallel to the biblical Genesis. And hence, anthropologists and historians of religion tell us that shamans, wise men, and tribal priests dressed or adorned themselves like women. Some, rendering the symbol in concreto (to borrow a term from Mircea Eliade), were in fact bisexual or homosexual.

One especially enlightening legend is that of the seer Tiresias. After killing a female snake, he is transformed into a woman and lives this way for many years; when he later kills a male snake, however, he recovers his masculinity. Yet his dual sexuality, or passage through the two genders, means he gains many more years of life.[11] It is as if Tiresias’ story were a parable illustrating Norman O. Brown, for whom, in Life against Death, the androgyny of Plato and of mythology likewise symbolizes the vanquishing of the duality of life and death. I would venture a further interpretation of the legend of Tiresias: when the soothsayer broke the time barrier and saw the future, his life was extended not only temporally but also in the sense of greater plenitude, of living every moment more fully.

It is interesting how the value attached to bisexuality ends up migrating from tribal rites to Brazil’s street carnival, where so many generally conventional men can enjoy their moment of androgyny by cross-dressing.

There is yet another paradox: the value attached to motherhood, to the importance of having a child. Foreshadowed in O papagaio e o doutor, motherhood is the way to plant roots in some of the ground traveled: the remote Lebanon of ancestors, France, especially Brazil. This might seem contradictory, coming from someone who Foucault saw as a “young man,” who took part in protests as a “man,” and who united with men who displayed “female” characteristics. Even more so in the terrain of identities, because she ends up having the most cosmopolitan of children, a bilingual French-Brazilian son, who goes to India to film Jews. And which occasions a case of mirroring, given the tense relation with the formalist rigor of European education.

We can move from the symbology of androgyny to the theme of freedom. Two stages or levels of freedom should be distinguished. One is transitive – for example, the freedom to be a woman and have all of one’s rights as a woman respected; to not subject oneself to the oppression of institutions and customs; to forego the need to be a mere extension of family, tribal, social, or corporatist values; to be free from inequality and economic constraints. The other is intransitive freedom,[12] which involves simultaneously being and not being a woman – better put: being and yet relinquishing being not a “woman” but manifold women and non-women across a gamut of possibilities that includes, among others, the parade of disparate and, at first glance, apparently opposite types found in A trilogia do amor (2010; The trilogy of love).

This intentional jumbling of roles – or this vanquishing of distinctions between genders and roles in what is still a patriarchal society – finds a metaphor in remarks made at the end of Carta ao filho concerning “the heroine of Brecht’s ‘the Unseemly Old Lady’,” the woman who, once a widow, became “Mrs. B, a person without responsibilities,” who “consumed the bread of life to the last crumb.”

But Betty Milan didn’t wait for widowhood or the breaking of ties. She has been systematically unseemly. I would say she has been methodically transgressive, right from her early training through a succession of rifts with institutions and breaches of rules laid down by families, groups, and others.

A mãe eterna closes with a lovely poetic prose piece, from which I draw this excerpt: “I didn’t know then that without any effort on my part, you would be reborn in my heart and we would continue together. You’ll be buried in a mahogany casket, as arranged, and will be placed in the family tomb to the sound of a magnificent silence – the silence of those who have never relinquished their independence.” I stress: “to the sound of a magnificent silence.” This oxymoron, this seeming paradox, symbolizes the act of vanquishing. In the realm of symbols (which constitutes reality), something can be its apparent opposite. And death becomes a re-affirmation of life for those who have never surrendered their independence, through creation and poetry – the manifestation of rebellion, of the aspiration to live fully, by someone who took her first steps by embracing rebellions during the course of an intensely personal journey, one that has been equally thought-provoking and prolific.

Betty Milan was born in São Paulo, Brazil. She is the author of novels, essays, crônicas, and plays. Her work has been published in Brazil, France, Argentina, and China. She has written for Brazil’s top newspapers and has been a columnist for the news daily Folha de S. Paulo and the magazine Veja. She worked for the International Parliament of Writers, based in Strasbourg, France. In 1998 and 2015, she was a guest author at the Paris Book Fair. In 2014, she represented contemporary Brazilian literature at the Miami Book Fair International. Before turning to writing, she earned her medical degree at the University of São Paulo and trained in psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan in France. Further information can be found at https://www.bettymilan.com.br/

Claudio Willer (São Paulo, 1940) is a poet, essayist, and translator. His recent publications include A verdadeira história do século 20 (poetry); Manifestos – 1964-2010; Os rebeldes: Geração Beat e anarquismo místico (essays); Um obscuro encanto: gnose, gnosticismo e poesia (essays); Geração Beat (essays); and Estranhas Experiências (poetry). He has translated Lautréamont, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Artaud, among others. He holds a PhD in Literature from USP, where he also did post-doctoral work. Further information can be found at http://claudiowiller.wordpress.com/about

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[1] To date, Betty Milan’s books have all been published in Brazil through Record publishing house, based in Rio de Janeiro.

[2] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985, 2^nd edition).

[3] In my afterword to Trilogia do amor (2010).

[4] A revised edition of the book was released in 1998.

[5] All quotations in English from Carta ao filho were sourced from Alison Entrekin’s translation of the book.

[6] From an article published in the newspaper O Estado de Minas.

[7] A reference to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006.

[8] “Heart Beat: Fifties Heroes as Soap Opera,” published in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, edited by Holly George-Warren (Rolling Stone Press, 1999).

[9] For example, by Michèle Sarde in the afterword to Consolação.

[10] All quotations in English from O papgaio e o doutor were sourced from Clifford Lander’s translation of the book.

[11] I have taken this and other observations about androgyny from the Spanish edition of Jean Libis’ Le mythe de l’androgyne (Ediciones Siruela: El mito del andrógino, n.d.).

[12] I am adapting something from Foucault in The Order of Things, i.e.,  his contrast of “intransitive” language, which is disencumbered from meaning or external reference, with a language that is only “transitive.”