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Contents
Selected Dalkey Archive Titles
When it first appeared in 1973, during some of the worst years of the brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985, The Girl in the Photograph (As Meninas) was hailed by the critics and the general public alike. Written by one of Brazil’s most respected writers, Lygia Fagundes Telles, it went through eleven editions in Brazil and was translated into a number of languages. Among the many jewels of Brazilian literature, The Girl in the Photograph stands out for being that rarest of literary birds, a serious work of art that has also had immense popular appeal. The passage of time has done little to diminish the novel’s power and relevance, not just for contemporary Brazil but, as American readers will discover, for those living in the United States of 2012, for our entire American hemisphere, and for our globalized and inter-connected world culture in general.
Not limited to Brazil, the problems the novel takes up—political fanaticism and oppression, the erosion of civil liberties under right-wing governments, the prevalence of torture in cultures that claim, piously, to be above such practices, and the devastating effects of drug abuse, poverty, and alienation—are as alive and as prevalent today as they were in the early 1970s. Perhaps more so, if we are to be honest with ourselves. The intellectual and artistic icons of the 1960s are all here, with references to Marx, Malraux, Mayakovsky Jimi Hendrix, Ché Guevara, Lacan, Barthes, and Sartre abounding, along with the occasional nod to French Structuralism, American interventionism and cultural imperialism, the socio-political significance of “bricolage,” racism, underdevelopment, pop culture, abortion, sexual politics, and Liberation Fronts. So while The Girl in the Photograph is, in some respects, a brilliant if disturbing period piece, a lacerating study of Brazilian society under the heel of a violent and ruthless dictatorship aided and abetted by the government of the United States of America, it is also a cautionary tale of universal significance, a parable about the need for human solidarity, responsible behavior, equality, and justice for all.
As such, The Girl in the Photograph operates on two narrative planes. One, the dominant one, deals with the private lives of three young Brazilian women living together in a boarding house run by Catholic nuns, a residence which, replete with the appropriate tangle of religion and politics circa the late 1960s, can be taken as a metaphor for Brazil itself. The other, less obvious one (but, for the author, much more dangerous, given Brazil’s grim political situation at the time of the novel’s appearance), functions as a thinly-veiled protest against the crimes committed by the leaders of the dictatorship and the abuse of power they exhibited in doing so. By early April of 1964, after President Goulart had been deposed, the Brazilian Congress, thoroughly purged of its liberal faction by right-wing supporters of the CIA assisted coup d’état, elected Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco as the new President. Shortly afterwards, on April 9, 1964, it then rushed to pass the infamous (for Brazilians) First Institutional Act, which, among other things, declared that a state of siege existed in Brazil, expanded the powers of the President to near dictatorial levels, and suspended Brazilian civil rights for a ten year period. Vowing to “follow the international leadership of Washington,” Castelo Branco, a staunch advocate of the “linha dura,” or “hard line,” as this related to the stifling of liberal thought and political action, created a nightmarish Brazil, a Kafkaesque horror-chamber of violence and repression, one in which a “book-burning mentality predominated—not only figuratively but literally. In Rio Grande do Sul, the commander of the Third Army, General Alves Bastos, ordered burned all the books which he branded as subversive. His capricious list of dangerous literature contained, it is reported, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black” (Burns 510, 511). And yet, against the very real threats of political imprisonment, torture, and even murder, Brazilian young people, along with many artists, writers, and intellectuals fought back. Protest songs, taking the form of folk music (also popular, and for not entirely dissimilar reasons, in the United States of this same period), became a powerful form of resistance, one especially effective in a land where half the people were still illiterate (Burns 513). All in all, the 1960s and 1970s were a dangerous time to be, as Telles was, a liberal supporter of democracy and democratic process in Brazil.
Although the action of her novel is set in the 1960s, not long after the dictatorship subverted the democratically elected but left-leaning government of João Goulart, its significance far outstrips its time and place. The novel’s unrelenting emphasis on the deeply intertwined inner lives of the three young women involved, and the degree to which their lives reflect the turbulent times in when they were coming of age, make The Girl in the Photograph, if anything, more powerful and affecting today than at the time of its publication. With the rise of Brazil in our Western hemisphere and on the contemporary world scene, it is clear that its own journey from liberal democracy to dictatorship and, now, its admirable effort to become a model democracy for the twenty-first century, can be taken as a sobering lesson about the absolute need for responsible, socially-conscious conduct, not only in one’s private life but in one’s public, or civic, life as well. Readers everywhere, but perhaps most especially those in the United States, should take heed of this lesson as they go about trying to save their own society and their own democracy in 2012. As a close and engaged reading of The Girl in the Photograph makes chillingly clear, the same issues, forces, and conflicts are very much in play.
Each of the novel’s three women, Lorena, Ana Clara, and Lia—rendered far more complexly than they might otherwise be by the story’s interlocking interior monologues—embodies, though in a different way, both of these narratives planes. The result is a very complicated narrative web—one that offers, however, a panoramic view of 1960s Brazil, a nation caught up in the throes of change and one which is, in 1964, about to be consumed by the repressive and anti-democratic forces within it. Indeed, the reader interested in inter-American comparisons will find much to ponder here.
The privileged scion of an old and wealthy São Paulo family, Lorena, who is determinedly virginal, also indulges in sexual fantasies concerning a tryst she burns to have with a married man, one Dr. Marcus Nemesio, whose initials, M. N., recur throughout the narrative, and whose perverse presence in Lorena’s feverish mind amounts to something very like an obsession.
A child of poverty and despair, Ana Clara has