Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil: Memory, Politics and Identities

Introduction

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SARA BRANDELLERO AND LUCIA VILLARES

Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953) is one of Brazil’s foremost canonical writers and one of the major figures of the country’s modernist tradition of the first half of the twentieth century. As one of Brazil’s most studied authors, he features prominently in university syllabi in Brazil and abroad, with a number of his works having been widely translated.¹ This edited volume aims to bring together contemporary perspectives on his work, mindful of the significance of Ramos as a unique voice in world literature and of his work as an important lens through which to gain an understanding of the making of modern Brazil and of the country’s place in the world today.²

Born in Quebrangulo, in the north-eastern state of Alagoas, on 27 October 1892, the oldest of sixteen children, Ramos’s childhood was spent between life on farms in the rural interior and the town of Viçosa and the state’s capital, Maceió, on the coast, where he completed his education. After a short period residing in Rio de Janeiro, working as desk editor and reporter for a number of newspapers, in 1915 he returned to the north-east and to the town of Palmeira dos Índios, where he had lived earlier and where his father owned a textile shop, which Ramos took over. He continued to write for different newspapers, but his first literary break came after he was elected mayor of Palmeira dos Índios, in 1927. The ironic and to-the-point style of his administrative mayoral reports to the governor of Alagoas caught the eye of eminent modernist poet and editor Augusto Frederico Schmidt (1906–65), who encouraged Ramos to publish the novel he had worked on since 1925 and which was finally published in 1933. Caetés ironically reflects on provincial life in Palmeira dos Índios, which Ramos knew all too well from his dealings as mayor. By then, he had been in office for three years and experienced much personal tragedy, with the loss of three siblings to bubonic plague. He had also re-married, to Heloísa Leite de Medeiros, after being widowed with four young children following the death of his first wife, Maria Augusta de Barros, due to complications in childbirth. He would go on to have four more children in his second marriage.

After leaving the office of mayor in 1930, he took on a series of posts in state government, first as director of Alagoas’s official press and then as secretary for education there. His most acclaimed works would follow in quick succession after the publication of Caetés, among them São Bernardo (1934), centred on life on the eponymous farm run by the ruthless and violent landowner Paulo Honório, and Vidas secas (Barren Lives; 1938), about a family of dispossessed migrant rural workers struggling for survival in the arid expanses of the sertão (arid hinterland), which would become his most famous novel and, as all of his major works, was grounded in the reality of his native north-east Brazil, one of the country’s poorest and most socially fractured regions.

Ramos himself stated that ‘nunca pude sair de mim mesmo. Só posso escrever o que sou’ (I was never able to escape what I am. I can only write what I am).³ In fact, his engagement with his northeastern background and commitment to probe into social complexities and the historical injustices of a fossilized social and political order, while bringing to life an array of individual subjectivities that inhabit his reconfigurations of different landscapes – urban and rural – of the north-east, would seal his reputation as one of Brazil’s most original and trailblazing voices. Today, in a broader context, his significance also lies in what he reveals about the experience of modernity and the construction of a nation the complexity of which is at once beguiling in its historical, cultural, natural richness and shocking in the brutal social contradictions that persist to this day.

Indeed, published between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s, Ramos’s texts draw our attention to the dark side of a process of modernization intensively promoted during the populist and authoritarian government of the Getúlio Vargas Era in Brazil (1930–54), which Ramos lived through, and which supported a programme of growing urbanization and industrialization of the country.⁴ Alongside the drive to modernize the country, Vargas’s ideology of national integration encouraged a specific national and international understanding of the country and a whole set of cultural stereotypes. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s classic study of inter-racial relations in Brazil, Casa grande e senzala (The Masters and the Slaves), of 1933, with its positive appraisal of the history of racial relations in Brazil, provided the Vargas ideology (and beyond) a welcome endorsement to the building of the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy, which, often associated with cultural practices such as samba, football and carnival, contributed to the creation of an image of the country that often still persists today and that Ramos undermined from the very beginning of his writing career.

Ramos’s conflictual relationship with the Vargas’s government, his imprisonment in 1936 and his commitment with the left after 1937 turned him into an emblematic figure as a socially committed writer. His prominent political profile as a left-wing intellectual has sometimes limited the possible readings of his texts, something we have tried to rebalance in this collection.

That said, it is impossible to dissociate Ramos’s literary trajectory from his imprisonment by the Vargas government in March 1936, in the aftermath of the failed communist uprisings of 1935 stemming from a movement led by Luis Carlos Prestes. These increased the general fear of communism and served as a pretext to revoke constitutional rights. Ramos was taken from his home in Palmeira dos Índios and spent ten months imprisoned, first in Maceió, then in Rio de Janeiro and Ilha Grande, at the infamous penitentiary complex on the island south of the city of Rio. The reasons for his imprisonment were never completely clarified, and he was never formally charged, though it is generally accepted that he was seen by the Vargas government as a communist sympathizer.

Suspecting his imminent imprisonment, Ramos hurriedly gave the manuscript of his third novel Angústia (Anguish; 1936) to the typist, thus having it published without fully revising it. Ramos later regretted having done so, qualifying the book as excessive and saying that a quarter of the text should have been cut out.⁵ Yet, this urban novel set in Maceió, revolving around the protagonist Luís da Silva’s tortured psychological state, and his lonely, frustrated professional and love life, would become one of Ramos’s most acclaimed works.

His most famous novel, Vidas secas, appeared soon after, in 1938, approximately one year after Ramos’s release from prison. This rendition of the plight of the poorest in the north-east’s rural outback groundbreakingly delved into the lives and mental processes of dispossessed sertanejos (inhabitants of the sertão), socially invisible figures in a context of a semi-feudal land system, whose individualities and psychological turmoil had not featured in Brazilian literature in this way before.

Indeed, the horrific experiences in prison certainly impacted on Ramos’s writing and helped shape it. Critic John Gledson, for example, noted how ‘the humiliation suffered by the author and his fellow inmates seems to have had the paradoxical effect of giving him a more dignified view of human beings’.⁶ It has also defined the understanding we have of Ramos’s work, emphasizing his position as a writer responding to catastrophic social neglect and political oppression.

His harrowing account of the time he spent in prison appeared in his posthumous Memórias do cárcere (Prison Memoirs; 1953), another of his key works. It was following his imprisonment that Ramos’s official affiliation to the Communist Party occurred, in 1945, which consolidated his place as a left-wing intellectual. He travelled abroad widely in these later years of his life, which included his visit to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, which he recorded in a series of writings published posthumously in 1954. However, his relationship with the party was not without conflict. Biographers note his resistance to attempts of ideological control on the part of the Soviet counterpart, as it tried to impose the tenets of socialist realism on Brazilian writers. Also noted has been his personal opposition to the party’s interference in his writing of Memórias do cárcere.⁷

Ramos would leave a body of work that has spoken to generations of readers both at home and abroad following his death from cancer at the age of sixty, in 1953. Some of the characters he created have become iconic – the cowherd Fabiano and his wife Vitória, from Vidas secas, the ruthless landowner Paulo Honório and his intellectual and compassionate wife Madalena, from São Bernardo, to name a few. And criticism on Ramos’s work is vast, having invited different critical perspectives (including, for example, psychoanalytical, Marxist and structuralist readings).

In Brazil, between the early 1930s and the late 1980s critics such as Antonio Candido, Lucia Miguel Pereira, Otto Maria Carpeaux, Alfredo Bosi, Letícia Malard and João Luis Lafetá – amongst many others – contributed to the construction of a solid interpretive profile.⁸ Alongside fellow north-eastern novelists of his generation, key figures such as José Lins do Rego (1901–57) and Raquel de Queiroz (1910–2003), Ramos was seen as part of the regionalist movement of the north-east of the 1930s, also known as the period of the romance social (social novel), characterized by neo-realist novels set in the socio-economic reality of the region – primarily in the landscapes of the arid sertão or the decadent traditional sugar plantations – which brought the literary and cultural production of this marginal region of the country into prominence vis-à-vis the hitherto dominance of the cultural centres of Rio and São Paulo. A number of these novels, such as Lins do Rego’s Menino de engenho (Plantation Boy; 1932), depict the stark social inequality of northeastern society, the struggle against the harsh climate characterized by periodic droughts of epic proportions, the gradual decline of the rural-based patriarchal order and the need to adapt to new urban and recently industrialized environments, vis-à-vis the legacy of centuries of a slave-based agrarian economy.

All these realities certainly also belong to the life experiences of many of Ramos’s characters. However, critics have noted how, differently from other regionalist novels, which often explore the picturesque, and address the changing socio-economic landscape of the time with a degree of nostalgia, and where characters often appear defined and controlled by their environment, Ramos’s works brought to life far more complex and autonomous characters, in conflict with their surroundings and with themselves.⁹

Within the tradition of the romance social, authors and critics believed that novels should have an explicit social message and mobilize readers to change Brazilian society. Books such as Cacau (Cocoa; 1933) and Suor (Sweat; 1934) by eminent novelist Jorge Amado (1912–2001), and Caminho de pedras (Path of Stones; 1937) by Raquel de Queirós, for example, promoted social and collective needs to the detriment of the individual and the construction of subjectivities. Many of the early critics of Ramos’s books read Ramos from this perspective, underlining the documentary aspects of his texts as evidence of the author’s intention to denounce a situation of social injustice. However, the prominence given to introspection and psychological analysis of the protagonist of São Bernardo, Paulo Honório, soon ensured that Ramos would be appraised as a unique voice in relation to the accepted model of social writing. Critics understood Ramos’s work in his own terms, celebrating his originality in not decoupling social concern from psychological depth, a quality that would also be evident in Vidas secas.¹⁰ The singular style that Ramos would develop would be one of the features of his writing that called critics’ attention from as early as 1933 and 1934, including critics such as Valdemar Cavalcanti and Aurélio Buarque de Holanda, who noted his tendency towards concision, his avoidance of unnecessary and ornamental words and constructions.¹¹

In 1945, Ramos published his first book of memoirs, Infância (Childhood). That same year, the critic Antonio Candido agreed to write a critical essay about each of the five books Ramos had published thus far. This collection of essays was published as a whole article in 1955 under the title of Ficção e confissão. This is arguably the most comprehensive appreciation of Ramos’s work as a whole. Candido calls our attention to Ramos’s use of irony, his tendency to self-criticism and self-depreciation. Candido also points to Ramos’s natural progression from fiction into biographical writing as a consequence of his commitment to his personal experience and truthfulness in his writing.¹²

Candido’s study is still among the most respected appraisals of Ramos’s oeuvre, but the author’s status in Brazilian letters has ensured a continued revisitation of his work. Recent studies include Wander Melo Miranda’s concise overview of the author, the recent edition of interviews the author gave during his lifetime, and the publication of hitherto unpublished texts by Ramos organized by scholars Thiago Mio Salla and Ieda Lebensztayn, all of which remind us of the importance of Ramos in the cultural scenario of Brazil today and show that he remains a ‘living subject’; that his texts and his political activism still provoke debate and mobilize readers.¹³

A number of critical overviews on Graciliano Ramos are available in English but there are no recent book-length studies on the author. Fred P. Ellison’s Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters (1954) places Ramos in the context of the regionalist movement, but offers a non-critical view of one of the leaders of that movement, Gilberto Freyre, and of his nostalgic and idealized portrayal of the inter-racial relations in Brazil. Other major studies include Richard Mazzara’s Graciliano Ramos (1974), which usefully contextualizes Ramos within Brazil’s modernist movement and regional setting, emphasizing the author’s commitment to the psychological exploration of his characters, and Celso Lemos de Oliveira’s Understanding Graciliano Ramos (1988), which adopts an overall biographical approach to his survey, in line with much of the output on Ramos.¹⁴

Thus, this collection of essays aims to bring a variety of new critical perspectives on the author to an English-speaking readership. The focus is on Ramos’s writings, and most of the chapters provide a close reading of an individual work, organized according to the order of publication. We opted to concentrate on Ramos’s own literary production given that recent criticism in English is scarce, though we are certainly aware of the impact Ramos had on other cultural production, especially film. A number of important filmic adaptations of Ramos’s work exist. Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1963 adaptation of Vidas secas is recognized as one of Brazilian cinema’s foremost productions and one of the emblematic films of the political cinematic movement of the 1960s and 1970s known as Cinema Novo. São Bernardo was adapted by Leon Hirszman in 1972 during some of the darkest years of Brazil’s latest experience of dictatorial rule (1964–85), and his translation of Ramos to the big screen eloquently evokes the climate of oppression and fear of those years as much as the dynamics of power in the violent rural north-eastern setting that was Ramos’s concern. Equally political was the later adaptation of Memórias do cárcere by Pereira dos Santos, in 1984, as Brazil was emerging from over twenty years of undemocratic government, signalling Ramos’s enduring resonance.¹⁵

Mindful of this, we aim to consider Ramos against his own background and his significance for understanding contemporary issues that affect Brazil today. Recent studies on Brazil have considered how, especially following the 1964 coup and the economic miracle promoted by the military dictatorship, the country has experienced a conservative form of modernization, insofar as it turned from a utopia to an ‘unrealised aspiration’, as described by Vivien Schelling, and an hegemonic order imposed from above.¹⁶ How exactly do Ramos’s texts relate to the political and cultural construction of modern Brazil? In his treatment of Brazil’s poverty and history of social neglect, how do his texts relate to more recent outputs dealing with the same theme? How does his work as a regionalist writer relate to contemporary authors who are homing in on Brazil’s vast and complex landscapes? Taking into account our contemporary perspectives on race, gender and sexuality, how can we understand Ramos’s construction of different identities?

The book is made up of twelve chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Reflections on Graciliano Ramos’, provides an interview with foremost contemporary writer Luiz Ruffato (b.1961), whose socially and politically engaged writing has often centred on the struggles of Brazil’s lower middle class, a blind spot in Brazilian literature, much like the sertanejos were in relation to Ramos. In his interview, Ruffato speaks about the significance of Ramos for his own work and for contemporary cultural production. In Chapter 2, ‘Graciliano Ramos and Politics in Alagoas’, Randal Johnson provides a study of Ramos’s early years in his native north-east and his early relationship with politics and left-wing movements, which provides a renewed understanding of Ramos’s relationship with politics, so significant in his later life. Chapter 3, ‘Debris of Worthless Shipwrecks: Caetés, the Anachronisms and Simulacra of the Modern Nation’ by Roberto Vecchi, deals with Ramos’s first novel, considering how it deconstructs tradition through the technique of double-narrative – the story within the story – and also through its provocative dialogue with Portuguese author Eça de Queirós (1845–1900). Focusing on Ramos’s subversion of tradition, Vecchi considers his dialogue with the groundbreaking conceptualization of anthropophagy as cultural practice within a postcolonial context in the key modernist text ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ (1928) by Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954). It thus goes on to analyse the novel’s configurations of the shipwreck within a broader discussion about the concept of modern experience, where the shipwreck is deprived of its tragic magnitude, being seen as ‘small’, ‘insignificant’, ‘common’.

Moving on to a discussion of Ramos’s second novel, Chapter 4 consists of Ana Paula Pacheco’s study entitled ‘The Subjectivity of the Werewolf (São Bernardo)’, which focuses on the figure of the self-made man in Ramos’s 1934 novel, seeking to grasp the connection between lyricism, money and melancholy in the book. In tune with the well-known Marxist readings of this novel by João Costa Lima and João Luís Lafetá, the chapter discusses how the protagonist-narrator’s relations with the world are determined by the logic of commodity fetishism: where every human relationship becomes a relationship between objects. As a prototype of the opportunist who resorts to all sorts of manoeuvers in order to climb the social ladder, Paulo Honório is compared to a hungry wolf who ends up as a victim of his own greed.

Lúcia Helena Vianna’s chapter ‘The Dead Woman in the Bedroom: São Bernardo’ provides a study of gender relations in Ramos’s novel and considers its female heroine, Madalena, and the threat she poses to patriarchal structures. Central to the discussion is Madalena’s command of the written word, and the chapter analyses the image of the letter as crystallizing Madalena’s destabilization of Paulo Honório’s patriarchal order, which her suicide ultimately also undermines as the expression of her free will.

Ramos’s critique of modernity is the focus of Chapter 6, ‘A Thick Heart: Migration of Souls and Meanings’, in which Lucia Helena analyses Ramos’s Vidas secas and its treatment of the theme of poverty and social exclusion in the 1930s as the country was experiencing rapid modernization. The essay focuses on the character of Fabiano in Vidas secas, in Ramos’s modernist work, in comparative analysis with another equally iconic literary character, this time drawn from the context of late modernity: the protagonist Macabéa from the classic novella A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star; 1978) by the foremost Brazilian woman writer Clarice Lispector (1920–77). Both are characters who give voice to migrants from the north-east, part of Brazil’s historically marginalized dispossessed majority, and define equally powerful perspectives on the construction of modernity and of modernization in Brazil.

Chapter 7 follows with an alternative perspective on Vidas secas. Sara Brandellero’s chapter ‘The Writing of the Spectral Land in Vidas secas’ considers the significance of landscape in Ramos’s piercing rendition of poverty in rural north-east Brazil and how we might see the characters’ relationship to their environment, as well as Ramos’s own act of writing, as marked by the experience of haunting. Her starting point is sociologist Avery F. Gordon’s definition of ghosts as social figures.¹⁷ Chapter 8, Wander Melo Miranda’s essay ‘The Anguish of Revolution’, studies Ramos’s novel Angústia and the autobiographical Memórias do cárcere, connecting the author’s concern with the political and ethical dimensions of his writing and Hannah Arendt’s concept of revolution as a new historical beginning where freedom is crucial. In Ramos’s work, the intention to write coincides with the intention to act; in other words, to narrate is to act politically. In Memórias do cárcere Ramos’s commitment to writing as a political act takes the shape of a specific way of dealing with memory. Here, to remember is not simply to repeat the past, but to free it from oblivion by giving shape and significance to lapses, distortions, hesitations of memory, in order to narrate a story (and a history) that could not be written otherwise.

In Chapter 9, Lucia Villares’s ‘Unearthing Value: Money and Topographies of the Self in Graciliano Ramos’, starts by comparing two descriptions of money that appear in the context of two of Ramos’s books: Angústia and Infância. Both instances involve the hiding of money by secondary characters, Graciliano’s grandfather, in Infância, and the slightly mad maid Vitória, in Angústia. In both cases, money is forced out of its ‘secret place’ with drastic consequences for the characters’ sense of agency. Villares interprets these passages as symptoms of a similar view on the value of money; a view that cannot be explained only by the traditional notion of ‘money fetishism’. Is it possible to interpret these literary representations of money beyond the usual Marxist framework through which Graciliano’s work has been read? Villares also develops the notion of ‘topographies of the self’: focusing on the meaning that money has for the character of the maid Vitória. The essay takes into account recent studies on the meaning of money, fetishism, urban everyday life in the context of modern subjectivities.

Chapter 10 considers Ramos’s novel Angústia through Mario Cámara’s reading ‘Graciliano Ramos is Not the Author of Madame Bovary’, analysing Ramos’s treatment of the protagonist Luís da Silva as a displaced person who is able to watch and listen to the world around him from the margins. Cámara discusses the protagonist’s position as a failed writer and how this might illuminate our understanding of Ramos’s own dialogue with literary tradition and his own choices as a modernist writer operating in Brazil.

Chapter 11, Aquiles Alencar Brayner’s essay ‘The Freedom of Memory: Autobiography and Fiction in Graciliano Ramos and Silviano Santiago’, delves deeper into the issue of autobiographical writing in Ramos’s work touched upon in Villares’s study. For many literary critics and scholars, Ramos’s autobiographical writings offer the gateway to understanding the genesis of his fictional characters and plots. In this chapter, Brayner proposes a reversal of this reading and seeks to elucidate the ways in which fictional elements are used in Ramos’s autobiographical account Memórias do cárcere. The chapter discusses how this undifferentiating approach between fiction and autobiography underpins the textual construction of the narrative while at the same time providing the focus of discussion in the book. Brayner’s analysis of Memórias do cárcere is complemented and at times supported by a reading of Silviano Santiago’s (b.1936) Em liberdade (In Liberty; 1981) that further questions the distinction between fiction and autobiography by stressing the central function of textual reception in literary works.

Concluding with the theme of memory and the writing of history and looking closely at Ramos’s significance for Brazil’s new generation of writers, Chapter 12, Tânia Pellegrini’s ‘On Influences: Graciliano Ramos and Milton Hatoum’, analyses the dialogue that contemporary Amazonian writer Milton Hatoum establishes with his master, Ramos. The essay considers Ramos’s Angústia and Infância and how they resonate in Hatoum’s novels Dois irmãos (Two Brothers; 2000) and Cinzas do Norte (Ashes of the Amazon; 2005). It deals with issues related to an oblique gaze, due to the characters’ situation in relation to their family and social structures, in parts of the country that are distant from the developed regions. This indirectly touches on and introduces new nuances to the well-known discussion of what constitutes Brazilian regionalist fiction and its relevance in today’s cultural landscape.

Notes

1Translations into English include: Childhood, trans. Celso Lemos de Oliveira (London: Owen, 1979); Barren Lives, trans. Ralf E. Dimmick (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); Anguish, trans. L. C. Kaplan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946); São Bernardo, trans. R. L. Scott-Buccleuch (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1979). An indication of foreign scholarship and interest on the author is given, for example, in Darlene Sadlier’s survey of scholarship in the US: D. Sadlier, ‘Lendo Graciliano Ramos nos Estados Unidos’, Revista IEB, 54 (2012), 31–52.

2The author is often commonly referred to in Brazil simply by his first name, Graciliano, and some of the chapters here have opted for this reference.

3In Wander Melo Miranda, Graciliano Ramos (São Paulo: Publifolha, 2004), p. 8. Originally published in 1948 in ‘Revisão do modernismo’ and reproduced in Homero Senna, República das letras. 20 entrevistas com escritores (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1957).

4Getúlio Vargas ruled Brazil from 1930, establishing the dictatorship known as Estado Novo (New State) in 1932 until 1945. He returned to office in 1951, this time through democratic elections, and remained in power until his death, in 1954.

5Antonio Candido, Ficção e confissão, 3rd rev edn (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2006), p. 11.

6J. Gledson, ‘Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos; Speculations on Sex and Sexuality’, in S. C. Quinlan and F. Arenas (eds), Lusosex; Gender and Sexuality in the Portuguese Speaking World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 23.

7See Ricardo Ramos, Retrato fragmentado (Rio de Janeiro: Globo Livros, 2011), pp. 98–141; Dênis Moraes, O velho Graça: uma biografia de Graciliano Ramos (São Paulo: Biotempo, 2012), pp. 259, 270–4; Clara Ramos, Mestre Graciliano: confirmação humana de uma obra (São Paulo: Civilização Brasileira, 1979), pp. 223–7, 252–3.

8See, for example, J. C. Garbuglio, A. Bosi and V. Facioli (orgs), Graciliano Ramos (São Paulo: Ática, 1987).

9Alfredo Bosi, História concisa da literatura brasileira (São Paulo: Cultrix, 1994), pp. 393, 402.

10 Luís Bueno, Uma história do romance de 30 (São Paulo/Campinas: EDUSP/Editora da UNICAMP, 2006), pp. 239–43.

11 Candido, Ficção e confissão, pp. 136–40.

12 Candido, Fiçcão e confissão, pp. 17–99.

13 See Melo Miranda, Graciliano Ramos; T. Mio Salla (org.), Garranchos: textos inéditos de Graciliano Ramos (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Record, 2012) – this includes some pieces of fiction, but also letters and short articles about politics, culture and literature; T. Mia Salla and I. Lebensztayn (orgs), Cangaços: Graciliano Ramos (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Record, 2014) (selection of texts on the phenomenon of the cangaço (i.e. banditry), of the nineteenth and early twentieth century north-east Brazil); T. Mia Salla and I. Lebensztayn (orgs), Conversas: Graciliano Ramos (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Record, 2014) (interviews).

14 Patrícia Vieira, Seeing Politics Otherwise: Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 154. Vieira’s book includes the chapter ‘Darkness and the Animal in Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do cárcere ( Memoirs of Prison )’. Book-length studies are: Fred P. Ellison’s Brazil’s New