Imprensa, história e literatura: O jornalista-escritor

Carlos Drummond de Andrade once wondered why newspapers always called him a poet, for he judged his “journalistic output . . . incomparably superior” to his poetry; “in fact, I am a journalist,” he declared in 1984 (vol. 3, pp. 16, 181). While it is well known that Brazilian writers from Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis to Jorge Amado wrote extensively for periodicals (and usually started their writing careers in newspapers and magazines), the relationship between this writing and their literary output remains little studied, despite the former's impressive volume. Rachel de Queiroz produced 1,387 articles for the magazine O Cruzeiro alone between 1938 and 1956 (vol. 2, p. 270). Machado de Assis only published about a third of his 200 short stories in books (vol. 1, p. 204), while only about one-tenth of Drummond's 2,432 crônicas (columns) in the Correio da Manhã subsequently appeared in collections (vol. 3, p. 185).Lúcio Cardoso disdained the 200 or so crime stories that he wrote for A Noite in the early 1950s, but “nothing justifies” such treatment of this “voluminous and important work” (vol. 3, p. 237), and this observation by Valéria Lamego encapsulates the approach of many of the 52 contributors to this collection. Mostly scholars of literature, with only a few historians, they focus on Brazilian and French writers, the latter ranging from Honoré de Balzac to Albert Camus. Chapters on Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Charles Dickens, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Robert Southey provide a few perspectives from other countries. The editors see a broad shift from the nineteenth century, when writing for newspapers was de rigueur for novelists (and canonical works of literature first appeared in serialized form in the folhetim sections), to the twentieth century, when journalism and literature largely went their separate ways. By the 1950s, those whom Nelson Rodrigues called the “idiots of objectivity” had moved Brazilian journalism from its French origins (prolix and opiniated) to a North American style dominated by conciseness and objectivity (vol. 3, p. 195). Nevertheless, some literati had to write for newspapers to support themselves, as did Clarice Lispector, who in 1952 authored the Entre mulheres (Among women) column for a Rio de Janeiro newspaper, while others were invited to contribute crônicas because of their literary reputations.The 34 chapters on 33 Brazilian writers (Machado de Assis gets 2 chapters) highlight the centrality of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil's literary world. None of the nineteenth-century chapters examine writers in the provinces and their relationship with the local press, but ambitious provincial writers like Antônio Gonçalves Dias or the brothers Artur and Aluísio de Azevedo made careers in the national capital, a pattern that largely endured in the twentieth century. While most contributors focus on canonical authors (and provide important insights into their lesser-known work), the chapter on Alberto Figueiredo Pimentel (1869–1914), considered a “failed” writer (vol. 2, p. 129), shows that much can be learned about the literary world from so-called minor figures.At over 900 pages, with 50 chapters (2 coauthored), this is a collection that readers will sample as they seek what interests them. The too-brief volume introductions, the first by Isabel Lustosa and Rita Olivieri-Godet and the rest by Lustosa alone, provide accurate paragraph-length abstracts to help readers find what interests them. The unfortunate seven-year delay between the conference at Rio de Janeiro's Casa de Rui Barbosa and publication means that this collection arrives somewhat out of date. It reads more like a conference proceeding than an integrated edited book: there is no real cross talk among the chapters, some of which are merely the length of a typical conference paper. The bibliographies (curiously provided for only some of the chapters) reveal only a handful of sources published in 2014 and 2015, and almost nothing more recent. Some of the authors subsequently published books incorporating material presented in their chapters.Unsurprisingly, there is scarcely any mention of the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira (https://memoria.bn.br/hdb/periodico.aspx), the open-access newspaper database launched by Brazil's national library in 2012, which is currently enabling different approaches to literary history, exemplified by João Roberto Faria's Teatro e escravidão no Brasil (2022). A vast corpus of once virtually inaccessible material is now readily available (and somewhat searchable) and can be considered in the context in which it originally appeared. Lustosa and Olivieri-Godet's collection raises many questions that will, no doubt, be explored more fully as scholars use these new tools to study familiar writers’ not-so-familiar work.

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