Read The Girl in the Photograph Online
Authors: Lygia Fagundes Telles
The Girl in the Photograph
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 quickly risen on the prevailing social
and economic ladder, although for the most meretricious of reasons; born a great beauty
in the
favelas
, or slums, she has, upon her discovery by the fashion industry, been transformed
into a highly paid model, a young woman whose material fame and fortune cannot mask
the despair that eats away at her. Although outwardly the epitome of what it means
for many young women—in Brazil and elsewhere—to “make it” in a consumer society, she
is vitiated by her drug addition and tormented by her enervating sense of emptiness.
Desiring most of all to “wallow in pleasure” (151), she effectively allows herself,
commodity-like, to be purchased by a wealthy
fiancé
, even as she ever more desperately carries on a pitiful, and ultimately ruinous,
relationship with Max, another drug addict and a dealer as well. Dramatically illustrating
as it does the utter waste of two young lives, the ill-starred relationship between
Ana Clara and Max constitutes one of the novel’s most tragic elements. And it requires
no stretch of the imagination to read the pair of them, too, as symbols of Brazil
under the dictatorship; as the people who, supposedly benefitting from the “economic
miracle” that accompanied the early years of the regime—and that, according to the
generals, justified its stringent measures—were, in reality, only suffering from it.
Finally, there is Lia, the young revolutionary whose story differs from those of Lorena
and Ana Clara in that it has a very distinct social and political dimension to it.
The racially mixed daughter of an apostate Dutch Nazi who, having abandoned Nazism,
fled to Brazil, Lia is a convincing and sympathetic character. She is also the key
player in what more than one reader will regard as the novel’s funniest moment, mordant
humor being a quality of Telles’s work that her many admirers do not fail to applaud.
When the sexually liberated (but not, as in the case of Ana Clara, pathologically
promiscuous) Lia encounters a pitiful and sexually uncertain young man, she is so
bemused by his multiform innocence that, in a moment of carnal magnanimity, she decides
to instruct him in the art of lovemaking—an art which, as the text makes clear, he
is far from mastering. But because this key scene takes place in the very office where
the resistance is being plotted, and because the specific identity of the young man
in question is less important, arguably, than his gender, it reveals itself to be
more politically charged than one might expect. An
engagé
, albeit somewhat naïve intellectual, the appealing Lia commands the reader’s attention
for most of the novel.
Her story also stands out because it was, without doubt, the one that would have been
the most perilous for Telles to develop under the dictatorship. Although Lia is clearly
a fictional character, her story ties in with one of the most dramatic events of this
turbulent period, the 1969 kidnapping by urban guerrillas of the American Ambassador
to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick. In Telles’s novel, Lia’s lover and co-revolutionary,
Pedro, is released from prison as part of the negotiations by which, in real life,
Ambassador Elbrick was freed, unhurt, by the guerrillas after the Brazilian government
acceded to their demands. Also connecting the two narrative planes, as well as the
three young women involved in them, are a series of recurring motifs, chief among
which are
Lia’s need to use her friend’s car for an act of political protest, Ana Clara’s anguished
desire to scratch out the pain she feels inside her head, and, for Lorena, the telephone
call that never comes from the rich and connected married man, whom she believes,
in her feverish fantasy world, would be her ideal lover.
What is perhaps most intriguing in the novel is the extent to which the author uses
women as the barometer of Brazil’s social, political, and psychological health in
the second half of the twentieth-century. In a way that, though focused on Brazil,
is also directly applicable to our globalized and interconnected world culture of
2012,
The Girl in the Photograph
emphatically suggests that no society will ever be truly healthy and strong until
its women are. This point—more radical, perhaps, in 1973, when Simone de Beauvoir
(whose name also turns up in the text) and others were involved in the early Women’s
Liberation Movement, than in 2012, when more women than ever enjoy the rights and
responsibilities so long denied them—turns up time and again in
The Girl in the Photograph
, and in many different forms. Even the outwardly comic scene in which Lia seeks to
sexually “liberate” a young man, whose obnoxious post-coital prattle suggests that
he is still an unenlightened prisoner of
machismo
, offers the attentive reader a more serious political message: namely, that in sex,
as in so many other things (the planning of a more democratic society, for example),
men need, and desire, the instruction of women. As Lia puts it, “Women are finding
their way. The men will come along in good time” (112).