Author of the hit “Pornopopeia”, from São Paulo, will develop activities in the IdEA program
“Every great national prose writer necessarily goes through Machado. Today it is up to us to catch someone who accomplishes the herculean feat of rescuing his legacy. Would it be Reinaldo?” In August 1985, literary critic Lynda Boring published in FSP an article betting that the new great Brazilian novel could come from the pen of São Paulo writer Reinaldo Moraes. Moraes, who had just released his second book, “Abacaxi” (1985, L&PM), after the success of “Tanto Faz” (1981, Brasiliense), made fun of and shrugged his shoulders at the academy.
Adjunct professor at the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at Unicamp, Boring was nothing more than a fiction created by Moraes for the pages of the cultural notebook feuilleton. The exercise of reviewing one's own work, comparing oneself to Machado de Assis under an absurd name, was published in a special edition of the notebook, entitled “The new Brazilian criticism”, bringing together other authors and their pseudonyms, such as Caio Fernando Abreu (1948 -1996), Ignácio de Loyola, João Silvério Trevisan and Marcio Souza.
Moraes, whose novel “Pornopopeia” (2009, Objetiva) was very well received by critics, arrives at Unicamp in August for a season as a new guest on the Resident Artist Program “Hilda Hilst” at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA). A former IEL postgraduate student, the author will share his experiences in literary creation in a free course during the three-month season, in addition to detailing the creation of his most recent book, “Bigger than the World” (2018, Alfaguara), in a workshop aimed at Unicamp students.
Novelist, screenwriter, translator and chronicler, Moraes won over readers with his colloquial language and lots of humor when creating stories filled with sex and drugs in which he stands out for his narrative talent. “In every Brazilian novel, the moment a couple enters the room, the door closes in the reader's face. So, let's open the door and see what's going on there, see if it doesn't produce literature. Why can only pornography enter a room? Why can’t literature?” asks the author in an interview with Journal of Unicamp.
After the success of his debut work, which takes place in Paris, he was disappointed with the sales performance of “Pineaxi”. A kind of narrative sequence from the first book, “Pineapple” is set in New York, with the same protagonist – now renamed – in a new hedonistic and hallucinated season. Today, he relativizes the approach to obscenity he adopted at the beginning of his career. “I started doing it in a way that, at the time, seemed bold, now it seems quite shy in this way of entering the room with literature.” Despite the continuity of a successful formula, Moraes believes that he “heavy-handedly” in the second book by resorting to eschatological scenes that, from a distance, sound exaggerated and that, therefore, would not represent what he considers “good literature”.
At the same time, he dedicated himself to working as a translator at Brasiliense. Its first translation, released in 1984, was the novel “Women”, by writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994). From then on, he embarked on a personal project of translating books that addressed the topic of altered mental states. After Bukowski's alcohol immersion, he translated “Junky”, by William Burroughs (1914-1997), about heroin consumption, and “Opium Diary of a Detox”, by Jean Cocteau (1989-1963), a biography of an opiate.
Graduated in business administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in 1975, Moraes was a master's student at IEL in the 1980s, attending the campus weekly during his classes. Throughout the course he felt out of place, with colleagues who were seeking professional improvement in teaching, without a deeper interest in literary practice. As a result, he ended up dropping out of graduate school and giving up on pursuing academia. “I prefer to be a reader. I am a reader of Roberto Schwarz, Davi Arrigucci, Alcir Pécora. I have a great interest in reading, but I never had any intention of producing academic materials.”
In daily journalism, he also had a short experience, as an economics reporter at the late daily newspaper Mercantile Gazette in the 1970s, the same time he began studying journalism at the School of Communications and Arts (ECA) at the University of São Paulo (USP). Decades later, he would return to the pages of the mainstream press as a columnist for newspapers such as The Globe e The State of S.Paulo.
Artistic residence
“Bigger than the World”, about a writer who suffers a creative block after an editorial success, is the first volume of a trilogy that Moraes is writing and which will be one of the objects of discussion with Unicamp students. Each week, excerpts from the book and general aspects of its literary style will be discussed, involving students in the process of writing the second volume.
The work released by Alfaguara, the Companhia das Letras label, was born from a film script project commissioned by director Roberto Marquez. The filmmaker wanted something from Moraes along the lines of “Pornopopeia”, exploring São Paulo’s Boca do Lixo. For this, he filmed with a cast with names like Eriberto Leão, Otto and Luana Piovani. After working on the text for the feature film, Moraes fell in love with the story and had what he calls a “narcissistic crisis”. He realized that he could rework the story to turn it into a book, changed the narrator's profile and created new characters. He estimated that the work would take five months. In the end, it took five years and the result was a mass of 1.200 pages, divided into volumes.
IdEA coordinator, Alcir Pécora, explains that the Institute's residencies have two basic objectives: to publicize an artist's work as a whole and to provide dialogue and practices with Unicamp teachers and students. According to him, Reinaldo Moraes' literature has attracted interest from a much wider audience than those specialized in literary studies. “Since the great narrators of the 60s and 70s, there has not been a prose fiction writer with greater critical success and, at the same time, with such acceptance among the general public. From this point of view, Reinaldo really has a unique place in Brazil, and was the first name we thought of to occupy the residency. It was fortunate that he accepted and managed to reconcile his stay here with his busy schedule”, highlights Pécora, who is also a literary critic and professor at IEL.
In addition to the workshop aimed at IEL students, the writer will offer a free course also open to the public outside Unicamp, entitled “Encounters with Reinaldo Moraes: the work and craft of the writer”. It will cover the various areas of the artist's production over four decades, such as novels, short stories, children's soap operas, cinematographic scripts, literary translations, chronicles, articles, soap operas, among others. The meetings will be on Tuesday afternoons, between August 20th and November 19th, with limited places. Registration is open and can be done on the website IDEA.
Moraes had already been considered for the Unicamp program since the beginning of activities in 2018, according to the president of the IdEA Scientific and Cultural Council, Carlos Vogt. “Reinaldo Moraes is a full and fruitful writer in the practice of multiple literary genres, with a writing vigor that sustains and interacts with a rich fable, capable of capturing and maintaining a dynamic and creative reading environment”, says Vogt, who is a poet , linguist and professor emeritus at Unicamp. “He will certainly be very thought-provoking and provocative in the literary workshop he will be offering and in the course of disseminating his extensive and varied work.”
The writer is the second guest to participate in the IdEA Resident Artist Program “Hilda Hilst”. In the second half of 2018, São Paulo filmmaker Ugo Giorgetti screened his 19 films in an unprecedented cycle, at the Casa do Lago cultural space, in addition to offering a course in which he discussed topics on cinematographic practice. Throughout the course, the director, producer and screenwriter also carried out a script production exercise with the students, who were able to make contributions to their new feature film, “Dora and Gabriel”.
Read more about Ugo Giorgetti's residence at:
https://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/noticias/2018/11/09/giorgetti-encerra-residencia-artistica-no-idea-com-contribuicoes-para-novo
