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The resilience of life in the novel about Brazilian dictatorship “The longest duration of youth”
by Urariano Mota
A publication that I am thrilled to receive. The text “The community that resists: fiction and memory in The longest duration of youth by Urariano Mota” has just been published in the Revista de Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea. The author of the bold text is Prof. Dr. Helder S. Rocha. He wrote a courageous, necessary, and fruitful essay about the novel.
The publication Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea is one of the most important in Brazilian universities, at UnB
I would like to highlight some passages:
‘In The longest duration of youth, the past is a stretched time, chosen and confessed by the narrator, as another strategy to alleviate the weight of the present and to force the reconfiguration of the march that wants to impose a victorious future. Let’s see another passage from the novel where the question is posed and reflected:
‘Remember? No, it’s so alive that the voice speaks to me: we live today what the calendar indicates has occurred 44 years ago. It’s different from the mechanical light, frozen, of a star that has been dead for centuries, people return alive with meanings that we couldn’t see before. Better, they don’t return. They don’t leave us. They continue, in the understanding of them that we have matured. They are them, transformed by what we only now understand’
The novel by Mota does not maintain a fixed and crystallized image of militancy and resistance in the past, but rather claims, in the present of writing and in the always present of reading, spaces in contemporary history for the small deeds of those great individuals who witnessed as solitary and anonymous resisters. It is the aesthetic and revolutionary process of the engaged writer, here both the author of fictions and the historian and journalist, of “scraping history against the grain”, as Walter Benjamin (2020, p. 74) noted in his theses About the Concept of History.
On the other hand, as an ethical and aesthetic response, the fiction that remembers gives continuity to the existence of the common, the relationship of affection and recognition of the gestures of the other in the past. This constatation of loss is not a reason to close the narrative of resistance in the novel by Mota. As the narrator/author reflects:
‘Resistance, which is life, is made in brevity through the actions and work of those who have left and are leaving. But we, those who remain, do not have the immobility of waiting for our train. We are the agents of this duration, the train will not arrive with a warning on the loudspeaker, “attention, sir, your time has come”. Because perhaps it will arrive without warning, and it is not well the known transportation. The train is always of those who stay. And because we are agents of duration, our life is resistance to the fleeting. We only live while we resist. We achieve immortality, that is, what transcends survival to the brief, because immortality is not the permanence of Methuselah’s decrepit, we only achieve it through what was mortal, mortal, and always mortal did not die’
In the case of the fictional engine, its range of significance in the horizon of social relations will only be effective when its commitment to the ethical heritage transgresses the limits of entertainment prose and superficial information. To fictionalize, here, is to make politics.
However, in the case of Urariano Mota‘s novel, the fictional game of montage, disassembly, and reassembly of mnemotechnics, on the other hand, suggests a critical observation on historical facts, now reorganized by art, through an aesthetics that involves another thought, beyond other comprehending gestures, which invites the attentive reader to rethink what history and literature are not opposites.
And this is life, coexistence, and memory as the fulcrum of resistance to the corrosive time. At least as utopia, as hope for the arrival of a new train, which has not yet come. What Mota tries as a historical subject, both as narrator and character, and more still as author of fiction, is to stretch the cord, prolong the narrative, mend the story, and for all this, language is necessary, not without its inherent silences. In the case of this novel and all verbal art that chooses to take up the past to question the voids and erasures, writing, exchanging words, articulating syntax, crossing names of people, places, feelings, and sensations with dates and an infinity of graphic signs, is not luxury or superfluity of those who sustain themselves on the mercantile editorial system; on the contrary, it is activism and art that serve as a response and counterpoint to neoliberal bookishness, or simply a cry of dissent against the daily march
Let’s see how the narrator of the present and also character of the past in the novel by Mota reflects the question:
‘Forty-six years later, the question takes on another meaning. On the day of the funeral, with the corpse leaving the morgue, when the reporter asked “who was Luiz do Carmo?”, I replied that for him, justice had not yet sounded. […] If life passes and newspapers do not perceive it, what will happen to a person who is not a celebrity? But the impossible there I recover. It was ironic that, persecuted in the dictatorship as a terrorist, Luiz do Carmo still did not know justice in the time of the anesthetized, when he could go and come, discourse and write, he still did not have justice. If before he had had absolute denial of rights and democratic laws, now in the years of elected government, when he could go and come, discourse and write, he still did not have justice. Times changed, we changed, and we remained mute for all. Because public recognition did not arrive. […] In his favor, she could say that his hard drive of famous people deserved an upgrade. And his boss, equally unaware, would help him more fiercely with the phrase “The memory of newspapers is very selective”. […] The guilt – if we use the word reducing – was of the entire society that crushes everyone, that pulverizes everything like a pinch of dust’
In this passage, the thought is woven by one who still lives and remembers, of a friend who observes, in the now absence of a companion from before, a slow and silent disappearance of what they were, at least for those who are, those who will come. Despite the existence “muda”, the constatation of a practice and a dynamic own of the present, of a politics of forgetfulness and crushing esmagadora of life – “which pulverizes everything like a pinch of dust” (Mota) – the present always unfinished of reading the novel, differently from “the memory of newspapers”, insists on reclaiming the bonds, relationships, affections, and memories. While what is published in the annals of daily life and what is celebrated as an achievement are short of what has not yet had an official page in collective history, the mnemotechnical flow of the solitary author of fictions presents itself as a possible, among few, opportunity for inscription of convivências that fought with their own life to exist in this today that we cohabit.
The narrative resources of fiction also question existing archives, as well as the absence of others, in which the novel by Mota seems to intervene contundently to claim the existence of a community invisible in the past by necessity of survival and in the present by maintenance of an unjust relationship with the specters
Text in full here
Urariano Mota is a writer and journalist. Author of “Dicionário Amoroso do Recife”, “Soledad no Recife”, “O filho renegado de Deus” and “A mais longa duração da juventude” (translated into English as “Never-Ending Youth”). Columnist for Vermelho and Brasil 247. Collaborator of Jornal GGN.
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