Evil in the Night – A novel by Erico Verissimo

Evil in the Night – A novel by Erico Verissimo

Get out, get out of the rotten world! (The city outside)

John Updike, Endpoint and other poems2009

Erico Verissimo, who died in 1975 at the age of sixty-nine, wrote a curious and highly original novel during the 1950s, and the story is striking if only because it is so unlike any other major writing of the time. The novel in question is Note (Night), an exciting book to read, published in 1954. In 1956, the story was translated into English by LL Barrett and published by Macmillan in New York.

A lot happened in Brazilian literature in the three decades between 1930 and 1960, but we can assume that Verissimo’s contemporaries were then mainly involved with rural themes. Of course, Verissimo always stood a little apart from them in the climate and character of his novels. This is because Verissimo’s works from the start of his career explored a different path: urban narrative. Along with this, we must understand that his fiction has not remained static. Verissimo, we must keep in mind, was a developer, a writer in progress, experimenting to the end. Furthermore, more cosmopolitan than his main contemporaries, Verissimo used his personal life experience to write the fascinating novels of his later literary stage.

While he remains after the publication of the second part of his saga Or Weather or Wind (the weather and the wind) in 1951, Erico Verissimo completed the draft of his novel Note. What is interesting about this novel is the degree to which some readers and critics misinterpret it by describing it as simply a story of jerks and whores. The story is, instead, deeper than that. Part of the problem is that Nighta story about the madness of modern city life, it has scenes and characters of unusual audacity, including scenes of frank sexuality and cynicism, which were unusual for Verissimo’s readers of the time and place. Night tells us about an unspeakable human tragedy, in which ordinary people are unconsciously trapped in the loneliness of their lives, characters as tragic as true comic figures. In a sense, his theme is dehumanization: that is, not seeing or hearing each of us as human beings. Despite being a story about loneliness, there is a lot of humor in Night.

Clearly, for many people Erico Verissimo has written, so to speak, a grotesque novel. One often hears that Night represents a strange interregnum in Verissimo’s work. However, today’s debate has rejected that simplistic view. To be sure, that portrait has ignored at least three things. First, this allegorical narrative of the dark night of the soul is not incongruous in relation to the rest of Verissimo’s works. This is especially true if we remember that his novels Cross Roads (CrossingMacmillan, 1943) and Music ao Longe, for example, also express the same “lost world” sentiment. Second, as Bordini (2006) observes, given that puppets (puppets) (1932), Verissimo’s first collection of short stories, the macabre side of existence fascinated him. surely, in Night Verissimo leaves out the romantic language of his earlier novels. For Night it does not deliberately target its broad audience. Third, with Night the cycle of six novels about Porto Alegre closes. According to Lorenzo Chaves Night it is Verissimo’s best realist novel; the critic also recounts Night to the “social realism” of Verissimo’s fiction written between 1933 and 1943.

With two eloquent and effective metaphors, Night represents the loneliness of modern man. One is the city as a kind of infernal machine that makes the anti-hero, simply called the “Unknown”, feel like prey. The city is alive and represents the meaningless life of the non-individualized human being. The Stranger must work to find solid ground, but the city and his emissaries will not allow it (“The city looks like a living being.”). Surely in this confrontation the modern man, the man without qualities (Musil), lacks his psychological unity, as occurs with the characters of Kafka, Woolf or Joyce. The other symbolic device used by Verissimo is the night itself which represents time without hope (“My God! – he thought – this night doesn’t end…”). The textual imagery of the narrative highlights the antihero’s desperate and never-ending search for his authenticity.

In this regard, it is important to see that while Stegagno Picchio correctly notes Mann’s contribution to Verissimo fiction, he argues that: “(…) his problematic subtracts from the qua di ogni invenzione che abbia alla sua origine el triangolo Joyce-Kafka-Proust.” For Picchio, the problematic of Verissimo remains below the inventions of the Joyce-Kafka-Proust triad. Despite the fact that his expressive innovations capture our gaze, we must go beyond the use of language or style. We must know that his themes are also similar. To be sure, his reading of Verissimo differs from that of Chaves and others who find Verissimo carrying out an enterprise that belongs to the tradition of the novel of bourgeois literature represented by Kafka, Mann, and Musil.

Now let us briefly recall the differences between our author and his colleagues. It is true, in fact, that Verissimo’s preference for dealing with the economic situation and class conflict at the rise of capitalism remains strong. But while it certainly is that, we must not forget that Night he shifted the emphasis to psychological analysis. So, too, Verissimo writes a symbolic novel where psychological analysis is exclusive. And yet, even when the material in the story is indistinguishable from that of his colleagues, the tone and treatment are subtly different.

We need to understand what Erico Verissimo was reacting to in the years after World War II. In the postwar period, stories of confusion and conflict proliferated in Europe. Now the stories express the anxieties and fragile hopes of an entire generation. Common to the stories was a new flexibility of structure, and soon the authors began to break the boundaries between author and characters. Beyond that, the spontaneity of the personal response intensified the relationship between feeling and expression. In fact, Verissimo deplored the emptiness of postwar life and Night responds specifically to this change of era. In a world beset by ideological divisions and hostility, literature must signal change and the reader must understand the meaning of these signals.

The most interesting stories are those in which we can identify with the main character of the story: the hero or the anti-hero. Naturally, it is not difficult to put yourself in the place of the Stranger, the antihero of Night. But it should be noted that Verissimo’s antihero is not a revolt like Camus’s modern man. He certainly seems more akin to Sartre’s characters from the existentialist trilogy. the paths of freedom (1945-49). In fact, we can observe that Verissimo characters such as Amaro, Vasco, Eugenio and this Unknown suffer the same indecision as Mathieu Delarue, among other Sartre characters.

Following the idea that philosophical problems dissolve in Verissimo’s work, Night it could be his first explicit homage to French existentialist ideas. This is, in fact, a point that deserves further investigation. In any case, we can find out in Night some characteristics of existentialist literature, such as: the evidence of a culture in crisis, the hero or anti-hero facing a “borderline situation”, the search for an authentic life and the awareness of freedom. In other respects, however, the novel seems, in terms of mood and atmosphere, in the popular tradition of the detective story. It certainly reminds us of a post-war novel like that of Léo Malet. it’s always night (1948). Both are defiant, haunting, and value alienation at the core of their characters. There is the buildup of a gradual threat as the shadow of incommunicability looms ever closer in these stories.

Night takes the reader into a claustrophobic world where amnesiac protagonist Robert the Stranger is searching for his identity. Because this is the story of the Stranger, the desperate seeker of his own identity; and how he was led through the ghastly night by the dangerous people he met in a seedy pub by the docks: Martin the Master, with his cynical and nihilistic outlook on life, and Claude the dwarf, a psychopathic artist who he strangely gravitates towards his Master, the cynical pimp. His companions manage to convince Robert that he is a murderer. The Brazilian critic R. Zilberman sees the main character as a kind of “human Pinocchio”, since he seems lost in the hands of his companions like the famous Collodi character. Robert narrowly escapes being caught by the two night birds when around dawn he meets Lili, a redheaded prostitute. Other than the anti-hero, she seems to be the only authentic human figure in the tale. After making love to her, he finally begins to remember the events of the day before: her wife left him (“If I came back, my God, if I came back, I promise you that from now on everything will be different.”).

Erico Verissimo’s characters in Night they will remain in our memory forever: they continue to haunt us to this day.

References

Bordini, Maria da Gloria.. 2006. After the incident. In: Verísimo, Erico. Incident in Antares . Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Chaves, Flavio Loureiro. The narrative of solidity. In: Verísimo, Erico. 1987. Note . Rio de Janeiro, Globe.

Picchio, Luciana Stegagno. History of Brazilian Literature . Turin, Einaudi, 1997.

Zilbermann, Regina. 1985. Gaucho Literature . Porto Alegre, L&PM.

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