Context
Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration
Theodore McDermott
You can see something of Borges in The Celebration:
in the way that the central event of the book—the event that gives it
its title—is absent from its pages. You can see something of Cortázar
in the way the chronology coils around and crosses over itself. You can
see something of Nabokov in the fictional annotations that retell the
story from an entirely new vantage, implying an endless number of other
versions as yet untold. You can see something of Barth in the stylistic
variations. You can see something of Machado de Assis, Osman Lins, and
Ignacio Loyola Brandao in the peculiarly Brazilian integration of
remarkable formal innovation and social and political engagement. You can see all of this, but what’s most apparent, and most important, is that Ângelo has written a book unlike any other. Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration is to reassemble.
This is not passive fiction that tries to tell, start to finish, the
chronology of a life, of an event, of a particular epiphany. Instead,
in chapters that skip through a bewildering array of styles,
techniques, times, and places, Ângelo, who has written a number of
other books both for children and adults, including the story
collection Tower of Glass, creates a kind of fiction that is as precise as it is broad. He
writes with a ferocious energy and purpose about both the inscrutable
forces of history and the maddening insignificance of all our
individual lives. Ângelo began The Celebration in
1964, twelve years before it was published and the same year a
revolution put a military government in control of Brazil. Near the end
of the novel, he writes: Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.” Ângelo’s
revulsion is palpable; he overcomes nothing, but writes anyway. And the
world that Ângelo creates is as vivid, as grim, and as crowded as a
Hieronymus Bosch hellscape. Some of these are actual historical documents, while others are
invented; it’s impossible to distinguish between the two. Together,
they describe the riot that exploded on the night of March 30, 1970 and
continued into the next morning. There is a “flashback” to documents
from earlier moments in Brazilian history, showing us the events that
made the riot unavoidable. Severe drought, government
corruption, prolonged disenfranchisement, and poverty have combined
with a host of unstated, alluded to, and unparaphrasable events and
prejudices to bring Macrionílio de Mattos, a fifty-year-old former
outlaw from the Northeast, and Samuel Aparecido Fereszin, a reporter in
Belo Horizonte, to the fore of a “highly organized group” of peasants
marching toward riot police. That’s the first chapter. In
fourteen pages, we’ve covered 120 years. We’ve been dropped into the
midst not only of Brazilian history, but also into a miniature war. Then
we turn the page and read the title of the next chapter: “Thirtieth
Anniversary . . . Pearls.” The next page is only occupied by a single
word, “Husband,” down in the lower right corner. We turn again and read: In the transition from the first to the second chapter, the book
moves from the public to the private without blinking. It moves from
the historical to the domestic without comment. The book is
filled with these kinds of shifts, sudden turns, and unresolved
mysteries. It moves from the ’30s to the ’50s, back to the ’40s, on to
the ’70s, and even into the future. We move through a cast of
characters as large and disparate, and yet surprisingly interconnected,
as those in Robert Altman’s Nashville. Chapter-by-chapter,
we unpack the contents of this book: a brief biography of a beautiful
girl who seeks a career in journalism and ends up left only with “days
of drunkenness and solitude”; the story of a woman who is driven to
abandon her family by the exclusionary intimacy that her husband enjoys
with her son; a chapter about a once-promising writer who gave up his
career to become a successful lawyer and a “strong contender for a top
slot among the ten best-dressed bachelors of the city of Belo Horizonte
in 1970”; a brusque story that tells, in alternating sentences, of two
characters who meet and confront each other in the last line; a
story—told from the points of view of his mother and a police
commissioner—of the consequences of a college student’s political
activism. And this only brings us half-way through. These black-edged pages demarcate the final chapter of the novel, which is entitled: *necessary? This is where, if it hasn’t already, summary begins to break
down. Any statement about plot, character, action, setting, theme, or
anything else would require a paragraph of qualifiers, caveats, and
extrapolations. For example, I could reiterate, We never actually see the celebration itself. But I would have to explain that the index contains annotations that, like those in Pale Fire,
are never indicated in the main body of the text, and that refer to
events that may or may not ever have happened—even in fictional terms.
Unlike Kinbote’s interpretations, however, this indeterminacy is not an
outcome of the alleged narrator’s probable insanity, but because the
events described in the index happen in the future. Sometimes “future” means “after the celebration.” Other times it means “after the date of the book’s publication.” The Celebration was first published in 1976, but we are still informed that Commisioner
Humberto Levita “died of laughter, literally, in 1982.” Now, this index
also includes an annotation to the word “Author”: an Author who is
similar to, but isn’t, Ângelo. Here, in the index, the Author is having
a conversation with a friend about the book you’ve been reading.
Parenthetical asides written by a third-person narrator describe the
action in what otherwise would be a passage comprised exclusively of
dialogue. Referring to the matter of the celebration not being included
in a book that’s named for it, the Author says, “I have some sketches,
I’ll show you (opening the drawer, taking out a folder, selecting three
pages, sitting back down again). Take a look (handing the pages to his
friend).” Only then is part of the missing scene included. In the end,
the celebration is neither present nor absent. Despite the novel’s
infinite fracturing, everything is carefully connected. The
term “experimental writing” implies that formal innovation is an
“experiment.” An experiment implies a question, implies that the book
is an argument whose success or failure proves or disproves something.
As a result, one often feels that they’re reading a lab report. I think
it would be better to disassociate “experimental” and “innovative” in
order to make room for books like The Celebration. Ângelo’s
novel is not an experiment, but a fully realized, nearly perfect work
of art. The use of so many styles, the colored pages, the
fragmentation, the “cross-index of the characters,” the primary
documents, the false ones—all of these are simply the elements that
best describe, well, reality. And because reality is subjective,
mutable, indeterminate, and indescribable, formal innovation is the one
great way to get at it. In the suffering of the drought-starved
and government-exploited poor, in the petty conflicts of upper-class
intellectuals, in the wide-angled scope of Brazilian history, in the
microcosm of a celebration, in everything the novel includes, and in
everything it pointedly leaves out, the entire, tired world is captured. And since the world hums along, thus far, without end, so does The Celebration.
You can start reading it, but you can never finish. I open this book
and close it. I swear it off, telling myself I’m through, that I get
it. I started reading The Celebration about eight months ago,
and though I have read it start to finish several times, I’m not
finished with it. I carry it around my apartment. I prop it open with
the weight of the salt and pepper shakers when I’m eating dinner or
hold it open with the soles of my shoes on the front steps when it is
warm enough, or bend it back when I am laying in bed. Oftentimes, I’m not even reading the words, only looking at the type on the page and wondering, How the fuck does he do it? But then, I come back to it again. It’s hard to know what to say about The Celebration,
a book that is so clearly a masterpiece, a book that you read with
wide, uncritical eyes, a book that strikes you initially as perfect,
and only improves after that. An essay in praise of The Celebration is like the hook that hangs a painting: it might help to get it
noticed, but won’t add anything to the beauty of the work itself. If
you will only notice it, the book will do the rest. ___________________________ Selected Works by Ivan Ângelo in Translation: The Celebration. Trans. Thomas Colchie. Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. $13.50. Selected Untranslated Works: Duas Faces [Two Faces], 1961. Out of Print.
When he sat down to do it, Ângelo took the entire world and dissembled
it so that he could cram everything in the space of 203 pages. The
entire world in one book, except he has forgotten to include one thing:
the celebration.
(Author’s note:
The answer to all of these questions is the book itself.
He doesn’t choose a subject: he includes everything. He doesn’t avoid
politics, but neither does he announce any specific political
commitment.
What am I supposed to write about in this shithole of a country?
Anything I write seems like a joke, as if I were totally avoiding the
subject. What subject? Shit, that’s all. And anyway, whoever said it
was my responsibility? Why not write detective stories, or one-act
plays for children?)
The novel begins with “A Short Documentary (the city and the interior,
1970).” The city is Belo Horizonte. The interior is the Brazilian
Northeast. The documentary is comprised of excerpts from newspapers,
leaflets, police testimony, a letter to the editor, books, a birth
certificate, “a popular Northeastern ballad of 1952,” speeches, and a
report from the “Sugar Refineries Association.”
—I have so much to do tomorrow.
We go, in a matter of three sentences, from an
unremarkable bit of dialogue to an insinuation of murder. We find
ourselves trying to figure out who’s speaking, who “she” is and why
“she” will die. But this is answered quickly: a wealthy husband is
trying to kill his beautiful wife, and she is his willing victim: “So
Juliana nodded yes, finished the rest of her slice, and braced herself
for the onslaught of its poison.”
It was some time ago that she began this business of making plans for tomorrow. But tomorrow she’s going to die.
Should you get a copy of The Celebration, you
will notice that the pages that comprise the last third of the book
have black edges, so that, when seen from the side, it’s explicitly
divided, like a phone book.
Between the bookends of a “Short Documentary” and an
“index,” then, we have been given seemingly disconnected stories of a
range of characters who (before the index) may or may not be going
to—or else (in the index itself) have already gone—to the celebration
of the title.
“AFTER THE CELEBRATION: A cross-index of the characters, in order of
appearance or reference, with additional* information regarding the
fate of those who were alive during the events of the night of March
30.”
surprising?
useful?
corroborative?
unnecessary?
useless?”(Author’s note:
This is how it was, this is how it is, and this his how it will be.
What a waste to let this moment go by without trying to capture the
sense of it, if only in outline, to be able to show someone: this is
how it was, back then.)
The Tower of Glass. Trans. Ellen Watson. Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. $12.95.
O ladrão de sonhos [The Thief of Dreams], 1995. Out of Print.
A face horrível [The Horrible Face], 1996. Out of Print.
Amor? [Love?]. Companhia das letras, 1996.
Pode me beijar se quiser [You May Kiss Me if You Please], 1997. Out of Print.
O Vestido Luminoso da princesa [The Luminous Dress of the Princess]. Editora Moderna, 1997.
História em ão e inha [History in Big and Small], 1998. Out of Print.
