Luiz Pacheco. The fight against the literary environment

We tend to forget how urgent literature is when it is useful to us. At certain moments in our lives, more than the search for any kind of consolation, we feel a hunger for reality. But if art has allowed itself to be dominated by the ecstasy of forms, reality has remained a taboo among us. And in this miserable country where so little is spoken, where above all we are afraid of our own voice, the worst kind of insolence is perhaps that of those who draw from deep within themselves a motivation, a desire to investigate the world, and live in a state of turmoil, enraged by what others accept as normal, without questioning it. Today, if we mention the name Luiz Pacheco, the hosts are still divided, with some showing polite disdain, while others show a half-rogue smile, as a sign of mocking complicity. But the truth is that the ghost has not been completely disinfected, dewormed, or bathed in salts – its smell still decomposes us. And there is no shortage of targets out there who are alive (albeit few) and resentful, which explains a certain coldness, the militant silence.

In the case of Luiz Pacheco, it would be useful to draw a decisive parallel with a contemporary figure, that of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. He, having equally implemented, and with equal zeal, the principle that what matters in literature is to wage war, established a single prohibition on the approach to his work: “Be aware that I forbid you to talk about me in a boring, normal, common way. I vehemently forbid it. […] I cruelly punish those who allow themselves the luxury of talking about me in a boring and sensible way: I die in their mouths and they end up with their mouths full of my corpse.”

The same principle or demand was made by Pacheco, who saw how, at times, for convenience, when many began to find him funny, they began to impose a caricature on him, swallowing him into the cast, as an element of ostentation, which brings color to the slapstick of literature. He, who never wanted to blend in, to be part of the group, always fought against the bookish and musty option, mocking hierarchies, the ways of presumption, and always mocking our saints of the altar. "When I see how well-behaved and well-coordinated our artists and writers are, mere usurers-employees of some little bit of talent that Nature gave them, the great examples of irregulars, anti-social or asocial, who were the great ones, always come to mind." Faced with a literature imbued to the bone with abstraction, I wanted to return it to tangible reality, and this was more a matter of instinct than of cerebral meditation, knowing the filthy realm of insufficiency, instead of living for idealistic projections, and wanting nothing to do with the absolute, but only with the reason that allows us to enjoy this plenitude of days, to be free, detached, to count on ourselves, to allow the little things to take their place in experience and in the relationship with ourselves and with others. Read fresh, rough, denatured, the same texts that made him famous, 'Community', 'The libertine walks through Braga, the idolatrous, its splendor', 'The Theodolite', among others, but so many, sharpened by the occasion, for general instruction. And if literature demands that a man not take too much care of himself, he recognized that this is a land still unpopulated, and that subjects need to assume themselves, not renouncing their circumstances, nor allowing themselves to be intimidated, but cultivating these extravagant, dramatic profiles. He never resigned himself, preferring to be seen treading the zones of humiliation, to revel in the most indecent and even sordid scenes, to agreeing with the religion of conformity.

As Gombrowicz points out, art gives us a perspective of the world as a cemetery: “out of a thousand people who have failed to ‘exist’, remaining in the zone of painful insufficiency, only one or two really manage to ‘exist’. Therefore this filth, this poison of unsatisfied ambitions, this struggle in the vacuum and this catastrophe have little to do with emigration and much to do with art, since they are rather a characteristic of every literary café and, in fact, it is indifferent where in the world writers struggle to be so.”

Being content with the crumbs Pacheco believed that the main obligation of the writer is to free us from the conventions and plots that prevent the sensual side of life from expressing itself, to build a relationship on another scale, deeper with existence, marked by boldness and even cruelty, allowing for the digression and expansion of this regime of irresponsibility, without which all creation becomes dull, servile, debased. According to his pact, the reader should put up with his madness in exchange for that spark of rebellion that frees reality itself. The reader ended up accepting a certain carelessness, sometimes brutal, excessive judgments, an unreflective grimace, a somewhat pathetic outburst, a malice, a whim, admitting that margin that opens up in coexistence for a guy to express himself in a licentious, open way, without feeling constantly watched and questioned, but rather being able to gather inspiration from everything: ferment, disorder, impurity and chance.

In this regard, Pacheco makes us see that there is a deeper understanding that only arises if we admit the instability of moods, a dynamic perspective on the world, phenomena and people. “Humanity was created in such a way that it must constantly define itself and constantly escape its definitions. […] Form is not compatible with the essence of life” (Gombrowicz). For this very reason, his literature is not defined by classical forms, but by variation and fragmentation, failure. He did not exactly leave behind a work that could be favored according to some canon; there are no novels, nor are there short stories, there are no plays or poems. There were no detective stories or science fiction stories, but letters, articles, chronicles, diaries, not just the shenanigans and the lashings of this person and that person, but a discourse that recounts the petty exploits of a man to get by, and the heartbreaks, the illusions, the shenanigans and skills, those humorous stories that make up our unofficial and even illegal mythology. Deep down, he and his writing are one and the same; it is an impetus, a way of becoming the embryo of vitality and development, of not being crushed or torn apart, but of managing to come out on top.

There was a restlessness there that knew how to be content with crumbs, provoke laughter, emotion, cheer, and all of that resonates within us, even if the material is often somewhat petty. Its clearest and most assumed purpose was to give us an impulse to “free ourselves from the congenital (or forcibly acquired? Out of prudence) stupidity that is so Portuguese”, and to that end it was always exposing the triumph of dilettantism, the intrigues of our crafty people, all that goes with schemes and pacts, the ways in which they get entangled in more or less disguised complicities to benefit themselves, allowing literature to be represented by works, little books that are indistinguishable from merchandise in general.

He had this notion very clear: they have to be beaten. They have to be torn away from the reality to which they have become accustomed, from these ways of betraying within themselves any trait that seeks the unlimited in the name of leading comfortable, undisturbed lives. His lucidity comes from this temptation to break through the comfort zone, to recapture the astonishment, to see everything again, for the first time.

Imposture hunter Life has always placed limitations on him. He had bronchial asthma, developed pulmonary emphysema, dragged on with inguinal hernias that had not been operated on, and his hypersensitivity to alcohol meant that a few drinks were enough to drive him crazy, making him do stupid things, and in at least one situation, he tried to throw himself out of a window. He did not live a truly legendary bohemian lifestyle, but he gained a reputation as an inveterate alcoholic, and went through periods of hospitalization and detoxification. This was in addition to the three stays in Limoeiro, for indecent assault, kidnapping, rape, this and the other, many of which he himself admitted, but poorly explained, and there were also stays in Caldas da Rainha prison, and the occasional nights spent in police stations. Being immune to the most crude and commonplace morality, he had his own code of values, a certain fondness for principles of another order. And he could be a tremendous scoundrel, he himself acknowledged this, but he never failed to do so according to a logic, coherence and ethics that had to be perceived on a case-by-case basis. On the other hand, he often found himself sabotaged after he began to criticize in articles in newspapers and leaflets some of our literary figures from a scene in which he distinguished between consumer literature, that of the hired guns, and “casino literature”, the kind in which so many are involved in a competition to accumulate prizes, distinctions, to enter all the indexes, the selections, to be part of all the delegations to the events and festivals abroad. And he understood how to tarnish this prestige, this plot of legitimacy based on scams, exchanges of favors, tricks, pointing out the scumbags of all this, accumulating a record against these eminences, all of this ends up being expensive. After all, he was always carrying out expert examinations, inquiring, gathering evidence, feeding the process with which he intended to make it very clear that "our intellectual life is a continuous deception, a complicated web of trapdoors, ghosts and madmen". And even if few people credit him with this, the truth is that his thesis triumphed, even among those who do everything to climb the hierarchy; today, even those who are established admit their contempt, even repugnance, for the literary world. If Pacheco could claim one title with the greatest pride, it was that of having interrupted this kind of national mass with a sarcasm that was, if not satanic, "sacrifice". After him, none of these candidates for great 'national writer' felt very comfortable campaigning.

He was certainly the most relentless hunter of cultural impostures, a demystifier and iconoclastic, and although his bold, burlesque and tragicomic tone often reveals an unspeakable bitterness, I would agree with the Polish writer when he tells us that the discipline of literary history certainly deserves some attention, but that we should not limit ourselves to the history of good literature, to the exceptions, to the great figures, when bad art can be more representative of the nation, and even more enlightening regarding the graphomania that is characteristic of us: all that overly automatic accumulation of texts, of books, and the nauseating pretensions behind the claim of greatness of complete works. It was through his immoderate enthusiasm for literature that Pacheco recognised that the pleasure of admiring implies, on the other hand, a “violence in repelling and mocking that which is not admired”. «The impulse to join is equivalent to the horror of repulsion, both are products (possibly condemnable) of a humoral temperament and with the heart close to the mouth (which brings about unpleasantness that they don't even know about...) of a type that does not want to give up its capacity for affirmation, it throws the most it is capable of into it.»

Pacheco claims the satirical function, this composition that ridicules the vices or defects of an era, and that responds with its corrosive irony to «a certain weariness of life and men, but without bitterness, still hopeful, humanizing himself through his own ills in the eyes of others and still deriving from it some flavor, some joy of being here».

We are all exhausted by an art forged by bureaucracy, and by this system that pushes writers into a grey area and robs them of the ability to develop the aspects that make them different, unique, and the rage with which they invest. That is why Pacheco immediately wanted to commit to representing life using vulgar language, “the kind that is heard on these streets, and therefore the only valid, current, practical and logical language given the circumstances”. In his pages, which are repeatedly revised and rewritten, the very text, even for an illiterate person, gives the impression that the characters are there in a state of turmoil, in a state of commotion. Even the block letters are touched by irregularity, by the abundance and variety in the use of punctuation, suggesting the impression of calligraphy, of scribbles, and we can sense the difficulty in breathing, the compressed air, the small reasons, the way of weighing up the sentence; all of this awakens in us a hunger for directness, for frankness. Besides, for a guy who gained fame and then became a legend as a wild joker, what he ended up recognizing was that his art came from his breathing, from the fact that he had to deal with asthma from a very early age, and had to carry pumps, and later an oxygen tank. All of this left its mark on his prose, which thrives on the vigor of insistence, in a nervous line, overlapping, overlapping intentions. Unlike that elaborate language that begs to be recited, his prose skims over cultural references, not allowing itself to be confused with that regime that makes us mannered, and that transmits above all a state of inhibition. The slurred phrase should sound through clenched teeth, inclined to joke, releasing laughter, darkening the tongue, making the teeth fall out, tearing the wrinkles of a wicked smile on the face. Here each word has carved out its place, representing that inner strength of writing that offers a support to thought, and freeing us from a thousand and one fearful calculations. In each line, he mocks that solemnity around which these frustrating gatherings and assemblies are organized, with their artificial respect and false sympathy, and which so well represent the reciprocal dullness between the writer and his audience, both satisfied, the former for having a stage, the latter for consuming products that show him how to express his self-esteem, arming himself with a repertoire of ready-made, false, pretentious and weak phrases.

Pacheco continues to provoke us, to entice us into his poorly frequented universe, with that disorderly rhythm, all that brilliance with which he plunged into the gigantic silence where our deaf, unconfessed and gagged reality is formed. And to close this text, highlighting a decisive trait in his personality as a writer, let us use some verses by the Costa Rican poet José María Zonta: “Now I understand how obedience/ to the demons within/ is also a discipline”.