The divergence of the “middle ground” in the characters of Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan

Abstract

The article introduces a crossing between the cultural-thesis scopes of “middle ground” [entre-lugar] in Latin American discourse, initially designed by Silviano Santiago in 1971, and his novel Stella Manhattan, written in 1985.

The development of middle ground as a category stems from a desire to account for the modulations of interbreeding and the anthropophagic tensions between Latin America and European metropolises. On the other hand, a reading of this area of tension and conflict between both continents modifies the statute of literary traditions bringing into focus the relationship between a work of art and externality beyond local contexts. Regarding methodology, an immanent criticism of texts is proposed, and an against-the-grain reading based on Walter Benjamin’s premise that in the interpretation of details it is possible to interpret the whole.

The 1964 coup implied the development of a modernizing project that would consolidate Brazil’s entry into monopolistic capitalism. The ensuing and progressive economic growth, which excluded a large portion of Brazil’s population, has come to be known as “the Brazilian miracle”, and coincides with the anos de chumbo, the most repressive period of the dictatorship. Violence, extreme fear and enforced disappearance radicalizes the need for new narrative finds in the Brazilian literary system in order to retell the horror and understand the construction of memories beyond militants’ heroic representations. Traumatic experiences are inscribed in Santiago’s novel from a place of geographical displacement and the mobile identities of the bodies. The middle ground, an essay tool initially, provides a new framework to generate allegories in the narrative configurations about political violence, not from the heroic stance of militant epics, but from the subjectivity of bodies in transit. Sexuality and writing occur in a unique place of escaping identities.

Keywords: middle ground; divergence; memories.