An indication of the cause

W. G. Sebald mutes Thomas Bernhard's suicidal clamour, writes James Wood in The Guardian. Indeed, in contrast to Bernhard's, Sebald's were tempered rants, but rants no less effective for giving voice to the muted anger, desperation, and madness of exiles. In The Emigrants (trans. Michael Hulse), memory seems the only stable nationality of its eponymous characters and its narrator. The narrator particularly weaves his story in an anachronistic voice, closely identifying with his subjects who are all uprooted from their homes. Only in the compass of memory can the peripatetic narrator and his subjects seem to find their moorings. Like Dr. Henry Selwyn in the first section of The Emigrants, the narrator of the second section and his subject (his former teacher Paul Bereyter) are both physically and spiritually displaced, exiled not to some nearby place but much farther, "halfway round the world":

In December 1952 my family moved from the village of W to the small town of S, 19 kilometres away. The journey – during which I [the narrator] gazed out of the cab of Alpenvogel's wine-red furniture van at the endless lines of trees along the roadsides, thickly frosted over and appearing before us out of the lightless morning mist – seemed like a voyage halfway round the world, though it will have lasted an hour at the very most.

...

He was in Poland, Belgium, France, the Balkans, Russia and the Mediterranean, and doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear. The seasons and the years came and went. A Walloon autumn was followed by an unending white winter near Berdichev, spring in the Departement Haute-Saône, summer on the coast of Dalmatia or in Romania, and always, as Paul wrote under this photograph [a photograph of a man was included in the text], one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

Paul Bereyter was increasingly losing his qualities because his race (a quarter Jewish or "only three quarters an Aryan") is an issue to some people around him. As he came face to face with the cruelty of these people, he preferred to live in a dream instead, a form of exile but a bearable one in any case. People like Paul Bereyter chose to forget, an act akin to dying.

Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schöferle, who ran a coffee house in S., informed Paul's mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele, and begged to request her, with respect of course, not to take her afternoon coffee at his house anymore.

With respect of course!!! (Sebald chose to be restrained about it. But telling the same story, Bernhard's characters would have gone on for many pages to register their outrage.)

Paul Bereyter's fallback was the memory of his childhood, although it was already darkened by history. The story of Paul's life was filtered through Lucy Landau, Paul's friend and the one who arranged for his burial after he ended his life. So we hear the story of Paul as he tells it to Mme Landau who tells it to the narrator – a familiar Bernhardian device of narrative attribution where the narrator is at one or several removes from his tale.

Paul once described that wonderful emporium to her in detail, said Mme Landau, when he was in hospital in Berne in 1975, his eyes bandaged after an operation for cataracts. He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him. In his childhood, everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium. coming through the small transom windonws let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells ... [emphases added]

And then Paul, through Mme Landau, went on to enumerate the various smells and the magical contents and the proprietor (Paul's father) and staff of the emporium. The inventory of memory was so precise and detailed it could bring out the murky quality of light as it struck the surface of the emporium. Common objects were recalled with "the greatest clarity". The novelist was here a kind of historian (or proprietor) of memory, the emporium being a representative image of object collection which Sebald used in other forms: like the Antwerp Nocturama and Antikos Bazar in Austerlitz.

Near the end of his life Paul, like Dr. Selwyn, is ready to come to terms with history, to make "endless notes" about it. What eats him so much, more than the systematic abuse the Jews suffered in Gunzenhausen, on Palm Sunday 1934, is the involvement of children in that notorious event.

For this reason, Mme Landau explained, Paul for a long time had only a partial grasp of what had happened in S in 1935 and 1936, and did not care to correct his patchy knowledge of the past. It was only in the last decade of his life, which he largely spent in Yverdon, that reconstructing those events became important to him, indeed vital, said Mme Landau. Although he was losing his sight, he spent many days in archives, making endless notes – on the events in Gunzenhausen, for instance, on that Palm Sunday of 1934, years before what became known as the Kristallnacht, when the windows of Jewish homes were smashed and the Jews themselves were hauled out of their hiding places in cellars and dragged through the streets. What horrified Paul was not only the coarse offences and the violence of those Palm Sunday incidents in Guzenhausenm ... but also, nearly as deeply, a newspaper article he came across, reporting with Schadenfreude that the schoolchildren of Gunzenhausen had helped themselves to a free bazaar in the town the following morning, taking several weeks' supply of hair slides, chocolate cigarettes, coloured pencils, fizz powder and many other things from the wrecked shops.

I would bet that there really exists such newspaper article. Real news items have a way of finding themselves in Sebald's prose. In The Rings of Saturn, the writer appropriated in the text an article in The Independent about the Balkan war crimes. These articles are part of the "endless notes" and documentary materials that strengthen the historical basis of the story. They are also part of the evidence that Sebald's characters collect in order to make sense of the violent era they lived in. The evidence confirms Paul's suspicion of the capacity of humans for cruelty and violence. Suicide – death, annihilation of memories, termination of possibilities – appears on the horizon as a possible response to "the logic of the whole wretched sequence of events".

He read and read – Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so. He copied out passages into notebooks [two facing photographs of cursive writing accompany this quoted passage] which give a good idea of how much the lives of these particular authors interested him. Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said Mme Landau, handing me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belong to the exiles and not to the people of S. [emphasis added]

"Gathering evidence" is of course the title of Bernhard's five-part childhood memoirs which appeared individually in German from 1975 to 1982 and in English as a collected volume in 1985. The first volume ("An Indication of the Cause") appeared as the second part of Gathering Evidence (trans. David McLintock) and contained this epigraph:
 

Two thousand people every year attempt to put an end to their lives in the

province of Salzburg. A tenth of these suicide attempts are successful. This

means that in Austria, which together with Hungary and Sweden has the

highest suicide rate in the world, Salzburg holds the national record.

SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN, 6 May 1975

Obsession with suicides and the suicidals characterizes the novels of Bernhard. His treatment of the subject, however, is not deadly serious. He can be mordantly funny about it. Whereas Sebald's humor is rare and dry and his treatment of suicide quite proper, Bernhard's is poker-faced hysterical and radical. An excerpt from Gathering Evidence:

Many boys actually did commit suicide at the boarding house in the Schrannengasse, though, curiously enough, none of them did so in the shoe closet, which would have been the ideal place: they all threw themselves out of windows in the dormitory or the lavatories or hanged themselves from the showers in the washroom. They were able to summon up the necessary courage, but he never had the strength, the decisiveness, or firmness of character required for suicide. During the short time he spent there during the Nazi period—between his arrival in autumn 1943 and his departure in autumn 1944—four pupils at the boarding house actually killed themselves by jumping out of windows or hanging themselves (how many others must have done so before and since!), and many others living in the city, having set off for school, were driven by unendurable despair to deviate from their usual route and throw themselves down from one of the hills, usually the Mönchsberg, onto the asphalt of the Müllner Hauptstrasse—the suicide street, as I used to call it. I often saw shattered bodies lying in this street, the bodies of schoolchildren and others, though mainly schoolchildren, lumps of flesh wrapped in bright-coloured clothes appropriate to the time of year. Today, thirty years later, I read reports at regular intervals (though more frequently in spring and autumn) about schoolchildren and others who have committed suicide. Every year there are dozens of such reports, though the real number of suicides runs into hundreds, as I have reason to know. It is probably true that in boarding establishments, especially those with exceedingly sadistic régimes and exceedingly bad climatic conditions, like the one in Schrannengasse, the subject which preoccupies the minds of the pupils is suicide—in other words, a completely unscientific subject, not one of the mass of subjects on the syllabus but one with which they are all intensely concerned. Of course the truth is that suicide and the idea of suicide are pre-eminently scientific subjects, though this is a fact which our hypocritical society cannot comprehend. Living with one's fellow pupils has always meant living with the idea of suicide: the idea of suicide comes first, the subjects of the syllabus second. I was by no means the only pupil who was obliged to spend the greater part of his time contemplating suicide. This was forced on me on the one hand by the brutality, ruthlessness, and utter viciousness that surrounded me, on the other by the extreme sensibility and vulnerability that is inherent in all young people. The time of one's life spent in learning and study is above all a time for thinking about suicide—whoever denies this has forgotten everything. The times I walked through the city thinking only of suicide, of blotting out my existence, wondering where and how I should do it, whether alone or in compact with others! There must have been hundreds of times. But these thoughts and speculations, prompted by everything I experienced in the city, led me back time and again to the prison of the boarding house. Every boy privately harboured the thought of suicide; it was the only thought that was both enduring and potent. Some were immediately destroyed by it, others merely broken, broken for the rest of their lives. The idea of suicide and the phenomenon of suicide were continually debated, but always in silence. And again and again we had a real suicide in our midst. I will not mention their names, most of which I have forgotten anyway; but I saw all of them hanging or lying shattered on the ground, the ultimate proof of the terrible suffering they had endured. I know of a number of burials at the Communal Cemetery and Maxglan Cemetery where boys of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, having been done to death by society, were unceremoniously dumped in the ground, not properly buried, for in this strictly Catholic city suicides were naturally not given a proper burial but simply dumped in a hole and covered with earth in utterly depressing circumstances, which shed a most revealing light on humanity. These two cemeteries are full of evidence to prove my recollections correct. I am thankful to say that these recollections are in no way distorted, but here I must confine myself to giving simply an indication of what I remember.

Despite the marked difference in their temperaments, Sebald and Bernhard both gathered evidence of personal griefs to produce layered and resonant images of horrific events. The images of peoples persecuted beyond belief, those who experienced things "more than any heart or eye can bear" – these images pile up and their cumulative value amounts to experiences fully lived and remembered. Reading the prose works of these writers is an attempt to understand the indications of their causes. Reading as a radical act of gathering evidence itself.




Winstonsdad's Thomas Bernhard Reading Week
1-7 July 2013

An unexpected return

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse (New Directions, 1996)



W. G. Sebald's subjects in The Emigrants, and elsewhere in his fiction, seem to be not themselves. They are loners and eccentrics, old and weary. Exiled souls wandering through life as if already dead. Take the first of four character portraits in The Emigrants. At the twilight of his life, Dr. Henry Selwyn starts to confide to the narrator certain moments of his life. (The best summary of Dr. Selwyn's story is contained in the review of Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Quarterly, reprinted in the Vertigo blog, here).

I think of Dr. Selwyn as a continuation of the Sebald persona in "Il ritorno in patria", the final section of Sebald's first novel Vertigo, the prose work immediately preceding The Emigrants. The narrator of that section, when he finally visited his village W. after a long time, was able to remember the past with stunning clarity (just like Dr. Selwyn). The eponymous character in Sebald's final novel Austerlitz, too, suddenly remembered all the obscured details of his transport on a train at a very young age. So, in a sense, Dr. Selwyn is a representative Sebaldian figure who was jolted from his zombie-like reverie, confronted by momentous events of the past, every fine detail of his recollection recalled in all its hyper-real color, contour, and texture. Memory lapse was lifted like a veil, or a dam releasing huge amounts of water.

Max Sebald's stories are often about memory and storytelling. For him, forgetting is like losing the substance of one's humanity. Put in another way, if one was without memory then one might as well be dead. As long as we commemorate the dead, they are alive within us or in us. Throughout the narrator's several encounters with him, Dr. Selwyn was depicted almost like a ghost already. His ghostly presence, however, is belied by the fascinating stories of his past. Up to a certain point, the doctor seems to resist death through remembering. And in imparting his story to the narrator, the doctor is now a part of the narrator's memory and so he (the narrator) remembers the old man and he (Dr. Selwyn) is fully alive in the narrator's memory.

Dr. Selwyn yearns for the past that was initially like a blank wall to him. But gaps in his memory are suddenly being filled with details he thought he'd lost. He has fond memories of his friend Johannes Naegeli, a mountain guide who went missing and was believed to have met a certain accident by falling into a crevasse of a glacier.

Yet the transference of memory does not stop between the narrator and Dr. Selwyn. The narrator is also passing it on to us, enlisting our confidence. Sebald has implicated us, the reader, in the old man's story. We become privy to Dr. Selwyn's past, and so even if he's dead (in the story), things that concern the doctor concern us now too.

Naegeli is one of the dead who returned in the story, but miraculously through an accident too, a natural process at that – the melting of the glacier that covered him for more than seventy years. At that point of the discovery of the frozen body, no one would have remembered the long buried Naegeli anymore (the only one who had the capacity to do so – Dr. Selwyn – was already dead, by his own hands, at that point in the story) were it not for the remembrance imparted by Dr. Selwyn to the narrator. And from the narrator to us, readers.  – "Certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence."

We now remember the dead, his humanity, even if we didn't know him personally because we have learned a part of his history. In a way, Sebald here demonstrated the power of sharing stories, of storytelling, of fiction in general, to preserve memories. To memorialize history and people against the eternal forgetting. Against the irreversible.

Poems (in conversation)

Poems from two poetry collections I read in the last two days: Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (Giraffe Books, 2001) by Edith L. Tiempo and To the Evening Star (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013) by Simeon Dumdum Jr.


From Spelling It Out
Edith L. Tiempo

How like a spell the dusk falls
On the jaded eyes.
It's not day or dark, in that deviant time
When the ways of rhyme
And the ways of reason
Do not play the sorcerer's part;
Just disarray, the random, distortions,
The turns and twists, surprise, surmise,
When the wavery decibel calls
The world to intimations,
In this twilight of the heart
Where a freakish glimmer reinvents,
And we startle
Into a place of perpetual
Sheer astonishments.


Thank You
Simeon Dumdum Jr.

To think that I owe you my deepest thanks,
And I have done nothing except sit here,
As though expecting someone to appear
Suddenly on the path between the banks
Of flowers, but the glare of noontime blanks
The eyes, and happily the inner ear
Catches your voice ever present and clear,
Calls on the mind and the heart to close ranks,
And begs the mouth to mutter something true,
And hands to reach for the path and to pick
A rose or two before someone arrives,
And then who knows if that someone is you
Because you're in my mind, and I am quick
To celebrate the linkage of our lives.

On the telling of a tale and the singing of verses

Nowadays, when certain book reviewers and blurb-spitters describe a book as an "epic novel", more likely than not it means that the book is too long to finish in a few sittings. Say, 500 pages at the minimum, in small print. Maybe the story continues through the next installments, each book in the now-expanding series stretching the story in ridiculous directions. More likely it's a sprawling historical romance or intergenerational family saga, maybe a space opera, populated by a dozen characters (humans or aliens) whose individual stories intertwine and whose destinies collide in an extravagant, show-stopping ending.

Such "epic stories" are more or less the bestseller kind; it may even be full of sobering surprises and shattering exposés about the human condition. But ultimately devoid of richness in the telling, of a rhythmic and singing prose style. A story that was just that: without linguistic intent. The epic in epic novels has been turned into a soap-like slipperiness, predictable in its unpredictability. The epic is robbed of its essential qualities, disabused of its traditional conceptions, becoming now a genre based on page count and spine thickness. This species of the novel, if it exists, must be returned to its literal rendering. The epic has to seek its epicenter.

In an epic lecture—third in a series—called "The Telling of the Tale", Borges, again:

If we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something. But I think that there is a greater difference. I think the difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero—a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Borges believed that there are only a few patterns or finite number of metaphors in rhymed verses. From this idea he also deduced that there are only a few templates for the plot of an epic story. The first requirement is the hero, along with the well-used elements—villains, heroine, sidekick, insurmountable odds, true tests of character and strength, stupendous fight scenes. The second is the form. It is in verse, and it must be sung.

The modern hybrid "epic novel" therefore must integrate the conventional epic requirements into prose. The hero is easy to come by, but telling the tale in a singing prose, not a prosaic prose, is another species of telling altogether. Predictably, Borges finds the modern novels are an epic fail.

We come now to our time, and we find this very strange circumstance. We have had two world wars, and somehow no epic has come from them—except perhaps The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom—and I find many epic qualities there—in The Seven Pillars the book is hampered by the fact that the hero is the teller, and so sometimes he has to belittle himself, he has to make himself human, he has to make himself far too believable. In fact, he has to fall into the tricks of a novelist.

The need for the epic (or for the mode of the epic) to weave into the fabric of fiction is necessary for Borges because he sees in the novelistic literature the possibility of gaining a heroic quality. But postmodern narrative tendencies irritate him.

I think that the novel is breaking down. I think that all these very daring and very interesting experiments with the novel—for example, the idea of the shifting of time, the idea of the story being told by different characters—all those are leading to the moment when we shall feel that the novel is no longer with us.

It may not be surprising that the old man prefers the grand style and the great storytelling tradition of heroes and deeds and the singing of them. His brand of fiction romanticizes the mythopoetic tradition. He almost apologizes for his preference, saying he may be an old-fashioned man from the nineteenth century. But myth-making has been with us since time immemorial. As long as the tales are being spoken and sung, handed down from singers to listeners, myths are created and recreated, over and over. After the words of the painter Whistler, Borges proclaims: "Art happens every time we read a poem." Which can be tweaked in this case: A myth is reborn every time we sing an epic novel.

I'm not sure whether Borges will consider João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas an epic novel. I'm almost sure he did not even read it. In the exacting terms he give for his type of novel, it fails in several respects. For one, it is told by the hero Riobaldo. And it is full of time shifts, with the muddled Riobaldo criss-crossing time and space in an always apologetic telling. He withholds information from the reader. He deliberately delays the story for—it's really rather irksome—the full impact of the outcome of—the way he always breaks off his narrative—every staggering showdown.

Ah, but hold on, wait a minute: I'm getting off the track. I was about to forget Vupes! My story would be neither accurate nor complete if I left out Vupes, for he comes very much into the picture.

Riobaldo is always getting off the track, circling around his long-drawn out story like a thirsty vulture to the corpse of his memory. Random thoughts assail him. Riobaldo, the hero, the ceaseless teller, belittles himself. He almost surely falls into the tricks of novel writing, making himself too believable.

I know that I am telling this badly, just hitting the high spots. I ramble. But it is not to cover up; don't think that. About serious matters, the normal ones, I have told you almost everything. I have no hesitation. You are a man who judges others as you would yourself; you are not one to censure. And my past deeds have been invalidated, proscribed. My respectability is solid. Now I am like a tapir in a pool; nobody can catch me. Little of my life is left to me. I am talking foolishness.

His words can be endearing and exasperating at the same time. They often linger like an unspoken commentary on the poverty and brutality of people around him. But whether his story ultimately describes the "breaking down of a man" or "degeneration of character" (as Borges cites Mencken) is debatable. I'm not even sure if Riobaldo is the hero of the novel.

Yet in many ways Guimarães Rosa tips the balance of the novel toward epic proportions. There is singing, and there are songs of old excerpted in it, ballads and lyrics. Riobaldo names his horse after a singer whose song haunts him. There are myths, myth-making from his own mouth, bygone stories of great jagunço chiefs. His is not a totally scripted tale. The seeming spontaneity underpins the deep sorrows of his heart. His stories follow the course of a river from the headwaters to the rapids, feeding into countless tributaries, according to the dictates of a compassionate memory.

As I think of them that is how I relate them. You are very kind to listen to me. There are hours long past that remain much closer to us than other more recent ones. You know yourself how it is.

The trickery of the modern novelist usually lies in the handling of memory and in the investigation of a hero's fallibility. And the modern novel, epic or otherwise, is full of these tricks.

The modern epic novel that Borges described is probably a hypothetical one. It was once possible, but modern writing has split the two tasks—the telling of a tale and the singing of verses as mutually exclusive ways of storytelling. Nowadays epic singing in prose is an ideal, like a perfect translation, impossible to write. But he is just too full of hope to give up his dream of the epic. His prophecy of its inevitable comeback, in the form of a novel, is a challenge both to writers and the readers who will sing them.

I think that if the telling of a tale and the singing of verse could come together again, then a very important thing might happen.

...

I have optimism, I have hope. And as the future holds many things—as the future, perhaps, holds all things—I think that the epic will come back to us. I think that the poet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell a story and he will also sing it. And we will not think of those two things as different, even as we do not think they are different in Homer or in Virgil.

That is from his lecture of 1967 or 68. Riobaldo, his precursor, is amenable on the aspect of songs bearing the heroes out. In his own novelistic way, Riobaldo sings his own tale.

"The war was a big one, it lasted a long time, it filled this sertão. Everybody is going to talk about it, throughout the North, in Minas and the whole of Bahia, and elsewhere, for years to come. They are going to make up songs about the many deeds."

...

Sô Candelario looked up with wonder on his face, and in an oddly quiet way spoke from his heart, in a pleasant voice:

"Let there be fame and glory. Everybody will talk about this for many years and in many places, giving praise to our honor. They will make up verses about it in the market places, and it might even be written up in city newspapers."

And maybe in novels too—who can say?

On Diadorim

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís (Knopf, 1963)


SPOILERS. LOTS.


Two taboos permeate Riobaldo's telling of his adventures. The first is the devil, its questionable non-existence, the evil power it gives those who are willing to make a pact by selling their souls. The second is his love for his fellow jagunço Diadorim.

Diadorim loved me too. So much that his jealousy of me spilled over. After a sudden satisfaction, that other shame arose in me, a strange revulsion. [29]

It is a love that revolts him, that he cannot openly acknowledge in a society where strong men are supposed to desire only women. And so he represses it.

I was crazy about Diadorim, and at the same time, underlying this, was a dull rage at it not being possible for me to love him as I wanted to, honorably and completely. [30]

He denies expression of that love in countless ways. For Riobaldo, it is an evil thing that must not be given due course. It cannot be named, much in the same way that the devil's name cannot be freely uttered. Riobaldo is afraid that the two taboos—his attraction for a fellow man and the existence of the devil—are interlinked.

Always when we begin to love someone, in the normal run of things, love takes root and grows, because, in a way, that is what we want to happen, and so we seek it and help it along in our mind; but when it is predestined, all-embracing, we love completely and fatefully, we have to love, and we come upon one surprise after another. A love of this sort grows first and bursts forth later. I am talking a lot, I know: I am being a bore. But it can't be helped. Well, then, tell me: can love like that come from the devil? Can it possibly? Can it come from One-Who-Does-Not-Exist? Your silence indicates agreement. Please don't answer me, or my confusion will grow. [117]

The novel then appears as a mashup of a violent action adventure and a tender love story, with the restraints of the larger society and its religious/folk beliefs—the dominant arbiter of morals—impinging on individual desires and happiness. But since this is a (LGBT) novel about transformations and perpetual self-inventions carefully worked out, the revelation about Diadorim's sexuality at the end compels the reader to reassess Riobaldo's self-questioning narrative.

Though the novel is often likened to a Western, an Eastern reading gives some insights into the most radical transformation in the book. Eclipsing Riobaldo's transformation from a simple bandit to a formidable jagunço chief is Diadorim's transformation into (or impersonation as) a man. Why did she do it?

The role of Joca Ramiro, her father whom she revered so much, is significant in understanding Diadorim's taking on the duties of an obedient son. Explaining her bravery to Riobaldo when they first met, the Boy (as Diadorim was then known to Riobaldo) explains: "I am different from everyone else. My father told me that I had to be different, very different."

In "The Death of a Disciple" (1918) by the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, a young girl impersonates the life of a boy (Lorenzo) in order to enter the church and serve God the father: "Whenever he was asked about his origins, Lorenzo would parry all questions with a guileless smile and offer only the vaguest of replies: his home, he said, was Paraiso, his father Deus."

The deep love for her old father is also the reason the legendary Chinese woman warrior Hua Mulan escaped her home to enlist as a soldier after her father was drafted into the army. Her heroic exploits are recorded in the poem “Ballad of Mulan”.

Last night I saw the army notice, The emperor is calling a great draft.
A dozen volumes of battle rolls, Each one with my father's name.
My father has no grown-up son, And I have no elder brother.
I'm willing to buy a horse and saddle, To go to battle in my father's place."

First transcribed in the 6th century and the basis of the popular 1998 Disney animated movie Mulan, it is said to be one of the first poems in Chinese history to support gender equality. After fighting battles for ten years, Mulan and her army visited the emperor who showered the victors with rewards. When the emperor asked Mulan what she desires, she replied that she only wanted to come back home. Her family, learning of her return, joyously welcomed her.

"I open my east chamber door, And sit on my west chamber bed.
I take off my battle cloak, And put on my old-time clothes.
I adjust my wispy hair at the window sill, And apply my bisque makeup by the mirror.
I step out to see my comrades-in-arms, They are all surprised and astounded:
'We travelled twelve years together, Yet didn't realize Mulan was a lady!'"

The male rabbit is swifter of foot, The eyes of the female are somewhat smaller.
But when the two rabbits run side by side, How can you tell the female from the male? 

Unlike in the Chinese poem, the revelatory ending of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands is a tragic affair, all the more poignant for dashing all hopes of potential future happiness between Riobaldo and Diadorim. In a kind of Buddhist sense, it may be part of Riobaldo's karma, part of the settling of accounts in the sertão, the final reckoning of his "pact".

One other interesting character in the book who seems to refract everything Riobaldo is narrating to his silent interviewer is his compadre Quelemém, an absentee commentator to the proceedings. Quelemém is a sort of guru to Riobaldo, "a person of such rare quality, that just being near him, everyone becomes calm, smiling, kind. [491]" Riobaldo derives several religious notions from him—karma, meditation, penance, self-denial—although he cautions against accepting them wholesale.

In this world or the next, each Jazevedão, when he has finished what he has to do, stumbles into his time of penance until he has paid in full what he owes—my compadre Quelemém will bear me out. [13]

He answered me that as we near Heaven, we become cleansed and all our ugly past fades into nothingness, like the misbehaviour of childhood, the naughtiness. Like there is no need to feel remorse for what we may have divulged during the turmoil of a nightmare. So—we become clean and bright! Maybe that is why they say getting to Heaven is so slow. I check these matters, you understand, with my compadre Quelemém, because of the belief he holds: that one day we pay to the last penny for every evil deed we have committed. A fellow who believes that would rather get up before daybreak three days in a row than make the slightest misstep. Compadre Quelemém never talks for the sake of talking, he means what he says. Only, I’m not going to tell him this: one must never swallow whole others tell us—that is an unbreakable rule! [16-17]

In his retrospective telling of his violent past, Riobaldo is all the more concerned about the afterlife and the salvation of his soul, repeatedly invoking God, Heaven, and Our Lady of Abadia. Here we find the abiding presence of religion that was the backdrop of Akutagawa's short story (and also, notably, of Endo Shusaku's novel Silence). For another reading of Grande Sertão's ending, I'm quoting from translator Charles De Wolf's notes to "The Death of a Disciple".

The surprise ending points to a mélange of traditions. In the minds of the story's first readers, Lorenzo would surely have evoked a non-Christian figure with a nonetheless specifically Christian association: Kannon [Guanyin]. A well-known subterfuge of the "hidden Christians" [Kakure Kirishitan] during the centuries of persecution was to use images of this enormously popular bodhisattva ... to represent the Virgin Mary. Kannon, as it happens, was originally male, becoming female along the journey to Japan from India via China. In a story that was surely known to Akutagawa, she is born Miào-Shàn, the daughter of a rich king in Sumatra, who seeks to thwart her in her desire to become a Buddhist nun, even to the point of setting fire to the temple in which she resides. She miraculously puts out the flames but in the end is put to death.

If this precursor sounds too esoteric, try a very modern variation of the story, in the 2007 Korean hit TV series Coffee Prince, which has a remake in the Philippines last year.