The guerrilla-body into the body of the nation: contamination and abjection in Herbert Daniel

Abstract

What I intend here is to discuss and analyze the Brazilian novel Meu corpo daria um romance, written by Herbert Daniel (whose extensive literary production has been solemnly and systematically ignored by studies in the field of Brazilian literature) and first published in 1984. The focus of the discussion is to understand how Daniel promotes the rhetorical articulation between body, desire and revolution as fundamental concepts for an emancipatory view of sexuality (especially male homosexuality) in the context of struggle and resistance to the Brazilian dictatorship throughout the end of the 20th century. There is an undeniable cultural, discursive (and even linguistic) dimension in the composition of the materiality of the body, and Herbert Daniel is not unaware of this fact. However, it must be stressed that to say that human reality can only be understood through the mediation of language does not imply denying, suspending or not recognizing the materiality and concreteness of the body as a lived reality, as carnality. Following the arguments of Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile bodies (1994), we can think that, for Herbert Daniel, the understanding of the body occurs as something concomitantly immanent and transcendent. The representations of the body through literary discourse (as well as in other artistic modalities) can be seen as an index of the processes of historical transformation, in so far as they inscribe in a dialectic way the relations of subjectivity/objectivity and the processes of oppression, subordination and cultural subversion. Literature, in this sense, has been defined throughout Western history as a symbolic field haunted by the presence of the body, both in terms of reiteration (mimesis) and in terms of subversion (ruptures of performative bias).