Evil in the Night – A Novel by Erico Verissimo

Out, out of the rotten world! (The city outside)

John Updike, Endpoint and other poems2009

Erico Verissimo, who died in 1975 at the age of sixty-nine, wrote a curious and highly original novel during the 1950s, and the story commands attention, if only because it is so different from any other major writing of the time. The novel in question is Note (Evening), an exciting reading book, published in 1954. In 1956, the story was translated into English by LL Barrett and published by Macmillan in New York.

Much happened in Brazilian literature in the three decades between 1930 and 1960, but we can assume that Verissimo’s contemporaries were then mainly involved with rural themes. Of course, Verissimo always stood a little apart from them in the mood and character of his novels. This is because Verissimo’s works from the beginning of his career explored a different path: urban narrative. Along with this, we must understand that his fiction has not remained static. Verissimo, we must bear in mind, he was a developer, a writer in progress, experimenting to the end. Furthermore, more cosmopolitan than his leading contemporaries, Verissimo used his personal life experience to write his fascinating late literary novels.

While he remains after the publication of the second part of his saga Or Tempo or Wind (the weather and the wind) in 1951, Erico Verissimo completed the draft of his novel Note. What’s interesting about this novel is the degree to which some readers and critics misunderstand it by describing it as a simple story of jerks and prostitutes. The story is, instead, deeper than that. Part of the problem is that Eveninga story about the craziness of life in modern cities, it has scenes and characters of unusual audacity, including scenes of overt sexuality and cynicism, that were unusual for readers of Verissimo’s time and place. Evening tells us about an unspeakable human tragedy, in which ordinary people are unconsciously trapped in the loneliness of their lives, characters as tragic as true comic figures. In a sense, his theme is dehumanization: that is, not seeing or hearing each of us as human beings. Despite being a story about loneliness, there is a lot of humor in Evening.

Clearly, for many people Erico Verissimo has written, so to speak, a grotesque novel. One often hears that Evening represents a strange interregnum in Verissimo’s work. However, today’s debate has rejected that simplistic view. To be sure, that portrait has ignored at least three things. First, this allegorical narrative of the dark night of the soul is not incongruous in relation to the rest of Verissimo’s works. This is especially true if we remember that his novels Cross Roads (CrossingMacmillan, 1943) and Music ao Longe, for example, also express the same “lost world” feeling. Second, as Bordini (2006) observes, since puppets (puppets) (1932), Verissimo’s first collection of short stories, the macabre side of existence fascinated him. Surely, in Evening Verissimo sets aside the romantic language of his earlier novels. For Evening it does not deliberately address its wide audience. Third, with Evening the cycle of six novels about Porto Alegre closes. According to Lorenzo Chávez Evening it is Verissimo’s best realist novel; the critic also recounts Evening to the “social realism” of Verissimo’s fiction written between 1933 and 1943.

With two eloquent and effective metaphors, Evening represents the loneliness of modern man. One is the city as a kind of infernal machine that makes the anti-hero, called simply the “Unknown”, feel like prey. The city is alive and represents the meaningless life of the non-individualized human being. The Stranger must work to find solid ground, but the city and his emissaries do not allow it (“The city looks like a living being.”). Surely in this confrontation modern man, the man without qualities (Musil), lacks his psychological unity, as occurs with the characters of Kafka, Woolf or Joyce. The other symbolic device used by Verissimo is the night itself which represents hopeless time (“My God! – he thought – tonight does not end…”). The textual imagery of the narrative highlights the antihero’s endless and desperate search for the authenticity of himself.

In this regard, it is important to see that while Stegagno Picchio correctly notes Mann’s contribution to Verissimo’s fiction, he argues that: “(…) his problematic remains to the di qua di ogni invenzione che abbia alla sua origine il triangolo Joyce-Kafka-Proust.” For Picchio, the problematic of Verissimo remains below the inventions of the Joyce-Kafka-Proust triad. Although his expressive innovations capture our gaze, we must go beyond the use of language or style. We must know that his themes are also similar. To be sure, his reading of Verissimo differs from that of Chaves and others who find Verissimo carrying out an enterprise that belongs to the tradition of the bourgeois literary novel represented by Kafka, Mann, and Musil.

Now let us briefly recall the differences between our author and his colleagues. It is true, in fact, that Verissimo’s preference for dealing with the economic situation and class conflict in the rise of capitalism remains strong. But while it certainly is that, we must not forget that Evening shifted the emphasis to psychological analysis. So, too, Verissimo writes a symbolic novel where psychological analysis is exclusive. And yet, even when the story’s material is indistinguishable from that of his colleagues, the tone and treatment are subtly different.

We need to understand what Erico Verissimo was reacting to in the years after World War II. Postwar stories of confusion and conflict proliferated in Europe. Now the stories express the anxieties and the fragile hopes of an entire generation. Common to the stories was a new flexibility of structure, and soon the authors began to break down the boundaries between author and characters. Beyond that, the spontaneity of the personal response intensified the relationship between feeling and expression. Indeed, Verissimo deplored the emptiness of post-war life and Evening responds specifically to this change of time. In a world beset by ideological divisions and hostility, literature must signal the changes and the reader must understand the meaning of these signals.

The most interesting stories are those in which we can identify with the main character of the story: the hero or the antihero. Naturally, it is not difficult to put yourself in the place of the Stranger, the antihero of Evening. But it should be noted that Verissimo’s antihero is not a revolt like the modern man of Camus. He certainly seems more akin to Sartre’s characters from the existentialist trilogy. the paths of freedom (1945-49). In fact, we can see that Verissimo characters such as Amaro, Vasco, Eugenio and this Unknown suffer from the same indecision as Mathieu Delarue, among other Sartre characters.

Following the idea that philosophical problems dissolve in Verissimo’s work, Evening it could be his first explicit homage to French existentialist ideas. This is indeed a point that deserves further investigation. In any case, we can find out in Evening some characteristics of existentialist literature, such as: the evidence of a culture in crisis, the hero or antihero facing a “limit situation”, the search for an authentic life and the consciousness of freedom. In other respects, however, the novel seems, in terms of mood and atmosphere, to be in the popular detective novel tradition. It certainly reminds us of a post-war novel like that of Léo Malet it’s always night (1948). Both are challenging, disturbing and value alienation as a central element of their characters. There is the buildup of gradual threat as the shadow of incommunicability draws ever closer in these stories.

Evening takes the reader into a claustrophobic world where the amnesiac protagonist Robert the Stranger searches for his identity. Because this is the story of the Stranger, the desperate seeker of his own identity; and how he was led through the ghastly night by the dangerous people he met in a seedy dockside pub: Martin the Master, with his cynical and nihilistic outlook on life, and Claude the Midget, a psychopathic artist who he strangely gravitates towards his Master, the cynical pimp. His companions manage to convince Robert that he is a murderer. The Brazilian critic R. Zilberman sees the main character as a kind of “human Pinocchio”, since he seems lost in the hands of his companions like the famous character of Collodi. Robert narrowly escapes being caught by the two night birds when near dawn he meets Lili, a red-haired prostitute. Other than the antihero, she appears to be the only authentic human figure in the tale. After making love to her, he finally begins to remember the events of the day before: her wife left him (“If I came back, my God, if I came back, I promise you that everything will be different from now on.”).

Erico Verissimo’s characters in Evening they will remain in our memory forever: they continue to haunt us to this day.

References

Bordini, Maria da Gloria.. 2006. After the incident. In: Verisimo, Erico. Incident on Antares . São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

Chavez, Flavio Loureiro. A narrative gives solidarity. In: Verisimo, Erico. 1987. Note . Rio de Janeiro, Globe.

Picchio, Luciana Stegagno. History of Brazilian Literature . Turin, Einaudi, 1997.

Zilbermann, Regina. 1985. Gaucho Literature . Porto Alegre, L&PM.