Zero by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão

First published: 1974 (English translation, 1983)

Type of plot: Sociopolitical surrealism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: A large city in Latin America

Principal Characters:

• José Gonçalves, the protagonist, a vagabond worker at odd jobs turned assassin and subversive
• Rosa, his wife
• Attila, his friend and fellow subversive
• Gê, the terrorist leader

The Novel

Zero was written in Brazil in the late 1960’s, during the first years of the repressive military regime which took power in 1964. The setting of Zero as a “Latindian American country, tomorrow,” stated on the introductory page, is a thin disguise for Loyola Brandão’s contemporary Brazil. Certain dates, historical names, geographical references, and institutional acronyms link the novel to that country, although many of the events and the atmosphere could fit several other Latin American countries ruled by authoritarian military regimes. Finished in 1969, Zero was too controversial for Brazilian publishers in the early 1970’s, despite the author’s previous respected and successful publications, and was first published in Rome in Italian in 1974. The following year, during the beginning of the regime’s political opening, it was published in Brazil to the acclaim of critics and a public thirsty for a literary treatment of the country’s dark period, during which censorship was in effect.

The salient characteristic of Zero, as a novel, is unconventionality. It is an extensive prose narrative containing a degree of character and plot development and thus may be deemed a novel. Its unconstrained language, its bizarre characters and episodes, and especially its chaotic structure, however, clearly set it apart from the norm. Yet this unconventionality is the critical element for the author’s creation of a critical, surrealist portrait of the times in his homeland.

Zero is a series of titled, disjointed narrative units, lists, drawings, and graphs, the majority of which sketchily relate major events in the characters’ lives, but many of which serve to convey social, political, and philosophical commentary linked to the plot only as a backdrop to reinforce tone and atmosphere. The plot revolves around José Gonçalves’s evolution from vagabond to subversive. At the outset of the work, the reader sees José doing the first of his odd—both diverse and strange—jobs, killing rats in a run-down film theater. Later, he writes slogans for Coca-Cola bottle caps and books acts for a national freak show that makes up an entire neighborhood. Finally, he carries out robberies and assassinations for Gê, the leader of the subversive “Commons.” Other significant events in his life are his residence in an abandoned book warehouse, where he reads and gains political consciousness; his courtship of and marriage to Rosa, whose dubious background causes him anguish; his murder of individuals whom he believes are doing him wrong; and his arrest, torture, and subsequent escape.

Plot development is secondary to tone and atmosphere, and the reader is required to piece it together from frequent but disjointed and transitionless glimpses that are intercalated among other, unrelated but equally chaotic observations and commentaries made by the narrator. These latter elements include statistics on Latin American countries, mini-subplots on exploited individuals, a labeled drawing of a malnourished man, ludicrous Orwellian government pronouncements, plentiful ironic footnotes and “Free Associations,” and even strings of nonsense syllables. Attention is focused naturalistically on torture, pain, sexual acts, deformities, and the like through detailed listings.

The chaotic nature of the novel’s structure is underscored by the deliberate breaking of convention in punctuation and spelling, seen, for example, in the placement of commas between verbs and their objects and the phonetic rather than normative spelling of many words. The novel’s emphasis on the base and the ugly is heightened by frequently coarse and brutal language almost devoid of any lyric quality.

The Characters

None of the characters is fully developed. Indeed, they all seem to be caricatures drawn by a literary expressionist. There are virtually no physical descriptions, only sketchy background information, and little sense of balance in them as real persons. They speak, act, and react in exaggerated, often implausible ways, as people appearing in dreams and nightmares. Many characters come on the scene, provide some significant insight into the work’s meaning, then disappear for the rest of the novel.

The character of José Gonçalves, the protagonist, is drawn by his actions and words. The reader is told little of his background, there is no introspection, and what other characters say about him centers on his outward behavior. Even the third-person narrator, who is not omniscient, relates only what José does and says. Nevertheless, the reader can follow a basic evolution of the protagonist’s character. José becomes aware of the depravity of his occupation as rat killer, gains political consciousness and a general awareness of the world around him through reading, marries, seeks a house and a better job, and begins an individual revolt through acts of robbery and murder. Although he eventually joins the Commons, the violence he commits in conjunction with this radical group essentially continues his personal revolt and is not motivated politically. Thus, he is largely a pathetic character who does not grow in his human dimension but, as a victim of his times and environment, ends up contributing to the general despair of society.

Rosa is the object of José’s love, fear, and rage. Her role is more that of a foil for José than that of a character in her own right. His courtship of her makes him confront the scorn of others (who tell him that she is an immoral woman). With her, he vents his sexual energy and his incipient revolt and violence. For her, he seeks a general improvement in his life, during which he encounters inanity and frustration. Her death at the hands of government torturers seals his fate with that of the Commons. Rosa, though enigmatic, is loving and suffering, while José is violent and aggressive.

Attila, a nickname reflecting his violence when he is drunk, is the closest thing to a friend that José has. Besides drinking, he smokes marijuana and chases women. Although the reader does not see what leads him to join the Commons with José, his rowdy character allows him to fit well into their terrorist activities. He serves as a sounding board for José, allowing him to express some of his anger.

Gê is portrayed as a dedicated, cool-headed professional revolutionary along the lines of Che Guevara; their similarity is enhanced by the phonetic similarity of their first names. For him, everything has its role as seen from the perspective of Marxist dialectics, and he attempts to recruit José by appealing to his potential role. Since José is not ready to embrace this concept, Gê simply directs his rage and uses his bravery and skill with a gun as means to further the revolutionary end.

Various other characters populate the pages of Zero in brief portraits that reinforce more general themes and motifs. Carlos Lopes, for example, appears several times throughout the novel in a sort of story-within-the-story, to underscore the absurdity and inhumanity of the sociopolitical system. Seeking medical aid for his ill child at a public hospital, he is sent from window to window over some two years’ time in a futile search for the proper functionary. Finally, with his dead, mummified child in his arms, he is arrested for not having updated a certain form. Toward the end of the novel, Carlos Lopes is linked to the larger plot as the reader sees him among Gê’s men. Another character briefly portrayed is Crato, a man of so great a resolve that he withstands the most horrendous torture, including witnessing the torture and murder of his family. Such secondary characters generally serve as poignant examples of the injustice inherent in the sociopolitical order, the major theme of the novel.

Critical Context

Zero is the best known of Loyola Brandão’s works. It continues the themes and attitude of his previous novel, Bebel que a Cidade Comeu (1968), but evinces an evolution into a more audacious, experimental creation. Some subsequent works—the novel Dentes ao sol: Ou, A destruiçao da catedral (1976) and the stories of Cadeiras proibidas (1979), for example—also have certain parallels in theme and perspective but are much more conventional in structure, language, and development of characters and plot.

Zero represents a significant landmark in modern Brazilian prose fiction, with its bold structure, contumacious tone, and unrelenting indictment of the military regime. Numerous other Brazilian novels have rendered a critical portrayal of life under this repressive regime with similar themes, techniques, and tone, notably Ivan Angelo’s A festa (1976), Carlos Heitor Cony’s Pessach: A travessia (1967), and Roberto Drummond’s Sangue de Coca-Cola (1983), but Zero stands out as the most innovative and powerful of the literary protests of those dark times.

Bibliography

Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. “Ignacio de Loyola Brandão and the Fiction of Cognitive Estrangement.” Luso-Braizilian Review 24 (Summer, 1987): 35-45. A discussion of the theme of metamorphoses in Loyola Brandão’s works.