The non-quixotic prose of Bandeira: fiction or poetry

Abstract

Bandeira, without writing a single short story, tells countless histories. In a letter to João Cabral, he complains about septenaries laid out by his friend as Christmas celebration in a postcard that seemed Anatole France’s fleas. The fleas came from Les matinées de la Villa Saïd, where a professor Brown, chatting with the Anatole-character himself, remembered Sancho’s “bug beds that were like this Mahometan!” from Avellaneda’s Quixote. On the other hand, Bandeira’s fleas, he expected, “were done like that!” outdatedly, like Anatole himself, or those laid out verses. How Anatole’s own character, Avellaneda and how the flea / bed bug from Bandeira hint a space that arises uncannily compose this essay’s question, carrying on Silvio Elia’s illumination: Bandeira as a distinguished prose writer; given the defamiliarization in his stories and in his poetry. Finally, the uncanny in such non-short stories is read as becoming, though Bandeira weeps in the Itinerário: “But I know I wasn’t born with bossa for prose. Though I tried it many times.”