João Gilberto Noll in Madrid
Although he is still relatively unknown in the Spanish-speaking world, Noll is gradually finding the position he deserves among us, thanks to the translations of his work that the Adriana Hidalgo publishing house has been producing over the last few years (up to now they have published Lord, Harmada, Bandoleros, and A cielo abierto). In Brazil, Noll’s books have become classics, and he is an example for the country’s new generation of innovative and radical authors. He is currently giving workshops and lectures at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid.
His work, a close relative to the strange books by Clarice Lispector, propels language from within, allowing it to move forward along a smooth and transparent surface of empty adventures that take place in familiar urban contexts. Noll appears to have paid close attention to Thoreau’s criticism of the militarization of language through syntax, although, instead of opting for absolute anarchy and the absence of syntax, he prefers to subvert it from within, in an attempt to derail it. In fact, Noll’s rhythms seem to be closer to free jazz than to military marches, with his syncopes, jumps, unexpected breaks and subordinate sentences that threaten to rupture the stable relationships of meaning, repetitions, etc. Thanks to all this, the writing experience is transformed into an action, a true performance. The reading experience, on the other hand, reaches an extremely strange state which could be described as an apathetic epiphany.
The novels revolve around a single character, or, to put it another way, a single voice, whose external attributes vary from book to book. However, they could not be further from psychological literature, which is defined by a set subjectivity, with causal behaviours that can be interpreted depending on the parameters of a whole range of behavioural sciences. Instead, the voice does nothing but mutate and change, submitting to an extreme experience of alterity with regards to itself. It is a schizoid voice, sympathetic to Artaud’s demented polyphonies, and, above all, to his body without organs. Therefore, rather than psychoanalytic oneiristic machines in which individual consciousness toys with losing itself, before finally finding itself in a sort of transcendent interpretation of the ego, Noll abandons all hermeneutic pretension and embarks on the exploration of what is not yet a matter to be understood, to be made sense of; it is yet to be named.
Noll produces deviant hagiographies. After renouncing all their earthly ties (their family, their obligations with regard to society and the state), his characters have forgotten the fact that they are moving towards sainthood. In fact, they do not even seek it any more. They seem to have been trapped in that stage of asceticism in which God is absent or silent, in order to test their faith, and they all give in to the Devil’s temptations, with indifference, without the mediation of desire. A strange and necessary author.
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