Paranoid Orientalism in Bernardo Carvalho’s O sol se põe em São Paulo

Abstract

Bernardo Carvalho’s novels frequently revolve around paradoxes. This is never more evident than in his treatment of the theme of travel, especially travel to the “Orient.” The growing body of fiction he has produced since his debut in 1993 is characterized by three tendencies, all interconnected by the bonds of paradox.¹ The first is the simultaneous deployment and frustration of orientalist narratives. Most of his novels take place either outside of Brazil or are focalized through an “external” foreign gaze on the country, and are highly self-conscious about the increasing limitations of “Othering” discourses of the colonial era, such as orientalism. The second is his frequent recourse to the trope and narrative structure of paranoia. The characters in his novels and the novels themselves make causal connections across geographical and temporal boundaries that seem to resist the sense of dissolution and dislocation produced by the vertiginous global scope of the plots themselves. The third is the self-conscious textual performance of identity in the context of a highly mediated information age. Carvalho’s narratives are frequently woven out of diary entries and letters, drawing attention to the process of writing the self. His fictions allude suggestively to biographical details about the author while in interviews he criticizes what he sees as the autobiographical tendency in the contemporary prose fiction of Brazil and insists that his texts problematize the genre of autoficção [autofiction].