A scholar of Brazilian short stories, Professor Vera Tietzmann Silva conducted, in 1991, one of the most complete studies on the narratives of Laranja da china, noting, for the first time in criticism, this stylistic peculiarity of the São Paulo author that does not escape a critical reader: the approximation of his literary art to cinematography, an art that was developing at that time. Professor Vera thoroughly analyzes, among other stylistic peculiarities, the cinematic montage technique that Alcântara Machado so skillfully transferred to his short stories. This essay, titled "Montagem e humor em Laranja da china," was published in Cadernos de Letras da UFG, série Literatura Brasileira, number 06, in 1991. And later in Passando dos limites, a work published by the Federal University of Goiás Press in 1995.
Sensitive to the new artistic languages that emerged around Modernism, such as cinema, fiction writers, including short story writers, began to incorporate them into their texts, radically altering the structure of the narrative genre. Over time, the dilution of the plot, in short, of the fable or story; the absence of clear character contours; the indefiniteness of time and space, led fiction to invade the boundaries of the lyrical genre, also incorporating poetic characteristics. Indeed, Emil Staiger, when theorizing about genres, demonstrates that they do not function, as the classics wanted, in separate compartments, isolating themselves into lyrical, epic, and dramatic. Today, they are, in fact, like communicating vessels, with the lyrical and dramatic flowing into the epic, meaning that characteristics of poetry or theater can be present in a narrative text, or vice versa, in perfect intercomunication.
Avarmas, released by Ática in 1978, is an excellent example of a work that takes literary experimentation techniques to the extreme. Gilberto Mendonça Teles, in the preface he wrote for this book, places Miguel Jorge within the "universalist" line, alongside José Veiga, and states that the author of Avarmas "has known how to introduce the most audacious modifications in the language of his short stories." Furthermore: contrasting this work with Miguel's debut book (released almost 30 years ago), titled Antes do túnel, Gilberto points out in the latter, from 1967, some imperfections typical of a debut author, but states that in Avarmas, written no less than ten years later, "hesitations give way to a well-thought-out language construction, and the awareness of language as a game assumes its full manifestation." The critic also perceives, very clearly, the artistic language techniques present in the work in question (such as cinema), but considers that "it is undoubtedly the appeal to poetic language that is visible in all the short stories."
In the series of short stories in Avarmas, one can indeed verify what Emil Staiger theorizes: all genres, in one short story or another, more or less radically, coexist or interpenetrate. The narrative "Macro Micro," for example, which examines labor relations, is structured entirely under the influence of cinematic language. The short story "Putein," on the other hand, incorporates dramatic language to such an extent that, with slight adaptations, it was transformed into a play, included in the work Teatro contemporâneo, published by Miguel Jorge in 1981. The very title of the short story collection in question is a form of poetic montage, with good expressive yield. In Avarmas, an agglutination of ave(s) (bird(s)) and armas (weapons), there is already the ambiguity proper to the lyrical genre, offering several possible readings, which we come to understand better after reading the work or within its context. Even better: after "reading" the author's worldview, understanding how he sees the world and, within it, man. In the aforementioned preface, Gilberto Mendonça Teles, understanding the poetic climate that permeates the short stories, offers the first reading of the title in a metaliguistic direction, stating that "Avarmas, (...) a mixture of birds and weapons, suggests the encounter (the game) of the winged language of poetry with the armed language in these narratives: it soars to arm; or arms itself to soar. It matters little."
Trying to look at the human depth captured by Miguel, through the poetic, we believe that at least three more readings can emerge from the depth of the text to the title. One, of an ironic nature, would be: "Hail, weapons!" Perhaps a cry of resistance and mockery in the face of a dehumanized world, in which we are no more than fragile birds to be shot down in existential flight. Or a kind of cruel and ironic form of greeting, reminiscent of that "Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute you," uttered by condemned men before death in the arena, for the delight of the Romans, in the era of the Caesars. At the same time, a "Hail, weapons!" underlies it, sounding like a formula to exorcise evil: God save us from them! It is not without reason that the short story "Avarmas," eponymous with the work, unfolds in a terrifying atmosphere, suggesting the 1964 Revolution. The illustrator of the two editions of Avarmas, Aderbal Moura, captured this sense very well, materializing this idea throughout the pages of Gilberto Mendonça Teles's preface, where these two elements (birds and weapons) are juxtaposed. There, through a prescient optical stratum, the reader can see disoriented birds that have passed through the line of fire (one of which, already hit, plunges into the abyss), and the double barrel of a heavy-caliber weapon, exploding towards others outside our field of vision, yet showing the shooter's hand firm on the trigger. Another reading would be the possibility of an antinomy or two opposing poles: bird x weapons. On one hand, the fragility of the human being; on the other, the force of institutions, "the web of constraints," as Italo Calvino would say, which destroy man or the humanity of man.
Most of the short stories in this book, recalling Cortázar when referring to the modern short story, "shoot Descartes in the back": almost nothing can be rationally explained, and the relationships of causality disappear, as does everything known in the decalogues of the so-called traditional short story. The first narrative, "Décima Quarta Estação" (Fourteenth Station), for example, is structured within "a fog or nebula," to use the author's own expression. The first difficulty for the beginner reader is that this short story is built through intertextualization, that is, it is built upon a pre-text (or an existing text), which are biblical passages of Christ's passion or fragments of these passages. These, in turn, serve as the basis for the "via-sacra" ritual, instituted by the Catholic Church, or, more precisely, by the people of Jerusalem based on the memory of this passion.
There is a fable or plot, but as if it were a frayed fabric or one that presented the empty spaces of lace. The fabulation, the plot, or more simply, the author's way of weaving his nebulous text, leaves not a compact fable fabric, but only hints, fragments of action here and there. The reader is invited to participate in the creative process, filling in the gaps, joining the threads to form the story's fabric.
The main character, an unnamed "I," apparently begins to experience his scourging in an interior monologue. In the third line, he expresses himself thus: "and here is my image ignited." This is the moment of eruption of this anonymous character into the text. To ignite means to erupt suddenly, to catch fire with intense flame, sparks, or explosions. This is also the author's method of composition _ flashes of scenes, here and there, make up the short story. "Behold the shouts the crowd the voices the multitude in progressive anger moving in a spot in a fog or a nebula." It is not the multitude in progressive anger, in biblical chords, but the crowd. The millennial and the modern intertwine, and what moves in a nebulous spot, in a fog, is both an ancestral biblical time and a new time within a narrative that is being generated. In a fog, established by a consciously sought semiological indecision (everything is and is not what discourse seems to say), a condemned and sentenced man performs a ritual, interweaving death on the gallows and on the cross. Crucifixion, a practice the Romans inherited from the Carthaginians to subjugate the peoples under their dominion, especially the Jews, was the slowest and most painful form of execution. At the end of the short story, it prevails. The two forms of execution should take on a symbolic meaning in the short story. The illustrator, attentive, also captured the duality of the ordeal, illustrating the bottom of the page preceding the "Tenth Station" with a sinister gallows and the character, in the foreground, with a crown of thorns on his head, in the style of Christ.
