Preface to Ficções Completas – Grafatório Publishers – 2023
Link to purchase the book > https://grafatorio.com/site/produto/ficcoes-completas/
Journeys into Arnaldo’s Workshop
By Jotabê Medeiros
Arnaldo Baptista is firing on all cylinders, yet he defies the boundaries of prose. That is to say: he is neither firmly planted in the exclusive territory of prose nor strictly bound by the cadence of poetry — though his writing encompasses all of that, plus a central element: visionary insight.
Brought together for the first time thanks to the keen eye of Grafatório Publishers, O Abrigo, The Moonshiners, and Rebelde Entre os Rebeldes are three texts by the São Paulo-born singer, songwriter, painter, writer, and multi-instrumentalist Arnaldo Dias Baptista; the first two are previously unpublished in book form. Written in the 1970s, these texts could be classified as science fiction — two being shorter pieces, one more novella-like in scope. Yet, they all transcend categorization, entering a realm of philosophical acclimatization, existential exploration, and mystical invention.
Rooted in dystopian foundations and built upon the classic definition of the genre (a narrative offering a technical and materialist vision that examines humanity’s future possibilities), Arnaldo’s texts employ a delightful hybridity: dramatic writing infused with technical automotive and sociological details, the jarring jargon of consumer culture, pop culture references, and assembly-line technical manuals.
In these stories by Arnaldo, worlds die, are born, collapse, and die again. Characters of fleeting brilliance punctuate the narratives: Juan Manuel Fangio, Tinker Bell, and conductor Nelson Ayres — along with his radio program Um Piano ao Cair da Tarde (A Piano at Dusk)— coexist with icons of pop permanence, such as Coca-Cola and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2).
O Abrigo is the story of how a man constructs his own concept of egocentric self-preservation. The concept of a nuclear, bomb, or air-raid shelters — or perhaps even one designed to withstand Artificial Intelligence, as is already being speculated — carries with it notions of segregation, cruelty, and elitism; it is the embodiment of injustice and sacrifice. Arnaldo explores this ethical crossroads — even while endowing his protagonist with a certain utopian sensibility — , using a narrative style that is both spare and fluid, seemingly drawing the reader right into the story.
The Moonshiners, originally written in English, is grounded in the idea of a universal union — an expansion of the family unit concept — through the coupling of a human with an “extra-human,” an interplanetary traveler. Arnaldo’s stories, written with the pulse of the late 1970s, occasionally venture into politically incorrect territory — particularly regarding misogyny — reflecting the moral landscape that would come to dominate the following decade. One can spot the author’s playful irony here and there; for instance, “Cagmen”— the name of one of the text’s female extraterrestrials— can be read as a gag (playing on the English word “cage,” implying something like “Men-Cage”).
The science fiction work Rebelde Entre Os Rebeldes — now published in its entirety, free from excessive copy editing — seems to echo the classic * Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig (1974). But without the typical ideology of the counterculture, rooted in chronic individualism and a solitary rejection of civilization’s pre-molded rules. Through his “on-the-road” mechanic hero, Arnaldo anticipated the era of Elon Musk-style space tourism; he was a visionary with his space shuttles and machines endowed with spirit, charting a progression of discoveries made in the light of clean, uncontaminated, analog knowledge. Set against the backdrop of an escape into space, the text even offers a sort of tribute to the machine uprising in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), staging a confrontation with a successor to the HAL 9000 computer.
The author develops a narrative rhythm that finds few parallels in existing Brazilian literature — perhaps only José Agrippino de Paula ever grazed this core, stripped of psychological introspection. “When the machine arrived, it was one of those days when everything seems like a mirage to us, for I had even bought a hat.”
Skeptical of humanity’s capacity for self-governance, Arnaldo repopulates the world to create a new consciousness; yet this consciousness, too, is subject to dissipation, corruption, and boredom — an agonizing paradox. All the texts incorporate the house as a vehicle, and that vehicle as a battering ram forcing the limits of human expansion toward its own essence, whether on Mars or beneath the Earth.
Arnaldo displays a keen technological radar. He was already attuned to new possibilities for scientifically explaining the cosmos — such as Stephen Hawking’s 1974 description of space black holes: dead stars that had collapsed, possessing gravity so intense that not even light could escape. “One could now make out a sort of black void, from which a faint, icy breeze seemed to emerge, carrying dust of the kind commonly described in stories about archaeological discoveries in places unvisited for ages,” he writes.
In Arnaldo’s texts, the narrator is both present and absent, detached yet involved, often finding himself caught unawares in his own temporal gap: “There are moments when our attention — ordinarily so vague and paradoxically inattentive — is compelled to push aside everyday thoughts and, amidst the exigencies of a pressing moment, awaken to a reality that is sometimes all too abrupt.”
As you all know, Arnaldo Dias Baptista was the creative genius behind —and a pioneer of — the greatest Brazilian pop group: Mutantes. His songwriting as a bandleader — fundamental to his work with the legendary Mutantes and his exceptional solo career — bears no direct parallel to his literary output, which is more expansive and crafted with greater concision. Yet, it is entirely possible to unearth fragments of his past here and there: “[…] guttural moans (from mutants, I believe; beings who had somehow survived lethal doses of neutron radiation and were wandering, likely mad, across the fields).”
Arnaldo Baptista’s literature seems directly connected to the Latin origin of the word “prose,” signifying direct, free communication — though, in his case, not automatic. Confronting his conscience in search of the meaning of life, Arnaldo carved out passages into the interior of his own mental odyssey. To grasp the vast canvas of his multifaceted body of work, reading these precious texts is akin to discovering a map studded with pins on the wall of Arnaldo’s mental workshop — each one hinting at a journey that promises to be nothing short of dizzying.
