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Mimesis and Justice: The Realism of Vidas Sêcas

The novel and film Vidas Sêcas (1938, 1963) are counted internationally as classics of Brazilian realism. In their different media and in their different artistic movements – the modernist regionalism of the one, the Cinema Novo of the other – the novelist Graciliano Ramos and the film-maker Nelson Pereira dos Santos have produced works that are readily categorised as realist. Does the realism common to them depend upon a suppression of the imaginative character inherent in them as works of art? Does their realism therefore figure in the control of the imaginary that the contemporary Brazilian literary critic Luiz Costa Lima proposes as a characteristic of the modern period? This article questions the definition of realism as the self-effacing documenting of an independently existing reality, and contends that the reception of realism has often neglected the latter's construction of truths and its practice of showing a world open to the imaginative interventions of justice.