The "III Workshop in Progress" by Joyce Studies in Brazil took place at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, from June 21st to 23rd, 2023. Scholars, students, and James Joyce's readers joined the event that discussed Joyce, and Beckett, specially, in Latin America, among other topics related to Joyce or Modernism (literature, film, music, dance etc.). In the event, professor Donaldo Schüler, who translated for the first time in Portuguese the entirety of 'Finnegans Wake', inspired by the discussions toward Joyce and Beckett readings from the peripheric point of view, and our voices, that don't reach many outside peripheric countries, wrote a MANIFESTO that I am sharing with you. No, we are not waiting for Godot, WE ARE GODOT! By Dirce Waltrick do Amarante
GODOT WANDERS BY DONALDO SCHÜLER
Not Portuguese, not English, not French, not Cantonese, GODOTNESE, confluence of all knowledge, of all flavors. Instead of Renaissance, Birth, permanent state of birth. Center? Ilha do Desterro*, center of exiles, crossing of speeches, of thoughts, of creative gestures. Banished without being banished, deterritorialized without deterritorialization, without dogma or doctrine. WITHOUT Movement. Don't be surprised. Godot** has been silent for decades, now that he has opened his mouth he can provoke global revolution.
*Florianópolis in Santa Catarina State is known as Ilha do Desterro (Something as Exile/Banishment Island). The I and III Workshop in Progress, an event promoted by James Joyce Studies in Brazil, took place in Florianópolis. The researches discussed Beckett as well and thought about language and exile from Beckett and Joyce’ s work.
** Godô was written in Portuguese with an accent that highlights the chance of his name (and himself) in another culture.
THE MANIFESTO**
GODOT WANDERS
Agora: now there is Agority.***
After the Plague the Feast.
Agora
Place of confluence: merchants, politicians, thinkers, poets together and confused/meldet. Trade in goods, images, ideas.
Fleets crossed the seas to wrest riches. Predators enslaved. In the conquered lands, rivers of blood dragged proscribed cultures into nothingness. People uplifted in centers impose ways of being and thinking with the furor of weapons. Modern means of communication break down borders. After colonization, globalization.
Photograph buildings destined for art is not enough. It is important to act. Permanently occupy spaces. Promote debates. Erect book tents. Dance. Sing. Tell a story. Declaim.
Present. Represent. Debate. Live.
The common space brings everyone together. Instead of troops, devices transport
thinkers, ideas, images, poems. Mixture of colors, bodies, languages. Globalization is astonishing when hegemonies thrive. In the agora everyone is equal. Why despise materials that others have despised? Art is not just what the frame surrounds. Art spills over into what we touch, smell, look at, taste. The art of the non-marketable. Art of what escapes control. The free invention of words and worlds. The concept, the object, the abject. Assembly, disassembly and reassembly.
Now Time explodes in the now: emergence of the past in the present. The now goes to the garbage bin – no future. Between past and present there is no causal relationship.
Happenings fragment into the indeterminate. There is no forecast. Fragmented universal culture. Answers are in effect here and NOW.
Transferring current obligations to other generations is a mistake. Blaming predecessors is wrong. The answers that the moment demands are invented.
Agority The age of now. Immediate communication annuls space. The waiting time.
Accommodate emergencies now. Agority holds those who do responsible. The present acceleration does not authorize loss. Agority stimulates creative impulses: they come from the present or the past, from the East or the West, from inside or outside, from the tangible or the dream. The glass summons the column. Verses from Homer line the side of the newspaper column. It is written on the ground, on tablets, on parchment, on paper, on skin, on fabrics, on luminous canvas. Quipus. Words live: written, sung, crushed, cut, remembered, relived, invigorated, retold.
Brightness of torches, lanterns, spotlights, tubes, the sun, the moon, the eyes. Reading texts, maps, codes, enigmas, illuminated advertisements, posters, trifles, external or internal abyss. Syntaxes constructed, torn apart, remade. The realism of things seen and unseen. Choreography: from fish to spaceships.
Invigorate. In carrying out tasks, individualities compete. Ethics of solidarity. Pathetic ethics. Respect for everyone's work. Book: editor, proofreader, printer, cover artist, paper maker, color maker, distributor, bookseller, reader. Think of a community where everyone is responsible. Shem and Shon.
Do not resort to violence to correct local problems. Violence will never be contained by repression. Repression generates even greater reaction. Violent people kill repressors. Threats uttered by bellicose voices haunt. Outskirts react angrily to storms blowing in from the center. Coercive standards are based on the suspicion that man is not capable of free choice. Ethical rules are not imposed from outside.
The house of man, the extraordinary. Ordinaries build houses ordered by the norms of others. Extraordinaries escape the ordinary, responsibly build their own homes. Extraordinary = Godô.
Revisit Proteus, the mythological figure who, imprisoned, escapes in other forms. Who is Proteus? Factory worker, musician, poet, dancer, actor. Proteus = Godot. Freedom is conquered without destroying order. Being an artist, an artist of one's own life, art dictated by individual decisions. Emancipation without schism. Differentiate to collaborate.
Vigor is born of combined forces. Being-with, syn-on. At the confluence of techniques, advances, reflections, agority prevails. The force of sporadic conjunctions. The energy that explodes in a minute, in a millionth of a second. The force of unforeseen conjunctions. Complex interaction between man, the media, industry, the interior and the exterior, the countryside and the city, the individual and the group, the old and the young. Between yes and no there are transitions. Affirmation and negation are mixed up, compete, flow. Kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscape.
The power of seduction. Reason and passion. The art to rest and to act. The rediscovery of vigor in idleness. Businesses do not deny idleness. Symphony and cacophony. The eloquence of silence and the alertness of the cry. Brevity intensifies the will to do, to live.
The heroism of everyday battles. The fight against death. The fight and the mourning.
Instead of minorities thinkers, minorities artists, an ever-increasing number of thinkers and artists. Universal vote for a thinking totality. Combined struggle to create the man who does not yet exist but who will have to exist. After the crisis, the crasis.
Godot: Don't wait for me. I'm in the action.
**Translation in Globish by Dirce Waltrick do Amarante.
*** Schüler plays with the word Ágora (Agora in English), and agora (now in English), and agoridade (a made up word that was used by Haroldo de Campos and means to reinvent the present (now/agora, something like nowty) using references from the past.