This is a pre-print version of the chapter published at The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-south-and-literature/3DC70F4322D4CECEA9F849BAA79CCCB5 Critical Theory: Made in Brazil Fabio Akcelrud Durão University of Campinas (Unicamp) One of the most decisive developments in the humanities in the last fifty years has been the disappearance of the standpoint of universality. Today, any claim to occupy it generates, almost like a Pavlovian reflex, the suspicion of ideological veiling, as if the desire to speak for all necessarily and unavoidably entailed the silencing of some, perhaps even of most. Critical imagination thrived on the fragmentation of experience, articulating until then untheorized modes of thinking and existence resulting from gender, race and sexual specificities, among others. Power was identified everywhere, while descriptions of it remained confined to partial realms of social and psychic reality. While the “South turn” should be viewed in this context of opening new horizons at the expense of an image of the whole, it differs significantly from so-called minorities studies, first of all by the sheer size of the world revealed. Numerically, the South is bigger, both geographically and demographically, than the North; historically, some of its cultures and civilizations preceded Western ones. Central in its characterization is the insight that much of what passes for universal is in reality the result of unequal exchanges, economic as well as intellectual, for these do more than oppress or even suppress difference: they reproduce subordination. One example of the latter – to show the parallelism of mind and matter – is the application of theories as the most disseminated academic modus operandi in a peripheral country like my own, Brazil. Just as in the circuit of material production, with cars in the 1960s or computers today, technology – the concept as tool of intelligibility, its articulation as a machine of thought – is imported from the north and put to work at home either through reassembling (commentary/explanation) or application to native materials. As we shall see, underdevelopment, one of the South’s names, is not a transitory state that can be overcome with more progress, more modernization; it is rather the outcome of a combined and uneven development, to use a celebrated phrase (to which we will return), that guarantees the maintenance of things as they are. The global south thus makes one forcefully aware of the dimension of the place one is speaking from. This in turn very easily leads to a tension inside the theory between what is being thought and its locus of enunciation, the content and its vehicle. A statement such as “the North reproduces relations of subordination” may be taken as a performative paradox when published by Cambridge University Press. To escape it, it is futile to search for some kind of purity, which could only generate to a reductio ad absurdum; after all, there will always be a south within the south – as in my case, writing from São Paulo and Unicamp, one of the most prestigious universities in Brazil in relation to the rest of the country, much of it impoverished. Instead of looking for cases of authenticity, which in reality derive from imagining the South as an irreducible other, it is more productive to investigate the North-South relationship as a dialectical one, whereby alterity is not conceived as an externality to be sought for, always so close to the exotic, but rather as something internal, when the marginal shows, even as it is reproduced by the center, that the latter is not identical to itself. This was a conclusion reached by a school of social thought developed at the University of São Paulo, which included scholars from different fields in the humanities and which, beginning in the 1950s and extending to the present day, provided an innovative understanding of Brazil with far-reaching implications for what today we can term a general theory of the South. In literary studies Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz were its main representatives. For a good contextualization and introduction of this school and its development of the dialectic, see Arantes (1992); for a representative collection of Candido’s essays in English, see On Literature and Society (1995). Here we will be closely following the latter’s reading of nineteenth century Brazilian literature, in order not only to present a sophisticated reflection on and from the South, but also to posit how this formative period continues to reverberate, in however modified a manner, in contemporary Brazil. Finally, Schwarz’s dialectical findings will be compared to those obtained by a representative of subaltern studies in what can be viewed as a similar project, albeit with noticeably divergent results. But before proceeding, a few preliminary words on method. Firstly, in our current theoretical Zeitgeist, when so often articles appear to be written just to utilize fashionable concepts, it is refreshing to observe how Schwarz derives his interpretative tools from the literary material itself. Concepts come always afterwards, in the explanation of key passages; this makes it much harder to comment on his texts, because emphatic notions bring with them the literary context in and from which they were forged. This is why I will dwell so closely on particular novels below. Secondly, Schwarz follows T.W. Adorno’s important epistemological ideal of conceiving of literary form as crystalized social content This is a point very much repeated in the secondary bibliography on Schwarz (e.g. Cevasco and Ohata [2007]); Adorno deals with this idea under several guises; see, for example, Aesthetic Theory (1997: 140-147). . “Form” here, however, is a dynamic concept; it is not something given in advance; rather, identifying what constitutes a form is already an interpretative gesture. Finally, it is important to bear in mind when dealing with Schwarz that the nation is a strong category in his thinking. Brazil is not just a location: it is at once a centripetal system of self-reference Seminal for this understanding of the country is Antonio Candido’s Formação da Literatura Brasileira (2000), which only considers literature to be established in Brazil once writers, readers and texts formed a strong enough net of interrelations. For Schwarz’s musings on this, see “A Book’s Seven Lives” (2015). and centrifugal field of absorption and projection. And just as space is not an empty coordinate, time must be approached qualitatively, for the notion of formation, even in its aftermath and exhaustion, only makes sense if phenomena are inserted in the process that constitutes them. This is why a focus on the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of consolidation of Brazilian literature, may not be a bad starting point. In his reading of writers José de Alencar (1829-1877) and Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Schwarz developed his original theory of misplaced ideas (1992a). It was forged before the concept of the Global South acquired currency, and yet, as it happens sometimes, that which was conceived avant la lettre seems to fit better the new notion than much of which became consolidated in and through it. Let us then follow Schwarz’s reasoning, starting with the problem of adjusting the novel form to Brazil (1992b: 41-77). When Alencar published Senhora, perhaps his best novel, in serialized form in 1874 he was well aware of the fact that he was importing a literary genre which had only a precarious tradition in the country. Writing a Brazilian novel was an effort to modernize the spirit of the nation; in it, one could already identify a pattern that would haunt Brazil into the twenty-first century: the attempt to catch up, to show that the country was on equal footing with the others in the concert of nations. The enterprise failed, as should be expected. As any literary genre, the novel was not simply born, but came into being through a period of maturation in which literary form absorbed social experience. Brazil’s was of course very different from Europe’s, and any project of a superficial adaptation was fated to be either derivate or simply not Brazilian. However, as Schwarz shows, the deficiencies of Senhora are so representative that they become cognitively valuable: a minor work converts into a masterpiece of sorts. (Incidentally, there is a nice dialectic of flaws here, for when a very determinate reason if found for them, they turn into their opposite and can be redeemed.) The story is typically romantic: Aurélia is a beautiful, poor young woman, who was rejected by Fernando Seixas, her fiancée, for a better dowry. After receiving a providential inheritance, the now wealthy Aurélia pays to have Seixas’ engagement broken, gives him money so that he can liquidate his debts and marries him in what the reader learns is conceived as a business transaction. Taken by surprise by the arrangement, Seixas fully assumes the role of someone who has been bought, viewing his wife as his mistress; he refuses all the luxuries she provides him; becomes the hard-working civil servant he had never been; and eventually pays off his marital debt, after which he and Aurélia can finally be together in everlasting happiness. The plot is trite and badly constructed, characters are superficial and the style redolent of nineteenth-century mold. But the deepest problem is one of national adequacy: European romantic love presupposes the emergence of free subjects, people responsible for themselves and not beholden to figures of authority. The subjacent material condition for this was the generalization of money as universal mediator, not only because love and leisure are more than an alliteration, but also because through money the world is leveled as everything is for sale. This was the backcloth against which romantic revolt took place – a contradictory one, no doubt, insofar as it presupposed the autonomy of literature from religion and morality, a consequence of the selfsame leveling brought about by money. Nothing of the kind happened in Brazil: in the 1870s 15% of the population were slaves, who were exploited to the utmost (in the fields or mines they survived on average seven years); wage labor was incipient; social mobility, a fiction; gender relations were fixed and apart from marriage there were few options for a woman to sustain herself. In the absence of a developed labor market, those who were not proprietors had to rely on personal relations to survive; they had in one way or another find a patron who, more or less acknowledging it, would support them. Thus favor becomes a particularly important social and cultural practice playing a role somewhat similar to money as a quasi-universal mediator. In this context, the opposition between love and money was a fiction in the worst sense of the term. It so happens, however, that typically Brazilian contents found their way in Senhora on the margins of the work, through details, minor characters and subplots. First, in absentia: the novel is characteristically devoid of strong male figures. Aurelia is an orphan and Seixas’ family comprises a mother and sister. Unwittingly or not, Alencar eschews the patriarch; with him, the idea of the choice of who to marry would be a chimera. In Schwarz’s words, “the harsh moral dialectic of money is used to describe the gallantries of frivolous young men and women but does not affect the rich landowner, the businessman, the bourgeois mother, or the poor governess, whose lives are ordered by the laws of favor, or of brutality pure and simple” (p. 51). If the pater familias disappears from the main story, he is all-too present in the subplot. Pedro Camargo, Aurélia’s father, is the natural son of a wealthy landowner in the province, who loves him. He is sent to the capital Rio de Janeiro to study medicine; there he falls in love with Emília, a poor woman, and, not daring to face his progenitor’s authority, abandons school and marries in secret. Without the means to support a couple in need, Emília’s family disowns her. The contradiction with the main storyline is forcefully expressed by Schwarz: “the grandfather – from whom Aurélia will go on to inherit a fortune – is not presented as a despicable figure for having had illegitimate children, nor is the son condemned in the name of Love for having failed to move mountains, or in the name of Medicine, which he rejected as a vocation, nor is his wife thought any less for having had scant respect for the family and for tradition, nor can her family, which after all was large and poor, be condemned for not taking in a penniless student. In other words, love, money, family, decency, and profession are not presented as secular priesthood, in that absolute sense that had been conferred upon them by bourgeois ideology, and whose necessary presence dramatizes and raises the tone of the major portion of the novel.” (p. 58) The point here is that Alencar was blind to such discrepancies (and there are others in Senhora); they emerge as an almost necessary result from the project of importing the European novel into the Brazilian reality. The productivity of his failure derives from the coherence of his effort to adapt a literary form to a different context, inserting in it indigenous contents, but without modifying it. It is Machado de Assis who manages to go deep enough in the constitution of the novel to make it express a national predicament, which would have remained less visible without its literary embodiment. That which remained on the fringe in Alencar now occupies center stage in Machado, thus creating a potential for social critique not at all common at the time. And yet, he was no poète maudit or revolutionary writer; one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he died a fully recognized, celebrated author. His oeuvre is a vast one, comprising novels, short stories, newspaper stories (crônicas), poems and plays, but it is in his romances that he achieves a depth of perception seldom equaled since. Machado published eight novels and the discrepancy in quality between the first four (Ressureição [1872], A mão e a luva [1874], Helena [1876], Iaiá Garcia [1878]) and the last six (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas [1881], Quincas Borba [1891], Dom Casmurro [1899], Essaú e Jacó [1904], Memorial de Aires [1908]) has been a nagging thorn for critics. Schwarz interprets Machado’s second phase as the outcome of the formal exhaustion of, and personal disillusionment with, possibilities of reconciling paternalism and liberal ideals such as equality and individual freedom (Schwarz: 2000, 83-232). In different combinations and with increasing complexity, Machado’s first novels attempt to conciliate a patriarchal worldview – let us call it colonial ancien régime – based on a fixed social structure with personal merit, as in, say, the attainment of a desirable marriage guided by the heart’s choice. The realization of the impossibility of ultimate agreement between these opposites led to a perspective in which both would be mobilized in a process of mutual negation. Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881) The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, English translation 1987 is puzzling book. The eponymous narrator tells the story of his life after death, and this peculiar standpoint gives him all the freedom to organize the plot as he wishes. The novel reminds one immediately of Sterne’s Tristan Shandy in its abundance of digressions and interruptions in the narrative, recurrent appeals to the reader and lack of respect for a number of rules that characterize realist literature. By means of his irreverence and the intimacy he creates with us, Brás Cubas seems charming to many first time readers, who may be easily baffled by his unreliability. Schwarz’s reading proves otherwise. The narrator’s changes of point of view are not merely psychologically motivated, nor is his bleak worldview to be identified with that of the work itself, as claimed by existentialist interpretations. As in the end of the novel: “Putting one and another thing together, any person will probably imagine that there was neither a lack nor a surfeit and, consequently, that I went off squared with life. And he imagines wrong. Because on arriving at this other side of the mystery I found myself with a small balance, which is the final negative in this chapter of negatives – I had no children, I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature” (203). Rather, the whimsical, voluble way he organizes the narrative material, not respecting any apparently preconceived plan, arbitrarily moving from one topic to the other, corresponds to a specifically Brazilian mode of behavior, which I shall now discuss. To put it bluntly, the overriding compositional principle of the novel is the tense, never resolved combination of a liberal, enlightened point of view, on the one hand, and, on the other, that of the colonial, anti-bourgeois, ancien régime. This mixture pervades all levels of the text, from the organization of the plot, through characterization and reaching the composition of individual sentences and the choice of words; it encompasses the image of the narrator, questions of tone and the relationship of the novel form and other literary genres within Brás Cubas. But let us examine these elements at work in a specific passage: desolate after his mother’s death, Brás withdraws to his country house in then semi-rural Tijuca (now an over-populated neighborhood in Rio); his father is worried about his lethargy, because he has dreams of greatness for his son. He convinces Brás to accept a position in congress, which he had been working on (that was how Brazilian democracy functioned at the time), and to court a woman he chooses, Virgínia, who later on will become Brás’ long-time lover. It is against the backdrop of patriarchal demand and filial duty that the ensuing episode takes place. Just as he decides to leave Tijuca, he meets Dona Eusébia, an old acquaintance of the family, of inferior social status. She has already appeared earlier in the story when, during a dinner in 1814 to celebrate Napoleon’s fall, the boy Brás Cubas catches her kissing Dr. Vilaça, a table orator and rhymer, “a serious [grave] man, mannerly and calm, forty-seven years old, married and a father” (30). The whole scene is set on a comic mode and the lightness of tone suggests a tolerant, enlightened view, as if it were saying that these things happen, that they are a part of life and contribute to Brazilian local color. But to come back to the later encounter, one can clearly feel in their exchange how economic inferiority translates into patterns of behavior: Dona Eusébia is over-solicitous and very eager to please. Above all, however, she is keen to show her daughter Eugênia to Brás; her motherly tenderness succeeds in generating in him “an itch to be a father” (chapter XXX, p. 60). The narration is masterful because at no point does the opposition between action and intention surface in the text. For Eusébia, marrying Eugênia to Cubas would mean security in a society in which those without property, let alone women, had few options for supporting themselves. As Schwarz puts it, “since there was no practical foundation to the autonomy of an individual who lacked means – because of slavery, the labor market was embryonic – the value of the person depended on arbitrary (and humiliating, if the pendulum should happen to swing) recognition by some member of the owner class. In this sense, I don’t think I am going too far if I say that Eugênia, among other figures of similar type, embodies the generality of the situation of the free, poor person in slave-owning Brazil” (2001: 58). Next day, Cubas finally resolves to return to his house at Matacavalos street, but is persuaded by D. Eusébia to stay. For the second meeting, Eugênia did not put on her adornments for me that day. I think they had been for me – unless she went around like that a lot of times. Not even the gold earrings she had worn the day before were hanging from her ears now, two delicately shaped ears on the head of a nymph. A simple white muslin dress without any decorations, having a mother-of-pearl button at the neck instead of a brooch and another button at the wrists, closing the sleeves, without a shadow of a bracelet. (63) There is intelligence in the choice of getting rid of adornments. It can be interpreted in a contradictory manner, mobilizing what is at stake in the novel as whole. On the one hand, it signifies the acknowledgement of inferiority; here, wearing jewels would represent the pretense of occupying a social status one is not entitled to. On the other hand, however, the gesture may mean the opposite, a claim of equality: no source of embellishment is capable of influencing, or changing, who one really is. This is already prefigured by a detail after Cubas’ first meeting with Eugênia: “In the afternoon I saw Dona Eusébia’s daughter by on horseback, followed by a houseboy. She waived to me with her whip. I must confess that I flattered myself with the idea that a few steps farther on she would look back, but she did not turn her head.” (61) Now, Cubas, an educated man, fully acquainted with European Enlightenment, could only cherish it: “That was how she was in body and no less in spirit. Clear ideas, simple manners, a certain natural grace, the air of a lady [...]”. A final feature crowns this dialectic of plainness: the fact that Eugênia is lame and limps. Here the novel sets the stage for a possible, almost expectable development: the scene could unfold in courtship and marriage, thereby asserting individual integrity against a coercive social order; if that happened, Brás Cubas would become Senhora. But it is not, and plot goes in another direction. Brás tarries in Tijuca and from his posture, reflected in the jocose tone of the writing, one feels his commitment is tenuous: But the next day the morning was clear and blue and in spite of that I let myself stay, the same on the third day, the fourth, right to the end of the week. Beautiful, cool, inviting mornings. Down below, the family, the bride, parliament were calling me and I was unable to attend to anything, bewitched at the feet of my Crippled Venus. Bewitched is just a way of enhancing style. There was no bewitchment but, rather, pleasure, a certain physical and moral satisfaction. I loved, her, true. At the feet of that so artless creature, a spurious, lame daughter, the product of love and disdain, at her feet I felt good, and she, I think, felt even better at my feet. (65). The affair culminates in a kiss, when the erstwhile enlightened Cubas is replaced by the traditionalist one. Notice how origin and heritage here erase concerns with individuality and how distinctly the voice of the master can be heard: Indeed, Eugênia’s first kiss came on a Sunday – the first, which no other male had taken from her, and it was not stolen or snatched, but innocently offered, the way an honest debtor pays a debt. Poor Eugênia! If you only knew what ideas were drifting out of my mind on that occasion! You quivering with excitement, your arms on my shoulders, contemplating your welcome spouse in me, and I, my eyes on 1814, on the shrubbery, on Vilaça, and suspecting that you could not lie to your blood, to your origins...” (65; elisions in original) Note here how the reference to heredity contrasts with the lightness with which the scene of the kiss with Dr. Vilaça is presented in the beginning of the book: instead of the tolerance for and openness to different forms of behavior, here there is all the gravity of moral law. After the episode of the kiss, Cubas finally decides to descend to town. Eugênia fully understands the situation, as she says “You are doing the right thing in running away from the ridiculous idea of marrying me.” (67) Finally, the Eugênia sequence closes with a last encounter, when Cubas several years later is “visiting a slum to distribute alms”. When she recognizes him, “she turned pale and lowered her eyes. But it was only a matter of an instant. She immediately raised her head and looked straight at me with dignity. I understood that she would not accept alms from my pocket and I held out my hand to her as I would have to the wife of a capitalist. She greeted me and shut herself up in her tiny room. I never saw her again” (201). – Eugênia does not relinquish her dignity: this is where equality ends, in a favela, in utter poverty. The opportunistic oscillation between the colonial and the liberal worldviews has wide-ranging implications. In the first place, it provides a powerful counterargument against the ideology of progress, that mode of thinking that differentiates an archaic and a modern Brazil, values the latter and tries to extirpate the former. What Machado de Assis shows is that both can easily and comfortably coexist. Secondly, this combination of opposites has historical import, for it was appropriated by Brazilian modernism of the 1920s and the Tropicália movement of the 1960s as ontologically constitutive of Brazilian identity. The critical impetus behind Schwarz’s analysis, in which this combination of opposites is associated with domination and suffering, is conceived as an antidote to it. For Schwarz’s reading of Tropicália, see “Cultura e Política 1964 – 1969”, in O pai de família (1978), and “Verdade tropical: um percurso de nosso tempo”, in Martinha versus Lucrécia (2012). Indeed, one of the most pressing questions for Brazilian sociological and cultural thought today concerns the mutations through which the intertwining of the archaic and the contemporary may have undergone as the penetrative power of capitalism deepens in Brazil. Or, to put it in a different perspective, the question is whether this opposition can ever be dismantled as long as the country remains what it is. But the most important consequence to be drawn from all this goes beyond the national context and acquires a global relevance. As we saw, the Enlightenment in the late nineteenth century Brazil had no progressive thrust, but on the contrary, as we have seen, becomes part of oligarchic apologetics. Thus, the Brazilian version of the South should not be considered as deviation or aberration of the European norm; rather, since Machado masterfully mobilizes and explores the most important resources of the enlightened Weltanschauung, it should be conceived as a constitutive part of the world system, which it now criticizes. The logic here is of an internal outside, as it were. It is not just the case that the country was a player in international politics; more than that, the accumulation process that allowed for capitalism to establish itself as the dominant economic system worldwide was founded on the exploitation of colonies, which provided cheap raw materials and a consumer market for manufactured European products. In sum, a perspective emerges from the South that is able to criticize the whole, which is rigorously derived from the minutiae of literary form and, to be sure, which takes shape in a negative guise: a totality made of economic exploitation and social modes of domination, whose precondition for change is the clarity of vision offered by an interpretation such as Schwarz’s. This reading has interesting points of contact with post-colonial studies, particularly of subalternity. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000) works as a useful counterpoint. Both authors reject the idea that Europe should represent the norm Brazil and India should strive to reach, both dismiss the notion of progress associated to it, and both agree that Euro-American conceptual categories are at least imperfect, if not useless, for comprehending social practices of the non-Western world. The difference in their respective projects resides in the articulation of the foreign and the indigenous. In Chakrabarty’s words, [t]o provincialize Europe in historical thought is to struggle to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between two contradictory points of view. On one side is the indispensable and universal narrative of capital – History 1, as I have called it. This narrative both gives us a critique of capitalist imperialism and affords elusive but necessarily energizing glimpses of the Enlightenment promise of an abstract, universal but never- to-be-realized humanity. Without such elusive glimpses, as I have said before, there is no political modernity. On the other side is thought about diverse ways of being human, the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle – perennially, precariously, but unavoidably – to “world the earth” in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging. These are the struggles that become – when in contact with capital – the History 2 that in practice always modify and interrupt the totalizing thrusts of History 1. (254) That which appears for Chakrabarty as a duality, albeit in tension, for Schwarz is intrinsically imbricated. In the analysis of the Indian historian, that which escapes the rule of capital, “particular ways of being in the world” (255), becomes a solace, while for the Brazilian literary critic it remains part of the arsenal of class domination. The kinds of social change envisioned by both thus differ significantly in their magnitude. Schwarz’s horizon, however improbable, is that of the revolution and the total emancipation of the oppressed: it is in relation to it that political progress may be measured and literature become cognitively indispensable. References Adorno, T.W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997 [1973]. Alencar, José de. Senhora. Trans. Catarina Feldmann Edinger. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994 [1875]. Arantes, Paulo Eduardo. Sentimento da dialética na experiência intelectual brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1992. Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Oxford: O.U.P., 1997 [1881]. Candido, Antonio. On Literature and Society. Trans. Howard S. Becker. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1995. ----. Formação da Literatura Brasileira. 9th ed. Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 2000 [1959]. Cevasco, Maria Elisa and Milton Ohata (eds.). Um crítico da periferia do capitalismo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Ed. John Gledson. London and New York: Verso, 1992a. ----. O pai de família e outros estudos. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1992b [1978]. ----. Ao vencedor as batatas. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades/Editora 34, 2000 [1977]. ----. A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis. Trans. John Gledson. Durham: Duke U.P., 2001. ----. Martinha versus Lucrécia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. ----. “A Book’s Seven Lives”, trans. Adriana Jonhson, in Wasafiri, no. 82, Summer 2015 [1999]. Ed. F.A. Durão and Suman Gupta. pp. 4-10. 12