SOURCE: Johnson, Randal. “The Dynamics of the Brazilian Literary Field, 1930-1945.”¹Luso-Brazilian Review 31, no. 2 (winter 1994): 5-22.

[In the following essay, Johnson draws parallels between the political conditions and the changing literary scene in Brazil during the 1930s and 1940s, noting that Brazilian writing of that period maps the relationships between control and influence in Brazilian society.]

Nos anos 1930 e 1940 o campo literário brasileiro passou por uma profunda reestruturação. Durante esse período, o modernismo canonizou-se e institucionalizou-se, novas gerações de escritores surgiram e a divisão do trabalho in-telectual tornou-se mais diversificada e mais especializada. Por volta de 1945, a dinâmica desse campo, baseada nas mudanças estruturais de autoridade literária, tinha mudado de forma irreversível. Ao examinar os componentes deci-sivos da transformação desse campo literário, este estudo tem o objetivo de mapear as relações sutis e complexas entre a literatura e os diferentes níveis de autoridade e poder na sociedade brasileira. A primeira parte fornece um pano de fundo e um enquadramento dos pressupostos teóricos do estudo. A segunda enfoca quatro componentes mutáveis do campo literário: as relações entre os intelectuais modernistas e o Estado; a expansão da indústria editorial; a luta pela definição legítima do trabalho literário; e, finalmente, a autonomia redescoberta do campo literário.

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In the 1930s and 1940s the Brazilian literary field experienced a profound restructuring. During this period the modernist generation of the 1920s became canonized and institutionalized, new generations of writers emerged, and the division of intellectual labor became more diversified and specialized. By 1945 the dynamics of the field, based on changing structures of literary authority, had been irreversibly altered. This essay examines key components of the literary field's transformation as a means of mapping the subtle and complex relationships between literature and different levels of authority and power in Brazilian society. These components are the redefinition of the role of intellectuals and their relationship to the state, the expansion of the publishing industry, criticism and the struggle for the legitimate definition of the literary work, and, finally, the rediscovered autonomy of the literary field.

BACKGROUND AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

During the past two decades the period between the Brazilian Revolution of 1930 and the overthrow of Getúlio Vargas in 1945 has attracted increased attention from scholars in many different disciplines. Numerous factors account for the growing interest in the 1930-1945 period. The social, economic, and political changes that followed the events of 1930, a year said to mark the birth of modern Brazil, are sufficient to justify historiographic interest. Perhaps more importantly, however, twenty-one years of military dictatorship (1964-1985) have provoked an interest among scholars in many disciplines in both the impact of military rule and, in a broader sense, the conservative and authoritarian nature of Brazilian society. Such a concern leads inevitably to the 1930s and especially to the Estado Novo (1937-1945), which, among its many other legacies, greatly expanded and centralized the state bureaucracy, created corporative structures of social and political organization, and redefined the relationship between intellectuals and the state.²

This reassessment has only recently begun to occur in literary studies, perhaps because the relationship between literature and authoritarianism is less readily apparent—except in coercive terms—and, at least on a surface level, less significant than that of other sectors.³ Moreover, the general contours of Brazilian literature between the Revolution of 1930 and the return to democracy in 1945 are well-known. The canon, although constantly undergoing purely textual reinterpretations, is fairly well established. Furthermore, the concerns of the critical field in recent years, with emphasis on textuality and, more specifically, on linguistic rupture and innovation, are not particularly conducive to the reexamination of a period in which textual practice is frequently secondary to external considerations. Yet even a superficial consideration of the relationship between the Estado Novo and literary and cultural production evidences the importance of a critical revision that goes beyond the bounds of textuality. Although the literary field clearly possesses its own specificity, values, organization, objects of contention and agents of consecration, many of the concerns, tensions and structures of the literary field in the 1930s are inseparable from those of the broader intellectual field and the social system of which it is part.

Critics are virtually unanimous in recognizing the impact of the events surrounding and following 1930 on the literary field, and yet based, perhaps paradoxically, on the presupposition that literature represents an autonomous form of cultural discourse, most studies of the period's literature follow a charismatic mold which focuses on the “genius” of individual writers and isolated works. In this kind of analysis, the relationship between literature and society is often reduced to a text's “representation” of reality (or to even more indefensible assertions that the “subversion” of syntax is somehow tantamount to the political subversion of the power structures of Brazilian society).

One of the presuppositions of this study is that literature and literary texts are neither totally autonomous nor entirely self-contained, nor simply “reflective” of social structures, but rather constitute dynamic networks of social relations that are intimately bound up with frequently subtle relationships of authority and power. Edward Said has argued that texts obtain their authority by virtue of what he calls “affiliations” (roughly what I am referring to as “social relations”) or “that implicit network of peculiarly cultural associations between forms, statements, and other aesthetic elaborations, on the one hand, and, on the other, institutions, agencies, classes, and amorphous social forces.” Such affiliations anchor writers and their texts in a complex system of cultural relationships which include the “status of the author, historical moment, conditions of publication, diffusion and reception, values drawn upon, values and ideas assumed, a framework of consensually held tacit assumptions, presumed background, and so on” (Said 1984, 174).

Literary practice is thus defined relationally, both in terms of a discursive, primarily literary, “intertextuality” and in relation to the institutional framework in which literature emerges and is sustained. In the specific case of Brazil, where cultural production has developed in the shadow of or within the parameters authorized by the state, relationships to the constituted power(s) in society must be considered part of literature's multiple affiliations. This does not mean that intellectuals or writers are “contaminated” by their association with the state, that literature is necessarily at the service of the state, that it is directly subject to economic determinants, or that it simply “reflects” external political ideologies. Literature and literary practice, rather, participate in and in many ways express the cleavages that characterize elite social thought in general. They serve, ultimately, to reproduce the hierarchical structure of Brazilian society.⁴

To say that the literary field reproduces the hierarchical structure of society is not to denigrate the value of literary or artistic work. Rather, it helps explain its power, authority and social function. In his discussion of affiliations, Said has shown that culture serves “authority, and ultimately the national state, not because it represses and coerces but because it is affirmative, positive, persuasive” (Said 1984, 171). Literature and culture express the values, anxieties and concerns of a certain segment of society and thus possess an essentially positive value, at least for that segment. At the same time it is difficult to argue the universality of those values, even within a specific national context. Rather, by expressing the values of a specific class fraction and by reproducing itself, literary practice tends to participate in the work of social reproduction and thus reinforce those values and the social structure in which it emerges.

MODERNISM, INTELLECTUALS AND THE STATE

Intellectual work occurs in specific social contexts inevitably intersected by a number of tensions. In Brazil of the 1920s and 1930s, some of these tensions concerned political centralization versus the decentralized federalism of the First Republic, institutional modernization versus the continuation in power of traditional elite sectors, the creation of a self-consciously national culture versus the country's European cultural heritage, the desire for reform versus need for self-preservation, a weak civil society versus an increasingly strong state, and the intellectuals' self-perceived mission in the process of national construction versus their real isolation from the centers of power.

During the Estado Novo Getúlio Vargas called on intellectuals and writers to abandon the ivory tower they frequently occupied during the Republican period and to participate actively in the task of nation-building. Speaking on the occasion of his induction into the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1943, Vargas criticized the previous role of the Academia and the isolation of intellectuals from the rest of society, advocating instead the “necessary symbiosis of men of thought and men of action” which had begun to take shape in the 1930s. Vargas' entrance into the Academia, engineered by poet and Estado Novo ideologue Cassiano Ricardo, personified, on a purely symbolic level, this symbiosis (Velloso 1987b, 8-12).⁵

On other occasions Vargas recognized the importance of the Brazilian modernist movement for the Revolution of 1930 and the Estado Novo. In a speech delivered at the Universidade do Brasil in 1951, Vargas recalled the significance of the relationship between literature and politics.

The collective forces that provoked the revolutionary modernist movement in Brazilian literature … were the same ones that precipitated the victorious Revolution of 1930 in the social and political field. Brazilians were disquiet … searching for something new, something more sincerely ours, more viscerally Brazilian … The renovation of literary and artistic values, on the one hand, [and] the renovation of political values and institutions [on the other] … fused into a broader, more general and complex movement that was simultaneously reformist and conservative. …

(Cited by Oliveira 1982, 508)

According to Vargas' retrospective interpretation, the literary and political fields had converged in their desire for modernization (“renovation,” in Vargas's speech) and in their nationalism. In fact, the tension between cosmopolitanism and cultural nationalism that structured modernism—its “contradictory modernity,” to use Daniel Pécaut's expression—is at the core of many of the political questions raised in the 1930s (Pécaut 1986, 21).

Although the prevailing canonical view of modernism tends to stress its “progressive” aspects (rupture with the previously dominant literary discourse and, by extension, affiliation with “progressive” political and ideological positions), Vargas's dual emphasis on modernization and tradition (“reformist and conservative”) quite precisely characterizes both modernism and the ideological foundations of Vargas's corporative regime, which made concerted efforts to delineate and establish its cultural roots and intentions. This, in turn, facilitated the convergence of interests between intellectuals and the state—and the incorporation of the former into the state apparatus—during the authoritarian Estado Novo (Oliveira 1982, 508).

Multiple factors are of course involved in this convergence, not the least of which is the expansion of the federal bureaucracy and what Sérgio Miceli calls the “market of positions” (1979, 130-140). Apart from such institutional considerations, many intellectuals, including most modernists, answered the Estado Novo's call for participation in the process of national construction. A self-attributed “mission,” frequently assuming the shape of national “conscience,” “guide,” “mentor,” or “voice,” has long been characteristic of intellectuals in diverse national and historical circumstances. In moments of crisis or political transformation, Brazilian intellectuals have often claimed and defended the right to intervene in the process of national organization, reorganization, or transformation. Shortly after Independence, Romantic writers—most of them closely associated with the Imperial government—took upon themselves the herculean task of forging a national culture. Thus the concern, in the Indianism of such writers as Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar, with creating symbols of national identity. With the declaration of the Republic (1889), many intellectuals saw themselves as “guides” in the process of modernization and, armed with positivist theories and ideological liberalism, instrumental in the remodelling of the state. In the 1920s, the ‘scientistic’ concerns of Republicans were replaced with cultural nationalism in a search for the roots of Brazilian-ness as part of a broader process of national discovery (Velloso 1987a, 1-2).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals of various intellectual persuasions expressed concern with Brazilians' lack of knowledge of their own country and the need to free themselves and their culture from imported models (Chauí 1986, 28). In Oliveira Vianna, for example, this concern takes the form of an opposition between the “Brasil legal” and the “Brasil real.” The “legal” Brazil is the nation which exists only in the abstract, in such documents as the Constitution of 1891. It is a nation structured according to the principles of democratic liberalism, a political philosophy and system imported from Europe and therefore unauthentic, artificial, and alienated from Brazilian reality. The liberal state had failed to create a national unity, to provide the impetus for modernization, and to achieve a conciliation of social classes. Another formula, better adapted to Brazilian reality, was needed.

The “real” Brazil, untainted by cosmopolitan ideologies, exists in its purest form in the hinterland, dominated by landed elites. It is “seignorial, autocratic, paternalistic, patriarchal, authoritarian and anti-democratic” (Medeiros 1978, 164). Thus, to preserve and guarantee national sovereignty and survival, Vianna proposed in liberalism's place an autochthonous, nationalist, specifically Brazilian authoritarianism dominated by enlightened, and if necessary reeducated, elites. The formula that resides at the core of Oliveria Vianna's thought—institutional modernization through nationalist authoritarianism—forms the matrix of most Brazilian political thought between the wars (159, 175).

Although it was somewhat late in adopting the explicit cultural nationalism which had permeated the intellectual field since at least 1916, modernism's concern with modernizing Brazilian literature corresponds roughly to Oliveira Vianna's call for institutional modernization, and its attack on previously dominant literary modes utilizes virtually the same categories Vianna used in his rejection of liberalism: lack of authenticity, artificiality, and alienation from Brazilian reality. The movements' illiberalism found expression on diverse occasions in such writers as Graça Aranha, Ronald de Carvalho, Oswald de Andrade, Cassiano Ricardo, Ribeiro Couto, Menotti del Picchia, and Plínio Salgado. Its search, especially after 1924, for Brazilian modes of expression is thus rather consonant with nationalist currents of authoritarian thought generally, including its emphasis on the need for dominance of enlightened elites.

Even the concern with popular culture, evident particularly in the work of Mário de Andrade, did not imply a redistribution of economic or even symbolic goods. Rather, popular culture served as a model or a source of “inspiration” for the regeneration of elite production along more authentically “national” lines.⁶ A messianic undercurrent, present especially in Oswald de Andrade's Pau-Brasil and Antropofagia and in the Verde-Amarelo/Anta faction, would find fuller expression after 1930s with the exacerbation of political tensions and the splintering of modernism along ideological lines as well as in the appearances of the neo-naturalist social novel.

Whether on the left or the right, intellectuals saw themselves as having a specific mission in the task of national salvation. In this sense, they attempted to break through the isolation experienced during the First Republic. Despite different analyses and prognoses, the idea that the resolution of the crisis depended almost exclusively on an enlightened elite was common to all tendencies. The fear of “revolution” was implicit in both the critique of liberalism and the affirmation of the ignorance of the masses, and both progressive and conservative factions developed organic conceptions of society and politics. Institutional modernization and organization were means of impeding a true revolution and profound social transformation (Pécaut 1986, 14, 30).

Luciano Martins has argued that in the 1920s a native intelligentsia began to be constituted in Brazil as diverse groups demanded or aspired to social, political, cultural, economic and institutional modernization, the ultimate goal being the construction of a modern nation. Their claim to legitimacy, essential for fulfilling their self-appointed mission, derived from the recognition and valorization of their knowledge by broad sectors of elite society as well as from their ability to define the “national” and outline conditions for national organization. This intelligentsia failed, however, when it came to structuring an autonomous cultural field, since the link it sought between modernity and modernization led, first, to unsuccessful alliances with outdated or extreme political ideologies and, subsequently and more importantly, to the state. Thus, before it developed autonomous structures or institutions that would guarantee a certain independence of action, free from external demands, the cultural field became highly politicized and fell under the influence if not control of the state (L. Martins 1987, 65-67; Pécaut 1986, 32).

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, therefore, many intellectuals tended to associate their activity with the state, which they identified as the “highest representation of the Nation” and to which they attributed the preservation of order, organization, and national unity. They saw their own role as inseparable from the larger goals of the state, and many tended to converge in their profession of authoritarian solutions based on social demobilization. Their illiberalism and their mistrust of economic elites coincided with positions held by large sectors of political and military elites, while their frequently expressed desire to “rediscover” the true Brazil and construct a national identity found resonance in the state's attempts to build a sense of nationality and to forge an organic cultural and political unity.

Given this coincidence of national(ist) purpose, the Vargas regime was successful at co-opting and incorporating on a fairly large scale intellectuals of all stripes. Its definition of its cultural mission—constructing a sense of nationality and cultural unity through the rediscovery of the nation's cultural roots—fit well with that of intellectuals. Culture and politics became inseparable. During the Estado Novo, the state penetrated all areas of cultural activity, not merely through ideological control, but also by sanctioning the creation of professional associations and actively supporting diverse forms of cultural production through such organizations as the Serviço Nacional de Teatro, the Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo, and the Instituto Nacional do Livro, all created in 1937. In other words, culture became the state's business (Miceli 1979, 130-131; Pécaut 1986, 97).

In his expression of the proper relationship between the intellectual and political elite, Vargas adopted an idea that had been advocated since the mid-1920s by the intellectuals associated with the Verde-Amarelo or Anta subcurrent of literary modernism, most of whom were actively engaged in the ideological justification of the authoritarian/corporative state as well as in various facets of the Estado Novo's propaganda efforts. Menotti del Picchia, Cassiano Ricardo, and Cândido Motta Filho successively served as director of the São Paulo division of the government's propaganda agency, the Departamento Estadual de Imprensa e Propaganda (DEIP). Ricardo subsequently directed the government newspaper A Manhã, Menotti del Picchia A Noite.

But they were not the only modernists incorporated into the state apparatus. Gustavo Capanema's Ministry of Education became a new Maecenas for many intellectuals. Throughout the Estado Novo Carlos Drummond de Andrade served as Capanema's chief of staff. Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade served as director of the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (SPHAN). Mário de Andrade wrote the first draft of the law creating SPHAN, collaborated closely with the agency, and elaborated a project for a Brazilian encyclopedia for the Instituto Nacional do Livro. Composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote the “Hino da Revolução de 1930” and directed the movement of choral music for the ministry. Architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer, originators of Brasília's ultra-modern architecture, designed the ministry's new building. Plastic artist Cândido Portinari was commissioned to do murals. Sculptor Bruno Giorgi undertook the construction of a monument to youth. Augusto Meyer served as director of the Instituto Nacional do Livro, Prudente de Moraes Neto and Vinícius de Moraes on the government's film censorship board. Ronald de Carvalho, Ribeiro Couto, Murilo Mendes and Raul Bopp served in the diplomatic corps. Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda and Rubens Borba de Moraes held high-level positions in the Biblioteca Nacional. Manul Bandeira was a member of SPHAN's Advisory Council and, along with Jorge de Lima, professor at the federal Faculdade de Filosofia. Rosário Fusco, Marques Rebelo, and Graciliano Ramos all contributed to the DIP's journal Cultura Política. In São Paulo, Oswald de Andrade served on the editorial board of DEIP's journal Planalto (Cândido 1984, 27-36; L. Martins 1987, 84; Miceli 1979, 129-197).

One might of course argue, along with Antônio Cândido (1979), that there is a difference between “serving” and “selling oneself to” the state, or, with Luciano Martins (1987), that the ambivalence of many intellectuals led to a political “quasi-schizophrenia” as they found themselves situated within a state whose authoritarianism they condemned, or, with many others, that there were few other options available for intellectuals who wanted to participate in some significant way in the life of the nation. One can also accept arguments, such as that of Silviano Santiago in relation to Mário de Andrade, concerning the moral or ethical integrity of many intellectuals who served in the state apparatus (Santiago 1988c).

Of course, there existed different degrees of identification with the regime. Cassiano Ricardo and his fellow verdeamarelistas strongly supported the Estado Novo and thus acted in consonance with their own ideological and political convictions. Carlos Drummond de Andrade's support waned as the authoritarian regime neared its inevitable demise and as he increasingly, but briefly, flirted with socialist ideas. Mário de Andrade, as evidenced in his many letters on the subject, was torn by the demands of the state or federal cultural bureaucracy and never felt particularly comfortable with politics or with close proximity to those in power.

The fact remains, however, that modernism became institutionalized during and within the Estado Novo as most modernists were incorporated into the state apparatus, thus serving, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, to reinforce Brazil's hierarchical and elitist structures of domination.⁷ In other words, the contribution of intellectuals to the state's cultural project, no matter how indirect and refracted, served to reinforce and reproduce the literary/intellectual field's position within the broader field of power and to reinforce the state's role as an agent of intellectual legitimation.

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

In Brazil the market for symbolic goods historically has been highly restricted and concentrated, especially given the lack of generalized access to public education and the high levels of illiteracy (1890-84٪, 1920-75٪, 1940-57٪) (Candido 1975b, 137; Ortiz 1988, 28). This situation has had rather severe implications for the development of an autonomous literary field. Although the decrease in illiteracy would seem to indicate an increase in the potential reading public, which could occasion a diversification of both publics and producers, legitimate literature (i.e., that which disavows commercial interests as a primary motivation and is recognized as “serious” literature by the critical establishment) has continued to be a form of cultural expression directed primarily at an educated elite, despite the considerable expansion and growth of the publishing industry in the 1930s. The limited size of the market of symbolic goods has rendered the professionalization of the field problematic at best.

The 1930s witnessed the appearance and/or growth of such important publishing firms as Ariel, Schmidt, the Companhia Editora Nacional, Globo, and, especially, José Olympio, which became the most important literary publisher of the period. This expansion, which included considerable investments in new cultural producers, and particularly in the new generation of novelists, created the possibility for the appearance of a small group of semi-professional writers (e.g., Jorge Amado, José Lins do Rego, Érico Veríssimo). To appreciate the importance of this expansion, despite its limitations, one need only recall that most works published by modernists in the 1920s were financed by the authors themselves and some, like Manuel Bandeira, financed all of their editions until the 1940s (Hallewell 1982, 184).⁸ A work of the importance of Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928) had an initial print run of 800, a second edition in 1937 of 1000, and a third in 1944 of 3000. In other words, in the fifteen years subsequent to its publication, only 1800 copies of the novel had been printed (Santiago 1988b).

The industry's expansion at least partially resulted from the international economic crisis which had a severe impact in Brazil in the early 1930s. The rapid decline in the price of coffee and the subsequent devaluation of the mil-réis in relation to European currencies caused a sharp increase in the cost of imported books and a dramatic decline in the volume of books imported. Conditions thus existed for Brazilian books to become competitive in the local market for the first time since the early nineteenth-century, and space opened for the diversification and expansion of local production as well as for translated fiction. In a certain sense and on a very small scale, this functioned as a form of import substitution (Miceli 1979, 77).

The production of symbolic and cultural goods in Brazil is highly concentrated along the Rio-São Paulo axis, with some activity in Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre and other state capitals. In 1937 the states of Rio, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul possessed 61 percent of all publishing houses in the country. Although the concentration of the production of cultural goods remained essentially unaltered, with Rio de Janeiro continuing to be the major locus of consecration and legitimation, the 1930s witnessed a remarkable expansion in the number of volumes published as well as an extension of distribution circuits. Whereas in 1929 the number of books published in the country was on the order of 4.5 million volumes, by 1937 the country's three largest publishers alone printed that many. The publishing industry in São Paulo experienced a growth rate of over 600 percent between 1930 and 1936 (Miceli 1979, 84; Hallewell 1982, 246).

A full understanding of the dynamics of the literary field in the 1930s and 1940s would be impossible without a discussion of the José Olympio publishing house. Carlos Drummond de Andrade has suggested that the social direction Brazilian literature took during the period can only be understood in terms of the interaction among the intellectuals and artists who gathered daily in the José Olympio bookstore: Graciliano Ramos, Cândido Portinari, José Lins do Rego, Astrojildo Pereira, Amando Fontes, Gilberto Freyre, and many others (Hallewell 1982, 268). Andrade's suggestion is no doubt correct, but it does not go far enough, for José Olympio also published the major figures of the psychological or intimist novel that arose in often explicit opposition to the social novel. With the single exception of Érico Veríssimo, José Olympio published every novelist now considered canonical and thus constituted an unprecedented concentration and centralization of authority, understood as the power of recognition and, ultimately, legitimation in the publishing field. It was as if publication under the José Olympio imprint were a sine qua non of consecration.

Virtually all of the cleavages in the intellectual and literary fields, and thus in the field of power as a whole, are evident in José Olympio's list. He published writers of the left and the right, social and psychological novels, modernists of both generations (1920s and 1930s), Catholic and secular ideologues, unknown writers and consecrated ones. On the one hand he created the prestigious Documentos Brasileiros series (1936), directed by Gilberto Freyre and initiated with Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda's Raízes do Brasil, while on the other he published the Problemas Políticos Brasileiros collection (1934), which was largely a forum for Plínio Salgado and his fellow travellers in the Integralist cause. He was also the publisher of Getúlio Vargas' A Nova Política do Brasil and of DIP directors Lourival Fontes and Amílcar Dutra de Meneses (Hallewell 1982, 263-264).⁹

At least initially José Olympio was able to attract the best of the new generation of Brazilian writers primarily because of the economic advantages offered. By expanding the market reach of the Brazilian novel and by offering such advantages, José Olympio himself helped shape the field and stimulated the proliferation of social novels written during the period. As already indicated, this created the conditions for the existence of a small group of semi-professional writers who were relatively independent of the kinds of constraints and external demands placed on those who could not live at least primarily from their writing alone. Their position in the intellectual field derived, rather, from the “positive sanctions” of publishers and the reading public (sales, printruns, literary prizes, etc.). Although the literary field was highly politicized and subject to any number of strategies of legitimation based on ideological affinities, even those writers explicitly aligned with a specific political creed were able to preserve their position in the field only because of a certain degree of positive recognition from critics and the public rather than from their political stances alone. External determinants, in other words, were refracted by the specific logic of the literary field (Miceli 1979, 95).

José Olympio's domination of the field raises the question of internal cultural dependency and the centralization and concentration of the production of symbolic goods. One of the ironies of the literary field in the 1930s is the contrast between the proliferation of the regionalist social novel within the context of the extreme centralization of legitimate literary publishing. The success of the Northeastern novel and the Northeastern novelists was possible only in the institutional framework provided by the nation's capital. By the mid-1930s, all of the major representatives of the genre had established residence in Rio de Janeiro, although for the most part they continued to write about their state of origin. In this sense a homology can be drawn between the expansion and centralization of the publishing industry, especially José Olympio with its ideologically heterogeneous group of writers, and the expansion and centralization of the state apparatus, with its incorporation of intellectuals of all political persuasions.

It is equally ironic that the social novel would find success only within the same publishing program that printed the most powerful figures of the Estado Novo and its propaganda apparatus. If I am correct in arguing that the José Olympio imprint became, in the 1930s, a sign of legitimacy, then the fact that both political extremes and the major figures of the authoritarian state's apparatus used the same source of legitimacy mitigates in and of itself the political efficacy of engagé literary discourse.

THE LEGITIMATE DEFINITION OF LITERARY PRACTICE

Literary criticism constitutes a second level of evaluation of literary production (the first being the publishing industry), and thus a second instance of recognition and legitimation. Like the literary field of which it is a part, it develops its own rules of operation, its own hierarchies, and its own structures of authority. Criticism is, in fact, one of the conditions of the existence and sustenance of the literary work as such. As Bourdieu has put it, “Every critical affirmation contains, on the one hand, a recognition of the value of the work which occasions it … and on the other hand an affirmation of its own legitimacy. Every critic declares not only his judgement of the work but also his claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, he takes part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art” (Bourdieu 1983, 317).

The most significant transformation in the field of criticism would come only toward the end of the period in question, with the move toward university-based professionalization. Throughout the period the field of criticism continued to be dominated largely by the impressionistic literary roda-pé, that is, the weekly journalistic review by a single critic which normally occupied a fixed space in a newspaper (Bolle 1979, 23-24).

The critics who occupied the roda-pé frequently exerted an immense amount of power in their judgment of literary works. João Luiz Lafetá, for example, describes the critical power of Tristão de Athayde in the 1920s in the following terms: “All of the important works that appeared in this period passed through his judgmental sieve; he was the critic of modernism, the disseminator of the literary experiments of the period's avant-garde; his word could be decisive, his opinion was capable of consecrating, his presence was constant and respected, his judgements were often received as definitive, putting an end to discussions” (Lafetá 1974, 57). Álvaro Lins, who was perhaps the leading critic of the 1940s, has been described as the “emperor of Brazilian criticism,” the “regent of literature,” the “master of criticism,” the “prefect of critics,” ultimately responsible for the “rectory of Brazilian letters.”¹⁰ The power of these critics was often such that their opinions affected both subsequent evaluation of literary works (a form of perhaps unintentional censorship, in the sense that lesser critics were intimidated by and thus reluctant to counter their proffered opinions) as well as sales of books, or, in other words, legitimation and consecration by the public.

Despite the dominance of a relatively limited number of critics writing for the most part in journalistic formats, the years between 1930-1945 did in fact witness an important diversification in the field of literary reviews, with such relatively non-partisan publications as the Boletim de Ariel (1931-1938), Dom Casmurro (1937-1945), Revista Nova (1931-1932), Lanterna Verde (1934-1938, 1943-44), the Revista Acadêmica (1933-1945), the Autores e Livros supplement of A Manhã (1941-1945), and Clima (1941-1945). The period also saw the appearance of critical tendencies explicitly aligned with specific ideologies and published in periodicals functioning as organs of political movements (e.g., the ANL's A Manhã [1934-1935], the AIB's A Offensiva [1934-1938], and Cadernos da Hora Presente [1939-1940], which joined together sympathizers of the outlawed AIB, and, after the overthrow of Vargas, Literatura [1946-1948], associated with the Communist Party). In such cases the space of publication itself was often sufficient to define the critic's ideological orientation and literary preferences (e.g., Tasso da Silveira in A Offensiva, Jorge Amado in the ANL's A Manhã).

In the 1930s literary debate concerned two major, interrelated issues: the status of modernism in the national literary canon and the legitimate definition of literary practice. Debates concerning the second issue were highly politicized, those concerning the first implicitly so. The aesthetic achievements of modernism may have been “routinized,” but many critics were unwilling to grant the movement total consecration and legitimacy. The major critiques of modernism came from the right, which tended to identify the movement, rightly or wrongly (but no doubt simplistically) with the left. Typical among such critiques are Tasso da Silveira's sometimes exaggerated attacks in Definição do Modernismo Brasileiro (1931) or Octávio de Faria's infamous essay “Mensagem Post-Modernista” (1937).

In terms of the second issue—the legitimate definition of literary practice—the literary or critical field, largely divided between political extremes, reproduces ideological debates of society as a whole. The principle of legitimation is entirely external to the literary work itself, deriving from political positions assumed by the writer. Questions of literary form arise only with infrequency, and rarely among those most passionately involved in the debate. This is true of both the right and the left, as critics attempted to deny the status of novelist to works of different orientations:

Lúcio Cardoso: “My conception of the novel goes against those of the majority of modern novelists who favor an art based on pure observation, a photograph of reality. They want to capture the world we see and which expresses nothing because the truth is below ground. I do not recognize them as novelists, but rather as reporters.”

Marques Rebelo: “I don't understand and I can't tolerate the conception of documentary novel [romance-reportagem] in the sense that many modern writers use the term. Of course there is an element of reporting and documentation in the novel, as there is in other literary forms. But we should not give it this particular stamp that places the novel on the terrain of history and journalism. A novel is something else, it's a work of art.”

Jorge Amado (on Em Surdina): “I still hope that Miss Lúcia Miguel Pereira … will decide to write novels and leave behind her preconceived ideas and explanations, which are fine in articles but useless in the pages of a novel.”¹¹

At stake here (and the examples could be multiplied indefinitely) is precisely the legitimate definition of the work of art, or, in this case, of the novel.

The ideological struggle within the field of reviews took a number of forms and involved not only critics but also the state and its strategies of cultural orientation and control. While the Estado Novo made concerted efforts to institutionalize, shape and control the production, reproduction, and diffusion of symbolic goods, the producers of such goods often managed to develop their own modes of resistance. In other words, in response to state pressure, intellectuals created their own forms of counter-pressure intended to undermine the designs of the state or to advance their own ideological projects (examples of this counter-pressure include the Revista Acadêmica's special edition in homage to Romain Rolland in late 1936, or the amount of space devoted to specific Brazilian writers, normally identified with the left). Such pressure, however, is limited and ultimately retreats to the specific logic of the literary field, which tends to reject external demands in favor of its own rules of functioning or its own authority.

THE AUTONOMIZATION OF THE LITERARY FIELD

Antônio Cândido has argued that the most “accomplished” expressions of social thought and sensibility in Brazil, whether in literature, historiography or the social sciences, have almost always taken a literary or quasi-literary form. At least up until the 1940s literature “had been, more than philosophy or the social sciences, the central phenomenon in [Brazil's] intellectual life.” As such, literature had frequently incorporated other discourses and had responded to demands external to the literary field per se. In terms of its very discourse Brazilian literature historically has thus lacked the independence and autonomy from external determinants that it possesses in other contexts. The regionalist novel of the 1930s, for example, served as a form of sociological and political knowledge as well as literary knowledge. With the increasingly differentiated division of intellectual labor, occasioned to a large extent by the growth of the social sciences, literature began to gain specificity and autonomy and assume a more properly aesthetic configuration, while at the same time losing its long-standing prestige as the culture's standard-bearer (Cândido 1975b, 130-136). The expansion of the market of symbolic goods, albeit still on a limited scale, and the diversification of the reading public, which corresponds to the diversification of producers, also contribute decisively to the process. Other factors are equally relevant.

Politically speaking, it is important to recall that through a dual policy of repression and co-optation, Vargas had managed to neutralize or marginalize his opposition, which frequently developed indirect forms of resistance. I have already referred to the pressures of censorship and increased repression in the literary field. Certain kinds of discourse became unacceptable, and although the social novel continued to dominate throughout the 1930s, it suffered a marked decline after 1937. Censorship obviously had a chilling effect on writers' political intentions.

Because of the Estado Novo's similarity to and ideological identification with European corporative states—most notably Portugal, Spain and Italy—expressions of opposition to European fascism were indirect expressions of opposition to the Estado Novo. Brazil's entry into the war in February 1942 provided a rallying point for Brazilians of all political persuasions and created the tensions or contradictions that would eventually lead to the demise of the Estado Novo. Two facets of this new situation seem especially important for the autonomization of the literary field: the unification of intellectuals and the state around a common goal, which would soon turn forcefully against the regime itself, and the increasing influence of the United States in both political and cultural terms.

If, on the one hand, intellectuals supported and closed ranks with Vargas's decision to declare war on the Axis powers and enter the war effort, on the other hand pressure for internal democratization increased. How could Brazil fight Nazi-fascism in the name of democracy while at the same time sustaining an authoritarian, corporative regime? Attention in the literary field shifted from the internal social problems which had characterized much Brazilian fiction in the early 1930s (drought, hunger, class divisions) toward a concern with more universal values and the more immediate goal of redemocratization. Fiction by and large ceased being the arena of such discussions and debates. The writers who had created the social novels of the previous decade had either attained a certain level of consecration and had thus become the new orthodoxy (e.g., José Lins do Rego) or had transferred much of their political energies to other, more explicitly political endeavors (e.g., Jorge Amado's militancy in the Communist Party).

The shift of political struggle to other arenas occurred at least partially through the creation of professional organizations which represented the professional and political interests of their members. The Estado Novo was a corporative regime, and many social sectors, including intellectuals, were subject to corporative dispositions. The Ordem de Advogados Brasileiros was created in 1930, the Academia de Medicina in 1931, the Ordem de Engenheiros e Arquitetos in 1933. Such organizations give the category ligitimacy, allow members to lobby the state in defense of professional interests, and provide an official definition of professional competency. They allow the category, in short, to act in a unified fashion and with a united voice. At the same time, through such organizations the professional intellectual is inserted in the organic construction of society and power (Pécaut 1986, 65-66).

In 1942 a group of writers formed, in Rio de Janeiro, the Associação Brasileira de Escritores (ABDE). The association's original idea was to attend to problems of the profession such as royalties and relations between writers and publishers. But the major preoccupation, as Antônio Cândido describes it, was the establishment of an association that would organize writers and intellectuals in opposition to the Estado Novo. As proof of this broader concern, Cândido notes the absence of the writers most closely associated with the regime, “either because they supported it ideologically, because they worked, with or without conviction, in official organisms of information and propaganda … or because they wrote assiduously in publications oriented in that direction” (Cândido 1975a; also Mota 1979).

What Cândido does not note is that the ABDE was founded in the offices of A Manhã, a newspaper owned by the state which served as an official organ of the Estado Novo. A photograph taken at the time (reproduced in Cassiano Ricardo's memoirs (Ricardo 1970) as well as in the volume of Mário de Andrade's letters to Murilo Miranda [M. de Andrade 1981]), is remarkably suggestive for an analysis of the social relations of Brazilian literature in the early 1940s, revealing the relative nature of ideological divisions among intellectual elites. Taken in the offices of A Manhã, the photograph is a group portrait of ABDE's founders, representing two generations of writers of various political persuasions, ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left. Despite their different positions in relation to Vargas's regime, all of them shared a concern with the preservation and reproduction of the literary field, or what Bourdieu refers to as an “objective complicity.”¹²

Nevertheless, the association was important for organizing the field and galvanizing opposition to Vargas. The ABDE soon began to function as a sort of oppositional “united front” comprising diverse tendencies of the intellectual field. The organization's I Congresso de Escritores (First Congress of Brazilian Writers), which opened in São Paulo on 22 January 1945, bringing together delegations of writers from all regions of the country as well as observers from foreign countries, marked an important step in the downfall of Vargas and the redemocratization of the country.¹³

Although the intellectual field continued to be highly politicized, with, as Raul Antelo puts it, an “acceleration of ideological life,” the literary text itself tended to cease being the forum of political debate and ideological positioning that it had been earlier (Antelo 1984, 235). As the Estado Novo came to an end, the possibilities of political participation expanded rapidly and in many different directions. In fact, the political nature and activist orientation of the ABDE soon began to concern some intellectuals, who felt that it should devote its efforts to the professional problems faced by the category and for which it was originally created.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the ABDE continued to function as an essentially political organization at least until the second writers' congress, held in Belo Horizonte in 1947, after the Communist Party had once again been proscribed. The second congress, in fact, revealed bitter divisions between communist and anti-communist factions of the ABDE (Antelo 1984, 287-290, n. 8).

Other factors are also important for understanding the process of autonomization of the literary field in the 1940s, not the least of which was the creation of universities in the 1930s and the formation of a group of professional critics starting in the 1940s with their rejection of impressionism and their more specialized approaches to their subjects. This reorientation marks the true beginning of systematic studies of Brazilian literature in the country (Martins 1983, 597-598).

Coinciding with World War II there also occurred an increase in the cultural influence of the United States, especially, although not exclusively, through the cinema and mass media. In the critical field this influence is expressed by the impact of New Criticism, brought to Brazil largely by Afrânio Coutinho, who argued vehemently that the university, not the newspaper, was the proper site for the development of a “scientific” literary criticism.

Coutinho's frequently virulent campaign against journalistic criticism corresponded to the appearance of a new generation of poets—the so-called “generation of 1945”—advocating a return to more traditional esthetic form. Both represent attempts, with different degrees of success, to reshape the Brazilian literary system (W. Martins 1983, 608-627). Flora Süssekind has correctly suggested that Coutinho's campaign attempted to establish new relations of power in the literary field, based no longer on the personality, articulateness, or rhetorical eloquence of journalistic reviewers, but rather on aesthetic criteria, textual analysis and the substitution of the newspaper by the university as the “temple” of literary culture. In this sense Coutinho's choice of Álvaro Lins, the “emperor” of criticism in the 1940s, as his major target was significant, since his defeat would imply the defeat of the literary system he represented. Again, what was at stake in Coutinho's struggle to redefine principles of legitimacy was power in the field (Süssekind 1986).

In the 1940s an urban-industrial society was consolidated with the expansion of the working class and middle sectors, an increase in the urban population, the development of a tertiary sector and new forms of more rational business management. Coinciding with the increasing urbanization of Brazilian society and an increasingly specialized division of intellectual labor was a diversification of cultural forms and publics through the expansion and modernization of the cultural industry, especially film, radio, mass circulation magazines, and, as we have seen, the publishing industry. Publishing, however, did not accompany the growth of other sectors of the cultural industry. The number of volumes published in São Paulo in 1956 (5,980,968) was only marginally superior to the figures for 1946 (5,650,395) (Ortiz 1988, 65-68). These figures would tend to suggest that the diversification of available cultural forms led much of the newly-incorporated urban population to prefer other forms of leisure activities to literature, which continued to be a form of cultural discourse aimed primarily at an educated elite (Santiago 1982b, 25).

Another factor that has had a long term effect on the critical field needs at least a passing reference. The defeat of Nazi-fascism in Europe and the end of the Estado Novo led to the delegitimation of the right in cultural discourse. In his memoirs Cassiano Ricardo recounts the virtual exodus of intellectuals from the staff of A Manhã in early 1945, presumably to establish oppositional credentials or fearful of being identified with the now discredited authoritarian regime (Ricardo 1970, 169-178).

Since 1945 the left has maintained a hegemonic position in the cultural field, which amounts to a sort of inverse relationship between political power and cultural discourse, since the left has never held power in Brazil. This situation has had several consequences. First, writers clearly aligned with the right have often been excluded from the literary canon and very frequently from even the most elementary forms of analysis. Secondly, the word “conservative” has largely become taboo in the cultural field. The automatic self-identification of intellectuals with the left not only empties the category of any real meaning—except in those cases where political militancy accompanies the identification—but also results in a distortion of the true dynamics of the literary field as well as in a frequent misrecognition of the true relationship between intellectual work and the power relations of Brazilian society.

Notes

1. This article is a revised version of portions of “Literature, Culture and Authoritarianism in Brazil, 1930-1945,” Working Papers 179, Latin American Program, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. (1989). It was prepared (in part) under a grant from The Wilson Center. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of The Wilson Center.

2. Some representative studies are: Mota (1977); Vasconcelos (1979); Erikson (1977); Hallewell (1982); Schwartzman, et. al. (1985); Trindade (1974); and Wisnik (1983). On the role of intellectuals, see Luciano Martins (1987); Medeiros (1978); Miceli (1979); Oliveira, et. al. (1980); Oliveira, et. al. (1982); Pécaut (1986); Sadek (1978); Velloso (1987).

3. Roberto Reis's A Permanência do Círculo (1987) is important in that it examines the persistence of authoritarian, patriarchal structures in the Brazilian novel from the 19th-century into the 1950s. The same author's The Pearl Necklace (1992) deepens the discussion, focusing specifically on the 1930s. Antelo's Literatura em Revista (1984) is an exemplary critical study of three literary and cultural magazines published in the 1930s and 1940s (Cultura Política, Revista Acadêmica, and Literatura). Almeida's frequently overlooked Jorge Amado: Política e Literatura (1979) is also useful in that it examines Amado's position in the constitution and delineation of the literary field from the early 1930s through the 1970s. It focuses less on Amado's work as text than on the evolution of the terms of debate used in its reception, recognizing the existence of a complex institutional framework in the establishment of a literary canon. A number of essays by such critics as Antônio Cândido and Silviano Santiago are also obligatory references. See Cândido 1975, 1978, 1980, 1984, and Santiago 1982a, 1982b, 1988a, and 1988c. Santiago's literary tour-de-force Em Liberdade (1981), a pastiche of Graciliano Ramos in the form of a personal diary written after the writer's release from prison in 1936, is an integral and important part of this general reassessment.

4. For a theoretical exposition of the cultural field's symbolic reproduction of the field of power, see Bourdieu (1983), reprinted in Bourdieu (1993).

5. In reference to the literary field during the First Republic, Nicolau Sevcenko (1983) has shown convincingly that those intellectuals, such as Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto, with a more critical perspective tended to be marginalized within the cultural field. Jeffrey Needell discusses the founding of the Academia, based on “Retreat from political activism, desire for official recognition as the arbiters and makers of culture, implied acceptance of values dominating society, the values of the nation's elite” (1987, 192-196).

6. José Miguel Wisnik (1983) has revealed some of the contradictions in Mário de Andrade's conception of popular culture, especially his inability to recognize the authenticity of emergent urban forms.

7. Sérgio Miceli has outlined the hierarchical structure of bureaucratic positions themselves, distinguishing between “escritores-funcionários,” such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade or the other modernists, who entered the state apparatus at a rather high level due to their capital of social relations (e.g., Drummond's longstanding friendship and collaboration with Gustavo Capanema), and “funcionários-escritores,” such as Oswaldo Orico, who lacked such social capital, entered the bureaucracy at a lower level, often through public competition, and worked their way up the bureaucratic ladder with varying degrees of success (Miceli 1979, 178-187).

8. Much of the information in this section is taken from Hallewell's study, the most comprehensive available.

9. As Miceli describes it, Olympio's authors “include both the regime's organic intellectuals, recently coopted by the central government (Azevedo Amaral, Alceu Amoroso Lima, Pontes de Miranda, Oliveira Vianna, Octávio Tarquínio de Souza), and the figures of greatest literary prestige among the new novelists (Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego, Rachel de Queiroz, Octávio de Faria, Cyro dos Anjos, Lúcio Cardoso, Joao Alphonsus), plus a whole category of writers who obtained the [publishing] house's approval because of their activity in the bureaucratic circles of the state apparatus” (Miceli 1979, 89 n.26).

10. Descriptions from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Roberto Alvim Correa, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Carlos Gesteira. Cited by Bolle 1979, 48.

11. Citation by Lúcio Cardoso in Broca 1938a; Marques Rebelo in Broca 1938b; Jorge Amado in Amado 1934.

12. According to Bourdieu, all of the agents engaged in a specific field have a certain number of fundamental interests in common, especially regarding the functioning and perpetuation of the field itself. Thus a certain objective complicity tends to underlie surface antagonisms. Such complicity is evident in the founding of the ABDE. Bourdieu 1983a, 90. See also Bourdieu 1982, especially 106, n. 7.

13. For an overview of the congress see Mota 1977, 140-141. Also Cândido 1975.

14. See Carlos Drummond de Andrade 1985, 25-26; also Antelo 1984, 201-202, n. 38.

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