SOURCE: Schwarz, Roberto. “The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in the Work of Alencar.” In Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited by John Gledson, pp. 41-77. London: Verso, 1992.

[In the following essay, Schwarz discusses the rise of the novel in Brazil, focusing particularly on the works of José de Alencar.]

The novel had existed in Brazil before there were any Brazilian novelists.¹ So when they appeared, it was natural that they should follow the European models, both good and bad, which had already become entrenched in our reading habits. An obvious statement, perhaps, but one which has many implications: our imagination had become focused on an artistic form whose presuppositions, in the main, either did not apply to Brazil at all, or applied in altered circumstances. Which was at fault: the form—the most prestigious of the period—or the country? One example of this ambivalence, which occurs particularly in peripheral nations, was provided at the time by the American Henry James, whose interest in the imaginative possibilities of England's social structure led to his emigration there.² Let us look at the matter more closely. To adopt the novel was to accept the way in which it dealt with ideologies. It has already been noted [in ‘Misplaced Ideas’] that these became displaced in the context of Brazilian life, although they retained their original names and their standing remained the same. The discrepancy was an involuntary one and can be regarded as the practical result of our social development. To achieve harmony with reality, the writer would have to repeat this dislocation on a formal level if he was to keep up with the objective complexity of his material—no matter how closely he followed the example of the masters. This would be the great achievement of Machado de Assis. In brief, that same global dependency which forces us to think in inappropriate categories, led us to produce a literature in which that misfit between ideology and reality had no means of surfacing. Or, to put it another way, and to anticipate my argument: instead of acting as a constructive principle, the disparity was bound to surface in an involuntary and undesired way, surreptitiously and as a defect. This is a literary instance of the inferior intellectual level referred to in ‘Misplaced Ideas’.

Recalling his formative years, Alencar³ writes of the literary soirées of his childhood, in which he would read aloud to his mother and other female relatives, leaving them all in tears.⁴ The books involved were Amanda and Oscar, Saint-Clair das Ilhas, Celestina and others.⁵ He also mentions the lending-libraries, the Romantic reading-matter of his fellows in the student ‘republics’ [fraternities] of São Paulo—Balzac, Dumas, Vigny, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Byron, Lamartine, Sue and, later, Scott and Cooper—besides describing the impression left on him by the success of Macedo's first novel, A Moreninha.⁶ Why should he not also attempt to write? ‘What regal crown can be compared to that halo of enthusiasm that surrounds the name of a writer?’⁷ There was no shortage of great figures to emulate but, more important than this or that individual reputation, was the prestige of the general model, and the patriotic desire to enrich one's country with yet another product of the modern spirit.⁸ However, the implantation of the novel, and of its realist strand in particular, would be no easy matter. No one had any difficulty in making a mental visit to the soirées and barricades of Paris. But it did not seem quite right to bring the whole cortège of sublime viscountesses, ruthless parvenus, illustrious criminals, witty ministers, idiot princes and visionary scientists to the drawing-rooms and streets of Brazil, even if we limited ourselves to the transportation of their problems and of their general atmosphere. Could the novel, however, exist without them? How would those great energizing themes in which the novel was anchored—social climbing, the corrupting power of money, the clash between the aristocratic and bourgeois ways of life, the antagonism between love and marriages of convenience, between vocation and the need to earn a living—how would these work out in Brazil? They would be modified, of course. But they did exist in our active imaginations, with the real existence that the body of European ideas held for us. However, the means of modifying them were not apparent, still less the effects of any such modification on literary form. These had yet to be elaborated and discovered, just as the above-mentioned themes had not always been present, awaiting the appearance of the European novel to be given concrete form. They emerged, or took on modern form, in the soil of the—continent-wide, age-long—transition from feudal times to the capitalist era. In Europe too, it was necessary to explore, isolate and combine these themes, until a kind of literary repertoire had been formed upon which all writers, good, bad and indifferent, could draw. It was, by the way, this cumulative and collective aspect of literary creativity, even at the level of the individual, which would permit the appearance of the large number of efficient, second-rate novels that were produced by Realism. Riding on the crest of a wave of contemporary ideas and solutions, these books give the impression of being complex, even when they are not particularly profound in their treatment of modern themes, and are thus able to sustain our interest. Just like a good modern film. This was a kind of accumulation that was difficult for Brazilian literature to adopt, since its stimuli came and continue to come from outside the country. A position of disadvantage, perhaps, but one which today has its advantages, since it has quite naturally coincided with the bankruptcy of the Western literary tradition, something which European intellectuals have some difficulty in accepting, and that has led to what may be regarded as one of the most symptomatic features of our times—namely, a cultural discontinuity and arbitrariness that in Brazil has always existed, albeit against our will.

As a reflective and gifted writer, Alencar responded to this situation in various, and often profound, ways. His work is one of the treasure-stores of Brazilian literature, and looks forward in some ways to Modernism, although this is not immediately apparent. Something of Iracema came down to Macunaíma: the long journeys between adventures, the geographical representation of Brazil, the mythological material, Indian place-names juxtaposed with the history of the white man; something of Grande Sertão was already present in Til,⁹ in the pace of João Fera's exploits; our imaginative iconography, with its innocent maidens, its Indians and forests owes much of its social definition to his work; and finally, on a more general level, and so as not to lengthen the list, the inventive and peculiarly Brazilian ease of Alencar's prose remains as capable of inspiring us as ever. However, one has to admit that his books are never truly successful, that they display a certain imbalance and even, when it comes down to it, a kind of silliness. Even so, it is interesting to note that these weaknesses become strengths when looked at from another angle. They are not accidental, nor do they result from a lack of talent; on the contrary, they provide us with proof of intelligence and coherence. They reveal to us the points at which the European model, as it combined with local colour (of which Alencar was a fervent supporter), led to incongruity. Such points are critical for Brazilian life and letters since they reveal the objective conflicts—the ideological incongruities—that occurred as a result of the transplantation of the novel and of European culture to our country. In order to identify these conflicts, we shall be studying them as they appear in Alencar's urban novels and then go on to show how they are resolved by Machado de Assis.¹⁰

Interestingly, Nabuco,¹¹ the pro-European who clearly observed and detested these same impasses, made a curious comment on them in his famous dispute with Alencar. Contrary to popular belief, the quarrel—referred to by Afrânio Coutinho as a tête-à-tête between giants—is short on ideas and lacking in substance; they even squabble about who knows the more French. But it does at least record a particular situation. Nabuco hated Alencar's realism for two reasons: for not keeping up appearances, on the one hand, and on the other for not satirizing those same appearances with the knowing and acceptable licence of French novels. He reacts like a man who, having spent some time away, returns to his home town, where he is horrified by the existence of a brothel, and shocked by its lack of chic. In Nabuco's eyes, Alencar's young women, with all their airs and graces, are both improper and idiotic, neither romantic nor naturalist—a perceptive observation, even though he sees only the negative results of the mixture.¹² The same is true of his comments on the topic of slavery and on the Brazilianization of the language. If Alencar were to have accepted such criticisms, he would have written either morally edifying or totally European novels. Nabuco puts his finger on real weaknesses, but only because he wants to conceal them; Alencar, however, stubbornly continued to insist on such weaknesses, guided as he was by his sense of reality, which allowed him to feel at those precise points of weakness new topics and a Brazilian flavour. By defining these areas without resolving them, he established and laid out the elements of the great literature that he failed to produce—providing us with yet another example of how tortuous the process of literary creation can be.

In a study of Macedo, whose novels mark the beginning of the Brazilian tradition, Antonio Candido has observed that his work is a combination of detailed realism, ‘sensitive to the social conditions of the period’, and the machinery of the Romantic plot. These are two aspects of a single conformity, which ought to be distinguished: one being a pedestrian adherence ‘to the humanly and socially limited milieu of the carioca bourgeoisie’; and the other, ‘which we could call poetic, and which makes use of typically Romantic ideas and models, as has just been suggested: tears, darkness, betrayal, conflict’. As a result, Macedo's works are lacking in verisimilitude: ‘So much so that we wonder how such pedestrian characters could possibly become involved in the agonizing situations to which Macedo submits them’.¹³ The same judgement applies, with a slight adjustment, to the analysis of Alencar's urban novels, as we shall see in due course. Let us look first of all, however, at their basic elements. The detailed realist style and the local colour expected of the novels of the period, provided the characters and anecdotes of our everyday Brazilian world with literary respectability and status. The plot, however—the real principle of composition—drew its energy from the ideologies of romantic destiny which came either in the form of the serialized love story (in Macedo and some of Alencar) or in its realist version in Alencar's more powerful urban novels. As is noted in ‘Misplaced Ideas’, everyday life in Brazil was regulated by the mechanics of favour, which were incompatible—in a sense which will be specified at a later point—with the melodramatic plots of a Realism that had been heavily influenced by Romanticism. By submitting itself to everyday reality and literary convention at the same time, the Brazilian novel set off on two diverging routes, and it was inevitable that it should stumble in its own fashion, in a way that French works did not, since the social history upon which the latter were based could be thoroughly explored in them by means of those very same plots. Looked at from the point of view of origins, the disparity between plot and realist observation is evidence of the juxtaposition of a European model and a local setting (the fact that this setting had itself been transformed into literary material under the influence of Romanticism is of little importance in this context). If we then proceed from the question of geographical origin to the ideas that belong to those places of origin, we will have returned, and with a clearer idea of the underlying forces involved, to the real problem of composition. In this context, Romantic ideologies which, whether they were liberal or aristocratic in tendency, constantly implied a mercantilization of life—are used as the master-key with which one can gain entry into the universe of favour. By remaining faithful to observable (Brazilian) reality and the accepted (European) model, the writer unwittingly replays a central incongruity in Brazilian intellectual life, leaving it unresolved. It should be added that there is no simple consequence to be drawn from such a dualism; in a culturally dependent country like ours, its presence is inevitable, and its results can be either good or bad. Each case must be judged on an individual basis. Literature is not a matter of rational judgement, but of imaginative form; the movements of a reputable key which actually opens nothing at all may well be of great literary interest. When we come to look at Machado de Assis we shall see how the key is opened by the lock.

Senhora is one of Alencar's most carefully constructed books, and its composition will serve as a useful starting-point. It is a novel whose tone varies considerably. One could say that the periphery of the novel is far more relaxed than its core: Lemos, the unscrupulous and calculating uncle of the heroine, is ‘as round as a Chinese vase’ and looks like a piece of popcorn; old Camargo is a gruff, bearded landowner, rough-hewn but honest; dona Firmina, the personal maid and errand woman, gives great smacking kisses to her young mistress, and when she sits down accommodates ‘her half-century of corpulence’.¹⁴ In other words, what we have here is a simple and familiar milieu, which has the potential for suffering and conflict, without itself being called into question, since it is legitimized by the natural and appealing ability of the characters to get by on the day-to-day level. The businessmen are rascals, little sisters are self-effacing, relatives are on the make; vices, virtues and defects are calmly acknowledged and described in such a way that the prose retains its sense of proportion. It is neither conformist, since it does not set out to justify, nor is it critical as such, since there is no desire to transform. The register changes, however, once we move into the more sophisticated social circle. It is restricted to a group of marriageable young people—a fact that is not without its interest, as we shall see. This domain is ruled by the power of money and appearances, as well as by the course of love. The combination of hypocrisy, complex by definition, of the ethical pretensions that are peculiar to this sphere, and the spontaneity that is typical of Romantic sentiment, result in a language that is saturated with moral implications. The reader is inevitably obliged to reflect on the text in a normative way, at the expense of enjoying the simple pleasures of the evocation of the characters and their milieu. The salons and the prose of Balzac provide a distant source. Finally, at the centre of this centre, the voltage hits the ceiling each time Aurelia, the heroine of the novel, enters the scene. For this beautiful, intelligent and much-courted heiress, money is no more than an accursed intermediary: as far as she is concerned, all men and all things are under suspicion of having their price. Her sense of purity is equally excessive, and is expressed in the most conventionally moral terms. Throwing herself from one extreme to the other—from purity to degradation, one of which may be feigned, the other of which is intolerable—Aurelia gives rise to a dizzying motion which has immense ideological import, in as much as it deals with money, that ‘modern god’—but is also somewhat banal, since, at its extremes, it lacks complexity. The problem of wealth is reduced to one of virtue and corruption, and is inflated to the point where it dominates the whole scene. The result is a prose at one and the same time thick with moral disgust and with a profound conformism—righteous indignation, in fact—a combination that is not exclusive to Alencar. It was a mixture that was typical of his century, the hallmark of Romantic melodrama, of the future radio soap-opera, and could even be observed only a short time ago in UDN speeches on the corruption of modern times.¹⁵

But let us go back and adjust the distinction made earlier between the contrasting tones of the peripheral and central characters. The question is not one of degree, but of kind. In the case of the former, Alencar makes the most of commonly perceived character traits, which are local in nature and very often burlesque, presenting them exactly as they have been fashioned by the forces of tradition, habit and affection. This world is what it is, and does not point to some other different universe into which it might be transformed or, to put it another way, it is unproblematic: there is no place here for the universalist and normative purpose of the Romantic-liberal prose of Aurelia's level of the novel. The tonality is the same as that of one of the important novels in Brazilian literature, the Memórias de um sargento de milícias.¹⁶ And it should be noted that these features are also grounded in a literary tradition of their own. In the case of the central characters, however, Alencar tries to perceive the present as a problem, as a state of affairs that cannot be tolerated. This accounts for the greater importance or ‘seriousness’ attached to these passages—although in literary terms it is always a relief when Alencar returns to his other manner of composition, which produces a much greater degree of wit and narrative vigour. However, it is by means of this second style, heavy with ‘principles’, polarized between the sublime and the shameful, that he affiliates himself to the central tradition of the Realism of his time, dedicated precisely to showing the present in all its contradictions; rather than presenting local difficulties, their interest lay in the universal tensions and conflicts of bourgeois civilization. This was the style that would prevail. By way of summary we could say that serious commentary in Senhora is limited to the worldly sphere of money and social climbing, which, as a result, takes priority in the narrative. Like the great protagonists of the Comédie Humaine, Aurelia lives out her torment and, in trying to express it, transforms it into both an intellectual element of her everyday existence and a formal element—as we shall see when we come to look at the plot—which is responsible for the tight structure of the novel. However, that reflective and questioning tone, though well elaborated in and of itself, is not entirely convincing, and does not live happily with the other. It feels pretentious, somewhat inappropriate, and could do with being analyzed in greater detail.

First of all, it ought to be noted that in Senhora the formal dominance and the social importance of the characters do not coincide. If it is natural that the ‘sophisticated’ world should form a contrast with life in the provinces and the world of poverty, it is odd that it should include petty civil servants and the daughters of not so well-off businessmen. And it is even odder that it should exclude adults: the mothers who attend parties in Rio are never anything more than respectable ladies who watch over their daughters and never tire of criticizing Aurelia's daring ways, ‘unseemly in a well-bred young woman’.¹⁷ The same is true of the men, who are all caricatures, unless they are young. In other words, the up-to-date tone is reserved for the nubile and respectable young men and women, and is used in an ornamental way, rather than as a means of synthesizing the social experience of a certain class, besides being dubious in itself if taken too far. Its rule does not run among those characters who may be serious in their own right, but are excluded from the literary spotlight and from the movement of ideas that has the task of carrying the novel through to its conclusion. The composition of the book is thus limited by frontiers of frivolity, to the detriment of its ambitious structure. The original literary model did not contain any such discrepancy; one need only recall the importance of adultery, of politics, of the arrogance of power, etc., in Balzac's world to feel the difference. Alencar keeps the same tone and several of the same techniques, all of which, however, are displaced by the local setting demanded by verisimilitude. We will return to this difference at a later point.

For the time being let us consider the different, complex aspects of this cultural borrowing. First of all, we must rid ourselves, though not entirely, of the pejorative connotations of the concept of borrowing itself. Consider what it meant, in terms of its modernity and audacity, for a character, and a female one at that, to grapple freely with the contemporary, or at least recent, issues of European Realism. In one very obvious sense, this was in itself an achievement, whatever its literary results. It could be compared, for the benefit of the present younger generation [i.e. in 1977: Ed. note], to the jump made in the sixties from reading the standard philosophy and sociology manuals in Spanish to the works of Foucault, Althusser and Adorno. For the truly cultivated person, the choice between an old and a new form of alienation is not hard to make. Leaving a small-scale and complacent imitation behind, the novelist forced himself to conceptualize his world and impose a contemporary structure on his thought processes. The novel was approaching the seriousness that Romantic poetry had attained some time before.¹⁸ Finally, the actual process of this imitation ought to be considered, since it is more complex than it appears. In the preface to Sonhos d'Ouro, Alencar writes: ‘To accuse these books of being of foreign confection is, begging critics' pardon, to reveal a profound ignorance of carioca society, which is right here, showing off its Parisian bows and frills, and speaking the universal tongue, the language of progress, a jargon littered with French, English, Italian and now German terms. How can we hope to photograph this society without copying down its features?’¹⁹ Thus, the first step is taken by society, not literature, which in effect imitates an imitation.²⁰ But inevitably, progress and Parisian frills took on a different meaning in Brazil; to repeat an expression used in ‘Misplaced Ideas’, they represent a second-degree ideology.²¹ The novelist, himself a part of this fashionable movement of society, arrives on the scene and not only copies these new features, which have already been copied from Europe, but copies them in a European way. Now, this second copy disguises, though not completely, the true nature of the first, which is unfortunate as far as literature is concerned, since it accentuates its tendency towards the ornamental. In adopting the form and tone of the realist novel, Alencar accepts its tacit understanding of the world of ideas. Herein lies the problem: he treats as serious those ideas which take on a different form in Brazil; he deals with second-degree ideas as if they were of first degree. All of which adds up to a style that is bombastic and uncritical—despite its scandalous subject matter—and which lacks the venom without which a modern style of writing cannot deal with Brazilian historical experience. Once again we have come to the knot that Machado de Assis will untie.

In sum, foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as it is in any other field, and is not simply an easily dispensable part of the work in which it appears, but a complex feature of it. It makes a significant contribution to our general body of culture, producing varying degrees of benefit, and borrowings can quite easily be morally, politically and aesthetically audacious as well as artistically inappropriate. Which of these contexts is most important? Nothing, apart from professional deformation, speaks in favour of a purely aesthetically-based judgement. We are attempting to focus on a given moment of deprovincialization, on the reasoning that lies behind the dominant tone of Senhora, without, however, neglecting to point out the novel's negative aspects, or reveal its structural weakness. To go back a step: the tone of the novel, in its aims at least, is bold and aggressive, it would like to be regarded as modern and up-to-date; its position in the whole composition, however, goes against its profound intentions and relegates it to the level of a mere social accomplishment. In the final analysis it is this ornamental aspect which predominates. For some reason or other, which we should by now be beginning to understand, 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 mothers, or the poor governess, whose lives are ordered by the laws of favour, or of brutality pure and simple. However, it is people like this that give the novel its variety. Though they are secondary characters, they make up the social framework within which the central figures circulate, and they determine its importance. In other words, our procedure so far has been as follows: we linked the essential structure of the plot—after characterizing it—to the restricted circle it describes, always using the same terms in which the novel operates. Then we saw how this circle fits into the fictional social sphere, where it is considered in relative terms, in terms of the place given to it in the Brazilian social milieu, itself also fictional. What authority does this discourse have? The deciding factor is the ebb and flow of the second aspect (that of the minor characters), which undermines the fundamental tone of the book and its central purpose. Style and structure run at cross-purposes, which is exactly the opposite of what happens in the original model: Balzac's sensationalist and generalizing style, so tightly and artificially constructed, goes hand in hand with an extraordinary sense of concentration, to the point where this style becomes less and less uncomfortable as we begin to convince ourselves of its essential continuity with countless casual and ‘peripheral’ figures that displace, reflect upon, invert, modify—in other words, play their part in—the central conflict, in which they are all involved, in one way or another.²² Take, for example, the discourse of any of his great female protagonists, disillusioned in tone and vitally ‘central’ to the novel: just like that of any character who appears ‘casually’ on the scene—the criminal, the seamstress, the pederast, the banker, the soldier—we find them all equally by turns rebellious, meddlesome, vulnerable, calculating and intrepid. The furious movement of the plot is far from being natural, and comes close to being ridiculous, but somehow manages to retain its link with reality—on an abstract level—due to the overwhelming weight of savoir faire and of experience, which is beyond the scope of the individual, and is not simply a literary phenomenon: it is the sum total of a reflective social process, seen through the eyes of a genius. This is the experienced and sociable fifty year old whom Sartre has identified as the narrator of French Realism.²³ We shall be looking at the historical presuppositions of this form later on. For the present it is sufficient for us simply to understand that this artistic elaboration had its roots in a real process, one which was new, as furious as the prose it produced and not at all ‘natural’, which was turning the whole of European society inside out, and was doing the same in Brazil, but without actually managing to transform the core of that society: what we are talking about is the diffusion—together with its innumerable effects—of the market as a form, of money as the basic nexus of all social relationships. It is the immense magnitude of this movement, which was both global and localized at the same time, that sustains the variety and the overtly theatrical mobility of Balzac's work, allowing him to move freely through vast and apparently disparate areas of society and experience. When Brazilians came into possession of the novel, then, we inherited more than it alone; we also acquired a posture and a diction that were not in harmony with local circumstances, but rather struck a note of discord. Machado de Assis would take full advantage of this disagreement, naturally in a comic vein. To be plain, the main thrust of our argument is as follows: what is peripheral and localist in Alencar becomes the central subject-matter of Machado's novels; this displacement affects ‘European’ motifs and the serious grandiloquence that is central to Alencar's work, so that they do not disappear completely but take on a grotesque tone. In Machado, then, the problem is solved.

But let us get back to Senhora. Our argument may seem somewhat arbitrary: how can a few secondary characters, who take up a minor portion of the novel, play such a decisive role in its general tone? Indeed, if they were taken away, the dissonance would disappear. But we would be left with a French novel. That is not what the author intended, who on the contrary wanted the novel to become a national genre. However, his small, secondary world, introduced into the novel as local colour rather than as an active, structural element—a decorative edging, but one without which the book would not be set in Brazil—dislocates the intended effect and importance of the action as it develops in the foreground. What matters is this: if the local soil is rich enough for the novel to take root in it, then it ought also to be able to sustain a stable diction. For reasons that we have already considered and for others that we shall go on to look at, the diction of the Brazilian novel did not immediately acquire this stability. In other words, the roots of our artistic problem, one of formal unity, lay in the unusual nature of our ideological grounding and ultimately, at the bottom of this, in our dependent-independent position in the concert of nations—even if these things were not specifically addressed in Alencar's book. It is a literary expression of the difficulties we had in trying to integrate both localist and European tonalities, controlled by the ideologies of favour and of liberalism respectively. Not that the novel could actually eradicate this opposition; but it had to discover some arrangement by which these elements, instead of producing an incongruent form, would become part of a regulated system, with its own logic and its own—our own—problems, dealt with on their own appropriate level.

Rather than explain, what we have done so far is to make certain attributions: one tone is ours, another theirs, the plot is European, the peripheral anecdotes are Brazilian, etc. To escape the accidental element of paternity, however, the contingency of geographical origin needs to be substituted by the sociological presuppositions of the forms, which are essential and irremovable. To be more precise, let us say that, out of the more or less contingent body of conditions in which a form is born, this form retains and reproduces some—it would make no sense if it did not—which then become its literary effect, its ‘reality effect’, the world they represent.²⁴ The vital point is this: a part of the original historical conditions reappears, as a sociological form, first with its own logic, but this time also on the fictional plane and as a literary structure. In this sense, forms are the abstract of specific social relationships, and that is how, at least in my opinion, the difficult process of transformation of social questions into properly literary or compositional ones—ones that deal with internal logic and not with origins—is realized. We could say, for example, that there are two dictions in Senhora, and that one prevails over the other when it ought not to. The sensible reader will probably recognize, because he can notice certain similarities, that one of these dictions comes from European Realism, while the other is closer to a familiar and localist tone. As an explanation, however, this recognition does not really address the problem. Why shouldn't the two styles be compatible, if incompatibility is a question of form and not of geography? And why can't the form adopted by European Realism become Brazilian? This final question turns our perspective on its head: though we have seen that one cannot sustain an argument on the basis of origin, we can also see that in real terms its contribution is decisive. Thus, my main topics for discussion are: some important formal borrowings, with some indication of the presuppositions on which they are based, and which eventually were transformed into their ‘effect’; a description of the material to which the form was applied; and finally, the literary results of this displacement.

To begin with, let us look at how the story unfolds. Aurelia, an extremely poor and virtuous young woman, loves Seixas, a modest and rather weak-minded young man. Seixas asks her hand in marriage, but then spurns her for another who is able to offer a dowry. Aurelia suddenly inherits a fortune. She would have forgiven Seixas for his inconstancy, but she cannot forgive his financial motives. Without revealing her identity, she invites her former fiancé to marry her in secret, promising a massive dowry, but requesting a receipt. The young man, who is up to his neck in debt, accepts the offer. It is here that the main plot begins in earnest. In order to humiliate her lover and avenge herself, but also to test his mettle and for sadistic reasons—something of all three—Aurelia begins to treat her recently purchased husband as a piece of property: she reduces the marriage of convenience to its mercantile aspect, and the implications of this will aggressively dominate the plot—to such a degree that the four stages of the story are entitled The Price, Discharged from Debt, In Possession, Ransomed. As the rigorous structure imposed on the conflict indicates, the plot and its characters are in the tradition of Balzac. With much self-analysis and suffering they play out one of the great ideological themes of the period to its improbable logical conclusion (though there is a reconciliation at the end, which we shall look at later on). Aurelia is fashioned in the iron-clad, unyielding mould of the avengers, the alchemists, the money-lenders, the artists, the social climbers, etc., of the Comédie Humaine; like them she grasps an idea—one of those that had caught the imagination of the century—and from then on, without it, her life has no meaning. As a result, the logic and the historical destiny of an important contemporary issue become determining elements in the organization of the plot, attaining the status of a formal principle—among other things. Not that the characters involved represent some abstract notion, in the way that Harpagon had represented avarice for Molière. Rather we are dealing with an abstraction—one that will be combined with all sorts of particular aspects of biology, psychology and social position—that, once the choice is made, tilts the balance in their personalities in crucial ways: it decides their destiny for them. Like a flash of light in the night sky, these reflective and emphatic characters make their mark on the social scene, and leave behind them, apart from the violence of their whirlwind movements, the implacable outline of the contradictions that arise from the conflict between their ideals and society. If we pick up on this theme, we can observe that we are dealing with a narrative model whose material necessarily includes first-degree ideologies—unquestioned ideals such as equality, the republic, the redeeming power of science and art, romantic love, the acknowledgement of merit and the possibility of social mobility, ideas which, after all, in nineteenth-century Europe, gave meaning to life in a very real way.²⁵ In this sense, the Realist novel was a great dream-destroying machine. To understand its importance, one needs to look at it as a whole, as an active movement which crossed national boundaries, paying no respect to the existing hierarchy of topics: one by one it set up the most fervently held ideals of the period, attached them to the stronger and more gifted characters, and allowed them to be destroyed—during the course of the plot—by the implacable mechanism of money and of social class. This explains the intellectual importance of the movement, its bold posture as the friend of truth, which is taken up anew by Alencar. Once again we come to the old problem that was mentioned earlier on: Brazil was importing a model, whose involuntary effect was to raise the profile of these ideas and extend their compass—to give them echoes, energy, critical force—in a way which was at variance with Brazilian experience. Or, from a compositional point of view: in a way which did not include the secondary characters, who were responsible for providing local colour, in the general structure of things. What message did Aurelia's universalizing and polemical discourse have for these characters, whose main interest lies in survival? In such circumstances, the very boldness of the realist approach has its meaning transformed, as we shall see.

As another example of the same thing, take Aurelia's ‘Machiavellianism’, i.e. the ease with which she takes advantage of this society's mode of operation. Having been lucky enough to inherit a small fortune, the young woman is disgusted at first by the venality of her suitors. Then, after giving some thought to the matter, she hatches a plot and ends up buying the husband of her choice. The victim of money learns the lesson of money, and surrenders her happiness to it—and to its hateful mechanisms. She thus takes her place alongside the illustrious group of ‘superior’ beings who escape the rule of fortune and social mobility in as much as they were able to understand it and manoeuvre it in their own interests. At the right time and in their proper place, such figures, of which realist fiction is full, had the weight of reality. They were ridding themselves of obsolete traditions, they had no illusions about morality, and they paid for their clear vision with the hardening of their hearts. It is one of the basic situations of the nineteenth-century novel: the whims of love and of social position, made possible by the bourgeois revolution, collide violently with inequality, which, though transformed, remains a fact of life; such desires have to be put off to another time, compromises have to be reached, by means of the effective manipulation of one's energies and those of other people … until finally, after wealth and power have been acquired, it is discovered that the hopeful young man of the earlier chapters no longer exists. With a thousand and one variations, this three-act formula was absolutely fundamental. Placed between the eager hopes of the early chapters and the disillusionment of the ending, there was always the same interlude, in which the principles of modern life were allowed unrestricted play: the machinery of money and of ‘rational’ self-interest goes about its business, anonymously and effectively, and leaves a contemporary stamp on the odyssey of trials that has been the destiny of heroes since time immemorial. Such are the consequences, from the point of view of bourgeois individualism, of the general victory of exchange-value over use-value—a victory also known as alienation—which becomes the touchstone for the interpretation of the period. The literary effect and the social pre-suppositions of this plot, springing from the moment of greed which is its lever, lie in the autonomy—perceived as a dehumanization of the emotions, a reification—of the economic and political spheres, which appear to function separately from the others, according to an inhuman and mechanical rationale. As far as economic matters are concerned, the reasons for this lie in the automatic nature of the market, where objects and the workforce are regarded as one and the same thing, and which, from the point of view of personal merit, is as arbitrary as a roller-coaster. As for politics, in the historical period that began with the establishment of the modern state, according to the teaching of Machiavelli, its rules of behaviour have nothing to do with moral norms. In both spheres, as in the area of social mobility, which is in some senses an intermediate one, social life is seen as an apparently negative and implacable thing, and the only way to maintain any dignity is to confront it.²⁶ It is against this background, and no other, that the Romantic conflict, exhilarating at times, sinister at others, between the individual and the social order can be called poetic. Solitary, free and obsessed, the protagonists of the novel draw up their financial, amorous or social plans. Some triumph through their intelligence and toughness, others through marriage or crime, still others fail, and finally there are those symbolic figures who make a pact with the devil. All possess a certain grandeur, which could be termed satanic, but which stems from their radical loneliness and their firm determination to use their brains to achieve happiness. Even Seixas, a distant grandson of Rastignac, makes a calculation of this nature: realizing that he is being treated like a piece of merchandise, he accepts the part, and plays it with such rigour that Aurelia, exasperated and finally defeated by his obedience, ends up begging him to start behaving like a human being again. Stated in the terms of our problem: these are fables which owe their symbolic force to a world which had not existed in Brazil. Its form is the underlying metaphor of the society that has been demythologized (entzaubert, to use Max Weber's word) and mystified as a result of bourgeois rationality, that is, by the gradual spread of the concept of mercantile exchange.

Having said all this, the direct confrontation between a literary form and social structure can only occur in theory, since the latter, being both impalpable and real, cannot appear in person between the covers of a book. The truly literary experience is a different matter, and must be addressed by any good theory: theoretical competence in any field can be judged by the measure of agreement or disagreement between the form and the material to which that form is applied. Such material does bear the mark of and is formed by real social forces, and becomes their—more or less awkward—representative within a work of literature. Therefore, it is the form which this material takes on which interests us, so that we can compare it with the material that surrounds it. How, then, can we identify these formal embryos, that guarantee fidelity to the local scene and form a contrast to the certainties upon which the model of the European novel—imitated by Brazilian writers—was based? Some pages back, we talked about ‘a more relaxed tone’. Let us return to the problem, this time with reference to the plot.

The initial section of the novel, entitled ‘The Price’, ends in suspense and climax, on the very night of the wedding: Seixas ‘was singing his song of love, that sublime poetry of the heart’, when Aurelia interrupts him and declares, receipt in hand, that he is a ‘bought man’. Here we have ‘the chaste first fruits of sacred conjugal love’ and the intolerable ‘one hundred contos’ of the dowry face to face. Within the limits of the vibrant black-and-white oppositions consecrated by Romantic ideology, the antagonism between ideals and money could not be more highly-charged.²⁷ End of chapter. The second part of the novel opens simply and in an unconstrained manner, in a different register, and benefits greatly from the contrast. The narrator takes us back in time so that he can recount Aurelia's story and that of her family, from their modest origins to the thousand-conto inheritance. Leaving behind the elegant sphere of polite society, we enter scenes of poverty, set in the suburbs or the countryside. It will be seen that in this setting the stories—subplots which play no decisive role in determining the form of the book—are of a different kind. Pedro Camargo, for example, is the illegitimate son of a rich landowner, whom he fears more than death itself. He comes to Rio to study medicine. He falls in love with a poor young girl, cannot summon the courage to tell his father, and marries her in secret. In leaving home, she too is escaping the opposition of her family, since the young lad is not officially recognized as the landowner's son and therefore might not inherit. Their marriage produces two children: Aurelia and a ‘weak-minded’ boy.²⁸ Still fearing to tell all to his father, the student returns to the plantation, where he eventually dies. He leaves his wife and children in Rio, in the awkward position of being a family with no known father. The mother and daughter sew for a living, the son takes on such jobs as shop assistant, etc. Notice, in this brief summary, how, though they are undoubtedly present, the elements of the Realist novel are dealt with in a completely different way: the grandfather—from whom Aurelia 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 of for having had scant respect for her 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 a 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. They do not constitute a first degree ideology. The formal consequences of this fact are many. First, the tension is lowered, losing both its normative stridency and its central position as the dividing line between what is acceptable and what is not. Since it is not an obligatory and collective moment of destiny, the ideological conflict does not centralize the economy of the narrative, in which it plays a circumstantial and incidental part. It does not permit the combination of individualism and the Declaration of Human Rights, which the classic plot of the Realist novel depends upon for its vibrancy. The solutions it proposes are not based on principle, but on convenience, and are in accord with their immediate circumstances. Arrangements that in the bourgeois world would have been regarded as degrading, are looked upon in this sphere as facts of life. Note also the episodic nature of the story, the way in which its conflicts are spread out: indeed, these conflicts presuppose the above-mentioned ‘relaxed tone’, without which the poetry of its erratic movement, so Brazilian in style, would be clouded over with moralism. As far as the prose is concerned, its literary quality does not consist in its critical force and its ability to address a problem, but is admirable in terms of its verbal facility, its quick sketches, its movement, all of which are direct mimetic virtues, and which remain in sympathetic, effortless contact with everyday speech and with trivial ideas. It is a stream of events, described with great artistic skill and capable of being prolonged indefinitely, which in the end turns into something like the repertoire of possible destinies in this world we live in. This brings us close to the oral tradition and, possibly, to the ‘yarn’, simpler in structure than the novel, but tuned into the dreams—which are also individualistic—of our social universe. It is the literary correlative to the ideological predominance of favour: the lack of normative absolutes reflects, if we can put it this way, the arbitrariness of the will, to which everybody must conform. This explains the modern preference for this narrative style, in which the Absolute values, which still today drain us of our energy and morale, are relativized, because they are linked to the shifting, human—illusory, it is worth repeating—basis of interpersonal relations. To get an idea, then, of the ideological distance travelled in this shift of register, we could say that it cuts across or short circuits the fetishism that belongs to the civilized world of Capital; a fetishism that isolates and makes absolute the so-called ‘values’ (Art, Morality, Science, Love, Property, etc., and above all economic value), and which, as it separates them from social life as a whole, makes them irrational in substance, at the same time as it makes them, for the individual, the depositaries of all available rationality: a kind of insatiable exchequer, to which we owe and conscientiously pay for our existence.²⁹

One novel, but two reality-effects, incompatible and superimposed—that is what we are talking about. Aurelia is out of the ordinary: her trajectory will be the curve of the novel, and her reasons, which in order to be serious presuppose the classic order of the bourgeois world, are transformed into a formal principle. Around her, however, the atmosphere is one of patronage and protection. Old Camargo, Dona Firmina and Sr Lemos, the decent Abreu and the honest Dr Torquato, Seixas' family, the ease with which Seixas is able to arrange a sinecure for himself—all these are characters, lives, styles which imply an entirely different order of things. Formally, the structure of the plot dominates the novel. Artistically, however, this same domination is not carried through, because Alencar does not complete the formal predominance of bourgeois values with criticism of the rule of favour, of which he is both a friend and an admirer. Thus, not only does the form not reach its full potential, but its force is also restricted: the sign of negation that logically and in more implicit ways it should present to the aspects of the novel opposed to it loses its authority, counterbalanced merely by fine words. That is, alternation between incompatible ideological presuppositions breaks the fictional spine of the book. They result in a divided base, which will be accompanied on the literary plane by incoherence, a false tone and, above all, by lack of proportion. If Balzac's middling characters stare, petrified, into the Medusa-like features of his radical characters, who represent a concentrated form of everyone's truth—they are the ‘types’ of which Lukács speaks—in Alencar, they look in shock at Aurelia, whose vehemence seems extravagant nonsense to some, to others a mere social accomplishment. To both it looks like imported literature. The programmatic nature of her sufferings, which ought to guarantee her a dignity above personal considerations, seems like an isolated caprice, a young girl's whim. When love and money or appearance are not absolute and exclusive, it is entirely reasonable that she should take them (and other things) into account when she gets married; the conflict that makes them absolute seems unnecessary and unnatural. The same goes for the prose, which seems exaggerated. And even from the point of view of linear coherence there are difficulties, because, although she is a good, compassionate and unselfish young woman, Aurelia spits out flames of satanic heat and is rigorous in applying the ethics of her contract. It may be thought that this is dialectical: what we have here is Shylock and Portia in a single character. Not so, since, although there is some movement between the two terms, furious at times, the process does not transform either of them—Alencar holds on to them both, out of a respect for local morality on the one hand, and an attachment to modernity on the other—so that these things leave the book in exactly the same state as they began it. Note also in this context the uncertain weight of Aurelia's disillusioned remarks: if they were justifiable (as they would be if they worked in the formal context of the book), those women who criticize them, on the grounds of impropriety, would be made to look like hypocrites; but they are not, they are well-meaning mothers. The fashionable young men, who find them piquant and are not offended, are accused of moral insensitivity. At the end of the novel, Seixas, who had romantically agreed to humble himself in order to win the esteem of his beloved, includes among the reasons for his obedience … commercial integrity, and thus returns approval to the commercial nexus upon which the whole critical force of the plot is targeted.³⁰ One can see how much damage is done to the very fabric of the prose by looking at the opening pages of the novel. Rio's polite society is referred to successively as elegant, backward and wicked, without any attention being drawn to the contradiction. Also, the narrator himself does not remain the same. Sometimes he speaks with the complicity of the social chronicler, on other occasions he speaks like a wise commentator on the nature of the human heart and the laws of social intercourse, at other times he is a strict moralist, or an educated man who is well aware of Brazil's provincial status, or, finally, he is a respecter of local social practices. For the purposes of the novel, where does the truth lie? Add a little humour and self-criticism and these incoherent points of view would be transformed into the vertiginous inconstancy of Machado's narrative stance.

Similar discrepancies arise in a more naive fashion in A pata da gazela and in Diva. In the latter book, which begins amusingly, the general atmosphere—like that of Senhora—is that of the family, of social niceties, parties and little romantic flirtations. Then the plot suddenly takes off: the heroine's prudish and timid inclinations, quite normal and convincing at the beginning, are extended to breaking-point, and expressed in the most inappropriate and exaggerated Romantic rhetoric, which speaks of purity, doubt and total disillusionment, with the whole thing ending in marriage. Between the banality of social life and the movement of the plot, there lies an abyss. They are talking at cross-purposes. Even so, though it never reaches the level that only artistic coherence can provide, the plot does have a certain energy: there is something crude and blunt about its development, despite its conformism, something peculiar to violent, wordy fictions, full of delicious punishments and disgusting triumphs, by means of which the humiliated imagination compensates for its resentment and for the vicissitudes of life.

The lack of proportion that we find in A pata da gazela occurs in the reverse fashion: instead of the Romantic intensification of minor conflicts, here we witness the rapid emptying out of the initial Romantic situation, despite the fact that it is the book's main focus of interest. Horacio, a dissolute man-about-town, is placed in stark contrast with Leopoldo, a young man who is modest on the outside, virtuous and idealistic within—so much so that his eyes are phosphorescent. The former says to the latter: ‘you love a woman's smile, I love her feet’, which can be taken both figuratively and literally.³¹ Indeed, materialism and illicit fixations are opposed to the love of moral beauty—all with reference to a foot. If the foot is pretty, Horacio could not care less who it belongs to; for Leopoldo, if the woman concerned spoke directly to his soul, he would marry her even if her foot were a ‘deformity’, an ‘elephant's foot’, ‘covered in lumps like a tubercle’, or a ‘joint of meat, a stump!’³² However, the perverse and cruel components are gradually removed, leaving the arena to the safe contrast between the frivolous young man and the sincere one, with its predictable ending. Imperceptibly—not even that imperceptibly—the question at issue changes. The boldness of the ideological conflict is like a false beam which holds the attention of the reader but, in the final analysis, it fails to support the narrative. Since they are not metaphors for Brazilian society as a whole, perversion, the elegant social whirl, ennui, the fashionable tailors and shoemakers that appear take on the role of ornamentation, superimposed without much skill on the daily routine of our real life, which somehow needed their prestige. Not that it was lacking in depth—as Machado de Assis would prove. But it would be necessary to provide it with a proper structure. Getting back to the point, once again we have returned to the situation we looked at earlier: the up-to-date tone provides the narrative with breadth and an air of modernity, only for that same narrative to render it useless: it is neither necessary nor superfluous. Or rather, it is necessary for narrative literature to be presentable, but is out of proportion when it comes to the incorporation of the local element.³³ The same goes for the conflict between moral ideologies, which at one moment is daring and serious, à la Balzac, at another complete and utter affectation, deliberately humorous at times, at others unintentionally so. It should be obvious that each of these sudden turns destroys the web of credibility that has been woven by the previous context. The good literary material that remains, of which there is a fair amount, owes its existence, once again, to the author's grasp of mimetic techniques, which survives the incongruities of his composition. Even the question of the foot, made into a legitimate literary topic by Romanticism's satanic side, works within its own unexpected, petty, direct but lively sphere, in a similar manner to that noticed in the development of Diva. Not only does it originate an insipid debate between the body and the soul; it also gives rise to more intimate, spontaneous thoughts, expressed, for example, in the names given to the physical defect or the way in which its discovery affects the lover. So amid the generalizing blandness, a certain piquancy filters through, which forms part of a Brazilian literary tradition, the tradition—if it can be put in this way—of crass vulgarity, carefully planned in some cases, spontaneous in others. To document its historical existence one need only recall the incident of the haemorrhoids in Macedo's A moreninha;³⁴ the strange sensation experienced by the hero of Cinco minutos, Alencar's first story, when it occurs to him that the veiled and mysterious night traveller, on whose shoulder he had placed ‘his ardent lips’, at the back of an omnibus, might have been an ugly old woman; the terrible chapters on Eugenia, the lame girl in the Memórias postumas de Brás Cubas; the multitude of barbarities produced by the Parnassian-Naturalists, a combination which has its own kind of vulgarity; and in our own day and age the jokiness of Oswald de Andrade, the deliberate rottenness of Nelson Rodrigues, the petty, miserable atmosphere of Dalton Trevisan, as well as a vast, well-established tradition in popular music.³⁵

Alencar's Realist fiction is inconsistent at its core; but its inconsistency merely repeats in a purified and developed form the essential dilemma of our ideological position in Brazil, and is its effect and restatement. It is an inconsistency which is not at all incidental: on the contrary it has great substance. From the point of view of theory, when one repeats an ideology, even when it is done in a concise and lively manner, all that happens is that an ideology has been repeated, and nothing else. But from the point of view of literature, which is imitation—at least at this level of the process—and not a matter of rational judgement, this inconsistency takes us halfway down the road. To get from this stage to the conscious, critical representation of social reality, is only a single step. Though we have concentrated so far on one particular aspect, our analysis reveals that there are two sides to the coin. Let us move on to its more positive side. It is more than likely that Alencar himself sensed something of what we have been trying to put across here with reference to Senhora, and to the figure of Seixas. When the latter was attacked for his lack of moral stature, Alencar replied by explaining that he ‘models his characters to accord with the true measure of Rio society’, and then boasts ‘precisely of … that national stamp’. ‘Your colossal figures’, he tells his critic, ‘would look like stone guests in our (Brazilian) world.’³⁶ It all depends on what he means by that reduced scale, ‘the measure of Rio’, the one that bears the Brazilian trade-mark. Why must a social climber in Rio be smaller than his Parisian equivalent, or risk looking like a mere shadow? If we look into the matter more closely, it becomes evident that the stature of Alencar's major figures does not remain stable. Are they mediocre? Or do they stand out from the mass? First one thing, then another. They oscillate between the titanic and the familiar, according to the dramatic necessities of the European and localist features of the plot respectively. Thus we have Aurelia, who lives in a world of the most severe absolutes—in which she is as sensual as a salamander, belts out arias from Norma and tramples on society ‘as if it were a poisonous reptile’—asking Dona Firmina whether she is prettier than Amaralzinha, her constant companion at parties and functions; later on, when the author wants to underline her intelligence, she is complimented on her knowledge of arithmetic. Similarly, Seixas is referred to, for Romantic purposes, as a ‘predestined’ and a ‘superior’ being, while the rest of the time he is a very ordinary young man.³⁷ In Diva, Medicine is a priestly office, but the doctor spends his time courting a girl who refuses him.³⁸ Also, it does not take long for the rather heterodox admirer of women's ankle-boots, in A pata da gazela, to be revealed as a respectful young man, who feels ‘outpourings of contentment’ when his beloved's father welcomes him into their home.³⁹ In reality, then, the ‘measure of Rio’ is the result of the unresolved alternation of two opposing ideologies. Restated in the terms of our argument, it is a consequence of the fact that in Brazil European ideas are degraded, emptied of their effectiveness one might say, due to their displacement by the mechanics of our social structure.

That's as far as reality is concerned. When we come to the fiction, Alencar's expression must be regarded with some caution, with a careful distinction being made between the constructive plan and its actual artistic effect, i.e. between degrees of intention. We have already seen how these characters—contrary to the author's own statements—are not lacking in extremes, particularly in Senhora; their stature is determined, to the detriment of their intended grandeur, by the network of secondary relationships, which weakens, and consequently relativizes, the position and the basis of the central conflict. This explains the sense of disproportion, of formal duality, that we have attempted to point out, which is the aesthetic effect of these books, and which also constitutes their profound harmony with Brazilian experience. Having been excluded from the façade of the composition, which is determined by the uncritical adoption of the European model, our national peculiarities come back in through the backdoor, in the shape of a literary inviability, which Alencar nevertheless gives value to because of its mimetic accuracy. Thus the tribute paid for the inescapable lack of authenticity of Brazilian literature is acknowledged, its price fixed, and is then capitalized upon and turned into a positive advantage. It is this transition from an involuntary reflex action to a careful elaboration, from incongruity to artistic truth, that must be studied. Here we have the beginnings of a new and different dynamic for the composition of the Brazilian novel. Notice, however, that the problem is as follows: what we have identified as a compositional defect is regarded by Alencar as an imitative success. Indeed, the formal flaw that we have been highlighting, and which Alencar, guided by his sense of the ‘measure of Rio’, continued to reproduce, is of immense mimetic value, and there is nothing more Brazilian than this half-baked literature. In this case, then, the difficulty is only an apparent one: all literary forms have a mimetic aspect, just as an imitation will always contain the germ of a literary form; it is possible for a frustrated construction to be an imitative accomplishment (as we have just observed is the case here) which, though it cannot redeem the work, can give it artistic relevance, either as the basic material for a future form, or as material for further consideration.

Let us see in what sense this is true. Alencar does not stress the contradiction between the European form and the local social scene, but he does insist on juxtaposing them—all this as a member of his class, who could appreciate progress and the cultural novelties of his day, to which he had right of access; but who also appreciated the traditional social relationships, since they justified his privileged position. It was not a case of indecision, but rather of simultaneous adhesion to two entirely heterogeneous terms of reference, incompatible in their principles—but harmonized within the practice of our ‘enlightened paternalism’. We are now in the presence of the initial pattern for conservative modernization, whose story has not yet reached its conclusion.⁴⁰ We are back to the problem outlined in the previous chapter: wherein lies the logic of this weird, though very real, combination? By repeating the interests of his class, without criticizing them, Alencar thus reveals a crucial fact of Brazilian social life—the reconciliation of clientelism and liberal ideology—while at the same time denying its problematic nature, which explains his failure when it comes to another kind of conformism, that of common sense. His literary incoherence is the symptom of his failure in this regard. In other words, we could say that the European form and the local social scene are taken as raw material, with skill but without being reworked. Placed face to face, in the narrow, logical space of a novel, they contradict each other as a matter of principle, while this same contradiction is not expanded upon because of … a sense of reality. Being neither reconciled, nor in conflict, they do not make the vital reference to each other that would enable them to rid themselves of their conventionality and gain artistic integrity: the former lacks verisimilitude, the latter is made insignificant, and as a result the whole is stunted and unbalanced. It was a whole, however—and this is the most surprising thing—in which there is real imitative achievement, the ‘national stamp’ which led Alencar to repeat his recipe, and stabilize its form within our national literature. This represents his most profound legacy to the tradition of Brazilian Realism.

Formal breakdown and mimetic force, then, are linked in Senhora. The reader will understand that we are re-reading the book through a different prism. Inconsistency is not now being regarded as a weakness in a particular work or of a specific author—that is, as a repetition of ideologies—but as the imitation of an essential aspect of reality. It is not the final effect, but a necessary transition to another, more complete artistic effect. This is a ‘second-degree’ reading, which recovers the sometimes unintentional truths of the ‘measure of Rio’ for the purposes of further consideration. One must also note that in this perspective the formal defect is an ingredient, just as are the very ingredients which produced the defect itself. Having constituted itself as form, the inconsistency becomes itself material, something to be turned into form in its turn. So much so that instead of the combination of two elements—the European form and the local material—which turns out to be unstable, we have a three-fold combination: the instability that results from a combination of European form and local material, which turns out to be funny. In the place of Alencar's unintentional effects, which can now be seen merely as a constituent element of something more complex, another very different and more relaxed effect appears, whose humour lies in the awkwardness of the first. Clearly, the intellectual and artistic fruits of this second effect are almost completely absent in Alencar. It would be necessary to wait until the second phase of Machado de Assis' career fully to appreciate its benefits. Nevertheless, this second effect is the very substance—yet to be developed—of the ‘measure of Rio’. To give the argument its abstract form: if the contradictory effect is an initial and intentional part of the construction, it ought to determine and qualify the elements that produce it, as well as defining the way they relate to each other. It ought to relativize the emphatic presentation of European themes, remove the marginality and the innocence of the local body of themes, and give the sudden shifts of the narrative tone, which mark the contradictory nature of the postulates contained in the book, a carefully calculated and comic meaning. One can recognize here, I hope, the characteristic tone of Machado de Assis.

My argument becomes even more convincing if we take into account a question of scale: if the imitative power of Alencar's novel is the result of a break within the construction of the work, which is thus weakened by being split, the reading of the work will be tedious and frustrating (as, in fact, is the case) and someone has made a mistake of literary construction. To make the most out of the end result, it needs to be concentrated, so that its presence is felt at all points in the narrative; its large-scale structural effect needs to be transformed into the minute chemistry of composition. And in fact, Machado's prose is dependent upon a kind of miniaturization of qualities that had occurred previously within limited zones of Alencar's novels; it explores this same ideological space in almost every phrase, inconsistencies included. Having been reduced, regulated and stylized into a single rhythmic pattern, the difference in proportion between the grand bourgeois ideas and the fluctuating movements of favour is transformed into a diction, into a music that is both sardonic and surprisingly familiar. From a formal inconsistency to a humorous, deliberate incoherence, the literary effect has become a cause, made of much more complex material, which another form will go on to explore. I am not hereby suggesting that Machado's novels are the simple product of the criticism of Alencar's. Literary tradition does not run on a separate course to life in this way. Clearly, Alencar's problems, with very little adjustment, were the problems of the time in which he lived, as can be easily documented by contemporary parliamentary speeches and in the press, which contain the same contradictions and betray the same lack of proportion. Machado could have been correcting the faults of any of these sources. But it is not really a case of influences, although these did exist and are not difficult to find. What needs to be looked at more closely here is the formation of a literary substratum which is of sufficient historical density to support the creation of a literary masterpiece.

Let us go back a step to the mimetic power of the formal impasse. According to our analysis, the reason for this same impasse lies in the uncritical adoption of an ideological combination, common in Brazil—which is subjected to the need for unity demanded by the Realist novel and by modern literature. Because it repeats ideologies, which are themselves the repetitions of appearances, literary is also an ideology. In the next, second, stage of the process, the impasse is regarded as being characteristic of the Brazilian way of life. Consequently, it becomes a consciously desired effect, which is the same as saying that the combination of ideologies and forms that produces it are relativized, once these begin to lose their intrinsic worth and are appreciated instead for the dubious results of their contact with each other. The ideological repetition of ideologies is interrupted, in the cause of mimetic fidelity. This little hiatus can thus be given the title ‘measure of Rio’; it may not be a complete rupture but it is sufficient to redistribute certain emphases, reorganize certain perspectives, and make possible the emergence of a whole new literary field which does not simply reconfirm well-established illusions—that is the step Machado would make. As far as he himself was concerned, there may have been many motives for this modification. But from an objective point of view, which is what matters at present, the shift has the virtue of incorporating as something in its own right, a specific moment of incongruity in our adoption of European ideology into the context of Brazilian letters.

In other words, the process is a complex variant of the so-called dialectic of form and content: our literary material only achieves sufficient density when it takes in, at the level of content, the unsuitability of the European form, without which we cannot be complete. Obviously, there still remains the problem of finding the right form for this new material, an essential part of which is the uselessness of the forms that we were obliged to adhere to. However, before the form could appear, the raw material itself had to be produced, now enriched through a process of degradation of the European formal universe. With reference to this operation, it ought to be noted that its moving force is entirely one of mimesis. Likeness to reality, then, is not merely a superficial feature. The work of adjusting the imitation, limited, at first sight, by the haphazard nature of appearances, lays down, as it were, the course of a new river. The consequences it holds for composition, determined as they are by the logical—i.e. historical—demands of the material that is being used because of its likeness to reality, infinitely exceed the restricted sphere of mimesis, although it is the latter that brings them to light. In this sense, and for the purposes of any author, ‘the measure of Rio’ could be a vague nationalistic and imitative principle which needed no further definition; in objective terms, however, it gives rise to what could be called an amplification of the internal space of the literary material, a space which will from now on always have the means of referring to European ideologies, something which will both add piquancy and a vital element of truth. In other words, in order to construct a truthful novel one needs to use real material. That is, with Brazil being a dependent country, there needs to be a synthesis in which the distinguishing features of our inferior position in the emerging Imperialist system appear in a regular fashion. Because of the need to imitate, to remain faithful to ‘national characteristics’, the ideologies of favour and of liberal thought will always be forced to cohabit. Together they make up a brain-teaser which, once it is supplied with the necessary logical—as opposed to mimetic—force, will give rise to a new, made-to-measure, picture of our (reduced size) local bourgeoisie. It is a process which, even today, is of great interest to the critic, since it has not yet reached its completion.

All that remains now is for us to look at the most obvious defect in Senhora, namely its sugary ending. If the novel had ended in some other fashion, unspoilt by ‘the mysterious hymn of sacred conjugal love’, it would have had one less defect, but it would not have been better. None of the problems that we have been considering would have been resolved. The rose-tinted, or, at least, morally edifying ending is not specifically linked to Brazilian literature, but rather to the novel of social reconciliation, to Feuillet and Dumas Fils, for example, who were direct influences. They were writers whose work was well and truly wrecked by their calculated conformism. If one were to take Feuillet's Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre, and sharpen the contradictions that he tries to attenuate, we would be left with a good Realist novel.⁴¹ Like Alencar, Feuillet had inherited a formal tradition which contained the critical presuppositions of the bourgeois revolution. Both Senhora and Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre encompass the modest garret and the mansion, the city and the provinces, the businessman's office and the lover's garden, the sentiments of the aristocrat and those of the bourgeoisie, etc. In Feuillet's novel, the antagonisms implied in this juxtaposition of narrative areas and themes are mere shadows of doubt and subversion, diluted by the virtue of his positive characters. The victory always belongs to an exemplary league of egalitarian aristocrats and selfless members of the bourgeoisie. However, the problems of the bourgeois revolution were not only being formalized in the workings of the Realist novel, of which Feuillet is a practitioner. More importantly, he was working with reality itself, with the living society of Europe which was the source of material for this literature. In Feuillet's case, then, to speak of disguising social contradictions and of destroying their literary significance is to say one and the same thing. With Alencar, it is quite a different matter, since he only reconciles the situation at the end of the narrative and is non-conformist during its development, where he is bold and positively enjoys contradictions.⁴² What can be done about this form, if its opposing principles do not shape the material that they ought to organize? If old Camargo's plantation is not the seat of provincial and aristocratic virtues, but rather of Capital and the immoral habits of the slave population, how does it shape up in the contrast with the greed and frivolity of Rio? Regardless of how this question is answered, it does not fit in with the central plot, and does not even chime in with it. Similarly, when he moves from his modest lodgings to his wife's mansion, Seixas does not strictly speaking move from one social class and, more importantly, from one ideology to another—as the difference would appear to suggest; all he changes is his standard of living, as we would put it these days, which removes the poetic force of the two settings. And so on, and so forth. If the oppositions that define the form being used do not also govern the social environment to which that form is applied, formal rigour will be accompanied by a lack of artistic balance, and the very frankness with which these—supposedly monstrous, but in fact highly respectable—contradictions are related will itself be conformist. All of which explains the strange effect of these novels on the modern reader: though they are set in a contemporary historical context, they leave no impression of any historical rhythm whatsoever. This is because any poetry the latter might convey is dependent upon a genuine periodization, i.e. on the correspondence between conflicts exactly situated in time and the historical contradictions that organize the movement of the work as a whole.

Having demonstrated, then, that Alencar's most useful contribution to the development of the Brazilian novel lies in the weak points of his writing, let us also look at how his weaknesses contain features that can be regarded as real strong-points, features which, when taken in isolation, reveal his true merit as an author. With reference to Senhora, Antonio Candido has observed that its main theme—the purchase of a husband—not only gives form to the plot, but also has repercussions on the book's metaphorical system. What we have here is a case of formal consistency, whose effect ought to be looked at.

The heroine, hardened by her desire to avenge herself, and given the opportunity to do so by her inheritance, rigidifies her soul as if she were the agent of an operation designed to crush another by means of capital, whereby he is reduced to a mere possession. And the images which Alencar uses themselves emphasize the mineralization of her personality, affected as it is by the dehumanization of the capitalist system, until the Romantic dialectic of love recovers its conventional position. So, both in the work as a whole and in specific details of each section, the same structural principles are active in shaping the material.⁴³

Indeed, its dramatic movement transforms the rich young woman, surrounded by the ‘mob of suitors’,⁴⁴ into an angry, vehement woman. When she takes the initiative, Aurelia looks at the world through the eyes of money, and intends to repay with interest all the humiliation she has had to endure. The other side of the coin, however, is that when she feels that she herself is being seen with the same eyes, we see her pale, ‘marble-like’ complexion, her ‘icy’ lips, her ‘jasper-coloured’ cheeks, her nervous contractions, her harsh, metallic voice, etc., take over.⁴⁵ To this extent we are shown the moral dialectic of money and the harm it can do to people. However, as the mention of marble and jasper suggests, there is a more complex movement at work. The mineralization to which Antonio Candido refers is situated at the meeting points of many levels of the narrative: it is the hardness necessary to manipulate others, the categorical refusal to become a tool of someone else's schemes, it is the idol worship of unconscious material and of the statuesque, it is the rejection of the body, it is the prestige of expensive substances, etc. In other words, the object of the novel's economic criticisms has a sexual attraction. ‘And such is the way of the world, that the satanic glow of this woman's beauty was her main attraction. The depths of her passion could be divined in the bitter vehemence of her rebellious soul; and one could catch a glimpse of the raging sensuality that the love of this Bacchic virgin contained within itself.’⁴⁶ The explicit message, then, is that money puts restraints on one's natural emotions; the underlying message, however, is that money, contempt and denial form an eroticized whole, which opens our eyes to horizons which are more exciting than the conventions of everyday life. In other words, money is pernicious because it creates a division between sensuality and the existing domestic framework, but it is also interesting for that very same reason. This gives rise to the convergence, in Alencar's work, of wealth, female independence, sensual intensity and images taken from the world of prostitution. As we have seen, this is developed with considerable boldness and complexity, though it is true that it is heavily influenced by La Dame aux Camélias. Thus, the formal logic with which Alencar develops his theme reinforces—rather than eliminates—the formal duality that we have been studying: it places the bourgeois reification of social relationships at the centre of the novel. Where Antonio Candido recognizes a particular virtue in Alencar's work, there is also a defect. The total manipulation of one person by another, and thus the absolute conflict between them, becomes the model for individual relationships in the novel. This is one of the essential consequences of liberal capitalism, and it is one of the merits of the Realist novel to have revealed it in its own structure. However, it was not the formal principle that Brazil was looking for, despite the fact that—as a theme—it was indispensable to us.

Notes

1. See Marlyse Meyer's stimulating study, ‘O que é, ou quem foi Sinclair das Ilhas?’, in Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, No. 14, São Paulo 1973.

2. Theobald, an assertive American in ‘The Madonna of the Future’, 1873, cries: ‘We are the disinherited of Art! We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste, nor tact, nor force, how should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist, as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.’ The Complete Tales of Henry James, Rupert Hart-Davis, London 1962, vol. 3, pp. 14-15. Back in America, on a visit to Boston, James writes: ‘I am 37 years old, I have made my choice, and God knows that I have now no time to waste. My choice is the old world—my choice, my need, my life. … My work lies there—and with this vast new world, je n'ai que faire. One can't do both—one must choose. … The burden is necessarily greater for an American—for he must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe; whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one dreams of calling him less complete for doing so. (I speak of course of people who do the sort of work that I do; not of economists, of social science people.) The painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet; but a hundred years hence—fifty years hence perhaps, he will doubtless be accounted so.’ (The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Mattiessen and K. B. Murdock, Galaxy Books, New York 1961, dated September 1881, pp. 23-4.)

3. José de Alencar (1829-77) The most important Brazilian Romantic novelist. He wrote some twenty novels in a relatively short life, as well as being an important politician (Minister of Justice 1868-70). He is perhaps most famous for his Indianist novels, especially O Guarani (The Guarani Indian) (1857), which made his reputation when he originally published it as a feuilleton, and the shorter, more lyrical, and carefully constructed Iracema (1865). Both fictionalize (and sentimentalize) the encounter between the Portuguese colonists and the indigenous peoples of Brazil. His aim was the establishment of a national literature, intended to cover all aspects of the country's history and present society, somewhat on the model of Balzac. Senhora (A Lady) (1875), the novel with which this essay is primarily concerned, was among the last to be completed, and is one of a group, along with Diva (1864), A pata da gazela (The Gazelle's Foot) (1870) and others, intended to represent urban life. O tronco do ipê (1871) (The Ipê Trunk) and Til (1872) deal with the life of the interior.

4. José de Alencar, ‘Como e porque sou romancista’, [How and Why I became a Novelist], Obra Completa, ed. José Aguilar, Rio de Janeiro 1959, vol. I, p. 107.

5. These novels are all mentioned by Alencar in ‘Como e porque sou romancista’. They are popular romances by forgotten authors, usually British and female, which were widely read in translation in Brazil between about 1820 and 1860. More information can be found in the excellent article by Marlyse Meyer cited in the author's note 1.

6. Published in 1844, this sentimental novel set in Rio was the first popular success of its author, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo (1820-82).

7. Ibid., p. 109.

8. Antonio Candido, ‘Aparecimento da Ficção’, Formação da Literatura Brasileira, Martins, São Paulo 1969, vol. II, ch. 3.

9. Grand sertão: veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) (1956) is the greatest achievement of João Guimarães Rosa (1908-67). In plot it is somewhat like a cowboy story, and is set in the wild Brazilian outback: however, its language and its themes make it one of the great modern experimental novels.

10. In the book, Ao vencedor as batatas (The Winner Gets the Potatoes) of which ‘Misplaced Ideas’ is the first chapter, and this essay the second, the final chapters deal with Machado de Assis' early novels, written in the 1870s. The full resolution of the contradictions present in Alencar's work would only be resolved, however, in Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1880). See especially essays 5 and 6.

11. Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) was one of the leading writers and politicians of the late nineteenth century in Brazil, most famous for having been one of the leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery. In 1873, he engaged in a polemic with Alencar which originated in the failure of the latter's drama O jesuita, but which extended to take in a critique of his novelistic production also.

12. Cf. A Polêmica Alencar-Nabuco, Tempo Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro 1978, and especially Nabuco's objections to Diva, pp. 153-63.

13. See the chapters in the above-mentioned Formação da Literatura Brasileira that deal with the novel. Put together, these sections make up a theory of its development in Brazil, and can be read as an introduction to the work of Machado de Assis. Though he does not form part of the ‘formative’ phase dealt with in this book, and is only rarely mentioned, Machado is one of its central characters, its main point of disappearance: the tradition of the novel in Brazil is discussed, at least in part, with Machado's future contribution in mind. See pp. 140, 141 and 142 for quotes referred to.

14. José de Alencar, Senhora, Obra Completa, vol. I, pp. 958, 966, 979, 1065 and 1066.

15. The UDN (União Democrática Nacional) was the party of liberal constitutionalism (i.e. respectable conservatism) of the period 1945-64, between the end of the rule of Vargas and the Estado Novo, and the military coup.

16. The only novel of Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1831-61), it was originally serialized in 1852-3. In tone, plot and setting it is completely different from the other fiction of the time. It concerns the exploits of a rascal, Leonardo, in the lower-class Rio of the early part of the nineteenth century. Its importance as a precursor to much of the less serious, but none the less critical literature of the twentieth century was pointed out by Antonio Candido in his seminal article ‘Dialética da malandragem (The Dialectics of Roguery)’, Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (São Paulo) 8 (1970), pp. 67-89.

17. Senhora, p. 952.

18. Above all, in the works of such writers as Antônio Gonçalves Dias (1823-64), the first Indianist poet of stature, and other Romantics such as Manuel Antônio Alvares de Azevedo (1831-52), sometimes called the Brazilian Byron.

19. Obra Completa, vol. I, p. 699.

20. The situation can be compared to that of Caetano Veloso singing in English. When attacked by the ‘nationalists’, he replied that it was not he who had brought the Americans into Brazil. He had always wanted to sing in the language that he had heard on the radio from an early age. Furthermore, the fact that he sings in English with a northern Brazilian accent clearly marks a significant moment in our historical and imaginative development.

21. In his comments on consumer habits in Brazil at the turn of the century, Warren Dean observes that certain goods, which were commonplace in Europe and the United States, were transformed into luxury items by the import trade. Cf. The Industrialization of São Paulo: 1880-1945, The University of Texas Press, 1969.

22. ‘Balzac's many-sided, many-tiered world approaches reality much more closely than any other method of presentation. But the more closely the Balzacian method approaches objective reality, the more it diverges from the accustomed, the average, the direct, the immediate manner of reflecting this objective reality. Balzac's method transcends the narrow, habitual, accepted limits of this immediacy and because it thus runs counter to the comfortable, familiar, usual way of looking at things, it is regarded by many as ‘exaggerated’ and ‘cumbersome’. … But his wit is not confined to brilliant and striking formulations; it consists rather in his ability strikingly to present some essential point at the maximum tension of its inner contradictions.’ (G. Lukács, ‘Balzac: Lost Illusions’, Studies in European Realism, London, Hillway Publishing 1950, pp. 58-9.)

23. J.-P. Sartre, ‘Qu'est-ce que la littérature?’, Situations II, Paris, Gallimard 1948, pp. 176ff. For a comic condensation of Balzac's writing habits, see the incomparable parody of him done by Proust, in Pastiches et mélanges. The enjoyable, comforting side of Balzac's generalizations is mentioned by Walter Benjamin, in his study of the figure of the flâneur, in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London, Verso 1973, p. 39.

24. Althusser's expression, though in another philosophical context.

25. See, for example, Lukács' writings on the role of Romanticism in the Realist novel. Since it was an ideology which sprang spontaneously from the non-conformist and anticapitalist thinking of the nineteenth century, the Romantic dream became, as it were, an indispensable feature of the novel: it was an ideology which bred a certain character type and literary climate, only to undermine them on the level of plot. ‘Balzac and Stendhal’, op. cit.

26. ‘Only by the eighteenth century, in “civil society”, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity.’ Karl Marx, ‘Introduction’, Grundrisse (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy), Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 84. Cf. also Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, Merlin, London 1971, pp. 83-222; and Lucien Goldmann, Pour une Sociologie du Roman, Gallimard, Paris 1964.

27. Senhora, p. 1028, 1029, 1026, 1029.

28. Ibid., p. 1038.

29. For a way of conceptualizing the contrast between pre-capitalist narrative and the novel—though the basis of the argument lies in the transition from craft production to industry, something which does not fit the Brazilian case—see Walter Benjamin's splendid essay on ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations (Schocken, New York 1969), pp. 83-110. In an ideal sense, and exaggerating somewhat, we can say that the ‘story’ in this sense presents its hearers, their experience, and the traditions to which they are connected, with the simplicity of an anecdote. Experience and traditions are in their turn composed of anecdotes, to which this latest one is added no sooner than it has been uttered. The strength of this genre, then, lies in the poetry of a story which stands out against the background of a varied repertoire of everyday wisdom. It is a genre which has no place for conceptual knowledge, any knowledge, that is, which does not have the guarantee of lived experience, or cannot be translated into another anecdote. This is precisely the opposite of what occurs in the novel, whose adventures are imbued with and explained by the commonplace but counter-intuitive mechanisms of bourgeois society. The poetry of the novel lies in the ‘modern’ and artistically difficult combination of lived experience, naturally expressed by mimetic means, and of abstract and critical awareness, in particular the social dominance of exchange-value, and the thousand-and-one variations on the contradiction between formal equality and real inequality. In the case of the novel, a certain severity and logical consequence are regarded as a sign of quality. We can say, then, that in the novel, incidents are imbued with generalisation, but that the element of generality refers to a particular type of society, or, better, to a historical stage in the development of that same society, encoded in the central conflict. In the ‘story’, however, incidents are free of explanation, though, however, they will be added to the ahistorical and generic stock of the motivations and destinies of our species, this latter viewed from the perspective of the diversity of human beings and of peoples, as opposed to that of changing social orders and regimes. The story contributes to the ‘casuistics’ of human situations and of regional traditions: it introduces you to the adult world, and amuses you, if you have ears to hear. The novel, however, which can only disillusion the reader, is committed to telling the truth about life in a specific social context, and is critical in nature even when unintentionally so. The novel is the most historical artistic form of all, into which so-called scientific knowledge—especially history, psychology and economics, accompanied by the aims of portraying an epoch and denouncing its evils—is incorporated, yet it has been instrumental, in Brazil, in stifling the literary conceptualisation of the country. Here lies the paradox. While the story, incomparably less discriminate and bathed in the almost eternal and unspecific wealth of oral narrative, manages to combine an ahistorical basis—the confusions of life—and an uninhibited delight in reproducing events, which allows it to attain a kind of realism, the Realist tradition not only failed to achieve this result in Brazil, but actually hampered it.

    However, it is obvious that Alencar is not a true storyteller in this sense, if for no other reason because he is writing. Thanks to one of those happy paradoxes of Romanticism, he combines an authentically popular vein with the modern, nostalgic Romanticism of evocation of the past, whose broad and sustained tempo forms a symbiosis between reflection and spontaneity—the profound and natural connection with nature and the community, counterfeited in the ‘visionary’ posture of the Romantics—which is the poetic inspiration of the school and the feeling for existence that it counterposes to bourgeois society. In its purest state, this second movement of the imagination can be found in Iracema, where the world evoked is never allowed to remain on the distant horizon of objectivity. In this novel, in every sentence, or at intervals which are not much greater, the images are always passing by, getting closer, disappearing into the distance, making up for another one in space, in time, in the imagination - an ‘inspired’ changeableness which loosens the rigidity of pure objectivity and brings back the element of vital interest and excitement in memory and perception. The same thing can be seen in O guarani [The Guarani Indian], and the beautiful introductory description of O tronco do ipê [The Trunk of the Ipê, a native Brazilian flowering tree]. Mutatis mutandis, this is the rhythm of the great Romantic meditation in which, by an effort of silence and mental intensity, the complexity of the world is grasped and retained, to be recomposed—in moments of exaltation, plenitude and clarity—in the continuous, unbroken flow of the imagination. Note, however, that however affirmative these visions may be, in Hölderlin or the English poets for example, the world they construct is always unreal—the unstable, tremulous world of a visualization governed by the mind—whose plenitude ‘returns’ to men the feeling of nature and of life which modern society seems to have taken away from them. That is an important difference: Alencar's nature has a great deal of this in it: it too is saturated with nostalgia, but there are moments when it is just the Brazilian landscape, and nothing more. Where the Romantics, polemically attacking their own time, restored perception and nature back to an imaginarily pristine state, what Alencar is doing is contributing to the glory of his country, singing the beauties of its landscape and teaching his fellow-countrymen to see it. The Romantic spell allows him, thus, to give value to his homeland, instead of rediscovering it, like his European models, in opposition to his less sensitive contemporaries. In this way, the Romantic exaltation of nature lost its negative pull in the Brazilian context, and ended setting up the patriotic model as far as landscape description goes. The prestige of a modern literary movement gave prestige to the country, which others thought uncouth, while the discovery of our country by this same literary movement backed up its claim to truth (see Antonio Candido, Formação da literatura brasileira, Vol. 2, p. 9). Very pleased with themselves, and proud of being in tune with progress, our elites got themselves up to date with feelings which told them to despair of civilization. That's what you call being a young country. That's the reason for the very peculiar juxtaposition in Iracema of a poetry of distance, which gilds the Indian names and features of the landscape with a Romantic glow, to a purely informative, or propagandistic intention. It's a juxtaposition which opens up a space for indifference, between true literature and mere jingoism, or real nostalgia and postcard conventionalism, a combination picked up later, in a comic—and so, this time, genuine—vein, in the early poetry of the Modernists. In a degraded version, completely deprived of naiveté, the confusion between Brazil, the empirical country, and paradise—the ‘genteel fib’ that Mário de Andrade spoke of—is today the daily bread of official propaganda.

    However that may be, the breeze of Romantic meditation also got as far as the Realist novel, however much it may have been diluted by the prose medium, and hindered by such wordly subject-matter. Instead of being set in untamed nature or in an isolated village, now we have the developed totality of the social world: to give his readers the equivalent of the contemplative plenitude of the poet, the novelist forces himself to blend into his prose the necessary mass of factual knowledge, their analytic and critical amplification, and finally the unimpeded flow of reflection—a synthesis which goes entirely against the tendency of the times, in which these three requisites clashed with one another, as indeed they still clash. Again, Balzac will be the model. His visionary posture, which is rehearsed and not always convincing, pretends to be the ‘genius's’ capacity to take in the France of the era of capital in a single mental glance; to divine its complex movement from any given suggestive detail; freely to fantasize about it, without this stopping him uttering all kinds of witty, original, extraordinary (etc.) truths. The nature of the subject-matter, however, gets in the way: this reflective tone, in such close intimacy with the bourgeois world, can only be kept up with a struggle—transactions are not landscapes or destinies—which is why we occasionally get the impression that Balzac's visionary power is also an immense urge to gossip. Alencar, who is trying to get the same atmosphere, achieves good results when he is being retrospective: leaving the main conflict (where he is less successful), he goes back, to set out, from the beginning, the story of one of its elements, which he does with a sure, interesting, economical—and poetic—skill. Apart from the earlier history of Aurelia, that of Seixas, and Chapter 10, Part I of O tronco do ipê are good examples. Brief and informative by definition, such retrospective stories limit any ideological reflections on the part of the narrator or the character (reflections which spoil Alencar's urban, critical novels), and the crazy, complicated plots (which spoil the novels of adventure). It is realist by definition: its method is the clear, suggestive concatenation of the actions, with the aim fixed on the situation which originated the flash-back in the first place. The result is a less tense shaping of the actions, which is interested above all in the description, and not the criticism, of the most important forces affecting the story. It is a narrative style in which mimetic talent, local, Brazilian culture, and Alencar's wider vision of it stand out, while at the same time the clashing effects produced by our ideological life are minimized. Alencar only has occasional recourse to this style in Senhora, but it is central in Til and O tronco do ipê, the novels he sets on plantations. These are books with an abstruse plot, linked to a subliterary conception of destiny and the expiation of guilt—but this very conception lightens their prose, in the way we have seen in the case of the flashback. Instead of the analytical complexity of the problems dealt with, we have the force of destiny. In either case, we are dealing with rich plantation-owners, who have to pay, comprehensively, for the forgotten ill-deeds of their youth, However, when destiny comes onto the scene and falls on the unfortunate mortals, the weight of their guilt coincides in large measure—to the advantage of the story—with the weight of the past, with the concatenation and the purgation of the objective conflicts of the world of real plantations: illegitimate children, slaves gone mad with fear, embezzled property, hired toughs, murders, arson, superstition, revolts in the slave-quarters, etc. The chapters surrounding the fire in Til (Chapters 1-9, Part 4) can be read to get an idea of the strength and the extent of this kind of action. And in fact, it is in the unity and strength of the construction of long, varied sequences like this one, that the romantic, ‘subjective’ power of the narrator shows itself. It is also there, in the spontaneous manner with which images and words come to him (it is so spontaneous that at times it verges on the nonsensical) that Alencar's diction comes close to that of common, pre-literary speech. The narrative movement, in its turn, fragments into short episodes, compatible with the narrative of popular tradition. For me, considering what might have been, these are his two best books.

30. Senhora, p. 1203.

31. Obra Completa, Vol. I, p. 650.

32. Ibid., pp. 608, 652.

33. The expression and the problems were suggested to me by Alexandre Eulálio, who sees Alencar's diction as a readjustment of the juridico-political prose of the student coteries of São Paulo [the Law Faculty which Alencar attended, Ed. note], which would always mark his fictional prose style.

34. In A moreninha, Ch. 3, the hero, a medical student, in enquiring after the health of a respectable mature woman, and being given various euphemistic descriptions, tells her that she has haemorrhoids.

35. Chapters 30-3 of Memórias póstumas deal with the hero's passing fancy for a sixteen-year-old illegitimate girl; the Parnassian-Naturalist poets flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century—Schwarz is probably thinking of such bizarre poets as Augusto dos Anjos (1884-1914); for Oswald de Andrade see essay 8; Nelson Rodrigues (1913-80), Rio dramatist, who focusses on the seamy side of the petty-bourgeois existence in Rio; Dalton Trevisan (b. 1925), in his short stories, deals with rather similar subjects, though in the provincial city of Curitiba.

36. In a note appended to Senhora, p. 1213.

37. Senhora, pp. 955, 959, 968, 1054.

38. Diva, p. 527.

39. A pata da gazela, p. 609.

40. Gilberto Freyre takes note of the problem, perceptively as far as its lasting presence in Brazilian life, but blinkered by class as far as its difficulties are concerned—above all, without the least aloofness from it, in spite of the almost hundred years that have passed: ‘So we should be aware of this contradiction in Alencar: his antipatriarchal modernity in some respects—he is even in favour of ‘a certain emancipation of women’—and his traditionalism in other respects: including his delight in the authentically Brazilian figure of the virginal young girl of the patriarchal plantation.’ ‘It is as if Alencar, through this Alice, at the same time so traditional and so modern, had anticipated the attempt at the renewal of Brazilian culture on a modernist and traditionalist base which the Regionalist Moyement of Recife [founded by Freyre in 1926: Ed. note] represented, alongside the grander Modernism of São Paulo, one wing of which also tried to combine these same conflicting tendencies’. Gilberto Freyre, José de Alencar, Cadernos de Cultura, pp. 15, 27-8.

41. With the opposite intention, Paul Bourget makes the same observation: ‘Reading his books, one feels a singular respect for this noble spirit who, although given to daring analysis and to dangerous forms of curiosity, managed to keep the cult for everything gentlemanly, for women and for love.’ Pages de Critique et de Doctrine (Plon, Paris 1912) p. 113. Perhaps affected by the Paris Commune, Dumas fils is more direct: ‘The time has passed when one could be witty, charming, libertine, sarcastic, sceptical and fanciful; these are not the times for that. God, nature, work, marriage, love, children are serious matters’. (Preface to La Femme Claude, quoted in Anthologie des Préfaces de Romans Français du XIXe Siècle, ed. H. S. Gershman and K. B. Whitworth (Julliard, Paris 1964), p. 325.

42. The distinction between conformism and conciliation in Alencar was pointed out to me by Clara Alvim.

43. Antonio Candido, ‘Critica e sociologia’, in Literatura e Sociedade, Ca. Editora Nacional, São Paulo 1965, pp. 6-7.

44. Senhora, p. 954.

45. Ibid., pp. 1044, 1028.

46. Ibid., p. 955.