Master on the Periphery of Capitalism , livre ebook
233
pages
English
Ebooks
2001
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233
pages
English
Ebooks
2001
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
12 décembre 2001
EAN13
9780822380801
Langue
English
A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism is a translation (from the original Portuguese) of Roberto Schwarz's renowned study of the work of Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis (1839-1908). A leading Brazilian theorist and author of the highly influential notion of "misplaced ideas," Schwarz focuses his literary and cultural analysis on Machado's The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, which was published in 1880. Writing in the Marxist tradition, Schwarz investigates in particular how social structure gets internalized as literary form, arguing that Machado's style replicates and reveals the deeply embedded class divisions of nineteenth-century Brazil.Widely acknowledged as the most important novelist to have written in Latin America before 1940, Machado had a surprisingly modern style. Schwarz notes that the unprecedented wit, sarcasm, structural inventiveness, and mercurial changes of tone and subject matter found in The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas marked a crucial moment in the history of Latin American literature. He argues that Machado's vanguard narrative reflects the Brazilian owner class and its peculiar status in both national and international contexts, and shows why this novel's success was no accident. The author was able to confront some of the most prestigious ideologies of the nineteenth century with some uncomfortable truths, not the least of which was that slavery remained the basis of the Brazilian economy.A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism will appeal to those with interests in Latin American literature, nineteenth century history, and Marxist literary theory.
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
12 décembre 2001
EAN13
9780822380801
Langue
English
A Master on the
PeripheryofCapitalism
A Book in the Series
Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução
Sponsored by the Duke-University of North Carolina
Program in Latin American Studies
Post-Contemporary Interventions
Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson
A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism
Machado de Assis
Roberto Schwarz
Translated by John Gledson
Duke University Press
DurhamLondon
2001
∫2001 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$
Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
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Contents
Introduction by John Gledson vii Preface 1 1 Initial Observations 7 2AFormalPrinciple16 3 The Practical Matrix 20 4SomeImplicationsoftheProse29 The Social Aspect of the Narrator and the Plot 6 The Fate of the Poor 56 7TheRichonTheirOwn76 8 The Role of Ideas 101 9QuestionsofForm114 LiteraryAccumulationinaPeripheralCountry Notes 165 Glossary 179 Bibliography 185 Index 191
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Introduction
John Gledson
In 1880, the brazilian writerJoaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) began to publish his fifth novel, the Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas,in theRevista brasileira;the following year, it appeared in book form. This is one of the major events of Latin American literary history. The first great novel to appear in the region, theMemoirs(as the book will be referred to here) need not be read for extraneous reasons—because of its importance in the history of literature, say, or because it is Brazilian, be-cause its author was mulatto, because it gives a portrait of a slave-owning oligarchy, or any number of other motives. We can read it ‘‘simply’’ because it is a great work of art, with a unique atmosphere that imposes itself on the reader from the start, an artistic unity and tone, a brand of humor that may have a≈nities with other books but that is also sui generis and still has its e√ect today, whether the reader is Brazilian or not. As Roberto Schwarz comments, in the originality of its prose it could be compared to works by great innovators like Henry James or Proust. Since then, of course, there have been numerous attempts to pin down and explain this elusive quality, which is all the more extraordinary in that the novel appeared, or so it seems, out of the blue. Nothing even approaching it in quality or style was being published in Brazil at the time. Machado himself had published four novels in the 1870s—the last of them only two years before theMemoirs— which are still read today, but for which we have to make allowances: they are, on the surface, conventional enough stories of star-crossed love, doomed to failure either because of jealousy (Ressurreição[Resurrection], 1872) or because of the protagonists’ di√erent stations in life (A mão e a
luva [The Hand and the Glove], 1874; Helena, 1876;Iaiá Garcia, 1878). Usually they involve the female protégée of a rich family and the heir to the family fortune: the basic situation is something like that of Pamela or Mansfield Park. In 1990, Roberto Schwarz published this book, the first to give a convincing account of this extraordinary literary event. Previous explana-tions were often biographical or ‘‘philosophical’’ in nature, or combined the two, often in simplistic ways. Machado, a successful and hard-working civil servant, had to ask for leave from work in Rio de Janeiro, to recover in the spa town of Nova Friburgo from an illness that apparently threatened his sight. Some have speculated that the sharply satirical, sarcastic tone of the Memoirs was brought on by increased pessimism. Others have given overriding importance to literary influences, most obviously that of Lau-rence Sterne, mentioned in the opening note ‘‘To the Reader,’’ on the novel’s digressive, quirky organization. None of these explanations was ultimately satisfactory, if only because they were one-sided, concentrating on either style or content when what was needed was something that embraced both. For some years, Schwarz had begun to elaborate a much less naive account of the process of change, which focused its attention on a combination of social and literary causal patterns. The central ideas of this work began to take shape in the period around 1964; they were elaborated and researched in the following turbulent years, eight of which (1969–77) ∞ Schwarz spent in exile in Paris. In 1977, on his return to Brazil, Schwarz publishedvencedor as Ao batatas[The Winner Gets the Potatoes], which reached the threshold of ≤ the 1880s without crossing it, though it promised to do so. In an ‘‘Expla-nation to the Reader,’’ he said, ‘‘This is the first half of a study of Machado de Assis. Because it has a relative independence, and the second half might take time to finish, I preferred not to wait, and to publish the chapters that follow straight away.’’Ao vencedorwas a considerable success: its arguments, about nineteenth-century culture and literature in general and Machado in particular, had a striking originality, and, what was more, fitted the novels of the 1870s to perfection, allowing one to read them with new understand-ing, even a sense of revelation. Not exactly an easy book to read, but written with a density and verve that force one to combine patience and pleasure, it was far and away the most influential book of literary criti-cism—not just on Machado—to have been published since the fundamen-tal shift in Brazilian culture that began to take place in the late 1950s and ≥ early 1960s. When A Master did appear, thirteen years later, it was an
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immediate success: partly because the wait had been long, but partly also because of the irresistible conjunction of the first great book by Brazil’s greatest writer, and the critic universally acknowledged to have risen to the challenge Machado poses to literary criticism, theory, and history. Al-though more demanding to read thanvencedor Ao —a di≈culty with its own logic and necessity, and its corresponding rewards—A Master soon went into a second printing and remains, without a doubt, the central point of reference for the study of Machado, with implications for the study of Brazilian and Latin American literature, of Third World literature in general, and of the nineteenth-century novel, particularly in the complex and long-drawn-out shift from,grosso modo,realism to modernism. The great achievement ofA Master,I think, is to explain an apparent paradox: how is it that a writer so rooted in his own time, writing in a slave-owning cultural backwater, is also, in many ways, soadvanced?Schwarz’s great perception, which lies at the root of a good deal of his achievement, is that the modernity paradoxically arises, to a considerable degree, out of the backwardness, and does not merely happen in spite of it. The primary object of this introduction is to set the scene, especially in terms of the Brazilian context, to help understand how, in the words of the title, there ∂ came to be a ‘‘master writer on the periphery of capitalism.’’ The book can, of course, be read on its own—more precisely, with a copy of theMemoirs at the ready—but its peculiar density will, I hope, be made less daunting by a previous airing of some of its contexts and arguments.
In the opening pages ofA Master,Schwarz says, ‘‘The possible correspon-dence between Machado’s style and the particularities of Brazilian society, slave-owning and bourgeois at the same time, occurred to me a little before 1964. The idea carries within it the concern with dialectics prevalent at the time, and added on top of that came the swift reversal of the following period’’ (3). The obvious implication is that this book and the one that preceded it have strong links with recent Brazilian history, 1964 being the year of the coup that put an end to the illusions of populism and marked the beginning of more than twenty years of military rule. Some understanding of this process illuminates the reading ofAo vencedor as batatasand of this ∑ book. The most defining moment of all is, not surprisingly, the military coup itself, though it should be remembered that in the first few years of the regime, roughly until the coup within a coup that brought the hard-line right to power in 1968, intellectual life still flourished, though within in-
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