When reflecting on the formation of Brazilian literature, Antonio Candido got to the conclusion that literature acts upon the individual with the same force as institutions, family and religion do, though, acting in a more subtle manner, and therefore, with more enduring effects. What enters through reading takes root without the reader realizing that it is being shaped. It enters as experience, as emotion, as identification with a character that seems impossible to be real, yet somehow sounds like the most genuine person you have ever encountered.
In his essay The Right to Literature (O Direito à Literatura), Candido places literature as a condition for humanization, alongside with food and shelter.
For him, depriving someone of literature constitutes a genuine form of violence; likewise, asking how the classics construct a national identity is, at its core, asking how a people learn how to recognize themselves and become human collectively.
Brazilian literature emerged with the task of inventing a nation that was still in the process of discovering itself, while simultaneously concealing what lay beneath that project. Candido called the network of authors, works, and readers who mutually recognize one another and together form a living tradition a “literary system.” The difficulty was that this system, in nineteenth-century Brazil, had to be built upon a fractured foundation. The language was Portuguese. The models were European. The intellectual elite looked up at Paris as the mirror of what it wished to be, while the real Brazil, the Brazil of the slave quarters, the backlands, the tenements, and the caatinga, existed on the margins of any literary project that sought to speak about it without reducing it to the picturesque. Those authors who were able to inhabit this contradiction with honesty, without looking away, became classics. The others remained as historical curiosities.
At the time, Machado de Assis was probably the one who better understood this dilemma and, for that reason, he was the most subversive. He understood that the identity the Brazilian elite sought to construct was a convenient fiction, and that convenient fictions need to be dismantled from within, using the very tools that sustain them. Therefore, he took the novel, a genre of the European bourgeoisie, and used it to show how the Brazilian bourgeoisie was a distorted copy of its original European counterpart, a performance of refinement that refinement itself wouldn’t take seriously.
Bras Cubas narrates from beyond the grave. because, in life, he couldn’t have spoken without partiality — and from beyond the grave he can say everything the living have an interest in suppressing. Capitu looks sideways because she knows that looking directly is a privilege Bentinho’s narration never granted her, and in this way, Dom Casmurro teaches how power constructs versions of reality that become definitive simply because the person telling them possesses enough authority not to be questioned.
Capitu’s guilt is determined by the one who holds the power of speech. In Brazil, that has almost always been the case.
It is worth remembering that the one who was writing was a racialized man, the descendant of enslaved people, epileptic, stutterer, and a regular attendee of the same salons that excluded him through the back door. Machado learned early on that Brazil was, in truth, two countries with the same name.
There was the Brazil of the manor houses and the Brazil of the slave quarters, and there was also the Brazil of those who moved between the two without ever fully belonging to either of them, which was perhaps the most revealing place, as it exposed, simultaneously, the illusions of both.
Machado‘s irony is born there, from that oblique position (to borrow his own words), which perceives what those who are too immersed are incapable of seeing.
A reader shaped by Machado learns to distrust narrators, and to distrust narrators is to learn to distrust power, which is perhaps the most necessary intellectual exercise of all and that no school teaches with such effectiveness.
Well, if in Machado the language is the scalpel that cuts through the appearances of the elite, when we shift our attention to the Brazilian Northeast of the 1930s, Graciliano Ramos transforms language into the first wound of exclusion. If the author of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas) distrusts rhetorical excess, the author of Barren Lives (Vidas Secas) exposes the abyss of enforced silence. In Barren Lives, Fabiano attempts to formulate a thought, but the sentence dissolves before it can be completed. The words had been taken away before he even arrived, taken away by hunger, by drought, by the colonel, by the historical accumulation of a country that decided certain people did not need language in order to exist.
Graciliano Ramos constructs his argument through what he takes away, demonstrating that poverty penetrates deeply into language, that oppression settles where it is most invisible and most enduring, and that the first confiscation is always the confiscation of words.
It is worth recalling that Graciliano himself was imprisoned without trial during the Estado Novo, in 1936, and spent almost a year in detention without facing formal charges. From that experience emerged Prison Memoirs (Memórias do Cárcere), published posthumously, a work that is at the same time autobiography and fiction, testimony and a literary creation of the highest order. Graciliano wrote from within violence, with a body that violence had passed over, and yet his prose is restrained, precise, devoid of even the slightest trace of sentimentalism. That restraint is itself a response. The Brazil that Graciliano constructed was cut out of the official photograph. It has no place in samba or in folklore. Precisely for that reason, it attains a depth that celebratory books rarely achieve, because the identity of a people also includes what this people recognizes, uncomfortably, what it is, and not merely what it claims to be.
The passage from this real Brazil to a metaphysical Brazil is guided by the hand of the ones who decided that language required a new baptism.
Guimarães Rosa remade the language from within, as someone renovating a house by replacing its walls while the people were still asleep in their rooms. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertão: Veredas) encompasses the vastness, the doubt, the devil that maybe doesn’t exist, but yet continues to haunt. Riobaldo narrates as one who prays, in circles, forever returning to the same point to see whether, this time, the answer might be different. Sir, you who are listening to me, does the devil really exist? The question about the devil is a question about the evil, the guilt, whether there is a clear line between the good and the wrongdoing, whether life is made precisely of the substance in which this line doesn’t hold.
The language Guimarães Rosa created rises from within the soil.
It is a fusion of the archaic and the neologism, of Portuguese and fantasy, of syntax folding upon itself and words that seemed to have always existed. The author studied Latin, Greek, German, Sanskrit, and poured them all into the speech of the countryman as someone seasoning a meal with ingredients no one would ever expect to harmonize. The result sounds like spoken language and it’s profoundly literary, it appears regional, and it’s universally recognized in its strangeness.
After Rosa, the Portuguese language became capable of containing more of the world.
Clarice Lispector wanted to discover what happens when language attempts to reach that which exists before language. Born in Ukraine but brought to Brazil as an infant, she grew up in Recife and later in Rio de Janeiro, carrying Portuguese as a second skin that, paradoxically, was the most real one. She wrote as someone to whom language could still be questioned, weighed, rejected, and attempted again, producing a prose that always seems to approach something that language normally does not reach.
The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.) begins in the instant after horror and moves inward rather than forward, excavating what it means to have been touched by something that has undone the version of oneself that was built with so much hardwork. G.H. kills a cockroach, and her vision of the world fractures. The rest of the novel is that fracture spreading, the consciousness struggling to keep with the damage. The Hour of the Star (A Hora da Estrela), her final novel, published in the same year she died, tells the story of Macabéa, a poor Northeastern migrant living in Rio de Janeiro, who is witnessed by a male narrator who openly admits he doesn’t understand the character he has created.
That confession is also Brazil’s confession about itself, the confession of a country that produces its own Macabéas without being capable of narrating them, that lets them die run over by a car without ever having given them a story they could call their own. What Clarice opened in the Brazilian imagination was the permission that interiority is a legitimate literary subject, that the female consciousness is entitled to complexity, that a woman may occupy three hundred pages asking questions without those questions ever needing to get to a conclusion in order to have a value.
in a country where certain voices were historically denied the right to unfold, to lose themselves within their own labyrinths without apologizing for the detour, Clarice was a political gesture disguised as literature.
From this point, it is striking how the canonical Brazilian literature of the nineteenth century was written predominantly by men from the urban elites of Rio de Janeiro. When it tries to speak about Brazil, it speaks from a part with the authority of who speaks for the whole. What the popular imagination accomplished, with a wisdom that academia was slow to recognize, was to create its own classics outside the margins of that project.
The string literature (literatura de cordel) in Brazil’s Northeast fulfilled for generations the role that the novelists of the Second Reign never managed to achieve: to be read, and sung, by those who lived Brazil from below. João Grilo is a classic. Lampião is a classic.
Popular classics circulate, endure, shape people, and give names to the world without requiring academic endorsement, and the true national identity is forged through the friction and overlap between these two canons, the official and the subterranean, that inhabit the same territory, frequently invisible to one another.
There are governments that understand this before any literary critic does, which is why they treat culture as one would treat an enemy archive. When funding for universities is cut and research institutes lose their budgets, when cultural funds are depleted and ministries dissolved, national identity becomes ornamental, made of symbols that depend on simplicity to function and that fear complex questions. In Brazil, those very questions exist within the classics that such projects require to be forgotten. This forgetting has a purpose.
A people who have lost the tools through which they understood themselves become more vulnerable to the version of themselves that power wants them to believe.
It is for these reasons and others, that the classics continue to be summoned even after the conditions that sustained them have been systematically dismantled. They create Fabiano without words, and with him an entire understanding of the linguistic poverty that his silence conveys. They create Riobaldo asking about the devil, and with him the understanding that doubts may be more honest than any certainty. They give us G.H. eating the cockroach, and with her the realization that there are experiences capable of dismantling identity and pushing the subject toward something that still has no name. Lastly, they create Capitu gazing out at the sea, and that gaze remains as a question.
The classics survive because they are questions that every generation encounters, still without answers, and that compel them to keep searching.
And perhaps beginning that search is the only movement that makes a nation grow in its capacity to see itself through its own eyes, a growth that neither size nor discourse have ever been able to guarantee.