Antonio Candido: On Literature and Society
224
Antonio Candido: On Literature and Society
224Paperback
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Overview
Here Howard Becker makes available for an English-speaking audience a collection of the provocative work of Antonio Candido, one of the leading men of letters in Brazil. Trained as a sociologist, Candido conceives of literature as a social project and is equally at home in textual analyses, discussions of literary theory, and sociological, anthropological, and historical argument. It would be impossible to overstate his impact on the intellectual life of his own country, and on Latin American scholars who can read Portuguese, but he is little known in the rest of the world. In literary, women's, and cultural studies, as well as in sociology, this book contributes a sophisticated and unusual perspective that will dazzle readers unfamiliar with Candido's work.
Emphasizing the breadth of Candido's interests, the essays include those on European literature (Dumas, Conrad, Kafka, and Cavafy, for example), on Brazilian literature (Machado de Assis and others), on Brazilian cultural life and politics, and on general problems of criticism (the relations between sociology and criticism, and the problem of literature in underdeveloped countries). Of particular interest is a long piece on Teresina Carini Rocchi, an Italian immigrant to Brazil, who was a lifelong socialist. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691607313 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #295 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
On Literature and Society
By Antonio Candido, Howard S. Becker
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1995 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03630-4
CHAPTER 1
ON VENGEANCE
When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. —Louis MacNeice
The sun had nearly reached the meridian, and his scorching rays fell full on the rocks, which seemed themselves sensible of the heat. Thousands of grasshoppers, hidden in the bushes, chirped with a monotonous and dull note; the leaves of the myrtle and olive-trees waved and rustled in the wind. At every step that Edmond took he disturbed the lizards glittering with the hues of the emerald; afar off he saw the wild goats bounding from crag to crag. In a word, the isle was inhabited, yet Edmond felt himself alone, guided by the hand of God.... He then looked at the objects near him. He saw himself on the highest point of the isle, a statue on this vast pedestal of granite, nothing human appearing in sight, whilst the blue ocean beat against the base of the island, and covered it with a fringe of foam.
Not long before, this man had fled from the dungeon where he had lived through fourteen years, a day at a time. A skillful sailor, an exemplary employee, he was nineteen when an anonymous denunciation sent him, without his knowing why, into solitary confinement in a fortress situated on another island. He hoped, he despaired, then resolved to starve himself to death. But chance put him in contact with a neighbor in the prison, a learned priest who opened the world to him through the cultivation of his spirit, analyzed the causes of his imprisonment, taught him science and wisdom, and gave him a map leading to an incalculable fortune, buried on the island where he now stood. The priest died and was about to be buried; Dantes took his place and was thrown into the sea from the heights of the fortress, a cannonball fastened to his feet. Thanks to luck, to his energy, and to a variety of skills, he succeeded in being saved, arrived at the island after some time, and somehow managed to remain there alone; now it is the decisive moment in which he will learn if the treasure really exists.
It does exist and it is beneath his feet. From there, he will gradually find the hidden entrance, which lacks nothing to fit the finest stereotypes of this kind of literature: a stone hiding a large iron ring, a flagstone to be removed, stairs, a cave, two buried chests. Simple, eternal, and always the same. He will take possession of the riches that have waited for him for almost three and a half centuries, he will be omnipotent, he will do everything he desires. With the disgrace and the imprisonment, there gradually rose out of the ingenuous sailor a new man, to whose changes we are witness. But the final realization, the man who is really other, we will only unexpectedly see, some chapters later, in the midst of the revelry of the Roman carnival. In this instant, when he is on the peak of the island, we find him still only halfway there, because it is still a few minutes until he will begin to come gradually into possession of the resources permitting him the final development of his being.
It is the halfway point of his destiny, between two poles of the human imagination: the mountain, from which one sees the world and has the sensation of power; the cave, where the mysteries that give power are hidden. The pinnacle that enlarges, the recess that concentrates. The immensity where the imagination flies, the egg in which it germinates.
He is two minutes from the cave, looking at the world from the top of the hill; when he emerges from the entrance of the cliff and contemplates it anew, he will already be in possession of the hidden riches and everything will look different. He will be anxious to leave and begin his new career, giving scope to the projects he had sketched in prison. "It was no longer a question now of spending his time contemplating this gold and these diamonds, and remaining at Monte-Cristo like a dragon watching over useless treasures. Now it was necessary to return to life among men, and to seize the worldly rank, influence, and power in society given him by this riches, the foremost and greatest force of which human beings can dispose."
From the heights of his island, he contemplates the world, before and after. Proust intended to write an essay on the role played by altitude in the novels of Stendhal. In fact, many decisive events in those novels take place at elevated points, though the battle of Waterloo occurs on the plain: the tower of Father Blanès, in which the little Fabricio learns and reflects; the Torre Farnese, in which he is imprisoned and loves Clelia Conti; the mount of the Delphinian Alps, in which Julien retires to think and to take decisions with the good Fouqué, or the tower of the jail, in which he vacillates between his two women and awaits the guillotine. But it would be necessary to go further and evaluate the role, in human decisions, of the heights transformed in literary image, in symbol, in myth, in unconsciously selected fictional space. How many poems are called "In the Mountains," or occur at the summits of hills?
In Romanticism there are many, and the poets leave these heights only to climb further still. If, in a poem by Magalhaes, the founder of Brazilian Romanticism, Napoleon crosses his arms atop his cliff, in order to contemplate in his imagination destroyed kingdoms, the liberator poet of Castro Alves takes an albatross's wings and flies over the slave ship. Tower, mountain, the island peak, the isolated cliff, the elevated castle, space itself, are favorite places of the Romantics, who situate the encounters of men with their dreams of liberty or power in them. Turning away from the burial of old Goriot, Rastignac hurls his famous challenge to Paris, from the heights of Montmartre: "Now it is between the two of us!" The city that lies before his feet is the World, the kingdoms of earth, and within him is a demon who incites him—Jacques Collin, or Vautrin, or Trompe la Morte, the future Father Herrera. These Romantic heroes do not reject the tempter, not even when they are toughened by deprivations in the wilderness of men, like Edmond in prison. They accept the challenge. The heights show the universe, as they did in the dream of Faust, who, from the heights of his Sunday hill, wanted to be a bird accompanying the sun, in a world without twilight.
But the effort of Romanticism was to add to the world seen from above a world seen from below, associating Mephistopheles with Faust, the witches' recipe with his desired transformation to youth, Walpurgis Night with the love of Marguerite. From below come the roots, the humus, the compost of foliage. Victor Hugo shows life from the heights of Notre Dame, the convulsive universe of Cláudio Frollo, his dream of power and lust. But he shows too the Hall of Miracles, a kind of vast underground of society, which sends its filaments into every part. Then everything is subverted, mixed, and it is the freak, Quasimodo, who defends the purity from the tower's heights. In another book Hugo shows the sewers of Paris, from which Jean Valjean comes forth on his work of salvation, as in life he redeems himself and redeems others, starting from the moral subsoil of the galley and social infamy.
Here the planes begin to cross, the atmosphere of the heights is mixed with the emanations from below, and we see that the imagination of the heights is fed by energy acquired in the depths; that the vigor unveiled on the mountain is able to act thanks to the temptations hidden in the cave; that the clear and luminous dominion practiced on the heights has a dark underside. This occurs exactly at the moment when Edmond sees the world, standing on a summit that has for its depths a cave from which will issue the conditions of his strength. And he knows quite well what this implies, to judge by what he will say later in a conversation in which he defines his being and his aim:
I too, as happens to every man once in his life, have been taken by Satan to the highest mountain in the earth, and when there he showed me all the kingdoms of the earth, and as he said before to Christ, so he said to me: "Child of earth, what wouldst thou have to make thee adore me?" I reflected long, for a gnawing ambition had long preyed upon me, and then I replied, "Listen,—I have always heard tell of Providence, and yet I have never seen it, nor anything that resembles it or which can make me believe that it exists. I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world is to recompense and punish." Satan bowed his head and groaned. "You mistake," he said; "Providence does exist, only you have never seen him because the child of God is as invisible as the parent. You have seen nothing that resembles him, because he works by secret springs and moves by hidden ways. All I can do for you is to make you one of the agents of that Providence." The bargain was concluded. I may sacrifice my soul, but what matters it? If the thing were to do again, I would again do it.
One cannot express it better, with such Romantic (and even sub-Romantic) phrasing, this new avatar of an old theme. Romantically, the devil confers a substitute divinity on the initiate, who will have in consequence a double nature, divine and infernal. All this is at work in Edmond at this moment in which we see him at the highest point of his island, the island that is both peak and cave, sun and darkness, whose name he is going to take, dissolving himself in it, adopting its two planes. He is alone, as a Romantic hero must be. The lizards teem from the cracks in the rocks like premonitory emeralds. The sun, on high, will rise again in the metal hidden in the chests, as in the sonnet of Cláudio Manuel,
As the fertile flames spring up in gold.
Edmond contemplates the sea, which is the world. For the world, he himself will rise like a pinnacle, when he is merged with his island. But, like his island, he will have in his innermost being another world, which will develop, take form, which will make up the final design of both his open and his secret being—placed on high, nourished from below. He is going to begin the Romantic battle against society, the battle that began, perhaps, with Schiller's Karl Moor, that was refined in the melodramatic characters of Byron, and that will be the principal crystallization of the myth of rebellion, until the passing of events permits other forms of subverting the heights with strength coming from other caves.
II
The Count of Monte Cristo was written by Alexandre Dumas with the collaboration of Auguste Maquet and orders itself around three principal fulcrums, geographically distributed, which Dumas himself designated as Marseille, Rome, Paris. Accepting this division, we can say that the Marseille part is good, the Italian part (done entirely by Dumas) excellent, the Parisian part—which comprises most of the book, of which it occupies around two-thirds—mediocre.
The mediocrity comes not only from the content and the journalistic tone, but principally from the prolixity, the redundancies, the dialogues padded without the least shame in order to make the material "pay." While these defects are worst in the Parisian part, they exist throughout the work, least in the Roman section, which has a lightness of touch and a charm that recall Stendhal. The stories of the bandits, the mixture of religion, love, and blood, the settings of the palaces and ruins have something of the air of an "Italian chronicle," though Dumas revealed a certain French philistinism toward the customs, the furnishings, and the food. Beyle would have rejected all this, but he would certainly have approved of the nocturnal adventure of Albert de Morcerf, who sleeps tranquilly while his life is at stake and while the captain of the bandits who imprisoned him in the catacombs reads Caesar's Commentaries with attention.
In other parts, above all the third, Balzac comes to mind, in the overly elegant description of elegant settings, in the preoccupation with financial operations, the political maneuvers, the rise of the middle classes. We remember him, too, in certain glimpses of prison and of wrongdoers. But above all in the case of Mile. Danglars and her friend Mile. d'Armilly, who run away together; Mile. Danglars, brunette and strong, dresses like a man, though men as such do not interest her, and their looks ricochet off her as "on the shield of Minerva, which some philosophers assert sometimes protected the breast of Sappho." At other times we think of Balzac through the affinity of certain silly things that clash in the solid fabric of the Comédie humaine, but fit comfortably in the loose stuffing of the good Dumas, seldom galvanized by the rush of imagination and the felicity of the phrasing. The passage below seems to have come from a Balzacian pastiche by Proust, who was extremely skilled in seeing the ridiculous traits of the great novelist:
Mercedes asked for six months, to wait and lament for Edmond.
"In fact," said the priest with a bitter smile, "this would add up to eighteen months. What more could the most adored of lovers ask for?"
And he murmured the words of the English poet: Frailty, thy name is woman!
But if we recall the names of these two great writers when we read this minor contemporary, the author who impregnates the entire book, perhaps more than Dumas himself saw, is Byron. The Count is a Byronic hero par excellence, the Byronic hero constituting the simplest and most widespread formulation of the pattern of the romantic hero—as it appears in the novel of terror, the fantastic tale, the sentimental and macabre melodrama, and narrative poetry.
"Franz could not see him, this true hero of Byron [the Count], or so much as think of him, without imagining this gloomy face on the shoulders of a Manfred or beneath the cap of a Lara."
"I would see in him one of those men of Byron, who disgrace marked with a fatal stamp; a Manfred, a Lara, a Werner."
One of the characters, the Countess G., is the actual Teresa Guiccioli, the last of the English poet's mistresses; she mentions him [Byron], and, terrorized by Monte Cristo's bloodless and sombre aspect, she likens him to the vampire Lord Ruthwen, whom she says she has known personally.
But, leaving aside the almost anonymous Byronism of the times in which the novel was written (the Byronism of the fatal, dark hero, who was only one manifestation of a character ideally established in the Romantic consciousness), leaving aside, then, what had become public property, there is the orientalism, which appears here in tonalities and themes that are clearly Byronic. Monte Cristo possessed seraglios in Egypt, in Asia, and in Constantinople, he lives part of his life in the Orient, traffics with Muslim princes, has for his slave a beauty who, exactly like the enchanting heroine of Don Juan, is Greek, is called Haydée, and is the daughter of an old man. One of the important moments of the plot is the denunciation she makes, which demoralizes and finally brings to his death Count de Morcerf, the onetime fisherman who betrayed Edmond and took his bride. The denunciation consists of revealing that he betrayed the Pasha of Janina, his protector and benefactor, to the Sultan. For Europeans, Ali Pasha was linked to the battle of the Greeks against the Turkish Empire, and Morcerf possessed the Order of the Savior, which showed that he had fought in the Greek war of independence, in which Byron died. Byron, on the occasion of his first voyage to the Orient, was also in Janina and was well received by Ali Pasha, whom he celebrated in Canto II and the notes related to it of Childe Harold:
Ali reclined, a man of war and woes:
Yet in his lineaments you cannot trace,
While gentleness her milder radiance throws
Along that aged venerable face,
The deeds that lurk beneath, and stain him with disgrace.
Finally, we note an ultimate Byronic feature: the symbolic incest, exactly in the untimely love of the Count for the daughter of Ali Pasha, the Haydée already referred to, whom he buys at the age of eight from a Turkish trader to use as an instrument of vengeance and raises lovingly as a daughter.
Thus, there is a clear link with the universe, the themes, the experiences, and the legend of Byron; and with respect to the already mentioned analogies with Stendhal and Balzac, these show how The Count of Monte Cristo is linked to a certain type of fiction and psychological ideal of its time, without reckoning with its kinship to its still more modest brothers—the novels of Fréderic Soulié or Eugène Sue.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Literature and Society by Antonio Candido, Howard S. Becker. Copyright © 1995 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Ch. 1 On Vengeance 3
Ch. 2 Catastrophe and Survival 22
Ch. 3 Four Waitings 45
Ch. 4 Repression's Truth 75
Ch. 5 Dialectic of Malandroism 79
Ch. 6 An Outline of Machado de Assis 104
Ch. 7 Literature and Underdevelopment 119
Ch. 8 Criticism and Sociology (An Attempt at Clarification) 142
Ch. 9 Teresina and Her Friends 152
Index 195
What People are Saying About This
"Antonio Candido is one of Brazil's most important literary scholars. I should place his best essays on a par with Erich Auerbach's work on Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature or some of the chapters in Mimesis. An even closer parallel would be some of the critical essays of Octavio Paz. Like Auerbach and Paz, Candido is an intellectual with a wide range of interests, rather than an academic whose speculations remain within the limits of his discipline. Like them, too, he writes clearly in a style accessible to a general reader. The essays selected here give a good idea both of the kind of problems Candido addresses and of his characteristic approach to them."—Thomas R. Hart, University of Oregon"The great thing about Candido is that he was a cultural theorist avant la lettre. In his own way, he defined cultural studies long before the field, as such, appeared. This originality, this inspired refusal to fit existing molds, this insistence on seeing literature as a social process (and social processes as inherently symbolic) still sets him apart. A broad array of scholars will benefit from this excellent selection of his work."—Candace Slater, University of California, Berkeley"Antonio Candido's is a world culture embodied in a locally rooted sensibility. Written in Portuguese, this 'tomb of thought,' his work, which was a major influence on two generations of Brazilian scholars, will inspire Anglo-Saxon readers. They will admire Candido's elegantly sober style and his insights on the subtle relation between society and its literature. Literary critics, as much as authors, can truly be universal."—Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, University of Chicago