Other Roots, The

Wandering Origins in Roots of Brazil and the Impasses of Modernity in Ibero-America

Pedro Meira Monteiro, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

First published in 1936, the classic work Roots of Brazil by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda presented an analysis of why and how a European culture flourished in a large tropical environment that was totally foreign to its traditions, and the manner and consequences of this development. In The Other Roots, Pedro Meira Monteiro contends that Roots of Brazil is an essential work for understanding Brazil and the current impasses of politics in Latin America. Meira Monteiro demonstrates that the ideas expressed in Roots of Brazil have taken on new forms and helped to construct some of the most lasting images of the country, such as the "cordial man, " a central concept that expresses the Ibero-American cultural and political experience and constantly wavers between liberalism's claims to impersonality and deeply ingrained forms of personalism. Meira Monteiro examines in particular how "cordiality" reveals the everlasting conflation of the public and the private spheres in Brazil. Despite its ambivalent relationship to liberal democracy, Roots of Brazil may be seen as part of a Latin Americanist assertion of a shared continental experience, which today might extend to the idea of solidarity across the so-called Global South. Taking its cue from Buarque de Holanda, The Other Roots investigates the reasons why national discourses invariably come up short, and shows identity to be a poetic and political tool, revealing that any collectivity ultimately remains intact thanks to the multiple discourses that sustain it in fragile, problematic, and fascinating equilibrium.

PART I

Familial Politics

CHAPTER 1

Marking The Starting Point

Readings of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda

Since the preface to the fifth Brazilian edition of Roots of Brazil in 1969, where Antonio Candido (b. 1918) reinforced the importance of Max Weber in understanding the book, the discussion of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s German influences has remained a central one.¹ We would do well to recall, however, that the German theorists to which Candido refers are not limited to the heirs of the modern hermeneutics, with Max Weber, the author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as an illustrious representative. Candido argues that, in bowing to the softening of Buarque de Holanda’s “dialectical” inspiration, the Weberian streak in Roots of Brazil has lost much of its original rigidity. It would take until the early 1990s, however, for a sharp-eyed reader of Antonio Candido to elevate that dialectic to the level of sentiment, casting it as a constitutive part of the Brazilian intellectual experience.² And only in the decade to follow would Candido’s work be understood in terms of the influence of the German tradition of Romance studies, and Auerbach in particular—an author who would leave deep marks on Buarque de Holanda’s imagination.³

If there is a “sentiment of dialectic” in Buarque de Holanda as well, the issue will demand a painstaking investigation, one that overspills the scope of this book. For now, I will simply register the idea that after the 1970s, Roots of Brazil is virtually inseparable from Candido’s reading. Hence the boutade from Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos (declaring that the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda “of the book Roots of Brazil is an invention of Antonio Candido’s”⁴) is somewhat illuminating: the preface’s questions have left an indelible mark on the text, with all subsequent readers working under the sign of that interpretation. This becomes even more ironic when one is aware that Candido himself, in another important preface, would declare provocatively that “the common denominator amongst most prefaces is their lack of necessity.”⁵

The reading sketched out in that preface is often reproduced in academic environments in Brazil and abroad, sometimes in the form of the hypothesis of ideal types built in pairs—broadening the old dichotomy in Latin American thought, stretching back to Euclides da Cunha and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.⁶ The observation that Roots of Brazil apparently lacks the rigidity of the framework that unyieldingly pits civilization against barbarity opened up a modernist territory in the critical imagination. From this view, European heritage and all its associated values would receive the impact of something beyond local color—the very possibility of reimagining the order of that heritage. It is as if from the entrails of an “other” (being none other than “we” Brazilians, in the perspective constructed by the modernists in the 1920s and transformed into an allegory by the tropicalists in the 1960s), there emerged a new reading and the formidable rediscovery of the modern. Here we have the new forms of modernity in the tropics: the “million-dollar contribution of all our mistakes,” in Oswald de Andrade’s avant-garde phrasing from the 1920s, or the “advantages of backwardness,” in the formulation that was so key for the Brazilian sociological imagination.⁷

In terms of Buarque de Holanda and his imagination of Brazil, this was a matter of turning a skeptical gaze on the imported formulas of a liberalism that continued to justify itself ideologically and which by 1936 was evoking dreams of an economic thrust that might finally cast out the specter of social dissolution from the political horizon. This phantasm was not merely the communism that had been prowling around Europe since the previous century, but also, and more importantly, the specter of the debacle that had shaken New York in 1929, and which in Brazil, with the crisis in coffee prices on the international market, had revealed the deep fissures in a venerable, prodigious political and economic structure. The 1930s brought a widespread renegotiation within the Brazilian elites, forcing the coffee heavyweights offstage or at least into new roles, they having been the first patrons of the young vanguard and those who would also help to shape the modern Brazilian university, sprung of the illusion of a still-mighty São Paulo.⁸ In the heat of the period, national and international politics were discussed with a focus on the debate over the virtues and vices of capitalism, an advanced capitalism that Buarque de Holanda had seen and studied in his German years. In the twilight of the Weimar Republic, from 1929 to 1930, the late Weber’s name still shone as an insuperable reference for the new generations of academic intellectuals around the young Brazilian journalist in Berlin. This is the background to the conception of Roots of Brazil—a half-German book, as we tend to put it.⁹

Antonio Candido’s preface both validated and suggested a reading that, after the late 1960s, would highlight method in Roots of Brazil (ideal types ordered in dialectical pairs), while it also underscored the magnitude of the political problem: with the nation’s Iberian roots revealed, how to seek out practical solutions for Brazil? In other words, which resonate some of the preoccupations that would keep so many generations of Latin American economists and sociologists busy, one might ask: how to imagine and propose the development of a country of Iberian origin?¹⁰

In his preface, Antonio Candido sketched out a veritable map of interpretative possibilities. Hence posterior studies from researchers of a number of generations, who although they may at times seem to distance themselves from or simply steer around his concerns, ultimately provide responses to questions that appear, albeit in embryonic form, in that preface. The preface does not stand alone in this regard, however. The critical reception of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s work cannot be understood outside the framework of an editorial effort where Antonio Candido’s name must be cited, although not exclusively. In the late 1980s, Maria Amélia Alvim Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio’s widow, discovered a trove of unpublished material that Candido would evaluate, edit, and publish under the title Capítulos de literatura colonial [Chapters of Colonial Literature].¹¹

The “Introduction” to this posthumously published book painstakingly details the story of the recently discovered manuscript: this was Buarque de Holanda’s contribution to a failed project from Álvaro Lins, who had planned to publish a História da literatura brasileira [History of Brazilian Literature] (through Rio publishing house José Olympio) in fifteen volumes, with Gilberto Freyre and a number of other intellectuals as collaborators. Buarque de Holanda himself would take on the seventh volume, dedicated to colonial literature. The story of the book’s conception and the planning of the collection—which would produce just two volumes, one on oral literature by Luís da Câmara Cascudo and another on prose fiction from 1870 to 1920 by Lúcia Miguel Pereira—is symptomatic, providing us with a rare map of the intellectual field that demonstrates the indissociability of literature and social studies in the critical imagination of the time.

The collection, perhaps overly eclectic to our contemporary eyes, was first proposed (as Candido tells us) in the early 1940s, which brings up two important issues in our understanding of Buarque de Holanda’s thought.¹² First of all, the studies for the volume on colonial literature, which would be written for the most part in the following decade, reveal that the project came to stand as an important and perhaps even an essential part of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s research, which by then had grown beyond the investigation of the westward push from the highlands of São Paulo—this vein had already produced the 1945 book Monções and would later lead to Caminhos e fronteiras [Paths and Frontiers] in 1957, while it also took in the Italian Renaissance, Luso-Brazilian arcadismo, and the Iberian baroque. This would lead Candido to speak of an “Italian phase” in Buarque de Holanda’s work from 1952 to 1954, namely the years he spent teaching at the University of Rome, an experience that bolstered the conception and composition of the thesis behind his 1958 masterwork Visão do paraíso [Vision of Paradise], as well as a “German phase,” covering his time in Berlin from 1929 to 1930.¹³ Second, beyond the story of Buarque de Holanda’s research, we can imagine what it might mean to compile a “history of Brazilian literature” in the 1940s and 1950s with such a wide array of collaborators. This was a highly specialized field (a specialization that Buarque de Holanda himself, a fixture in newspapers’ literary sections, could speak to with great competence and refinement), but one that also demanded a critical imagination with a vast scope. We contemporary readers frequently reject this vastness, given our stockpile of qualms around grand theories. But these syntheses, generally viewed with distrust, when not scorn, and which would be nearly inconceivable today, anchored an intellectual horizon that could resist academic departmentalization and the fragmentation of knowledge, engaging with the public sphere in ways that we are hard-pressed to understand today. The notion of the public, or at least the reading public, was entirely different, as it presupposed an audience thirsty for interdisciplinary work—this, much before our current quest for interdisciplinary studies, which can be understood as a reaction to the compartmentalization of knowledge that has shaped contemporary disciplines and fields.

The scene described by Candido in his “Introduction” to Buarque de Holanda’s posthumous book is itself an intervention that refers to and rues the specialization of the field of literary studies but also recalls a taste for synthesis that, we may imagine, serves as a profound link between the two authors: the one who left the manuscripts and the one editing them. In this sense, we can better understand the brilliant phrasing of the title: “I proposed Capítulos de literatura colonial,” Antonio Candido writes, “with the famous book by Capistrano de Abreu [Capítulos de história colonial (Chapters of Colonial History)] in mind, but particularly recalling a less systematic work, by Alfonso Reyes: Capítulos de Literatura Española [Chapters of Spanish Literature].”¹⁴

The reference to Capistrano de Abreu (1853–1908) suggests the fertile presence of historical studies within literary reflections, exposing the very intersection that produces Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s reflections.¹⁵ Evoking Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), on the other hand, is an indication of a more complex relationship, one that Candido may well have had in mind. Not only did the Mexican writer play a role in the invention of the cordial man, as we shall see, but we must also recall that the “non-systematic” nature of this “too-disperse work,” the Capítulos de Literatura Española, mingles in Reyes’s oeuvre with a profound sense of the organic nature of the latinoamericano.

The same year that Buarque de Holanda published his Roots of Brazil, three years before the appearance of the first volume of Capítulos de Literatura Española in Mexico, and after six years spent as Mexican ambassador in Rio de Janeiro (then the nation’s capital), Alfonso Reyes presented his “Note on American Intelligence” in Buenos Aires. Here, the organic imaginary stands out emphatically:

To speak of American civilization would be, in this case, inappropriate: that would take us to archeological regions outside of the topic at hand. To speak of American culture would be something of an error: that would make us think of a branch from a European tree transplanted in American soil. We may, however, speak of American intelligence, the American vision of life and action in life. This will allow us to define, albeit provisionally, the tone of America.¹⁶

This American “tone” or hue may be less a clearly established quantity than a speculative finding, the precarious nature of which comes through in Reyes’s prose, in his “provisional definition,” which is all that any interpreter of “America” can aspire to. Not only do both succumb to the allure of organic metaphors, but in both cases the train of thought also runs into the same doubt as to America as an entity. In the cutting terms of Roots of Brazil, “Inside, we are still not American.”¹⁷

A reading of Antonio Candido’s introduction to Capítulos de literatura colonial allows us, in short, to understand that we are standing before a vast map on which the broad lines of the imagining of the new American space can be sketched, this place at once ciudad letrada and carte de Tendre for the ranks of Brazilian intellectuals—or Latin American intellectuals, from a wider angle.¹⁸

The late 1980s would bring yet another attempt to reconstruct the critical memory of Buarque de Holanda—to wit, the book edited by Francisco de Assis Barbosa, Raízes de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda [Roots of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda]. A partial collection of the articles published prior to Roots of Brazil (up until 1935, that is), it includes two studies, true prefaces, by Barbosa (“Sérgio antes de Berlim” [Sérgio before Berlin]) and, once again, Candido (“Sérgio em Berlim e depois” [Sérgio in Berlin and Afterwards]).¹⁹ The former provides a firsthand testimony of the early years of the restless, immature critic—Buarque de Holanda’s “apprenticeship,” as Barbosa puts it—based on the recollections of friends and colleagues, revealing from the start that this world cannot be understood outside one’s circle of personal and emotional ties, ones which join the prefacers and the prefaced in ways that are often quite complex. Barbosa’s study and editorial work are thus one of the first serious attempts at a critical mapping of what might be called a prehistory of Roots of Brazil. Or, to recall George Avelino Filho’s astute turn of phrase, a search for the “roots of Roots of Brazil.”²⁰

This interest in the early history of Roots of Brazil lets us imagine an investigation in which the very making of thought takes center stage, where the scholar seeks both that which is revealed and that which the thought-in-progress hides from view. In the case of such procedures, Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of a move “against the grain” is always welcome.²¹ To put it in terms that may be more familiar to our contemporary sensibility, we might evoke the need for a genealogical effort in analyzing thought, recalling that the coherence of a discourse is ultimately constructed after it, and that its meaning is always, inescap...