Naturalism against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-Siècle Portugal and Brazil by David J. Bailey

Abstract

MLR, .,   highlights the creativity of much of the work produced against the backdrop of economic, social, and political upheaval. ‘Contexto, texto e intertexto en Cuaderno de vacaciones (), de Luis Alberto de Cuenca’ by Juan José Lanz analyses the collection in terms of its context, thematic structure, formal structure, and intertextual references, offering a very perceptive reading of the author’s work. Finally, Javier Letrán’s ‘La lírica en los tiempos del neoliberalismo: reflexiones sobre Balada en la muerte de la poesía, de Luis García Montero’ examines the aforementioned prose poems, and presents the death of poetry as evidence of the intrinsic value of literature and, more specifically, the lyric genre. is carefully curated volume offers a superb homage to one of the UK’s most prolific and respected Hispanists. e contributions, both individually and collectively , provide inspiration for the discipline much as Dadson did throughout his career. U  L D C Naturalism against Nature: Kinship and Degeneracy in Fin-de-Siècle Portugal and Brazil. By D J. B. (Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . ix+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. e transnational dimensions of literary Naturalism operating between Brazil and Portugal are explored in this excellently written book by David Bailey. By selecting four authors—Abel Botelho, Eça de Queirós, Aluísio Azevedo, and Adolfo Caminha—the author examines how the scientific gaze in the late nineteenth century sought out the ‘nature’ of human passions and behaviours, especially those that were labelled deviant or served to disrupt the familial, societal, patriarchal, and colonial status quo. Naturalism thus read off the body and its desires the keys for understanding the decadence of society and oen prescribed a set of diagnoses for its recuperation. Between the identification and the prescription, however, different expressions of Naturalism evoked a tangled web of intimacies, kinships, and ties that were not all reducible to, or easily contained by, degeneration or undesirability. As Bailey argues, ‘Naturalism [. . .] formed part of a wider arc of epistemological approaches to the nineteenth century that drew on Positivist principles of reason and logic as the only valid route to truth’ (p. ). is truth was refracted through different literary, cultural, and geographical traditions and, while certain aspects were held in common from one side of the Atlantic to the other, others were not. While all authors concerned may have, in broad terms, accepted the ‘presumed supremacy of “science”’ (p. ), some were also daring enough ‘to dwell upon the insufficiency of the discourses that they nevertheless deploy[ed]’ (p. ). While there was such a phenomenon as Lusophone Naturalism, Eça and Botelho deployed it to reimagine the family in relation to the rest of Europe, echoing the fact of Portugal’s ‘semi-peripheral’ positionality within European capitalism and colonialism. ese authors were also in tune with connotations surrounding the  Reviews ‘decadence’ of fin-de-siècle society and, especially, the visibility of practices such as homosexuality. e illnesses of the country were thus identified. Caminha and Azevedo were, by contrast, more concerned with the viability of the future project of Brazil as a country shot through with racism and the legacy of colonialism. Each chapter could be read in its own right. e one on Botelho, for example, rereads O Barão de Lavos as one of the author’s series on ‘social pathology’, places its representation of ‘pederasty’ within the scientific discourse of the period, and analyses how the tensions around it worked to display and simultaneously disavow the practice as an expression of an atavistic past which threatened the present. It was, therefore, both ‘reductive and productive, surprisingly generative in its obsession with degeneracy’ (p. ). Caminha’s Bom Crioulo seemingly rewrites the notion of the family and subverts what is ‘against nature’ in order to ‘make space for the new citizen, the freed slave fighting for recognition in the wake of abolition’ (p. ). Degeneration theory becomes productive in a Foucauldian sense in terms of the effects it engenders. At times, Bailey perhaps over-emphasizes the internal consistency and the workings of ‘scientific’ thought by pointing to ‘pseudo-scientific’ ideas and...