The Pearl Necklace: Toward an Archaeology of Brazilian Transition Discourse.

Abstract

In his book-length publication in English, Roberto Reis re-evaluates the Brazilian literary canon, stressing the authoritarian undercurrent in much of that country's cultural discussion and rejecting the idea that literature has been a force for positive social change. Reis analyzes 8 works of fiction written during what he calls the transition period between 1850 and 1950 when Brazil advanced from an agrarian society to an urban society. His map of the country's modernization reveals the role of intellectuals - often co-opted in construction of a strong, central state - and the aversion toward history that he says characterizes much of Brazilian social formation. Even Brazil's leftist literature parallels the history written by the dominant groups, he argues, and it perpetuates the unjust, closed, and elitist structure of the State. He sums up the concerns of the book by asserting, History must be taken as a problem. Organized around the mataphor of a pearl necklace, each chapter (or bead on the strand) addresses a specific feature of the authoritarian question. The writers discussed - those ignored by contemporary Brazilian criticism as well as those canonized - include Jose de Alencar, Humberto de Campos, Jose Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Galeao Coutinho, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Machado de Assis and Erico Verissimo are the two discussed here whose literary practice, as Randal Johnson observes in his Foreword, fractures the monolithic solidity of discursive certainty, linking them to later writers such as Oswald de Andrade, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, and Clarice Lispector.