Colony, Cult and Culture
editor's preface
The Dialectic of Resistance: Alfredo Bosi, Literary Critic
Pedro Meira Monteiro
Born in São Paulo in 1936, Alfredo Bosi is one of the most notable intellectuals from a generation that, arriving on the scene and establishing itself during the second half of the twentieth century, is responsible for the great critical paradigms that continue to guide academic production in Brazil. If we may situate Bosi alongside Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz, names that are better known to an English-speaking public, this is because, despite their differences and singularities, there is something that unites them at a deeper level: they each seek, in their own way, to understand the phenomena of a literature and a culture whose production is grounded in a peripheral experience—in this case, Brazilian—that develops in the seductive shadow of models originating in the North, especially in Europe, and always in consonance or conflict with these models. More broadly, we might imagine that the valorization of a culture produced in the molds of a peripheral formation is an essential part of a debate that applies to all of Latin America. Or, thinking of the fissures in a totalizing national discourse, we might be close to what can be identified, using a terminology more palatable to the Anglo-American academic sensibility, as a properly liminal culture—a term at least as old as Victor Turner's writings and employed here with the meaning that Homi Bhabha ascribes to it.1
Though Bosi's text was born under the sign of a critical constellation somewhat removed from contemporary theoretical debates in North America and Great Britain, it shares with them an astonishment before the complexity and richness of a world constructed against the tide of hegemonic discourses and that ultimately establishes itself in a symbolic space crisscrossed by the violent forces of colonization or, more recently, littered with the ruins of colonial power. Here a plane of conflicts and contradictions is drawn, a plane where all of the “ghosts” of the “repressed” will appear—to cite a metaphor recent studies have borrowed from the language of psychoanalysis in order to understand how forces that surge forth from the margins regularly put in check the wholeness of a national discourse with pretensions to inclusiveness. That which is repressed and then (re)appears in phantasmagoric form in the contemporary cultural and political scene ultimately designates the “performative time” of a site of resistance comprised of the people themselves. Bhabha looks to Fanon in seeking to comprehend that “zone of occult instability where the people dwell,” which from a postcolonial (and, to be exact, postmodern) perspective points to the ephemeral temporality of all discourses (Bhabha 303). It is here, I believe, that both the meeting point and the point of divergence with respect to Bosi's analysis of culture are to be found. After all, the performative space of the popular is for the Brazilian writer less ephemeral in nature than it would appear from Bhabha's perspective. Where contemporary theory, produced by a largely Anglophone academy, might see the imminent dissolution of all identities, Bosi's contemporaneous reflections seek out the daily re-composition of something that, while not constituting a fixed or stable identity, establishes itself as a strong environment for the reaffirmation of the repressed—a “repressed” that in both theoretical visions invokes memory, ritual, and myth in composing the performative space of its own resistance. In this book, this is referred to as the “dialectic of colonization.”
Before briefly reflecting in this Preface on the meaning of the critical project proposed and announced by Bosi's essay, it would be useful to inform the reader of the partial character of “Colônia, culto e cultura” (Colony, Cult and Culture): published in 1992, it is the opening chapter of a long book entitled Dialética da colonização (Dialectic of Colonization), which has been reprinted many times in Brazil and translated in its entirety into French and Spanish. The book contains ten essays on Brazilian literature as well as addenda that reconsider the critical material or specify the conditions and context of the text's production, along with an epilogue that accompanies more recent versions of the text, beginning with the 2001 edition.2
The book that the reader has in hand is the product of a dual effort aimed first at making a seminal essay from the Brazilian critical imagination accessible to an English-language reading public, and second, at placing Alfredo Bosi's name in the space that is rightfully his, among the great critical voices of Latin America that are present in the complex environment of reflection on culture in English.
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Alfredo Bosi tells us in his 1992 “Acknowledgements” that Dialética da colonização began with the courses on Brazilian literature he taught at the University of São Paulo in the 1970s. Here he perhaps inadvertently provides us with a first, decisive clue for understanding his critical project: the material Bosi brought together was weighed down by the spirit of a particular age. As a critical intervention and theoretical reference point, Dialética da colonização was born under one more brutal Latin American dictatorship, which both reawakened the ghosts of domination and fear and brought critics and writers to join the ranks of a multiform resistance that was not always completely organized or coherent.3 Literature's referential power, which allows it to speak of what is generally silenced, is especially important in such historical periods. In this sense, one would be justified in imagining Alfredo Bosi in his Dialética da colonização pondering, by way of a masterful analysis of a literary garment sewn together over various periods, the existence of forces that resist power's instantiations and machinations and that oppose, to the brutal mug of violence, the ambiguous and quite often liberating face of the letter.
The idea of resistance appears throughout Bosi's oeuvre. In a classic essay published also during the decade of the 1970s, “Poesia resistência” (Poetry resistance), Bosi described a “mytho-poetic will” already under threat from the “mechanisms of interest, of productivity,” with it ultimately falling to poetry to gather “those residual elements of the landscape, of memory and of dreams that the culture industry has not yet succeeded in manipulating for sale” (142).
The terminology used reflects the era in which the essay was written (with a word's time being itself a theme of absolute importance to Bosi), and reveals a deep desire to view poetic production as a possible instance of resistance. The “dialectic” that announced itself in Bosi's writing from the 1970s is less a teleological movement of consciousness capable of categorically revealing history's future course than it is the power to, in the context of a daily existence emptied of meaning, scrape at a wound where a certain liberating potential still shows forth. From this time forward a muted, insistent battle is fought, whose sounds of conflict resound in Bosi's texts. This is a battle against the “haughty autism” of words that represent themselves, that are subdued in the metalinguistic exercises of modern (or postmodern) poetry, and that are always ready to lose their original link with what we might dare to call community—a community of meanings and of peoples in which subjects share their experience with others and reencounter and discover themselves in the presence of those who are like them. The subject does this through the liberating power of language, by rediscovering the “living meaning” of poetic language among the silence that this language, being at the same time sound and poetry, delicately guards. Still in the 1970s, Bosi echoed Hegel in suggesting that though they were always close to each other, the poetic word and music differ because in the case of poetry the word, from an “end in itself,” is turned into “a means of spiritual expression.” He adds: “It is true that verbal expression loses 'the independence and the freedom of sounds' that is peculiar to music; but the silence that appears after the final word guards, in the folds of perception of the person who hears it, the speaker's way of being. The tone, prolonged in the pause, has an interpersonal reach” (Bosi, O ser e o tempo 106). It is not difficult to detect in the phrase's Hegelian impulse echoes of an even deeper belief that informs Bosi's critical militancy, which is the “at once simple and profound sight” hidden in Croce's definition of poetry as “a complex of images and the feeling that animates them” (Bosi, “Sobre alguns modos” 8).
In a certain sense, this “feeling” that animates literary material points to a subject that we customarily think of, from a modern or postmodern perspective, as divided, ripped apart, or simply fragmentary. In order to accurately understand Bosi's critical project, however, one must not suppose that what guides it is a simple nostalgia for a whole and unpolluted subject that is said to be lost in contemporary experience. On the contrary, Bosi always refers to a divided subject that is wounded at its core. At the same time, he is never interested in the simple chronicling of subjective fragmentation: what interests him is the seeking out in texts of that animus that sustains them as intersubjective provocations, the search for what meaning remains in them. And here I cannot fail to note that for Saint Augustine to signify meant precisely the capacity to make signals (signa facere), to produce something that the subject knows and in which he recognizes himself, since language itself can be a singular and irreproducible experience for the subjects and their interlocutors.
Alfredo Bosi's critical vocabulary, a highly complex mixture of theoretical and philosophical references, resounds of time, or rather it resounds in time: it is a lofty, risky bet on the value of human experience that would become lost in the market, and that capitalism would transform, without compassion or pity, into merchandise. But terms and concepts used in literary analysis are not and cannot be exact copies of the vocabulary belonging to the epoch in which the critic is situated. The spirit that animates a particular analysis may flow, and indeed flows, from the needs and concerns of the present. However, the study of literary material requires a dialog that applies synchronically and diachronically to the letter of the text being analyzed. The challenge becomes one of understanding the horizon of possibilities the writer finds open to him or her at the time of writing. Let Father Vieira serve as an example: it is not by chance that Bosi, in one of the essays that comprise Dialética da colonização, understands Vieira as a tortured author, deeply divided between the extremes of a “universalist discourse,” which would move him to a commitment to free the slaves, and the “barrier against the universalization of man” that the “colonial condition” erected, and that caused Vieira, the defender of the Amerindians, to simultaneously make an apology for black slavery (Bosi, Dialética 119-48).
It is not by chance that this is the punctum dolens of a long-standing critical polemic, which I invoke here merely to illustrate how Bosi's criticism feeds on this mixture of hope and belief in literature's power of resistance. Many of the harshest critics of Bosi's work hold this to be an undesirable ingredient in the context of literary interpretation, since according to them an analysis that remains faithful to the mentality and the rhetorical web informing the writing of someone like Vieira should be fundamentally concerned with the author's commitment to the “practical” reasons of the Empire and his coherently counter-reformist mindset. In this mode of criticism, it would be anachronistic to speak of a divided Vieira, tortured by his own conscience.
But this is precisely the power of Alfredo Bosi's criticism, which is sure to reveal itself to the reader of Colony, Cult and Culture: the providentialism, the millenarianism and the utopianism that may hide within texts produced on colonial soil are often profound manifestations of a great, inherent contradiction in what the poet Gregório de Matos called the colony's máquina mercante (trading machine), which is maximally exploitative while simultaneously creating the space for its own superseding. To cite Ferreira Gullar's aporia, which serves as the epigraph to this book, “for us the new represents, contradictorily, liberty and submission.” As we will see, to produce culture is also to venerate the dead, to remember them, and to find in the vestiges of the past the rationale and fuel for resisting the economic machine that consumes everything and everyone. In this vision of culture, literary material simultaneously belongs and does not belong to its time. Or, to put it differently, from within the rhetorical web that binds literary material to its own time this same material opens itself to other time periods that are contained in the time of writing. This is not an anachronism, but the need to perceive, or dare to imagine, that there is always a subject, a contradictory figure by definition, hiding behind the text. This subject speaks not only within his or her own time, precisely because he or she also speaks to us, the inhabitants of another time.
I assume that in reading this book the reader will feel the spirit of the time revealing itself, as an illumination, in certain passages. The hopes that individuals have invented always and throughout the ages to withstand pain and suffering march in succession before our eyes. The text is also music, and the attentive reader will hear echoes of many of the appeals for resistance voiced during our own time: from the critique of consumer society to a veiled hope for a return to community; from the alternative society so intensely rehearsed by the counterculture to contemporary Third-World theories of underdevelopment. All this suggests that there lies concealed in Colony, Cult and Culture a theoretical corpus that ranges from Marxist-oriented sociological criticism to the humanism of Liberation Theology, all mediated by a perplexity before the sometimes liberating, sometimes imprisoning power of language.
Words of resistance, taken from the roots of resistance: this is what Alfredo Bosi's criticism can offer when it dives into the depths of a text, a space where the spirit finds a relief that is nothing more than the inverted, magnificent sign of its own misery.
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Colony, Cult and Culture cannot be reduced to strict referentiality. I do not think that in a text like this one should only look for “information” on the Brazilian “case.” The reader will of course find references to the history of the Portuguese colony in America, and will become especially aware of how Alfredo Bosi positions himself in relation to the Brazilian critical and historiographical traditions, recognizing their merits and observing their limitations. This said, Bosi's reflection here is broader in scope: it seeks to understand the production of literature (or of what has been produced “beyond the pale of writing”) in its capacity as a fundamental, dialectical element of resistance to an overwhelming, conformity-enforcing power that, in the colonial context, advances unabashedly and often without any constraint. Ultimately, the colony is the space in which the trajectories along which commercial capital advances (with industrial capital following in its wake) are revealed in their full force. And yet it is this same space, crisscrossed by violence and ironically described by Marx as “idyllic,” that produces forms of resistance, which, archaizing as they are, can paradoxically speak to modern consciousness in loud voices. From the depths of a land that capital tends to destroy, a dissonant and beautiful voice surgesforth. Bosi will seek out this voice alternately in an erudite register that formalizes and sublimates popular experience, and in an oral register that deforms cultured themes in order to press them into the service of people's experience, which is always full of meaning.
The collection of cultured authors brought together for Bosi's profound analysis of resistance in the colonial context is a large one: there are the Jesuits from the first phase of colonization in the sixteenth century, the satirical poet Gregório de Matos and Father Vieira from the seventeenth, Basílio da Gama and the Neoclassical árcades poets of Minas Gerais from the eighteenth, the epic and lyric Renaissance poet Luís de Camões, the modernist Anglophone poet T.S. Eliot, the chroniclers of the Portuguese colony, the travelers, the great theorists: Marx, Burckhardt, Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Celso Furtado. And then there are other artists and figures, even more fundamentally at home in the matter the critic seeks out in his avenging desire to understand resistance in the complexity of its forms. These are located on the border between the popular and the erudite, and the colonial-era Baroque-popular sculptor Aleijadinho is chief among them. Additionally, and as the reader will see, the literary critic attentively and emotionally recounts the performance of a religious hymn he witnessed on the outskirts of São Paulo. To his (and our) amazement, the hymn combines erudite medieval poetry with the popular, provincial and entirely un-modern “caipira” tone of the singers and those leading the ceremony, and compels us to consider the complex weave of meanings contained in the idea of culture. “Cult” and “culture” are precisely the initial terms of Bosi's text, and are the words by the way of which the book's reader is invited to penetrate the hidden caverns of the complex historical process that is colonization, with all of its marks, ounds, advances, and retreats.
An additional word on a central aspect of this book: since “culture” is its principal object of study, and as Bosi seeks to comprehend it in the context of the Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial formation, the problem of acculturation logically occupies a central space in his analysis, particularly in terms of the notion of a “mixed” tradition and production in which not only the “high” and “low” registers mix, but in which the idea of the “reinterpretation” of one culture by another (this is a term Bosi takes from Herskovits) takes on an absolute and constant importance. The complex themes of hybridization and miscegenation, so appealing to our contemporary academic curiosity, both within and outside of Brazil, are foundational elements of Bosi's analysis. The reader will see how, in this book, a severe though respectful critique of theoretical models taken from Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's and Gilberto Freyre's classic analyses is coupled with a timely discussion of the sublimation of violence in discourses on race relations. This sublimation leads, or may lead, to the idealization of Brazil as a country that, less affected by a rigid segregationist logic of the type established in the United States, would have achieved the mysterious and long-desired ideal of a racial democracy. It is precisely on the often unseen (or concealed) aspect of violence that Bosi focuses when he analyses miscegenation in all its diversity and depth.
A final observation on the words that Bosi so skillfully works in his essay and that carry much of the weight of his reflection on culture and its forms. At a certain point, he makes the important distinction between the colonial “system” and the colonial “condition.” The colonial “system” can be measured and analyzed, and provides the basis for an economy organized by a colonial logic, oriented toward agricultural exportation and monoculture, and based on forced labor and the greatest possible exploitation of the environment and the people. The colonial “condition” refers to “a more diffuse set of experiences” on the part of historical subjects, who cannot simply be reduced to the role attributed to them by the economic system, but who in the very heart of this system discover the fissures and wounds where they will shelter the dreams, hopes, sufferings, and doubts they have as people of flesh and bone. It is in the colonial condition, within the overarching colonial system, that an alert Bosi will seek out the voice of his subjects—a voice we could ultimately term the vox populi. This is an extremely important element, which allows the reader to identify this book as part of a long tradition of reflection on popular culture.
It would not be amiss, perhaps, to look for the roots of Bosi's concern with the popular in an intellectual tradition that goes at least as far back as the attention paid by Brazilian modernism to themes and elements belonging to the “people,” among them their speech and songs. In absorbing and reacting to many of the ideas championed by the European vanguards at the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazilian modernism encompassed all those artists who, seeking to poetically recover the “people” without falling into the trap of Romantic idealization and stylization, programmatically incorporated the popular—its ways of speaking and feeling—into the realms of literature, music and the plastic arts. The person who went farthest in this mission, or dream, may have been the poet and fiction writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), who in his time was also a dedicated folklorist. At the same time, Bosi's search for the “popular” has little to do with the folklorist's cataloguing effort, and is much closer to those moments that in English-language academic writings on popular culture are termed “moments of freedom,” and which Juan Flores recently borrowed from the title of a book by Johannes Fabian.
Nevertheless, there are differences in tone: placing Bosi in the context of contemporary criticism dealing with popular culture it is possible to argue that he reacts with a certain skepticism to the dominion of “mass culture,” as if “archaizing” content were essential for the constitution of those moments that, as this book will show, lead to the momentary affirmation of another identity, radically resistant to the sterilized identities that the “system” creates and recreates on the symbolic plane. It is from the colonial, or postcolonial, “condition” that truly epiphanic moments are born, moments of affirmation of an Other who resists, let it be said once more, the economic machinery of the “system.” But from Bosi's perspective resistance is only possible through the selective exercise of memory. And here the Brazilian critic again approximates Juan Flores's discussion of the “pueblo pueblo.” In the end, the possibility of capturing those “moments of freedom” is only opened to those who perceive the “arts of timing” and substitute a more nuanced vision for a merely spatial conception of the “popular,” noting that ultimately the location of the “popular” is temporal and historical rather than geographic.
Therefore, what the cultural critic looks for, or should look for, are those spaces in which dominated subjects overlay diverse temporalities and force them to dialog with one another, constructing an environment in which the freedom of the people is revealed, albeit fleetingly. This is a momentary freedom that is the more moving and meaningful for being transitory and unrepeatable.
Princeton, NJ, November 2007
Notes
1 “What might be the cultural and political effects of the liminality of the nation, the margins of modernity, which cannot be signified without the narrative temporalities of splitting, ambivalence, and vacillation?” (Bhabha 298).
2 In addition to its opening essay, which is published here for the first time in English, Dialética da colonização contains chapters on the sixteenth-century Jesuit José de Anchieta (“Anchieta ou as flechas opostas do sagrado”), seventeenth-century satirical poet Gregório de Matos (“Do antigo Estado à máquina mercante”), Father Vieira (“Vieira ou a cruz da desigualdade”), Vieira's fellow Jesuit and chronicler of the seventeenth-century sugar plantation João Antonio Andreoni, or Antonil (“Antonil ou as lágrimas da mercadoria”), nineteenth-century novelist and politician José de Alencar (“Um mito sacrificial: o indianismo de Alencar”), on the strange coupling of a slave-holding mentality and liberal consciousness in nineteenth-century Brazil (“A escravidão entre dois liberalismos”), on the awareness of slavery's horrors, before and after the 1888 abolition, in authors like Castro Alves, Lima Barreto and Cruz e Sousa (“Sob o signo de Cam”), on the positivist roots of the idea of a centralizing welfare state in Brazil (“A arqueologia do Estado-providência”), on a typology of contemporary cultural production, understood through a balancing of the erudite and the popular (“Cultura brasileira e culturas brasileiras”), and finally, a synthesis of the results of the author's research (“Olhar em retrospecto”).
3 The Brazilian dictatorship, inscribed in the cycle of Cold War-era Latin American dictatorships supported by the government of the United States, lasted from 1964 to 1985, when a civilian politician who emerged from the authoritarian government's traditional support base was elevated to the presidency of the country. The first direct elections for the Brazilian presidency to follow the dictatorship took place in 1989.