Dual but Combined: Roberto Schwarz and the Sense of the Dialectic

This essay explores the arc of Roberto Schwarz’s literary and cultural criticism not just as an elaboration of the dialectical tradition forged by AdornoAdorno, Theodor W., BenjaminBenjamin, Walter, BrechtBrecht, Bertolt and LukácsLukács, Georg, but also, and more importantly, as both a product of and unprecedented contribution to debates central to the formation of Brazilian intellectual history. Taken from his Sentimento da dialética na experiência brasileira (1992), a book-length study of the Brazilian dialectical tradition’s origins in the country’s peripheral situation and its flourishing in the aftermath of the 1964 military coup, Arantes’s contribution begins by emphasizing the singular importance of Antonio Candido’s literary criticism to Schwarz’s own practice. Candido’s criticism asks, What in the end is the referent of a literary form, and even more challengingly, of a Brazilian novel? And, as is well known, Schwarz sets out to answer this question in his celebrated cycle of essays on Machado de AssisAssis, Machado de, beginning with A Master on the Periphery of CapitalismSchwarz, Roberto. Yet, as this essay also makes clear, his efforts to define the referent that Brazil names required Schwarz to revisit his own intellectual formation, especially as it related to the rereading of MarxMarx, Karl undertaken by a group of intellectuals at the Unversidade de São Paulo in the 1960s. For what was at stake in this rereading was not just the question of how the MarxianMarxism tradition was both challenged and transformed by the formation of BrazilBrazil, but also the construction of a standpoint from which center and peripheryPeriphery, metropole and colonyMetropole and colony, backwardness and progress, development and underdevelopmentUnderdevelopment, traditionalism and modernizationTraditionalism and modernization, hegemony and dependencyDependency are viewed not as binary oppositions, but rather separate moments in the development of a unified totalityTotality. The dialectic of dual but combined, this is the structural principle that organizes both social materials and novelistic form in Brazil, and it is the discovery of this dialectic that Schwarz’s attention to form reveals to demonstrate the true universalism of Brazilian literature.