Subjective Form: Registration and World Literature

This chapter highlights three instances of world-literary registration in the criticism of Roberto Schwarz. Although he is best known for his reading of ‘volubility’Volubility in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which describes Machado’s self-conscious transformation of formal fissures into sources of innovation, Schwarz’s work also contains examples of literary registration that do not involve the critical consciousness of the individual writer. To the Victor, the Potatoes!, for example, is not primarily concerned with the successful transposition of social reality into literary form, but rather with the failures of Brazilian authors like José de AlencarAlencar, José de to adapt the formula of European realismRealism. Furthermore, in Schwarz’s interpretationInterpretation of Antonio Candido’sCandido, Antonio reading of the ‘dialectic of roguery’ in Manuel Antonio Almeida’sAlmeida, Manuel Antônio de novel Memoirs of a Militia Sargent, it is not the author’s conscious engagement with the most pressing issues of his time that allows him to aesthetically register Brazilian society, but rather their textual suppression and exclusion. Here, then, are three modalities of registration: not only registration through the successful and self-conscious transformation of existing forms, but also registration through the failure to achieve this transformation, and through the exclusion of the very social material that is to be registered.