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Classic by Antonio Candido is re-released

Formation of Brazilian Literature is considered a milestone in the history of literary criticism in the country

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Formation of Brazilian Literature, by Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918-2017), is considered, by critics, one of the four founding books of Brazilian intellectuals' reflection on their own identity.

Despite the difference in objects and theoretical foundations, the book would be paired with Casa Grande and Senzala, by Gilberto Freire, Brazil roots, by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Formation of Contemporary Brazil, by Caio Prado Júnior.

The 16nd edition of Formation of Brazilian Literature: decisive moments, 1750-1880, carefully produced by Ana Luisa Escorel, Antonio Candido's eldest daughter, was published by Ouro sobre Azul, with support from FAPESP.

The launch took place this Monday (27/08), at the Foundation's headquarters, in event's audience which paid tribute to the author and was attended by former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and professors José Goldemberg, Celso Lafer (former president of FAPESP) and José de Souza Martins (adviser at FAPESP), among others.

In the preface to the first edition of Formation of Brazilian Literature, from 1957, Antonio Candido reported that the book was prepared and written between 1945 and 1951. After being read by Décio de Almeida Prado, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and others, and having been well received by them, it was put aside until 1955, when the author finally began the revision work, which lasted until 1957.

This little information is, in itself, quite revealing, as the author in question was not an occasional writer, but a stubborn intellectual worker. This was attested to the FAPESP Agency both by Ana Luisa herself and by Walnice Nogueira Galvão, professor emeritus at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo and assistant to Antonio Candido for years (“all his life”, as he said).

Ana Luisa recalled that she grew up listening to the sound of her father's typewriter keyboard. However, that then young intellectual, at the beginning of his career, was thoughtful enough to wait for the work to become popular, without letting himself be carried away by the rush of publication.

The result, as Walnice recalled, was a “monumental treatise”, on the scale of the three other founding works mentioned. “Due to this monumental scope, I consider Formation of Brazilian Literature Antonio Candido's most important book. He understood this formative process as the battle of Brazilians to have their own literature. And this could only be achieved over the course of two centuries, when, as European models were copied, originality was defined here. This angle of approach is very smart,” he said.

Among the authors who would have influenced him, Walnice remembered, firstly, Sílvio Romero, whose critical method was, in fact, the object of Antonio Candido's professorship thesis. Antonio Candido himself, in the aforementioned preface, mentioned, as a first reference, the History of Brazilian Literature, by Romero, “whose red spine, in the Garnier edition of 1902, was very early one of my fascinations on my father's bookshelf, having been one of the books I consulted most between the ages of ten and fifteen, searching for excerpts, biographical data and the author’s tasty judgments.”

And the phrase reproduced above constitutes yet another revealing passage. In this case, the precocity with which Antonio Candido launched himself into books. Not only as a voracious reader, but also with the meticulousness and insistence of the future literary critic.

“My father started reading when he was eight years old and never stopped. At the age of 10, he read auspicious, by Goethe. He read it through a translation, I don't know if it was Portuguese or French. At that time, he went with his parents to Europe and had a French governess, becoming practically bilingual. He said that, when he was young, he was so immersed in French culture that he often thought in French,” said Ana Luisa.

This youthful intellectual atmosphere was accurately captured in The Sharp Word (read at: agency.fapesp.br/18962), organized by Walnice Nogueira Galvão based on interviews, statements, articles and letters from Gilda de Mello e Souza (1919-2005), wife of Antonio Candido. In the 1940s, students at the then Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters at the University of São Paulo, the two, still single, participated in a select circle of young people from traditional families, gathered around the magazine Climate, which would come to exert great influence on the country's intellectual life.

The group included Décio de Almeida Prado, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Ruy Coelho and Lourival Gomes Machado, among others – all greatly influenced by the so-called “French Mission”, which, from the mid-1930s, structured and gave substance to USP , with the arrival of teachers such as Roger Bastide, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel and Jean Maugüé.

However, in Formation of Brazilian Literature, Antonio Candido was based less on the contribution of these intellectual contemporaries than on the guidelines of a 19th century French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), an exponent of positivism, as Walnice recalled. “He was also influenced by Anglo-Saxon 'New Criticism' and German Stylistics [Auerbach, Curtius, Spitzer],” he said.

The option to build your book based on the analysis of texts, using only subsidiarily the context, is a feature of this methodological choice. Regarding this, Antonio Candido himself expressed himself clearly when writing about the coherence of literary productions.

“At the level of the author, it manifests itself through the literary personality, which is not necessarily the psychological profile, but the system of affective, intellectual and moral traits that result from the analysis of the work, and whether or not they correspond to life (...) At the level of the moment, or phase, it is manifested by the affinity, or complementary character between the works, a consequence of the relative articulation between them, originating the style of the time, which allows critical generalizations. Therefore, it is not interesting here to rigorously determine the historical conditions – social, economic, political –, but only to suggest what we could call the temporal situation, that is, the synthesis of the conditions of interdependence, which establish the common physiognomy of the works, and are realities of a literary order, in which environmental factors are absorbed and sublimated” [page 39 of the new edition].


Politician and teacher

This appreciation of the literary text for what it actually says, and not based on the historicity of whoever says it, did not mean, for Antonio Candido, a lack of commitment to time and history. On the contrary, as a citizen, he made public action an ethical imperative.

He participated in the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) until it was extinguished in 1965, due to an act of the civil-military dictatorship. Afterwards, he participated in the founding of the Workers' Party (PT). And also the founding of the Faculty Association of the University of São Paulo (Adusp). But, according to the opinion of his daughter Ana Luisa, this action was guided much less by political vocation than by moral obligation.

“Unlike everyone else, I don’t think my father was a political being. In my opinion, he did politics out of obligation. Since he was a boy, he has been deeply touched by social injustice. And I remember well that sometimes he had trouble sleeping thinking about it. It turns out he had no religion. He was a total atheist. How could an atheist deal with this kind of unrest? Only through socialism. So, very early on, he became a socialist. Three friends were fundamental to this: José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a descendant of the Patriarch and a communist; Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, his friend from his university days and a socialist; and Febus Gikovate, in the Socialist Party,” he said.

“What I'm saying is very controversial, because it clashes with everyone's opinion. For me, he didn't like politics. But he did what he judged to be fair whenever circumstances required it. In his youth, he was a candidate for deputy for the Socialist Party, because there was no other candidate available. This was very characteristic of him: if there was a mission to be accomplished, he did it. He was also one of the founders of the PT and was completely loyal to the party. But, when the PT reached the Presidency of the Republic for the first time, it wrote a letter to Lula, distancing itself from party activity. He continued to support, but moved away. The knowledge of the world that formed him came through literature, and he always knew, through literature, the risks of being close to power. Artists had already warned about these risks, since Classical Antiquity, since the Renaissance, since Romanticism. And he was steeped in that wisdom,” he said.

Ana Luisa revealed that her father even postponed his competition for full professor because he did not want to be part of the university's collegial bodies and participate in university politics. “But, at all times when the institution suffered threats, he was there, on the front lines, to defend it,” she said.

This strong sense of responsibility he also expressed in his regular activity as a teacher. “Antonio Candido prepared his classes very carefully. He wrote them down and taught me how to write my classes too. But his classes were not read. The writings were used as support points. He always said: 'Never improvise anything. Always prepare everything you are going to do, be it class, intervention, conference'. And he turned this general advice into very precise guidance: 'Four double-spaced typed pages are one lesson. Write the lessons and, in two or three years, you will have an essay ready for a book.' So, he wrote everything down and then turned the notes into publishable texts,” said Walnice, who, before being an assistant, was his student.

Such guidance aimed not only at optimizing intellectual work, but mainly reflected respect for the subject and respect for students. “He was the best teacher I had in my life. He was absolutely clear and had the greatest interest in making the student understand. He possessed infinite patience,” Walnice said.

Patience and availability were also his characteristics at home, as his daughter Ana Luisa told, in charming details.

“My father and mother had me very young. They were two teachers at the beginning of their careers. And I requested them a lot. What impresses me in retrospect is remembering the patience my father had in helping me. I was always hanging on to it. There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't ask for it in some way. He was a very busy person and, during this period of my early childhood, he was simultaneously writing Formation of Brazilian Literature, on the one hand, and Rio Bonito Partners, on the other,” he told FAPESP Agency.

“They are very different works and both very important, each in its own area. At the same time, he had his academic activity, teaching classes daily in the afternoon and, on some days of the week, also in the evening. And he still wrote weekly for the newspapers. But there wasn't a single day during that period in which he didn't drop everything he was doing to serve me. I asked him to tell stories, I scribbled down the books he was reading. And he had the greatest patience. It took me a long time to understand the exceptionality of this attitude”, said Ana Luisa.

 

ReproductionSERVICE

Formation of Brazilian Literature: decisive moments, 1750-1880
Author Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza | 16th edition
Publishing company: Gold on Blue
pages: 800
Price: R$ 128,00 

 

 

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Audio description: In the internal area, frontal and bust image, man in the center of the image speaks into a microphone affixed to a table pedestal, and he gestures with his arms, keeping his elbows resting on a supposed table, his arms parallel and with his hands open. He wears glasses and wears a black suit over a dress shirt. Image 1 of 1.

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