Seventeenth-century witticisms and other essays

15/09/2024

Culture • Literature • Books

By FLAVIO ANTHONIO FERNANDO REIS*

Considerations on the book by João Adolfo Hansen

Author of hundreds of articles and essays, as well as 22 books, João Adolfo Hansen is one of the most important intellectuals in Brazil. As a critic and historian of literature, his propositions can be considered a watershed in the study of Portuguese-Brazilian literature prior to the XNUMXth century. In addition, he devoted himself to the study of a wide range of subjects: the work of Father Antônio Vieira, the poetry of Gregório de Matos, eighteenth-century literature, the work of Machado de Assis, and the modernists (Drummond, Clarice Lispector, Cecília Meireles, and others).

He wrote about recent works and classics such as Dante, Cervantes, Camões, etc., as well as contributions to the study of ancient music and the visual arts. In 2019, Edusp launched Seventeenth-century witticisms and other essays, first volume with the author's main critical texts.

Count Lucanor, in the Book of examples, tells the story of a king who, deceived by swindling weavers, walked around naked and everyone around him, in order to please him, attested to the beauty of the clothes he was not wearing. The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen reworked the story in the short story “The king’s new clothes” and made it famous. In this case, a boy points out the king's nakedness and the subjects, moved by the child's courage, confirm the reality, nullifying the monarch's arrogance.

Returning to our subject and taking into account the criticism and historiography of Brazilian literature practiced since the 19th century, João Adolfo Hansen’s work courageously denounces the king’s nakedness. With analytical rigor and intelligence, he raises crucial questions about mechanically applied critical categories and asks: is it possible for there to be nationalisms before nationality? What are the categories “literature”, “author” and “originality” in literary practices in which imitation is a determining principle? How do poetic and rhetorical conventions function in discursive practices prior to the 19th century?

What is the convention of “historical time” specific to each period or each work? What is an author? Is the notion of “soul” the same in Dante and in Machado de Assis? What is the publication of a work in a society of oral and manuscript practices? What is a book? In this case, the last question is the title of a 2013 work, which proposes a broad debate about the apparently obvious notion of “book”, an object that is not at all natural and, rather, a material and symbolic artifact.

In the broader context of literary studies and human sciences in general, João Adolfo Hansen's thought dialogues and integrates with the main currents and authors of the 1983th century, among them Roger Chartier and Michel de Certeau, with whom he maintains friendship and dialogue. In XNUMX, with The o: the fiction of literature in Grande sertão: veredas, João Adolfo Hansen proposes new possibilities for reading Guimarães Rosa's work, beyond the regionalist sociological schemes recurrent in Brazilian criticism.

According to Leon Kossovitch, in the book’s preface: “Hansen makes names proliferate, generating languages, all of them from Rosa, coming from the desk, but no less from the cerrado, if not from the Black Forest, in almost always twisted use, arbitrary motivation that makes etymologies shudder, as it comes from who knows where and from beaten places”.

Generally, theoretical concerns are present in João Adolfo Hansen's main essays, whether through the revision or refutation of analytical categories, adjusting them to the text and not the other way around: it is the work that dictates the paths of his intelligence. Some essays are eminently theoretical, such as “Author", published in the book Critic's words, organized by José Luis Jobim; or “Discreet”, published in Libertines, libertarians, by Adauto Novaes.

In 1985, it published Allegory: construction and interpretation of metaphor, another theoretical study and historical-literary review of the fundamental notion of metaphor. In the third edition, released in 2006 by Hedra, the following observation can be read: “out of print since its second edition in 1987, (…) it is a fundamental study for all those who work with the interpretation of texts and images”.

Admirers and opponents

In any case, it was with Satire and ingenuity: Gregório de Matos and Bahia in the XNUMXth century, published by Companhia das Letras in 1989, that João Adolfo Hansen's name achieved prominence in the controversial field of “Brazilian colonial literature”. The Jabuti Prize in 1990 and his appearance in newspapers and magazines meant that his research and ideas were widely disseminated, garnering admirers and opponents.

The book's thesis refutes traditional aspects of studies on literature and the arts prior to the 19th century, including idealist propositions centered on the notion of “period styles” or nationalist projections. It demonstrates the inconsistency of notions such as “Classical” and “Baroque,” as they appear in literary history manuals invented by Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegel, and therefore refutes the use of recent anachronistic categories, widely used to classify heterogeneous modes of writing and styles that circulated in literature and the arts practiced until at least the 18th century.

With this, he highlighted and revised critical dogmatisms mechanically repeated in literary studies: “One can, with rigor, speak of 'Brazilian literature' in the colony or, simply 'literature', in the 1822th and XNUMXth centuries? The expressions are anachronisms. Before XNUMX, obviously, there is no 'Brazil' in the sense of 'nationality' implicit in 'Brazilian literature'. And the practice and concept of 'Literature' date from the Enlightenment, presuppose the National States; the progressive ordering of time; the impossibility of historical repetition; the separation of public/private; the bourgeois individual, self-represented as free competition, rights, conscience and psychology; the extinction of rhetoric and Aristotelian 'mimesis'; 'originality' as a cultural commodity; the new division of knowledge, in which the book of fiction or poetry is Art, as 'aesthetic disinterest' etc.” (“Baroque Metaphors of Brazil”. Caderno mais!, Folha de S. Paul.

The emperor is naked, pointed out João Adolfo Hansen, and soon there were favorable and opposing reactions. Among the oppositions, perhaps the most famous can be found in the pages of Folha de S. Paul, in the literary supplement mais!, from 1996, when João Adolfo Hansen and Haroldo de Campos led a debate around the poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos. On one side, Haroldo de Campos, with the article ““Original and revolutionary”, defended the “undeniable originality” of the poetry of the Bahian poet, considered a notable ancestor of national poetry.

On the other hand, the neophyte, an equally perceptive critic, in “Sharp rapiers and thick clubs”, proposed that the different historical and philological parameters of authorship and writing rule out the modern concepts of “plagiarism”, “intertextuality” and, above all, the Enlightenment and Romantic notion of “originality” as a satisfactory category for reading 17th century Bahian poetry. Furthermore, the absence of autographs and 17th century literary practices point to a shared artistic production and not exactly a creative individuality.

And so Satire and Ingenuity appeared and radically changed the approach to literature prior to the 2000th century, especially with the expansion of critical categories and the historiographical and philological principles available. In line with the new approach, in the early XNUMXs, with the thesis “Textual criticism in caelum revocata“A proposal for editing and studying the tradition of Gregório de Matos and Guerra”, Marcello Moreira further expanded João Adolfo Hansen's proposals, exhaustively demonstrating the dynamics of production, circulation and classification of poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos.

Later, the two experts produced one of the most important editions of this poetry, in a monumental publication in five volumes. The last volume, in addition to glossaries and bibliography, contains a laborious study, done by two hands, on the modes of production and circulation of poetry in Portuguese-Brazilian lands before the 18th century.

Father Vieira

In the study of 1970th century literature, the works of Father Antônio Vieira stand out. The first texts on the subject appeared in the late 50s and, since then, there have been almost XNUMX years of uninterrupted studies. In the recent edition of Complete works of Father Antonio Vieira, directed by Eduardo Franco, with the collaboration of numerous specialists from various parts of the world, João Adolfo Hansen was responsible for, in addition to other texts, the introductory essay of the Clavis Prophetarum (Key of the prophets), one of the most emblematic works of Vieira’s production.

In 2003, João Adolfo Hansen organized a volume of letters from Father Vieira, published by Hedra under the title Letters from Brazil, whose introductory essay is one of the main studies on the subject. Furthermore, when dealing with Jesuit literature (the works of Anchieta, Nóbrega, Fernão Cardim, Simão de Vasconcelos, among others), João Adolfo Hansen claims the reconstitution of the historical categories presupposed in the texts, both the poetic-rhetorical ones, originating from the linguistic precepts of the past, as well as the specific cultural and theological notions, such as: “Providence”, “soul”, “Reason of State”, “Just War”, “freedom”, “hierarchy” etc., shedding new light on the interpretation of these literary productions.

Thus, within the scope of literary historiography practiced in Brazil since the 19th century, inherited from the nativist propositions of Ferdinand Denis and Wolf, through the specific methodologies of Silvio Romero, José Veríssimo, Ronald de Carvalho and others, up to the most recent ones, such as the well-known approaches of Antonio Candido and Afrânio Coutinho, notions and theoretical models are used that are committed to demonstrating a progressive organic system of literary productions, the purpose of which is to define what is intended as “Brazilian Literature”, from the perspective that “Literature” is the representative repertoire of national identity. With this, the “national” canon is reduced to those works that best respond to the required nativist criteria.

In João Adolfo Hansen's thesis, in addition to discussing concepts such as “literature”, “literate practices”, “writing”, “authorship”, “circulation” and many others, which demonstrate the historicity of the terms, notions naturalized by traditional criticism, such as “baroque”, “nation”, “local color”, “national genius” etc., are refuted and the application of particular interpretative categories pertinent to the works analyzed is proposed. As a result, there was a notable expansion of the objects of interest, that is, of the available historical canon, and of the keys to interpretation.

Furthermore, discursive concepts that had disappeared, erased by cultural changes, or replaced by untimely notions, were reactivated, as João Adolfo Hansen observes: “The scholastic categories that make up the 'I-you' personality in the process of interlocution of discourses are ignored and replaced by liberal and psychological categories of bourgeois subjectivity; the metaphysical, religious and providentialist orientation of the meaning of history, which is typical of Portuguese Catholic politics in the fight against Machiavellian and Lutheran heresy, is eliminated and replaced by evolutionary, Enlightenment and liberal, formative, progressive and nationalist concepts; the rhetorical regulation of artistic precepts and forms, as well as the theological-political interpretation of their significance and meaning, are erased, proposing in their place external aesthetic categories, such as the expression of the authors' psychology, the opposition 'form/content', documentary realism, the proto-nationalist anticipation of the Brazilian national State. Furthermore, the naturalized use of the notion of 'Baroque' to classify this poetry and totalize its time transistorically generalizes the liberal, sometimes Marxist, definitions of the notions of 'author', 'work' and 'public'”.

In 2001, the magazine TeresaOn its issue 34, published one of João Adolfo Hansen's most famous essays, “Baroque, neo-baroque and other ruins”, a text reproduced more than once in other periodicals or collections. It is a detailed theoretical and methodological exposition on the study of ancient literate practices, whose specificities demonstrate other conventions of reading and interpretation, so that the otherness of the past is made known, with its own doctrines and judgments.

To this end, the terms and means of accessing the discursive ruins are discussed, according to “intervention rules” that do not distort them: “The past is happily dead and its remains are only of interest in the present as material for a work of destruction of universalisms that discard their historicity. The dead are only of interest in the criticism of the living and the very living.”

Several important essays by João Adolfo Hansen were published as prefaces or introductions to books with which he collaborated, directly or indirectly. This is the case of the opening text of the book Sacrament theater, by Alcir Pécora, from 1989. At that time, only the two critics could dialogue on an equal footing, given the state in which studies on Father Antônio Vieira's sermons were found.

This fruitful dialogue resulted, among other collaborations, in the book 17th century poetry, published by Hedra in 2002. It is an anthology of the so-called “poetry of sharpness”, organized by Alcir Pécora. The introductory essay, written by João Adolfo Hansen, is an essential study on the reception and interpretation of that poetry. In 2008, an essay of the same scope, entitled “Introduction: Notes on the Epic Genre”, precedes the works organized by Ivan Teixeira in the volume Epic, published by Edusp and the Official Press of the State of São Paulo.

Also from 2008 is the preface to Aleijadinho and the airplane: the baroque paradise and the construction of the colonial hero, a book by Guiomar de Grammont. In 2011, she wrote the voluminous preface to the aforementioned Critica textualis in caelum revocata?, by Marcello Moreira, a crucial work for the study of literature practiced in Brazil in the 17th and 18th centuries.

João Adolfo Hansen's intellectual interventions, from the 1970s to the present day, have enriched literary studies and the debate on the human sciences in general, with courageous and thought-provoking ideas. With a vigorous work, João Adolfo Hansen advocates for culture as an inalienable right and a means of social action and transformation.

*Flavio Antonio Fernandes Reis is a professor in the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the State University of Southwest Bahia (UESB). Author of the book Scipio's Dream: Cicero's Reception in Sixteenth-Century Portugal (Humanitas Publishing House). [https://amzn.to/3B5Ag0s]

Originally published in the newspaper Draft.

Reference

John Adolfo Hansen. TheXNUMXth-century sharpness and other essays. Organization: Cilaine Alves Cunha & Mayra Laudanna. São Paulo: Edusp, 2019, 344 pages. [https://amzn.to/47Je48N]