By VINICIUS MADUREIRA MAIA*
Comments on the more than seventy notebooks made by Antonio Candido
“If death comes at night, it will find me irritable and restless, but not unprepared.”
Amos Oz (1996)
“Then I won’t go anymore
Finding myself in life as in a strange garment
Stunned on earth
And for the love of only one woman
And the impudence of men
Like today when composing after three days of rain
Listening to the song of the curruíra and the cessation of ruin
And prostrating myself at the feet of I don’t know what”
W. S. Merwin (1993)[I]
The historian Peter Gay tells us of a time not so long ago when there was a general and poignant need to confide in a confidant, even if this was a fictional companion or an artifact disguised as a solemn listener; a period when even the least restless children were encouraged to keep diaries—so as to make it easier for adults, especially relatives, to monitor and often censor their confessions. A time and custom that we still largely share.
Upon his passing, Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918-2017), a leading literary critic in the country, in addition to a vast and widely read and celebrated bibliography, left behind more than seventy unpublished notebooks of handwritten notes, a habit he had faithfully cultivated since adolescence on the recommendation of his mother, Dona Clarice, “a brilliant woman and a great reader”. The number of notebooks he wrote throughout his life is undetermined, as he confessed to having destroyed many others after “negative outbursts”. The documentary Antonio Candido, final notes (2024), directed by Eduardo Escorel, revolves around the last two volumes, written between the end of 2015 and mid-2017, the year of his death.
The tape highlights the intertwining of photographs in the profusion of references drawn from each strip of remembrance. Escorel here inaugurates a new direction in his line of production and in his handling of archive images and current footage, which dates back to the late 1960s, and his growing appreciation for contemporary figures: that of an imagery that is no longer interpreted simultaneously, since, given the nature of the documented material, the notebooks become epigraphs and glosses to the figurations. The images are preceded by Antonio Candido's notes, which constitute a commentary. The precedence is given to the world in brochure form, concrete, even if it comes from a fragment.
Perhaps it does not seem strange then to consider both notebooks, although not reproduced in full, as the main characters of the film, whose plot develops somewhat linearly with each new entry, page after page, accompanied by the narration of actor Matheus Nachtergaele. His is the ghostly voice of the deceased author who was tasked with recounting something of his own life based on his last entries: “In the early hours of May 12, eight months before that rainy afternoon in São Paulo, I died. When I died, I left my notebooks in the closet in the hallway of the apartment where I had lived for twenty-one years.”
Escorel partly acknowledges the debt he owes to the genius of Brás Cubas. This is not a very new expedient in our literature, but at the same time, it is a graceful testimony from someone who, in life, was a deeply convinced atheist and, nevertheless, seemed to like imagining himself in the afterlife, pondering from the coffin about his own obituary on one of those occasions.[ii]
There are moments of the greatest obscurity, from beginning to end. Whether it be pondering how deeply rooted social class was in their positions and those of their coreligionists in 1937, how much elitism there was in the ideological confusion between their desire for democracy during the Vargas dictatorship and their “disinterested class interests”, or how much of the good faith that these young people saw in themselves was not a sort of obtuseness. Whether it be their admitted lynx-like blindness to the struggles of black people and their fundamental drama as the most excluded among us. Whether it be situating the Northeast as an instance of reopening perspectives; so much so that, until he got to know the region after the age of forty, he admitted to having only a primary and secondary vision of life, still imbued with naivety and preconceptions that are very difficult to dissolve. It is the acquiescence with him that the political party he helped to found gave rise to the abuses from which he suffered.
And so it goes, stripping himself naked. Refusing symbolic masquerades. Like the senescent Breton king, also father of three daughters, whom he undoubtedly cherished.
— I would like to say a few words about the ambivalence of notes as the consummation and fading of a critical method of affective remembrance that Antonio Candido new way came to prefer and to which not a few frowned. Of gradual annexation of a spiritual domain unbesieged by pure reason, to make its “field” and generation as if impregnable, with the exception of one or another more or less tempered censure. A parasociological effort par excellence. Let's leave it for later.
At the risk of another misguided critique, readers accustomed to Antonio Candido's famous writings may not see in these notebooks an (unjustly) expected equivalence of craftsmanship and analytical depth, clarity of lines and good timbre, which are characteristic of professional texts, those for real. These notes were intimately thought out pro home, to a circle in theory no larger than four people: the author himself and his three daughters, to whom he sometimes openly refers and to whom he granted the posthumous power to decide on its eventual scope. Therefore, they do not have the power to be what they are to us, in their theoretical power, for example, the Prison Notebooks — these in which a relative is also questioned — or the Goncourt's diaries, as a period portrait. The notes certainly did not have similar ambitions. They are interesting because they are his. Because they favor a sort of late reunion, even if virtual and in remembrance. Because they are pages that are less suited to intellectual instruction than to emotional recovery.
Nor is the fine and wide reliquary of themes gathered there impressive, ranging from happy glimpses of childhood in Poços de Caldas to widowhood embittered by the premature departure of a beloved wife; from plump typewriters, donated by illustrious friends in self-exile, to the piano well played by relatives, whether related or disassociated; from the awareness of growing organic fragility to indifference to the death that approaches at the same time; from the stupefaction at the first arbitrary acts committed by the dreadful gang from Curitiba against Lula in broad daylight to that sinister night of the congressional collusion to oust the first woman elected president of this “despatriated homeland”; from the pride of briefly belonging to a political movement that had snatched millions from despair to the dismayed observation of the resounding return of social iniquity.
Not even the jokes and quips, nor the cornucopia of foreign expressions, which are spun in French, German, Italian, Latin and even Greek — tributaries of his admitted mandarinesque displacement in time: to an aunt and a French teacher (Jean Maugüé) he had always seemed fixed in the 19th century; in his own terms, he even had a touch of old age, something old. He even knew that some people thought he was vain, “foreignized”. And that some people are born posthumously.
[There is a double strangeness here. Antonio Candido embodies a time that has long been fading away, assuming it still exists. That of a certain asceticism that serious study required. Of burning one's midnight oil. Of long durations. Of self-applied pedagogy. Cultivation of the self. Of a physical dedication and mental discipline that, broadly speaking, no longer concerns us, us specialists or anti-intellectuals. In turn, Antonio Candido is already technically dead, insusceptible to the brutality of events, to which Brazilians in general are accustomed in all their phlegm. This malaise erupts in several facets: for example, in the longing he feels for the time when bandits had their own code of honor, and most of them were proud of not carrying weapons. The golden age of Fantômas, Arsène Lupin. Today, to his horror, any chicken thief is a potential murderer. The widespread vulgarity of murder reminds him of the banal verse he overheard in Mexico: “kill, that God forgives / kill, that God forgives”. Then he sighs: The weather… And not without reason. This (terrible) world will be inherited by the great-grandchildren.
Another aspect that seems anomalous in Antonio Candido today is reflected in his formidable ability to convey emotions or experiences marked by extensive reading: if, when climbing the hill in Pamplona, his legs fail him, it is La Fontaine who pushes him; if the aberrations of politics annoy him, it is Gounod's Faust who gives him the lyrics (et Satan conducts the ball); if you feel like you have your bags packed, Aeneid encourages you (you will acquire it); and if he finally wishes to surrender, he borrows the moan of the caged sibyl (I am the only one who can). This rich collection, once common to certain circles and then spontaneously perceived and captured, is today as disconcerting as the obsolescence of the idea of training. But there are those who can and will see it, in derision, as the dusty storeroom of Parnasse's secret cabinet, he himself guesses it. Personally, and he will not be a docile image, this last Antonio Candido, naturally absorbed in the world of ideas, somewhat evokes the delirious Balzac who, in his death throes, (they say) deplored: “Only Bianchon could save me…”. Horace Bianchon was a doctor of the Human Comedy.]
It is surprising to see in his notebooks, and it is no small thing, that old age did not come to destroy the capacity for organized thought and thoughtful exposition of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century. Nor did it hinder his impeccable ballpoint penmanship, which, by the way, does not require dubbing. Lucidity and balance are evident. And even his usual modesty still does the honors of the house. Right there where artistic nudity excites him — the unusual muse Maria Flor. The fleeting scent of the girls' sex, of that song. Nothing finally "detached from there". The rest of his body faded, the most resplendent organ remaining in a delay. Like an evanescent Cheshire cat.
By that time, for obvious reasons, the nearly centenarian Antonio Candido had long since retired from public life, which is only touched on tangentially in the film. Not that he is restricted to the private sphere: the viewer will not be surprised by much of the dynamics of the elderly gentleman secluded in his rooms. Both dimensions are suppressed, given the narrative option of strictly following the notes, albeit in leaps and bounds (the documentary only allowed two short fictional monologues that sandwich everything else). Roberto Schwarz will draw attention to a much more notable absence in the film: the university,[iii] to which the old professor perhaps owes all his prominence — one of the FFLCH buildings now bears his name. The fact that the profession, a vital component that often intersects the public and private domains, especially when it comes to a teacher, also does not appear at all in the documentary, fits perfectly with the plot.
A widower for over a decade, his daughters were all grown up and emancipated (including the elderly), with whom did he live? We are told of a glimpse of his life outside: that he found it uncomfortable to answer phone calls, as the interval between bad news, now daily… that someone would randomly pay him a visit, was getting shorter. But he didn't even have a cook at his service? Did he leave notes about caretakers? Who paid the expenses? We contemplate shadows of an old hero without a valet. Weapons laid down.
The use of the deceased author fits in well with the reduction of Antonio Candido to a pure, desubstantialized voice, echoing half-impassively through the rooms of the apartment where he had lived for many years, among the distant moments and people over which his memories hover, stimulated by news and longings brought to fruition.
And it is only as a specter that we catch him in the distance, later, a few times, twice, tortuous, dragging himself along the sidewalks of Jardins, crossing intersections by force — alone. Even when descending onto the concrete of the streets, Antonio Candido assumes the form of a spiritus clausus, more or less in Elias's terms, as a fundamentally independent individual non-being, a monad without openings, in whose isolation the entire world, including all other people, represents the external world, from which its internal world is by nature dissociated.
Otherwise, a typical portrait of the loneliness of the dying.
And it is due to this traditional alienation to which the decrepit are socially discriminated, which artistically justifies the somewhat predictable choice of a “young” actor to skillfully imitate the speech of the late professor, away from unimaginably experienced actors, dismissed in droves in the last few seasons, banished from the once familiar gaze of the audience. An Ary Fontoura, a Francisco Cuoco, a Lima Duarte, a Mauro Mendonça, an Othon Bastos or a Tony Tornado, to stick to just the nonagenarians.[iv] Outcasts. Most of them still active. Driven out. [if I may make a comment in the style of Adorno, the film has its coherence in its most questionable points]
The narration also assumes a function of compensation, of landing the pure physical absence. But this dramaturgical concern with emulating a certain register of refinement, characteristic or attributable to Antonio Candido, conceals subtle differences between speech and writing. A criterion of representation that is not Bressonian, so to speak, because it is less prone to disaffection, to a flatus vocis. And that does not tune well with the mise-en-scène of a character with already hoarse, trembling, uncoordinated hands and voice, fatally lucid, for that very reason, to disintegrate from a caricature of himself; with the conscious manifestation of someone fallen into himself, stripped.
Closed in on himself, he doesn't have much left. Listen and wait — that’s the way. To remember. To think about death, whether someone else’s or the future. And, who knows, to rejoice in the aftermath, as a preamble. “To think about the dead is to prepare for one’s own death,” Amos Oz used to say. “Because the dead exist only in memory, my recollection, my skill in reconstructing a bygone moment, almost a Proustian recapture of precise gestures that may have happened fifty years ago.” Antonio Candido, in his decisive moments, finds satisfaction in spending hours on end reconstructing beloved figures and lived episodes, sharing with Oz the desire to keep the dead alive as long as possible in their bloodless minds and hearts: “a room with six people, and I’m the only one still alive. Who was sitting where? Who was saying what?”[v]
As the song goes, the old man leaves life and death behind.
The film's poignancy is therefore due to a secondary feat: not a certain revelation of the inexorable and obvious finitude of existence. But that old age is a barren desert populated by the dead. Even that of a venerable person. A dungeon. A pathos suffered in silence and apart. To which others can only witness indirectly, through a device. Unpresentable. To die, intransitive verb.
Hence Schwarz’s gratitude for the “hour and a half in the company of an extraordinary man” seems a bit inappropriate.[vi] In fact, it has already been observed in another Escorel film that there is “no introduction of the human person with individual existence, in his singularity”.[vii]
It is no wonder that death — the possibility of the impossibility of being — is the closest thing one encounters. Leitmotiv, a recurring theme that connects the others, according to the mood and the role of the day. It even appears in political commentary, in the frustration caused by a painful omission in the face of the impudence of the “scoundrels” and their vaunted delinquency, in the cowardice that shames the day laborer for not having set fire to his clothes and thrown himself like a torch “against these worthless men / in this no man’s land” — an image taken from Vinícius’s Balada do Mangue: a immolação como solução possível [The Immolation as a Possible Solution]. He soon cools down, realizing his fantasy: he has been inactive in political matters for a long time… the traces of his former militancy haunt him like something from a past life, from another world that is no longer accessible. And he soon consoles himself after taking stock that he has already paid his dues in all this…
The presence of death is tyrannical and rivals that of another female figure of intense evocation: Dona Gilda de Mello e Souza. The “irremediable feeling of deprivation” touches him deeply. After her death in 2005, he began to transcribe on the back cover of each notebook the suggestive first stanza of a poem by Novalis (Was wär' ich ohne dich gewesen?). Having lived by her side for more than sixty years is, to the bereaved, an undeserved gift. And the natural tendency to isolation finds its limit in contact with his daughters, who are the continuation of their mother. Having survived her is like a misfortune: since she left, he has known no greater joy. And there is this regret that he has passed the point in life, that the “shameful shadow” forgot to take him…
Not that he wishes for death. Nor does it bother him. He is disillusioned; an “enormous indifference” prevails. He only fears that it will come to him slowly, painfully, vengefully. As it unfortunately did to his family. To each one, the inescapable.
And is it by chance that the director sees the making of the film as a kind of therapy in the face of the shock and introspection experienced as a result of the notebooks?[viii] Antonio Candido, final notes truly appears as a phenomenology of the Spirit of death, of its sudden appearance to common consciousness. Now discern whether the narcissistic wound caused by its reminder whether or not it heals in empathy is what they are. If a desired identification with the dying is fostered, an affection. If the engendered self-awareness about our own perishing is freed from a proud pereat mundus. Or if just a sudden flash. As solipsistic as it is ephemeral.
It is legitimate to doubt, however, that the final years of someone of Antonio Candido's stature were spent according to the suggestion. desolate Escorel's cameras, said to be inspired by this feeling of accelerated depopulation of the world, which overflows from the notebooks in an understandably anguished manner at times. As if resigned to the punishment of filling the aforementioned. And everything else happened in a cloudless fashion. But, judging by the testimony of his driver friends (not shown on the tape), motorcades escorted by convoys of scouts often disturbed the tranquility of the block just so that a president in person could wish them a happy birthday. Proverbial shyness was not enough to avoid the ubiquity of harassment. The appeal of a discreet profile does not go unnoticed. Not even close to being a target in an amethyst tower.
The film pays the price for a certain (laudable) caution in the face of the risks of staging an idealized subjectivity, for a certain submission to the dictates of a note by Antonio Candido, according to which the reduction of life to words would be a potentially good thing, a kind of survival. At least in this respect, Antonio Candido, final notes it does not pass through the sieve of a given ethics of filmmakers or, at least, of an imperative halfway between the hypothetical and the categorical, formulated by another colleague documentarist, for whom realistic cinema must seek to reveal the invisible real without violating its visibility.[ix]
Finally, the question concerning an alternative theme according to which the notebooks themselves were somehow less privileged in their representation than their author himself would have to pass uncomfortably through the investigation of both the direction and cuts that the directing team decided on, as well as the editing process, dealing with three times the number of hours of recordings. But the occasional indulgence from a layman or someone who didn't get their hands dirty can't prevent the investment of certain expectations in relation to the work, nor the rebound of a certain frustration with its completion.
As an achievement, Antonio Candido, final notes looks at what he saw and hits what he didn't see: the unfathomable apartment to which the disconsolate age forces. It is a well-composed, admirable work, photographing glimpses of a chained Prometheus. None of his takes surpasses, however, those of a film almost ten times shorter, although better achieved in terms of this effort of visual rapprochement with a tangible absence. Amidst the series of testimonies and interviews of the Antonio Candido Occupation, created by Itaú Cultural in 2018 with the support of colleagues and family members of the centenarian honoree, stands out as the most touching of all, in its abundant naturalness, the story of his friend Moacir Teixeira, a taxi driver with whom the “professor” always rode.[X] A certain moment in the video, which apostrophes a vanitas unexpectedly Hamletian is enough to touch even the most soulless creature. And, in addition, an instant of the true in the closest.
PS: On the night of 27/09/2024, squeezed between the two hundred people lined up on the 5th floor of IMS Paulista, people who were not lucky enough to attend the session Antonio Candido, final notes commented by the director himself, accompanied by Lina Chamie, Rachel Valença and Roberto Schwarz, I was able to at least hear the following dialogue between two professors (I will not say who), who had been involved in a noisy academic debate around Glauber Rocha since the end of the wing:
— Have you seen the movie?
— Not yet. But from what I've been told, I have my objections. I have objections, you see?
- Which?
— Ah, I don’t know. This Antonio Candido there… all these quotes from abroad… I don’t like this vision of Escorel’s son-in-law at all. Antonio Candido wasn’t that snobbish.
—But he had that side too.
— Oh really? He did?!
- And then…
The enjoyment of cinema is not confined to the ambience of its reproduction. Personally, I do not think that a son-in-law metaphysics has leaked in there in any way (the perception of that aunt and French professor of his is perhaps more appropriate) — whatever that might mean exactly, as an apparent biased representation of the father-in-law, translated in the form of a possible revenge for the times he found himself constrained against the wall, questioned about better intentions, engagement rings, etc. What we encounter first and foremost: that atmosphere of ordinary isolation to which old people are reduced, alone with the reminiscences of their lost and conquered days, days “grown like daughters and that no longer fit in the port” of their tired arms.
*Vinicius Madureira Maia is a doctoral candidate in sociology at USP.
Reference
Antonio Candido – final notes
Brazil, 2024, documentary, 83 minutes.
Directed by: Eduardo Escorel.
Notes
[iv] Here is the warning that we are miles away from the identitarians' cry that certain roles should be strictly conferred on those who have the corresponding existential credentials. As usual, the problem lies deeper.
[vii] HABERT, Angeluccia Bernardes. “J.: the choice for opacity and restrictive conditions”. ALCEU, v. 10, no. 19, Jul./Dec. 2009, p. 49.
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