By RODRIGO MENDES*

Considerations on the concept of John Cesar de Castro Rocha

“In literature, the basis of Marxist criticism lies in the dialectic of literary form and social process. This is a slogan that is easy to launch and difficult to fulfill.”
(Roberto Schwarz, What time is it?).

1.

I have been researching the form of rap for approximately eight years. Surviving in hell, by Racionais MC's, having reached the synthesis that I called the dialectic of straight talk in this intermediate moment of accumulation. It proposes proceeding as the structural principle of the album, an element that mediates between the aesthetic form and the social process.[I]

Every critical effort undertaken is inspired by and seeks to dialogue with Antonio Candido's critical method when interpreting Manuel Antonio de Almeida's novel,[ii] aiming to find a formal element, in its internal dynamics, that has a structuring character, and that maintains an intrinsic link with the society in which the work was erected, whose historical influences shaped in social form will also be explained by this element.

João Cesar de Castro Rocha on constructing the “dialectic of marginality”[iii] also draws inspiration from and dialogues with Antonio Candido, but here the relationship is culturalist and comparative, while in my case it is theoretical and methodological. João Cesar de Castro Rocha refers to elements that directly affect my research on the rap group and also other objects to which I intend to extend my interpretation, hence my criticism of his category, mainly due to the methodological inconsistency and lack of formal reading of the works.

How can we analyze a work of art autonomously and at the same time be able to see aspects of the historical context in which it was created? This is the question behind Antonio Candido's famous essay and the “Preface” by The speech and the city, in which the author presents the theoretical point of view related to the first part of the study. The work, already in a mature period of its critical accumulation, was the first truly dialectical essay on national soil (SCHWARZ, 1987),[iv] enabling the maturation of the field of literary criticism by seeking to make the object of study autonomous.

With a historical vein, Antonio Candido proposes to analyze what he calls structural reduction: from the aesthetic form, in its internal structure, it is understood that there are aspects of the social process impregnated in the work, which it aesthetically reorganized to the point that it can be studied as a relatively autonomous object – Roberto Schwarz who places the adverb, emphasizing the dialectic of Marxist interpretation. The characterization of the Memoirs is known, discussed and criticized. This is a consequence of the critical novelty that Antonio Candido brought when proposing this method of analysis – according to Roberto Schwarz, “it is the transition from criticism (…) in which the national is celebrated to criticism in which it is historicized” (1987, p. 136).

Methodologically, in short, it is possible to understand the step that Antonio Candido took towards the independence of literary criticism as a field of study in Brazil. However, every essay has limits, which arise from the limits of the social process in which the critic writes, and which, however, must be pointed out, under penalty of fetishization of the critical gesture and reification of thought. Roberto Schwarz and André Bueno[v] criticized fundamental aspects of Antonio Candido's text, and I think that some of the criticisms are related to the problems in Castro Rocha's essay, especially the separation, in the last section of the essay, between the analytical procedure and the literary material, an operation with an ideological basis (SCHWARZ, 1987, p. 150).

The problem is, for Roberto Schwarz, that sometimes the dialectic of malandragem is “the experience and perspective of a social sector (…) historically determined” and sometimes it is “a Brazilian way of being” (1987, p. 150). From a historical point of view, in the present of Schwarz’s criticism and later of André Bueno, we see the exhaustion of the possibility of national emancipation due to the development of capitalism and our position as a periphery of the system.

A materialist analysis, constructed in the Candidian essay from parts 1 to 4, in which the author demonstrates a critical accumulation within the text itself, arriving at the synthesis with the methodological proposition and the results obtained from it, is, therefore, opposed to the culturalist analysis of the final part, in which there is a detachment from the social process, suspending generalist ideas of a national type. It is the Achilles heel of the essay that is the herald of Brazilian dialectical criticism, but which serves as a warning of the risks of generalizations without historical and social basis, which invalidates any type of criticism if made from the prism of dialectical materialist epistemology.

2.

In another historical context and, therefore, under another social influence, João Cesar de Castro Rocha's article focuses its interest, if I am not mistaken, on literary forms from the end of the 2006th century and the beginning of the 1st century, and his proposal aims to encompass a large set of artistic objects from the period that synthesize what he calls the dialectic of marginality. In the article's summary, the author points out that he will propose an “alternative approach in relation to Brazilian society and, above all, to contemporary Brazilian culture” (XNUMX, p. XNUMX).

Here we have a problematic generalizing element, since Brazilian 'society' and 'culture' can mean many things: is he talking about the culture (from the anthropological point of view of a set of symbolic elements that identify a social group) that we know exists in the South of the country, in the Pampa biome, in open cultural dialogue with Uruguay and Argentina? Of the Amazonian culture? Or would it be that culture impregnated in Brazilian institutions due to Portuguese colonization, which manifests itself in clientelism and cordiality?

All these distinct aspects of culture are present in our society throughout the many square kilometers of Brazilian territory. The author continues, characterizing the term for the first time: “Perhaps the “dialectic of malandragem”, as formulated by Antonio Candido in a fundamental text, is being replaced by a “dialectic of marginality”. The “dialectic of marginality” aims to overcome social inequality through confrontation, instead of conciliation; through the exposure of violence, instead of its concealment (2006, p. 1).

Well, what is João Cesar de Castro Rocha's understanding of the word 'dialectic'? It represents an epistemology, a critical method that Antonio Candido, with specificities in Brazil, constructs to make his interpretation of a novel intelligible. Therefore, it seems to me absurd to say that one is being replaced by the other, since we are talking about theoretical constructs, not historical periods, for example, or cultural elements. Below he mentions some attributes of the dialectic of marginality, which we perceive to be cultural aspects and individual ways of life such as 'conflict' and the 'exposure of violence'. We will see how this operates in his text.

3.

In section 2 of the article, she presents works to illustrate her model of analysis of contemporary Brazilian culture. She immediately indicates that “Carolina de Jesus is, in fact, one of the most prominent precursors of what I call the ‘dialectic of marginality’” (2006, p. 7). This is a phenomenon that has existed since the 1950s, the height of developmentalism, pre-Brasília, pre-dictatorship of 1964, pre-neoliberalism. When indicating the temporal course, she states that there is a transition from malandragem as a “social strategy of the malandro” to marginality, understanding these two categories as “ways of understanding the country” (2006, p. 9).

As for the term 'transition', we have already discussed that it is imprecise to determine a word whose meaning is epistemological, and ahead we have another problem. The 'social strategy of the rogue' is in Antonio Candido's essay in a different way, in my opinion. There is a sociability, which the author calls the dialectic of roguery, which is the oscillation between order and disorder in the novel, which presents several characters; Leonardinho in particular, who is the protagonist and for this reason we observe him in the comings and goings between the poles of order and disorder, whose end is ascending.

Antonio Candido identified a structural principle in the form of the novel, present there and also in the dynamics of Rio de Janeiro society in the mid-19th century, as he intuits. This is what is presented in the essay – the possibility of interpreting a novel based on a specific method, in which a mediating element establishes the correlation between aesthetic form and social process; Candido did not “conceptualize the social strategy of the rogue,” something of a sociological, anthropological nature, although in the final stretch of the essay, as we have seen, he moves towards a generalization of the Brazilian way of being.

The second problem concerns interpreting the dialectic of malandragem as a “way of understanding the country.” Antonio Candido makes an undue derivation from it to talk about the Brazilian way of being, but it is not a way of understanding the country – unlike, for example, the work of Roberto DaMatta, which claims to provide a broad cultural explanation. If João Cesar de Castro Rocha intends to build a model to understand the country, it must have a strong empirical basis, supported by a clear method, a specific object and an indicated hypothesis, which does not seem to be the case, as we are seeing.

In fact, and in parenthesis, following the reasoning, João Cesar de Castro Rocha says that he owes to Sergio Paulo Rouanet the “more precise clarification of the meaning of the term “dialectic””, and that he uses it “in the light of Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectic, which does not require the final production of a synthesis, valuing instead the tension of the co-presence of antithetical elements”. (2006, p. 40)

Now, there seems to be a serious methodological inconsistency here, at the root of the constructed thought that gives the essay its title, since the term dialectic used is not characterized or used as epistemology, methodology, but rather in a fetishistic sense, whose surface reason overlaps the historically accumulated theoretical construct.

In Antonio Candido, dialectics is a critical/methodological procedure in which the author makes his literary criticism intelligible; in João Cesar de Castro Rocha, it is a word, inspired by Antonio Candido, that designates a Brazilian way of being. There is even a contradiction, since when indicating the passage from malandragem to marginality, he suggests the exclusion of the former, and when citing Theodor Adorno, he indicates that he aims at the “very tension of the co-presence of antithetical elements”.

In an attempt to characterize the category, João Cesar de Castro Rocha says: “I want to propose a different approach to analyze Brazilian society and, above all, contemporary cultural production (…) In other words, I am interested in identifying the cultural and symbolic representations of this conflict” (2006, p. 14). After all, is the object of study Brazilian society or its cultural and symbolic representations?

Because they are different things: the first is society itself, the object of analysis of social sciences and philosophy, and requires a specific methodology, whose book by Florestan Fernandes, Empirical foundations of sociological explanation is a good epistemological example. Dialectical literary criticism also interprets the historical-social process, but through a construct of the critic himself, supported and built from an interdisciplinary bibliographic accumulation.

Society as an object of study does not hold primacy of analysis for the literary critic; on the contrary, it is raised by the aesthetic form and will be explained, in that specific context of the work, from this and not the other way around. Therefore, the “cultural and symbolic representations of it”, which implicitly mean 'aesthetic works, books or films, from 1950 to the present of the text, 2006, that address violence in the foreground and indicate a worldview of conflict and not of conciliation' represent a corpus from another field of knowledge, namely literary or art criticism, and also require specific analytical and methodological procedures. These are areas that dialogue, but they are not the same thing.

4.

We have seen that the dialectical category of marginality is imprecise with regard to the first term, and we will see that it is also imprecise with regard to the second. What is “marginal” for João Cesar de Castro Rocha? He explains: “the term “marginal” does not necessarily and exclusively have a pejorative meaning, representing, above all, although not exclusively, the majority of the impoverished population excluded from the benefits of social progress.” (2006, p. 15).

Who is this population? Again, implicitly, we have the answer, through the aesthetic objects he presents, but let us note the imprecision. He refers to the northeastern population fleeing the drought, the indigenous people who live in seclusion, the country folk studied by Antonio Candido in Rio Bonito Partners, of the residents of thousands of small towns in the interior of the states? In a certain way and in a different way, all these social groups share the socioeconomic characteristic of being “impoverished and excluded from the benefits of social progress”.

Furthermore, the outskirts of Rio Grande do Sul are different from those of Minas Gerais, which are different from those of Acre, and so on. Rocha then quotes Ferréz speaking of the outskirts, and implicitly characterizes this “marginal” as being the marginal urban outskirts of large centers, such as the capital of São Paulo. This also applies to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

These environments have several elements that characterize them. Rocha points out one of them: “I believe that the development of the concept of “dialectics of marginality” can help to understand the emergence of a contemporary cultural production centered on violence” (2006, p. 15). Let us note, and passant, that the term dialectic of marginality is now treated as a concept, which I disagree with, as it is inconsistent in something elementary, the delimitation of its object of analysis.

But let us focus on another element, the issue of “violence” at the center of “contemporary cultural production” (read: books and films from 1950 to 2006, guided by a worldview of conflict, anti-conciliatory, and of the urban peripheries of large Brazilian centers). At other times the author reinforces this idea that one of the traits that identify the dialectic of marginality is “an image [of the country] that is defined by violence” (2006, p. 15).

What kind of violence? Gender violence, racial violence, class violence? All three intertwined? Religious violence, political violence? Aesthetically explicit or implicit violence? Violence in the macro sense, from the State, police violence, for example, or from everyday micro-relations? Why? The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is a violent novel, just like most 30s novels, for example. Or Great Sertão: Veredas, contemporary of eviction room, by Carolina de Jesus. Once again we have a vague, imprecise term to delimit an object that in turn is also not presented clearly.

One premise of dialectical materialist criticism is the objectivity of form. This notion in Antonio Candido is debatable – but I will not enter into this debate – but he clearly considers the work of art as an autonomous object, as we have seen. At a certain point in João Cesar de Castro Rocha’s article, he points out a difference between Paulo Lins and Carolina de Jesus (2006, p. 17) regarding their “objectives”.

Now, in a formal analysis, the works are objective, and the authors’ objectives are of little importance, since they behave intrinsically according to the social process that decanted them. The difference between analysis of form – which the author does not do – and selection of themes present in the works generates interpretative errors, which in themselves have little explanatory power, as João Cesar de Castro Rocha intends with his category/concept. For example, he says that “one of the most important innovations of what I have called the ‘dialectic of marginality’ is precisely its collective nature” (2006, p. 18).

So far so good, but what formal element does the author list to justify this statement? When it comes to art, the argument must be based on its internal structure, since this is what will explain it, and not what its surface says. Rocha indicates as elements of collectivity the fact that Mano Brown wrote the “Preface” to Capão Pecado. If we think about intertextuality, a good part of world literature will be collective… Still talking about Marc Ferréz, he comments that his book is illustrated with photographs, “a strategy used by most books of this genre” (2006, p. 19). “Genre” is characterizing the very dialectic of malandragem, which has now become a literary genre (later on the author still calls it a “literary movement” (2006, p. 15) or “this literature” (2006, p. 24), which makes it very difficult to know what he is referring to and how it can be a relevant analytical tool in Brazilian literary criticism).

André du Rap, Carolina de Jesus, Paulo Lins, Ferréz, Racionais MC's, these are some of the authors that João Cesar de Castro Rocha cites as representatives of the dialectic of marginality, despite his analytical imprecision. They can be framed under another prism, marginal-peripheral literature, but I will not address this subject now. We recognize these artists as belonging to a specific social process, historically located.

A serious problem arises when João Cesar de Castro Rocha, through the lens of explicit violence – something superficial, not structural – aligns Rubem Fonseca with these authors, “who can be seen as the true precursor of the current ‘dialectic of marginality’” (2006, p. 22). In addition to drawing attention to the ‘precursor’, since he had previously mentioned Carolina de Jesus, what is the historical parameter for placing Rubens Fonseca in the literary accumulation from Carolina to Ferréz? Rubens Fonseca’s art, interesting in itself, belongs to another aesthetic tradition, conveys another vision of the world and is decanted in another historical-geographical context.

The same can be said of Cinema Novo, which João Cesar de Castro Rocha indicates as being the precursor of the ethics of the “x-ray of inequality”, which the author does not explain what it is, but is related – if not synonymous – to the dialectic of marginality. Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” contained social criticism, if this is the guideline, but it also does not belong to the tradition of Carolina, Ferréz and Racionais; its origin is another, formally different – ​​avant-garde art – and ideologically located, in the sense of worldview, elsewhere.

The dialectic of marginality, in short, is, unless I am mistaken, a broad category that encompasses artistic works from the mid-1950s to 2006, which express violence, have an anti-conciliatory worldview, seek conflict to make social inequality explicit, and is produced by the excluded – residents of the urban periphery of the country's major centers, such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – and this represents, from a cultural point of view, a way of being Brazilian, it is an identity that replaces the malandra identity, or at least enters into conflict with it.

From my point of view, this is an imprecise category, whose object of study is not clearly delimited, and whose scope goes beyond literary criticism (in which there is no methodological procedure for analyzing aesthetic form and social process as proposed by dialectical materialism in literature) to be a generic commentary on contemporary Brazilian society, although I have a good intuition to understand that since the 1990s mainly, but being able to see in Carolina de Jesus a manifestation of this phenomenon, a type of aesthetic object has entered the scene that makes explicit the fracture of the Brazilian social formation and that has a demanding, uncompromising and potentially strong worldview in the cultural sphere by presenting another possible sociability in a country like Brazil. Racionais MC's is an example.

*Rodrigo Mendes is a master's student in Literature, Society and History of Literature at UFRGS.

Notes

[I] See MENDES, Rodrigo E. Dialectics of straight talk: proceeding as a structural principle in Surviving in hell (1997). Final Course Work. IL-UFRGS, Porto Alegre, 2023.

______. “Dialectics of straight talk: awareness-raising dialogue in Surviving in Hell”. In: SEDA – Rural-RJ Literature Magazine, v. 4, n. 10, p. 138-159, March 21, 2020.

[ii] CANDID, Antonio. The speech and the city. Rio de Janeiro: Gold on blue, 2015.

[iii] ROCHA, João CC “The war of stories in Brazil. Or the “dialectic of marginality””. In. Letters, (32), 23–70). Santa Maria, 2006.

[iv] All quotes from SCHWARZ, Roberto. “Assumptions, if I'm not mistaken, of 'Dialectics of Roguery'”. In: What time is it? São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1987.

[v] BUENO, A. “Dialectics and trickery”. In: Letras Magazine. N. 74, p. 47-69. UFPR Publishing House: Curitiba, 2008.

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