By LUIS EUSTÁQUIO SOARES*

Author's introduction to newly published book

The novels

Brazil emerged as a country from the European colonial expansion. It was never an island. It is, therefore, an integral part of the uneven and combined development of Western expansion. It cannot be interpreted, from any point of view, in isolation from the world. That is why the main challenge of this book is to analyze Brazilian culture and, within it, Brazilian literary production, in dialectical relation with the five phases of ideological decadence of bourgeois civilization, one of which is transhistorical, that of the colonial period, which is constantly updated in the following way: (i) it became a capitalist colonial phase mainly after the Second Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution of 1789; (ii) due to the crisis of the capitalist mode of production from 1870 onwards, with its epicenter in England, it transformed into imperialism; (iii) after the Second World War, it imposed itself worldwide as American ultra-imperialism. And what do periods of ideological decadence mean?

Although the category of ideological decadence, in dialogue mainly with György Lukács' essay, “Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decadence” (2016), will be the object of more in-depth analysis in the first chapter of this book, for the sake of clarity, it is necessary to attempt a draft definition. In convergence with the Communist Manifesto According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, if history is an open process, marked by class struggle, this broadly means: (a) that there are antagonistic classes, those that oppress and those that are oppressed; (b) that the class struggle can be, especially for the oppressed classes, conscious and effective or, from the perspective of the exploited classes, unconscious or hidden; (c) that, in the first case, the working class disputes, from the present, its own future, with the objective of ceasing to be the exploited and dehumanized class; (d) that, in the second case, the oppressed class accepts the dominant ideology, which is the ideology of the class that oppresses it, referencing itself in the past and in the present.

In this context, an era of ideological decline is defined as a period in which the class struggle is hidden, so that the ideology of the ruling class tends to be the reference for the working class. These are historical moments of predominance of reactionary ideologies in which the past sometimes overlaps the present and the future; at other times the expanded present takes the place of the past and the future.

With European colonial expansion, a class struggle is aimed at sui generis, namely: the anti-colonial, transformed into an anti-imperialist class struggle with the advent of the imperialist phase of capitalism, at the end of the 1779th century. Between the 1794th and 1798th centuries, Brazil experienced some isolated and no less dramatic episodes of anti-colonial class struggles, such as the Minas Gerais Conspiracy of 1817; the Carioca Conspiracy of 1791, the Baiana Conspiracy of XNUMX, the Pernambuco Revolution of XNUMX, not to mention the Quilombo dos Palmares in the XNUMXth century, a community whose existence represented the world vanguard of the class struggle that was both anti-colonial and anti-slavery, anticipating the Haitian Revolution of XNUMX by more than a hundred years.

However, since the capitalist and imperialist phase of Western expansion, the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist class struggle, in the context of Brazilian history, has been fundamentally unconscious and hidden, which is why it is possible to affirm that Brazilian culture has been dominantly expressed, throughout its history, as an ideological decadence inseparable from the dominant ideologies produced in the colonizing and imperialist metropolises.

These dominant ideologies represent the five phases of ideological decadence of bourgeois civilization, which are: (1) the decadence of the capitalist period, whose symbolic date is the seizure of state power by the Bourgeoisie in 1789, with the French Revolution; (2) the decadence of the inter-imperialist phase, which begins at the end of the 3th century and lasts until the end of the Second World War; (1947) the first phase of American ideological decadence, initiated by Truman in 4, with the beginning of the First Cold War; (1991) the Second Cold War of Yankee ultra-imperialism is the general name for the fourth era of decadence of bourgeois civilization, which began in earnest in 5 and continues to this day; (XNUMX) the decadence that concerns the eternal return of the ideology of colonialism, which is present in the four phases briefly presented, and is inseparable from the colonial status of humanity, whether in its European version, which concerns its long period of colonial, capitalist and imperialist expansion; or in its American version, here defined as ultra-imperialist.

The author of this book, it should be said in no uncertain terms, argues that literary art is such if it resists or expresses itself in opposition to the period of ideological decadence of its time, which does not mean, as will be seen in the first chapter, an epigone of a period, but rather its apogee achieved by the economic and political domination of one class over the others. Always considering the contradictions and the possibilities of errors in evaluation, any aesthetic-cultural production (a novel, a short story, a poem, a play, a song) that does not aesthetically oppose the ideological decadence of its time only deserves to be the object of critical analysis when it constitutes an important representative record of the dominant trends or lines of force of the ideological decadence of a country, a region, or a historical period.

And which Brazilian literary works can be analyzed as singular examples of resistance to the ideological decadence that dominated the period of their production? Since it is not possible to encompass everything, and it is necessary to make choices, such narrative works (there are many examples in lyric and drama), for this book, are: the novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881), by Machado de Assis, to be interpreted as a narrative that opposed the ideological decadence of the ideology of the Brazilian colonial phase, anticipating a satirical critique of the proto-bourgeois human typicalities of Brazil during the Second Reign and the beginning of the Old Republic.

As regards the period of the second phase of ideological decadence, the inter-imperialist one, the dialogue will be with the novels Industrial park (1933), by Patricia Galvao, Melancholic revolution (1943, Ground Zero I) and Floor (1945, Marco zero II), by Oswald de Andrade, because they were works that aimed, through the novel form, at the presence of different imperialisms in Brazil, the Japanese, the German, the English, the American, the Italian, at the same time that they also represented the permanence of the ideology of colonialism, under new formats, dialectically amalgamated with the phase of inter-imperialist ideological decadence.

The romance Eviction room: diary of a slum dweller (1960), by Carolina de Jesus; and PanAmerica, by José Agrippino de Paula, will be the literary texts that will be at the forefront of the analysis of the third and fourth phases of ideological decline of bourgeois civilization. The first, eviction room, will be analyzed as a singular human record of the permanence of the ideology of colonialism and, through this, of structural racism in Brazil, in view of the emergence, in the 1950s, of the period of American domination, marked by the ideological decline of the dominance of exchange values ​​or mercantile relations of the society of the spectacle, with the invasion of the daily life of the favela by radio programs and news, in addition to the sensationalism of printed newspapers.

Despite the daily presence of this typically American mass culture, a parodic capture of authentic popular culture, Carolina de Jesus' narrative stands out for demarcating the counterpoint of the values ​​of use inseparable from everyday life, solidarity and the struggle for survival in an environment of adversity and misery.

The second, PanAmerica, aims to analyze the unique structure of this novel by José Agrippino de Paula, interpreting it as a kind of mimesis parodic of the era of the bourgeois epic of hegemon American, divided into two periods, the First Cold War, semi-secular and proto-anarchist; and the Second, puritan, Zionist and neo-Pentecostal, focusing on the relationship between the Old testment and the biopolitical exceptionalism of American way of life, without failing to point out that postmodernity – today designated as the contemporary period – is, strictly speaking, the era of the hegemony of US ultra-imperialism, marked by the endless production of studios, with the assumption that human history itself is nothing more than the effects of film studios, and can be permanently edited and re-edited.

the chapters

The first chapter of this work, “The five periods of ideological decadence of bourgeois civilization: realism, formalism and naturalism”, aims to analytically present the categories of ideological decadence (with a discussion of the concept of ideology), which is the basis for defining what constitutes realist, anti-realist and pseudo-realist literature, anticipating that the approach is Marxist and has as its interlocutor fundamentally the theoretical-aesthetic production of the Hungarian thinker György Lukács. From there, the analysis of the five periods of decadence of bourgeois civilization begins, taking into account the following references:

(i) the literary production of aesthetic realism is the art of resistance to the periods of ideological decadence in which it is inscribed, not being, in this sense, a school or style of the period, but an artistic form of human expression of objective historical-social reality; (ii) anti-realist and pseudo-realist aesthetic manifestations are literary forms of ideological decadence, representing the dominant ideology of the period in which they are produced.

The second chapter, “The colonial status of humanity and the ideological decadence of the Arcadia complex of Brazilian culture”, aims to present the transversal historical context of ideological decadences, in art, in Brazil, based on the analysis of the ideology of dependence, inseparable from the historical situation of a country that never became sovereign, having been tutored, subjected, and impeded since Portuguese colonization.

The expression “Arcadia complex” is confused with both the ideology of dependency and the ideology of colonialism, being the form through which, in a trans-historical way (as long as the condition of a dependent country persists), Brazilian aesthetic-cultural production tends to manifest itself, as an escape from history, as a culture of ideological decadence; and not only in literature, but in musical, cinematographic, and pictorial productions, although the focus is always on literature, in its different genres.

The Arcadia complex in Brazilian literature manifests itself above all in an anti-realist manner, which is why it tends to hide concrete historical reality, especially the real living conditions of ordinary Brazilians, without titles, without properties, without homes or lands, constituting themselves as the multitude of super-exploited people from the colonial period of Portuguese domination, with the unspeakable tragedy of indigenous genocide and black slavery; from the brief period of English rule, hegemonic in the Second Empire; from the inter-imperialist phase and also from the period of American domination, which began, in fact, after the Second World War.

The third chapter, “Ideological decadence and real subsumption to capital: the era technetronics, realism and the baroque ethos”, is dedicated to the analysis of the historical-ideological backstage of American domination, seeking to establish the differences between the European imperialist capitalist colonial system and the Yankee one, with the concentrated care of describing, above all on a cultural level, the latter, American ultra-imperialism.

The fourth, “Realism and Baroque Ethos in Brazilian Literature,” in dialogue with György Lukács and Bolívar Echeverría, will first relate aesthetic realism, which objectifies historically constituted reality, with the category of baroque ethos, defined as popular rationality that adheres to use values, resisting, even to survive, the exchange values ​​of the era of capital. The basic hypothesis is that literary works of aesthetic realism cannot do without the baroque ethos, nor can the latter ignore the irreplaceable importance of objectifying social being in its dynamic, local, national, and global totality.

Next, we begin the analysis of Machado's novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, and, immediately afterwards, Industrial park, from Pagu; from Ground zero I and II, by Oswald de Andrade; eviction room, by Carolina de Jesus; and finally by PanAmerica, by José Agrippino de Paula, looking at them historically, culturally, politically and economically, taking into account the accumulated presence of the five eras of ideological decadence in Brazil and the different forms of manifestation, for each phase, of the ideology of colonialism.

 Finally, the fifth chapter, “The two cold wars and the two eras of decadence of US ultra-imperialism: the pandemic”, focuses on the analysis of the two phases of American decadence, the semi-secular and proto-anarchist, the first; the puritan and neo-Pentecostal, the second, seeking, even as a hypothesis, to reflect on the very serious current crisis that humanity is going through, intensified by the pandemic.

*Luis Eustáquio Soares is a full professor in the Department of Letters at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES). Author of, among other books, The society of integrated control (Edufes).

References

Luis Eustaquio Soares. The two cold wars and the Arcadia complex of Brazilian literature: Machado, Pagu, Oswald, Carolina de Jesus, José Agrippino de Paula. Vitoria, Press of the Federal University of Espírito Santo, 2023. [https://edufes.ufes.br/items/show/688]

REFERENCES

FLAG, Luis Alberto Muniz. The Second Cold War. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2013.

ECHEVERRIA, Bolivar. The modernity of the baroque. México DF: Ediciones Era, 2000.

ENGELS, Friedrich; MARX, Carl. the german ideology. Translated by Rubens Enderle, Nelio Schneider, Luciano Cavini Martorano. New York: Routledge, 2007.

ENGELS, Friedrich. MARX, Karl. communist manifesto. Translated by Alvaro Pina and Ivana Jinkings. New York: Routledge, 2010.

LUKÁCS, György. Marx and the problem of ideological decadence. In: LUKÁCS, György. Problems of realism. Translated by Carlos Gehard. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1966d. pp. 55-110.

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