Objective Form: Reflections on the Dialectic of Roguery

Abstract

The defining concern of Marxist criticism of literature is the dialectic of literary form and social process. This watchword is easily uttered but difficult to act upon. It was very widespread in Brazil before the military coup of 1964, yet the critical yield was almost negligible. If we discount the vocabulary, which, in the enthusiasm of the period, became more and more social, the interpretation of Brazilian literature, whether as a whole or simply in the form of its most important representatives, hardly changed. It was only in 1970—when the repression and intellectual fashion had already greatly reduced the numbers of those sympathetic to this tendency—that there appeared, for the first time in Brazil, a genuinely dialectical literary study. Forgoing boasts about method or terminology, giving structuralism a wide berth, and keeping a distance, too, from the concepts of Marxism (which was, however, its basic inspiration), Antonio Candido published a cogent and startling explication of Manuel Antonio de Almeida’s novel Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant.¹