From Malandros to Agregados: The Precarious Labourer and the Novel Form in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Abstract

In this chapter I identify a number of formal characteristics in the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel that will recur later in other places. Using Cândido’s idea of the ‘dialectic of order and disorder’, I argue that formal structures shaped by the erratic movement of malandros and agregados—original figures in Brazilian fiction who must oscillate between the bourgeois world and its chaotic underworld—are brought about in part by Brazil’s uneven combination of Liberalism and slavery, wage and slave labour. In Part I, I explore how Cândido’s ‘dialectic of order and disorder’ plays out in Antonio de Almeida’s 1852–1853 novel Memórias de um sargento de milícias [Memoirs of a Militia Sargent], but I attempt to develop the ‘dialectic’s’ links to global capitalist modernisation—links Cândido himself could not make fully given that he was writing under military dictatorship. While Edu Teruki Otsuka argues that the ‘dialectic of order and disorder’ around which Memórias is organised drives the novel into a cul-de-sac of cultural history, whereby the novel could not influence later authors given the organisation of the form around isolated regional conditions, I seek to trouble the idea that conditions obtaining in the Empire of Brazil were anomalous. I begin this work in Part II of this chapter by building on Schwarz’s seminal essay on Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899), analysing the structurally integral role played by the informal worker or agregado José Dias in the novel’s form.