“Everyone,” wrote Friedrich Schlegel, “contains a novel.”1 Characteristically, Schlegel’s fragment has a sting in its tail: “Not everyone needs to write it out.” Roberto Schwarz’s recent collection of “interviews, portraits, and documents” suggests that Schlegel’s irony is misplaced. Through Schwarz’s eye for novelistic detail, the world — that part of it known as “Brazil” — teems with unwritten novels. A famous essayist and professor of aesthetics, one of the first Brazilian women of her generation to enter the faculty ranks, recalls her surprise that visiting professors from France (among them Claude Lévi-Strauss) lectured from notes, and shared their bibliographies with students. A historical shift — the professionalization of scholarship, its separation from the decorative status of a class adornment (legible in the old catch-all Brazilian honorific, “Doctor”), a process that remains incomplete in Europe and North America — is registered subjectively, in a mild shock at a foreign way of doing things. Brought up in a patriarchal, rural setting (but with a vanguardist and leftist model in a cousin, the great Modernist poet Mário de Andrade), she notes that she had not a single female role model, and that despite her admiration for the women she grew up with, she would have to “put them in parentheses” (393). The phrase is the tip of an iceberg that is at once affective, social, and historical.

The portrait of a museum director, descended from a wealthy family and son of a great painter, reveals that “there is more in common than we are accustomed to admit between the materialism of a landowner and the acumen of a leftist administrator” (404). A right-wing intellectual (and eventual speechwriter for disgraced president Fernando Collor) is a vicious critic of the Left — but cares more about literature than he does about politics. A bohemian intellectual milieu develops around São Paulo’s Municipal Library in the late 1950s, where “there was a group that read a great deal of existentialism in Spanish, while the faculty read the same books in French and regarded themselves as more serious” (274). The bohemians “write and poetize as they can, some very well. Later most of them disappear.” But one who doesn’t is recognized by the television industry as “a beast for work” and becomes a prolific and celebrated writer of telenovelas (274-75). On going to the United States Schwarz finds the university milieu disagreeably masculine and the workload preposterous — the Americans having “developed a technique for textual description [...] that made it possible to write twenty acceptable pages without ideas” — but on returning home he finds the pace so slow that he tries “to continue the rhythm that to me had seemed, there, a horrible sacrifice” (286). Even a book review contains insights that are, in their coordination of feeling with historical movement, novelistic: “People who care about art can’t shake a sense of the unquestionable superiority of the modernists as artists; at the same time, they sense that the modernists, unequalled in their accomplishments, were not equal to the difficulty of modernity” (356).

Perhaps most astonishing is Schwarz’s portrait of literary critic and drama theorist Anatol Rosenfeld, who died in 1973 but whose impact on Brazilian theater — in particular the assimilation of Brechtian theory and practice — can be felt to this day. Leaving his doctorate at Humboldt University half-finished, Rosenfeld fled in 1937 to Brazil, where he initially lived hand-to-mouth pulling weeds at a eucalyptus plantation. The task posed a problem for the recent immigrant, who couldn’t tell the weeds from the seedlings. But Rosenfeld’s immigrant story, so tightly circumscribed by contingency — think only of how different the story would be if, like Adorno, he had already finished his dissertation and begun to establish a reputation — also contains an element of freedom. Schwarz lets us know that his own father, a lawyer emigrating from Vienna, had been sent to load bananas at the port of Santos — a placement he had sensibly declined. Rosenfeld’s immersion in Brazil is then both an historical accident and a deliberate project. He learns Portuguese in the interior, takes on arbitrary employment that doesn’t involve seedlings, and eventually makes his living as a traveling salesman. (It is hard not to be vaguely reminded of Seo Vupes in João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão.)Learning the hinterland from top to bottom, he becomes widely known as the “salesman of two valises” — one for his wares, one for the books he needed to continue his studies. Returning to the city of São Paulo, he begins his intellectual career as as a journalist for the Crônica Israelita,whose audience, as its name announces, is the small and insulated community of recent Jewish immigrants to São Paulo — a community whose horizons are, in comparison with Rosenfeld’s, as narrow in their own way as those he moved among in the interior must have been in theirs. As Schwarz puts it in his presentation of another remarkable document — the 1880 autobiographical letter of Luiz Gama, a former slave, to Lúcio de Mendonça — “as in a good realist novel, the unexpected turn strips bare the logic and the virtualities of a social formation, showing what in the exception belongs to the rule, what the exotic owes to the everyday” (345). As with Luiz Gama’s letter, Seja como for makes us think, among other things, of “the Brazilian literature that might have been, but wasn’t” (345).

Two other documents — both pertaining to Schwarz’s time in Paris in political exile during the Brazilian dictatorship — serve as bookends. The book begins with a chilling document that Schwarz comments on only by titling it, more or less, “Off-Stage.” It is a summary, dug up from the archives of DOPS, the Department of Political and Social Order — that is, the secret police — of Schwarz’s landmark essay “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964-69.”2 A broadly Adornian analysis of the contradictions facing an intellectual and artistic Left whose organic links with concrete politics had been brutally severed by the régime, Schwarz’s essay is bluntly described as concerning “techniques for agitation in the student milieu through theater, cinema, literature, and television” (11). The characterization, attributing the work not just to Schwarz but to his “team,” is not entirely false, but it is self-serving, puffing up the instrumental political utility of an essay “whose English translation,” according to the summary, “is already in the relevant CIA archives” (13). Already, astonishingly, a certain outline of the document’s author begins to emerge. Schwarz’s essay was first published in French (in Sartre’s “cryptocommunist” [12] Les Temps modernes), and our protagonist takes repeated pains to emphasize the “18 hours of labor” (11) that he spent making the translation, which he is anxious to say has not been properly edited (12), but “would not require a great deal of correction to make perfect (13). He goes on to describe the length of the text in pages (“in small type” [12]), and the hours he estimates it would take to edit and re-type. From these mortifying and no doubt pecuniary banalities, our commentator launches into a paranoid description of the “collective castration” the Left has planned for Brazil, intimating that Schwarz’s essay is part of a coordinated plan to corrupt “established institutions, traditional values of society: family, religion, sex, money, personality, etc., etc.” (13) Isn’t that “etc., etc.” peculiar? It is as though our protagonist’s wide-eyed, high-cold-war paranoia is, in the end, pro forma. After describing the Left’s goal as an “enslaved society, at the mercy of the beneficiaries of destruction,” and after fantasizing about the possible cultural “counter-action” that a right-wing intelligentsia could undertake on the basis of an analysis of the text, the commentary unexpectedly ends on an entirely different note. “Well, nobody will take the author Roberto Schwarz for a fool — not after reading his prose, which has little truck with foolishness. On the contrary” (14). Who is this person, who combines the poor expatriate student (anxious that his intelligence and work be properly valued) and the right-wing ideologue (possibly too intelligent to drink his own Kool-Aid) with the connoisseur of critical prose? Suddenly a phrase one might have passed over acquires new significance: “The article... was written... between October 1969 and February 1970” (11). How does he know?

If the book begins in, if not tragedy, then at least high tension and possible treachery, it ends in farce. In Paris Schwarz was a political exile, but also a graduate student. With his Master’s from Yale (directed by René Wellek) already in hand, he pursued a PhD in Latin American Studies at the Sorbonne/Paris III. Schwarz’s dissertation would become his first great monograph, Ao Vencedor as batatas (To The Victor, The Potatoes!, recently translated into English).3 But first he had to pass his defense. The last document of the book is a long letter Schwarz wrote home in 1976, after his scheduled defense, to his old professor and mentor, the great sociologist and literary scholar Antonio Candido. It begins:

Dear Professor,
Please don’t fall out of your chair, but the person who writes to you is not yet a doctor. (425)

What follows is a description of the twists and turns that led to this contretemps, which was in the end, as Schwarz’s tone makes clear, more or less easily resolved, despite the subjectively high stakes: “Obviously I trust my work more than the judgment of the committee. But it is also the case that people express their sympathy mainly because there is no money, work, or title on the horizon. In short, I passed a restless night” (427). The cast of characters is large — even Schwarz’s mother has flown in for the occasion — but the main ones are Schwarz himself one one side — ambitious, already aware of his possible place in Brazilian letters and of the historic accomplishments he and his generation of Brazilian intellectuals had begun to realize — but also aware of the potential for self-inflation that comes with ambition and ability; and on the other, his dissertation committee, who have status and security and some level of intellectual accomplishment, but turn out to be complacent, lazy, and incompetent in varying degrees. The comedy derives mainly from the fact that Schwarz’s principal antagonist — known to be politically conservative — expects to “demolish” the dissertation, while Schwarz for his part, despite his anxiety, relishes the idea that, one way or another, an ideological confrontation is going to take place around his work. But the antagonist turns out not to have the intellectual resources for the confrontation, and the more politically sympathetic committee chair hadn’t read the dissertation. “Instead of the opposition I had expected, between the right-wing intellectual and the intimidated little professor, the friction was between a thickwitted bully and a negligent bureaucrat, whose interest now lay in cleaning up the mess made by the former” (435). In the end the aggressor recuses himself from the committee, asking for Schwarz’s understanding of his nonsensical reasons for doing so — “the ogre solicits the human sympathy of the little man he was set to demolish” (428) — and the whole process is postponed to another day. The mirror image of Gilda de Mello e Souza’s impression of visiting French intellectuals of an earlier generation, the letter paints an unflattering portrait of European intellectual life — but one that, mutatis mutandis, anyone reading this review is sure to recognize.

Seja como for is, in the main, a collection of interviews; I have described the most surprising aspects of the book but not the most characteristic ones. As is to be expected in a collection of interviews, there is considerable repetition in the questions. But while all of the interviews are of value — my copy is thoroughly marked up — a few of them stand out as of particular interest. Schwarz extends himself when he is pressed by interlocutors of sufficient intelligence, intransigence, or sincerity. The interviews naturally presume a degree of familiarity with Schwarz’s work, and in what follows I will do the same.4

The first interview of particular note is rather a “debate” — the word is a little less antagonistic in Brazilian — on Schwarz’s 1990 monograph on Machado de Assis (brilliantly translated by John Gledson and published in 2001 as A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism) between Schwarz, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Franscisco de Oliveira, José Arthur Giannotti, Davi Arriguci, Jr., Rodrigo Naves, and José Antonio Pasta, Jr.5 Readers familiar with Brazilian letters will recognize this as an assembly of some of the most significant figures in Brazilian historiography, philosophy, literary theory, and art history. Right off the bat, Schwarz is pressed by Alencastro and Oliveira on a central aspect of the work that has — no doubt because literary studies in English is, with notable exceptions, theoretically eclectic on matters of interpretation — gone relatively unremarked in English-language commentary. Namely, that the meaning of Machado de Assis’ great novels — their malicious x-ray of the ideological structure of a decadent ruling class — was, for something like a century, hidden in plain sight. Don’t novelists write for their contemporaries? asks Alencastro, reminding us that the 1880s was a peculiar interlude in the life of the Brazilian upper classes, within an economic and ideological structure that was already unaccounted for in mainstream historiography. Since Brazil was suddenly importing Occidental culture and gewgaws that the dominant countries had begun to manufacture for export to their own overseas territories, the lack of fit between imported European culture and Brazilian daily life was not as rarified an observation as Schwarz makes it appear. So are we not then dealing with two readings? On one hand, a caricatural aspect, which would have been clear to Machado’s contemporaries, and a more slashing, destructive aspect that in fact is “another reading,” emerging from the concerns of a much later posterity, with its own critique of its ruling classes? And de Oliveira follows up with the corrolary observation that despite the aesthetic strength of the novels of Machado’s late period, their ideological impact was nil, in an historical moment when other authors were significant voices on political and social questions.

Schwarz’s answer is comprehensive, touching both on Machado’s few contemporaries who appear to have read him with uncommon perception, and on Machado’s contemporary neighbors in their disabused view of Brazilian society, who were not literary liberals but rather the most pessimistic and disillusioned stratum of conservative politicians. Schwarz insists that the meaning of Machado’s novels, while manifold and complex, is unitary. “Of course one can say that this tougher construction is an a posteriorielaboration of the critic, seventy years later. But in Machado’s case this simply doesn’t work, since there are a number of entirely deliberate moments in his fiction where he signals his intention” (67). (Schwarz does not respond directly to de Oliveira’s amplification — perhaps simply acknowledging that aesthetic success and political impact are goals that do not necessarily overlap). Schwarz goes on to point out that a similar thing happened with Baudelaire, whose politics, always a matter of “laughing in petit comité” (69) were recuperated for criticism only after 1968. And indeed, this kind of meaning-loss may be more the rule than the exception. The politics of aesthetic autonomy developed by Schiller were lost to most of his contemporaries and then completely dissolved in the intellectually conservative second two thirds of the 19th century, to be excavated by Lukács only in the 1930s — and to be lost again for the past fifty years. Meanwhile Schiller continued to be read, performed, and appreciated under all kinds of political régimes (this is the deeper mystery), and Schiller’s aesthetic ideology was appropriated and transformed in myriad ways that had little enough to do with the original undertaking. In a less political vein, the aesthetic project of English literary impressionism was understood in its moment only by the impressionists themselves — and perhaps not consciously even by all of them — and was only given a clear, explicit form more than a hundred years later by Michael Fried in his recent book, What Was Literary Impressionism?

Perhaps Schwarz’s strongest support (and an answer to the mystery of an appreciative misunderstanding) comes, unexpectedly, from Giannotti, who defends an opposing interpretation of Machado’s late novels as essentially melancholic and satirical in a more universalist, 18th-century mode. If Gianotti can defend this (traditional) interpretation, which is a descendant of the satiric one imputed by Alencastro to Machado’s contemporaries, then we are not dealing with an historical meaning and a modern construction, but rather simply with competing interpretations, which both must face the court of interpretive judgment. The fact that Machado was in some respects personally conformist can’t decide the question. (Giannotti: “Your misunderstood author was the president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters!” Schwarz: “That’s like saying Engels was a factory owner” [75-76].) The character of Counselor Aires, in Machado’s very last novels, represents, perhaps, precisely this figure of nonconformism in petit comité. But at the same time, Giannotti (like Machado’s contemporaries) knows something he does not know he knows. As anyone can attest who has tried to teach Johnson, Pope, or Swift, it is precisely the aspect of their work that Giannotti claims for Machado — universalizing moral satire — that strikes us today as insipid. Johnson and Pope are largely dead to us, and Swift maintains his interest precisely where he turns his own universalizing moralism against itself. As a novelistic “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” The Postumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas loses all interest. What we respond to, whether we know it or not, is the particular flavor of Brás’s malice, a distinctly modern haut-goût that asserts itself from the novel’s first sentences. Once we begin to follow that scent, we are in Schwarzian territory.

The debate has much more to offer, but in order to move on I will make only one further observation, which is that the whole conversation is made possible on the basis of an autochthonous Brazilian-studies discourse. Not necessarily in a nationalist sense — Schwarz’s work derives as much from Marx, Lukács, and Adorno as it does from Maria Sílvia de Carvalho Franco, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso; and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, for his interlocutors — but in the sense that the debate emerges from concrete theoretical problems that themselves emerge from concrete historical and political nexuses. The more cosmopolitan, eclectic Latin American Studies discourse seems — at least to me, an outsider to both discourses — painfully abstract in comparison.

Also meriting a close reading is the interview titled “Tug-of-War over Lukács.” It is certainly peculiar, in that the interviewer has understood little of Schwarz’s work and not that much more of Lukács’s; interviewer and interviewee are constantly talking at cross-purposes. At one point well into the interview, Schwarz, whom Perry Anderson has called “the finest dialectical critic since Adorno,” is asked: “Do you consider yourself a dialectician?” (133).6 It is frustrating and amusing by turns. At the same time, Schwarz here spells out his relation to Lukács without the circumspection that has always seemed to me to accompany his remarks on the subject. On one hand, it has always been clear that Schwarz’s aesthetic commitments are far more generous, in every sense of the word, than Lukács’s. On the other, Schwarz’s early work, particularly the first monograph on Machado de Assis, is — in its account of European realism, its understanding of the relationship of artistic form to historical reality, and its commitment to artistic form as a kind of aboutness, as making modally distinct but yet insistent claims to truth — strongly marked by Lukács, in ways that are never repudiated, and in fact remain, if I am not mistaken, crucial even when latent. For many of us these correspond intuitively to a “bad Lukács” and a ”good Lukács,” but that’s hardly a dialectical solution: Lukács himself would not have seen daylight between his sympathetic account of Schiller’s aesthetics and his critique of Flaubert’s. What mediates between the two?

First: “One might say that Lukács’s analysis presupposes... a certain unity of the nation. [...] In countries like ours of Latin America, the relevant unity is not national; [... T]hey belong to a unity that is transnational from the beginning, and in order to understand them, we have to understand the other pole; a significant pole of all the Latin American countries is external” (131-2). Second: “Lukács constructed a model for the European history of ideas and of the novel that depended on a general historical evolution from feudalism to capitalism to socialism. This is a powerful constuction. He shows how this development is actively functioning in the work of [European] philosophers and novelists. If we return to Latin America, we can see that this sequence doesn’t exist here and is therefore not universal. [...] We all know that colonialism and colonial slavery don’t precede mercantile states and are an entirely modern phenomenon” (128-129). One sees how Schwarz’s own critical insights immediately entail a critique of these two related blind spots in Lukács’s thinking. The dialectical interplay of these two poles of the colonial system, a back-and-forth whose very existence troubles the stageist model, is fundamental to Schwarz’s work, and might even be said to be the fundamental discovery of his intellectual generation. Lukács’s presuppositions, an asset in thinking through European literature and philosophy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when a national transition to a bourgeois order is broadly the order of the day, would become a liability exported to the Brazilian context.

It also seems to me, though Schwarz does not say so directly, that they become a liability exported to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even in Europe, and might serve to mediate between the “good” and the “bad” Lukács. Lukács seeks — and rarely finds — a proletarian realism that will have the same representational power as the great bourgeois realisms. But the proletarian experience of a transition to “socialism in one country” does not make contact with the cutting edge of economic and political developments in the same way that the bourgeois experience of a transition to capitalism in one country had done. In that way the decidedly marginal experiences that occupy, say, Joseph Conrad — who registers, in a conservative key, Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s dialectic of a European liberalism that is false in Europe because it is false in its colonies — will have a pulse on realities that a James Hanley or Willi Bredel cannot imagine.

There is a great deal more in this book: a tantalizing brief essay on the opening pages of Machado’s Esau and Jacob, which begins to open up the mysteries of the novelist’s very last novels and of their elusive protagonist, Counselor Aires; glimpses of an immigrant childhood where, receiving an indifferent secondary education, Schwarz is an intellectual at home — his parents had attended Lukács’s seminars in Vienna in the 1920s (117) — but an athlete and knockabout at school, ambivalent about going to college (270-271); useful overviews of most of Schwarz’s major critical work; valuable reflections on everything from May 1968 to the state of contemporary Brazilian culture and politics. But I would be remiss if I did not single out one more long interview, with a sharp and well-prepared group of Master’s students in Comparative Literature at the University Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in Natal. Here we catch a glimpse of Schwarz the pedagogue, generous with his influences and bibliography, opening up vistas and lines of flight within Brazilian literature and culture from Graciliano Ramos to Carlos Drummond de Andrade to Guimarães Rosa to Caetano Veloso, gently nudging students away from unproductive lines of thinking and toward ideas that are likely to be fruitful. It is a model, to be sure, but also full of useful insights. The passage on Guimarães Rosa and Alencar alone contains a good essay or two.

One can’t help looking at Seja como for from yet a third angle. Suspended over the whole book is the question of the fate of Brazil.

Fifty years ago [i.e. after the 1964 coup], those who marched for God, family, and property were those left behind by modernization, representatives of the old Brazil, who struggled not to disappear even though it was their side who had won. It was as if the victory of the right, with its trousseau of obsolete ideas, had been an accident and wasn’t sufficient to put the lie to the favorable movement of history. Despite the defeat of the advanced party, it continued to be possible — so it seemed — to believe in the work of time and the existence of progress and of the future. The neo-backwardness of bolsanarism, equally scandalous, is of another kind, very far from belonging to the past. The de-laicization of politics, prosperity theology, firearms in civil life, attacks on radar cameras, hatred of organized labor, etc.: these are not thrift-store items, leftovers from another time. They are antisocial, but they are born on the terrain of contemporary society, in the vacuum left by the ruin of the State. It is quite likely that they will be in our future, in which case those passed over by time will be us, the enlightened — without forgetting that the beacons of modernity have lost much of their light. (330)

As readers will be aware, Brazil imminently faces, at the least, a difficult and polarized election season and likely political violence; whatever the outcome (seja como for), the Bolsonaro régime is clearly making preparations for a hard coup (as opposed to the parliamentary coup that ultimately brought Bolsonaro to power). The whirlwind to be reaped in Brazil after the half-century-long capitalist counteroffensive is not qualititatively different than it is in the United States or much of Europe, but only quantitatively — and often not even that.

What is world-historical in Brazilian culture since the 1950s — and in this Brazil punches far above its weight — is intimately connected to the great class rapprochement between the progressive, anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and the “proletariat” in the broadest sense, the mass of those who, separated from the means of production, have no other means of subsistence than to sell their own labor — whether or not the resources exist to exploit that labor. This rapprochement was the social content of the pre-revolutionary period, which was brought to a close by the coup of 1964. It is the condition of possibility and social meaning of Cinema Novo; of Bossa Nova and MPB as much as the autonomous samba of a Paulinho da Viola all the way up through Marisa Monte, Marcelo D2, Lenine, and beyond; of the architecture of Lina bo Bardi and her cohort and decendants; of the poetry of Ferreira Gullar; even, in however mediated a way, of the great concretisms of Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica. It is also the condition and social meaning of Roberto Schwarz’s generation of scholars: Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Maria Sílvia de Carvalho Franco, Paulo Arantes, Francisco de Oliveira, and many more. As the quote above suggests, the impulse at the root of this cultural explosion continued its productivity long after the social movement that sustained it had been cut short: the Master’s students conducting the interview mentioned a moment ago have gone on by now to publish their PhD dissertations as books, but conversations like theirs can still be had in university classrooms in Brazil, and in the right rooms, after hours, amateur and professional musicians can still be heard making extraordinary music together. Moreover, the works that have taken inspiration from this development are permanent. As Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil put it, in perhaps the world’s only Adornian pop song, movements like Cinema Novo and Bossa Nova

Saved us
In the eternal dimension
But 7

Or, as Schwarz puts it here, giving credit to Hans Magnus Enzensberger for the thought, “It’s easier to transform underdevelopment into art than it is to overcome it” (321) — which is not to say that transforming underdevelopment into enduring works is easy. But on the terrain of the real, holding out hope for a Benjaminian redemption is cold comfort. It is no accident that Veloso’s bleakest song about Brazil is the one that places hope in deliverance.8

The question of “What is to be done?” is, except for a few salutary suggestions, not taken on in these pages. Central to any Marxism worthy of the name is the Hegelian dictum, variously referenced by Marx: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Whatever action is to be taken has to take place on the terrain on which we actually stand; in other words, what is to be done can only be accomplished on the ground of the actual political-economic-social-ideological situation. So our Rhodes is here — but where is that? What time is it?

In Seja como for, whose pages span several decades, Schwarz does not take on an extended analysis of the current political-economic-social-ideological situation in Brazil. That analysis instead takes the surprising shape of Schwarz’s new closet drama, Queen Lyre. Indeed, the shape is not as surprising as all that. If Schwarz has written a novel he is keeping it secret, but he is the author of two books of poetry and a wonderful Brechtian-Machadian play, The Dustbin of History; he is also the Portuguese translator of several plays from the German, including Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youthand three by Brecht. Queen Lyre begins, as the title suggests, as an adaptation of King Lear: the Queen of Blue Zealand (that is, Dilma Roussef) must keep her three ambitious daughters in check: Valentina (the Left, and the Queen’s favorite), Austéria (big capital, finance, and neoliberal exigency), and Maria da Glória (agribusiness, “traditional values,” and clientelism). But Queen Lyre has bigger problems than her daughters, and what begins as a tidy allegory quickly runs off the rails. Indeed, by the time we meet Lyre and her daughters, we already know that massive protests are brewing from below; from somewhere above, conspiracies are being hatched. The protests will take place; the Queen will be deposed; and in a rex ex machina that, except for the fact that it really happened, would be a perfect Brechtian non-sequitur of an ending, the King, who has been languishing in prison for the duration of the play, is released.

Of course the plot can hardly astonish, because it is just recent Brazilian history — as with Brecht in this mode, to say characters are “thinly disguised” would be wrong, because the disguise is so thin as to be an impudence, like robbing a bank in sunglasses. (“O Coiso,” for example, The Tool, is a derogatory nickname given to Bolsonaro in the real world.) If I am not mistaken, the composition of the play lies not so much in the plot — except for the ending, at once Brechtian and factual, which is a master-stroke — or in the satire, which is certainly present and often satisfying, but in giving form to the polyphony of contemporary Brazilian political discourse. Observations, ideologies, and truisms (observations needn’t be false to be in bad faith, and even correct observations by sympathetic characters can reveal their most abject compromises; ideologies only function if they have a relation to truth; some truisms are true) circulate and fail to circulate, have their intended effects, have other effects, or have no effect. Our sympathies, and the author’s, lie (how could they not?) with characters like Rita, a former communist and now working-class mother who is re-radicalized over the course of the play. But even the most sympathetic characters’ understanding of the situation is partial or, worse, optimistic; and some of the least sympathetic characters are the most cunning — a characteristic that involves, at the least, a sense of reality.

To do justice to this orchestration would take a separate essay. But in closing I want to draw our attention to the last two scenes. In the penultimate, “The Picnic of the Winners,” the forces unleashed by the coup are not easily controlled: says one bourgeois matron, “I’m more horrified by The Tool than I am by the redistribution of wealth” (112). A bourgeois gentleman immediately puts her straight: “My lady, we are not talking about civilization or bad faith. We’re talking about private property, which is something else altogether.” American readers will recognize the dynamic: replace “private property” with “tax relief.” This intra-class tension soon turns into a bloodbath: first the Fool is killed (his identity was never in doubt: his dying words are “If the intellectuals don’t fulfill their duty, the unctuous and deadly crime that demeans our country will forever remain in the shadows” (115), then the Queen, the working class Left and the student Left, and offstage the princesses; but then the coup plotters, and then their agents. At the end of the scene one of victors proclaims: “We will be legions of loose Tools, armed to the teeth, fighting lucha libre. The idea is to re-found humanity for the next thousand years or so” (117). The dreadful victory is complete.

But the war of all against all is, even in the most reactionary ideologies, only a pretext for society and not a plausible model of society itself; and we know from the newspapers that this is not the end of the story. The final scene, titled “The Second Investiture of the King,” is a dramatic monologue that takes place in the former King’s prison cell, seeming to compress in its two pages the entire term of Lula’s imprisonment. Near the beginning, he is certain of being released: “They need me to clean up their mess” (119) — which would seem delusional, except we know that by the end of the scene he will in fact be released. “I am the only one in this country,” the King reasons to himself, “who talked to everyone. [...] It is obvious that with me in prison, no national negotiation is possible. Therefore, when they shut me up here, it was precisely to put an end to negotiation” (120).

Now he is free. To mend the “ragged quilt” of Brazilian society? Or to take the fall for its failures? We will see. The King’s final words, and the final words of the play: “I would prefer not to be heckled on the way out” (120).

1. I would like to thank Milton Ohata for his comments on a draft of this essay.
2. Roberto Schwarz, “Cultura e Política, 1964-69,” in O Pai de família e outros estudos (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1978) 61-92; John Gledson, trans., “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964-69,” in Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas (New York: Verso, 1992) 126-159.
3. Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor as batatas (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2000); Ronald W. Sousa, trans., To the Victor, the Potatoes! (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020).
4. I have attempted an introduction to Schwarz’s work elsewhere. See “Roberto Schwarz: Mimesis Beyond Realism,” in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Beverly Best et al. (London: Sage, 2018) 465-478.
5. Roberto Schwarz, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson (Durham: Duke, 2001).
6. See also Paulo Eduardo Arantes, Sentimento da dialetica na experiencia intelectual brasileira: Dialetica e dualidade segundo Antonio Candido e Roberto Schwarz (Rio: Paz e Terra, 1992).
7. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, “Cinema novo,” Tropicalia II, Phillips, 1993.
8. Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa, A Luz de Tieta, Natasha, 1996. It also sets Veloso’s words to a gorgeous Bahian bateria(performed by the all-female Didá Banda Feminina) in the context of a modern pop recording, under the supervision of producer Jacques Morelenbaum, an accomplished classical cellist. This is not to say that Veloso’s politics and Schwarz’s politics are the same. As many readers will know, that is very far from being the case. As is natural, the explicit politics of the great Brazilian figures of the second half of the twentieth century runs the gamut. But if their greatness has something in common, and I think it does, it has to do with this class rapprochement — which itself appears in many forms, not all equally enlightened.