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.

Introduction

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. This uneven ideological and historical formation will reappear in various forms in the Caribbean and across Africa, thereby eliciting similar formal elements in fiction from those regions. Brazil is not, therefore, some arbitrary point of origin or place of emergence of fictional tropes which register economic informality. Rather, the starkness of the historical conflicts that raged through the Empire of Brazil (1822–1889) gave rise to a set of cultural characteristics that we will see emerge in similarly febrile times elsewhere. In Part I, I explore how Cândido’s ‘dialectic of order and disorder’ plays out in Antônio 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. As I discuss below, 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. Clearly my book seeks to trouble the idea that conditions obtaining in the Empire of Brazil were anomalous, and 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.

Memórias de um sargento de milícias, first published serially in Rio de Janeiro in the middle-class journal Correio Mercantil, is the story of the mischievous young Leonardo Filho, who is kicked out of his home as an infant and adopted by his godfather, before years spent as a street trickster (or malandro). He becomes loosely attached to various households for whom he performs favours (as an agregado), before accidentally ending up in a respectable position as the eponymous military sergeant. Mário de Andrade defined Leonardo as a picaro, an impish trickster figure from European literary romance, suggesting Almeida’s Brazil lagged behind Europe and could only be expressed through Renaissance forms (5). But given the text’s lucid evocations of “places and scenes in Rio de Janeiro”, critics such as José Veríssimo suggested that it was a premature realist novel (Cândido 79). As welcoming as the category of realism might be, readers will find that Memórias has little in common with those texts generally defined as such. To take just one strand of realism, Memórias feels so distant from the Bildung narrative tradition because it does not even pretend that the protagonist’s development is due to merit. As shown below, Leonardo exists in an intermediate class of poor but free people who, given the existence of slavery in Brazil, cannot easily sell their labour. They live by what Schwarz calls “favour” (22), working for bourgeois patrons whilst living and loving amongst slaves and freemen. Leonardo’s mischief is not, therefore, simply a belated form of romance impishness, but is a unique marker of the permissiveness within this intermediate zone. In a class of pervasive precarity, social rank or advancement is only secured by one’s privileged sponsors, and it is a coalition of three respected women who convince Rio’s chief of police Major Vidigal to give Leonardo a job and resolve the narrative. Memórias is thus a story of Leonardo’s journey from precarity to stability, but one that is arbitrarily brought to a conclusion by his benefactors. For Antônio Cândido, this disqualifies the text as a straightforward realist novel or Bildungsroman, but makes it an extraordinarily “totalizadora” and “anatomia espectral”—a totalising and ghostly anatomy—of a slaveowning yet bourgeois society (88).

For Cândido Memórias is a “documentário restrito” (74), a “restricted documentary”, which “ignores the ruling classes, on the one hand, and the labor force, on the other” (87). Leonardo’s constant shifts between families, ‘jobs’, pastimes, social groups, and so on describe the peculiar dynamic and trajectory of Brazilian society as a whole. Leonardo’s ability to move from blasphemous trickery in church, to a job in the royal kitchens, to an illicit love affair, to being arrested, to arresting his love rival (sometimes in the space of day) reveals the sheer arbitrariness of the values of Brazilian society. In a society in which “only a few free people worked and the others abandoned themselves to idleness, reaping the surplus of parasitism, of contrivance, of munificence, of fortune, or of petty theft”, “order”, argues Cândido, “is maintained with difficulty, surrounded on every side by a lively disorder” (95). There is a “capricious balancing of order and disorder”, analogous to the capricious balancing of liberal ideas of free labour and slavery. No one-value system can achieve full hegemony in an environment where the contradictions of the liberal ideal of free labour are so blatantly obvious (Cândido 95). Liberated from living by the ruling class’s manifestly empty codes, knowing his destiny either will be secured by others or it won’t, Leonardo is free to shift between the various activities and institutions of Brazilian society in a movement that Cândido variously calls the dialectic of malandroism or the dialectic of order and disorder.

How will I intervene in the criticism of Memórias? Since “Dialética da malandragem” was first published in 1970, few scholars have substantially departed from Cândido’s reading of the text. Indeed Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls Cândido the “undisputed figure of authority” on the novel (27). But Cândido’s development of the dialectic of order and disorder is slightly oblique and contains little close reading of the novel. At the same time, he is guarded in his development of the idea that ideological articulation and arbitrariness are peculiar facets of Brazilian society. For Schwarz, Cândido’s actual thesis is “by no means obvious” (Two Girls 19). At the end of the essay Cândido tells the reader not to think about what they have just read: “we must take with a grain of salt the idea that the Memórias is a documentary panorama of Brazil […] and after having suggested that it is rather its ghostly anatomy, much more totalizing, better to think nothing at all and let ourselves be lulled by this realist fable composed in tempo allegro vivace” (101). Better to think nothing at all, to retreat from the notion that the malandroism of Memórias is shaped by laughably naked, hypocritical ruling class interests and numbly embrace this silly story for what it is. This elaborate and ironic grounding of the potentially radical energy built up in the text and the essay gestures towards the subversive power of reading Memórias as shaped by arbitrary and capricious forces. Published in 1970, the essay emerges during the most oppressive period of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). In his study of the cultural impact of censorship in Brazil, Eduardo Manoel de Brito notes that a decree called AI-5, a sweeping state censorship package (85), resulted in the “torturas, prisões e exílio de intelectuais e politicos” (86). While the Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz spent these years in exile (Gledson viii), Cândido chose to stay and attack the regime obliquely. Brito cites Cândido’s 1972 article “A verdade da repressão” (translated by Howard S. Becker as “Repression’s Truth”) as an example: “[t]here is no reference to the Brazilian police, but, within the general tone of the text it is very easy to perceive the criticism of torture by the police” (qtd. in Júnior n.p.). In Memórias, Almeida writes about the arbitrariness and caprice of colonial Brazil during its Regency (1807–1822) thirty years later when the country was independent yet still slaveowning. Cândido writes about Memórias over a century later when the country was still an imitation democracy, shaped by neoliberalism’s confluence of liberal economics and political repression. I will argue that the ostensible unseriousness and oscillating structure of Memórias reveals the true arbitrariness of liberal values as they play out in the periphery of the world-system, precisely because Cândido could not fully articulate this point in 1970. To do so would have been to acknowledge that Brazil’s dictatorship revealed the true caprice of neoliberalism—free markets and cheap labour secured through violence and repression. Better to think nothing at all.

But the critical consciousness of history in Memórias has recently come under scrutiny. For Schwarz, the importing of the novel form into Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century distorted local content with the conventions and strictures of a form “such as only the French Revolution could have brought about” (Two Girls 42). In José de Alencar’s Senhora (1872), for example, the central characters “behave according to [a] shrill Balzacian formula” while the secondary characters, “drawn from nature or adapted from the topical press”, behave according to the clientelism and favour peculiar to Brazil (Two Girls 42). “In other words, the substance and the form of the central conflict are alien to the crowd of lesser characters, who are nevertheless in charge of assuring a local feel to the book and of conveying the tenor of the society” (Two Girls 42). In contrast, Edu Teruki Otsuka argues that Memórias does the reverse of a novel like Senhora through the “creation of a narrative framework based on the actual social relations that prevailed locally” (58). In this way, Almeida “avoided the incongruency that the direct transposition of the European plot produced in other writers’ works” (58). But it is precisely Almeida’s reorganisation of the novel form around a local intermediate class in which bourgeois values gain no purchase that leads Otsuka to conclude that Memórias cannot immanently critique Brazilian society. “Although Memórias explores the movement and rhythm of a particular class, it also presents an attractive image of the country – based on conciliation and malandragem – in which historical conflicts are disguised” (59). In what follows I will query the extent to which Memórias disguises historical conflicts, and in part II of the chapter, I argue that it is only Machado’s incorporation of the local Brazilian figure of the agregado as an integral cog in the plot that allows Dom Casmurro to expose historical conflict. While it is true that organising a novel around a class of people who cheerfully exploit the hypocrisies of a slaveowning bourgeoisie makes it impossible to castigate their practices according to any stable set of values, the very arbitrariness of the social trajectories and plot constitutes a critique of the historical forces that shape them. We will only be fully sensitive to the longue durée of the arbitrary historical forces that shape both Memórias and the other novels in this book if we read the spirit and not just the letter of Cândido’s essay.

Part I

Rethinking ‘Dialéctica malandragem’

Cândido’s writing gestures towards a flexible, transnational reading model that considers the specificity of Brazilian fiction within a heterogeneous world-system of literature. In the first section of his essay on Memórias Cândido considers Mario de Andrade’s implication that the novel is part of the picaresque tradition, a phase in the (pre)history of the novel. Cândido states that Leonardo has little in common with the European picaro figure and is rather an autochthonous Brazilian character.

[T]he analysis of Spanish picaresque literature shows that these two books motivated nothing of importance in Almeida’s book, although he might possibly have gotten some marginal suggestions from some other novel, Spanish or written in the Spanish style, which was common all over Europe in the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries. (80)

“One the other hand”, Cândido continues, “Leonardo the Son has some affinities with the picaresque narrators” (80). Cândido’s overall argument will be that Memórias is indeed a variant on the realist novel, just a form of realism that is shaped by Brazilian (rather than European) objective social conditions.¹ In the above passage about the relationship between Memórias and the picaresque novel, Cândido at once acknowledges the prevailing idea that authors write out of conscious influence but denies that this is what is happening with Almeida. Neither of the Spanish novels mentioned motivated anything of importance ‘in Almeida’s book’, a choice of phrasing which allows a form of transitive ambiguity, suggesting both that Almeida himself can have been consciously motivated to write the way he does by another text and, more obliquely, that the motivation can disintermediate Almeida as a conscious actor and simply give rise to a particular characteristic in his fiction. At the end of the section, Cândido concludes that Leonardo “nasce malandro feito, como se se tratasse de uma qualidade essencial, não um atributo adquirido por fôrça das circunstâncias” (69); “Leonardo […] is born a full-blown malandro, as if this were an essential quality, not an attribute acquired by force of circumstance” (81). So Cândido finally names Leonardo as a malandro, “a historically original figure, who brings together: (a) a folkloric, pre-modern dimension – that of the trickster; (b) a specific comic climate – that of the satirical production of the Regency period” (Schwarz, Two Girls 13). The conditional phrase “como se se tratasse”—‘as if it were’—indicates that the malandro only appears to be a character that has sprung from Brazilian soil. Leonardo is an original figure, but one who focalises much longer cultural trajectories. Cândido here productively exploits the tension between diachronic and synchronic conceptions of aesthetic production (and this is perhaps why he spends so long dwelling on the picaresque novel only to ultimately dismiss it as a conscious influence on Almeida). Cândido will ultimately conclude that Memórias could be said to constitute a form of Brazilian realism, not because it borrows aesthetic topoi from the history of the European novel, but because it has a “feeling of the social dynamic of Brazil” (my emphasis, Cândido 85), just as Dickens has for London during its industrialisation or Balzac has for Paris.

Cândido’s discussion of how the novel captures the ‘social dynamic of Brazil’ is the most important aspect of the essay for debates about world-literature. For Cândido, Memórias is “O romance de tipo realista” (74), a novel of a type or variety of realism, because it “comunica sempre uma certa visão da sociedade, cujo aspecto e significado procura traduzir em têrmos de arte” (74), “always communicates a certain vision of society, whose aspect and significance it seeks to translate in terms of art” (86). Becker adequately translates the multiple valences of Cândido’s key terms here: realism offers a ‘visão’ or ‘vision’ of society, in the sense of providing an insight (visão interior) to an audience by showing them a record of a place or event, but also having a singular imaginary vision (percepção imaginária) of a vast set of phenomena. Realism is often taken to mean anything that can do the former, that can relay to people what a scene actually looked like in reality. But, continues Cândido, “It is more doubtful that [realism] gives an informative vision, since generally we can only evaluate the faithfulness of the representation through comparisons with the data we take from documents of some kind” (86). ‘Informative vision’ is “visão informativa” in the original; in Brazilian Portuguese a boletim informativo is a news bulletin, so ‘informativa’ carries connotations of some supposedly objective relaying of raw data. Indeed for Cândido this is precisely what Memórias does not achieve. For a novel set in early nineteenth-century Rio—at the time a slave colony and the seat of the Portuguese royal court²—we merely “glimpse the world of the Royal Palace” on the one hand and virtually ignore the world of the “slaves” on the other (86–7). Cândido therefore calls the book a “documentário restrito” (74), or “restricted documentary” (87), “which ignores the ruling classes, on the one hand, and the labor force, on the other” (87), focusing instead on “free people of modest position” (86). Memórias is not, therefore, a panorama of the full material extent of a society such as Balzac provides across La Comédie humaine and as Alencar subsequently attempts in Senhora. The thing the novel documents is the movement of the intermediate class between the ‘ordered’ world of the ruling class—the latifundia and the royal court—and the ‘disordered’ world of poverty and slavery. This is the ‘feeling of the social dynamic of Brazil’, this dialectic of order and disorder, but Cândido does not fully unpack its radical implications.

Here, without mentioning Marx, Adorno, or Lukács, Cândido makes the basic Marxist critical point that Memórias is an imaginary response to objective social conditions. But crucially for Helgesson, Cândido is not “content with the reduction of the literary text to its external conditions of production. It is instead the interaction of different constitutive elements of the literary system that interests him” (149). I suggest that for Cândido, Memórias is interesting precisely because of its moments of uneven integration where what he calls the documentary elements appear incongruous with the movement of the plot, for example. For me, Cândido’s reading of these moments of integration and disintegration of the different formal and ideological elements of the text contains the radical potential of his multivalent reading method, but he is only able to gesture towards the conclusions in this essay, given the environment in which it was written. One example of this is Cândido’s reading of the episode in which Leonardo’s Godfather works as a barber on a slave ship and befriends the captain who, as he dies, asks the Godfather to deliver his fortune to his next of kin. Instead, the Godfather steals this slave fortune and, years later, puts it towards supporting his adopted godson Leonardo. For Cândido, this is a chief example of the novel’s “capricious balancing of order and disorder” (95):

Everything has been arranged on a plane more meaningful than that of the conventional norms; and we remind ourselves that the good, the excellent, Godfather, “took care of himself” in life by perjuring, betraying his word given to a dying man, robbing the heirs of the gold the man had entrusted to him. But didn’t this gold serve to turn him into an honest citizen and, above all, to care for Leonardo? “Tutto nel mondo è burla”. (95)

Cândido reads this episode as a symptom of an ideological impasse. The stolen fortune, derived from the cataclysm of the slave trade, serves to turn the Godfather into an ‘honest citizen’. Cândido doesn’t explicitly mention here that the stolen fortune originates in the slave trade that would not be fully abolished domestically until over forty years after the novel was written, with the result being that Brazilian society throughout this period openly operated on a principle of racial hierarchy and exploitation while simultaneously consuming and regurgitating European Liberalism including, of course, ideas of anti-slavery. In such an environment, who—including the author—could summon the moral authority to castigate the Godfather? ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’; everything in the world is a joke. The stolen slave fortune, ‘above all’, allows the Godfather to care for Leonardo to finance the apprenticeship around which the novel is organised. But while for Wynter the European Bildung narrative charts an individual’s development through merit in a market-based society (95), Leonardo’s development is manifestly underwritten by violent coercion and kept on course by Rio’s arbitrary patrimonial relations.

There is a simultaneous narrowing and expansion in this essay. While Cândido ostensibly restricts his view to this ‘restricted documentary’ novel, and his method to explication de texte, he is actually still working with a capacious idea of the literary as such. While he states that it is “doubtful that realism gives an informative vision” because we would have to measure this against “data we take from documents of some kind” and claims to focus on the ‘dynamic’ of the narrative as some autonomous object, he elsewhere tacks far closer to Raymond Williams by reading particular scenes in the novel as local manifestations of world-systemic ideological conflicts. For Williams, “the documentary” is one of the three strands of culture identified in the essay “Structure of Feeling and Selective Tradition” (n.p.). Material fragments of history from manuscripts to buildings to photographs are, for Williams, objects external to literary texts, but whose aspects and moods form the backdrop against which we read them. The sum of these aesthetic signals is what Williams calls the structure of feeling, and whilst Cândido explicitly casts doubt on our ability to read Memórias in relation to “data we take from [contemporaneous] documents of some kind”, he does locate in the text documentary artefacts—religious processions, slave ships, official uniforms—which help render the historical struggle raging in early nineteenth-century Brazil.

This reading is achieved by furnishing with historical specificity the ideological conflict that Cândido gestures towards. Cândido begins to read the ‘structure of feeling’ of early nineteenth-century Brazil, but by identifying the documentary elements within the text and then following Siegfried Kracauer in reading the “unconscious nature” of “surface-level expressions”, thereby “provid[ing] unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things” (75). Cândido thus turns us away from history and towards a text whose seriousness he keeps diminishing—‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’—before telling us at the close to “pensemos nada” (88), think nothing, and be “lulled by this realist fable” (101). But he has already begun to show us how to read this text and the radical implications of grasping its core ideological conflict. Cândido does not fully unpack this conflict (and indeed doesn’t identify the stolen fortune as a slave fortune) because to do so would be to stray quickly into a discussion of the ongoing dialectic of order and disorder in 1970s Brazil. The patrimonial management of Brazilian democracy which began at independence (the Emperor handpicked the president and government from elected officials (Burns 128–9)) was alive while Cândido was writing as the military junta selected ministers well into the 1980s (Anderson 2). Cândido thus gestures towards the idea that nonsynchronous historical formations come into sharpest conflict throughout Brazilian history. We will see this more clearly through close readings of Memórias below, but more generally it is this point that makes Cândido a crucial thinker for world-literary debates which seek to locate vernacular examples of a global process of combined and uneven development.

The Dialectic of Order and Disorder in the Text

Let us close read a few episodes where we see this oscillation between the worlds of order and disorder, which will also allow us to identify some of the representational strategies used to capture intermediate, casual, informal classes in Caribbean and African fiction under neoliberalism. Towards the beginning of the novel, Leonardo Pataca is arrested for his involvement in an illicit, occult party. The comadre visits the Lieutenant Colonel and asks him to help secure Leonardo Pataca’s freedom. Later on, the Lieutenant Colonel goes to see a friend of his who is a nobleman, who—we understand—will secure Leonardo Pataca clemency, probably from the King himself. In between these two episodes, the text digresses to the story of how the compadre stole his fortune from a dying slave trader who made the compadre promise that he would deliver his inheritance to his daughter. Of course the compadre never does this, and this is what effectively funds his care of the novel’s protagonist and thus the very plot of the novel. This triptych—comadre seeks Lieutenant Colonel’s help; the story of the compadre’s stolen slave fortune; the Lieutenant Colonel secures a pardon—shuttles us between the outer limits of Brazilian society. The comadre and the compadre are effectively the first concentric circle of advocates for Leonardo Pataca and his son Leonardo Filho. The comadre reveals her connection to the next circle out, the Lieutenant Colonel, who visits a nobleman in the next circle, who will talk to the King in the outermost circle. Meanwhile, we learn that the compadre was once an agregado—a wanderer, a casual labourer, a dependant—who performed bloodletting on a slave ship. He drew his fortune from this horrendous realm, the shadowy outermost limit of Brazilian society—and its ground bass of material production—the hellscape of the transatlantic slave trade.

The comadre must reach up towards the King to bring her godson back into society, while the compadre is only able to take in Leonardo Filho because of a stolen slave fortune. The intermediate classes are dependent on integrating these social extremes into their networks of patronage. The social consequences of this dual dependence are captured in the text. We see the compadre’s contradictory contempt for labour, and his desire for Leonardo Filho to rise up in society, in an earlier episode which alludes to the story of his slave fortune:

O padrinho porém não se dava disto, e continuava a querer-lhe sempre muito bem. Gastava às vezes as noites em fazer castelos no ar a seu respeito; sonhava-lhe uma grande fortuna e uma elevada posição, e tratava de estudar os meios que o levassem a esse fim. Eis aqui pouco mais ou menos o fio dos seus raciocínios. Pelo ofício do pai… (pensava ele) ganha-se, é verdade, dinheiro quando se tem jeito, porém sempre se há de dizer: — ora, é um meirinho!... Nada… por este lado não… Pelo meu ofício… Verdade é que eu arranjei-me (há neste arranjei-me uma história quehavemos de contra), porém não o quero fazer escravo dos quatro vinténs dos fregueses… Seria talvez bom mandá-lo ao estudo… porém para que diabo serve o estudo? Verdade é que ele parece ter boa memória, e eu podia mais para Diante mandá-lo a Coimbra… Sim, é verdade… eu tenho aquelas patacas; estou já velho, não tenho filhos nem outros parentes… mas também que diabo se fará ele em Coimbra? licenciado não: é mau oficio; letrado? era bom… sim, letrado… mas não; não, tenho zanga a quem me lida com papéis e demandas… Clérigo?... um senhor clérigo é muito bom… é uma coisa muito séria… ganha-se muito… (38)

In fact, he devoted a great deal of effort to planning for his future. He sometimes spent his nights building castles in the air: He dreamed of great fortune and elevated position for his godson and tried to plan ways leading to such ends. Here, more or less, is the thread of his thinking: “It is true (he reasoned) that in the office his father practices you can earn good money, if you’re good at the job. But there will always be someone who says ‘Oh, he’s just a bailiff.’ No, that won’t do. Now in my own trade it’s true that I’ve done pretty well (there is a whole story in that ‘I’ve done pretty well’ that will have to be told), but I don’t want him to end up a slave to customers’ small change. Maybe it would be good to send him to school, but where would school get him? It’s true that he does seem to have a good memory, and after a few years I could send him on to Coimbra. Yes, I could do that, since I’ve saved up all that small change. And I’m old, I have no other children or other relatives. But what the devil will he take up at Coimbra? Lawyer? No… that’s a bad profession. Solicitor? That would be good. Yes, a solicitor. But… no, no; I hate people who bother me with papers and lawsuits. Clergyman? A gentleman cleric would be nice… very dignified; you make a lot of money[.] (18)

Protruding into this passage is a bizarre archipelago of conflicting desires and ideological imperatives. We will see a similar mess in the postcolonial plutocrat Titus Tajirika’s mocking interview of a casual worker in Wizard of the Crow. Here the compadre contemplates Leonardo Filho’s future, which he can underwrite given his slave fortune. He wants Leonardo to attempt some kind of social mobility (“he dreamed of great fortune and elevated position for his godson”) but doesn’t see wage labour as a route to this (“I don’t want him to end up a slave to customers’ small change”). Given that this is a society which profits from slavery, the term ‘escravo’ has taken on none of the irony of historical distance (‘slaving away’; ‘you treat me like a slave’). Here the compadre literally equates labour and slavery. He holds labour in contempt because, for him, labour is unworthy of the free. But of course the compadre’s fortune derives from slavery, and he himself is a labourer. A combination of his slave fortune and his wage labour will underwrite Leonardo’s future. Indeed, the very dependence that he wants to free Leonardo from is the thing that will fund his path through society: “porém não o quero fazer escravo dos quatro vinténs dos fregueses”; “eu tenho aquelas pataca”. The translation cleverly brings out the subtle parallel here: the literal meanings ‘I don’t want to make him a slave to the four quarters of the customers’ (quarters as in the American English parlance for coins) and ‘I have those monies’ are both rendered using the phrase “small change”. Thus we see the compadre disavow one moment the thing in which he reveals his participation the next. The contradictions continue as he contemplates the different jobs. Instead of attaining his dignity through wage labour, he wants Leonardo to occupy a well-respected yet apparently labourless position. The idea of merit without labour bears the trace of a static and absolutist society, as opposed to a society based on the attainment of merit through work. After applying his personal prejudices to a number of clerical roles, he settles on a vocation from the realm of superstition, yet one which has a good deal of prestige in Rio. ‘Clérigo?... um senhor clérigo é muito bom… é uma coisa muito séria… ganha-se muito’—in Rio the higher calling is brought crashing back down to earth as a job for a ‘senhor’, an urban gentleman, fully embedded in society (just as the priest who sleeps with the ‘gypsy’ is). Yet the prestige of the job, for the compadre comes from the fact that one can ‘ganha-se muito’, earn a lot. Here the transcendent values of the church, the earthly values of economics, and a local system of prestige become muddled and interchangeable. This is due to the fundamental uncertainty over the status of labour itself in a society where labour is at once free and reified—unpaid and commodified.

The oscillations of the plot in one section of the novel veer between contradictory capitalist and non-capitalist models of the ‘family’. Following Cândido, we can identify in one passage documentary accounts of competing modes of resource distribution which the plot must somehow resolve. After the compadre dies and José Manuel becomes the favoured courter of Luisinha, Leonardo Filho wanders around the countryside outside Rio and meets the members of a large, modest household out for a picnic. They agree to take him in as an agregado, meaning he will perform menial favours for the family in exchange for (perhaps intermittent) food and/or board. Leonardo has sunk through the circles of Brazilian society to the level of idleness and disorder. Having flown close to Luisinha and the respectable household of Dona Maria, he suddenly veers into dependency in another characteristic move of Regency-era Brazilian society. To complicate matters, Leonardo falls in love with Vidinha, the daughter of the house, triggering a double conflict with her cousins; they are jealous of Leonardo’s affections for their cousin and angry that he is consuming the family’s resources. For one cousin, Leonardo is “a pair of legs [in] the house that don’t belong in the family” (120). For Janet Siskind, divisions of labour and resource distribution are organised by kinship structures (861). While for Marxist anthropologists such as Maria Mies capitalism generally reifies large resource-sharing units until we arrive at the patriarchal family,³ the (semi-)periphery has seen the capitalist family form imposed on places where other kinship structures persist. For Mies, the capitalistic “monogamous nuclear family” “consists of the forced combination of the principles of kinship and cohabitation, and the definition of man as ‘head’ of this household and ‘breadwinner’ for the non-earning legal wife and children” (104). But this household receives Leonardo precisely because it cannot support itself through a single ‘breadwinner’. “Neither proprietor nor proletarian”, the man of the modest Rio family cannot sell his labour for a wage, nor rely on any single, steady source of income (Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas” 22). All family members must therefore work in some way—usually through performing favours or relying on the patronage of the wealthy (Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas” 22)—and domestic labour cannot be consigned entirely to feminised people as under patriarchy. As an agregado, Leonardo is thus potentially a valuable source of domestic help for the family. But the narrative cheerfully admonishes Leonardo for being a lazy parasite on the family, using language which invokes both capitalist ideas of the nuclear family and other forms of kinship:

Em certas casas os agregados eram muito úteis, proque a família tirava grande proveito de seus serviços, e já tivemos ocasião de dar exemplo disso quando contamos a história do finado padrinho de Leonardo; outras vezes porém, e estas eram em maior número, o agregado, refinado vadio, era uma verdadeira parasita que se prendia à árvore familiar, que lhe participava da seiva sem ajudá-la a dar os frutos, e o que é mais ainda, chegava mesmo a dar cabo dela. E o caso é que, apesar de tudo, se na primeira hipótese o esmagavam com o peso de mil exigências, se lhe batiam a cada passo com os favores na cara, se o filho mais velho da casa, por exemplo, o tomava por seu divertimento, e à menor e mais justa queixa saltavam-lhe os pais em cima tomando o partido de seu filho, no segundo aturavam quanto desconcerto havia com paciência de mátir, o agregado tornava-se quase rei em casa, punha, dispunha, castigava os escravos, ralhava com os filhos, intervinha enfim nos mais particulares negócios.

Em qual dos dois casos estava ou viria estar em breve o nosso amigo Leonardo? O leitor que o decida pelo que se vai passar. (191–2)

In some households [agregados] were very useful because the family derived great benefit from their services—we had occasion to give an example of this when we told the story of Leonardo’s late godfather. In other instances, however—and these were the more frequent—the dependent, a confirmed lay-about, becomes a veritable parasite latched onto the family tree, partaking of its sap without helping it to yield fruit. And, what is more, he sometimes ended up killing it. And it is the case that, in spite of everything, if, on the one hand he was crushed under the weight of a thousand demands, if favours done were thrown up to him on every occasion, if the oldest son of the house, for example, took him for his amusement, or at the slightest and most justifiable complaint the parents leaped all over him taking the side of their own child, on the other hand whatever disturbance might arise in the house was also tolerated with martyrs’ patience. The dependent becomes almost a king in his castle, proposing and disposing, punishing the slaves, reproving the family children, intervening, in short, in the most private of affairs.

In which of the two categories was our friend Leonardo, or would he soon come to be? Let the reader decide on the basis of what is about to occur. (118–9)

This offers a documentary view of the ‘whole house’ in early nineteenth-century Brazil, where no single mode of production has become absolutely dominant. This kind of household is partly patriarchal because the agregado, not being a blood relation, is beneath ‘the oldest son of the house’. Equally, though, the agregado’s behaviour is ‘tolerated with a martyr’s patience’, and he becomes ‘almost a king in his castle’. This suggests the authoritarian values of the patriarchy identified by Mies do not totally structure this social unit. Authority and tolerance are not vertical and static here, but oscillate. This is the informality of a society in which the bourgeois patriarch cannot wield moral authority; they must ‘aturavam quando desconcerto’—put up with disconcerting things, because the slavery they depend on creates a huge surplus of freemen who are not fully bound by bourgeois codes of order and politeness. As a result, life in an extended household can seem rowdy and chaotic, but how can the heads of these families preach civility and duty while manifestly betraying such values as they punish their slaves? This ideological impasse is expressed in what Cândido terms the evenly weighted sentence structures typical of the novel’s style: ‘se na primeira hipótese’; ‘no Segundo’ [‘if in the first case’; ‘then in the second’]. Here I am following the elusive spirit of Cândido’s essay and reading in the documentary elements of Memórias the unconscious world-systemic ideological conflicts which they betray.

For the remainder of the novel, in which Leonardo will move from agregado to militia sergeant—from order to disorder—the plot oscillates just as Almeida’s sentences do, in an attempt to balance the ideological impasse of slaveowning yet bourgeois society. After joining the large household, Leonardo gets a casual job (with the help of his elite benefactor Dona Maria) as a general assistant in the royal pantries. It is unclear why Leonardo gets a job at this point. He is an agregado and one who, we are told, leeches off the family. Why would an economic parasite also seek other employment? Partly because Dona Maria insists—further revealing the arbitrary dynamics of this society—but there is no other reason within the logic of the plot. Leonardo cannot be allowed to settle as an agregado in a large family because the novel requires him to ‘develop’ in however superficial and arbitrary a manner. Otsuka claims that Memórias is too rigorously organised around local Brazilian conditions and is effectively closed off to the broader dynamic of history (59), but if this were true then Leonardo would happily remain a dependant and would be subject to no imperative to ‘progress’ beyond this state. But here Memórias compromises with the developmentalist imperatives of the novel form, in contrast to a text like The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’ which, for Schwarz, is organised around the “infinitely interesting movement of a real, existing order” (Two Girls 106). If Leonardo is to end up as the eponymous militia sergeant, he must be driven onwards out of the realm of disorder and dependency and towards the world of work, vocation, and order. So the ‘verdadeira parasite’ veritable parasite, content to drink the sap without helping to yield fruit, is also keen to take a prestigious job in the fabled realm of the royal household. Almeida has been able to retrieve from the mists of that vaguely folkloric “tempo do rei” (23)—time of the King—an echo of a partially disalienated life where labour is not the only means to securing social existence, and civilisational ‘progress’ does not mean unilateral capitalist modernisation. But in the novel’s imaginary, this historical settlement is beginning to break up as bourgeois ideas of ‘progress’ loosen the bonds of the ‘whole family’ and Leonardo is compelled to keep circulating through Brazilian society. In this sense, Otsuka is correct to claim that “historical conflicts are disguised”, because the malandragem—the oscillation of the plot—may well be a formal registration of the contradictions between the regressive social forms of Brazilian colonial capitalism and the liberal capitalism of the later nineteenth century (59). The point here is that arbitrariness of the social trajectories and plot can constitute for us today a critique of the historical forces that shape them.

The novel in part follows Leonardo’s path from the disorder of the big family to the order of the military, thus incorporating a developmental pathway—but it is a pathway and plot that zigzags between the realm of disorder and the realm of order, in both of which the agregado figure becomes an integral part. Two of Vidinha’s cousins are in love with her and want to eliminate Leonardo as a rival. The household go out for another picnic which is broken up by Major Vidigal, who arrests Leonardo. On the way to prison, Leonardo escapes, humiliating Vidigal. Back at the house, an argument has erupted: the cousins have had Leonardo arbitrarily arrested, and Vidinha is furious. Leonardo returns just before things become unpleasant. Now that he is a fugitive from justice, the comadre takes the opportunity to insist that Leonardo get a job. He begins work in the royal pantries but has some sort of fling (the text is oblique on this) with a maid, enraging Vidinha. She marches to the pantries, with Leonardo in tow, but on the way Major Vidigal appears and arrests Leonardo. While at the pantries, Vidinha confronts a young man working there who was in love with the maid. This ‘lackey’ sees an opportunity to get revenge on Leonardo Filho and begins flirting with Vidinha. He is eventually taken into the home in Leonardo’s place. On yet another picnic, the ‘lackey’ gets drunk and is arrested. It turns out that the arresting officer is Leonardo Filho, who, after his arrest on the way to the royal pantries, was recruited as an officer.

Leonardo’s lurch from the chaotic family to police custody and back again throws each of these spaces into disarray. Through subtraction, he is now the missing element in both, veering between the worlds of order and disorder which each want to claim him. We learn that Leonardo re-enters the house and breaks up the argument at the very moment that Vidinha “had hurled three or four exceedingly strong words at her cousins” causing her aunt to take offence and switch sides of the argument to defend the cousins (129). The arbitrary ‘taking of sides’ in the family is only resolved when Leonardo returns. His oscillation between the realms of order and disorder now brings temporary equilibrium to the latter but causes chaos in the former. Vidigal is humiliated, and the reputation of the most senior bailiff in Rio—the very coherence of the stratosphere of order and authority in the city—is under threat. This rupture is in turn resolved when Leonardo is made to take up a job in the royal pantries, appears to flirt with a maid thus enraging Vidinha, who storms to the pantries with Leonardo in tow. It is on this trip that Vidigal recaptures Leonardo, and the veneer of order is restored.

The subtraction of Leonardo from the family causes the same problems as before, but this time it is resolved when the ‘lackey’ from the royal pantries—who loved the maid and wants his revenge on Leonardo for flirting with her—worms his way into the large household and begins pursuing Vidinha. At this point, Leonardo has fully disappeared from the narrative; the oscillating outer electron of the Caesium atom has broken away, a new neutron has entered the nucleus, and the whole atom has settled into a stable state as Gold. But at another picnic the ‘lackey’ gets drunk and is arrested. The moment at which he leaves the family is the moment that Leonardo reappears, in the guise of a bailiff under Vidigal’s command, who acts as the arresting officer of the ‘lackey’. We learn that when Leonardo was arrested as he followed Vidinha to the royal pantries, Vidigal recruited him: “the major chose [Leonardo] for his service […] since, as someone experienced in such matters [crime], he intuited that Leonardo would be a valuable aide” (145). At the nadir of his cycle between order and disorder—the moment at which he is a fugitive from justice and has cheated on Vidinha—Leonardo is securely captured by Major Vidigal. But it is at this moment that he is suddenly drawn up to the extreme pole of order, given that Vidigal needs criminals to catch criminals. Here, both the large informal family and the pole of order find equilibrium because as a bailiff Leonardo is no longer eligible to participate in the family as an agregado. The fact that Leonardo ultimately acquires a respectable social position, with many hurdles along the way, suggests the novel has been tracking his apprenticeship or Bildung. But in this informal environment where bourgeois values have not achieved total penetration, the developmental plot lurches forward somewhat randomly. The engine is always necessarily some variation (however obscure) of the profit motive or Enlightenment ideas of material progress—it is variously error, injustice, paternal intervention, and other forces which disqualify Leonardo’s success as an apprenticeship in an egalitarian society. The denouement, in which three of Leonardo’s elite benefactors conspire to persuade Vidigal to promote the meritless boy to sergeant in exchange for securing Vidigal a wife, is a firework display of arbitrary powers—the heads of a client network conspiring with imperialist law enforcement to consolidate patriarchal control. Yet it achieves narrative closure within the conventions of the bourgeois novel form. So while Otsuka finds that Memórias uncritically imports the values and the dynamic of the anomalous class it describes, I have attempted to show that, by adapting the critical tools in Cândido’s essay, we can read the historical conflicts that the novel unsuccessfully disguises.

The cross-class connections we have been observing—Leonardo’s sponsorship by the wealthy Dona Maria, his living with a poor family, his work in the royal household, his ultimate promotion to sergeant—present an “attractive image of the country” where people move through society with ease and the elite tolerate the impishness of the young and the poor (Otsuka 59). But the “dark side of Brazilian conviviality” (Anderson 18) is the social conflict it disguises. Flora Sussekind has shown how the journal in which Memórias was serialised, Correio Mercantil, also carried adverts for “domestic help, illegal slave trade, theatres” (173), and further archival research has revealed that in the 15 August 1852 edition which carried chapters XII and XIII of the novel also featured adverts for a “Relojoaria Ingleza”, a shop importing clocks from Liverpool; the Royal Hotel near Blackfriars Bridge in London; and a shop selling “Pianos Inglezes” on the Rua dos Oulives (Correio Mercantil). The readers of Memórias were clearly consumers of European commodities, plugged into the networks of world trade, looking to the land of Bentham and Locke to literally keep time for them. Many of them may well have been slave owners, and as long as Almeida was being patronised by this class and its organ, he could not summon the moral authority to openly castigate their political economy. Almeida’s ‘attractive image of the country’ flatters the property owners by showing their relaxed tolerance towards the Leonardos of Rio, but this is the “tolerâcia corrosiva”, the corrosive tolerance, of the Brazilian middle class (87). This same corrosive tolerance is evident in the Haitian elite in Heading South who, despite their racism, countenance mixing with the poor insofar as it deescalates tensions caused by their grim exploitation amidst radical economic deregulation.

Almeida’s inability to openly critique the elite has led some commentators to claim that the novel is part of a closed, morally bankrupt historical laboratory “which does not internalize these [historical] conflicts and has no knowledge of moral convictions or remorse” (Schwarz, Two Girls 15; see also Otsuka 59). But this establishes a teleological view of history where capitalist modernisation has also meant gradual moral improvement. Schwarz has argued elsewhere that history as it has been lived in Brazil has featured moments where economic decline has damaged business owners, the latifundia, or patriarchy more broadly, resulting paradoxically in periods of social progress (Two Girls 188). While Almedia wrote Memórias the transition from sugar to coffee as Brazil’s monocultural export triggered the decline of slavery and slave capital (Burns 150). This novel of relaxed conviviality thus appears at a moment of impending economic decline for some of the Rio elite, but a moment within a longer erratic trajectory of social progress towards full abolition in 1888. The readers of Correio Mercantil would have been caught up in these jostling historical currents, so the willed civility of the informal exchanges in Memórias may have seemed, even to them, as a displacement of a more febrile set of relations. This is why the text combines regressive (clientelist) and progressive (Bildungsroman) elements. If we follow Cândido and read for the uneven combination of ideological pressures acting on the text, we do not have to follow Otsuka in concluding that the text is to some extent a cul-de-sac of cultural history, repressive rather than expressive of historical conflicts. Instead, we can see its social informality as a moment in which heterogeneous ideological pressures reach an impasse, without the prospect of violent class confrontation. We will see the same conditions obtain in Duvalier’s Haiti and post 1994 South Africa, when moments of economic stagnation or transition allow fragile class truces. But the organisation of the text’s form around local conditions of clientelism does result in awkward aesthetic features where “the constitutive elements are not integrated” such as the clientelist conclusion discussed above or the procession scene (Cândido 87). In Dom Casmurro, Machado de Assis was able to perfectly integrate the local conditions of favour and clientelism with the novel form. The agregado figure, José Dias, becomes a structurally integral character in the crushing victory of regressive forces in Brazil.

Part II

The agregado and the Novel Form in Dom Casmurro

In Dom Casmurro, Machado follows Almeida in making local reality structurally integral to the novel’s form. Just as the agregado character José Dias becomes a conscript of the cruel drift of the novel, so too was a relaxed, non-bourgeois, interstitial class exploited and crushed by the very forces that brought it into being. Unlike in Wizard of the Crow, for example, the anti-hegemonic potential of economic informality is totally undermined as it ultimately becomes a handmaiden of regressive forces. Helen Caldwell’s 1960 monograph discusses both Dom Casmurro’s emulation of Othello and the significance of adapting themes of jealousy in a capricious slaveowning culture like Brazil’s. Schwarz later demonstrates that Brás Cubas is “a firework display of a caricatured universal culture, a kind of down-market universality”, in overcompensation for the nation’s sham enlightenment and economic backwardness (Master 18). Seeing this materialist critical genealogy as a finished project (Castro Rocha xxxv), some formalist readings attempt to show that Machado realised the conservatism of his own literature and criticism around 1878, after which he ironises the reactionary tenor of Brazilian letters in the voice of narrators such as Brás Cubas (Castro Rocha 45–88). Despite vast differences, these critics all view aspects of Brazil’s colonial underdevelopment, world-systemic peripherality, or non-hegemony in the world republic of letters, as “a potentially productive force” (Castro Rocha 57). Meanwhile much recent criticism is foregoing the dialectics of core and periphery heuristic and focusing instead on Machado’s global ‘influences’—Europeans who predate him—thereby replacing the author with ‘the rest’ who succeeded ‘the west’ (see Salomão; Grünhagen; and Holanda and Diego). I follow Schwarz’s seminal essay on the novel, “Capitu, the Bride of Dom Casmurro”, in arguing that the text is shaped by an articulated economy of slave and wage labour, and deceptively charts the regressive victory of the sugar-plantation-owning class in Brazil. But while Schwarz focuses on Machado’s innovation of the unreliable narrator, and its attempts to discredit Capitu, I pay closer attention to the agregado character, José Dias, to build a more nuanced picture of his role in the novel’s plot structure and thus the regressive victory of his patrons. By integrating local economic informality into a global bourgeois cultural form, Machado refined a project begun by Almeida in Memórias.

While Schwarz’s work has done much to cast Machado as an artist of peripheral modernity, few studies build on this dialectical approach. The most recent edited collection of Anglophone scholarship on Machado’s work, for example, quotes Schwarz’s historical approach as a key aspect of Machado studies but has an ambivalent relation to Schwarz’s “Marxist ideological underpinnings” (Aidoo and Silva vi). In an apparent gesture of throwing open the curtains on a dimly lit subject, the editors declare that “Machado’s universal appeal also transcends Brazil’s national socio-historical borders and performs very successfully on the level of universal human behaviour” (vi). My task here will be to further mine the Brazilian historical context and Machado’s work to understand in greater detail its specific aesthetic response to local conditions. I then place that response in dialogue with other situated aesthetics elsewhere in the world-system, rather than overhastily deferring to the ideological fantasy of ‘universal human behaviour’ with no mediating conditions. It has been agued by scholars of different critical schools that Machado exploited the novel form in a unique manner. For Earl E. Fitz in Machado de Assis and Female Characterisation (2015) the author pioneered “a new kind of narrative (one both anti-realistic in nature and yet politically engaged)” (11). But Fitz’s work focuses on Machado’s mastering of the ‘essential’ ambiguities of language, thus telling us little about how the novels are shaped by Brazilian material conditions. By approaching Dom Casmurro via economic informality, I hope to correct this tendency.

Like Dany Laferrière and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, I suggest that Machado’s position as a (semi-)peripheral writer gave him a specific consciousness of economic informality that shapes his fiction. The author’s upbringing as the child of agregados and the godson of a wealthy, well-connected woman (Fonseca 19–21) meant the author was deeply familiar with the kinds of arbitrary and informal sociality that he explores through figures like José Dias. “Relations in the public sphere often intertwined with those of private networks. Godparents, on the surface, were part of one’s affective relations. If they offered sentimental advantages on the one hand, they also brought political and economic advantages on the other” (Schwarcz 14–15). Whilst Machado moved away from the outskirts and into Rio as soon as he could (Schwarcz 15), he never straightforwardly and uncritically accepted bourgeois life. He became “involved in the restricted group of urban literati” (Schwarcz 17), but, as we will see, a strain of his work eviscerates the arbitrary hierarchies and ideas of the prestige of Brazilian society. Commenting on a photograph of Machado sat amongst members of the exclusive Panelinha club, K. David Jackson wonders, “[c]ould his companions have suspected the presence in their midst of an ironist, a skeptical destabilizer of systems, a dismantler of illusion?” (3). The subtlety of Machado’s critique of the arbitrariness of Brazilian society was necessitated by his structural position in that society, but this is also what gives life to his novels. He had a foot in each camp, one on Morro do Livramento and one in the Panelinha club. He played the great game of rising up through a society in which mobility was not achieved through merit—everyone knew it, but no one could acknowledge it for fear of undermining their own position. Critics like Carvalho Franco and Schwarz have shown us that this was due to the fact that labour was performed and value generated by the very people who were excluded from any form of mobility or prestige, so the actual source of financial and cultural capital had to be repressed and new kinds invented and imaginarily inhabited by the wealthy as well as the precious freemen who performed their menial tasks. If the latter participated in the fantasy that hard work would be rewarded—something they knew to be untrue given that many were descended from slaves or had been slaves themselves—they might be rewarded with favour: a room in a grand house like José Dias or a place on the fringes of the estate like Machado’s parents. The fortunate ones may witness their patrons become godparents to their children, thereby helping them secure some kind of social mobility. Whence the complex forces jostling in Machado’s writing: “the ultimate goal” of the Brazilian Academy of Letters that he cofounded, was “to worship Brazilian culture” (Schwarcz 23), whilst at the same time his novels represented Brazil as a bizarre periphery of modernity, distinguished from Europe only as a place where “[Liberal] ideas would be false in a different sense [...] in an original way” (Schwarz 20).

Dom Casmurro is the disparaging nickname of the narrator, Bento, whose jealousy of his childhood sweetheart and wife Capitu leads him destroy their marriage and almost murder his son. Bento is the son of a wealthy and conservative sugar-planting family. Before she has Bento, his mother—Dona Glória—has a miscarriage, so promises her next son to the service of the church in return for the health of the child. But the young Bento falls in love with Capitu, the beautiful girl next door, and does not want to be committed to the seminary. Capitu is a girl born in the wrong century; she sees straight through Rio’s absurd economy of favour and system of prestige with her “olhas de ressaca” (n.p.), or “undertow eyes” (61).⁴ ‘Ressaca’ is translated by John Gledson as ‘undertow’, a powerful tidal force which draws swimmers into dangerous situations. In her sheer genius, Capitu helps Bento to plot a way out of a career in the church, deftly playing the opinions and designs of the patrician family members off against one another. Capitu’s undertow vision, then, is a countercurrent to the tide of Brazilian history which drifts along the course of the slave ship, undisturbed by the waves of abolition. Her attempt to help the son of a sugar-planting family (whose wealth is dependent on the massive exploitation of slave labour) resist the superstitious realm to which his mother lost him in a prenatal bargain and bring him instead into a world of romance, sexuality, and white-collar work (he will ultimately go to law school), constitutes a decisive break from the bourgeois-slaveowning society. The first part of the novel charts the success of Capitu and Bento’s escape from gulf stream of history. Bento transfers from the seminary to law school, he and Capitu marry, leave the oppressive home of the sugarstocracy, and have a child together. But for Alfredo Bosi, Capitu’s undertow eyes also put her beyond the control of Bento himself (30). So in the second part, Bento decides that Capitu has been unfaithful. The imperialistic and patriarchal values of his childhood home and his theological education come flooding back to drown Capitu and their son. Bento sends the pair away to Europe, where Capitu will die. For Schwarz, the end of the novel functions as “a poeticization of the old Brazil, of the colonial inheritance, whose persistence confirms the unbreakable hold of the propertied class” (Two Girls 88). The themes of slavery and the sacred status of property which “until now have appeared in the form of scraps of conversation, […] suddenly and dizzyingly take on a new intensity” (Two Girls 88). Liberal, enlightened aspirations, whose logical social conclusions of genuine individual agency are glimpsed at during the course of the novel, suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of the paranoid and barbaric elite. What has not been fully explored is the role played by agregado labour in the overall structure of the novel. The victory of a regressive elite that the novel stages is facilitated, now consciously, now unconsciously, by the flattery of the agregado class. Dom Casmurro will thus appear to us as a striking formal solution to the problem of how to represent the role of an intermediate class in a total social process. While Schwarz mentions the role of José Dias in the “gamut of relations of paternalist dependency” (Two Girls 72) which is a crucial part of the novel, I develop Schwarz’s argument by analysing in detail the local ideological conflict in which the agregado is bound up (particularly through close reading of his debate with Father Cabral), and his subsequent impact on Bento’s developmental trajectory.

The role of José Dias, the Santiago household’s dependant or agregado, in the overall formal structure of the plot, reveals the impact of Brazil’s slaveholding-yet-bourgeois political economy on the nation’s attitudes, cultural character, and destiny. It is José Dias who sets the entire plot in motion when he approaches his ‘employer’ or donor, Dona Glória, to tell her that Bento and Capitu are becoming close. He uses this opportunity to remind Dona Glória that she has promised Bento to the church, and it may be time for him to enter the seminary. Why might José Dias do this? His job as an agregado is to flatter and adulate his donors so he can secure their favour—given the prestige of ecclesiastical work in Brazilian society, José Dias seems to honour Dona Glória by reiterating the noble vocation which she has chosen for Bento. But as agregado José Dias is also subordinate to Bento himself in the household, a point that Machado incorporates into the scene: “José Dias, depois de alguns instantes de concentração, veio ver se havia alguém no corridor; não deu por mim” (n.p.); “José Dias, after a few moments’ careful thought, came to see if there was anyone in the corridor; he didn’t notice me” (7). Before telling Dona Glória about Bento and Capitu, José Dias has to check if he might be overheard by Bento himself. Here we see that José Dias cannot invoke any kind of authority over members of the household, even children. So why does he risk flattering Dona Glória at the expense of Bento? Again the answer lies in the social status of the agregado. After the death of Dona Glória, Bento will be the head of the household. José Dias’s place within the household would be more secure if its kinship structure remains inert. If Bento becomes a celibate priest and settles down in the old family home, the number of competing desires and opinions that José Dias has to balance in order to secure favour with all reduces. Whereas Bento and Capitu’s courtship risks the formation of a new household, combining the plantocracy and the petite bourgeoisie, thus creating an immensely difficult ideological balancing act for the figure who must agree with everyone. For José Dias, then, the middle-class (and deeply perceptive) Capitu poses a threat to his social reproduction as an agregado.

For Schwarz, the two form an antinomial pair in the structure of the novel. “In the dependants’ camp, José Dias’s opposite is Capitu” (Two Girls 73). Capitu would have been “the daughter of poor neighbours, half dependent on Dona Glória” and her sugar fortune (Two Girls 63). So Capitu, despite her intimate relationship with Bento, appears to us as “[p]art of the gamut of relations of paternalist dependency” displayed in the novel (Two Girls 72). Whereas Capitu attempts to resist the tide of history by forming a relationship across the class divide which would draw Bento away from working for one of Brazil’s largest and most arcane institutions, José Dias attempts to turn the prevailing winds of society to his advantage. Schwarz has suggested that José Dias does not exert any form of independent will: “[f]or all his wiliness, the agregado does not really think of himself as an individual, separate from the family he serves, with whom in his imagination he merges, and whose importance gives him the sense of his own worth” (Two Girls 73). But as we have just seen, José Dias clearly understands that, due to his dependent status, his own social reproduction is contingent in the material and ideological coherence of this elite family. By reminding Dona Glória of her promise to send Bento to the seminary, he aligns himself with a regressive current of history, but one which should provide security. It is this alliance of the agregado class with the very people who oppress them that Capitu must fight against throughout the novel. Schwarz of course understands this bizarre alliance and the fact that it is totally arbitrary—members of the intermediate class must align themselves with the views of whichever group can offer them shelter, thereby rendering the choice amongst ‘values’ an arbitrary one—but this does not mean that José Dias exercises no agency in the historical destiny of this society.

Schwarz’s claim seems inaccurate because José Dias weighs up options and plots his way through this paternalist society. By reminding Dona Glória of her promise, José Dias sets the entire plot in motion. He plays a structural role in the novel, just as the agregado plays a structural role in Brazilian society. Now Capitu and Bento will have to pick their way out of the clutch of superstition and capital if they want to be together. Given that José Dias must also serve Bento, the latter recruits him to help plot a course away from the seminary. José Dias is initially reluctant to assist Bento: “Em que lhe posso valer, anjoy do céu? Não hei de dissuader sua mãe de um projeto que é, além de promessa, a ambição e o sonho de longos anos” (n.p.); “My dear boy, how can I be of help to you? I can’t dissuade your mother from a project which is not just a promise: it’s been her dream and her ambition for many years” (50). José Dias frames himself as the broadly passive handmaiden of Dona Glória’s desires when in fact he has had a hand in curating them. We learn later that Dona Glória had misgivings about her promise. Bento even entertains the possibility that Dona Glória might have considered a different career for him: “I’m ready for anything; if she wants me to study law, I’ll go to São Paulo…” (50). This suggestion of an alternative career for Bento opens up a new potential route out of the crisis: “Over José Dias’ face there passed something like the flash of an idea”:

Uma vez que você não póde ser padre, e prefere as leis… As leis são belas, sem desfazer da teologia, que é melhor que tudo, como a vida eclesiástica é a mais santa… Por que não há de ir estudar leis fora daqui? Melhor é ir logo para alguma universidade, e ao mesmo tempo que estuda, viaja. Podemos ir juntos; veremos as terras estrangeiras, ouviremos inglês, francês, italiano, espanhol, russo e até sueco. D. Glória provavelmente não poderá acompanhá-lo; ainda que possa e vá, não quererá guiar os negócios, papéis, matrículas, e cuidar de hospendarias, e andar com você de um lado para outro… Oh! as leis são belíssimas! (n.p.)

Since you can’t be a priest, and prefer the law … Law is a wonderful thing, and that is not to belittle theology, which is better than all the others, just as the priest’s life is the holiest … Why not study law abroad? It would be better to go straight to some university, and at the same time as you study, you could travel. We can go together; we’ll hear English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, even Swedish. Dona Glória probably won’t be able to go with you; even if she can and does go, she’ll not want to deal with business matters, papers, registration forms, arranging lodgings, going here and there with you … Oh, the law is most wonderful!” (51–2)

Here José Dias prevaricates on the faultline between two opposing ideological camps in Brazilian society—weighing up the strategic advantages of each position. Given that his donor Dona Glória has promised Bento to the service of the church, José Dias must praise the institution—describing it in his customary superlatives (‘a vida eclesiástica é a mais santa’)—while at the same time proposing an alternative. The alternative is the study of Law. As Burns notes, Brazil’s constitution was heavily influenced by Portuguese law (116–7), and for Schwarz it is indebted to that great document of European Liberalism, the Declaration of the Rights of Man (“Misplaced Ideas” 20). Brazil’s imported legal tradition was therefore considered an index of its modernity. Bento’s conjecture that his mother would have been almost as likely to commend him to Law as to the priesthood shows the abstract equivalence of these roles in Brazilian civic discourse. Burns argues that the legal tradition was a vital part of the national character across the nineteenth-century Iberian world (96), and in their weak performance of civilisation, the plantocracy would also have valued legalism and lawyers. So José Dias decides he can suggest an alternative career for Bento whilst still adulating his donor. If he can do this favour for Bento and persuade Dona Glória to allow her son to pursue a career other than the priesthood, he will have secured his position with the next generation of the family on which he depends.

Here, José Dias ostensibly moves onto the right side of history by attempting to help Bento escape a conservative career for which he has no affinity. But Machado’s construction of the scene shows that what tempts José Dias over to Bento’s side is self-interest and an arbitrary choice amongst equivalent forms of oppression. By backing Bento’s law career, José Dias can still achieve the end he tried to bring about by reminding Dona Glória of the seminary: keeping a secure role in the Santiago family. José Dias imagines himself as a valet for Bento’s European education and travels. Such a journey of education and acculturation in Europe ostensibly represents an escape from the provincial ideological impasse that José Dias is trying to negotiate. Helping Bento attain a legal education at a great European university, away from the mock civilisation of this slave Empire, seems to represent a break with the contradictions of Brazilian society. But for José Dias, the very idea of Europe is dragged back into the topsy-turvy Brazilian imaginary, where it serves merely to embellish prestige rather than offer development. In José Dias’s cynical imaginary, the idea of Europe appears as what it really is: not a bastion of Liberalism and Abolitionism, but as a source of prestige. Europe, in fact, is reduced to the pure aesthetic data of sound which communicates no actual meaning: ‘we’ll hear English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, even Swedish’ (emphasis mine). In this passage of the novel it is the figure of the agregado who cynically shifts between two positions, thereby showing the arbitrary equivalence of the two in the Brazilian context. Crucially, this also serves to undermine the professed universalism of the European discourses of Liberalism and equality in law.

What follows is a deft balancing act in which José Dias must attempt to propitiate conflicting interests. It is this zany labour that generates the bizarre register in which José Dias speaks for portions of the novel. His somehow assertive obsequiousness, or manipulative passivity, is paradigmatically Brazilian in tenor. Here I want to show how what Schwarz calls José Dias’s performance of “cultivate[d] grammar and prosody” becomes integrated into the victory of Brazil’s regressive elite (Two Girls 71). In a scene where the family celebrate the promotion of their acquaintance Father Cabral, José Dias’s praise attempts to subtly undermine the idea that Bento might be suited for the same work:

José Dias, para se desforrar da concorrência, fez um pequeno discurso em honra “ao coração paternal e augustíssimo de Pio IX”. […] Padre Cabral confirmou os louvores do agregado, sem os seus superlativos; ao que este acrescentou que o Cardeal Mastai evidentemente fora talhado para a tiara desde o princípio dos tempos. E, piscando-me o olho, concluiu:

—A vocação é tudo. O estado eclesiástico é perfeitíssimo, contanto que o sacerdote venha já destinado do berço. Não havendo vocação, falo de vocação sincera e real, um jovem pode muito bem estudar as letras humanas, que também são úteis e honradas. (n.p.)

José Dias, to get even with the competition, made a little speech in honour of the “paternal heart of the most august Pius IX.” […] Father Cabral endorsed the dependent’s praises, though without his superlatives; José Dias added that Cardinal Mastai had plainly been cut out for the papal tiara from the beginning of time. And, winking at me, he concluded:

“Vocation is everything. The ecclesiastical state is most perfect, so long as the priest has been destined from the cradle. If there is no vocation—I speak of real, sincere vocation—a young man can quite well study humanities, which are also useful and honourable”. (76)

José Dias offers a panegyric to vocation and sincerity from his position as a domestic sycophant in a household that robs him of his dignity. Indeed the speech is made because, to maintain favour in the family, José Dias must ‘get even with the competition’. The entire performance could not be more bitterly ironic. Here the Portuguese undergoes a series of exhausting expansions to the level of superlative, before the jarring introduction of caveats. ‘A vocação é tudo’, vocation is everything; everyone has an immutable inner calling from birth, and the call of the church ‘é perfeitíssimo’—is the most perfect. This ‘perfeitíssimo’ parallels and contradicts José Dias’s pronouncement to Bento that law is ‘belíssimas’, or ‘most wonderful’; in Portuguese, he describes the two very different vocations in the superlative. But this expansive language is suddenly deflated: the priesthood is most perfect, but humanities are also ‘useful and honourable’. We shift jarringly from ‘tudo’ and ‘perfeitíssimo’ to ‘úteis e honradas’. Apparently the total absence of total perfection leaves behind something perfectly adequate, perhaps even ‘honourable’. Here José Dias’s language brings together the scales of totality and the absolute, and the sequential and incremental. This linguistic tension is conditioned by Brazil itself: an absolute monarchy with an elected legislature,⁵ a slaveholding meritocracy.

As the debate between José Dias and Father Cabral proceeds, we see that they each move fairly arbitrarily between the two sides of the argument, in a characteristic move of Brazilian society:

Verse

Verse   Padre Cabral retorquia:   —A vocação é muito, mas o poder de Deus é soberano. Um homem pode não ter gosto à Igreja e até persegui-la, e um dia a voz de Deus lhe fala, e ele sai apóstolo; veja São Paulo.   —Não contesto, mas o que eu digo é outra coisa. O que eu digo é que se pode muito bem servir a Deus sem ser padre, cá fora; pode-se ou não se pode?   —Pode-se.   —Pois então! exclamou José Dias triunfalmente, olhando em volta de si. Sem vocação é que não há bom padre, e em qualquer profissão liberal se serve a Deus, como todos devemos.   —Prefeitamente, mas vocação não é só do berço que se traz.   —Homem, é a melhor.   —Um moço sem gosto nenhum à vida eclesiástica pode acabar por ser muito bom padre; tudo é que Deus o determine. Não me quero dar por modelo, mas aqui estou eu que nasci com a vocação da medicina; meu padrinho, que era coadjutor de Santa Rita, teimou com meu pai para que eu me metesse no seminário; meu pai cedeu. Pois, senhor, tomei tal gosto aos estudos e à companhia dos padres, que acabei ordenando-me. Mas, suponha que não acontecia assim, e que eu não mudava de vocação; o que é que acontecia? Tinha estudado no seminário. Algumas matérias que é bom saber, e são sempre melhor ensinadas naquelas casas. (n.p.)

Verse

Verse   Father Cabral replied:   “Vocation stands for a great deal, but the sovereign power belongs to God. A man may well have no liking for the Church, and even persecute it: one day, God speaks to him, and he becomes an apostle: look at St. Paul.”   “I don’t contest that, but what I am saying is something else. What I am saying is that one can well serve God without being a priest, in this world; is that not so?”   “It is.”   “Well then!” exclaimed José Dias triumphantly, looking around him. “Without a vocation one cannot have a good priest, and in any liberal profession one may serve God, as is our duty.”   “Quite so, but vocations do not only come from the cradle.”   “But it is the best way.”   “A boy with no taste for the life of the church may well end up by being a very good priest; all is as God determines. I don’t want to set myself up as an example, but look at me: I was born with a vocation for medicine; my godfather, who was curate at the church of Santa Rita, kept on at my father to send me to the seminary, and my father gave way. Well, sir, I enjoyed taking the lessons and the company of the priests so much that I ended up taking orders. But suppose things had not happened that way, and that I had not changed my vocation, what would have happened? I would have studied some subjects it is useful to know, and which are always better taught in such places”. (76–7)

Father Cabral doesn’t speak in the same totalising language as José Dias, but he invokes a totalising authority in his argument: ‘vocation stands for a great deal, but the sovereign power belongs to God’. Here, José Dias once again attempts to qualify these totalising claims by suggesting that all ‘liberal professions’ are essentially service to God in different guises. This seems to be the perfect riposte from José Dias—it is at once pious and yet permissive of the entire modern division of labour. But having made this move he has also undermined the very idea of vocation, the pillar on which his argument rests. If there is an abstract equivalence of all careers, then inherent aptitudes for certain kinds of work cannot really exist. This allows Father Cabral to cynically complete the destruction of the notion of vocation: ‘vocations do not only come from the cradle’. This undermines the idea that the priesthood might be a calling at all, but this does not matter to Father Cabral’s argument because he has the sheer power of Brazil’s religious institutions on his side: ‘a boy with no taste for the life of the church may well end up by being a very good priest’. This is because all subjects, theology and the humanities, ‘are always better taught in such places [seminaries]’. This final remark renders the entire debate moot. In the structure of this argument we see the role of José Dias in microcosm. By attempting to incorporate two incommensurable positions, or values, or ideologies, José Dias’s “cultivate[d] grammar [and] prosody” becomes integrated into the crushing victory of one of Brazil’s most regressive institutions (Schwarz Two Girls 71).

José Dias is bound to lose the argument because he scarcely believes in what he is saying. He adopts the terms of the class who routinely humiliate him in an attempt to find a reprieve for one of its most privileged sons. A subordinate attempting to adopt and manipulate the terms of the oppressor is typical of the struggle for agency that Luise White observes in witchcraft and vampire discourse in Africa. It is a measure of the simultaneously liberal yet arcane nature of Brazilian society that a casual domestic servant can openly challenge a revered member of Rio society only to be ‘proved wrong’ on the most dubious grounds. Here, the informality of servants debating masters functions to conceal a strict hierarchy of prestige and its ethically bankrupt logic. We will see in Chap. 5 how many ‘weak’ characters in Wizard of the Crow are able to use and manipulate the terms of the ruling class with far greater success, suggesting that social and economic informality has greater revolutionary scope in neoliberal Africa. In Dom Casmurro, however, the extent of José Dias’s discursive defeat presages the crushing victory of the ruling class in Brazil.

Dona Glória will incorporate this contradictory and arbitrary notion of vocation:

I spoke to [my mother] of my vocation, which had been discussed that afternoon, and which I confessed I did not feel within me.

“But you loved the idea of being a priest so much[.] […] And anyhow… vocation? But vocation comes with habit”[.] (81)

The very reason that Bento is being sent to the seminary is that Dona Glória retains the idea that she promised the unborn child to the service of the church—combining patrician notions of genetic inheritance and primogeniture with the most conservative theological dogma. To suggest that ‘vocation comes with habit’ totally undermines the ideological foundation for Bento going to the seminary, but without actually impacting the fact that he is going to go. The pun on ‘habit’ is clearer in the Portuguese: ‘vocação vem com o costume’ literally: ‘vocation comes with the costume’. But ‘costume’ in Portuguese means both ‘costume’—as in the priest’s habit, as Gledson translates it—and ‘custom’, as in social convention. Here Dona Glória espouses the inverse of her own position, with no actual alteration of her behaviour, demands, or beliefs. Here Machado captures the attitude of the Brazilian plantocracy, a class who outwardly adopted European Liberalism without bringing its precepts of equality or Abolition to their conclusions. As we have seen above, José Dias’s need to maintain favour with Dona Glória means that he not only is powerless to oppose her more regressive wishes but actually assists in the process which seamlessly combines the antinomies of her class interests.

While José Dias is of course unable to prevent Bento’s entry to the seminary, it does seem that his discussion of vocation with Father Cabral exerts some influence on the situation. In a chapter entitled ‘Um meio-termo’—literally ‘happy medium’, but which Gledson translates as ‘The Compromise (93)—we can see how the conservative notion of in-born vocation has been tempered:

Meses depois fui para o seminário de S. José. […] Padre Cabral achara um meio-termo: experimentar-me a vocação; se no fim de dois anos eu não revelasse vocação eclesiástica, seguiria outra carreira. […] Era uma concessão do padre. Dava a minha mãe um perdão antecipado, fazendo vir do credor a revelação da dívida. (n.p.)

Some months later I went to the São José seminary. […] Father Cabral had found a compromise, to try out my vocation; if at the end of two years, I revealed no ecclesiastical vocation, I would pursue another career. […] It was a concession from the priest. It gave my mother an advance pardon, making the remission of the debt come from the creditor. (93–4)

Bento describes Father Cabral’s compromise using the economic terminology of debt and credit. This is apt, given that Bento’s freedom from a life of work in the church will be purchased at the cost of a deeply metaphysical and superstitious education which will go on to shape his life. As Father Cabral says above, even the humanities are ‘always better taught’ in seminaries. At this point in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, the church educated many people who would go on to secular roles, thereby maintaining a strong ideological influence across a range of extra-ecclesiastical fields. It is this pervasive social conservatism—as I will show below—that contributes to Bento’s destruction of his marriage and the emergent progressivism that it represents. The concession of the church to allow the laity to partake in a limited theological education before going on to what José Dias earlier called ‘liberal professions’ was effectively a strategic class compromise which produced a huge number of lawyers, planters, and traders, who continued to bring foreign capital into Brazil’s unstable, export-oriented economy, but who remained sympathetic to the state religion. This is one index of Brazil’s peculiarly combined and uneven development—bourgeois yet slaveowning, liberal yet staunchly Catholic.

Powerless to prevent Bento’s entry to the seminary, José Dias attempts to maintain favour with both Bento and Dona Glória by publicly assenting to the theological education, whilst privately indulging Bento’s desire to resist ecclesiastical education. During a discussion about Bento between Father Cabral and Dona Glória, José Dias interjects:

“I am certain,” he said, winking at me, “that in a year our Bentinho’s ecclesiastical vocation will manifest itself clearly and decisively. He’ll make a first-rate priest, no doubt of that. But if it doesn’t come in a year…”

Later, he said to me in private:

“Go for a year: a year will soon be gone. If you still don’t like it, it’s because God doesn’t will it, as Father Cabral says, and in that case, my young friend, the best solution is Europe”. (94)

He backs the seminary to please Dona Glória, but he backs Bento’s eventual escape to secure their trip to Europe. By the time José Dias visits Bento in the seminary, the agregado has fully synthesised these contradictory positions: “Be patient, carry on studying, nothing’s lost in leaving here with some learning; and what’s more, even if you don’t become a priest, the experience of the seminary is useful, and it’s no bad thing to enter the world anointed with the holy oils of theology” (114). Having reminded Dona Glória of her promise to send Bento to the seminary, before attempting to assist Bento avoid this fate, José Dias has come finally to defend the compromise that he himself has inadvertently brought about. At every turn, the agregado class are forced to propitiate the elite dogma which they themselves have been conscripted into fomenting. José Dias is embedded in the dialectical movement of the plot in the same way that the agregados are implicated in the dialectical movement of Brazilian society.

But, as ever, José Dias is not without agency. In order to continue with his original plan of keeping Capitu out of the family, he implies that she has become interested in other boys since Bento entered the seminary. When Bento asks how Capitu is, José Dias responds: ‘She’s been as happy as ever; she’s a giddy little thing. Just waiting to find some local beau to marry her…’ (115). José Dias is thus complicit in sowing the first seeds of mistrust in Capitu which will eventually lead, at the end of the novel, to the collapse of her marriage. For the aged Bento, recalling this moment in his memoirs after he has sent Capitu to Europe to die, this moment becomes the fons et origio not only of his historic mistrust of his wife but also of the imperialism and misogyny in which he reconstructs it:

I became anxious for Saturday to come [when he will go home and see Capitu]. Until then I was persecuted by dreams, even when I was awake; I’ll not recount them here so as not to lengthen this part of the book. I’ll just tell one, and in as few words as I can; or rather I’ll put two in, because one has its origin in the other, unless the two are halves of a single whole. All this is obscure, lady reader, but the fault lies with your sex, perturbing the adolescence of a poor seminarist in this way. If it wasn’t for you, this book would perhaps be no more than a parish sermon, if I’d become a priest, or a pastoral letter, or a bishop, or an encyclical, if I’d become Pope, as Uncle Cosme had recommended: “Off you go lad; come back Pope!” Ah, why didn’t I fulfil this desire? After Napoleon, lieutenant and Emperor, in this century all destinies are possible. (119)

The initial mistrust of Capitu that José Dias strategically inspired in Bento has grown into a general misogyny. While Bento thinks back on the course his life took from this point—leaving the seminary to become a lawyer and marrying Capitu—he constructs a parallel, conditional life in the church. A life he believes women have deprived him of: ‘If it wasn’t for you, this book would perhaps be no more than a parish sermon’. A world of total piety, evacuated not just of female agency but of all women, is a world sanctioned in the aged Bento’s imagination by the very spirit of European imperialism: ‘After Napoleon, lieutenant and Emperor, in this century all destinies are possible’. The actual historical trajectory of European Liberalism, from the French Revolution to Napoleon, simply serves to reinscribe the oppression it attempted to overcome. Bento’s trajectory in the novel from a young man cooperating with his fiercely intelligent girlfriend against an ancien régime, to an embittered conservative misogynist, is therefore of historical resonance. Crucially, in order to achieve his own ends, it is the agregado who is forced to play an integral role in this historical trajectory.

We have seen the role that José Dias plays in facilitating the regressive worldview of the sugar class. This political unconscious manifests itself clearly in the novel’s climax, where Bento becomes convinced that his son Ezequiel is actually Escobar’s—his friend from the seminary. After a long period in which commentators were drawn in to Casmurro’s performance, critics from Helen Caldwell onwards have sought to read against the grain of the account (Schwarz Two Girls 59–60). Given that Bento’s unreliability as a narrator has been established, there is every reason to suspect that the physical similarity between his son and his best friend expresses something deeper than Capitu’s guilt. “It is impossible to decide whether Ezequiel is Escobar’s son or not since the likeness between the two, recognized by Capitu, proves little in a book deliberately full of physical similarities and coincidences of every sort” (Schwarz, Two Girls 65). Schwarz suggests that this likeness is expressive instead of the political unconscious of the text but does not investigate this aspect of the text in much more detail. Given that Bento has never fully escaped the gravitational field of his liberal-slaveowning upbringing, it is this set of ideas that reassert themselves even after he and the brilliant Capitu have begun their new life together.

What is it about Escobar that arouses Bento’s suspicions? The pair meet in the seminary and bond over a shared desire to leave and pursue a different kind of life (141–3). Bento constructs his best friend in much the same way as he constructs his love:

Uma coisa não seria tão fugitiva como o resto, a reflexão; íamos dar com ele, muita vez, olhos enfiados em si, cogitando. Respondia-nos sempre que meditava algum ponto espiritual, ou então que recordava a lição da véspera. Quando ele entrou na minha intimidade pedia-me frequentemente explicações e repetições miúdas, e tinha memória para guardá-las todas, até as palavras. Talvez esta faculdade prejudicasse alguma outra. (n.p.)

One thing, perhaps, was not as elusive as the rest, and that was his habit of reflecting; often we would find him, with his eyes turned inwards, thinking. He always told us he was meditating on some spiritual matter, either that or committing yesterday’s lesson to memory. When he became an intimate friend of mine, he frequently asked me for explanations and detailed repetitions, and had the capacity to memorize them all, every last word. It may be that this faculty got in the way of some other. (106)

Compare this with the moment when Bento first tells Capitu that José Dias has been talking to Dona Glória about them:

Capitu, a princípio, não disse nada. Recolheu os olhos, meteu-os em si e deixou-se estar com as pupilas vagas e surdas, a boca entreaberta, toda parada. […] Capitu refletia. A reflexão não era coisa rara nela, e conheciam-se as ocasiões pelo apertado dos olhos. Pediu-me algumas circunstâncias mais, as próprias palavras de uns e de outros, e o tom delas. (n.p.)

Capitu at first said nothing. She withdrew her eyes, turned them inwards, and stayed that way, with her pupils vague and sightless, her mouth half open, stock still. […] Capitu was reflecting. Reflection was not a rare occurrence with her, and you could tell it was happening by her eyes, which were shut tight. She asked me for a few more details, the actual words spoken by each person, and their tone. (35–6)

Given that the entire narrative is an attempt to condemn this pair, there is an oblique accusation in the phrase ‘It may be this faculty that got in the way of some other’. The faculty that Bento is suspicious of in both cases is that of careful thought, of critical analysis. There is a patrician contempt here for the actual practice of critical thinking, as opposed to simply adorning oneself with the ornaments of European thought.

It is Capitu’s critical thinking which nearly succeeds in helping the couple escape the influence of Bento’s family and the seminary: the plantocracy and the church. “Capitu not only has her own aims, which she always takes into account; she has a well-formed and critical opinion of her protectors, and even of their religion. […] The clarity of her decision presupposes a distance from the system of subjections, obligations, and imaginary merging of interests characteristic of paternalism” (Schwarz, Two Girls 74). Yet Capitu is aware that she must still participate in the paternalist order if she wants to achieve her aims. But to the embittered old Dom Casmurro telling us the story, it is this critical faculty which he now seeks to condemn.

To ensure that she and Bento can get married, she befriends Dona Glória, her family’s donor, and makes a fine impression. “Inwardly emancipated though she may be from paternalist subjection, this is what constitutes her milieu and she must deal with it. The charm of the character lies in her natural way of moving in an environment she has outgrown, whose meanders and mechanisms she understands with a politician’s instinct” (Schwarz, Two Girls 75). Escobar negotiates Brazilian society in a similar way to Capitu. Escobar is from a modest background but wants to go into commerce. His friendship with Bento parallels Capitu’s with Dona Glória. He flatters Dona Glória to Bento (163) and gleans everything he can about this successful plantation family. Escobar seems vaguely uneasy about the sheer excess of the family’s wealth and the enormous presence of slave labour in the home:

Verse

Verse I told him what I knew of her life and my father’s. Escobar listened attentively, asking for more, requesting explanation of anything I omitted, or what was merely unclear. […] And did we have plans to go back to the country?   “No, we’ll never go back now. Look, that black over there, he’s from there. Tomás!” […]   I showed him another, then another and another, here Pedro, there José, then Damião…   “All the letters of the alphabet,” interrupted Escobar. […]   “What surprises me is that Dona Glória should have got used to living in a town house[.”] […]   “Mamma has other houses larger than these[.”] […]   “She’ll never be without a roof over her head,” he concluded, smiling agreeably. (163)

Given that this is Bento’s unreliable, self-serving account, do we believe that Escobar’s smile was really ‘agreeable’? Escobar tolerates this obscene inventory of property, and he is eventually rewarded for his patience with this unbearable family: “at my request, my mother did advance him some sums of money” (173).

Escobar is subsequently able to get involved in the coffee trade. As Burns argues, Brazil’s coffee industry began to flourish in the 1850s, around the time that the action of the novel begins (211). This marked the beginning of a diversification of Brazil’s ecological monoculture, dominated up until that point by sugar—the source of the Santiago family fortune. While sugar production had historically exploited massive amounts of slave labour (Mintz xviii), the coffee industry sought to reduce dependency on slavery. In contrast to the economically protectionist, pro-slavery sugar class, the coffee class engaged more deeply with Liberal ideas: “the progressive Nicolau de Pereira de Campos Vergueiro began to experiment with a system that combined features of indentured service and sharecropping. […] He generally supported liberal policies and was highly praised for his enlightened ideas” (Burns 215). Coffee planters studied the industry and were able to compete with rivals who still didn’t pay for labour: “a sack of coffee produced by free labor cost approximately half that of one produced by slave labor” (Burns 223). This is perhaps why Escobar is brilliant with numbers—another critical skill that the son of a sugar family treats with mild contempt: “[“]give me the number of houses your mother has and the rents of each of them, and if I can’t tell you the total sum in two minutes—in one—you can hang me!” I accepted the wager” (166). While Bento can hardly keep count of the number of slaves the family owns, Escobar can quickly calculate the rents on Dona Glória’s properties. The commercially minded coffee class were better informed on the domestic economy than the sugar planters, and their reduced dependency on slavery meant they drove technological innovation: “In some instances modern plantation owners were introducing labor-saving machinery” (Burns 223). Eventually this bold new commercial class was able to come out in support of ending slavery. Two years before Dom Casmurro sits down to write his memoirs, “The Republican Party in São Paulo, composed primarily of coffee planters, resolved in 1887 to favor total emancipation” (Burns 223).

Just as the coffee class posed a material and ideological threat to the Brazilian plantocracy, Capitu and Escobar pose a threat to the world that Bento never fully escaped. Given the likenesses and parallels between Bento’s representation of his best friend and his wife, is it any wonder that he sees a combination of their faces in the next generation? The world that these two enterprising, intelligent, critical young people represent is anathema to the comfortable world that Bento comes from. A world cushioned by the flattery and assistance of agregados, and the manual work of dozens if not hundreds of slaves. The role that José Dias plays, structurally opposite to Capitu, at key points in Bento’s life, means that he remains invested in the division of labour of the Old Brazil. The insinuations against Capitu that José Dias was bound to make in order to maintain his position have brought Bento to this point: he literally cannot identify with Ezequiel, with the next generation of Brazil, with any future that breaks with Brazil’s past.

At the very end of the novel, Bento poses the question, “What remains is to know if the Capitu of Glória beach was already in the girl of Matacavalos, or if the latter had been changed into the former because of some intervening incident” (244). Bento immediately invokes Scripture, not to examine his own heart or contemplate forgiveness, but to further incriminate a woman condemned without evidence or trial: ‘Jesus, son of Sirach, had he known of my first fits of jealousy, would have said to me, as in his Chapter IX, verse I: “Be not jealous of thy wife, lest she deceive thee with arts she learned of thee”’ (244). Bento’s theological education—undertaken in part due to José Dias’s intervention—embellishes his paranoia. As Schwarz notes:

the appearance of uncertainty serves as a cover for the rights of the stronger party, for accusation without the right of reply: the nub of the matter is whether Capitu’s infidelity – certain and beyond dispute – was the effect of the husband’s recurrent mistrust or whether it was already there, in the girl, ‘like the fruit inside its rind’. This false finale, in the form of a sophism backed up by Holy Scripture, by the narrator’s suffering, by his emotional and literary disposition and also by the conclusive value that we usually attribute to a novel’s last words gives us the measure of Machado’s artistic daring. (Two Girls 64–5)

For Schwarz, Bento uses his theological education and the novel form—associated as it is with the Enlightenment idea of knowing thyself, the diaristic self-examination of Robison Crusoe, the social diagnosis of Max Havelaar—to censure himself in the most limited way. A self-censure that is actually an exoneration. If he has one flaw, he claims, it is that the sleuth with which he developed his suspicions of Capitu may have taught her the wiliness with which she eventually betrayed him. Of course the logic is circular, but it is the logic of the entire formal structure of the novel. At every stage Bento reminds us that he is attempting to “tie the two ends of life together”, which, at the very end, turns out to be an oblique reference to this attempt to reconcile the young Capitu with the ‘adulterer’ (5). Bento is able to use the Liberal novel form as a vehicle for the arbitrary condemnation of Capitu. His theological education then serves as a performative mea culpa which actually forecloses any proper examination of his actions. Bento’s reassertion of the worldview of the sugar class is thus complete. He has appropriated the foreign form of the European novel, just as Brazil imported the precepts of European Liberalism. These foreign ideologies, though, are structurally flawed by their ability to be articulated with local realities and prejudices, such as the continued existence of slavery, and the latifundia’s own idea of its prestige. Just as Liberalism was accommodated by a cultural economy of elite prestige in Brazil—one that excused rather than censured their most inhumane practices—Bento appropriates the European novel form to exonerate and reassert his patriarchy. Within the formal structure of the novel José Dias, of the agregado class, is the conscript of this crushing victory of the regressive elite.

We have seen in the Brazilian novel several formal and aesthetic features of economic informality which will reappear in subsequent accumulation cycles of the world-system. In the closed historical laboratory of nineteenth-century Brazil, the role of economic informality appears now as a handmaiden to the painful victory of capital. In the following chapters I look to the role of economic informality under neoliberal modernity. Here, a similar discontent with the forms of exploitation that informality obscures or facilitates is becoming pervasive in fiction, yet given that neoliberalism continues to unfold before us, we will detect moments where informality affords opportunities for counter-hegemonic action. At a corresponding moment in a world-systemic cycle to that of Dom Casmurro we can sense a renewed opportunity for the kind of resistance once proffered by Capitu.