Romanesque and conflict in Brazilian and Scottish Romanticism: a case study

• In Event: Three Capital Figures of 19th-Century Brazilian Literature

Abstract

José de Alencar (1829-77 has been the object of several critical reviews of Lukacsian tendency that position his oeuvre in an evolutionary scale of realistic leaning, viewing its strong component of idealization in a negative light. In this text I intend to move the parameters of the issue, situating Alencar not in contrast with the mimetic realistic mode, but in opposition to it, placing him deliberately within the Romanesque mode, as an aesthetic and axiological option of the writer himself.
I have chosen to analyse his most ambitious novel, "Silver Mines" (1865-6), which merges genres such as the historical novel, the serial novel and the swashbuckler, all shaped under the strong influence of the Romanesque mode. Indeed, as in most of the best fiction produced in the 19th century, this work is also based on the binomial “love and adventure”, which is essential to Romanesque composition, especially in Walter Scott´s "Waverley novels" (FRYE, 1976). As in the best known novels of Alencar – "O Guarani" (1857) and "Iracema" (1865) –, "Silver Mines" shares the four characteristics of the Romanesque mode highlighted by J.-M. SCHAEFFER (2004), to wit: 1) prevalence of affections, passions and feelings; 2) representation of extreme actantial, physical and moral typologies; 3) saturation of events (“il se passe toujours quelque chose”); and 4) it is presented as a countermodel of the reality experienced by the reader. The latter aspect is the one I seek to highlight in "Silver Mines", as the work proposes a rereading of a crucial episode in colonial Brazil – the Dutch invasion of the Northeast of the country during the 17th century – as a “modèle contre la réalité” (SCHAEFFER, 2004), in which virtue, courage, wisdom and enchantment prevail to the highest degree.
Thus, following Frye, Schaeffer and Pavel (2004), I defend the premise that "Silver Mines" may be considered implausible at a “factual level”, but is fully acceptable from the point of view of “realités axiologiques et normatives”, when it deliberately proposes another possible interpretation of Brazilian history – utopic, certainly, but also true inasmuch as it deals with universal and timeless values.

Author

• Marcos F Peres, University of São Paulo