The physics of literature: concreteness, imagination and restraint in Antonio Candido

Abstract

In this paper, I develop notes on Os parceiros do Rio Bonito (1964), by Antonio Candido, highlighting the idea that the caipira's culture [country's culture] is disappearing. I associate this diagnosis with the reading that Antonio Candido develops about Os sertões (1902), by Euclides da Cunha, especially considering the article “Euclides da Cunha, o sociólogo” (1952). I turn to some aspects of the functions attributed to the literature by Candido, especially with regard to the Latin American context, marked by underdevelopment, focusing on the Formação da Literatura Brasileira (1959) and on the essay “Literatura, Espelho da America?” (1995). I intend, therefore, to deal with the dangers which, for the author, Western literature itself was challenged to face. I propose, finally, that Antonio Candido understands that literature is a delicate operation that involves diverse forces, such as that of concrete or corporeal reality, that of sociability, the force of imagination and the force of words themselves and their symbolic charge, what configures, in my perspective, a kind of physics of literature. To that end, I analyse the author's comments about bestiality, about the dangers of masturbation and imagination, comments present in the "Parte Complementar” of Os parceiros do Rio Bonito.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1170