The critic ‘recognizes in forms the fateful element’, wrote Lukács in 1910: ‘form is his great experience’.footnote¹ He was thinking of Roberto Schwarz. ‘Dona Placida’s life has the concise brevity of an eighteenth-century conte philosophique’, Schwarz writes in A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism, his monograph on Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. And: ‘the terrible fatalities contained in nineteenth-century Naturalism, without forgetting that its analytic coldness—universalist and classical in its style—has something jokey and crazed about it, which acts as Brazilian local colour.’footnote² Conte philosophique, Naturalism, classical coldness, local colour . . . Elsewhere in Master, it’s ‘small talk’, ‘operetta’, ‘dirty jokes’; in Schwarz’s review of Paulo Lins’s City of God, it’s ‘the great gangster movies’; in his essay on Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, it’s ‘abstract variation and the arabesque’.footnote³ And so on, and on.

Most of us open a book, and see words on a page; Schwarz sees forms—often more than one, pulling in opposite directions (‘In Machado’s prose, small talk and great abstractions form an inseparable comic duo, like Laurel and Hardy’.footnote⁴) One thinks of Cézanne’s motto, recalled recently by T. J. Clark (another critic for whom forms are the fateful element): ‘Je vois, par taches’.footnote⁵ I see by patches, by marks, or dabs, or spots; I see by discrete technical quanta to be specified—in Master, again: ‘a sublime kind of dirty joke’, the ‘cheapened aspect’ of operetta—with unpretentious, uncompromising precision.footnote⁶

Plenty of pretence, by contrast, in the figure Schwarz has so often written about: Machado’s narrator-protagonist, who will typically ‘change his mind, his subject, and his mode of speech at almost every sentence, and will not hold to the same course for more than a short paragraph’.footnote⁷ This volubility—volubilidade: the propensity to turn and roll (volver) now in this, now in that direction—is however not a weakness but a cunning, cynical way of impersonating with total impunity the various roles available to the Brazilian ruling class, ‘from paternalist concern to bourgeois indifference, from a cultivated, well-intentioned liberalism to the unfettered authority of godfather/slave-owner and back again’.footnote⁸ The result is the ‘erratic, loose story line’ of Machado’s late novels, whose radical segmentation—160 chapters in Brás Cubas, 148 in Dom Casmurro, 201 in Quincas Borba: on average, each about a page long—multiplies ad infinitum the opportunities for capricious injustice.footnote⁹ It’s a perfect instance of Schwarz’s idea of form: ‘(a) a rule for the composition of the narrative and (b) the stylization of a kind of conduct characteristic of the Brazilian ruling class’.footnote¹⁰ A specific plot shape, as the stylization of a specific class conduct. If one wonders what a Marxist analysis of narrative should be like, Master is it.

Abstract of social relationships. Schwarz reads a novel, and sees forms; and within forms, he sees classes.footnote¹¹ Style and plot add up to a social grammar which pervades, as in Simmel or Goffman, all sorts of everyday interactions. At one extreme are the actions of ‘the heads or heirs of Brazilian extended families’:

to whom their social dependents—and actual slaves—owed obedience and fidelity. Since these roles would alternate according to the momentary convenience of the rich, their dependents were continually at a loss to know with whom they were dealing. There was no way for them to foresee whether they were paying respect to a godfather and sponsor who would reciprocate; to a figure of authority who would brutalize them; or to a modern person of property, to whom inferiors were perfectly indifferent, to be treated like strangers.footnote¹²

Godfather, sponsor, authority, modern proprietor: all this, at the top of the pyramid. At the opposite extreme—in a colonial-postcolonial situation, the ‘middle’ strata tend to have little weight—are three characteristically Brazilian figures of subjection: slaves, whose main narrative role consists in ‘pointing up the sinister aspects of the ruling class’; the poor, who, since ‘an honest independent life’ is made impossible for them, end up living ‘at the whim of chance’; and the agregado, or ‘dependent’, whose life—‘less arduous than the others’, yet maddeningly ‘dominated by “favour”’—offers for its part a ‘caricature of the “free man”’.footnote¹³

A world ruled by cruelty, chance and favour: we have here, in the words of Schwarz’s teacher, Antonio Candido, ‘the “structural reduction” of a . . . course imposed on the Brazilian ruling class by historical circumstances’.footnote¹⁴ ‘A historical structure is imitated by a literary structure’, echoes Schwarz in an essay on Candido’s work whose very title—‘Objective Form’—makes clear what is for him the essential aspect of literary conventions.footnote¹⁵ ‘A part of the original historical conditions reappears as a sociological form’, he adds in ‘The Importing of the Novel to Brazil’; ‘in this sense, forms are the abstract of specific social relationships.’footnote¹⁶