At the age of forty, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis invented a narrative device that transformed him from a provincial, rather conventional writer into a world-class novelist. This leap is usually explained biographically, and psychologically. Critics like to say that Machado, who nearly went blind, lost his illusions and passed from romanticism to realism—and so on. Explanations of this sort, however, are beside the point, since anyone can contract an illness, shed illusions or accept a new literary doctrine without becoming a great writer. But if we consider the change as one of literary form, the terms of the argument alter. Machado’s innovation then appears as an aesthetic solution to objective problems, lodged not simply within his own earlier fiction, but in the development of the Brazilian novel and indeed of Brazilian culture at large: perhaps even of ex-colonial societies in general.

Textbooks usually classify Machado de Assis as a realist writer, situated after the romantics, whose illusions he methodically undoes, and before the naturalists, whose unspiritual materialism he rejects as an artistic error. Yet such a classification is open to obvious objections, for not everything that stands between romanticism and naturalism is realistic. Machado’s narrative style was in fact slightly old-fashioned for its time, owing much to a strand of digressiveness and comic rhetoric to be found in English and French writing of the eighteenth century. Nothing could be farther from the realist ideal of an unobtrusive prose, strictly dictated by the subject. Machado’s unconventional sense of motive, on the other hand, was not behind but ahead of the times. Anticipating the philosophy of the unconscious, it explored a kind of materialism that outdid both realism and naturalism, prefiguring Freud and twentieth-century experiments. Machado ostensibly shied away from the naturalist preference for the lower sides of life, but in fact only plunged further down, substituting for the servitudes of physiology and climate, temper and heredity the much more debasing servitudes of the mind in society. There was a definite element of rivalry between Machado and the naturalists that left their bravado, with its penchant for scabrous subject-matter, looking rather naïve and even quite wholesome.

By most conventional criteria, then, it would seem more reasonable to call Machado an anti-realist. Yet if we think of the distinctive spirit of realism as the ambition to capture contemporary society in motion, he can indeed be considered a great realist. But it would be truer to his complexity to call him a realist who works with apparently anti-realist devices. Of course, we need to ask why. My argument will be that this paradox, in effect a deliberate mismatch between a set of aesthetic devices and the stuff of life they depict, raises the question of what happens to realism in a peripheral country where the sequences of European social and literary history do not strictly apply, losing their inner necessity—or to put it more generally, how modern forms fare in regions that do not exhibit the social conditions in which they originated and in some sense presume.

For literary forms may not mean the same in the core and at the periphery of our world. Time can become so uneven, when it is stretched far across space, that artistic forms which are already dead in the first may still be alive in the second. Such contrasts can be viewed with regret or satisfaction. Progress may be lamented in the name of older forms of life, richer in colour and meaning; or backwardness be deplored as a refusal to cast off outworn garments, and catch the air of the times; or both can be dismissed as two sides of the same coin. Brecht, who did not want to lag behind his epoch, said it was futile for a realist to stare at workers trudging through the gates of Krupp in the morning. Once reality has migrated into abstract economic functions, it can no longer be read in human faces. Observation of life in a former colony, where social divisions remain stark, might then seem more rewarding. But such concreteness too is suspect, since the abstractions of the world market are never far away, and belie the fullness of spontaneous perception at every moment.

Be that as it may, the aesthetic and social field I want to consider is at once international and unbalanced, bending literary forms to circumstances that are often far from aesthetic, although rarely in any predictable way. We may well think that questions to do with literary realism cannot be answered by looking simply at formal labels as such, without reference to individual works or their quality. Today, after all, superficial features of realism are omnipresent in rich and poor countries alike—in soap operas, second-rate novels, movies, advertisements. Yet these are debased versions of the original, reducing the credibility and complexity of classic realism to the repetitions and moral simplicities of melodrama and commercial inducement. What seems to have disappeared, as modernist writers and critics pointed out a century ago, is what was once realism’s capacity to grasp what is new, and be true to it. Or, conversely, what has vanished is the kind of society and social dynamics that realism in its heyday captured. It is part of this change that later critics denied any such grasp ever existed, or was even an artistic ambition.

One particular side of this situation is less well known. In Brazil, literary historians outside the mainstream have shown that when this former colony became an independent nation, its peculiar and in many ways untenable morphology—invalidated by a progress which remains out of reach—imposed new tasks on European literary schools, that involuntarily altered them. Some of these changes have been carefully studied in Antonio Candido’s classic work Formação da literatura brasileira—momentos decisivos.

The first of these formative moments, neo-classical in style, occurred in the last fifty years of the colonial period. It was followed by romanticism in the fifty years after independence in 1822. Mainstream historiography, nationalist from the cradle, has it that neoclassicism, with its stylized imagery of shepherds and nymphs and its universalist spirit, represented the alienation imposed by the metropolis on its colony, while romanticism, with its motifs of chivalrous Indians and lively depictions of local contexts, stood for the attitudes of independence. Candido, who wrote not as a nationalist, but as a socialist studying the formation of a national literature, took a different view. The thesis he develops in Formação da literatura brasileira is that, notwithstanding the sharp artistic and intellectual contrasts between them, these two long literary moments were both under the spell of Independence-in-the-making, which put them to its own uses, and, in doing so, unified them to some degree. This offers us a much more interesting picture, one that allows us to sense, if we will, the pull of world history and the variations it generates. Here the shepherds and nymphs of the neoclassical school articulate the Enlightenment, with its principles of reason and public duty, its sense of educational and administrative responsibilities, self-interest and self-government, which take on an anti-colonial coloration and inform the first conspiracies for national independence. Even Arcadian conventions acquire new meaning, as they blend with the local environment to produce tangled loyalties: poets attached at once to the bare and anonymous backwardness of their native surroundings and to the illustrious landscapes of classical mythology, a strange combination of period rusticities that often tears them asunder. Thus one of the most universalist, timeless and theatrical conventions could convey a quite specific, concrete historical situation in a way that was poetic in its own fashion, and free of the restrictions of an exotic localism.