Your collection The Poor in Brazilian Literature (Os pobres na literatura brasileira) was published more than forty years ago. We’d like to ask about the context in which this work emerged. Has the conjuncture changed fundamentally?

The 1980s were a time of relative optimism marked by the return to democracy, major strikes that put the dictatorship on the defensive and the founding of the Workers’ Party (PT). This upsurge of the working class breathed new life into Brazilian society; thanks to them it became freer, more civilized, less oppressive – a debt that is not always acknowledged. The idea of surveying the presence of the poor in Brazilian literature came out of this new, left horizon. There were also the newly created graduate programmes in literature, whose student body was mostly hostile to the regime. It was a promising collective, and it seemed the right moment to mobilize this aesthetic-political potential to stir up the conversation. The contrast with 2026 – when the far right threatens to return to power through the ballot box – could hardly be more bitter.

How was the category of ‘the poor’ understood in the 1980s? Was it mainly used by the better-off to describe those below them, or was it used by poor people themselves? We ask because in Brazil today one often hears that in the eyes of the poor at least, there are no longer any poor people – only entrepreneurs.

The historic surprise of the 1980s was that the unionized workers – especially metalworkers – felt empowered to confront the military, big capital and the political class itself, including the regime’s progressive opposition. Leonel Brizola, Miguel Arraes, Almino Afonso, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and many others – some newly returned from exile – were taken aback by their unprecedented determination to lead the transition to democracy and negotiate their terms without deferring to professional politicians. That moment, as we know, did not last; the logic of coalitions, with its attendant class compromises, inevitably prevailed. It is also worth remembering that at the time, across the West, the relative weight of the working class had already begun to decline. The industrial boom and corresponding growth of the working class under the dictatorship was an exception to this trend. Nevertheless, the possibility of a reorientation of Brazilian society driven by the working class was set in motion.

Returning to your question, there was certainly a consciousness of poverty at the time. Of course, union leaders were no longer poor in the extreme, Brazilian, sense of the word. They lived modestly, in petit bourgeois style, in small brick houses with a car in the garage, yet remained in touch with the poverty from which they had come – that gave their leadership a special character. Ultimately, poverty was an undeniable social fact, and there was a determination to tackle it through collective action. As I understand it, their outlook was not revolutionary, but neither was it fatalistic in the old sense – nor individualist-meritocratic in the spirit of today’s ‘entrepreneurship’. Society was seen as an organized yet unjust whole, capable of being transformed.

Could you speak about your essay on Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881), ‘The Poor Old Woman and the Portraitist’, which was included in the collection. Does it still speak to the present?

As the title suggests, the essay deals not only with the poor old woman but also her portraitist and protector, and the relationship between them, which is one of appalling reciprocity. By brazenly adopting the upper-class point of view, at the expense of poor Dona Plácida, the narrator broke with the conventions of objectivity and disinterestedness that lent the realist novel respectability. He also broke with the patriarchal decorum expected in Brazil’s relations of domination. Commenting on Baudelaire’s provocation – ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’ – Benjamin remarked that the poet had transformed the ostentatious bad faith, class betrayal and perverse self-denunciation of the respectable classes into a literary device. It is an acutely perceptive observation, with far-reaching implications. Along similar lines, we might say that Machado staged a scandalous act of betrayal to his class at the level of narrative form – producing a satirical self-indictment on the part of the well-to-do. It was a bold, destabilizing move that paved the way for experimental fiction, where there are no unassailable positions, no fixed values independent of the composition itself. Characters, narrators, ideas, good intentions, dogmas, classes, forms, stylistic registers – nothing holds intrinsic value. Everything is defined and redefined through their constellation with other elements, which together reconstitutes the work’s truth.

This universalized dialectic – the primacy of process over its constituent moments – is a critical achievement of the first order, the unsurpassed modern standard until further notice. Here lies the cognitive power of advanced literature: the face-value of the currency counts for nothing. By stripping his narrator of the presumption of authority, and subjecting him to the work’s internal dynamics – where he stands and falls by his performance, on an equal footing with the other characters and elements of the novel – Machado was radicalizing the aesthetic game, leaving nothing beyond question. The judge stands trial, the narrator becomes the narrated, the yardstick is measured, and all prior rules to the contrary are revoked. The certainties attained through this redistribution of authority cast a distinctive light, with greater power than mere assertion left unchallenged, the ‘because I say so’. Brás Cubas’s brazenness highlights – with the incomparable brilliance of great art – the injustice that crushes Dona Plácida, who in turn exposes her social counterpart, a prototype of our ‘upstanding citizens.’ What happens at one pole reverberates two-fold at the other. Those who today insist on affirmative representations of class, gender or race might do well to reflect on this indirect path to achieving value.

That said, I did not address the main thrust of your question, which was not about my 1983 essay as such, but rather its significance – or lack thereof – in 2026. If I understand you correctly, you are playing devil’s advocate, asking whether the current disrepute of class analysis also extends to the last century as well. From this perspective, Dona Plácida would not embody the class injustices of nineteenth-century Brazil; she would be a failed entrepreneur, someone who through lack of merit slid into poverty. The absurdity of this ‘modern’ analysis, in which there are individuals but no societies, scarcely needs pointing out.

An overview of this trajectory might be summarized as follows. Around 1880, Machado de Assis laid bare – with extraordinary scope and acerbity – certain social chasms inherent in the clientelist order that dominated Brazil. A century later, some critics recognized the scale of this achievement and sought to retrace the broad outlines of those chasms. Another decade passed, and now – on a global scale – capital’s victory in the class struggle was sealed, celebrated, and officially proclaimed (‘the end of history’). Classes were declared obsolete, together with their corresponding analysis. Moreover, this victory now reached back in time to produce a more palatable, sanitized past, from which even the shadow of collective life has disappeared. ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ Margaret Thatcher dixit, 1987.

One distinctive feature of your work is the central place you give to class conflict when it is woven into the fabric of a work, whether in the fiction of Machado de Assis or Chico Buarque, the essays of Antonio Candido, Caetano Veloso’s autobiography, or the poetry of Oswald de Andrade and Chico Alvim. How do you see its critical purchase today? Has the evolution of contemporary society rendered it obsolete?

With apologies to Conselheiro Acácio, we still live in a class society, whose negative effects spare no one, its constant change notwithstanding. The intricacies of how this society reproduces itself, directly or indirectly, are of paramount importance to literature, even if they are not immediately obvious. When a work manages to capture their rhythm and uncover some of their patterns, the result is a pinnacle of artistic achievement. For the critic, the convergence of literary form and social process is a blessing. Once the historical basis of literary forms is laid bare, the scope of the interpretative effort shifts. The internal space of the work can now be explored as a relevant microcosm – perhaps even as an unprecedented representation of historical experience.

This transforms a remote, academic activity like literary criticism into a social intervention, lending an almost prophetic weight to its arguments, though preferably without losing a healthy sense of scepticism. Your final question, however, calls all of this into doubt. As I see it, capital’s victory in the class struggle, which remains the order of the day, may defy poetic justice, but it does not extinguish the critical spirit.

In A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism (1990), you also seem to be advancing a particular understanding of realism. Would it be fair to say that realism takes the logic of social life and recasts it as literary form?

The comparison of the realist narrator to a camera has done critical discussion a disservice. In any good novel, the relationship between the narrator and the world he narrates is not mechanical but reciprocal. Between the society being narrated and the social substance condensed in the narrator – his position, his voice, his literary means – there is a deep correspondence, a hidden affinity that gives the work both its resonance and its coherence. They are two different poles of the same world, each inhabiting it in its own way.

Naturally, the historicity and contradictions of the narrated world are more immediately discernible – and easier to discuss – than the narrator’s encoded patterns of behaviour. Yet those same contradictions exist within the narrator too, in condensed form, whether implicit or explicit, and sometimes even unwittingly. From this perspective, it is useful to think of the narrator as simply another character, as a participant in the world he narrates, on equal footing with the rest of the cast. Suddenly, the whole apparatus of narrative technique – with all its forbidding terminology, the speciality of professors of literary theory – becomes legible as human behaviour, whose social significance ceases to be mysterious. These are actions, ways of acting, things we do with one another or to one another.

Distinctions exist between the narrator, the narrated world and the historical world, but they are not absolute, and it is the critic’s task to explore them. Looked at from another angle, once the narrator has been dethroned – stripped of his nineteenth-century authority – we enter the realm of the experimental novel, without a fixed centre – or rather, without any privileged vantage point. In this absence, perspectives begin to fold back upon one another, without a conventional hierarchy; they validate and invalidate one another until – if indeed they do – they give rise to something akin to an internal truth. This may be highly unorthodox; discovering its historical significance is the critic’s task.

Could you speak more about your sense of the enduring task of the critic?

A luminous discussion of these questions can be found in Antonio Candido’s essay on Aluísio Azevedo’s O Cortiço (1890). Candido’s characterization of the novel’s narrator is closely grounded in the text, but it is enriched by the critic’s own historical experience and intellectual independence. The narrator is revealed as xenophobic, racist and resentful, steeped in scientistic prejudice and disdainful of workers, in keeping with the prevailing culture of a slave society. Beneath the progressive veneer of the frank, fearless naturalist writer Candido reveals a much more dubious social figure – one rife with obscurantist traits, yet highly representative. 

The surprise of this analysis, however, is that these lamentable features of the narrator do not diminish the novel; instead, they contribute to its power. The narrator’s convictions, or theses, are refuted in practice by the unbridled capitalist accumulation that drives the plot; this exposes the self-serving emptiness of his beliefs, or rather reconstitutes them as class prejudice – in other words, as ideology. Stripped of its conventional authority by the inner logic of the novel, which always has the last word, the narrative voice itself comes to figure as a problematic part of the reality itself, reshaped by the gravitational pull of the plot. Racism, chauvinism, scientism and contempt for labour are not supressed, but rather repurposed by – and made to serve – class exploitation. Here we see the deliberate as well as inadvertent complexity of realist literature in motion.

The critical findings are considerable: a brutal regime of capital accumulation within a post-colonial context; the intellectual unease generated by naturalism’s racial determinism in a profoundly mixed society such as Brazil; the displacement of racial conflict by class exploitation as the dominant social logic; and the transformation of a conservative, xenophobic and pseudo-radical novel, blind to social injustice, into a highly illuminating work, thanks to the critic’s intervention. To appreciate the originality of this, one need only ask how often literary criticism has yielded new knowledge not only about literature itself, but about the world beyond it.

The interview was conducted by Grupo de Trabalho Literatura e Sociedade. It will appear in the forthcoming Os Pobres na Literatura Ontem e Hoje, which takes up the project of Schwarz’s original collection.

Read on: Roberto Schwarz, ‘A Brazilian Breakthrough’, NLR 36.