160th Birthday of Aluísio de Azevedo

             Last Friday, 14th of April, the Brazilian writer Aluísio Azevedo would complete 160 years old. So this post is a tribute to him. As a Naturalist writer he showed us a reliable picture of the late XIX century in Brazil. The Naturalism-Realism literary movement was very important for the advancement of many other movements and fairer laws, and consequently justice, human rights,  and above all the truth, because only facing the realities of our lives and talking abou it, we can do a fair analysis and then humankind can evolve. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alu%C3%ADsio_Azevedo.The second https://www.amazon.com/Slum-Library-Latin-America/dp/0195121872. The third was published at file:///C:/Users/Luciano/Downloads/POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS.PDF

            Aluísio Tancredo Gonçalves de Azevedo (1857-1913) was a Brazilian novelist, caricaturist, diplomat, playwright and short story writer. Initially a Romantic writer, he would later adhere to the Naturalist movement. He introduced the Naturalist movement in brazil with the novel O Mulato, in 1881. Azevedo was born in São Luís to David Gonçalves de Azevedo (the Portuguese vice-consul in Brazil). He was the younger brother of the playwright Artur Azevedo. As a child, Aluísio loved painting and drawing, and would move to Rio de Janeiro in 1876, where his brother Artur was living already, to study at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. After graduating, he drew caricatures for many journals. His father's death in 1878, made him return to São Luís. He then initiated his writer career, publishing in 1880 a typical Romantic novel. He helps on the creation of a journal named O Pensador, where he wrote abolitionist articles. In 1881 he publishes the first Brazilian Naturalist novel: O Mulato, that deals with the themes of racism. Consolidating his career as a writer, he returned to Rio. He would write endlessly during the period of 1882-1895. Dating from this period are his famous novels, Casa de Pensão, (1884) and O Cortiço (1890), and many other works written in partnership with his brother, or with Émile Rouède. In 1895 he became a diplomat. He served in Japan, England, Italy and Argentina, where he died.

             First published in 1890, and undoubtedly Azevedo's masterpiece, The Slum, is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed novels ever written about Brazil. Indeed, its great popularity, realistic descriptions, archetypal situations, detailed local coloring, and overall race-consciousness may well evoke Huckleberry Finn as the novel's North American equivalent. Yet Azevedo also exhibits the naturalism of Zola and the ironic distance of Balzac. While tragic, beautiful, and imaginative as a work of fiction, The Slum is universally regarded as one of the best, or truest portraits of Brazilian society ever rendered. This is a vivid and complex tale of passion and greed, a story with many different strands touching on the different economic tiers of society. Mainly, however, The Slum thrives on two intersecting story lines, In one narrative, a penny-pinching immigrant landlord strives to become rich investor and then discards his lover for a wealthy woman. In the other, we witness the innocent yet dangerous love affair between a strong, pragmatic, gentle sort of immigrant and a vivacious woman who both live in a tenement owned by said landlord. The two immigrant are Portuguese, and personify two alternate outsider responses to Brazil. A deftly told, moving, and hardscrabble novel that features several stirring passages about life in the streets, the melting-pot realities of the modern city, and often unstable mind of the crowd, The Slum will captivate anyone who might appreciate a less political take on the nineteenth-century naturalism of Crane or Dreiser.

              This article will analyse spatial relations and practices in O Cortiço in order to demonstrate the novel's strong social-political critique of XIX century in Brazil. Brazilians critics of the time and thereafter were almost unanimous in seeing local naturalist novels as too close to Zola's works. Later critics tended to repeat what Baguley called the 'already established and seemingly set of arguments' against Zola and Naturalism by Marxist critics. Nelson Sodré, for instance, describes Brazilian Naturalism as having the same vulgar materialism, the same artistic narrowness, the same pedantic scientism of evolutionism and determinism, the same fascination with feminine hysteria and for pathological manifestation in general. After asking why Brazilians writers tended to prefer Zola as a model to Flaubert, and Comte and Spencer to Marx. Flora Sussekind answer by claiming that the 'bedroom affairs' of Brazilian Naturalism provided conservative and confortable substitute for the social problems that the writers were aware of, but preferred not to discuss. For Azevedo's novel does not fit the 'bedroom model', as it discusses social relations between different classes, and even slavery and abolition. It is not Azevedo's depiction of social conflict, however, that receives most praise from critics: the majority of them list as the most definitive quality of the novel its capacity to portray the movement of the crowds and collective forces. A quality also attributed to Zola. The critic Lúcia Pereira says that the best thing about O Cortiço is its panoramic vision and its capacity to show the spectable of the masses. Another critic, Álvaro Lins rehearses the same argument, claiming that Azevedo was never able to maintain a psychological attitude towards the isolated man, but he knew surprisingly well how to penetrate human groups. O Cortiço in spite of being considered one of the best novels in Brazilian literature, has received few detailed analyses of its social processes, its structure, or indeed almost any other of its aspects. It has deserved a treatment similar to that accorded to Zola's novels until 1950s, that is, a lack of engagement with the text itself on the part of the critics, even though, unlike Zola texts, it was considered a good novel. An important exception is Antonio Candido's superb article 'De cortiço a cortiço', the first study to take seriously Azevedo's engagement with the world of labour, profit, competition, visible economic exploitation. Even so, for Candido there is little sense of injustice in the novel and none of class exploitation, just nationalism and xenophobia, an attack on the immigrant's abuse. As a social product, the tenement is also a space of control.The long row of houses allows the landlord to keep a close eye on the lives of the inhabitants, repressing them any time he sees fit. In his role as the owner of the tenement, he has the right to evict anybody that annoys his authority, and that right is never questioned by the inhabitants of the tenement. In other words, the spatial and social organization of the tenement is highly determined by the logic of rent monopoly, a logic that assures in daily practices the hegemony of one class over others. In his descriptions of the tenement and its inhabitants, Azevedo at times resorts to some of the familiar tropes of Naturalism. As an environment, the tenement is also said to have an unavoidable influence over the people who live in it, such as Pombinha. If in order to read Azevedo we need to make reference to Zola it is not because of the 'fatalism' or 'determinism' of both authors, nor simply to compare the collective scenes in their novels. The main lesson Azevedo seems to have learned from his French Master was the critique of the dominant economic and social order. In Zola, an extremely acute visual sense and very detailed descriptions creates a world where people seem dwarfed by the things around them. They create a sense of space that is oppressive and unchangeable, reflecting a well-established social and economic order where upward movement by the poor, although promised, is actually very rare. In Azevedo, short, almost schematic descriptions of sceneries serve as a minimal structure for a space that is made up of people and that is constantly being produced and changed by people. The reason why the lack of descriptions in O Cortiço may have to do with the fact that in Brazil, unlike France, the upper class did not need detailed descriptions to visualize the space of the poor, In brazil, all they had to do was open their window.