This week we are going to know more about the same author of the past week, the Brazilian Aluísio de Azevedo. As many literary critics says, what Aluísio really wanted was to modernize Brazil and thus fight its economic and political exclusionary precepts. This post is a summary of three posts. The first was published at http://wikivisually.com/wiki/O_Corti%C3%A7o. The second was published at https://lljournal.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2007-1-bletz-texto/. The third was published at https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/aluisio-azevedo/the-slum/
O Cortiço (titled in English: The Slum) is an influential Brazilian novel written in 1890 by Aluísio de Azevedo. The novel depicts a part of Brazil's culture in the late nineteenth century, represented by a variety of colorful characters living in a single tenement. The Slum tells the stories of Portuguese and other European immigrants, mulattos, and former African slaves living and working together in a single community. It explores the author's naturalistic beliefs, having various characters being defined and changed by their environment, race and social position. Example are: the division between the mulattos and the hard-working European immigrants, how the climate and culture of Brazil can slowly transform these immigrants' behavior in atavistic ways. In addition the role of women is a key theme, with all female characters in one way or another revealing their purpose in the slum. In 2013 the book became a Musical on Brazilian broadway. Today the play is with Daniel Tupauan and Christian Coronel.
When Aluísio de Azevedo first published O Cortiço in 1890, it was immediately recognized as an important literary event. Still on every mandatory reading list in Brazil today, the novel is interpreted as a high point in Brazilian naturalism, heavily influenced by French deterministic thinkers. Already in his own time, literary critics emphasized the similarities between O Cortiço and Zola's works, particularly L'Assomoir (1877). It is certainly true that Brazil lacks the history of racial hatred that characterizes the U.S. But lack of racial hatred does not turn out to have led to lack of racial discrimination. Indeed, racial prejudices and deterministic legacies form a fundamental part of a novel as O Cortiço and should be recognized as such. Rather than seeing Latin American naturalist novels as imitations of European counterparts, one should consider XIX century Latin American intellectual endeavours as appropriating existing models for their own unique situations and means. Debates about race were of course prominent in Brazilian culture of that time, and only partly correspond to European positivist and deterministic ideas. Brazilian naturalist novelists created a more or less fictional space in which creatively conjured elements - people, forces, exogenous events - interact. They inhabited the landscape as both voyeur and active participant, and their writing comprised an act of creation, not just of literary art but, in certain ways, of society itself. Still readable for a XXI century audience, O Cortiço is a deeply pessimistic reflection of the social ills that plagued the Carioca society of the period right before Abolition, the 1870s. Brazilian Positivist ideas coincided with Abolition in 1888, whose aftermath saw the mobilization of numbers of former slaves from rural areas towards the cities. Around the same time, foreign immigration started, and both movements caused a wide process of destabilization of traditional society and culture. Displacement plays a crucial role in O Cortiço, both in the fate of the black slave Bertoleza as in the lives of the Portuguese immigrants linked to the cortiço São Romão. According to Thomas Skidmore one should be careful not to confuse racial ideologies in the U.S. with Latin America. In Brazil, racial attribution depended on how the person looked and on particular economic circumstances of that person, which led to the racial fluidity for which Brazil is famous. In other words: Social class and material wealth will directly influence the categorization of a person. O Cortiço is a result of urban modernization that can not be controlled. It is well documented how, in typical naturalist fashion, Azevedo researched his subject matter as if he were a scientist, a doctor searching for a cure of a sick patient, the nation's body. Ethnographer and sociologist Gilberto Freyre for instance, affirmed that: "Aluísio de Azevedo let in his book a portrait disguised in novel that is less literary fiction than the sociological documentation of a phase and a characteristic aspect of Brazilian formation." With these research methods, Brazilian naturalist novelist created a more or less fictional space in which creatively conjured elements: people, forces, exogenous events interact in a given sequence. Azevedo inhabits the city as both voyeur and active participant, and his writing comprises an act of creation, not just of literary art but, in certain ways, of Carioca urban society itself. Azevedo mostly rejects determinist notions in the portrayal of the male characters, but his attitude towards women, particularly the immigrant women is still largely dictated by the supposedly scientific ideologies of his time. Although I agree with Elizabeth Marchant that Azevedo shows a peculiarly hostile attitude towards his female characters in general. For many Brazilian, the figure of the immigrant was closely related to modernity and progress. However, the construction of the female immigrant differes significantly of that of her male counterpart. The immigrant woman is assumed to be unchanging and authentic, but her immigrant status makes her a suspect holder of any national tradition. She is supposed to represent both continuity, as a female, and modernity, as a immigrant and thus seems trapped, caught in either insanity or prostitution. For Azevedo, attempts to modernize the country by means of European immigrants are doomed to fail. Brazil is simply too overwhelming and the Europeans who come 'to make the America' discover that they themselves are being remade. For Azevedo, a tireless abolitionist, Brazil will never become a modern country unless it addresses its heritage of slavery and injustice. Immigrants will not contribute to improving their new country, if the local institutions of slavery and the pseudoaristocratic culture of the wealthy as set on destroying whatever modernizing effects immigration could possible have.
This enormously popular and influential Brazilian novel, published in 1890, is a landmark work of accusatory naturalism whose energetic author at his best deserves comparison with Balzac and Zola. The story concerns two obsessive love affairs and their disastrous consequencs: that Romao, an avaricious landowner who gives up everything (including his mistress) to pursue a wealthy woman, and that of the hulking, well-meaning Jeronimo and the mulatto spitfire Rita Bahiana, for those sake he destroys several lives, including his own. Azevedo is a passionate, sometimes hortatory writer, who tends to overmanage and needlessly explain, but his portrayals of urban discontent, rampant materialism, and especially of restless souls shaped and driven by their desires have an immediacy and authority that transcend (while not quite eschewing) melodrama, and have aged remarkably well.
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