Last Tuesday, 24th of July, the Brazilian writer Antonio Candido would complete 100 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. He wrote many times about the importance between literature and human rights. This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Candido. The second was published at https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/9783110549577/9783110549577-015/9783110549577-015.pdf. The third was published at
Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918-2017) was a Brazilian writer, professor, sociologist, and literary critic. As a critic of Brazilian literature, he is regarded as having been one of the foremost scholars on the subject by Brazilian universities. He was the winner of the Camoês Prize in 1998 and the Alfonso Reyes International Prize in 2005. Candido was professor-emeritus at the USP and doctor honoris causa by the UNICAMP. Candido's childhood was spent in the countryside in the states of M.G. and S.P. During this period, he did not attend school, being taught at home by his mother. In 1937, he and his family settled down in São Paulo, where he received formal education. In 1939, he began Law at the USP, a course he would eventually abandon in order to study philosophy at the same university. His first critical works were published in 1941, in the magazine Clima. In the following year he began teaching at the USP. He also taught Brazilian literature at the University of Paris. Candido married Gilda in 1943, a Brazilian essayist and fellow professor at the USP, with whom he had three daughters.
Antonio Candido, a central figure in post-second World War Brazilian literary criticism, wrote an essay in 1988 entitled, "The Right to Literature". He claims there that our age is marked by hypocrisy in relation to the ideal of justice. Never before have human rights been so widely proclaimed. Never, in fact, has civilisation been so advanced and so pervasive. And yet, social injustices remain, inequalities are aggravated and barbarism is rife. But it is because of this situation, that human rights are being pursued more intensively than ever before. Being a dialectical thinker, Candido sees in other words not merely incoherence, but a relationship between contradictory phenomena. Contrary to earlier eras, it is no longer possible for leaders to valorise barbaric deeds. Instead, they must be denied or camouflaged, since there has developed at least a minimal consensus concerning the right to human rights. Literature enters Candido's argument in two ways. First as an anthropologically phenomenon. The verbal organisation of the imagination has what hecalls a "humanising role in society." This is why, he says, there is a substantive right to literature that should count among the human rights. But, importantly, Candido also connects literature and human rights historically by reminding his readers how literature itself has contributed to shaping the public conception of human rights. As examples, he mentions how "the poor" enter literature through the work of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, but also how a Brazilian poet such as Castro Alves brought the horrendous practice of slavery to the readership's awareness. Not unlike Erich Auerbach, who in his Mimesis saw in the long history of realism as being connected to a gradual process of democratisation, Candido grants literature a privileged role in the historical and global emergence of egalitarian ideals. For those who know Candido, this mode of reasoning will seem familiar.In his work, he consistently maintained a faith in enlightnment universalism. A faith in universal reason forms both the precondition and ultimate horizon of his thinking. Always closely connected to the USP, Candido entered the public arena in the early 1940s and would reconfigure Brazilian literary studies with his magisterial Formação da Literatura Brasileira and subsequent work in the 1960s and 1970s. The novelty of this book was, among other things, its combined approach to literatura as both a social institution and an aesthetic phenomenon.
The analysis of the law in the literature also assumes significance due to the fact that a literary work is a witness of the social and legal reality, in which the various portraits of a society are exposed. Literature can denounce behaviors and contribute to social and juridical changes, allowing a focus of times and institutions that capture the legal world as a cultural product. Antonio Candido in his essay, "Literature and Social Life" states that social factors, such as values and ideologies influences the literary life and, because of that, aliterary work to be fully understood should not be separated from its social and historial context. Bakhtin states that "[...] the conception of the individual and the notion that they have of themselves acquires shape and existence in the signs created by an organized group, of which they have in the course of their social relations." Thus, the family relationship must be more than grounded in the affective component and not merely at the biological, considering that the interaction between individuals is responsible for the formation of identities. Over the years, human rights and family law had their concepts extended. New values were added to the society and their reflections in the legal system are shown in the reread of institutes with a different interpretation.
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