The Leftist Imagination (Olavo de Carvalho)

The Leftist Imagination
Neurosis is a forgotten lie you still believe in.
— J. A. C. Müller
Portuguese critic Fernando Cristóvão is the author of the finest study ever written on the narrative art of Graciliano Ramos. He now provides us, with The Contemporary Brazilian Political Novel (Coimbra, Almedina, 2003), an indispensable key to understanding the phenomenon of socialist unanimity that overtook this country precisely when the fallacy of socialism had already become obvious to the entire literate world.
This phenomenon reveals such alienation, such a disjunction between national consciousness and reality, that it’s hardly surprising that the help to understand it would come from abroad rather than from within.
What I conclude—somewhat freely—from Cristóvão’s study is that, in alarming proportions, the Brazilian novel since 1964 has ceased to be an expression of national life and has instead become a repository for the laments of a political faction which, frustrated in its ambitions for power, retreated into a solipsism saturated with rancor and self-pity, interpreting the drama of an entire nation through the petty scale of its internal grievances.
The Hour of the Ruminants, by José J. Veiga, published in 1964, depicts a grim vision of a thoroughly subjugated society, a mechanized totalitarianism which, even at that time, bore little resemblance to the lukewarm authoritarianism of Marshal Castelo Branco, and far more to the Cuban state—which the KGB itself regarded as the most perfect political control mechanism ever devised, and where, with unintentional self-irony, those discontented with Brazil’s new regime sought shelter and support. As a powerful allegory of totalitarianism in general, The Hour of the Ruminants reflected little of Brazilian reality, but everything of the leftist imagination.
With Antônio Callado’s Quarup (1967), the novel became a vehicle for intervention in the Left’s internal debate, advocating armed struggle. But the armed struggle—as only its most enthusiastic adherents failed to foresee—led to harsher repression and the Left’s discrediting, in humiliating contrast to the regime’s economic successes, which only deepened the intellectual Left’s isolation and made it more prone to hallucination.
Hallucinatory is the very atmosphere of The Celebration (A Festa) by Ivan Ângelo, where the political resentment of the defeated degenerates into “carnivalist” anarchy, which fashionable theories promoted as a tool of “liberation,” but which merely fostered generalized anomie—culminating in the rise of the drug trafficking empire which, unlike the military regime, truly oppresses the entire society, not just a political faction.
In Zero (1976) by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, anomie infects the very structure of the narrative, reheating the vanguard experimentalism of the 1920s in order to depict the idea of an intelligible reality as oppressive reactionism. In place of reason, the author adopts the slogan of “writing with the lower abdomen”—a kind of literary baile funk that, quite intelligibly, anticipated the general funkification of society.
If leftist intellectuals were capable of measuring the consequences of their words, their remorse would be endless. But they are like a thief who feels no shame in stealing—only in getting caught. The fundamental lie at the heart of their egocentric vision of Brazilian society is never examined. The only thing ever questioned is practical failure—the difficulty of seizing power. In the end, in this worldview, the only real sin is not having power.
In Bar Don Juan (1971), Antônio Callado transforms from apologist of guerrilla warfare into mourner of its failure. But his self-criticism does not penetrate to the root of the problem—it exhausts itself in laments over tactical and strategic missteps.
Group self-pity mistaken for national tragedy also permeates Pedro’s Love for João (O Amor de Pedro por João), by Tabajara Ruas, in which exiled guerrillas, hidden in an embassy in Santiago, listen on the radio to the bombing of La Moneda Palace—the end of their last hope for the Cubanization of the continent.
To practical failure was added the slow and irreversible corrosion of ideals. By the 1980s, no one could seriously believe that any socialist regime in the world was, in substance, more humane than our own faltering dictatorship.
Nor could anyone still believe that the celebration of anarchy would result in anything but the surrender of the nation to banditry—a result which, deep down, everyone desired, since it aligned with Herbert Marcuse’s speculations about the revolutionary potential of marginality and crime. But in a well-known neurotic process, the deeper the attachment to error, the more histrionically emphatic the verbal pretexts that conceal its original lie—until the sense of reality is completely replaced by rally rhetoric.
The complete triumph of stereotyped thinking comes in The Submerged Region (A Região Submersa), also by Tabajara Ruas, in which President-General Humberto I (what subtlety!) turns out, after dying in a plane crash, to have been a robot remotely controlled by the Americans. To speak of “literature” here would already be an exaggeration. Brazil was ripe to applaud ignorance as a superior form of wisdom, anointed by prophets, consecrated by the ballot box, and adorned with honorary degrees.
Needless to say, a similar process took place in theater, film, and poetry.
The narcissistic reduction of Brazilian social vision to the internal disputes of a political faction, the leftist intelligentsia’s attachment to its self-beatifying myths, and its refusal to seriously examine the social consequences of its own actions led to the self-destruction of the nation's intellectual life—sacrificed on the altar of political ambitions supported by a moral authority all the more diminished the more grandiose it claimed to be.
Today, what remains of “Brazilian culture” is the domain of marketing consultants and political operatives. The leftist intellectuals themselves perhaps feel somewhat uneasy in this environment, yet they fail to recognize it as the very creation of their own making—which, undeniably, it is. And why would they condemn it, if it was the precondition for their rise to power, and—at last!—their revenge for so many humiliations?