Ideas inside the place

Liberalism, slavery and cynicism

Abstract

The problems that slavery engendered in the daily life of Brazilian dependent capitalism gain representation in Machado’s fiction. Roberto Schwarz, in the 70s, published the essay “As ideias fora do lugar”, in which the critic sought to describe what he called a national “ideological comedy”, which would be characterized by the importation, without mediation, of ideas emanating from Europe and the USA by the country’s oligarchies in the 1800s. These ideas, supposedly, contrasted with the national reality, since, like liberalism and slavery, they encountered obstacles with the Brazilian productive forces, generating a kind of “ideological cacoete”, a “cultural torticollis”. The present article addressed the peculiarity with which Machado de Assis portrayed slavery in Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), from the aestheticization of violence provided by the semicolonial metabolism of Brazilian society from the perspective of national elites, mocked by the Bruxo do Cosme Velho. Was considered as the research methodology the bibliographic comparison of Machado’s critical fortune, contributions from literary theories and sociology, such as John Gledson, György Lukács, Octavio Ianni etc. The results of the problem now treated, the peculiar figuration of liberalism and slavery in Machado’s work, thus distanced themselves from the conclusions of Roberto Schwarz in the aforementioned article.