The Other Roots. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and the Portuguese

8/12/2019 The Other Roots. Srgio Buarque de Holanda and the Portuguese

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THE OTHER ROOTSSRGIO BUARQUE DE HOLANDA AND THE

PORTUGUESE

Pedro Meira MonteiroPrinceton University

The idea of roots clearly has a powerful appeal. Here Iattempt to show how the metaphorical field evoked by thetitle of Srgio Buarque de Holandas book,Razes do Brasil,points towards an indistinct, difficult origin, traumatic due to

its own lack of definition.As with all metaphors, the roots of the title transport us

to a particular imaginary country. When reading Razes doBrasil, we realize that this country, or this territory, is aboveall transcontinental and transcultural. It is part America, partEurope, part Africa. However, what is interesting is thatSrgio Buarque de Holanda does not restrict his investiga-tion purely to the concepts of miscegenation and themythical fusion of the so-called three races on the Ameri-can continent. From the beginning, he is more concernedwith a hybrid space which is the real starting point to theLuso-Brazilian or Luso-Afro-Brazilian civilizational adven-ture.

This space is more than mere hybrid, it is indecisive,oscillating between Europe and Africa, neither here northere. Through it, Portugal emerges as a bridging-territory,an image which Gilberto Freyre had already made famous bythe time the first edition ofRazes do Brasil was published in1936, drawing inspiration from a pantheon of authors,amongst the most notable of whom was Alexandre Hercula-no (Freyre 81).

The issue of originsthe roots of Brazilclearly bringsinto focus the problem of pertaining, or not pertaining,

belonging or not belonging, so dear to contemporary theory.In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that the anguish andthe theoretical and poetical hesitation of Srgio Buarque deHolanda in Razes do Brasil reveal something that we can,nowadays, recognize as the impertinence of pertaining. The


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fact is that we are all, whether we like it or not, especiallythose in the academic Anglophone world, informed andtrained by a type of sensibility that emerges from post-

colonial studies and poststructuralism. It is a sensibility thatmakes us profoundly distrustful of any origins that are fixed.Indeed, the notion of a clear and unequivocal identity is,quite rightly, anathema to the discourses of the contemporaryacademy.

Razes do Brasil was published when Srgio Buarque deHolanda was already a well-known intellectual fashioned byBrazilian modernism, occasionally working as a literary

critic for the newspapers of Rio de Janeiro. During the yearof the books first edition, he was affiliated with theUniversidade do Distrito Federal, which would be closedshortly thereafter, in the wake of the Estado Novo coup.There, hetaught both history and literary studies.1However,the year and a half he spent in Berlin as a journalist, between1929 and 1930, was really the formative experience whichevoked in him feelings of estrangement towards his homecountry. The experience of exile (both voluntary and invo-luntary) is vital to our appreciation of the creative processesinvolved in the elaboration of a work such as Razes doBrasil, or even Gilberto Freyres better-known Casa-grande& senzala. The latter came about not only as a result ofFreyres experience as a Ph.D. student at Columbia Univer-sity, but above all because of his time as a visiting lecturer atStanford University in California.2Both works are represen-tative of the major syntheses of social interpretation thatflourished in the 1930s, and are dominated by the need toexplain Brazil through a sense of contrast substantiated byforeign experience.3 We should remember here that thewhole of the first chapter ofRazes do Brasilis dedicated towhat is suggestively entitled Fronteiras da Europa.

Of course, this liminalspace reverts back to an image full

of implications which places the Iberian Peninsula, andspecially Portugal, as a sort of front line and fantastical pointin which Europe can barely recognise itself. It is the reservado sonho in Eduardo Lourenos words, or, more pointedly,the poor and underdeveloped country, scarcely capable of


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cooperating in the desperate Spanish attempt to re-attachthe peninsula to prxima Europa. That liminal space in-spired and underscored Jos Saramagos narrative imagina-

tion in hisA jangada de pedra. It is a space that always fadesaway on the horizon.

To understand Razes do Brasil fully, or at least tounderstand its portrayal of Portugal, we must remember thatMax Webers images provided a backdrop for the youngSrgio Buarque de Holanda.4The importance of Buarque deHolandas time in Germany cannot be underestimated. As aresult of that stay, at the turn of the 1930s, the future Brazi-

lian historian was immersed in an intellectual ambiance satu-rated in the major ideological questions of the day, particu-larly those concerning the spirit of peoples, race and identity,national character, founding myths, and collective essences.It was the sort of theoretical swamp in which the monstrousshadow of the Third Reich is retroactively projected, and itwas also an environment in which Europe foresaw itself asdivided in two. Against that backdrop, Weber was always anavailable counterbalance, far from those nationalist essentia-list concerns. What interested himin works which still heldan enormous appeal at the time Srgio Buarque de Holandawas at university in the last years of the Weimar Republicwas the individuals internalisation of the monastic ethic,and that religious asceticism which the protestant reforma-tion elevated to its maximum potency. The main conceptualpath is very well known: Weber tried to understand themoment when the Protestant ethic was to become secular,setting a new world-vision (Weltanschauung) and, strictlyspeaking, a whole new world: that of modern capitalism. In away, Weber tried to understand how the individual giveshimself up, throwing himself into daily and methodical workin a struggle which is at the same time religious and secular,sacred and profane. In sum, the reference here is the work

ethic within the capitalist world.However, there is a territory which is left outside thisworld and this ethic. Figuratively speaking, the Catholicshadow of the Counter-Reformation spreads itself over ano-therEurope, reaching in particular its extremes, that is, the


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imaginary space of the radical alterity, of another West, inJos Guilherme Merquiors words, words that continue thelong tradition of debates about the Iberian origins of Portu-

guese and Spanish America. The theme, as is known, is ever-present within Latin-American social and literary imagina-tion. All arielismosare therein potentially present, as part ofa broad conception which insists on seeing Latin America inrelation to its double: a protestant America, sometimesemulated, sometimes rejected, but always desired, even ifsecretly.5

The first chapter of Razes do Brasil is a profound,

hermetic and a somewhat impressionistic investigation of aworld and a culture in which the individual never relin-quishes himself. In Francisco Rodrigues Lobos work, Sr-gio Buarque de Holanda finds attributes such as a inteireza,o ser, a gravidade, o termo honrado, o proceder sisudo, allof which exalt the Portuguese nobre escudo (28) and leadsus to believe that Iberian man never dedicates himself to atask unless it is for himself.

Politics itself, underscored by this notion, is something thatdoes not transcend Iberian men. A collective solution, ifreached, will be achieved through the endeavours of anextraordinary individual:

Efetivamente, as teorias negadoras do livre-arbtrio foram sem-pre encaradas com desconfiana e antipatia pelos espanhis eportugueses. Nunca eles se sentiram muito vontade em um

mundo onde o mrito e a responsabilidade individuais noencontrassem pleno reconhecimento.Foi essa mentalidade, justamente, que se tornou o maior

bice, entre eles, ao esprito de organizao espontnea, tocaracterstica de povos protestantes, e sobretudo de calvinistas.Porque, na verdade, as doutrinas que apregoam o livre arbtrio ea responsabilidade pessal so tudo, menos favorecedoras daassociao entre os homens. Nas naes ibricas, falta dessaracionalizao da vida, que to cedo experimentaram algumasterras protestantes, o princpio unificador foi sempre represen-

tado pelos governos. Nelas predominou, incessantemente, o tipode organizao poltica artificialmente mantida por uma foraexterior, que, nos tempos modernos, encontrou uma das suasformas caractersticas nas ditaduras militares (27).


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If we accept these Weberian propositions, we might thinkthat the Iberian peoples shaped the universe of work andpolitics, culture and society in a way that Srgio Buarque de

Holanda finds unique.Those who know Razes do Brasil are aware that this

initial lack of distinction between the Portuguese and theSpanish will give way, in the body of the work, to a wholechain of differentiations. These differentiations will, in turn,delineate the terms of reference for comparing Portugueseand Spanish America. They are the foundation for theanalysis of the myth of paradise on Earth in Viso do

parasoSrgio Buarque de Holandas masterpiece, pub-lished in 1958.

What interests us here is not so much the debate about theoriginality of Brazilian civilisation, whose miscegenatedcharacter alludes to the original porosity of the Portuguesepeople, a people who were apparently always open to theOther, as Gilberto Freyre, and more recently, Darcy Ribeiro,want us to believe. This dubious tropicologia, which never-theless continues to seduce even the most unsuspectingcritics, is subject for another study. What really interests usis simply to note how this indecisive space between conti-nents, and also between cultures, creates a sort of indefinite,oscillating territory. It is here that Gilberto Freyre wouldultimately identify a democratic space. While Srgio Buar-que de Holanda does not go as far, he does draw on apassage by Gil Vicente, and on Alberto Sampaios analysisof Portugals ancient history, to remind us that the socialhierarchy in the Finisterrawas always less rigid than in therest of Europe, where the distance between nobles andpeasants was always clear and profound (Razes, 24-27).

The final question I raise is the following: what does theoscillation of Brazils roots mean? To play on RobertoSchwarzs famous expression, what does it mean that roots

are misplaced, neither here nor there, or rather, in a spacethat is by definition undefined? For historical and chronolo-gical reasons, Brazil did not suffer the shadow of Portuguesecolonial power for as long as the rest of the Lusophoneworld. As for the Lusophone world itself, those of us who


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teach in the Anglophone academy know that our discomfortwith the term Lusofonia forces us to name all our coursesas courses on the literatures of the Portuguese-speaking

worldas if we could vanquish ghosts by simply shiftingtitles. The colonial period is a remote memory zone for asecondary-school child in Brazil. But it becomes a phantas-magorical zone for a college student, and it can crudely andcruelly reveal itself within the striking anachronisms of theBrazilian social and racial, or ethnic, structure of today. Inshort, the Portuguese-speaking postcolonial world is nottotally exclusive to the regions that belonged to modern

Portuguese colonialism. Ironically, Brazil can reclaim itspart in the same dismantled Portuguese Empire, despiteknowing that Brazilian modernists, from the 1920s onwards,invented the fantasy of a major break, of profound separa-tion, as if we, ns, brasileiros, had nothing to do withPortugal.

The merit of Srgio Buarque de Holandas work is that itpointed out, over a decade after the juvenile and exuberantfantasy of the modernist feast in Brazil, that whether Brazi-lians like it or not, Portuguese history does have somethingto do with them. It is obvious that the usage of pronouns ofthe first and the third person plural (ns, eles) is proble-matic. But it is exactly here, within the hide-and-seek gameof words, that the universe of politics may be found. We areourselves, but we are also the Other.

Up to this point we are only at the same common senselevel of Brazilian modernism, with its ingenious, yet at timesinnocently conceived idea ofantropofagia. According to thisidea, in the face of the Other, I devour and absorb it tobecome myself. What Srgio Buarque de Holanda asserts, inthe 1930sa time when there was already disenchantmentwith Modernism in Brazilis that the moment for the con-struction of the I points towards a mythical moment of a

constitution that in itself is unreachable.Actually, those whom I devour carry on threatening me,and it does not matter that they have lost their fightingpower. Those whom I devour carry on threatening me phan-tasmagorically, insisting on reminding me of the indecisive


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zone from where I hail, an oscillating zone which, as withBorgess question about time, puts us at the centre of aparadox: when I want to find myself, I cannot; when I do not

want to find myself, I find myself there.The position I am advocating as that of Srgio Buarque de

Holanda inRazes do Brasilrefers to the idea that the sign-Brazil present in the title of his book is submitted to theoscillating and imprecise nature of roots that never root,andperhaps have never taken root. It calls to mind Derrida who,serving as a starting point for Lus Madureiras recent study,claims and defends the ability of the sign to disempower the

context from all its traditional strength.As Madureira reminds us in his Cannibal Modernities,

every sign, according to Derrida, carries with it a force ofbreaking with its context (1). The crisis that is developinghere is not only linguistic. Or rather, as it is a crisis ofmeaning, it is also a political crisis: the reference which wehoped to find in the rootof the word, of the sign-Brazil, islacking. It is not just a question of imagining that the rootsare loose, and that it would be good to re-plant them innational or international soil. The problem is that these rootscontinue to point towards an Other that challenges me. It isan Other which takes root in me, at the very time that Irecognize and I assume him as another.

Notes:

1. On Buarque de Holandas tenure at the Universidade do Distrito Fe-deral, see Carvalho.

2. On Freyres experience abroad, see Pallares-Burke, Larreta, andGomes. On Srgio Buarque de Holandas experience abroad, see Barbosa,Monteiro 2006, and Wegner.

3. On the importance of being a stranger to his or her own country inorder to explain it, see Rocha, and Santiago.

4. On the importance of Max Webers theses in the work of SrgioBuarque de Holanda, see Machado, and Monteiro 1999.

5. On the more or less secret passion of the other side of the mirror,see both Morse and DaMatta.


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Works Cited:

Carvalho, Marcus Vinicius Corra. Outros lados: Sergio

Buarque de Holanda, crtica literria, histria e poltica(1920-1940).Ph.D. dissertation, Unicamp, 2003.

DaMatta, Roberto. Tocquevilleanas: Notcias da Amrica:Crnicas e observaes sobre os Estados Unidos.Rio deJaneiro: Rocco, 2005.

Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-grande & senzala. Rio de Janeiro:Record, 2001.

Gomes, ngela de Castro (Ed). Em famlia: A

correspondncia de Oliveira Lima e Gilberto Freyre.Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 2005.

Holanda, Srgio Buarque de.Razes do Brasil. Ed. RicardoBenzaquen de Arajo, Lilia Schwarcz. So Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 2006.

---. Viso do paraso: Os motivos ednicos nodescobrimento e colonizao do Brasil. So Paulo:Brasiliense, 1992.

Larreta, Enrique Rodrguez. O caminho para Casa-grande. Itinerrios de Gilberto Freyre.Nehum Brasil existe:Pequena enciclopdia. Ed. Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha. Riode Janeiro: TopBooks, UniverCidade, UERJ, 2003. 195-204.

Loureno, Eduardo.A Nau de caro e Imagem e miragemda lusofonia. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2001.

Machado, Brasil Pinheiro. Razes do Brasil: Umareleitura. Srgio Buarque de Holanda: perspectivas. Ed.Pedro Meira Monteiro, Joo Kennedy Eugnio. Rio deJaneiro, Campinas: EdUERJ, Editora da Unicamp, 2008.155-180.

Madureira, Lus. Cannibal Modernities: Postcolonialityand the Avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature.Charlottesville and London: University of Virgina Press,2005.

Merquior, Jos Guilherme. O outro Ocidente. Presena15. 1990: 67-91.Monteiro, Pedro Meira. Buscando Amrica. Srgio

Buarque de Holanda,Razes do Brasil.Ed. Ricardo


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Benzaquen de Arajo, Lilia Schwarcz. So Paulo:Companhia das Letras, 2006. 313-334.

---.A queda do aventureiro: Aventura, cordialidade e os

novos tempos em Razes do Brasil. Campinas: Editora daUnicamp, 1999.

Morse, Richard. O espelho de Prspero: Cultura e idiasnas Amricas. Trans. Paulo Neves. So Paulo: Companhiadas Letras, 1988.

Pallares-Burke, Maria Lcia Garcia. Gilberto Freyre: Umvitoriano nos trpicos. So Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2005.

Ribeiro, Darcy. O povo brasileiro: A formao e o sentido

do Brasil.So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995.Rocha, Joo Cezar de Castro. O exlio do homem cordial.

Rio de Janeiro: Museu da Repblica, 2004.Santiago, Silviano.As razes e o labirinto da Amrica

Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2006.Saramago, Jos.A jangada de pedra. So Paulo:

Companhia das Letras, 1988.Weber, Max.A tica protestante e o esprito do

capitalismo. Trans. Jos Marcos Mariani de Macedo. Ed.Antnio Flvio Pierucci. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras,2004.

Wegner, Robert.A conquista do oeste: A fronteira na obrade Srgio Buarque de Holanda. Belo Horizonte: EditoraUFMG, 2000.

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