Language, by Olavo de Carvalho

This series of newspaper columns by Olavo de Carvalho was collected in this order in the book “The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot”.

In the first part of this collection, “Literature vs. Wooden Language,” Olavo explores the deterioration of intellectual discourse and literature in contemporary Brazil through three articles. In "Long Night", he laments the loss of genuine intelligence, replaced by superficial certainties expressed through a limited vocabulary of clichés. This degradation, according to Olavo, has led to a collective blindness where the populace fails to recognize the absence of substantial literature and intellectual rigor. “The Trigger-Word” delves into how these clichés serve as manipulative tools, evoking automatic emotional responses rather than fostering critical thought. Olavo argues that this reliance on simplistic, emotionally charged language undermines true intellectual engagement and critical analysis. In “Figures of Speech” (part of "The formula to drive the world crazy"), he critiques the prevalent use of figures of speech that replace rational debate with emotive impressions, leading to a superficial and manipulative public discourse. Olavo underscores that this approach to language stifles meaningful discussion and perpetuates a shallow understanding of complex issues.

In the second part, “Writers vs. Pretenders,” Olavo critiques the contemporary literary scene and the intellectual culture in Brazil. “Literature of the Lower Abdomen” criticizes modern Brazilian writers for abandoning the pursuit of truth and intellectual rigor, focusing instead on superficial and sensationalist themes. Olavo contrasts this with the dedication of past writers who engaged deeply with literature and philosophy. “Serious Matters” discusses the misrepresentation of Brazilian literature in international events, where mediocre and politically fashionable writers are showcased instead of truly influential and high-quality authors. Olavo contends that this misrepresentation diminishes the global perception of Brazilian culture. In "Conversation about Style", Olavo responds to a reader’s critique of his writing style, defending his polemical and unorthodox approach. He emphasizes that his style is intentional, aiming to provoke critical thinking and challenge the prevailing intellectual norms, which he sees as overly polite and conformist. Through these articles, Olavo calls for a return to intellectual integrity and a rejection of superficiality in both literature and public discourse.

• 1. Literature vs. Wooden Language
• Long Night
• The Trigger-Word
• Figures of Speech
• 2. Writers vs. Pretenders
• Literature of the Lower Abdomen
• Serious Matters
• Conversation about Style

1. Literature vs. Wooden Language

Long Night

Diário do Comércio, June 4, 2012

If there is one thing that the more you lose, the less you miss, it is intelligence. I use the word not in the vulgar sense of measurable little skills, but in the sense of perception of reality. The less you perceive, the less you notice that you do not perceive. Almost invariably, this loss is accompanied by a feeling of fullness, of security, almost of infallibility. Of course: the stupider you become, the less you are aware of contradictions and difficulties, and everything seems explainable in a few words.

If these words come with the seal of approval from the talking intelligentzia, then, my child, nothing in the world can oppose the overwhelming force of clichés that, with a snap of the fingers, answer all questions, resolve all doubts, and establish, with sovereign tranquility, the empire of final consensus. I refer especially to expressions like “social inequality,” “diversity,” “fundamentalism,” “rights,” “extremism,” “intolerance,” “torture,” “medieval,” “racism,” “dictatorship,” “religious belief,” and the like. The reader can, if they wish, complete the repertoire with a brief consultation of the opinion sections of the so-called “mainstream press.” At most, it consists of some twenty or thirty terms. Is there anything, between heaven and earth, that these terms do not perfectly express, do not explain in their minutest details, do not transmute into unshakable conclusions that only a madman would dare to contest? The Brazilian mind nowadays revolves around them, unable to conceive anything beyond what this meager vocabulary can encompass.

That these certainties are flaunted by people who at the same time profess relativistic faith and even peremptorily deny the existence of objective truths is further proof of what I have been saying: the less you understand, the less you understand that you do not understand. Unlike the economy, where the principle of scarcity prevails, in the realm of intelligence, the principle of abundance prevails: the more lacking it is, the more it seems to overflow. Complete stupidity, if such a sublime ideal could be reached, would thus correspond to universal self-satisfaction.

The most eloquent sign is the fact that in a country where for thirty years no novel, no play worth reading has been published, no one misses something once so abundant, so rich in these parts, which was — what was it called again? — “literature.” I say this entity has disappeared because — believe it — I never stop looking for it. I scour publisher catalogs, rummage through the internet for literary sites, read dozens of fiction and poetry works that their authors sadistically send me, and in the end, what do I find? Nothing. Everything is monstrously silly, empty, pretentious, and written in orangutan language. At most, here and there, some anemic talent shows up, which, to thrive, would still need much reading, life experience, and some good slaps.

But just as I do not see any imaginative literary work worthy of attention, neither do I encounter, in newspaper reviews and in “cultural” magazines that keep popping up, anyone who realizes the intellectual disgrace, the supreme scandal that is a country of almost 200 million inhabitants, with a university on every corner, without any superior literature. No one seems alarmed, no one complains, no one says a word. Everyone seems to feel that the house is in perfect order, and some are even crazy enough to believe that the great sign of the country’s cultural health is themselves. Wasn’t there even a Minister of Culture who assured that our cultural production was going through one of its most brilliant, most creative moments? Measured, certainly, by the number of funk shows.

See how, in the realm of intelligence, scarcity is abundance?

But the worst is not the quantitative poverty.

From Independence until the 1970s, the social and psychological history of Brazil appeared, translucent, in national literature. Reading the books of Machado de Assis, Raul Pompeia, Lima Barreto, Antônio de Alcântara Machado, Graciliano Ramos, José Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado, Marques Rebelo, José Geraldo Vieira, Ciro dos Anjos, Octávio de Faria, Anníbal M. Machado, and many others, we obtained a vivid image of the experience of being Brazilian, reflected with all the variety of its regional and epochal manifestations and with all the complexity of the relationships between soul and history, individual and society.

From the 1980s onwards, Brazilian literature disappeared. The complex and rich image of national life seen in the works of the best writers was then replaced by a system of stereotypes, vulgar and mechanical to the point of despair, infinitely repeated by TV, journalism, textbooks, and political speeches.

In the same period, Brazil underwent overwhelming historical and cultural changes, which, without the testimony of literature, cannot be integrated into the collective imagination, much less become the object of reflection. It was thirty years of metamorphoses lived in a state of hypnotic sleep, perhaps unrecoverable forever.

The tone of definitive certainty with which any politically correct nonsense presents itself today as the nec plus ultra of human intelligence would never have become possible without this long period of numbness and darkness, this long night of intelligence, at the end of which the simple ability to discern between normal and aberrant, sensible and absurd, glaring obviousness and impenetrable illogic was lost.

The Trigger-Word

Diário do Comércio, June 8, 2012

In the previous article, I mentioned some terms of the “wooden language” that dominate today’s public debate in Brazil, especially and mainly among intellectuals whose first duty would be to analyze the usual language, freeing it from the hypnotic power of clichés and restoring the normal traffic between language, perception, and reality.

But I am far from thinking that clichés are useless. For the demagogue and charlatan, they serve to awaken in the audience, by force of mere semantic automatism resulting from repetitive use, the desired emotions and reactions. For the scholar, they are the touchstone to distinguish between the demagogy discourse and the knowledge discourse. Without this distinction, any scientific analysis of society and politics would be impossible.

The language of clichés is characterized by three unmistakable traits:

1. It bets on the immediate emotional effect of words, bypassing the examination of the corresponding objects and experiences.
2. It seeks to give the impression that words are a direct transfer of reality, hiding the history of how their present meanings were formed by repeated use, expressions of preferences and human choices. Confusing words and things on purpose, the political agent disguises his own action and induces the audience to believe they are deciding freely based on a direct view of reality.
3. It grants the authority of absolute truths to statements that, at best, have relative validity.

An example is the use the Nazis made of the term “race.” It is a complex and ambiguous concept, where elements of anatomy, physical anthropology, genetics, ethnology, human geography, politics, and even religion are mixed. The effectiveness of the term in propaganda depended precisely on these elements remaining mixed and indistinct, forming a confused synthesis capable of evoking a sense of group identity. That is why the Gestapo ordered the seizure of Eric Voegelin’s book, History of the Idea of Race (1933), a scientific study with no political appeal: for it to function as a motivating symbol of national union, the term had to appear as the immediate translation of a visible reality, not as what it really was — the historical product of a long accumulation of highly questionable assumptions.

Similarly, the term "fascism,"¹ scientifically understood, applies quite appropriately to many leftist governments in the Third World,² but it is used by the left as a slanderous label to denigrate ideas as foreign to fascism as market freedom, anti-abortionism, or popular hatred of corruption. Once, in a debate, I heard an illustrious professor from USP exclaim: “Liberalism is fascism!” I gently asked the creature to cite one example — just one — of a fascist government that did not practice strict state control of the economy. None came, of course. The word “fascism,” in the mouth of the distinguished, was not the sign of an idea or thing: it was a trigger word, manufactured to evoke automatic reactions.

It should be evident at first glance that the terms used in political and cultural debate rarely denote things, objects of the external world, but rather a mixture of conjectures, expectations, and human preferences; therefore, none of them has any meaning beyond the bundle of contradictions and difficulties they contain, through which, and only through which, they come to designate something of the real world. You can know what a cat is simply by looking at a cat, but “democracy,” “freedom,” “human rights,” “equality,” “reactionary,” “prejudice,” “discrimination,” “extremism,” etc., are entities that exist only in the dialectical confrontation of ideas, values, and attitudes. Whoever uses these words giving the impression that they reflect immediate, unproblematic realities, recognizable at first sight, is a demagogue and charlatan. The one who writes or speaks this way does not want to awaken in you an awareness of how things happen, but only a favorable emotional reaction to him, his party, his interests. He is a drug dealer posing as an intellectual and professor.

The frequency with which trigger words are used in national debate as symbols of self-evident premises, unquestionable values, and infallible criteria of right and wrong already shows that the mere concept of responsible intellectual activity has disappeared from the mental horizon of our “talking classes,” being replaced by its advertising and demagogic caricature.

How did we come to this state of affairs? Investigating it is laborious but not substantially complicated. Just track the process of “occupying spaces” in the media, education, and cultural institutions, which, through the obsessively repetitive use of clichés, gradually uniformed the language of public debates and magnetized a certain repertoire of words with positive or negative, attractive or repulsive values, which then began to be used as triggers for automated, uniform, completely predictable reactions.

If you are trained to have the same reactions to the same words, you end up seeing only what you are capable of saying, and you hardly manage to think differently from what the owners of the vocabulary have told you to think. This was one of the main mechanisms by which the festive “democratization” of Brazil ended up, in practice, extinguishing the possibility of any substantive debate about anything.

Figures of Speech

[in: The formula to drive the world crazy]
Diário do Comércio, June 11, 2007

Every figure of speech compactly expresses an impression without clearly indicating the objective phenomenon that aroused it. Decomposed analytically, it reveals itself as carrying many possible meanings, some contradictory to each other, which may correspond to experience in varying degrees. In today’s Brazil, all the most prominent “opinion formers,” without any visible exception — media commentators, academics, politicians, show business figures — think in figures of speech, without the slightest concern — or ability — to distinguish between the verbal formula and the data of experience. They impose their subjective states directly on the reader or listener, without a mediating reality that could serve as an arbitration criterion between the sender and receiver of the message. Rational discussion thus becomes unfeasible at the base, being replaced by the mere confrontation of ways of feeling, a mutual demonstration of brute psychic force that almost necessarily gives victory to the loudest, most histrionic, fanatical, and intolerant side. As people somehow sense that this situation threatens to devolve into pure and simple exchanges of insults, if not slaps or gunshots, the remedy they improvise by mere automatism is to cling to the rules of politeness as a conventional symbol and substitute for the missing rationality, as if someone calmly and politely declaring that cats are vegetables were more rational than angrily shouting that they are animals. The result is that the language of public debates becomes even more artificial and pedantic, facilitating the work of demagogues and manipulators.

It is an environment of hallucination and farce, in which only the worst and most vile can prevail.

The pinnacle of mental debauchery is reached when criminal laws begin to be drafted in this manner. If the definition of a criminal conduct is vague and imprecise, the typification of the corresponding crime becomes pure matter of the subjective preference of the judge or political pressure from interested groups. Thus, for example, the agitator who openly preaches the inferiority of the black race and the joker who makes an occasional joke about blacks can be condemned to the same penalty for the crime of “racism.” Two qualitatively incomparable conducts are leveled down: there is no longer a difference between a crime and the appearance of a crime. It is Caesar’s wife in reverse: you do not have to be a criminal, you just have to look like one. It is enough to fit into an unlimitedly elastic definition that includes everything from the thoughtless use of certain words to explicit and fierce genocidal indoctrination. “Racism” is a figure of speech, not a rigorous concept corresponding to determined conducts. A law that criminalizes it is a game of chance in which justice and injustice are distributed randomly by judges who have the clear conscience of acting in the service of freedom and democracy. It is a comedy. Whoever takes the trouble to analytically distinguish the various meanings with which the word “racism” is used in different contexts will verify that they correspond to very different conducts, some of which may be criminal. These are the ones that should be the object of law, not the catch-all term “racism.” And “homophobia”? Its meaning ranges from homicidal impulse to religious devotions, from the scientific discussion of a nosological classification to the spontaneous repulsion to certain types of caresses — all of this criminalized equally. Those who create and draft these laws are obviously people without the slightest sense of responsibility for their actions: they are adolescents intoxicated with a delusion of power; they are misshapen and antisocial minds, dangerous sociopaths. Only totally duped voters could have elevated these individuals to the condition of legislators, giving reality to the macabre fantasy of Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse: the revolution of the mad, plotted in the asylum to subjugate sane humanity and impose madness as a rule. And do not think that by saying this I am myself appealing to a figure of speech, hyperbolizing the facts to draw attention to them. The inability to distinguish between literal and figurative meaning, the loss of the denominative function of language, and the reduction of speech to a game of intimidation and seduction without accountability to reality are characteristic psychiatric symptoms. When I became aware of the political-social diagnoses elaborated by psychiatrists Joseph Gabel and Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., who, going beyond the Schellingian conception of “spiritual illness,” classified revolutionary ideologies as mental pathologies in the strict sense, I thought they exaggerated. Today I know they were right.

Figures of speech are indispensable tools not only in communication but in the acquisition of knowledge. When we do not know exactly what a thing is, we say the impression it causes us. All knowledge begins this way. Benedetto Croce defined poetry as “expression of impressions.” Every incursion of the human mind into a new and unexplored domain is, in this sense, “poetic.” We begin by saying what we feel and imagine. It is from the confrontation of many diverse, incongruent, and opposing fantasies that the reality of the thing, the object, one day comes to appear before our eyes, clear and distinct, as if imprisoned in a mesh of imaginary threads — like the three-dimensionality of space that emerges from the lines drawn on a flat surface. Suppressing metaphors and metonymies, analogies, and hyperboles, imposing universally an entirely exact, defined, “scientific” language, as the philosophers of the analytical school aspired to do, would be to suffocate the human capacity to investigate and conjecture. It would be to kill scientific inventiveness itself under the excuse of giving science full powers over “pre-scientific” modes of knowledge.

But conversely, imprisoning the human mind in an inextricable web of figures of speech resistant to all analysis, imposing the game of emotive impressions as a substitute for rational discussion, and making nebulous symbolisms the basis of practical decisions that will affect millions of people is an even graver crime against human intelligence; it is enslaving an entire society — or several — to the inner confusion of a group of megalomaniac psychopaths.

2. Writers vs. Pretenders

Literature of the Lower Abdomen

Jornal da Tarde, July 3, 2003

In his Memories of 1994, Adolfo Bioy Casares left this testimony about his collaboration with Jorge Luís Borges:

“First things come first, and secondary things can be forgotten: the priority was literature, literary adequacy, philosophy, truth… For both of us, the most important thing was to understand… So it was not about him or me, who had spoken, but about having understood the truth of something.”

In the same sense, he had already noted in Diary and Fantasy: “Intelligence works like a kind of ethics. It does not allow concessions, does not tolerate meanness.”

How many Brazilian writers of the last three or four decades could repeat these words with equal sincerity?

To begin with, they do not believe in “truth.” They dispose of it with two or three relativist or deconstructionist clichés and do not think about it anymore. As for sincerity, they imagine it consists of details of sexual physiology.

Great literature is born from the synthesis of fervor, devotion, moral sincerity, with the elevation of intelligence and the breadth of world vision. Between the twenties and sixties, Brazilian letters almost reached the melting point where the mixture of these elements would produce the high seriousness demanded by Mathew Arnold. But afterwards, the mixture deteriorated. We miserably returned to the writing of the Samoyeds, the literati of Bruzundanga, as described by Lima Barreto in 1922:

“There is not in most of these people a depth of feeling that impels them to go to the core of the things they pretend to love, to decipher them by the sincere love they have for them, to want them completely, to absorb them. They only want the appearance of things… The glory of letters is only achieved by those who give themselves entirely to them; in literature, as in love, only those who forget themselves entirely and surrender with blind faith are loved. The Samoyeds are content with the literary appearances and the banal simulation of notoriety, sometimes due to lack of intelligence, other times due to insufficient or flawed education, but almost always due to lack of true poetic talent, of sincerity…”

Sincerity is measured by effort. Before definitively getting it right with The Invention of Morel (1940), Bioy wrote an infinity of very bad short stories and novels from ages 20 to 26. But it was not wasted time:

“In that period of continuous and unsuccessful creation, I read and studied a lot. I read Spanish literature, with the intention of encompassing it in the diversity of its genres, from the beginnings to the present, without limiting myself to the best-known authors and books; Argentine literature, not excluding popular forms like tango and milonga lyrics, which I selected in El Alma que Canta and El Canta Claro, for a possible anthology; French, English, American, and Russian literature; some of German, Italian, Portuguese (of course, Eça de Queiroz); Greek and Latin literature, some of Chinese, Japanese, Persian. Literary theories. Versification, syntax, grammar. Stevenson’s The Art of Writing, Vernon Lee’s Dealing with Words. Philosophy, logic, symbolic logic. Introductions to sciences, classifications of sciences, introduction to mathematics. The Bible. Saint Augustine. Church Fathers. Relativity. The fourth dimension. Biological theories.”

Just reading this paragraph instantly reveals what is wrong with national culture. The Argentine novelist — as indeed in his time the poor Lima Barreto, squeezing his meager budget to buy books on philosophy and science — studied more during those six years than any of the national writers that our public today applauds did in their entire lives. How many of them even have the interest, however vague and lazy, to extend their vision of things over such a broad domain of knowledge? None even conceives the possibility of doing so, and if we hint that it might be convenient, the almost inevitable response is a pair of wide-eyed eyes followed by a sarcastic diversion. Serious study is for professors, and even then, take it easy! Nothing beyond what is required by the curriculum. A self-respecting Brazilian literato considers intellectual effort to be reactionary pedantry and, as one of them proudly states, “writes with the lower abdomen.”

Serious Matters

Bravo!, July 1998

If a few decades ago the Brazilian government had decided to honor French culture and invited, to represent it, Françoise Sagan instead of André Malraux, Fernandel instead of François Mauriac, Edith Piaf instead of Raymond Aron, the French would have thought it a joke, and General Charles de Gaulle, if he had never said that Brazil is not a serious country — as he actually seems never to have said — would see a good occasion to say it.

However, we Brazilians took the Paris Book Fair perfectly seriously when it honored our literary culture in the persons of Messrs. Chico Buarque, Frei Betto, Paulo Coelho, Fernando Gabeira, Zuenir Ventura, Luis Fernando Verissimo, and others of equal or lesser caliber.

No one will deny that these creatures represent, in some way, Brazilian culture. But in what way, precisely?

To be representative of a country’s culture and moment, the writer must meet three obvious conditions. First: he must be excellent, he must express the best and highest of which his nation is capable, he must have given something of value to the world in the name of his country. Second: he must be current, that is, active. He must be up-to-date, either through works or deeds. Third: he must be influential, powerful, widely read, and talked about.

Of the 37 Brazilian writers on the list of honorees at the Paris Fair, three, and only three, meet these conditions: Carlos Heitor Cony, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and Antonio Olinto. All the others fail one, two, or all three.

Some of them are excellent but not current. The lack of currency is, of the evils, the least. It takes away a writer’s representativeness without diminishing his merits in any way. Jorge Amado and Rachel de Queirós, no matter how good they wrote later, will never cease to be the Northeastern modernism. They are fixed in that place of time. It is an honorable place, the most honorable of our literature — but it is not where we are today. Lygia Fagundes Telles is wonderful, but the best of what she did is already two decades old. Millôr Fernandes has never declined, but no one will say that in the last twenty years he did anything more worthy and outstanding than An Elephant in the Chaos or Liberty, Liberty. Geraldo Mello Mourão is an astonishing genius — but it’s been a long time since anyone heard about his works. Who will say that Antonio Torres is not great? He is, but he has not grown in the last decade: his fame and his best production are indissolubly associated with the dark years of the dictatorship. The same must be said of Plínio Marcos. There are two or three more in this category, but, not having the list in front of me, I speak only of what I remember. As just as it is to honor them, their choice would never be a priority in an event intended to present to a foreign people today’s Brazilian culture.

There is a second group: those who are excellent and current, but do not influence anything because no one has read them. They are a possibility, a hope. I hope that Adriano Espínola will be the Brazil of tomorrow when Língua-Mar and Táxi, as they deserve, are read in all schools. In today’s Brazil, he is a literary glory in a hypothetical state. Saying that he represents us is making a victory speech before registering the candidacy. The third group is the writers who are only current without being influential or excellent: they recently did things that had no repercussion and, coincidentally, were worthless. Their presence on the list is an unfathomable enigma. I will not name names. Non raggionam di lor, ma guarda e passa.

The most interesting wing is those who are influential and current, only. They specialize, by the way, in being so, and would not make the slightest effort to become excellent as well, either because they do not know what that is or because they imagine it consists of being exactly what they are. Incredibly, these make up the bulk of the list. Therefore, they translate the essence of the criterion that inspired the selection. They are precisely those I mentioned at the beginning of this article and a dozen others of identical intellectual caliber. It is by analyzing the reasons for their choice that we will discover what the Paris Book Fair thinks of Brazil.

I repeat, these names do represent national culture. They represent it, however, not in the eminent sense in which it was represented by Machado de Assis and Villa-Lobos, Gilberto Freyre and Portinari, or in the sense in which it is represented today — meeting the three conditions — by Ariano Suassuna, Bruno Tolentino, Ferreira Gullar, Wilson Martins, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Miguel Reale, Meira Penna, Amaral Viera, Edino Krieger, and a few others who, like them, are not on the list. Those chosen do not represent the Brazilian “genius,” but only the Brazilian “current affairs,” what everyone talks about daily. In a word, they represent our culture in the anthropological sense of the term: tastes and habits of the people. Precisely the sense in which the choice of Fernandel, Edith Piaf, and Françoise Sagan as representatives of France would be more than justified.

Now, what defines the anthropological point of view is the absence of value judgments. For the anthropologist, cannibalism or birth control by strangling newborns are mere facts, “cultural data”: as samples of “culture,” they are worth as much as the Cathedral of Chartres, the complete works of Pascal, or the self-sacrifice of Joan of Arc. Likewise, Frei Betto or Paulo Coelho are not Brazilian values. They are facts and have a high anthropological relevance. We cannot deny that they happened, although some may lament it.

The anthropological point of view presupposes, in the observer, a neutrality, a detachment, which he could hardly or would hardly wish to feel towards his own culture. Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands or Ruth Benedict among the Indians of New Mexico could look at things from afar because they had come from afar and knew they were going back to afar — to the place where the loved and hated things were, the truly important and valuable things, the things that demand decisions and commitments. Compared to the concrete demands of life, the “culture” the anthropologist studies is a functional or structural model, a toy culture, dismountable and harmless.

Those who adopt this point of view generally do not intend to adopt any of the values of the studied culture for themselves, but, comfortably settled in the values of their own culture, only want to observe with the detachment of an entomologist some exotic types who wear bones through their noses and eat little children. No one looks at a culture with such coldness when intending to learn from it, that is, to incorporate it, to mold values, habits, personal and national criteria and decisions by it. That is the difference that exists in a Frenchman when studying Nigerian tribes and when reading Goethe or Hegel, Shakespeare, or Leopardi. He learns in both cases, but the difference is the same as that between a study object and the teacher who teaches it. The object is passive and helpless before the student. The teacher or master, on the other hand, teaches, directs, molds. Interest in a culture is not the same whether it is, for the observer, an object culture or a master culture. If the Paris Book Fair had chosen, to represent Brazil, a Suassuna, a Tolentino, a Mangabeira, a Miguel Reale, there would be reason to suppose that France, the proud France, consented to learn from Brazilians who have something to teach it. Since it predominantly chose those people I mentioned, it becomes clear that it wishes to learn about us, but not from us. It does not want us as teachers, but as study objects. As study objects, the chosen ones were, without a doubt, well-chosen: Mr. Chico Buarque is at least as significant anthropologically as a copy of Notícias Populares, the budgetary practices of the National Congress, the Corinthians soccer team, or Gugu’s bathtub.

It is not for me to say that France is not a serious country. A country that rolls a million heads to realize philosophers' ideas is more than serious. It is deadly serious. Now, as seen from this very example, the actions of serious people have more lethal consequences than those of frivolous people. Therefore, if France believes that Brazilian culture should be regarded mainly as an object, an anthropological datum where value considerations are unimportant, its view of Brazil will most likely be taken seriously, adopted, and copied by the Brazilians themselves, for whom French culture is a master and not an object. To follow what our master teaches us about ourselves, we will have to abstain from any value judgment on our cultural productions, and, with anthropological detachment, no longer distinguish between Chico Buarque and Bruno Tolentino, between Frei Betto and Mangabeira Unger, between Zuenir Ventura and Miguel Reale. And that is when things will get much more serious.

Conversation about Style

Response to an email from reader L.B.,³ dated April 28, 2000,
published on Olavodecarvalho.org

Dear friend,

Thank you very much for your message and for the kind way you refer to my writings, despite the perplexity they cause you. This perplexity is natural, but it would lessen considerably if, instead of measuring them by the standard of the writers cited in your letter, you gauged them by my models. A writer’s work, after all, should be evaluated by what he is trying to do, not by what others, rightly or wrongly, think he should do. My style masters, for the polemical part of my writings, were Tertullian, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, William Hazlitt, Léon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, and Camilo Castelo Branco. These are authors rarely frequented by our academic intelligentsia, which, lacking repertoire, chooses its models in fashionable journalism, thus imposing, by easy repetition, a pattern of feigned politeness that ends up being considered the only elegant and acceptable way to write.⁴ St. Bernard, preaching from the pulpit — a speech situation that I allow myself to consider somewhat more solemn than an academic squabble — said: “The diligent preachers are like the oxen that pull the plow. The lazy ones come behind and eat the oxen’s dung.” Dr. Antônio Cândido, who is a refined man, would never write such a thing. For this very reason, St. Bernard converted multitudes, while Dr. Antônio Cândido only manages to show us how chic it is to have a vacillating soul.

It is not surprising that, contrasted with the powder puff model, the style of anyone who writes from the marrow of their person must seem “truculent.” However, this word, which has already become a cliché among my academic detractors to qualify my writings, and which you employ for the same purpose with a certain automatism, is obviously inadequate to the object it seeks to circumscribe, and denotes in its user — do not take this the wrong way — only a lack of vocabulary mastery. A piece of writing cannot be truculent without a certain emotional pathos that is completely absent from the productions of this jocular and pedagogical scribe. What these creatures really mean is that such writings scare them, but since it is not proper to confess fear in the face of mere demonstrations of obvious truths, they resort to the classic tactic of proud cowards, which is to measure the threat’s danger by the amount of fear it instills in them, rather than calibrating this by that as souls endowed with a normal quota of bravery and serenity do. In this twisted and subjectivist perspective, there is no way to distinguish between the force of a proof and the truculence of pure insult: unable to refute the former, they pretend to be targets of the latter, transferring the discussion from the sphere of facts to that of good manners, where they feel safer. Saying that people capable of resorting to this kind of subterfuge are “intellectuals worthy of respect,” dear friend, is having a very meager conception of what intellectuality, dignity, and respect are.

If it were necessary to define in a few words the manner I adopt in my journalistic writings — for there are others that require other skills — I would say that they are rather uncomfortable or unsettling, insofar as they mix, sometimes in the same sentence, diverse styles and tones, moving with the greatest nonchalance from the noble and solemn speech of ancient jurists to the coarse jest of popular humorists and sambistas, from subtle melody to the roar of barbaric dissonances (something I learned from my beloved and idolized Heitor Villa-Lobos), or making a thousand and one other arrangements that the candid doctors would never make, and which I do with the precise intention of habituating the reader to the double game of speech and things, in whose intuitive grasp lies half, no less, of the art of learning: on the one hand, speech is the path to truth and must symbolize, in its very body, the movements of the mind that questions itself between lights and shadows, movements that are never linear like the logical demonstration that ex post facto recapitulates and celebrates the consistency of the results obtained; on the other hand, the truth never fully identifies with the verbal formula that conveys it, and the writer, always having to leave the final part of the service to the reader’s intuitive gifts, must prepare the ground well for the decisive move, either through those long dialectical oppositions that sharpen the blade of intelligence, or — when there is no space for that, as in newspaper articles — through verbal paradoxes that, in a compacted and symbolic way, do the same thing. (I explain this technique in the handout "Debates and Proofs.")⁵ This is how, in the meager space of the most despicable of literary genres, one can leave in nuce a range of latent demonstrations insinuated, making the journalistic chronicle, instead of the loose opinion it usually is, the preface or summary of lessons and treatises, so that, by the mere distant noise of the approaching machines, the adversary senses the army of tractors that would pass over his poor objections if he had — as he usually does not — the courage to publish them. And this is the root of the false — or, in certain cases, feigned — impression of truculence: the reader caught in the act of false consciousness already feels crushed in advance, and, not knowing well how to explain to himself the reasons for his discomfort (for in a first instant the apprehension of the implicit proofs is only semi-conscious), seeks a fake relief by clinging to the first magic word that seems to have the power to, by cursing the pharmacist, neutralize the effect of the remedy. But oh, poor thing! When the subject resorts to this impotent mimicry of exorcism, it is my spell that is already operating inside his soul, forcing it to gradually assimilate the truth it rejected at the first impact. Very few, when the process is complete, have enough unity of consciousness to remember how it began. Hence those who puff with indignation or contort themselves in grimaces of affected contempt before my writings are the first to repeat them, with other and very poorly disguised words, months or years later. This has already become routine. Indeed, I am not offended that, to accept what they learned from me, they have to attribute it to themselves. A teacher could not teach anything if he did not make some concession to the childish pride of the silliest students.

This is also how, by simple style variation, the willing reader can be habituated to accept the truth independently of the verbal expression that conveys it, provided he has enough imagination to understand that the choice of a style may have reasons that etiquette does not know. Only by taking the prevailing stereotype as measure and standard can one try to characterize my style by resorting to clichés like “aggressive,” “disrespectful,” etc., categories that apply more to the judgment of class assignments in primary schools than to a conversation about serious literature, where the demands of banal politeness must give way to higher considerations. If there are indeed criteria in which my writing never aspired to fit, they are those of the well-mannered literary correctness that in the 1950s our letters seemed to have definitively overcome thanks to the “truculence” of authors like José Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado, and Nelson Rodrigues, and which today return to rule with all the force of politically correct commandments, calling the police when a writer simply transposes to the essayistic and philosophical genre the stylistic freedom already consolidated in fiction literature. And if something could depress me to the point of making me lose the respect I have for myself as a writer, it would be to find in my writing some similarity, however remote, with what in journalism manuals and in chic leftist circles, especially USPian, is considered good taste. Vade retro, Satana! Good taste, dear friend, is a terrible literary judge. It was the attachment to good taste that made Voltaire cover his delicate nostrils before the “truculence” (sic) of Shakespeare’s plays, predicting that very soon they would be forgotten by the public… Note, by the way, that the term “truculence” is not entirely out of place to describe Titus Andronicus, for example, and that the rules of literary politeness on which Voltaire relied to make this judgment were genuine standards of elegance ennobled by a venerable literary tradition (read, for example, Buffon), not that recipe of inhibitions and antics that passes for elegance among the Tonton Macoute of national journalism. For even so, Voltaire was wrong.

Other points of your letter do not require these explanations to be answered because they rest on simple observation errors. For example, your question about whether the use of the word “fart” to qualify certain statements by Ms. Marilena Chauí would not be “a very impolite way to start a debate.” The answer is: it would, yes. But in this case, I was not starting anything, but responding to an insult. This lady, confessing to knowing nothing of my work and my person, had qualified me as a “rascal.” No one resorts to such a heavy adjective without being driven by anger, and if I respond to this rabid insult with my calculation of the relative value of human and simian farts, anyone who knows how to read with sensitivity will notice that, instead of retaliating in kind, I oppose the hysterical fury of my attacker with an imperturbable sense of humor. In this and similar cases, anyone who calls me “angry” is merely projecting onto my writings the morbid reaction they provoke in people of bad temper.

In fact, in the case, there was no debate at all. If there had been, it would have started with my writing "The Logic of Mystification, or: Auntie’s Whip,"⁶ which demonstrated, through rigorous text analysis, the mystificatory nature of certain expositions by Ms. Marilena. Instead of responding or correcting herself, Ms. Marilena preferred to say she did not know me and, in the same act, proved by her burst of rage that she knew me perfectly well.

As for Messrs. Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Luis Sérgio Henriques, and Marco Aurélio Nogueira, it is not true to say that as intellectuals they are “worthy of the highest respect,” nor that their “democratic stance has already been proven.” No Gramscian can be worthy of respect in the intellectual sphere since Gramsci himself reduces intellectual activity to revolutionary propaganda, and whoever lends himself to this degrades intelligence in general — and his own in particular — to the most infamous of roles. Ideology is the prostitution of intelligence: self-dignifying poses and media hype do not change this one bit. And there is no “democratic stance” in people who, gathering by the dozens to collectively beatify their idol on the internet, dodge debate when challenged by a solitary opponent and still make faces of offended dignity when he proposes a simple exchange of links between the respective homepages, which is the most democratic thing in the world. I am democratic, who even without reciprocation put a link to theirs on my page.

No, my friend, do not be fooled by the gentle speech of those who dominate the academic environment and subjugate it to political ambitions. They can speak gently because their speech is not the expression of their personal reality, but a disguise to cover it. Professor Antônio Cândido, while speaking gently in public, did not cease to conspire, in petit comité, to stifle the voice of his opponents in the USPian tribune. Paraphrasing Theodore Roosevelt, their motto is: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

It is true that Antônio Cândido was very polite when discussing with Miguel Reale in the press. But why be rude to the adversary when you can boycott him behind his back and still look good in the eyes of the crowd? Many people were, in this case, deceived by appearances. It seems you were too.

In contrast with the democratic mask of words covering the authoritarianism of actions, Miguel Reale was always tough when speaking of leftists, but he kept open, unalterably, for forty years, the tribune of his Brazilian Journal of Philosophy, certainly the only one among the great cultural magazines of Brazil that deserved the qualifier “pluralist.”

Even more absurd is that, while praising the polite treatment Prof. Cândido gave his opponent, you still insinuate that this was even too much honor for someone carrying the “authoritarian taint” of Miguel Reale. That is what I call reasoning by media stereotypes, without taking the reality of the facts into account.

The only “authoritarian taint” that can be attributed to Miguel Reale is his youthful participation in integralism, a movement that, no matter how foolish it seems to us today, always acted honorably and kept its hands clean of any complicity in tyrannical actions, having been rather a victim of brutal repression and having issued, by the way, the first Brazilian protest against the persecution of Jews in Germany.

There is no shame in having been an integralist. Shame is having been a communist. Shame is having belonged to a movement that, after suffering under the Vargas dictatorship persecutions identical to those suffered by the integralists, still had the nerve to become an accomplice of its own executioner.

At least I am ashamed of my communist past, and against integralism, I have nothing to argue except the sin of stupidity.

As for Reale’s participation in the 1964 movement, read, investigate, study his acts as Secretary of Justice in São Paulo or as Rector of USP, as well as his contributions to federal legislation, and tell me where, how, when this man attacked any of the fundamental democratic freedoms.

“Authoritarian taint” is an easy-effect cliché that many resort to when they have nothing to say against characters they dislike.

Finally, I must say that your objection to proofs in philosophy or human sciences is just the naive repetition of another cliché. Many things have been proven, positively, over 24 centuries of philosophy. However, even more numerous are the heads that ignore them and the mouths that repeat what they say. If I leave this discussion for another occasion and place, it is because on this same homepage you will find enough places and occasions to prove what I say.

With my best wishes,

Olavo de Carvalho

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1. Editor’s Note: “Fascism is defined by the centralization and sharing of power between the government and half a dozen economic groups, by hysterical nationalist ideology (racist or not), and by a police state on a scale that can range from authoritarianism to totalitarianism. Depending on the circumstances, fascism will appear right-wing or left-wing. Read the studies of A. James Gregor” [Olavo de Carvalho, in a Facebook comment].↩

2. See A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism, 1969, and Interpretations of Fascism, 1997.↩

3. Editor’s Note: I omitted the reader’s original email for space reasons and because its content is implied in the response. But the reader of this book can find it at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/estilo.htm.↩

4. Editor’s Note: For general tips from the author regarding writing, see the articles “Learning to Write” and “Still the Art of Writing,” published in O Globo on February 3 and May 19, 2001, and available at the links: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/escrever.htm and http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/semana/aindaarte.htm. Excerpt from the first: “The language of the media or the public square repeats, in the quickest and most functional way, what everyone already knows. The language of writers makes something that could barely be perceived without them speakable. That one delimits a collective horizon of perception within which everyone, by simultaneously perceiving the same things in the same way and without the slightest effort of attention, believes they perceive everything. This one opens, for attentive individuals, the knowledge of things that were perceived, before them, only by those who paid a lot of attention.”↩

5. Editor’s Note: Handout “Debates and Proofs” address: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/apostilas/provas.htm.↩

6. Editor’s Note: Available at the link: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/tiazinha.htm.↩