On Jorge Amado's Brazilian Socialist Realism

Abstract

The stereotypical representation with which you are no doubt acquainted is of Socialist Realism as sub-literature, irredeemably marred by censor-ship and control, at best aborted imagination, at worst sheer propaganda. One can certainly admit the truth of this view, but only rigorously insofar as the mistake be avoided of assuming immediate freedom in other kinds of literature. Such an assumption comes almost naturally as a rhetorical and performative result: tarrying on the world of constraints automatically projects a universe of unbridled possibilities. This is why it is fruitful to consider Socialist Realism side by side with its geopolitical counterpart, Capitalist Realism, conceived not so much in Fisher’s sense of a problem-atical disappearance of alternatives to the status quo, but rather as a kind of writing organized around its own salability. Capitalist Realism is the ruling kind of literature today because it is structured around the socially naturalized belief that things only have the right to exist as long as they can be sold and generate profit. In sum, then, in spite of all differences, at least methodologically, the politburo and market can be put side by side as two structures of restriction, a gesture that in turn leads to a displacement of binaries: instead of the opposition Socialist Realism versus freedom, the contrast of two kinds of limitation, perhaps loosely resembling what Guy Debord, in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle , termed “con-centrated” versus “diffuse” spectacle. Of course, one could form yet another analytical distinction, now confronting these forms of control against