Time's out of joint

Roberto Schwarz and the brazilian fracture of the world

Abstract

A panoramic journey through Robert Schwarz’s critical work, this paper intends to identify the great lines and modulations of his main essays, taking as a point of departure the ways some obsessive themes, as the asymmetries of modernity and the figuration of these tensions in the work of art, operates as foundations and frames of reference of a sort of elusive and allegorical Bildungsroman, focused on the dispute to provide the ultimate face to the greatest Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, and, therefore, to define the meaning of his legacy in the general metanarrative of the nation. At the same time, by plunging on the complexities and ambiguities of some of the most influential essays of the critic, one tries to describe and explore the basic tensions of his writing, enhancing the recurrent dead-ends created between, on the one hand, the dense net of telescopic connections linking books and texts, canonical or not, and, on the other, some of the less obvious implications of its convoluted mode of exposition, in which the phrase becomes an agonic dramatization of the very clash of forces which constitutes the world.