ABSTRACT: National character appears differently to outsiders and to insiders of the given nation being characterized. The present characterization of Brazilian character, because of frequent absences from Brazil and immersion in a variety of other cultures, adds the perspectives of the outsider to those of an insider long concerned with Brazilian identity. Other scholars have analyzed Brazilian character. Depending on which component of Brazil's complex nature they emphasized, whether, for example, they took the interior or the coast as primary, they have conceived of Brazil as essentially Dionysian or Apollonian. James Bryce, perhaps the most sensitive of all foreign students, placed emphasis on the coastal culture and saw Brazil as basically Apollonian. According to this latter approach, which is akin to the author's own, the core of Brazilians' character comprises spiritual volition, adventurousness, and poetical vision, shared with an important segment of their Portuguese ancestors. Hawever, this Old World heritage has undergone expansion, differentiation, and creative transmutation in the course of creative synthesis with New World elements. Since early days Brazilians have tended to harmonize idealism with response to reality, political independence with traditional political forms. In all areas of life in Brazil, the same polarity appears: in music, in architecture, even in its cuisine and its football. There is every reason to believe that this process of creative synthesis of old and new will continue as Brazil meets the future.

     SOCIAL scientists do not agree on the nature of national character or on the methods of identifying it. Ruth Benedict once suggested that it would be possible to achieve such an identification by seeking the most fundamental and persistent values of a people and describing a national type in terms of these values. Other social scientists visualize the national character of a people as if it were "the personality of a single individual." In both cases the perspective is that of an observer looking in on a particular people not his own from the outside.

     In cases where the analyst is an insider and not an outsider, Robert Redfield has suggested, "national character" is a "world view"; and that in this case the analyst "attends especially to the way a man in a particular society sees himself in relation to all else," and also "the way the world looks to that people looking out".

     The author of this article, both as a Brazilian and as a social analyst, has been preoccupied for years with the "national character" of his own people. And having been absent from Brazil for a considerable number of years, his attitude may combine that of an outsider with that of an insider, with the insider being predominant.

     This predominance of the insider over the outsider is both a disadvantage and an advantage. To attend especially to the ways a man in a particular society sees himself in relation to all else implies an attitude that may be difficult to convey to outsiders, unless he is exceptionally gifted with empathy and intuition. Moreover, to see himself in relation to all else within a national complex, even an insider must be empathic as well as objective.

     I am, to be sure, not the only Brazilian who has been preoccupied with the subject. Other Brazilians have attempted to analyze and interpret the "national character" of their fellow countrymen in terms more or less scientific: quasi-sociological or quasi-psychological. One of these analysts, Euclydes da Cunha, 1 came to conclusions favorable to the Brazilians of the interior - a population archaic in their culture, preserved by them from the early colonial days, and vigorous in their physical health - and unfavorable to the more civilized and modernized Brazilians of the coastal area. Da Cunha concludes that in order to speak of a national Brazilian character one must take into consideration two distinct expressions both of culture and of ethos. Indeed, the national character of the Brazilians should be considered complex, not simple or single. It does, in fact, appear that in certain regions of their vast country the Brazilians seem to be Dionysian; in other regions Apollonian. Other differences might be pointed out.

     Da Cunha was, perhaps, too severe with the Brazilians along the coast and perhaps too rhetorical in his praise of Brazilians of the interior. After all, the Brazilians along the coast of Brazil built, through the centuries, what in Da Cunha's days (the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth) was already considered by some reliable foreign observers a stable, positive, though in some aspects very deficient, modern civilization in the tropics. One of these observers of the period was James Bryce.

     1His famous book, Os Sertões, is now translated into English.

     Bryce found a people and a civilization both primarily Portuguese, though in some parts of the country considerably influenced by Amerindian and Negro cultures and bloods that were not to be disregarded by Europeans. It was a people whose task had been, and was, a tremendous one. Brazil represented a vast space with scattered centers of population which it must draw together by extending its means of communication, by sustaining public credit, so that revenues could be applied to useful purposes, such as educating the Negro and Indian populations.

     Were the Brazilian people worthy of the vast territory of Brazil? What would be the future of the Brazilians and of Brazil? These were questions that Bryce asked himself at the very beginning of the twentieth century. He projected partial answers by considering what he then interpreted as the national character of the Brazilians.

     According to his interpretation, the Brazilians, being primarily a Portuguese people, retained some of the characteristics of the Portuguese: spirituality, adventurousness, and poetical vision. Specifically, Bryce wrote of the Brazilians as he saw them more than half a century ago:

     They have a quick susceptibility to ideas, like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far made any great contributions to science in the fields either of physical inquiry or in those of economics, philology, or history.

     The famous British political scientist and historian wrote about the Brazil he knew in the first years of the twentieth century, for example: "The Brazilians do not strike me as new people". Therefore, it is easy to understand why a traveler from the United States in Brazil is reported by Bryce as having said: "How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon and the Paraná!" By this the North American meant that, in the hands of Anglo-Americans, in a few years steamers would ply up and down the rivers of Brazil, railways would thread the recesses of her forests, and this vast dominion would almost inevitably be enlarged at the expense of weaker neighbors till it reached the foot of the Andes.

     Bryce had doubts as to whether "such a consummation" in Brazil would really be "in the interests of the world." He said: "May not territories be developed too quickly? Might it not have been better for the United States if their growth had been slower?" There questions seem to imply, on the part of Bryce, a sympathetic understanding of what, in the Brazilian national character, as he knew it more than half a century ago, was an inclination to do things in a slow rhythm, in contrast to the intense dynamism of the Yankees of the United States.

     As a whole, the Brazilian national character seems to remain, in this point, conditioned by a sense of time that is distinctly Iberian and , as such, preindustrial - prechronometric even - while that of the Americans of the United States is typically industrial, chronometric, "modern". Still the rhythm of growth in some areas of Brazil - São Paulo, for instance - has become similar to the "Yankee" one, and in a very Yankee way Brasilia recently was built. Are these significant departures from that characteristic trait of the Brazilian national character, the inclination of Brazilians not to rush, but to do things in a slow rhythm? Are such phenomena as the rapid material growth of São Paulo and the building of Brasilia in four years to be considered anticipations of what is to happen in a few years to the Brazilian nation? Answers to these questions are not easy.

     The Brazilian national character should not be considered, either on this point or on others, so static as to remain absolutely the same as it was a century and a half, a century, or half a century ago. It has changed. It is changing. However, these changes have not and should not be expected to be radical in a people who, though American, did not strike Bryce as "new people" but as mature people. Brasilia may seem to be a test of the attitude of Brazilians. They perceive these achievements as too rapid and too new. Most Brazilians are enthusiastic about it, but not a few of them are critical both of the speed with which Brasilia was built and of the sacrifice of serious and urgent needs of the country in the fields of health and education in undeveloped areas, as well as of its very newness, a newness considered by some Brazilians to be exotic and not truly Brazilian.

     Though an American people, the Brazilians seem to be in some aspects of their character and of their behavior inclined to combine modernity with tradition. Hence the special pride of many Brazilians in the fact that Brazil was for some time a monarchy, indeed the only monarchy on the American continent. This probably contributed, in no small way, to what Bryce considered the absence in Brazilians of characteristics of a distinctly new people. The fact is that, becoming politically independent, Brazilians never separated from their European sources in the same radical way that most of the Spanish people of America separated from Spain. This is a characteristic of their national character that remains significant and valid: the Brazilians are not inclined to be radical in breaking with the past, though these breaks have happened and are shown in what has become Brazilian, or original, in Brazilian culture. Its national cuisine, for instance, is sociologically interesting as an expression of the Brazilian national character, for here one finds a cuisine that, though Portuguese in its basic traditional elements, has assimilated in an adventurous, experimental way Oriental, Amerindian, and African contributions and is now assimilating Italian , German, and Japanese elements in such a way as to be already one of the most complex cultural achievements anywhere and in any field. In it, Brazilian invention is present in a very vivid way; this cuisine is not a mere compilation: it is a creative synthesis, a creative synthesis of the old and the new as expressions of a third dimension.

     What has happened with the cuisine has happened and is happening with other cultural developments in which one may identify expressions of a Brazilian national character: music, architecture, painting, religion, literature, and even political forms of organization or of government.

     Some foreign critics are too severe with Brazilians when they see political developments in contemporary Brazil that do not seem to correspond to their ideas or ideals of democracy or some other complex. Such critics fail to understand a tendency in the Brazilian national character that has become more pronounced in this century than in previous centuries: a tendency toward bolder combinations of the old and the new, of tradition and modernity, of Brazilianness and a contemporary scale of values in what are Brazilian solutions to Brazilian problems, circumstances, and needs. It is generally admitted that the Brazilian national character inclines toward democratic solutions not only in social and racial matters, but in political matters as well. The history of the Brazilian national state-monarchy and republic-seems to confirm this interpretation.

     If so, some foreign observer may ask why Brazilians seem now to be reshaping their political system in such a way that authoritarian trends seem to be superseding the conventionally liberal democratic ones. A similar question might be asked in regard to France. Is the change in political organization that is happening in France indicative of a change in the French national character? Or is the French national character more complex than the permanence, for over a century, of a parliamentary regimen in France? The complexity that seems to be a basic reality in connection with the French national character is also a reality in regard to the Brazilian national character.

     In the most significant of their cultural activities, the Brazilians have shown since the early days a tendency to harmonize their idealism and even their adventurous romanticism with reality. The achievement of political independence, with the preservation not only of a monarchical form of government but of a European dynasty, is so impressive an example of this tendency that it may be considered a trait of their national character. This tendency has been present in Brazilian national life for more than a century and a half.

     The revolutionary movement of 1964 brought this trait of the Brazilian national character into dramatic focus: what some Brazilian leaders, acting in what they considered to be in harmony with their national character, seemed to be trying to do, that is, to adapt their democratic political idealism to present-day reality or to present circumstances - the reality of a world not exactly at peace. These being the circumstances, not a few Brazilians are realistic enough to think of their country as too vast, physically and socially, to be left to an entirely free interplay of competition between partisan, political, and other groups.

     However, this revolutionary movement is developing in a way suavely Brazilian, as the Independence, Abolitionist, and the Republican "revolutions" developed, finally achieving what is essential in their goals. In this, as in other aspects, the Brazilian national character in the twentieth century remains essentially the same as in the nineteenth century, though now as then realistically adapting itself to new circumstances, national and international, technological and political, economic, social, and religious.

     Is Brazil - with its present problem of developing a unique political organization of is own - a "civilization," a "national civilization" with a "national character"? Some of us think that it is not only a "national civilization" but increasingly original in its traits. If it succeeds in developing a state that will be neither a copy of the United States model nor of the British pattern, but that will represent a Brazilian style of national state, such as its music, its architecture, its cuisine, and its football, then Brazilian national civilization and Brazilian national character will give new evidence of originality.

     Of the originality of their civilization and character Brazilians are only now, in the middle of the twentieth century, becoming fully conscious. They have become conscious of uniqueness, and bold enough to appear before the world as a people different in their music, their architecture, and their cuisine, and in their way of playing football, from more mature peoples and from more classic, more Apollonian civilizations.

     Since this is happening in Brazil, it is time for a new Lowie or a Mead or a Claude Lévi-Strauss, that is, for a social scientist of high, comprehensive intelligence, to observe present-day Brazilians, their "national civilization", and their "national character". As Redfield once suggested, such a study should be made of a societal structure viewed by an outsider under the aspect of a national system. Foreign observers who have written about Brazil in recent years have only scratched the surface, though one finds some good impressionistic remarks about the Brazilian national character in such authors as the American Roy Nash, the German Konrad Guenther, the French Roger Bastide, and the Italian Tullio Ascarelli.

     When Aldous Huxley was in Brazil, he spoke with me about the country he was visiting for the first time. He was disappointed in Brasilia, which he responded to as particularly "improbable" and "unpredictable". He seemed to include the Brazilian national character in this generalization. Huxley observed that some Brazilians thought that "God is Brazilian". In this, he saw consequences of an attitude that made many people in Brazil disdainful of systematic effort and methodical action, of science and of planning in behalf of national welfare. Incidentally, his view agreed in some points with that of his fellow countryman, James Bryce who, half a century before him, had remarked that the Brazilians, though noted for their political and literary inclinations, paid little attention to science and even to history and to historical studies.

     Though not nearly as much as in Bryce's day, present-day Brazilians may still be weak in physical and natural science. Some of them, even when Roman Catholics, may continue to believe in astrology, spiritualism, and magic. The fact is, however, that planning is being undertaken by some of today's Brazilian leaders in regard to national finance and to national and regional economic activities, probably more than by any other Latin-American national leaders. Brazilians are accepting this, if not enthusiastically, in a fair way. This seems to indicate that in these respects Brazilian national character is changing, though not so much as to become adept at method and unqualifiedly receptive to planning in national life or production. Brazil remains essentially plastic, flexible, and, in spite of the use of economic planning by some of the modern leaders of the country, "improbable"- as Aldous Huxley would say. Through "improbabilities" Brazilians are developing a civilization of their own. They reveal a national style of behavior that is, with its contradictions, as expression of a national character.

Source: FREYRE, Gilberto. Brazilian National Character in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia : [s.n.], 1967. 57-62p.