Aos amigos o Direito, aos inimigos a lei: mandonismo, coronelismo, júri e cangaço na literatura de José Lins do Rego

Abstract

The Brazilian novelist José Lins do Rego Cavalcanti (1901-1957) was born in the farmhouse (casa-grande) of a northeastern sugar cane farm. His maternal grandfather, who was owner of six sugar cane farms (engenhos), descended from a family trunk that had many properties in the region around the headquarters of the municipality of Pilar-PB, and, overtaking the border with Pernambuco, in the region of Timbaúba and Itambé. His relatives, in addition to being socioeconomically powerful, they dominated the politics of those municipalities during the first years of the twentieth century, as well as they had obtained positions of state deputy and judge in Parahyba do Norte and Recife. When, in the 1930s, José Lins do Rego began his career as a novelist, he named his first five books as "Sugar cane cycle", a series of works that, in an autobiographical and memorialistic tone, rescued the world of sugar cane farms in which he had lived his childhood. The "Cangaço, mysticism and drought cycle" is another set of works written by the author that portrays the Brazilian northeast, however, entering the dry hinterlands. This dissertation proposes to use the literature of José Lins do Rego, mainly in relation to these two "cycles", to study, in the Brazilian First Republic, the relationship between the private power of sugar cane farmers and the law made by the State. Since the Empire, Brazil has incorporated the modern project of legal absolutism. The laws made by the State should be, henceforth, the categorical guide in regulating social life and in resolving conflicts. This implied transformations in the way with the farmers managed their bossy leadership ("mandonismo") and the private order in their lands. It also put sugar cane farmers in electoral disputes, sometimes fraudulent and virulent, that aimed at the political control of the State institutions - the police chief, the jury, the tax inspector, etc. Here is the "coronelismo". Traditionalist, the novelist missed the world of sugar cane farms with their archaic mills, which has crumbled with the industrialization and urbanization in the early twentieth century. The image of the sugar cane farmer, arbitrary, but, in his view, capable to support people in need and of building a private order, has disappeared in front of the impersonal and individualist modern law promoted by the State. But, in a literature filled with internal tensions, Rego was also able to denounce the violence of the political disputes, that, sometimes, led to the involvement between landowners and itinerant bandits, who were named "cangaceiros".