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Seven Faces
Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism
By Charles A. Perrone Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9801-1
CHAPTER 1
Leaders and Legacies: From Modernismo to Reactions and the Contemporary
Eu ouço o canto enorme do Brasil! [I hear the enormous song of Brazil!]
— Ronald de Carvalho (1926)
Even as the end of the twentieth century approaches, the most fundamental point of reference for all artistic endeavors in Brazil is Modernismo, the national incarnation of European modernism in the fine arts and literature. Modernismo was a broad-based movement of renovation, transformation, and self-realization in the dynamic decade of the 1920s and after. All kinds of assumptions about creating art, writing literature, understanding the structure of thought, and instituting values hark back to that decade of growth and cultural assertion. In general terms, modernismo can be regarded as a reaction to the exhaustion of established artistic principles, as an endeavor in making new forms, and as an exercise of intent to modify the cultural order, especially in literature. As in Europe, where the well-known succession of -isms (Futurism, cubism, etc.) and diverse individual contributions configure modernism, Brazil's coming of age did not comprise any unified program but rather several different projects with shared interests in aesthetic liberty and in the notion of being "modern." What most distinguishes the Brazilian case is its nationalistic dimension, the search for New World modes of expression and definitions of national psyche. This aspect of modernismo, while naturally reminiscent of the concern with Volkgeist, a prime facet of nineteenth-century romanticism, is bound essentially to the particular developments of the early twentieth century.
Winds of change had begun to blow in Brazil's artistic circles in the 1910s as received practices suffered from old age, inconformity with reigning passadismo (past-ism) grew, and Avant-garde-information filtered into the country. Inaugural activities in 1922 (the centenary of independence from Portugal) would represent the culmination, agglutination, and organization of transformational energies. The official starting point of modernismo was the Modern Art Week, a three-day series of public events and performances in São Paulo in February 1922. Those happenings constituted a monument, a historical marking unique to Brazil, as no other major nation has so enshrined the time and place of its artistic maturation. The outcry of modernismo was founded on general rejection of conservative immobility in the arts, and of staid linguistic convention and empty pomposity in letters. Brazilian modernists held utopian beliefs in progress, in the possibilities of reform, and in the wonders of technology. They endeavored — often being deliberately provocative and scandalous — to overcome taboos and prejudices and to consecrate new languages. Leaders of the movement would appeal to colleagues in the arts to ensure their own originality through consideration of all (i.e., multiracial, multicultural, multiregional) aspects of Brazilian life. While this awakening of national consciousness largely characterized the thematic side of the Modern Art Week, stylistic issues played out as attacks on bad (antiquated) taste and literary senility, as efforts to demystify an ingrained rhetoric that had for years restricted expression. The Modern Art Week launched campaigns for change and agendas of experimentation, making a fundamental contribution to an aesthetic and psychological climate in which a generalized critique of the thought and creative options of preceding generations could take place. At the outset, the Modern Art Week was a point of convergence for new artistic currents that had been appearing in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since World War I; at its conclusion, it was a springboard for further adventures and a platform for consolidation of publications and groups. The most important of these merit treatment from the perspective of vanguardism.
In literature, modernismo is commonly considered in two phases or divisions. The Modern Art Week marks the beginning of the vanguardist "heroic" phase of rebellion and rupture, which extends to the turn of the next decade. During these initial years, poetry was the driving force of the movement. The lyric genre enjoyed high prestige and, with its accumulated cultural capital, was a focal point of intellectual life in the 1920s. As David William Foster writes with reference to Brazil, "it is important to underscore how the fundamental instrument of modernism ... was poetry ... wherein resides the foremost testing ground of the modernist project." Geographically, the cosmopolitan and future industrial center of São Paulo was the main stage of the heroic phase. As modernismo also solidified in the political and cultural capital of Rio de Janeiro, and spread with enthusiasm to other states, national spirit abounded and different manifestations evolved. A second commonly recognized phase runs from about 1930 to the middle of the decade of the forties, when some landmark retrospective essays appear. During this less militant second phase, often portrayed as having a more positive outlook and constructive approach, regional studies emerged (most notably the work of Gilberto Freyre), the novel gained increasing recognition, and lyric diversified in groups and individual endeavors. For some, modernismo may mean everything in the modern period, i.e., all literature since 1922, or serve as a historical designation whose extension remains open to debate. In the present study, the term modernismo will be employed in the more standard manner to refer to developments until about 1945, when, as seen below, an organized reaction to the liberties of modern verse took place. This usage is also understood to encompass the later work of the major voices who began in the twenties and thirties.
The young proponents of modernismo made significant inroads against entrenched models of declamatory eloquence in Brazilian letters in general, and antiquated Parnassian conventions in poetry in particular. Concurrently, the movement emphasized Brazilian content, including language itself, and drew heavily on European avant-gardes for technical support. It is possible to make a fundamental bipolar simplification of modernismo in poetry as the advent of free verse and the affirmation of nationalism. The study of modernismo has encompassed diachronic and synchronic efforts to trace the organization and realization of the Modern Art Week, to understand individual and collective projects involved in the Week, and to follow the subsequent unfolding of the movement. To capture its guiding spirit of rupture, one must first look back at the mind-set and the poetry to which the Brazilian modernistas were so opposed.
Parnassianism and the Cult of Belles-Lettres
Parnassianism, which was relatively prominent in late nineteenth-century lyric of the mother country Portugal, still dominated Brazilian poetry at the outset of the third decade of the twentieth century. The practices of this French school were grounded in reverence for form — versification, meter, rhyme scheme, strophe — and in denial of romantic excess, strong emotion, and hyperbole. In the Brazilian parallel of this European aestheticism and écriture artiste, noble diction (read, classical Continental Portuguese), mastery of technique, and exquisite taste (in language and content) were appreciated for their own sake. Parnassianism gained the status of a normative regime in literature and of an institution in high Brazilian society. For Benedito Nunes, the particular literary way of being shaped a certain social alienation:
verbal decorum and refinement determined the "literary" behavior of the Brazilian intelligentsia.... Affectation of style in writing gave luster to such behavior and was part of a life style that masked, with the ritual of the vernacular purity of the language and of the self-sufficiency of the Beautiful, the frustrated and evasive social role of writers and artists who saw themselves in European molds, through which they idealized a superior station to attribute to themselves in a society from which they were effectively separated.
The codified and restrictive Parnassian positions, so wrapped up in senses of propriety and prestige, created unavoidable distance from real-life circumstances, notably linguistic practice. While typically cultivating things exotic (Oriental or classical Greco-Roman) and reifying writerly rules, Brazilian Parnassianism did aim at inculcating civic pride in a conservative vein and managed to pay some attention to local culture. Olavo Bilac (1865–1918) was, before modernismo, recognized as a master of versification and a model of elegant erudition, and as the "Prince of Poets." His sonnet "Língua portuguesa" ("Portuguese Language," 1919) communicates the traditionalist attitude toward the instrument of expression:
Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela,
És, a um tempo, esplendor e sepultura:
Ouro nativo, que na ganga impura
A bruta mina entre os cascalhos vela ...
Amo-te assim, desconhecida e obscura,
Tuba de alto clangor, lira singela,
Que tens o som e o silvo da procela,
E o arrolo da saudade e da ternura!
Amo o teu viço agreste e o teu aroma
De virgens selvas e de oceano largo!
Amo-te, ó rude e doloroso idioma,
Em que da voz materna ouvi: "Meu filho!",
E em que Camões chorou, no exílio amargo,
O gênio sem ventura e o amor sem brilho!
Last flower of Latium, wild, uncultured beauty,
You are at once both splendor and the grave:
You're gold which, in the gang's impurity,
Doth veil a giant mine in graveled lave.
I love you thus, unknown, obscure and hidden,
A blaring trumpet, lyre of singleness,
Your fury's like the sea that's tempest ridden,
Your lullaby's of love and tenderness!
I love your lush green woods and perfumes, wrung
From virgin jungles and expansive sea!
I love you, rude and sorrowful native tongue,
In which my mother called: "Dear son of mine!"
In which Camões bemoaned, grieved exile he,
His luckless genius and love's tarnished shine!
In the early twentieth century, the Parnassian style in poetry, and its corollaries in official public discourse, remained the style of the ruling class, of cultured and semicultured bureaucrats. Liberal professionals were accustomed to conceiving of poetry as "ornate language" according to consecrated models that could guarantee "good taste" through imitation. In schools and society salons, which respected the Academy of Letters, the vogue was the descriptive sonnet. It was against this fallow provincial culture that the literary protests of modernismo would rise. Though still firmly in place, Parnassianism was certainly ready to fall by the 1920s. While its principal poets had already died, other known poets were weak artists and disinterested cultivators. What remained of the movement was empty, formulaic rhetoric. The unusual pervasiveness of Parnassianism was yet to be challenged in its foundations and, finally, overcome.
Literary Modernism Brazilian Style
The dual impetus of modernismo — formal liberty and the search for Brazilian identity — had inherent potential for contradiction, surging from both cosmopolitan and local sources. The former meant contact with, and adaptation of, the novel ideas and formal proposals of the European avant-gardes, while the latter led to a nationalism of resistance to the foreign and to emphasis on Brazilian originality, even on the autonomy of local intellectual life. There was no avoiding oscillation between, and sometimes mixture of, these two aesthetic and ideological positions. Wherever new projects might lead, an iconoclastic impulse was foremost in the first phase of modernismo. As Nunes underscores: "the rebelliousness of the generation of '22 against the immobility and academic self-sufficiency of the national intelligentsia that aestheticism had strengthened and safeguarded was manifested in an outward expression of rejection as an act of rupture" ("Pensamento estetico," 111). Breaking with the established institutions of literature would be achieved through, and allow for, both further patriotic opportunities and exploration of modern forms.
The principal European influences on modernismo were futurism and cubism. The futurist manifesto (1909) of the Italian F. T Marinetti encouraged audacity, revolt, and artistic blows against the status quo. It affirmed the beauty of velocity and technology in the urban age of the machine and offered "words in liberty" as the cry of rebellion in poetry. Poets in Brazil absorbed the ideas of Guillaume de Apollinaire, whose antitraditionalist manifesto de syntese (1913) clamored for "words in liberty" too and sought for poetry the multidimensionality of pictorial cubism. The later esprit nouveau (1920), constructive in character in comparison to the destructive vanguards of the 1910s, also inspired Brazilian intellectuals. Other influences were German expressionism in painting, with its exaltation of the elemental, and the manifestos of dadaism (1916–1919), with their derisive and clowning attitudes toward everything, including the autonomy of art, and their attractive appeals to primal laughter, ingenuity, and primitivism that challenged all literature and its encompassing society. The surrealism of André Breton (manifesto, 1924) also called for permanent revolt and a kind of "literary terrorism," while valuing, above all, the subconscious. This line, centering on liberation and projection of unconscious material, could lead to a kind of experimentation of primitivist character, of natural interest in tropical and largely undeveloped Brazil.
In the 1910s and 1920s, a few Brazilian writers were exposed to and responded to avant-garde agitation to varying degrees. In terms of attitude and technical applications, the manner in which authors understood and used European avant-garde vices and devices were as heterogeneous as modernismo itself. In a larger sense, the big difference between Europe and Brazil, with respect to the significance of the artistic vanguards, is that the European avant-gardes were produced as the result of a fundamental crisis of thought. There is a pervasive agonistic character in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the proponents of various -isms come out against art and the entire social structure that supports it. During the "heroic phase" of Brazilian modernism in the 1920s, what was sought was not so much an activist lyric, or a reformulation of civilizational values per se, nor a general break with the social structure, but rather a kind of artistic making up for backwardness and lost time, a modernizing "resetting of the clock." The rupture of modernismo was with the past and was carried out with an eye to literary revitalization, and to affirmation of the right to pursue a fresh creative consciousness.
In the pursuit of new expressive means and goals, the poets and prophets of modernismo fell into a series of different groups. One Brazilian observer established five convenient divisions with distinctive traits: (1) the dinamistas (dynamists) of Rio de Janeiro, including venerable essayist J. P. da Graça Aranha (1868–1931) and poet Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935), who stressed material progress, technical greatness, and the cosmic destiny of Brazil; (2) the desvairistas (loonies) of São Paulo, especially in the person of the multifaceted national cultural leader Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), who theorized poetic making, underscored freedom in artistic research, and proposed a national language; (3) the primitivistas (primitivists) led by the central figure of Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954), author of two key manifestos of modernismo, with their suggestions of return to origins and flight from illustrious old culture; (4) the nacionalistas (nationalists), patriotic writers who spoke against prejudice and advocated a kind of paternalistic reform; and (5) the espiritualista (spiritualist) group called Festa, who, in the 1930s, reexplored symbolism, tradition, and mystery. Beyond this scheme, one must highlight the places of two widely respected and influential independents: Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968), some of whose pre-1922 verse effectively marks the transition to modernismo, and much of whose subsequent poetic work so vividly embodies the modern spirit, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987), who headed the modernist platform in the state of Minas Gerais and would become the leading lyric voice in Brazil in the twentieth century. Many other poets represent collective and individual directions of modernismo.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seven Faces by Charles A. Perrone. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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