The Man Who Reinvented Brazil

Mário de Andrade is a name that follows me for a very long time. Once at school, back to my 1^st grade, I was asked to go to Mário de Andrade Publish Library to do a research. When you are a kid, every place that has a person’s name is very intriguing. You first thing that the name is from a politician, or a doctor who donate a lot of money to the City Hall, or an important person from history, a warrior maybe. I though that Mário de Andrade was a mayor from the past, but never though, until probably high school, that he was much more important than that: he was the man who reinvented Brazil.    

Opposite of what you certainly think, Andrade didn’t start his artistic career as an author. In fact, he never had formal education in literature. He was a prodigious pianist as a little boy and studied music instead, since this was his passion. He was, though, an autodidact in history, arts and poetry and had mastered the French language, getting in touch with works of Rimbaud and other poets from symbolism. For certain, that wasn’t an easy job for a little boy who was born at the end of the 18^th century, in 1893. Therefore, even while studying music, he was already producing his own poems without pretensions of being the great author he turned out to be.

At this point, you are probably thinking why is the public library from Araraquara, my hometown, named after Mário de Andrade. It is not only because he is one of – or maybe the – best author from 20^th century in Brazil, but because he wrote one of his masterpieces there (Macunaíma), in a farmhouse his family owned. He lived most of his life in São Paulo, a big city which was one of his poem themes, but in 1913 he moved to this countryside property after his brother died in an accident during a soccer game. He abandoned, then, his music studies, and when he was finally prepared to go back to his hometown he could no longer play piano, as he developed a problem on his hands, which trembling very often. However, he didn’t abandon his passion for music and became a teacher. At the same time, he showed a bigger interest in literature than he ever had. He published his first work in 1917, a collection of poems called There is a drop of blood in each poem under the pseudonym Mário Sobral. This work has vestige of Brazilian culture, although with strong French influence, and even though didn’t have the repercussion he expected, he kept working on his writings and researches about the Brazilian popular culture. During that time, he met a group of young artists who were interested in the European Modernism. They created the Group of Five, composed by the poets Mário de Andrade, Oswaldo de Andrade and Menotti del Picchia and the artists Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfati. Together, they organized the most important artistic event of vanguard in Brazil: The Week of Modern Art, which we will discuss further soon.

Mário was not only a poet, college professor and musicologist, but also novelist, critic and, of course, an art historian. His contributions to the record of Brazilian popular culture is immense and is not only visible in his literary work. In 1935, during an unstable political moment in Brazil, Andrade was able to create a unified Department of Culture in São Paulo with Paulo Duarte, a writer and archaeologist. One thing Andrade really wanted to do while funding director was to conquer and disseminate the Brazilian culture throughout the country. He expanded his work in folklore and folk music, bringing also his collection of recordings to the Department. Cultural and demographic research was, then, one among several important works he had done. In 1938, Paulo Duarte was exiled and Andrade resigned his position at the department, moving to Rio de Janeiro, where he would be a college professor. In 1941, he went back to São Paulo to take the position as funding director at the Department of Culture back, but he wasn’t as enthusiastic as he was before. Four years later, Andrade died of heart attack at the age of 52. 

During basically all his life, Andrade’s work wasn’t publicized as it should have been, for he had several divergences to the govern of president Getúlio Vargas. But after 1955 with the publication of Complete Poems his name could finally be canonized.

As we could see, Mário de Andrade is a national hero who not only helped bringing the artistic vanguard in vogue to his country, but also contributed to the reinvention of Brazil, with all his research about popular culture and its use into his writing work. Macunaíma is the best example, which, as a reminder, we will discuss very soon. Talking about Macunaíma, if you already read it or are reading it, what are your impressions so far?

About Araraquara

Araraquara is a green and beautiful college town. We call it Morada do Sol (Where the Sun lives) because it is very sunny and hot mostly all the time. There are also lots of folktales there, and I want to tell you the one about the snake.

A baby once was rejected by his mom and thrown into a river in front of one of the oldest churches of the city to die. This baby, then, becomes a snake, who lives underground the church. Every time it moves, it breaks a piece of the church, which was never finished. To protect the population against the snake, it was built a sculpture of an eagle, who supposedly protects the city. This is one among other versions of this folktale.

Good to Know

English Translations of Mário de Andrade:

1. Andrade, Mario de. (1933) Fraulein. Trans. Marharet Richardson Hollingsworth. Macaulay, New York.

2. Fraulein (Amar, Verbo Intransitivo). Trans. Margaret 1933.

3. Popular Music and Song in Brazil. 1936. Trans. Luiz Victor Le Cocq D’Oliveira. Sponsored by the Ministry of State for Foreign Affairs of Brazil: Division of Intellectual Cooperation. Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1943.

4. Hallucinated City (Paulicea Desvairada). Trans. Jack E. Tomlins. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1968.

5. Macunaíma. Trans. E.A. Goodland. New York: Random House, 1984.

6. Brazilian Sculpture: An Identity in Profile/Escultura Brasileira: Perfil de uma Identidate. Catalog of exhibition in English and Portuguese. Includes text by Mário de Andrade and others. Ed. Élcior Ferreira de Santana Filho. São Paulo, Brazil: Associação dos Amigos da Pinateca, 1997.

Published Works in Brazil 

1. Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema, 1916
2. Pauliceia Desvairada, 1922
3. A Escrava que não É Isaura, 1925
4. Losango Cáqui, 1926
5. Primeiro Andar, 1926
6. O clã do Jabuti, 1927
7. Amar, Verbo Intransitivo, 1927
8. Ensaios Sobra a Música Brasileira, 1928
9. Macunaíma, 1928
10. Compêndio Da História Da Música, 1929 (Reescrito Como Pequena História Da Música Brasileira, 1942)
11. Modinhas Imperiais, 1930
12. Remate De Males, 1930
13. Música, Doce Música, 1933
14. Belasarte, 1934
15. O Aleijadinho de Álvares De Azevedo, 1935
16. Lasar Segall, 1935
17. Música do Brasil, 1941
18. Poesias, 1941
19. O Movimento Modernista, 1942
20. O Baile das Quatro Artes, 1943
21. Os Filhos da Candinha, 1943
22. Aspectos da Literatura Brasileira 1943
23. O Empalhador de Passarinhos, 1944
24. Lira Paulistana, 1945
25. O Carro da Miséria, 1947
26. Contos Novos, 1947
27. O Banquete, 1978 (Editado por Jorge Coli)
28. Dicionário Musical Brasileiro, 1989 (editado por Flávia Toni)
29. Será o Benedito!, 1992
30. Introdução à estética musical, 1995 (editado por Flávia Toni)

Bibliography:

Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma. Trans. E.A. Goodland. New York: Random House, 1984.

___ Macunaíma. MediaFashion: São Paulo, 2008.

Origins and Literary Movements

Last week we discussed the definition of literature and its meaning to people of any culture. This week it’s all about its origins and literary movements, that is, the history of the art of word and the artistic aesthetics around the world in different periods of time.

HISTORY OF THE ART OF WORD

Once upon a time a story, a narrator and a listener… And then literature was created. The end. That’s a short way to tell the immense history of literature. It didn’t start with writing; it started through the oral tradition, in which a story was told several times, first by its creator, then by different people who listened to it before and passed it forward. Years later, mouth to mouth it was finally registered in a piece of paper to be saved for posteriority. That’s what probably happened to The Odyssey, known as the first literature in Europe: Homero told the story, but we don’t know exactly when it was transcript to the writing form and by whom. In fact, it is not clear if Homero ever existed, maybe a myth created by anonymous fragments about his life and works, which in some cases give different information. This said, we can’t precise the date of the literature’s beginning, specially because several writing works have been lost through the time, mostly destroyed at wars or kept only by oral tradition to the ones who are already buried for thousands of years. Below is a little illustration of what is supposedly the beginning of literary manifestation.

LITERARY MOVEMENTS

Literature, as we learned, was “born” before Jesus Christ and it is one of the oldest thing you can imagine. There are so many information out there about it that it can be very confusing sometimes to understand who wrote it, when it was written, why it was produced the way it was and so on. For example, why one of Virginia Woolf’s  techniques was the stream of consciousness? The answer could be: because she was living in a period of insecurity caused by the two World Wars, the fear of what could happened, the constant sensation of imminent danger. It was, then, a moment in which men of any kind, culture and society were concentrated on their own feelings and thoughts, when their subconsciousness were in a confusion of feelings. Stream of Consciousness, therefore, would bring to Wolf’s characters that expression of the modern way of life: the troubled mind of man in despair, for example, represented by the absence of punctuation during a narration in 1st person¹. A narration without punctuation shows the fragmentation of the character who tells the story, who can’t put his/her pieces together. In this sense, we know Virginia Woolf is one of the several authors haunted by a period of world’s destruction, and the artistic movement she participated is called Modernism. Dividing literature in periods according to elements such as culture, society and ideology is important so that we can identify in which period a work was written and what are its influences and aesthetics. We can understand better Virginia Woolf’s work if we learn about her time, as well as the artistic movements in vogue. A literary movement starts and ends as significant changes in history and art occur. Some countries have gone through most of the periods, other ones only a few. In Brazil, for example, literature movements started after 1500 with its “discovery” and had huge European influence though Portugal.

In a didactic way, we are pointing only a few literary movements and giving a brief explanation of each one.   

In Portugal and Galicia (Spain), the first literary movement was the GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE LYRIC, which started during the Medieval Era at the end of 12^th century till middle of the 14^th. When Iberian Peninsula² was dominated by Roman Empire, Latin became its main language. The aggregation of the spoken language at that time and Latin resulted in what we call Vulgar Latin, the language spoken by the people, and later on it evolved to Galician-Portuguese, which was spoken in all Iberian Peninsula. The same way people from that region shared their language with each other, they did so with their literary movement.

The Galician-Portuguese Lyric production was poems meant to be sung and were called cantigas or trovas. The poet was a singer whose way of survivor was to entertain aristocracy. It was always a man who could sing songs of different categories in male or female voice: in male voice, they were songs about impossible love stories between people of different social classes; in female voice, love stories of ladies waiting for their lovers who were fighting at war; in both voices, satiric poetries of insult or mockery. The most known authors of that period were Dom Dinis, Fernão Lopes and Paio Soares de Taveirós.

Troubadour entertaining aristocracy.

From 14^th to 15^th century, during a transition between Medieval Era and Renaissance, the movement of HUMANISM emerged in Italy to the rest of Europe. Historically, feudalism³ was in its period of decay. The Black Death and the Hundred Year’s War between England and France decimated great part of Europe’s population. There were not much people to keep feudal properties safe from impostors, not even more vassals^­4. The emergence of a new social class, the merchants, demanded a change in the laws to come and go between properties, since the feudal laws didn’t allow the circulation of any person from one land to another. This way, the feudal Lords disappeared, giving space to a new way of government: the Monarchy. Feudal properties are now grouped into a monarchy, and the Right to come and go facilitates trades of any kind. 

In consequence of the church crisis, the art from Humanism gives valuation to men, who are the center of everything instead of God. Universities, dominated by the church, now undergoes a makeover, allowing the critical thinking instead of only theologies studies. In Portugal, Fernão Lopes is named chronicler of Torre do Tombo, where all the historic documents were storage. His job was to write chronicles about the deeds of kings. At the same time, Sá de Miranda comes back from Italy and brings to Portugal the new aesthetic. Humanism, then, is marked by the decay of poetry and the evolution of prose, not only by the chronicles, but also by production of plays such as The Divine Comedy. The most important authors from this period are Dante Alighieri and Miguel de Cervantes.

Later on, from early 14^th through the 16th century, RENAISSANCE was the new artistic movement in vogue. It started in Italy, from where it was spread all over Europe. In those days, several burghers’ sons begun to attend universities, getting in touch with the classic culture. At the same time, a religious crises led by Lutero started a manifestation of questions about God. This way, one of the characteristics of the artistic production of that time was anthropocentrism, with a strong idealization of pagan gods and so the classic mythology, which writing registry was spread thanks to the invention of press. Followed by all these factors, one of the principal characteristic of this movement is the rationalism versus emotionalism and religiousness. The expansion of merchant activities opened space for Mercantilism, so that the great navigations allowed exploration and a different point of view of the world. The “discovery” of the New World is one of the remarkable happenings of that time.  Some of its important authors are Luis Vaz de Camões and Francisco Sá de Miranda.     

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli.

Contrary to the Renaissance, in which there were no space for emotionalism, ROMANTICISM, as the name already says, emphasized the emotions rather than rationalism. It was an artistic movement that started in the 19^th century and had different generations through Europe, having several characteristics, such as the Gothic, darkness of emotions, depression, and, specially, the individual subjectivity. The German author Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe wrote the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, a romantic love story with a drastic ending, and this work was spread through Europe. As the bohemian lovers read it, it caused a mass suicide. Let’s explain this: literature was the way of entertainment of that time: no TV, no cellphones, no iPads… In this sense, it was also a way to inspire the youth in their way of living and creating art. That said, the trama of Goethe’s novel was so real, with such a disturbing tone and morbid end, that caused commotion among them, who identified themselves to the character Werther, deciding to follow his drastic ending. This movement of mass suicide in real life and in literature was so common that it got a name: Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress in English), a period in which man finds himself as self-destructive and sinful. The English author George Gordon Byron emphasized the Sturm und Drang in his poems, which are famous all over the world. Another important type of production in Romanticism is the fantastic literature, which Edgar Allan Poe is an essential author. Its most important characteristics are the nature of darkness and mysterious forces. Other important authors are Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Camilo Castelo Branco.

The Death of Werther by Baude.

In 1857, Gustave Flaubert, a french author, published his novel Madame Bovary, which came to break down Romanticism completely and to start a new artistic movement: REALISM. There were no more space for romantic stories; on the contrary, the love stories were seem as a joke and a bad example for society. The faithful representation of reality, the psychological analyzes of characters and details of narration are some of its principal characteristics. Some of the most important authors from Realism are Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis.

As an extension of Realism, NATURALISM came from France in the 19^th century to portray society in a very objective way, using elements of biology to comprehend human behavior. Pessimism, again, is one of its principal characteristics, followed by Scientism, in the sense that everything had to be explained by the eye of science. Its common themes are misery, racism, prejudice, prostitution, crimes, sexual perversions and adultery, and all of it, as human behavior and origins, is explained biologically. This artistic movement is extremely influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Some important authors of Naturalism are Émile Zola, Aluísio Azevedo and Thomas Hardy.

In the Fin de Sècle in France, SYMBOLISM reacted against rationalism, materialism and scientism from the previous movement. The literary artists applied a language in their work that could “suggest” reality instead of the obvious way of realism in the past. To do so, they used symbols, images, metaphors and synesthesia (figure of speech) to basically invite the reader to analyze those elements and to put all the information together in other to achieve its meaning. Some of its important authors are Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry and Charles Baudelaire.

Other artistic movements happened during Realism, some of them, as we already said before, its extension. MODERNISM came afterwords, in early 20^th century, and had completely different characteristics, such as formal innovation, reaction to science and technology and encompassing primitivism. This is a very important and rich period of artistic production, which we will discuss further before the analyzes of Macunaíma, as Mário de Andrade, its author, is one of the representative of Modernism in Brazil. Some of the principal authors of this movement are Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Andrade.

In late 20^th century, POSTMODERNISM was also a period of rich production. After both World War, the world experiment different changes, specially psychological by the fear of another war. We have discussed a little about this when we talked about Virginia Woolf’s Stream of consciousness, one of the characteristics of Postmodernism as well as the fragmentation and paradox. Some of its important authors are Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and João Cabral de Melo Neto.

As we can see, there are lots of literary movements around the wold, and we just made a simple explanation of a few of them. The importance of its knowledge is that, by so, we can comprehend the meaning of the literary work. For example, why some works don’t have a regular punctuation? Maybe it was because of the artist’s style; maybe it was because of the time the artist lived. In whichever way, the answer is out there, you just have to catch it through a lot of reading.

We hope you enjoy today’s reading. Next week we will make a reading of Morphology of The Folktale by Vladimir Propp, the semiotics theory we will apply to our first literary analyzes. 

Literature has a immense history and a past full of incredible work. Could you tell us your favorite literary movement and why? 

GOOD TO KNOW

SEMANTICS – LITERAL AND FIGURE OF SPEECH

When we speak to someone in a literal way we intent that our message is transmitted in a very clear way. LITERAL LANGUAGE, then, is composed by words which use are according to their exactly meaning or definition. There is no way a person wouldn’t understand the message, unless the words in use in the context of communication are actually not common or are too formal. In opposition, when we want to communicate something but we don’t want the message to be so direct and clear, we use a technique called FIGURE OF SPEECH, which are commonly used in poems and lyrics. In literature, it is one of its main tools in the sense that the words are not used according to their exactly meaning or definition, but are deviated from their meaning to be equated, compared or associated with other normally unrelated words or meanings. Our interest, therefore, is to understand some figures of speech so that we can identify them during our readings. Below are a few examples:

• Simile: comparison of two things.

Example: Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed toward me like towers of pisa (Lolita by Vladimir Nabokob).

• Metaphor: implicit, implied or hidden comparison between two unrelated things that share some common characteristics.

Example: 

ROMEO: But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

          It is the east, and Julie tis the sun.

          (Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare)

• Synesthesia: a sensation combined by another to give one only impression.

Example: Back to the region where the sun is silent. (The Devine Comedy by Dante Alighieri)

• Onomatopeia: a word designed to imitate a sound.

Examples: Splash (for water), moo (cow), meow (cat).

• Personification: human characteristics attributed to inanimate objects or abstract notions.

Example:

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

(Have You Got A Brook In Your Little Heart by Emily Elizabeth Dickinson.)

• Oxymoron: pair o f opposite or contradictory terms used together for emphasis.

Example:

I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady.

(Hamlet by William Shakespeare)

• Paradox: self-contradictory, unreasonable or illogical statement or proposition.

Example:

I must be cruel to be kind.

(Hamlet by William Shakespeare.)

• Hyperbole: extravagante or exaggerated statement to express strong feelings.

Example:

I had to wait in the station for ten days-an eternity.

(The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad)

Notes:

1. A narration in the 1st person of the discourse is made by a character. In this particular case, it is the main character who narrates its own story, showing its psychological emotions.
2. Iberian Peninsula at that time aggregated the territoris of Portugal and Galicia.
3. Feudalism was a period of Medieval Europe in which a relationship between a Feudal Lord (a man who is the owner of a big piece of land, the nobility), the clergy and the peasantry – the three social classes of that time – was necessary in order to acomplish their obligations of war. 
4. Vassal was, in the Feudalism era, a person who had obligations to a Feudal Lord such as military support, shelter when needed and protection. A vassal had to sworn loyalty to the lord and was basically tied in this alliance forever.

Bibliography:

Alighieri, Dante. (2015). The Divine Comedy. Quarto Group: New York.

Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth. (2013) Have You Got A Brook In Your Little Heart. Delphi Classics.

Fortarel, Jô. (2008) Literatura em Língua Portuguesa: Enciclopédia do Estudante. Moderna: São Paulo.

Nabokob, Vladimir. (2010) Lolita. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group: New York.

Nicola, José de. (1990) Literatura Portuguesa da Idade Média a Fernando Pessoa. Scipione: São Paulo.

____ (1985) Literatura Brasileira das Origens aos Nossos Dias. Scipione: São Paulo.

Shakespeare, William. (2000) Romeo and Juliet. Wordsworth Editions: United Kingdom. 

____ (1988) Hamlet. Bantam Books: New York.