SOURCE: López, Kimberle S. “Modernismo and the Ambivalence of the Postcolonial Experience: Cannibalism, Primitivism, and Exoticism in Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma.¹” Luso-Brazilian Review 35, no. 1 (summer 1998): 25-38.

[In the following essay, López analyses Andrade's text as an attempt to define an inherently Brazilian language and literature.]

Este artigo analisa o texto Macunaíma (1928) de Mário de Andrade partindo da perspectiva do Primitivismo literário. A questão da formação de uma identidade literária brasileira é problemática quando se trata da utilização de conceitos europeus como o Primitivismo, o Exotismo e a Antropofagia, que tradicionalmente são empregados para manter a relação desigual entre o colonizador e o colonizado. Ao escrever Macunaíma, Mário de Andrade se apropria de elementos do discurso europeu, como o Primitivismo da Vanguarda francesa e a etnografia do alemão Theodor Koch-Grünberg. Em última análise, Macunaíma reflete o paradoxo central do Modernismo literário, o qual procura afirmar a identidade nacional, mas sem rejeitar toda influência européia. Nesse sentido, Macunaíma, como o Modernismo brasileiro em geral, manifesta a inerente ambivalência da experiência pós-colonial.

Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.—Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago

Mário de Andrade published Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter in 1928, just six years after the “Semana de Arte Moderna” which initiated the Brazilian literary and cultural Avant-garde movement known as Modernismo. Brazilian Modernism, outlined in Oswald de Andrade's Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagist manifestos, had a two-pronged drive: a cosmopolitan interest in the development of a Brazilian literature comparable to that of modern European nations, and a concern with the affirmation of national identity. Macunaíma embodies the central contradiction of the Modernist movement: it strives to define a Brazilian identity by incorporating popular speech and indigenous myths, but also seeks to create a cosmopolitan literature for international export. Modernism, in turn, exemplifies the more general paradox of the inherent ambiguity of the colonial and postcolonial situations overall,² in which expressions of cultural autonomy necessarily borrow discursive practices from the metropolis.³ An approach to Macunaíma from the perspective of ethnography highlights these contradictions, since while the Modernists are determined to avoid the acritical imitation of the modes of representation of any single European nation, Mário de Andrade draws on European attitudes toward the American Primitive in his attempt to integrate Brazilian letters into mainstream Western culture. Andrade's borrowing of elements of European discourse, such as the movement of French Primitivism and the work of German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grünberg, complicates his Modernist project of developing a new, distinctly Brazilian literary voice, since it implies the turning of the imperial gaze toward his own people. Ultimately, the concepts of Primitivism and exoticism remain problematic, even, as in the case of Macunaíma, when the author is applying them to the construction of an identity for his own modern nation.

Andrade's rhapsody has roots in both popular and erudite culture, and in both European and indigenous traditions. Because his own ethnic and cultural background is that of a mulatto from São Paulo, Mário de Andrade's knowledge of indigenous folklore is based primarily on scholarly research. Indeed, Andrade's very interest in indigenous culture, and many of his sources for it, were European in origin: these include the Avant-garde trend of French Primitivism, the burgeoning interest in the studies of anthropology and folklore, and the work of specific European ethnographers, such as Theodor Koch-Grünberg. Thus in spite of Oswald de Andrade's claim that “O primitivismo que apareceu na França como exotismo foi para nós no Brasil verdadeiro primitivismo” (cited in Johnson, Literatura e cinema 59), we might query, to what extent can the Brazilian culture Mário de Andrade seeks to represent really be called his own? George Yúdice's “We are Not the World” forces us to question what authorizes a certain individual to represent a group, and to recognize that even the representation of that individual's own ethnic or national group merits critical examination.

In the case of Macunaíma, Mário de Andrade, an educated mulatto from the urban South, is representing his own modern nation, but not only his own ethnic, regional, or educational identity, by portraying Brazil as a combination of European, African, and indigenous influences. Although in demographic terms, the Afro-Brazilian and mulatto presence is much stronger, the literary and ethnographic imagination tends to skew representation toward indigenous culture and to conflate the terms “popular” and “indigenous.” While in the nineteenth century, José de Alencar brackets off black and mulatto reality in order to portray Brazil as the product of racial miscegenation between Indian and white, even in the twentieth century, native American culture still seems to fire the literary and folkloric imagination more than that of other marginalized groups. At this stage, it is pertinent to ask whether Avant-garde images of Amerindians really represent an evolution beyond the Romantic concept of the noble savage toward a more accurate representation of this Other.

Although both the Romantics and the Modernists were involved in affirming Brazilian identity in the face of an imposed culture, neither was interested in the social life of the indigenous Other which in reality coexisted with them in historical time; rather, both used representations of a remote Other in order to elucidate elements of the self in the present. Latin American Romantics were able to claim a greater degree of authenticity in their representation of the noble savage than their European counterparts: “Indianism thus found fertile terrain in Brazil, for while born out of the influence of Rousseau, it was able to feed on the uniqueness of the American past, rather than on French philosophical currents” (Zilberman 144). However, it was the European Romantics' original valorization of the exotic that made Americans look at their own history in this fashion and, although they are American, the authors of these Romantic texts were still describing an ethnic Other. In the Brazilian context, Indianism was a means of explaining Brazil's racial miscegenation without reference to the Afro-Brazilian contribution to the formation of the nation. In Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer points out the irony of looking for the birth of a nation in an indigenous people which has been systematically exterminated through the process of forming that nation, while ignoring the black population, who were the true and often unwilling participants in racial miscegenation in Brazil, but who were still slaves at the time that José de Alencar was writing his most famous nation-building novels, O Guaraní and Iracema (150-64).

Andrade's Modernist Macunaíma does deal with the question of Afro-Brazilian presence to a far greater extent than do Alencar's Romantic novels. For example, an entire chapter is devoted to a syncretic macumba ceremony. Even more significantly, Macunaíma and his two brothers represent the combination of three races, African, European and Amerindian. The anti-hero himself is born a Tapanhumas Indian and “preto retinto” (5) who becomes blond and blue-eyed when he bathes in the pool that leaves one of his brothers bronze and the other black. Macunaíma's cultural ambiguity is highlighted when he becomes emperor of the Amazons: although he is marginalized on two counts, as black and Amerindian, his status as emperor implicitly associates him with the colonizer. When he loses his amulet, a gift from his beloved Ci, he searches in vain all over his imperial domain and then heads for São Paulo, in a boat laden with cocoa beans for trading.⁴

The question, then, lies in how Andrade's concept of the Other differs from that of previous literary and ethnographic writers. In terms of the use of concepts of exoticism and the noble savage, the image of the Amerindian really evolved less than might be expected between Romanticism and Modernism. The two most recognized authors of these literary movements in Brazilian prose, José de Alencar and Mário de Andrade, share a great deal: Andrade at first publicly identified with José de Alencar in his mission to incorporate racial miscegenation into Brazilian national identity, but later eliminated the part of the dedication of Macunaíma which explicitly linked him to Alencar (Lopez, Margem 75). Telê Porto Ancona Lopez sees Andrade's text as the culmination of the effort initiated by Alencar, an Indianism which in its Modernist phase would mean a genuine understanding of the social reality of the Amerindian (Margem 77). Lopez is too quick, however, to see Macunaíma as the ultimate success of attempts to accurately represent indigenous peoples as a social reality, since the daily life experiences of the inhabitants of the Amazon and the Northeast are not truly represented in Macunaíma, nor indeed can we assume that such was the intention in a work that relies so heavily on the fantastic. Lopez signals the fact that the Romantics valorize Primitivism, but still gazing through the eyes of the colonizer (Margem 76), thus implying that Modernismo has progressed far beyond this kind of auto-exoticism.

In her insightful article on “Preguiça and Power,” Renata Wasserman presents a more conservative estimate of Andrade's contribution to our understanding of the indigenous Brazilian. She begins by analyzing in detail the relationship between discourse and ideology in Brazilian Modernism's paradoxical struggle to develop a new literary language while continuing to borrow cultural models from Europe. She points out that in any decolonizing effort, one colonial remnant which is virtually impossible to exorcise from the creole culture is that of the colonizer's language, which, in the case of Latin American countries, has taken root over centuries, and, with few exceptions, is the only language of the majority of the population. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Latin American authors found themselves in the incongruous position of needing to express their newly-found independence with the tools most readily available to them: European language and modes of representation. Wasserman distinguishes between the sort of Primitivist project in which Mário de Andrade engages and the idealization of the Amerindian in earlier literature. She states that whereas European-style Romanticism includes indigenous characters for exotic effect—exoticism forming part of a language of oppression—, Macunaíma represents both positive and negative aspects of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian characters, thus resisting the simple idealization of these marginal groups. In Macunaíma, Andrade brings out the ideological ambiguity of both foreigners and Brazilians of different racial background, with no exclusively positive or negative models of any ethnic origin. Wasserman concludes that, although exoticism traditionally is the discourse that the powerful use to oppress the powerless, Andrade's contribution lies in his de-mythification of the Primitive, as he turns exoticism upside-down in order to make Brazilian society more aware of its own otherness.

As a cosmopolitan author associated with Brazilian Modernism, Mário de Andrade was familiar with the concept of Primitivism employed by the French Dadaists and Surrealists, who had already drawn an aesthetic connection between Freudianism and the study of folklore. Primitivism took on international dimensions in the early decades of this century as French Avant-garde artists traveled to Brazil and elsewhere in the capacity of unofficial cultural ambassadors. As Wasserman notes, when Mário de Andrade wrote Macunaíma, the process of valuation of the Primitive had already been going on in Paris for nearly a decade (102). And, when Andrade finally made his own ethnographic journey to the Amazon and the rural Northeast, it was because of an original inspiration on the part of French poet Blaise Cendrars, who several years earlier had organized a trip to Minas Gerais known curiously as a journey of “discovery of Brazil” in spite of the fact that many of its participants were Brazilian. This formulation of the expedition's purpose underscores the fact that what these Brazilian intellectuals were discovering was not the self, but an ethnic Other which coexisted with them in the same modern nation.

The Brazilian Modernist concept of the Primitive, as outlined in Oswald de Andrade's “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) was specifically influenced by the reading of Lévy-Brühl and Keyserling, and by the Dadaists, who had their own anti-bourgeois cannibalist movement. Although Mário de Andrade did not read Lévy-Brühl until after the publication of Macunaíma, he must have been familiar with the French thinker's ideas, which were key to Oswald de Andrade's earlier Pau-Brasil manifesto (1924); Lévy-Brühl's notion of the primitive mind as pre-logic is clearly present in Andrade's work, as is Keyserling's impression of the alienating effect of modern civilization upon human beings.⁵ Because the very emphasis on the Primitive is the product of European influence, Macunaíma can be seen as a manifestation of the ambiguity inherent in the enterprise of postcolonial authors who gaze at their own culture through the eyes of the former colonizer.

What occupies our attention here are the powerful implications of using European concepts of the exotic American Other in a Brazilian author's efforts to affirm cultural independence through ethnographically-inspired literature. The specific way in which Brazilian Modernists appropriate European Primitivism is initially spelled out in Oswald de Andrade's 1924 Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil, a text with which Mário de Andrade expressed significant differences (Lopez, Margem 18). Oswald de Andrade's second Modernist proclamation is the Manifesto Antropófago, published in May of 1928, before the publication of Macunaíma but after its initial writing. Mário de Andrade collaborated in the first phase of the journal Revista de Antropofagia, but later did not hide his objections to some of the more radical tenets of the Anthropophagist movement (Castro 60-61). In spite of these differences, Macunaíma is widely recognized as a vital practical enactment of what Oswald de Andrade put forth in theoretical terms in his manifesto. This coincidence with the anthropophagist movement is demonstrated not only on the level of images of cannibalism, but on a broader cultural level as well. The work is replete with representations of cannibals, such as the giant Piaimã Venceslau Pietro Pietra, who himself combines both foreign and indigenous identities; the forest-dweller who eats his own leg and offers Macunaíma a piece; and the man-eating siren who devours the hero in the end. But the anthropophagic consumption of the Other in Andrade's rhapsody goes far beyond the simple representation of cannibalistic acts: in a more general sense, the entire project is anthropophagistic in that it consumes materials from a broad range of sources and incorporates them in a de-hierarchized whole, without categorically excluding any discourse, including that of the colonizer. Significantly, Macunaíma shares with Oswald de Andrade's Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagist movements the central paradox of attempting to create an independent literature while still adhering to aesthetic norms established by the European colonizer.

In a May, 1928, letter to Alceu de Amoroso Lima, Mário de Andrade laments that his forthcoming work will be associated with the Anthropophagist movement, which he feels will restrict its reception (cited in Lopez, Margem 96). Although he feels that the label of antropofagista limits the interpretation of his text, the author of Macunaíma refrains from publishing his views at the time in order to avoid calling public attention to the lack of national intellectual solidarity, the illusion of which was of interest to the Brazilian Modernists' goal of the formation of a national literary identity. By 1929, the rupture between Oswald and Mário de Andrade was official, as the Revista de Antropofagia began to attack the author of Macunaíma both personally and aesthetically (Castro 60-61).

In spite of the author's objections, an approach to his text from the point of view of the Anthropophagist movement adds a great deal to its interpretation. Anthropophagy, the Modernists' chosen image for Brazilian cultural growth, is based on the concept of consuming one's enemies in order to appropriate their strength, an idea that is very much suited to a postcolonial literature which borrows from the colonizer in order to assert an independent national identity:

Just as the aboriginal Tupinamba Indians of Brazil devoured their enemies in order to appropriate their force, the modernists argued, Brazilian artists and intellectuals should digest imported cultural products and exploit them as raw material for a new synthesis, thus turning the imposed culture back, transformed, against the colonizer.

(Stam 124)

In his text The Man-eating Myth: Anthropophagy and Anthropology, W. Arens observes that the word ‘cannibal’ itself comes from a rumor about the Other, when the Arawaks indicated to Columbus that the other inhabitants of the island, the Caribs, were anthropophagi. He goes on to relate that when a Spanish Royal proclamation of 1503 and later the system of the encomienda permitted cannibals to be enslaved, the term ‘cannibal’ came to signify any resistance to enslavement (51).

An exoticizing image similar to that of anthropophagy in its relationship to colonialism, and one equally exploited in Macunaíma, is the myth of the indolent native. Syed Hussein Alatas explains:

In its historical empirical manifestation the colonial ideology utilized the idea of the lazy native to justify compulsion and unjust practices in the mobilization of labour in the colonies. It portrayed a negative image of the natives and their society to justify and rationalize European conquest and domination of the area.

(2)

In Macunaíma, Andrade chooses to make preguiça the defining characteristic of his “hero without character”; like the Modernist use of cannibalism, the myth of the lazy native is related to the valorization of the Primitive, since in contrast to the work ethic of a consumer society, primitive societies do not require that individuals continue to work after their basic necessities have been satisfied. In this light, Macunaíma's motto, “que preguiça!” can be seen as symbolizing resistance against an economic system which does not serve the Brazilian's needs (Lopez Ramais 199). In Macunaíma, the insistence on indolence as the hero's defining trait is a means through which Andrade's rhapsodic novel challenges the positivist ideal of “order and progress,” offering the notion of “preguiça” as an antidote to the utilitarian concept of humanity in urban Brazil.

As a cultural metaphor for a literary movement which seeks to affirm national independence, Primitivism can be nothing less than ambiguous. We might ask why Brazilian Modernism takes as a central image one which traditionally has been used to deride and enslave others. The answer to this question would seem to lie in exploiting the postcolonial potential for turning taboo into totem,⁶ by appropriating stereotypes of marginality and converting them into metaphors of resistance. In the case of Macunaíma, this phenomenon manifests itself by transforming the mark of difference—cannibalism, preguiça, or the “impurity” of Brazilian Portuguese—into a symbol of empowerment. Gender and race-oriented approaches to literature and culture have demonstrated how marks of difference can be used by the oppressed as a means of resistance and empowerment: Aimé Césaire's work on négritude, Hélène Cixous's theories of écriture féminine, and Roberto Fernández Retamar's reevaluation of the symbol of Caliban are all examples of transformations of emblems of alterity. Andrade incorporates both Afro-Brazilian and indigenous figures in a positive light in Macunaíma, but since the author himself formed part of urban Brazil, the Amazonian Indian is still an Other to him. A salient question, suggested by Yúdice's “We are Not the World,” is whether the ethnographic gaze ceases to be problematic simply because the author belongs to the same modern nation as the ethnic group described.

Before writing his rhapsodic text, Mário de Andrade had read the work of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and various Luso-Brazilian cultural critics, including Capistrano de Abreu, Couto de Magalhães and Barbosa Rodrigues (Cavalcanti Proença 47). Although he took his own anthropological tour through the Amazon to Peru, Mário de Andrade's principal ethnographic model for Macunaíma was Koch-Grünberg, whose Vom Roroima zum Orinoco inspired many of the mythical episodes of his Modernist text. Although it is often cited that Andrade wrote a full-length draft of Macunaíma in one week in 1926 while lying in a hammock, it is equally true that before he began to write, he was saturated with readings of folklore and ethnography such as those compiled in Koch-Grünberg's text, and that he revised the text after the trip to the Amazon which he documented in newspaper articles signed “o turista aprendiz.” While writing his Modernist rhapsody, Andrade made no secret of the fact that he owed much of his inspiration—and a great deal of actual material—to the collections of Brazilian folktales found in Koch-Grünberg. The author drew on the work of other authors so heavily, in fact, that he was accused of plagiarism, an accusation to which he responded in various personal letters to friends such as poet Manuel Bandeira and Alceu de Amoroso Lima, and in a biting response to Raimundo Moraes, who had couched his subtle insinuation of plagiarism in the context of a defense of Andrade's originality (Lopez, Margem 7). Andrade's response was that indeed he had calqued themes from many authors, and is not ashamed of this fact; more than plagiarism, however, this sort of intertextuality is part of the anthropophagist method of consuming material from diverse sources and later excreting what is not desired.

Over the last few decades, many studies have linked anthropology with the enterprise of imperialism. Pioneer work on this topic appears in Edward Said's Orientalism and in the collection of essays edited by Talal Asad with the title Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Said shows how Europe first invents the myth of the Orient and then uses that myth to justify and prolong colonization. Both Said and Asad note how anthropologists have often unwittingly contributed to maintaining the hierarchy of power of the colonial system. Contemporary studies of ethnography and ethnographically-based literature have addressed, although not answered, Said's fundamental question of “how can one study other cultures and peoples from a […] nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, perspective” (24).

In addition to anthropology's need for the Other, and the need to describe the Other as cannibal, the study of alien cultures itself can be seen as a cannibalistic pursuit. According to Arens, anthropophagy and anthropology are interdependent concepts, and the social science of anthropology could not exist without such disparaging depictions of the Other used for the purpose of domination (184). Ethnography is inherently parasitic: it feeds off the Other, depending on the cultural “inferiority” of this Other and reinforcing its exoticism through writing. Conscious of this, in recent years cultural critics have turned the gaze of anthropology upon ethnographers themselves in the sort of meta-ethnography practiced by the contributors to Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture. In the spirit of anthropophagy, the ethnographic cannibal himself is cannibalized when ethnographic writing itself becomes the object of parasitic writing; such is the case of Andrade's Macunaíma, which absorbs Koch-Grünberg's text into a new literary whole.

One relevant question is whether Andrade can borrow myths and legends from Koch-Grünberg's text without also absorbing some of his attitudes about the Amerindian Other. The first volume of Vom Roroima zum Orinoco, in which the author speaks directly and authoritatively to the reader about his experiences traveling along the Roroima and Orinoco rivers, is the most subjective of the five volumes, and thus is the most useful in an effort to investigate the construction of ethnographic authority in Koch-Grünberg's account. The first chapters recount the German scholar's arrival in Manaus, his subsequent trip to São Marcos and finally his visits to various indigenous groups, including the Taulipang. While living among these indigenous peoples in what James Clifford would term the “inside”/“outside” position of the “participant-observer,” Koch-Grünberg partakes in all aspects of the native lifestyle and generally appears to treat his hosts as equals.

Far from identifying with people of European extract in the region, Koch-Grünberg censures the continuation of the colonial abuse of power on the part of wealthy landowners and rubber contractors, who deceive and coerce the Amerindians into providing slave labor. Koch-Grünberg takes his indignation so far as to question the very presence of white man in indigenous territory. Of course, Koch-Grünberg is not the first to say that the true barbarians are the Europeans and that the Amerindians are the civilized ones, a paradoxical formulation which appears in literature as early as the sixteenth century, and which continues in Romantic idealizations of the noble savage. Even Koch-Grünberg's denunciation of colonial presence in the area remains, however, the persistence of a European representation of the Other. Although he calls into question his own cultural heritage by putting value-laden binary terms such as “civilized” and “savage” in quotation marks, at the same time Koch-Grünberg repeats the colonizer's gaze by constructing his ethnographic authority upon an anonymous but collective first-person, the European “we” through which he differentiates himself from the Amerindian Other.

While living among the Taulipang, the German ethnographer identifies with the indigenous lifestyle so thoroughly that he claims to feel completely at home, so much that he seems to forget his ethnographic stance. Koch-Grünberg's own conception of the noble savage is apparent, however, in his insistence on the purity of his indigenous informants. In order to serve as appropriate informants, the Amerindians must be truly primitive, not tainted by any contact with society. Although he lives with the indigenous population for extended periods of time, Koch-Grünberg's cultural identity never ceases to be European, and his ethnographic authority clearly derives from his identification with a cultural “we” from across the ocean. Even his thin veneer of “participant-observation” while living among the Amerindians as one of them disintegrates when the scholar begins to penetrate the Amazon. His authorial stance takes over, as he begins to refer to his indigenous companions in territorial terms as “my Indians,” the subordinates whom he is paying to carry his equipment. Although he sets himself apart from both the landowners and previous ethnographers in that he pays fair wages to his informants and to those who accompany him on the trip, at the same time he establishes his own patriarchal authority by treating his informants neither as equals nor as employees, but rather as children whom he reserves the right to punish. He accuses them of indolence and disobedience, and even threatens them on one occasion with retribution for their unwillingness to act as docile informants. Confronted with the “uncooperative” Yekuana, Koch-Grünberg demonstrates the full force of his patriarchal authority as he threatens to burn all his equipment and contact his compatriots down the river who will unleash their wrath upon the unwilling informants.

At this juncture, one must ask how Koch-Grünberg can perceive his own assumption that the Amerindians are required to serve as paid guides and informants as anything different from the indentured servitude imposed by the landowners and rubber contractors, whom the ethnographer had criticized so violently at the beginning of the volume. His description of the Yekuana as reluctant and uncooperative is symptomatic of a mode of thinking in which the native informant is considered as somehow obliged to speak, and is expected to owe a debt of gratitude to the interviewer;⁷ this perceived obligation to bear witness stems from the fact that the ethnographer/informant relationship mimics the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Koch-Grünberg sees his own role as the benevolent patriarch, kind to the Amerindians, but reserving the right to withdraw this kindness at will; this is apparent when he tells the Yekuana that they have yet to see the evil of white men, and that they do not realize how well the ethnographer has been treating them. Michael Herzfeld succinctly defines the ideological implications of the fact that this benevolence is the ethnographer's prerogative: “Anthropologists may appear deferential to their informants, but this is merely the privilege of power inasmuch as it is optional” (17). Although he begins his text by criticizing the colonial presence in the Amazon, Koch-Grünberg ironically ends up repeating this presence through his exercise of patriarchal authority.

A fundamental question is whether, in his cannibalistic appropriation of material from Koch-Grünberg, Andrade can avoid adopting the same sort of ethnographic authority which develops over the course of Volume I of Vom Roroima zum Orinoco. Not only did Andrade incorporate elements from Koch-Grünberg's second volume in virtually every chapter of his rhapsodic work: he also made his own ethnographic journey, from May to July of 1927, in the middle of the period when he was rewriting Macunaíma.⁸ It is fitting that Andrade begins his voyage to the Amazon and the impoverished Northeast on a craft christened the Pedro I. The name of the Luso-Brazilian emperor who chose to remain as monarch of Brazil after the seat of the Portuguese empire had returned to Lisbon sets the tone for an ethnographic voyage which embodies the ambiguity of Modernism, and of the colonial and postcolonial situations in general. It also points to the peculiar ambiguity of Brazil's unique colonial experience: after being a viceroyalty in the eighteenth century, Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese empire in the early nineteenth century, and later became an empire equal to Portugal before finally becoming a republic in 1889.

Andrade's trip to the Amazon, like the one to Minas Gerais planned by Blaise Cendrars, could easily be referred to as a journey of “discovery of Brazil,” a clearly dubious denomination when the participants themselves are largely Brazilian. Andrade's journey also had an ethnographic intent, that of collecting folkloric material, principally music, for publication. As Koch-Grünberg before him, Andrade claims to feel at home in the peripheral regions he visits; although he is from the industrialized South, Andrade identifies with the rural Northeast: “Descobri que sou nordestino. Jamais o meu corpo se sentiu tão bem como no Nordeste [. …]” (cited in Castello Branco 76). And, like Koch-Grünberg, he occasionally takes his informants for granted: Castello Branco notes, for example, that Andrade allows Sérgio Olindense and his companion, Gina, to do much of the original gathering of folkloric material for a book on ethnomusicology, but never gives them credit in the final product (59). Andrade's claim that his true spirit is Northeastern evokes George Yúdice's “We are Not the World”: although Yúdice does not resolve the issue of who can represent whom, he poses questions that prevent us from taking for granted the authenticity of representation of another ethnic group even if the author belongs to the same modern nation.

In the same letter in which Mário de Andrade admits that he borrowed material from Koch-Grünberg and other erudite sources, he also insists on the right to put his own name on the cover: “Meu nome está na capa de Macunaíma e ninguém o poderá tirar” (cited in Lopez, Margem 100). The neocolonial nuances of the practice of appropriating the story of an ethnic Other and publishing it with the erudite author's name on the cover have been the focus of recent studies of ethnography and ethnographically-based literature such as the hybrid genre of the testimonial.⁹ By writing fiction based on ethnographic sources, Andrade puts himself in the same inside/outside position as the ethnographer: he is Brazilian, but the Brazil he describes is not his own urban South; and by insisting on his authorship of a text partially cannibalized from indigenous folklore, Andrade contributes to the ambiguity of postcolonial relationships.

In order to discuss the question of European influence in Macunaíma, it is imperative to look at how the work itself portrays foreign characters. Although Andrade's work is generally interpreted as representing transculturation in a positive light, Macunaíma's arch-enemy, Venceslau Pietro Pietra, is a negative character with a composite cultural background. At first glance, it might seem that the Peruvian river trader with an Italian last name is meant to condemn all immigrants. Venceslau Pietro Pietra's cultural identity is complicated, however, by the fact that he also carries the labels of “gigante” and “Piaimã,” appellations which evoke both Iberian and Taulipang legends of man-eaters. Since the villain's identity is so diffused, he cannot be linked with any simple rejection of foreign influence. More than his ethnicity, Venceslau Pietro Pietra's profession is indicative of why he is the villain: as a nouveau riche immigrant and collector of precious stones from all over Brazil, his representation can be seen as a comment upon foreign acquisition of Brazilian property.

The ideological ambiguity of accepting foreign influence can also be seen in Macunaíma's lack of a consistent national character. One of the first indications of this is the hero's valorization of foreign goods, since he takes Smith and Wesson revolvers, a Patek clock and some imported Leghorn chickens with him when he leaves São Paulo for the last time (136). The clearest example of Macunaíma's infidelity to native culture, however, is his inability to commit to a Brazilian woman. Vei, the Sun, proposes that if he can be a faithful husband to any of her daughters, she will give him Europe, France and Bahía as a dowry, but the inconstant Macunaíma betrays these tropical maidens with a Portuguese fishwife, a mistake for which he ultimately pays with his life, when in the final chapter Vei arranges for the siren Uiara to devour him. On the level of plot structure, then, Vei's final vengeance indicates a valorization of Brazilian national culture in the face of foreign influence.

After his letter to the Amazons and his public speech about the Southern Cross, Macunaíma continues the quest for his lost amulet. When he finds out that the giant has taken the amulet abroad, the hero resolves to follow him; lacking funding, he decides to pose as a painter in order to secure a government grant to Europe. When he is unable to obtain a grant, Macunaíma's ardent response appears to be a sincere defense of national culture in the face of European influence: “[…] não vou na Europa não. Sou americano e meu lugar é na América. A civilização européia de-certo esculhamba a inteireza do nosso caráter” (114-15). It soon becomes evident, however, that the characterless hero only defends his American identity because external forces bar him from going abroad, since when the water nymph creates a mirage of a transatlantic ship to delude the hero, he does not hesitate to shout: “Gente! adeus, gente! Vou pra Europa que é milhor!” (120).

Macunaíma's inability to commit to a national identity ultimately leads to his death, when Vei, the Sun, still angry because he betrayed her native daughters with a Portuguese fishwife, concerts the hero's fatal encounter with the lady of the lake, who takes away his indigenous amulet, his Patek clock and his Smith and Wesson revolver, along with several body parts.¹⁰ Vei's own instrument of vengeance, the siren Uiara, is a transcultural figure, as she is associated with figures of aquatic seduction from both indigenous and European mythology, and her physical description corresponds with that of a Brazilian of mixed race. Macunaíma's tale is preserved only because before this incident, the anti-hero tells his story to a parrot, the only talking bird that did not desert to British Guyana (158). In keeping with the work's ludic style, the narrator fails to explain how he understood the story, which was told to him in the dead language of the Tapanhumas tribe (167). The rhapsody's final statement in terms of the relationship between Brazil and its former colonizer occurs when the parrot flies off toward Lisbon, thus exporting Macunaíma's transcultural story to Europe.

Although Mário de Andrade denied direct links with the Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagist movements as outlined in Oswald de Andrade's manifestos, his attitude toward Europe can be compared to literary anthropophagy, since it borrows from diverse American and European sources without categorically rejecting any; the parrot's flight to Lisbon points to Pau-Brasil's goal of creating a Brazilian literature for export; at the same time, ambiguous attitudes toward more developed nations throughout Macunaíma reflect Modernismo's determination not to depend entirely upon any single European country as a source of cultural and linguistic material. The parrot's final act indicates that the colonized can do more than simply mimic the discourse of the colonizer, and that modes of representation can indeed migrate from the periphery to the metropolis.¹¹ This brings us again to the question of colonialism and self-representation.

As far as decolonization is concerned, Brazilian Modernism is not entirely iconoclastic, since it promoted the cultural autonomy of the nation, but not in the radical terms of rejecting all foreign influence. Although there was diversity within the movement in terms of both aesthetics and politics, even between Oswald and Mário de Andrade, the Modernistas in general wished to avoid the acritical imitation of the cultural manifestations of any single European nation, but saw no need to reject everything that came from Europe. The Anthropophagist movement in particular allows for the incorporation of material from a variety of sources in a critical reelaboration. Brazilian Modernists wanted their literature and culture to be recognized on an international level, and they progressed toward this goal by following the aesthetic trends of the French Avant-garde. Literary anthropophagy does not claim to invent ex nihilo, but rather uses the materials at hand—even if these are the modes of representation of the colonizer—to create a new, if not entirely original, cultural artifact. From a more critical stance, Oswald de Andrade's goal of a “Poesia Pau-Brasil,” a poetry for export parallel to the country's first export of dye-wood, smacks of a repetition of Brazil's position as provider of raw materials. Randal Johnson comments on this paradox: “When Oswald de Andrade writes that his Pau-Brasil poetry is for export, he implicitly accepts the continuation of Brazil's historical role as an exporter of raw materials and of a certain ‘exoticism’ that has long fascinated Europeans” (“Tupy or not Tupy” 46). How, then, can Brazilian Modernism affirm national independence if it reproduces the relationship of colonizer to colonized?

Significantly, in order to make their literature palatable to an international audience, Brazilian authors chose to defer to the aesthetic values of mainstream Western literature. As Vivian Schelling points out, Mário de Andrade adopts the stance of Primitivism in order to cope with the contradictions of being an intellectual in a developing nation; this results in his self-definition as a “primitive intellectual,” an intrinsically paradoxical identity. While his character Macunaíma assimilates European cultural and linguistic values, Andrade also continues to look to the metropolis for the legitimation of his literary enterprise. In his efforts to create a Brazilian culture for export, Andrade depends on European acceptance of his literary artifact, and thus must couch his project within a discursive style which is familiar to his intended audience. Thus the paradox of the primitive intellectual is related to the inherent ambivalence of the colonial experience.

In spite of the heterogeneity of the new literary language Andrade proposes for Brazil, there is no question that his project overall belongs in the category of erudite literature; in terms of accessibility, the linguistic orientation of Macunaíma elicits a highly literate reader who is familiar with both popular and erudite Brazilian Portuguese, as well as with Latin, French, English and Italian. The reader of Macunaíma must have a certain level of familiarity with various ancient and modern languages in order to identify the target of the Brazilian author's irony. In addition, the text is replete with “inside jokes” and esoteric comments directed at Andrade's Modernist contemporaries. Thus although Andrade was concerned with popular culture, it is clear that the extremely stylized Macunaíma is really intended for an elite audience.¹² In this sense, Andrade, like his character Macunaíma, positions himself within the discourse of power.¹³ Since erudite culture is associated with the foreign metropolis and the domestic dominant class, while popular culture is associated with the margins of society, the goal of incorporating popular speech into erudite literature is not only a cannibalizing, but to a certain extent also a colonializing, endeavor.

Is Modernist Primitivism, then, really a means of turning European images of Latin Americans on their heads, or is it merely a case of what Antônio Cândido calls the persistent exoticism of Brazilian self-image (324)? In response to Oswald de Andrade's assertion that Brazilian Primitivism is more authentic and less exotic than French Primitivism (“O primitivismo que apareceu na França como exotismo foi para nós no Brasil verdadeiro primitivismo”), we can respond that “We are Not the World”; that is, although the cosmopolitan authors of Modernism are Brazilian, it does not mean that their representation of Amerindian culture is unproblematic. Although Mário de Andrade is Brazilian, the image of the Amerindian remains an exotic factor in Macunaíma; and the fact that the indigenous folktales incorporated into his text come from erudite European sources adds to the ambiguity of his national literary project. Mário de Andrade's representation of Primitivism and exoticism to a certain extent implies that the Modernists are continuing to look at themselves through “imperial eyes.” In this manner Macunaíma exemplifies the paradox of a literary movement which strives to be cosmopolitan while simultaneously seeking to affirm Brazilian national identity, and by extension, it embodies the inherent dilemma of aesthetic self-representation in postcolonial Latin America.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Renata Wasserman, Candace Slater, Paul Goldberg, and Margo Milleret for reading this paper and providing me with useful comments, and also to the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, for awarding me a research travel grant to Brazil to conduct research on Mário de Andrade.

2. Homi Bhabha, borrowing terms from Frantz Fanon, develops the concept of the inherent ambivalence of the colonial situation in his article “On Mimicry and Man.”

3. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt discusses transculturation in terms of how the modes of representation of the colonizer are appropriated and transformed by the colonized and later returned to the metropolis from the periphery. This is very much the case of Brazilian Modernism, and especially the Anthropophagist movement, which selects from received materials and invents a new object which it then presents for acceptance to a cosmopolitan audience. I contend that in order to achieve this acceptance, Modernist authors such as Mário de Andrade must look at their own culture through “imperial eyes”; that is, by employing European concepts of the Other to Brazil, the Modernistas turn the gaze of the colonizer on themselves, which necessarily produces ambiguous results in terms of the formation of a literary identity for a postcolonial nation which seeks to affirm cultural autonomy.

4. In a work that strives to create a Brazilian literature for export, it is significant that Macunaíma's currency is also one of America's first (agri)cultural exports to Europe. In another chapter, “pau-brasil,” the export for which the country was named—and also the title of one of Oswald de Andrade's Modernist manifestos—is mentioned as well (69).

5. This study of the influence of contemporary literary and philosophical trends in Brazilian Modernism is based on the work of Randal Johnson, Telê Porto Ancona Lopez, and Carlos Berriel.

6. Lopez notes that Mário de Andrade had read Freud's Totem and Taboo before writing Macunaíma (Margem 18).

7. Based on more recent ethnographic fieldwork, David Guss attributes this perceived resistance of the Yekuana to firmly held tribal beliefs against writing and recording. He interprets Koch-Grünberg's reaction as a complete lack of ethnographic interest in understanding the Yekuana in their own terms (413-26). Guss turns the ethnographic gaze back upon the ethnographer himself, concluding that “What is really conveyed in his [Koch-Grünberg's] accusation is the continued frustration of a fieldworker who cannot get his unwitting hosts to fulfill their role as informants. The Yekuana simply did not want to play ‘Indians’ to this uninvited guest who had experienced such grand success up to this point” (414).

8. Andrade himself employs the term “viagem etnográfica” to refer to this trip in his Turista Aprendiz (20).

9. Some important sources on the relationship between ethnography and testimonial literature include Elzbieta Sklodowska's Testimonio hispanoamericano (New York: Peter Lang, 1992); René Jara and Hernán Vidal's Testimonio y literatura (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986); and the 1992 special issue of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana.

10. Mário de Andrade affirms the explicit ideological meaning of Vei's vengeance: “[Macunaíma] se amulhera com uma portuguesa, o Portugal que nos herdou os princípios cristãos-europeus. E, por isso, no acabar do livro, no capítulo final, Vei se vinga do herói […]” (article cited in Berriel 104).

11. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt suggests a model of transculturation which takes into account the multidirectional influence of modes of representation; that is, she replaces the traditional model of unidirectional influence from colonizer to colonized with one which recognizes the possibility of mutual influence.

12. In a 1925 letter to Drummond, Mário de Andrade states: “Não estou fazendo regionalismo. Trata-se duma estilização culta da linguagem popular […]” (cited in 71 Cartas 73).

13. In a retrospective glance at Modernismo in 1940, Andrade admits that the Modernist spirit and its trends were imported directly from Europe, and “Junto disso, o movimento modernista era nitidamente aristocrático” (“O Movimento Modernista” 236).

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