SOURCE: Johnson, Randal. “Brazilian Modernism: An Idea Out of Place?” In Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, edited by Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, pp. 186-214. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.

[In the following essay, Johnson reviews the Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s as a response to European modernist movements as well as a cultural expression of postcolonial Brazil.]

We are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarefied dialectic of not being and being someone else.

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes

One of the central concerns of the organizers of this volume is whether dominant theories of modernism, normally based on European or “metropolitan” experience, can account for the “peripheral” expressions of Hispanic and Latin American modernism. They cite Fredric Jameson, who suggests that the existence of colonialism “means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life worlds … remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power whatever social class they may belong to.” This “spatial disjunction” results in an inability to understand how the system functions in its entirety. Consequently, “as artistic content [daily life and existential experience in the metropolis] will […] henceforth always have something missing about it, but in the sense of a privation that can never be restored or made whole simply by adding back in the missing component […]. This new and historically original problem in what is itself a new kind of content now constitutes the situation and the problem and the dilemma, the formal contradiction, that modernism seeks to solve; or better still, it is only that new kind of art which reflexively perceives this problem and lives this formal dilemma that can be called modernism in the first place” (50-51; stress added).

My purpose in this essay is less to take issue with Jameson or to test his hypothesis—which may on the surface seem reductionist in that it limits legitimate modernist works to (some of) those of the metropolis—than to examine the same kind of questions in relation to Brazilian modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. Obviously the focus must be on the periphery rather than the metropolis, the margins rather than the center. The set of issues Brazilian modernists had to face involved their own objective situation and intellectual positioning not only in relation to European culture, but also, and more importantly, to their own culture and to the network of social relations in which they were objectively situated. In the best of cases, such as Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, modernist artists may indeed have “reflexively perceived the problem” and “lived the formal dilemma” to which Jameson refers, but they did so as if through a reverse or distorting mirror, self-consciously reflecting on the paradoxes inherent in the position of the Brazilian intellectual vis-à-vis European culture, on the one hand, and in relation to their own society on the other. At its best, Brazilian modernism casts a critical eye on cultural imitation and dependency, but perhaps all too frequently without an awareness of the contradictions of its own cultural production.

BRAZILIAN MODERNISM: AN IDEA OUT OF PLACE?

In February 1922 a group of iconoclastic young Brazilian writers, artists and intellectuals gathered in São Paulo's Municipal Theater, noisily declared the country's artistic independence, and officially inaugurated what has since become known as the modernist movement, or simply put, Brazilian modernism. The Semana de Arte Moderna, a series of exhibitions of plastic arts, concerts, poetry and prose readings, and lectures on contemporary aesthetic theory, marked the “coronation” of a movement that had been gaining strength over the previous decade.¹ Brazilian modernism arose initially as a response to European avant-garde artistic movements, as a reaction to the literary codes that had dominated Brazilian letters since the end of the nineteenth century, and as a cultural expression of the sociopolitical and economic changes the country was undergoing in the first quarter of the century. According to standard literary historiography, the “heroic” period of the movement extends until 1930, by which time the relatively cohesive group of 1922 had splintered along ideological lines. A second phase of modernism, dominated largely by the neorealist social novel, yet also witnessing the maturation of modernist poetics, runs until approximately 1945.

The initial phase of poetic modernism was characterized by systematic opposition to the outdated structures of Parnassianism and symbolism and by a concomitant rejection of traditional metric and rhyme schemes. Its revolt, based on the absorption of the European avant-garde, systematized the use of free verse, literary experimentation, and the thematization of modern urban society, ranging from a quasi-hallucinatory fascination with technology to a focus on the quotidian. In their attack on what they were fond of calling passadismo, Brazil's modernists made frequent use of satire and parody. After its noisy beginnings in São Paulo, the movement—or at least a number of its most prominent participants—shifted toward explicit stances of cultural nationalism based primarily on the rediscovery of folk and popular elements of the national culture. Literary groupings in other states followed São Paulo's example, and regional or local literary reviews proliferated throughout the decade.

From the outset Brazilian modernism was a heterogeneous movement encompassing a multiplicity of aesthetic, cultural, social, and political proposals. Aesthetically it represented an intersection of avant-garde currents—futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, dada—borrowed more or less directly from Europe, and residuals of “premodernist” literature in Brazil. Politically it included active supporters of São Paulo's ruling oligarchy, vaguely liberal dissidents, and participants in Rio de Janeiro's frequently authoritarian movement of Catholic renewal. Modernism evolved in the twenties through a series of subgroupings (Pau-Brasil, 1924; Verde-Amarelo, 1926; Festa, 1927; Verde, 1927; Anta, 1927; Antropofagia, 1928), often revolving around short-lived literary reviews and united by a common concern with creating a “new” literature in Brazil.²

Sociologist Renato Ortiz has suggested that modernism, directly imported from Europe, was “out of place” [fora de lugar] in Brazil since it proposed modernity without modernization (32-37). The idea of modernism did not—indeed could not—correspond appropriately to the “totality of society,” which, despite certain signs of modernity, continued to be characterized by a traditional, authoritarian, and decidedly antimodern social structure which still revealed the vices of its (recent) slaveholding past. In this sense, modernism in Brazil represented an example of what Florestan Fernandes has called “anteriority.” Drawing from Marshall Berman's discussion of Russian modernism, Ortiz notes that the Brazilian movement's gesture represented an anticipation of social modernization rather than its expression or reflection; this anticipation reveals, at the same time, the hiatus or disjunction between ideas and social reality.³ Although correct in arguing that modernism did not correspond to the “totality” of Brazilian social relations, Ortiz's analysis oversimplifies by underestimating the process of change that São Paulo and the country were undergoing at the time.

Arising at the outset of a decade of social, political, and economic transition, modernism was in fact a cultural expression of the transformation and modernization of Brazilian society. The monarchy had been deposed in 1889, a year after the abolition of slavery, and the following years were marked by chronic instability and authoritarian rule under the ideological guise of republican liberalism. A political system dominated by a landed oligarchy and an agro-export economy continued to sustain a rigid, hierarchical, and patriarchal social order. Throughout the First Republic (1889-1930), Brazil continued to exist in a situation of classic economic dependency with coffee and its barons reigning supreme.

Nonetheless, the period also witnessed the intensification of a process of industrialization and urbanization that would lead to a rearticulation of relations of power among the nation's elites. The scarcity of imported manufactured goods during World War I stimulated industrial production. From 1915 to 1919, 5,490 new industries were established, mostly in São Paulo, which became Brazil's leading industrial center. Between 1921 and 1929 São Paulo's “population increased 52٪, gross production rose 324٪, exports through Santos 165٪, imports 180٪, state revenues 820٪, federal revenues 227٪, municipal revenues 271٪, banking transactions 224٪” (Bello 261). Between 1904 and 1923, more than 1.5 million immigrants entered the country, providing cheap (and largely white) labor for industrial expansion, but also importing a tradition of political militancy (Carone 1-6). Strikes protesting low wages and poor working conditions mobilized thousands of workers in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1917, 1918, 1919, and 1920, evidencing a growing, if incipient, class consciousness among the urban proletariat.⁴ The country, in short, was undergoing a process of modernization and social change that would eventually lead to the Revolution of 1930 and beyond.

A number of events occurring in 1922, besides the Semana de Arte Moderna, forcefully mark some of the major currents of Brazil's historical and cultural evolution throughout the decade and into the 1930s. The military [tenentes] revolt in Copacabana revealed dissatisfaction within the armed forces, leading to the 1924 São Paulo revolution, the Prestes Column, the Revolution of 1930, to the corporative Estado Novo in 1937, and, arguably, to the military coup d'état of 1964. Jackson de Figueiredo's founding of the Centro Dom Vital, a Catholic lay organization, resulted in the revitalization of Catholic social thought, often with a strong authoritarian component. The founding of the Brazilian Communist Party attempted to give expression to a growing working class and its incipient political militancy. That same year also witnessed the inauguration of Brazil's first radio station, a sign of technological modernization, and the first loan from the United States, an indication of an eventual rearrangement in the country's relations of dependency with industrialized nations. Modernism joined these other events as part of a broad but often vaguely defined desire for change.

Ortiz's argument represents a rather simplistic application of a concept that Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz has developed in recent years in a number of essays and interviews, starting with the introduction to his critical study of the early novels of the great nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, Ao Vencedor as Batatas. Schwarz's suggestive analytical framework bears directly on questions of modernism and the margins, center and periphery. Writing in and of a “peripheral” context, Schwarz argues that Brazilian imitation of European ideas, fashions and artistic movements has frequently resulted in what he calls ideas which are “out of place,” or a radical disjunction between Brazilian social and economic reality and its forms of ideological sustenance.⁵ The classic example Schwarz provides is the nineteenth-century slaveholding elite's adoption and endorsement of European liberalism. Through a complex process of ideological contortionism or “cultural whiplash,” such ideas are “adapted” to the Brazilian situation without in any way modifying the structure of the country's social relations. In Schwarz's words,

The combination of latifundia and unfree labour […], given durability by its important role in the international market, and later, by internal politics, stood firm through Colony, Emperors and Regencies, through Abolition, the First Republic, and even now is a matter of debate and bullets. Our ideological life, no less determined by national dependency, did vary: at a distance, it followed in the steps of Europe. (Let us point out that it is only the ideology of independence which turns this into a problem; foolishly when it insists on an impossible cultural autonomy; profoundly, when it reflects upon what was truly possible) […]. The latifundia, little changed, saw the baroque, neoclassic, romantic, naturalist and modernist cultures pass by, cultures which in Europe reflected immense transformations in its social order. We could well suppose that here they would lose their point, which in part did occur …

For the arts […] there was always a way to adore, quote, ape, sack, adapt or devour these manners and fashions, so that they would reflect, in their imperfectiveness, a cultural embarrassment in which we would recognize ourselves. …

(27-28)

Schwarz continues his analysis of Brazil's cultural dependency by saying that throughout its social reproduction, “Brazil unceasingly affirms and reaffirms European ideas, always improperly” (29).

Although most would agree that the acritical adoption of foreign ideas, regardless of their source of origin, can introduce distortions in cultural and ideological discourse, numerous critics and social scientists have taken issue with certain aspects of Schwarz's analysis, especially its apparently totalizing and unforgiving nature (“always improperly”). In an early response to Schwarz, Carlos Nelson Coutinho argued that so-called universal culture or ideology is not necessarily external to Brazilian society, imposed by imperialist relations of force. Rather, it is potentially internal, becoming in fact internal when a determinate class or social strata finds (or thinks it finds) in it an expression of its own Brazilian class interests. He suggests, for example, that when a working class began to take shape in Brazil, it did not seek its appropriate theoretical expression in Bororo myths or African religions (68).

Coutinho further notes what he calls a “strange and paradoxical dialectic” between the appropriateness and inappropriateness of foreign or “universal” ideas. Turning to the concrete example offered by Schwarz, Coutinho argues that liberalism did in fact express the interests of Brazil's dominant classes: “free international trade, rational calculation in the commercialization of export products, legal guarantees of equality between members of the rural and commercial oligarchies, and so forth.” Liberalism also served the interests of freemen who were not large landowners, since it “assured their formal right to equality vis-à-vis landowners as well as their difference from slaves.” In these instances, liberalism was clearly not an inappropriate political ideology. In relation to slavery and the clientelistic bonds between the dominant and the dominated, which is the main focus of Schwarz's analysis, liberal ideology did indeed reveal its “out of place” and “inappropriate” face (69).

Coutinho's argument, in short, is that ideas begin to “find their place,” becoming more consistent with realities and class interests they express, with Brazil's passage from formal subordination to real subordination as the internal mode of production, under the combined action of endogenous and exogenous factors, becomes effectively capitalist and subordinated no longer (or not only to commercial capital), but also and above all to international industrial and financial capital. And this occurs, according to Coutinho, because Brazil's class structure increasingly becomes essentially analogous to that of capitalist society in general, and the ideological contradictions of Brazilian cultural life in the twentieth century become increasingly similar to those of universal culture. Referring specifically to modernism, Coutinho writes that “the attempt at renovating artistic techniques starting from the importation of the European vanguard can be interpreted as the expression of an historically necessary attempt to adapt art's productive forces to the new quotidian universe that capitalism, in its modern, industrial form, was introducing in Brazilian life, particularly in São Paulo. …” (70).

Schwarz's analysis is considerably more subtle and complex than it may at first glance seem based on Coutinho's counterargument. Schwarz's concern is not to catalog beliefs and ideologies as appropriate or inappropriate. Rather, he attempts to show how, at different moments in Brazilian history, the very question of appropriateness—or the stability between contradictory conceptions of the national social being—becomes “the centre of ideological and moral preoccupations,” and the “ubiquitous stamp of ‘inauthenticity’” comes to be seen as “the most authentic part of the national drama, its very mark of identity” (13). He argues, ultimately, that simply counterposing the national and the foreign, the authentic and the inauthentic, the original and the imitative, the appropriate and the inappropriate, is reductionist, and that the contradiction between the two, seen within both world and national relations of power, is the key to drawing a more precise figure of Brazil in the modern world. Returning to the specific topic under discussion in this essay, modernism was “in place” in Brazil in that it did in fact represent interests of specific groups and class fractions. It was a movement with its own contradictions and internal struggles. At its most subtle and complex, it did indeed reflect, consciously or not, on the dilemmas raised by colonialism, neocolonialism, and dependency.

THE SOCIAL RELATIONS OF BRAZILIAN MODERNISM

From approximately 1890 to 1920, Brazilian literature had been dominated by an academic, Parnassian discourse that provided a sense of refinement to literati bred on fascination with French culture.⁶ Literature had become officialized and codified according to norms that reflected the archaic, highly stratified class structure of Brazilian society, with poetry the privilege of an intellectual and aristocratic elite. Afrânio Peixoto, a prominent writer of the period, declared literature to be the “sorriso da sociedade” [smile of society]. Properly metrified form was more important than substance, and poetry became a static, decorative mode of literary expression, out of touch with the rapid transformations Brazilian society was undergoing.

Modernism represented a revolt against the vacuous superficiality of such poetry and, at the same time, constituted a literary and artistic expression of rapidly expanding urban, industrial society. The impact of European futurism and its fascination with the velocity of urban life and technological society was of prime importance for the modernists, although they did not adopt Marinetti's program in toto. The modernists used the term futurist in a polemical sense as a global category for those opposed to the archaic forms of the literary establishment, or passadismo. Rarely did they address (or perhaps even understand) the political implications of Marinetti's movement. By 1925 Mário de Andrade and others consciously rejected the futurist label, preferring the broader, and more ambiguous, term modernist (“Assim Falou o Papa do Futurismo”). Other avant-garde movements—expressionism, cubism, dada, and, somewhat later, surrealism—also had varying degrees of impact on the young modernists, and especially on Oswald de Andrade, whose 1924 novel Memórias Sentimentais de João Miramar is a fascinating example of cubo-futurist prose, while his later “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) clearly reveals the influence of expressionism, dada, and surrealism.

The assimilation of the European avant-garde reveals, directly or indirectly, some of modernism's major contradictions, especially in terms of its class composition, political affiliations, and cultural nationalism, which began to dominate literary discussions within two years of the Semana de Arte Moderna. Modernism was an aristocratic revolt by young artists linked to the ruling landed oligarchy, or what Mário de Andrade refers to as the “rural nobility” (Aspectos 238). This might at first glance seem to present a paradox, since the artificial and academic language against which modernism revolted mirrored the oligarchy's ideological consciousness (Lafetá 13). The paradox, however, is more apparent than real.

The economic transformation São Paulo was undergoing was based on export-led industrialization. That is, a large portion of São Paulo's incipient industrial bourgeoisie, and much of the capital used in the industrialization process, derived from the rural oligarchy, the coffee barons. This fraction of the bourgeoisie was well educated, widely traveled, and culturally refined with regard to contemporary styles and customs. To reinforce that refinement, it needed the association with new artistic currents. This economic and political elite was open to change as long as it did not affect their position in the social structure. Modernism's aristocratic backers accepted and sponsored the movement as a means of affirming their superiority by supporting young, talented artists who may shock a complacent and provincial public but who in no way affect the established social order (Iglesias 15).

At the same time, modernism's supporters boasted of their seigniorial origin by attempting to preserve the best of its traditions. In his 1942 lecture, “O Movimento Modernista,” which remains the best critical overview of modernism, Mário de Andrade describes the aristocratic salons where the modernists and their elite patrons would meet to discuss contemporary intellectual and artistic trends. Referring to the cult of tradition within the body of modernism, Mário recalls the “perfect composition” and elegance of the Afro-Brazilian cuisine that was frequently served (Aspectos 239; also Lafetá 14-15). Modernism's artists and the rural aristocracy thus joined together in the cultivation of both modernity and national cultural traditions.

Brazilian modernism, in short, was the creation of artists who, due to their social and economic status, were most aware of and influenced by artistic trends in Europe. This is, of course, nothing new. Brazilian literature and culture have developed historically in what critic Antonio Candido describes as a dialectic between “localism” (premeditated and frequently virulent literary nationalism) and “cosmopolitanism” (the conscious imitation of European styles and genres) (Literatura 109-38). During the colonial period Brazilian literature was, in Candido's words, an “expression of the colonizer and, later, of the Europeanized colonist, heir to his values, that it actively served in an effort to impose those values” (“Literature”). Although Brazil became politically independent in 1822, it remained culturally dependent, imitating European models and standards. The first manifestations of Brazilian romanticism, the country's first important postindependence literary movement, appeared in Paris, where Gonçalves de Magalhães and other young intellectuals founded the magazine Niterói, Revista Brasiliense (1836). Chateaubriand served as a model for the Indianism of romantic novelist José de Alencar. In the 1920s, modernist Oswald de Andrade, “on a trip to Paris, looking down from an atelier on Place Clichy—the world's navel—discovered, bedazzled, his own country” (Prado 5). The point of reference is always Europe.

Antonio Candido argues perceptively that the modernists' borrowing was distinct from previous instances. In the first place, Brazil was much closer to Western Europe than before, not only through increased communication and the country's more intense participation in current social and economic problems, but also through a less accentuated cultural differentiation. Brazil, in other words, had closer contact with events taking place in Europe and was culturally more advanced in the late teens and early 1920s than it had been at the time of romanticism or Parnassianism. Moreover, some of the social stimulants that gave birth to the European artistic vanguard also affected Brazilians: the velocity and increasing mechanization of modern life, accelerated processes of industrialization, and the rise of an increasingly vocal proletariat (Literatura 120-21).

The Brazilian modernists copied Europe, but their copying process included a critical and regenerative component in relation to Brazilian art. Unlike previous artistic movements, which had imitated European aesthetics and techniques after they had become stabilized and somewhat academic in their country of origin, modernism imported an “anti-academic spirit” which freed it from the very necessity of copying. In Mário de Andrade's oft-cited words, modernism's major achievements, despite the European origin of much of the technique used, were “the permanent right to aesthetic experimentation; the modernization of Brazilian artistic intelligence; and the stabilization of a national creative consciousness” (Aspectos 242).

The European avant-garde from which the modernists drank had transformed its artistic tradition in part by polemically incorporating various aspects of primitive art with the purpose of increasing the distance between themselves and the artistic conventions of the past (Nunes xi-liii). To justify modernism's use of primitivism, a number of critics have argued that the primitive was as much Brazilian as European. Antonio Candido explains that the modernists' cultural familiarity with black fetishism [sic], ex-votos, and folk poetry predisposed them to accept naturally and easily assimilate artistic processes which in Europe represented a profound rupture with the social milieu and spiritual traditions. Using techniques learned from the European avant-garde to reelaborate elements of the national culture, they shaped a form of expression that was at once local and universal. Following Candido's analysis, João Luiz Lafetá suggests that primitivism, in the form of black and Amerindian expression, was just as present and active in Brazil as the European culture of the predominantly white ruling classes and therefore naturally found a place in modernist discourse (Candido, Literatura 120-21; Lafetá 13; Nunes).

Although frequently repeated, the argument has a touch of speciousness. The modernists may have been aware of black “fetishism” and diverse forms of primitivism and may have been able to assimilate such processes with ease, but they did not see them as elements for aesthetic elaboration or attempt to incorporate them into their art until after the Europeans had done so. In this sense they were not unlike the romantics, who were aware of indigenous peoples but did not attempt to develop an Indianist current in Brazilian literature until Chateaubriand provided a model. Furthermore, black and Amerindian expression may have been as present and active in Brazil as hegemonic cultural forms of the elite, but they were in many ways displaced, repressed, or expropriated by dominant forms. They were, in short, voiceless in the cultural circles of the ruling class. While they searched for representation, the modernists challenged representation itself.

Schwarz has identified another ramification of cultural copying. A constant concern with latest developments in Europe frequently results in a lack of interest in previous generations of Brazilian writers, causing a lack of continuity in literary production (2). Modernism arose in reaction to the dominant literary norms of the preceding decade. Although such writers as Olavo Bilac, Francisca Júlia, and Alphonsus Guimarães were undeniably passé by the 1920s, the modernists (with the obvious exception of Mário de Andrade) tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject the totality of the previous decades' literary production. Their lack of interest in the work of writers such as Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto, who died in 1922, is telling, indicative of the limits of their social awareness and critical vision of Brazilian reality.⁷

Despite these perhaps natural limitations, modernism was the first artistic movement in Brazil in which cultural and artistic relationships with Europe were viewed as problematic or as presenting a dilemma for artists desirous of creating a modern Brazilian art. This dilemma found multiple expressions in modernist writing and was ultimately responsible for the increasing nationalization of the movement after 1924. As early as 1922, however, Mário de Andrade expressed the tension inherent in his activity as a Brazilian artist with a European cultural background, when he wrote, in “O Trovador,” “Sou um tupi tangendo um alaúde” [I'm a Tupi Indian strumming a lute!], or when, in “Inspiração,” he describes São Paulo as a “Galicismo a berrar nos desertos da América!” [Gallicism crying in the wilderness of America!]. In Mário de Andrade the tension would reach its paroxysm in the poem “Improviso do Mal da América” (1928) in which the poet decries the “grito imperioso de brancura” [imperious cry of whiteness] that shapes intellectuals like himself. In the “Manifesto Antropófago,” Oswald de Andrade provided a more ironic formula with his parodic “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.” This dilemma would shape much of the modernist debate in the second half of the 1920s.

THE QUESTION OF NATIONALISM

A dual movement of destruction and construction was implicit in the modernist gesture. Modernism sought to destroy the rigidly stratified norms of its literary predecessors and at the same time create a new Brazilian literature which was at once up to date with the most advanced trends in Europe and an expression of Brazil's individuality. The “target” of modernism's early wrath—Parnassianism and vacuous rhetoric—was easily and quickly defeated, as much by atrophy and the deaths of the leading figures of Brazilian literature as by the arguments of the new generation. Raimundo Correia died in 1911, Olavo Bilac in 1918, Francisca Júlia in 1920, Alphonsus de Guimarães in 1921, and Ruy Barbosa, who, perhaps more than any other, represented traditional values, in 1923. With the “old guard” gone, if not always forgotten, the question of brasilidade began to dominate literary debates which had earlier focused almost exclusively on aesthetic renewal. The goal of modernism shifted from the “modernization” of Brazilian art to a desire to use the freedom of expression conquered in the movement's initial phase to create an authentically Brazilian literature in consonance with “national” reality.

Literary historiography suggests that the movement became “nationalized” in 1924 with the publication of Oswald de Andrade's “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” [Manifiesto of Brazil-Wood Poetry]. In fact, a sometimes diffuse nationalist spirit characterized the modernists' activities and Brazilian intellectual life generally even prior to 1922. The years immediately preceding the eclosion of modernism witnessed the founding of nationalist journals such as Revista do Brasil (1916), Brazilea (1917), and Gil Blas (1920). A number of nationalist organizations also appeared in the late teens: Ação Social Nacionalista (1915), Bilac's Liga de Defesa Nacional (1916), Propaganda Nativista (1919) and the Liga Nacionalista, which later evolved into the Liga do Voto Secreto (1925). In his 1942 lecture, Mário de Andrade mentions the São Paulo regionalist movement which had been launched by the Revista do Brasil, the nationalist editorial activity of Monteiro Lobato, and Menotti del Picchia's 1917 poem Juca Mulato, which portrays a mulatto field hand in love with the landowner's daughter. Mário's own Paulicéia Desvairada, widely acknowledged to be the first book of modernist verse, is a song of and to the city of São Paulo (Aspectos 235). Modernism, in short, cannot be isolated from this broader movement of cultural and political nationalism.

Although one can clearly detect nationalist elements in modernism's earliest phase, major emphasis was undoubtedly on questions of aesthetic renewal rather than cultural nationalism. By 1924 emphasis had shifted in the other direction as artists began incorporating regional and popular elements into their verse and searching for proper cultural symbols to express their nationalist concerns. Oswald de Andrade's publication in that year of the “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” was followed two years later by the formation of rival groups, notably Verde-Amarelo (1926) and its successor Anta (1927), both by Menotti del Picchia, Cassiano Ricardo, and Plínio Salgado. In 1928 Oswald responded to these two groups with the “Manifesto Antropófago,” published in the first issue of the iconoclastic Revista de Antropofagia.

Lafetá suggests that by inserting itself in a broad process of discovery and interpretation of national reality, modernism attempted to shake the ideological structures that underlie cultural production prior to 1922. He sees in this process a convergence of the movement's aesthetic and ideological projects. He argues that the artificial and academic language against which modernism revolted mirrored the ruling landed oligarchy's ideological consciousness, which had created and sustained rigid social structures destined to be overthrown or transformed by the country's development (immigration, industrialization, urbanization, etc.) (13).

Modernism's concern with national reality allowed it to add the “liberating” power of folklore and popular literature to its campaign of aesthetic subversion. “Repressed components” of the Brazilian personality could thus break through the “blockade” imposed by the dominant ideology. But, Lafetá is quick to note, it was the aesthetic rupture that permitted this “ideological” break and occasioned their convergence. By bringing such elements into erudite artistic production, in one swift stroke modernism broke through the ideology that formented a distorted vision of Brazilian reality by segregating the popular and inaugurated an artistic language consonant with the period's modernity. Lafetá's asserted “liberation” of folk and popular elements would seem to suggest that modernism was in some way a literary movement that expressed the anxieties and revindications of the popular classes.

The modernists' use of popular and folk elements has yet to be thoroughly analyzed, and Lafetá's assertion of their liberating impact needs to be examined in more detail. If the attack on language implied an attack on the rural oligarchy's ideology, modernism was at the same time supported by and explicitly supportive of that very oligarchy and other elite sectors. The attack clearly had limits. Furthermore, modernism did not value popular culture in its entirety. Referring to musical nationalism—that is, the incorporation of national motifs in erudite musical composition—José Miguel Wisnik shows convincingly that the modernists tended to adopt and stylize only those forms deriving from rural popular culture, which they idealized as the “pure, hidden physiognomy of the nation.” They tended to reject the emerging urban popular culture, such as that of black or proletarian communities, which reflected the social contradictions of urban society. Modernism's musical nationalism was unable to accept the authenticity of the popular cultural manifestations of urban life since they would, in Wisnik's words, “disorganize its centralized, homogeneous and paternalistic vision of national culture” (131-33).

Following Wisnik's analysis, the incorporation of folklore, regional culture, and popular forms of expression, especially those of rural origin, may just as well imply an attempt to capture and preserve a world and a social order that was disappearing in the wake of the country's modernization. Antonio Candido has described the modernists' incorporation of folklore and popular elements as a kind of literary populism, which implies the manipulation of the popular by the elite (Literatura 164; Brito, Poesia, xiii-xxxiv). The use of popular elements, whether seen as incorporation or populist expropriation, does not necessarily imply a project of “liberation” as Lafetá would suggest. One must thus take with a large grain of salt suggestions such as that of art critic Aracy Amaral that the modernist group actually embarked on a sort of suicide mission, since it was dedicated to a series of demands which, if realized, would mean the extinction of their social class (1: 69).

Any project of cultural nationalism implies a certain concept of the nation. Along with different aesthetic propositions, modernism also entailed diverse nations of Brazil and Brazilian literature. Alfredo Bosi suggests that during the heroic phase from 1922 to 1930 the modernists could only see Brazil either as a “harlequinate São Paulo, which was the space of modernity, or as the mythical territory of Macunaíma and anthropophagy, Martim Cererê, and Cobra Norato, a Brazil whose contradictions were magically resolved through the poetic word” (315). Modernism, in other words, was unable to see Brazilian society in terms of contradiction, preferring instead to forge a national unity by attempting a utopian return to the country's pre-Cabralian innocence and exploring the nation's collective unconscious through what Bosi has called a “tupi-baroque-surreal” conception of Brazil. Within this genral tendency, however, there were different proposals with distinct ideological implications.

With Pau-Brasil (1924) Oswald de Andrade attempted to reverse the historically imitative stance of Brazilian literature and the one-directional flow of artistic influence by creating a poetry for export, just as Brazil-wood was the nation's first export product. Oswald's movement was based on the idea that a native originality, still extant in popular manifestations of Brazilian culture, had been repressed and deformed by an erudite or elitist perspective (“o lado doutor,” in Oswald's words) imported and imposed from Europe beginning with the first colonizers. Opposing elite forms of knowledge (rational and analytical) with popular forms (intuitive and synthetic), Pau-Brasil sought a synthesis between such dichotomies as past and present, modernization and backwardness, country and city. To discover the true Brazil one must break through artificial, imported ways of seeing and create an authentic national culture integrated with national reality. “See with open eyes,” says Oswald's manifesto.⁸

Although Pau-Brasil criticized imitation of imported solutions, it was not xenophobic in its nationalism. The manifesto itself recognizes that French poet Blaise Cendrars has given Oswald an important suggestion: “You have the train loaded, ready to leave.” Oswald wanted to create a new kind of poetry based on an intuitive perception of Brazilian reality. The native originality was to be found in Brazilian cuisine, folklore, history, economics, ethnological formation, as well as in the peculiarly Brazilian version of the Portuguese language, with all its errors (Nunes xix). The originality was to be discovered by forgetting the thought schemes imposed through years of conditioning by a social and economic elite (like Oswald himself, we might add) educated in Europe or according to European standards.

Pau-Brasil sought to take advantage of the benefits of technology, but put them to use in the creation of a national culture, to take advantage of what modern society had to offer without rejecting the best of Brazilian traditions. It wanted to synthesize, as the manifesto puts it, the “forest and the school,” creating a “vision to encompass the cylinders of mills, electric turbines, factories, questions of foreign exchange, without losing sight of the National Museum” (Oswald de Andrade, “Manifiesto” 187). More importantly, Pau-Brasil recognized the existence of a primitive, collective innocence and national purity that had been effaced by centuries of false interpretations deriving from European, not Brazilian, experience, and which could be overcome through knowledge which was at the same time emotional, intellectual, sentimental, and ingenuous (Martins, Minas gerais, 91; Nunes xix). Pau-Brasil poetry was to be “Agile and candid. Like a child.”

Pau-Brasil is not of course without its contradictions and paradoxes. By borrowing extensively from the European vanguard, Oswald himself participates in the scheme of imposing foreign values. Although Pau-Brasil implicitly criticizes imitation of Europe, it is deeply influenced by the European avant-garde, especially cubism and expressionism (the first in its concern with reducing artistic form to its essential minimal elements, the second with its psychological primitivism, valorizing “raw states” of the collective national soul) (Nunes xix). Today Pau-Brasil is canonized as marking the beginning of the nationalist current in Brazilian modernist literature, but in the 1920s Oswald was harshly criticized for being too heavily influenced by Europe. Menotti del Picchia consistently referred to Oswald's movement as Pau-Paris, while Tristão de Athayde called it “literatura suicida” [suicidal literature].

Even those more sympathetic also voiced criticism. Mário de Andrade considered the “Falação,” which opens the volume Poesia Pau-Brasil and summarizes the ideas of the manifesto, to be “a prime example of inconsistency and frivolity” (“Oswald de Andrade”). Carlos Drummond de Andrade criticized the superficiality of Oswald's primitivism and the poverty of his poetic technique. Furthermore, 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 (Amaral 124).

In 1928, Oswald reelaborated Pau-Brasil in his Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibalist Manifesto], which in many ways constitutes a response to a conservative nationalist subcurrent of Brazilian modernism which had emerged in 1926-1927 (Verde-Amarelo) and, subsequently, Anta). In the second manifesto, cannibalism becomes a metaphorical form of resistance and a new attitude toward cultural relationships with hegemonic powers. Instead of closing oneself to European culture, which is implicit in some more xenophobic currents of Brazilian modernism, the antropófagos sought to devour it, taking advantage of its positive aspects, rejecting the negative, and creating an original national culture that would be a source, and not a mere receptacle, of forms of artistic expression.

The cannibalist movement is a frequently ingenious metaphorical response to the dilemma of Third World intellectuals whose education and, frequently, inclination is European and yet who want to free themselves from the bonds of European hegemony and create an art faithful to national reality. Oswald's movement recognizes the need for taking advantage of cultural elements from diverse sources and adapting them to Brazilian reality. Vera Chalmers refers to Oswald's “anthropophagic attitude” as a way of organizing elements already saturated with cultural signification. Imported culture influences must be devoured, digested, and critically re-elaborated in terms of local conditions (19).

The cannibal was not, of course, unique to Brazilian literature at the time. It had appeared in European avant-garde literature as early as 1902, and can be seen in the work of Jarry, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Marinetti, as well as the Dadaists. In 1920, Francis Picabia published the review Cannibale as part of the Dadaist program. For Dada, cannibalism was an aggressive, antibourgeois element used to shock and insult. In Marinetti, cannibalism has the purely ritual sense of the absorption of primitive values. According to Heitor Martins, cannibalism is the ultimate degree of primitivism and is shocking “to the Western spirit recently freed from Parnassian Hellenism and the sickly ‘finesse’ of art nouveau” (21).

In Oswald de Andrade, the idea of the cannibal was used to scandalize, to threaten the imagination of the reader with the possibility of its permanent resurgence. As Benedito Nunes puts it, the word “antropofagia” was used as a verbal weapon, as an instrument of personal aggression with explosive resonances. “It is a catalyzing word, reactive and elastic, which mobilizes negations in a single negation, of which the practice of cannibalism, anthropophagic devouring, is a bloody symbol, a mixture of insult and sacrilege, of scorn and public flagellation, like the verbal substitute of physical aggression against an enemy of many faces” (xxvi). Cannibalism, in Oswald's program, becomes the underlying force of all social relationships. It is a new paradigm that expresses, in allegorical terms, the revolt of the colonizer against the colonized. It represents an attempt to devour the advantages of the former without being culturally decharacterized or destroyed. The favored weapons in antropofagia's metaphorical deglutition: corrosive humor, irreverence, parody, and sarcasm.

Nunes sees antropofagia as at once an organic metaphor, a diagnosis, and a cure. As a metaphor it is inspired by the Tupi custom of cannibalizing their warrior-enemies as a means of absorbing their strengths. In Oswaldian terms it encompasses the consumption of everything that should be rejected, assimilated, and overcome in the creation of intellectual and cultural autonomy. The diagnosis is that Brazilian society has been traumatized by colonial repression and conditioning, the paradigm of which is the suppression of the original anthropophagous ritual by the Jesuits. Catechism is exemplary of this censorial action. The cure is to use that which was originally repressed—cannibalism—as a weapon against historically repressive social, political, and intellectual mindframes as a means of recovering the original and authentic bases of Brazilian society. Oswald thus rejects the cultural icons imposed by centuries of colonial rule and dependent relationships, replacing them with native symbols deriving from Amerindian civilizations (xxvi).

Oswald calls for a return to a utopian, pre-Cabralian golden age of matriarchal society when people, rather than enslaving their enemies, ate them. It was perceived as a society based on natural communism, with a just distribution of material and spiritual goods. Although his proposal represents to a large extent a nostalgic desire to return to a premodern Paradise Lost,⁹ Oswald does not reject the benefits of technological society. His program is influenced by Lévy-Bruhl's concept of the primitive mind as being at a prelogical stage as well as by Keyserling's idea that modern civilized man alienated by technology, not primitive man, is the true barbarian. Oswald paradoxically accepts the advantages of technological society, but resists the analytical consciousness that gave it birth.

Antropofagia proposes a permanent revolution, the Caraíba revolution, which synthesizes then subsumes all previous revolutions:

We want the Caraíba revolution. Greater than the French revolution. The unification of all effective revolts in the direction of Man. Without us Europe would not even have had its poor declaration of the rights of man […].

Filiation. Contact with Caraíba Brazil. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the surrealist Revolution and to Keyserling's technological barbarian. We move forward.

(Do Pau-Brasil 14)

Reversing traditional interpretations, the New World thus becomes the source of all revolutions and of all theories of primitivism; the Caraíba revolution, in turn, becomes the synthesis, the beginning and the end, of all western revolutions. It will transcend capitalism, fascism, and communism, returning humankind to a state of primitive yet bountiful innocence.

Oswald's program, of course, constitutes a utopian vision. Roberto Schwarz has argued that antropofagia is a triumphalist interpretation of Brazilian underdevelopment which plays on the disjunction between bourgeois values and those of the rural patriarchy, between urban society and the country's backwardness. Primitive elements are seen in positive rather than negative terms. In Schwarz's words, Oswald “advocated cultural irreverence in place of subaltern obfuscation, using the metaphor of ‘devouring’ the alien: a copy, to be sure, but with regenerative effect” (8). Brazilian primitivism will give back to Europe a modern spirit, free from the constraints of repressive religious doctrine and the utilitarianism of capitalism. Oswald rejected any sense of inferiority, placing Brazilian culture on a par with the best Europe had to offer. Oswald's proposal not only is utopian, but also reflects a considerable degree of naiveté and exaggerated optimism concerning cultural relationships. Citing Schwarz once again, “historical distance allows us to see the ingenuousness and conceit contained in these propositions,” for Oswald's idea was that “modern material progress will make possible a leap from pre-bourgeois society directly to paradise” (7).

The most important literary work which has been associated with Antropofagia was Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma, although its composition preceded Oswald's movement by almost two years. Macunaíma, is an allegorical discussion of the nature of Brazilian civilization, the national psyche, and the relationship of Brazil to European cultures. Characterized by its author as a “rhapsody,” it orchestrates popular and folk motifs in Rabelaisian fashion around a structural core formed by indigenous legends collected by German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg in the headwaters of the Orinoco in northern Brazil and southern Venezuela early in this century. The novel satirizes emerging technological society, bombastic rhetorical forms of language, and Brazilian mores and customs. Although it is literally filled with cannibals of all sorts, most notably the Italo-Brazilian industrialist Venceslau Pietro-Pietra, or Piamã, cannibalism does not have in Macunaíma the programmatic or ontological sense it does in Oswald's movement.

Macunaíma's compositional processes relate directly to Mário de Andrade's broader vision of cultural nationalism, which ultimately differs from that of both Oswald de Andrade and more conservative nationalist currents of modernism. Mário saw nationalism as the first step in a process of self-discovery that would contribute to universal cultural values to the extent that it was authentic and faithful to itself. His ultimate goal was the integration of Brazilian culture into universality, not the closure implied by more xenophobic concepts of nationalism. In this sense, by the mid-1920s, Mário came to criticize the superficiality of such concepts and their lack of critical self-awareness and discussion. In 1927, for example, he declared himself a “non-nationalist Brazilian,” since he felt that nationalism, as propagated by reigning intellectual circles, had become little more than a fad (López 1972, 204-07).

Mário recognized the difficulty of creating an authentic national culture in a country discovered and colonized by Europeans and permeated with European values and standards. His 1928 poem, “Improviso do Mal da América,” is perhaps his most acute expression of the dilemma faced by Brazilian intellectuals. Although he recognizes the diversity of Brazilian society, he is dominated by a “grito imperioso de brancura” [imperious cry of whiteness] that impedes his own cultural integration: “Me sinto só branco agora, só branco em minha alma crivada de raças!” [Now I feel only white, only white in my race-riddled soul!] Mário felt that the dominant whiteness slowly destroys the cultural differentiation provided by other racial identities.¹⁰

Mário's artistic answer to this dilemma, in Macunaíma and elsewhere, was to use popular forms of cultural expression structurally, and not merely ornamentally, in erudite cultural forms. He began by systematizing errors committed in everyday speech as a means of capturing an authentically national social and psychological character on the level of language. By bringing those errors into educated speech and writing, he hoped to help in the formation of a Brazilian literary language. His interest in popular culture as a means of understanding Brazil evolved into a systematic study of Brazilian folklore and the re-creation of popular forms on an erudite level. Knowing and incorporating the foundations of popular Brazilian thought, he felt he could help lead Brazil to its self-knowledge and its passage from nationalism to universalism in the higher arts (López 1972, 102). Macunaíma is the artistic culmination of Mário de Andrade's research in Brazilian folklore and popular forms of expression.

Through the combination of disparate elements Macunaíma attempts to create an allegorical synthesis of Brazil. Although clearly nationalist in intent, Macunaíma takes the discussion to a higher and more complex level than most of Andrade's contemporaries. Macunaíma critically dissects reigning myths such as that of “o Brasil-grande” [Great Brazil], which reached its paroxysm in Count Afonso Celso's Por Que me Ufano do Meu País (1900) but which found resonances in the debates of the 1920s. Macunaíma discusses the relationship between Brazil and Europe and the possibility of creating a new civilization in the tropics. More importantly, it provides a model for creating a national literature. Through its parody of Brazilian society, language, and culture and its radical recasting of literary language based on the incorporation of popular elements—what in the novel is called a “fala impura,” an “impure speech”—Macunaíma reaffirms the critical, regenerative value of literary invention.¹¹

Mário proposes a critical vision of Brazil's place vis-à-vis Europe, and Macunaíma is a penetrating discussion of the Brazilian national and cultural identity. In Mário's view, Brazil has never been able to overcome its colonial or dependent status. The novel's subtitle is O Herói sem Nenhum Caráter [The Hero with No Character]. According to Mário, the Brazilian has no character because he has neither his own civilization nor an awareness of a cultural tradition. He explains in one of Macunaíma's prefaces that Brazil is like a twenty-year-old boy. General tendencies of character development may be perceived, but nothing may be concretely confirmed (cited in López, Macunaíma 87-89).

Gilda de Mello e Souza has cogently argued that the central focus of Macunaíma's final episodes is the direction of Brazilian culture, torn between a desire for independence and autonomy, on the one hand, and continued subservience to Europe on the other (60-63). The indecisive Macunaíma, symbolic of Brazil, is caught between his loyalty to Vei, a Sol [Vei, the Sun], who represents tropical civilization, and the Uiara, a “beautiful fair-skinned damsel” inhabiting the cold, that is, European, waters of a lagoon “covered with gold and silver.” Angered by his vacillation, Vei “lashed the hero's back with rays of heat like a cat'o-nine tails,” throwing him into the piranha-infested water. Having lost his “treasures” through mutilation, Macunaíma tires of living on earth and becomes the constellation Ursa Major. His punishment for having betrayed the potentiality of tropical civilization is his transformation into the “beautiful but futile twinkling of yet one more constellation.”¹²

Macunaíma is thus a pessimistic view of cultural relationships. The hero is defeated because “His life, with so many adventures, so much love-making, such deceit, such suffering, such heroism, was in the end not worth living. He lacked the spirit to straighten himself out.” In other words, Macunaíma lacks the strength to align his future with a tropical civilization and, conversely, to resist the seduction of Europe. He fails to live up to his potential, and has no project for the future, no direction. David Haberly correctly suggests that Macunaíma is not only an etiological myth of national creation, but an explanation of the annihilation of the future, a myth of national destruction (159).

A certain moralism is inherent in this pessimistic prognosis. The “hero” Macunaíma is the prototype of the malandro (trickster or scoundrel). He is both good and evil, courageous and cowardly, capable and inept. His cultural and psychological ambivalence and his failure to define himself vis-à-vis the possibility of a more authentic civilization lead to his self-destruction and the destruction of his race. He leaves no heir; he is the last member of the tribe. Only a talking parrot remembers the hero's adventures, and it tells Macunaíma's story to the novel's narrator. Malandragem (hustling, trickery, roguery) and ambivalence are not solutions to the problems of Brazil's future.

The conclusion to the novel anticipates Mário de Andrade's own intellectual evolution in the 1930s and 1940s as he moved toward an increasingly instrumental vision of art and literature. In his article “Elegia de Abril” (1941) and again in his celebrated 1942 lecture on modernism, Mário regretted the movement's lack of political awareness and participation:

In the great majority we were abstentionists. I cannot even say “abstentionists,” which implies a conscious attitude of the spirit: we were simply unaware. Not even the nationalism we practiced with a bit more breadth than our regionalist predecessors was able to arouse in us any awareness of the role of intellectuals or their responsibility toward art and humanity, their relationship to society and the state.

(Aspectos 186)

In fact, not all the modernists were abstentionists or unaware of the political implications of their intellectual and artistic activity. Those who were aware, however, were more often than not traditional intellectuals closely aligned with the ruling class and engaged in the ideological justification of the social order. As Joan Dassin has suggested, in the 1920s the modernists and the economic sectors that supported them remained essentially indifferent to the concerns of the middle class and the proletariat (164).

The Revolution of 1930 would bring about a new political reality in which indifference or political neutrality was no longer a viable alternative for writers and intellectuals. Liberalism, the guiding political and economic doctrine—in theory if not practice—of Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930), was largely discredited, and the appeal of authoritarian or totalitarian solutions was great. Ideological divisions within modernism, which began with the increasing nationalization of the movement in 1924 and increased with the creation of the Partido Democrático in 1926, became exacerbated. Some, like Oswald de Andrade, joined the Brazilian Communist Party; others, like Plínio Salgado and Tasso da Silveira, were attracted by fascism or other authoritarian solutions. Yet others, like Mário de Andrade, remained independent of political parties and continued grappling with the immense paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas facing intellectuals and Brazilian society as a whole.

Brazilian modernism, in conclusion, is a complex, multifaceted movement of intellectual and artistic production. Its importance derives from its participation in a broader process of social modernization and from its questioning of traditional literary and artistic values. The task facing critics of the movement is to broaden and deepen the analysis, resisting limiting canonical interpretations based solely on aesthetic criteria or Eurocentric conceptions of modernism and reinserting the movement in its objective sociohistorical context by examining its different subcurrents, tendencies, and practitioners in terms of their diverse articulations and affiliations with the social and ideological ground.

Notes

1. On the Semana, see Batista, et.al.; and Brito, História do Modernismo Brasileiro and “A Revolução Modernista.”

2. The most important of these reviews were Klaxon, 1922; Ariel, 1923; Novíssima, 1923; Estética, 1924; A Revista, 1925; Revista do Brasil (2nd phase), 1926; Terra Roxa e outras terras, 1926; Festa, 1927; Movimento Brasileiro, 1928; Verde, 1927; Revista de Antropofagia, 1928; Revista Nova, 1931; Lanterna Verde, 1934. A number of these reviews have received close attention from scholars in recent years. See Boaventura (1978 and 1985); Caccese; Guelfi; Lara; and Napoli.

3. Ortiz need not have gone so far in his search for an explanation. In his famous 1942 lecture, Mário de Andrade, widely considered the leading figure of Brazilian modernism, explained that “the modernist movement was the foreteller, the preparer, and in many places the creator of a new stage of the national spirit” (Aspectos 232).

4. On the proletariat during this period see Pinheiro.

5. A number of Schwarz's seminal essays, including the introduction to Ao Vencedor as Batatas, have been translated and collected in the volume Misplaced Ideas. I prefer to render the expression “fora de luar” as “out of place” rather than “misplaced.”

6. For a thorough and insightful discussion of French influence on “premodernist” Brazilian writers, see Needell, especially Chapter 6.

7. Silviano Santiago has argued for closing the books on immanent interpretations of modernism and for reexamining the work of Euclides da Cunha and Lima Barreto as a step toward a future reevaluation of contemporary Brazilian literature as a whole. See “Fechado Para Balanço.”

8. For a thorough discussion of Pau-Brasil, see Moraes 83-89.

9. The expression is borrowed from Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 15.

10. For an intelligent discussion of Andrade's concern with cultural and racial identities, see Haberly 123-60.

11. See Reis, “Passando a limpo” and “A fala impura.” Also Barbosa, “A Modernidade do Romance,” 30-33.

12. I cite from E. A. Goodland's translation.

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