Embassy of Brazil

Brazilian literature has evolved in such distinct stages that its only unifying factor is the continuing use of the Portuguese language. And, of course, its origin was in the literature of Portugal, from which it sprouted like an extension, taking several centuries to acquire its own character.

The first document in Brazilian literature is considered to be the Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, telling the Portuguese king about the discovery of the new land in 1500. This letter to a certain extent defined the mood of colonial literature in those first centuries by the praise of natural resources in the forests, the wealth of water, fauna, fertile soil, the pleasant climate, so different from the rigors of the northern hemisphere, and the friendly Indians. For a long time this was the tone adopted by those who wrote in praise of the recently annexed tropical land. In the middle of all this somewhat conventional praise, however, there were heard some more distinctive voices which gave a livelier character to Second Century Baroque.

But it was only at the end of the third century that the first identifiable movement made an appearance, when a group of poets from Minas Gerais, in harmony with the European aesthetic canon of its day - Arcadianism - tried to adapt it to local sensibilities. They were also in favour of independence from Portugal and passed into history by taking part in the conspiracy known as the "Inconfidência mineira" in 1789.

During this period the claims for independence and self-government by the intellectuals became openly nativist, even at a time before they had become conscious of belonging to a nation. They went on to give voice to the idea of being sons of a land other than Europe, even if it expressed itself by means of a European language.

Romanticism would reach the highest point of fulfillment and theory in a literature in the act of seceding from its Portuguese sources and it is no coincidence that this tendency becomes more evident in the wake of the political independence achieved in 1822. The romantic writers already believed that it was their historical mission to create a truly national literature. And they wondered if by underlining their separateness and giving an outlet to the picturesque they could be making the mistake of giving in to the demands of being other-than-European. Indianism, the most obvious nativist creation, runs this risk .

This was the debate which occupied most of the nineteenth century, when, after the Call from Ipiranga, it became urgent to define the parameters of an aesthetically autonomous literature in a country which was now politically independent.

The question under discussion was not easy. On one side there was the argument that independent people should produce literature which concentrated on local matters, luxuriant tropical nature and typical local characters who were not to be found in the mother country, such as pioneers, cattlemen, backwoodsmen, black slaves, Indians. It is true that this needed to be done and was done. On the other hand the doubt crept in that, in doing this, writers were producing exoticism for outside consumption.

The path which avoided either of these choices, in other words neither an imitation of foreign styles nor a mere reproduction of local color, showed itself to be extremely complicated and was to depend upon a gradual build-up which took the effort of more than one generation of writers.

It is with realist prose that a mature internal critical vision was reached, coming from within and directed towards that which would give the nation its particular character, after three centuries of moving away from its origins in another continent. Such a character was the specific outcome of a variety of factors, colliding and interacting with a colonial society in the tropics, which was agricultural, patriarchal, built on slavery and racially interbred.

The triumph of realism was completed by modernism in the twentieth century. With the ghosts of the previous century exorcised by the acquisition of maturity, the modernists faced up to their relationship with their origins in another way, by declaring their kinship with Europe and at the same time their separateness. In this way they both preached and practiced an art which shook to its foundations the academicism which had become institutionalized in the literature of the mother country, represented above all by naturalism, parnassianism and symbolism. They brought themselves up-to-date with the avant-garde outside Brazil. And they constructed an unprecedented platform from which to grapple with the particular paradox that had always disturbed Brazilian intellectuals: how to assert a Brazilian personality without appearing quaint.

The realization of this aim affects the entire output of the modernist group, whether prose or verse. But it found its particular expression in the movement known as anthropophagism. This involves an anti-colonial attitude where the consumption without guilt of the best of European civilization exists alongside the rejection of everything that does not expressly have to do with the interests of the eater, or which puts him in the subordinate position of a mere portrayer of local color.

The journey is complete and Brazilian literature is ready to engage in other battles, such as those, defined but not yet resolved, resulting from the arrival of the culture industry and the impact of American influence. And this, after having spent so much time defining itself specifically as the flowering from the collision of cultures.

The most notable figures were Padre Antonio Vieira (1608 - 1697) and Gregório de Matos (1636 - 1696). The former, a renowned preacher famous for his grandiloquent style, using complicated arguments and imagery, very much in the Baroque style, left a vast output of sermons and letters, besides being a noted militant in causes concerning the colonial population. The latter, known as "The Mouth of Hell", was an extraordinary satirical poet, as well as a lyrical and religious one. He attacked everything and everyone in his verses, endowed as he was with an energetic, saturnine sense of humor. Even today he retains a prominent position in Brazilian literature, as well as being a leading light of baroque poetry.

Two passages are given below as examples of the kind of literature known as "chronicles and travel memoirs". The first is from Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil (1618) by Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão: "This land, in so far as it is peopled today by the Portuguese, has its beginning at the Amazonas River, also known as the Pará, which is located astride the equinoctial line, and runs as far as the captaincy of São Vincente, which is the last of those to the south of that line, and between the first settlement and São Vincente there are many fertile lands, settlements, notable rivers, famous ports and bays quite capable of accommodating large fleets."

The second is taken from the História do Brasil (1627) by Frei Vicente do Salvador: "In Brazil there are huge forests of uncultivated trees, cedar, oak, mahogany, Brazilian hardwood and others unknown in Spain, very strong woods from which the most sturdy galleons can be constructed and, what is more, from the bark of some of which can be extracted coarse fibers to seal cracks and to make ropes for the shrouds and cables, so that here there is everything required to build ships if the King would authorize us to do it here (....). Nor are the Brazilian woods less beautiful than they are strong, because they are of all colours, white, black, red, yellow, purple, pink and speckled green, but apart from the red wood, known as brazil wood, and the yellow, called "tataiúba", and the pink "araribá", the rest do not yield dyes from their colors (....). There are other trees called "caboreíbas", which give the sweetest balsam for making medicines, and the Supreme Pontiff has declared it a suitable material for holy anointing and confirmation..."

Before these writers, in the first century after the arrival of the Portuguese, Father José de Anchieta (1534 - 1597) dealt with the language problem by writing plays in Tupi with the intention of converting the Indians, and was also a fine lyric poet in the religious style. Shortly after this, Bento Teixeira wrote Prosopopéia (1601), considered to be the first genuinely Brazilian literary work, a eulogy in praise of the captain-general of Pernambuco, of a kind that flourished in later colonial times.

Arcadianism

As a reaction to the excesses of baroque ornamentation, Arcadianism sought a simplicity of expression and an idealization of country life. In Brazil some of the authors of the Minas Group became Arcadians - since it was in Minas Gerais that the new tendency was most prevalent - such as the poets Cláudio Manuel da Costa (1729 - 1789) and Tomás Antonio Gonzaga (1744 - 1810), the latter finally made popular thanks to his love poems, As Liras, in praise of Marília de Dirceu. Earlier Arcadians were Santa Rita Durão (1722 - 1784), who wrote the epic poem Caramuru, and Basílio da Gama (1714 - 1795), author of another epic poem called O Uruguai.

Indianism

Indianism, offspring of romanticism, idealized the Indian as a national hero. Its most famous adherents are José de Alencar (1829 - 1877) in the field of prose (O Guarani, Iracema, Ubirajara, among other works) and Gonçalves Dias (1823 - 1864) in the field of poetry (his "American Poems" are to be found spread among several books, amongst which stand out the poems I-Juca, Pirama and Marabá, as well as the unfinished Os Timbiras). However, neither writer restricted himself to Indianism alone and they are of major importance also in other forms of literature. A marginal voice within romanticism, Castro Alves (1847 - 1871), diverging from Indianism, has gone down in history as the poet of the slaves, producing abolitionist poems such as Navio Negreiro and Vozes d'África.

Personalities

Typical Brazilian Character

José de Alencar produced, almost single-handed, a veritable map of the regional characteristics of Brazil in his novels, stories and dramas. Among his populous gallery of characters are the backwoodsman, the cattleman, the pioneer, the black slave, the Indian, the recent immigrant, the missionary, the peasant, the plantation-owner etc. His works are set in every type of environment, from the arid outback to the savannahs, passing through forests, mines and new settlements, not to mention urban settings. Among his novels are As Minas de Prata, O Gaúcho, Til, A Guerra dos Mascates and O Sertanejo. His work was complemented by that of regionalists, amongst whom were Franklin Távora (1842 - 1888), author of O Cabeleira, O Matuto and Lourenço; Manuel de Oliveira Paiva (1861 - 1892), author of Dona Guidinha do Poço; Bernardo Guimarães (1825 - 1884), author of A Escrava Isaura, O Garimpeiro and O Índio Afonso; and Alfredo Taunay (1843 - 1899), author of Inocência.

Realist Prose

In the wake of the half romantic, half realist urban novel of Rio de Janeiro, as in the work of Manuel Antonio de Almeida (1831 - 1861), author of Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias, Joaquim Manuel de Macedo (1820 - 1882), prolific author of A Moreninha, O Moço Loiro, As Vítimas-Algozes, As Mulheres de Mantilha etc., José de Alencar, author of Senhora, A Pata da Gazela, A Viuvinha etc., came Machado de Assis (1839 - 1908) who, after trying his hand at romantic fiction, raised the novel and the realist short story to their fullest potential, with Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, Histórias sem Data, Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro, Esaú e Jacó, Relíquias da Casa Velha and Memorial de Aires. His august shadow extends over succeeding generations.

The generation which followed, that of the naturalists, produced Raul Pompéia (1863 - 1895), author of O Ateneu, and Aluízio de Azevedo (1857 - 1913), author of O Cortiço and O Mulato, both of them involved with other aesthetic ideas. Later on came two writers very different from each other: Euclides da Cunha (1866 - 1909), author of Os Sertões, which dealt with how much the process of the country's modernization was costing the poor in the remote interior; and Lima Barreto (1881 - 1922) author of Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, which continued the chronicle of Rio de Janeiro, shifting its focus to those living on the fringes, the bohemians in the bars and the inhabitants of the hostels, in short, an entire culture of mixed race people marginalized by the social structure.

The Portuguese Language

Officially there are seven Portuguese-speaking countries in the world today, a legacy from the old colonial empire: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau, São Tome and Príncipe. The sharing of a common language was a matter of great concern to Brazilian writers, when the version used in the New World began to stray more and more from the original. The language used in Brazil is undoubtedly the same language and does not even constitute a dialect. But it is a very distinct branch of the language which has not stopped encountering problems throughout its evolution. The romantics soon claimed the right to diverge from the Portuguese cultural norm, and not only by the introduction of "tupinismos" (native Indian vocabulary), which they insisted upon using concurrently with Portuguese. The quarrel between the legitimists and the separatists reached its climax at the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless the difference was only openly accepted, and then ratified by various orthographic agreements, after years of struggle, mainly by the modernists. Among them was Mário de Andrade, who frequently propounded theories on the subject, brandishing a copy of Gramatiquinha da Fala Brasileira (A Little Grammar of Brazilian Speech).

Collision of Cultures

The authors of the second modernist generation consolidated the achievements of the organizers of Modern Art Week 1922, with the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902 - 1987) in the forefront, whilst at the same time another great poet and participant in Modern Art Week, Manuel Bandeira, continued to refine his output. This second generation of modernists is equally rich in prose writers, expanding to take in the regionalists of the 1930s: Graciliano Ramos (1892 - 1953), author of Vidas Secas, São Bernardo, Angústia, Infância; José Américo de Almeida (1887 - 1980), inaugurator of the movement with A Bagaceira; Raquel de Queiroz (1910), author of O Quinze; José Lins de Rego (1901 - 1957), author of Menino de Engenho, Cangaceiros, Pedra Bonita, Fogo Morto; Jorge Amado (1912), whose huge output includes Suor, Jubiabá, Gabriela Cravo e Canela, Tenda dos Milagres, Tieta do Agreste, etc. In a third phase, regionalism in its turn gave way to the work of three writers whose best work appeared around the middle of the century, being two writers of fiction and one poet: Guimarães Rosa (1908 - 1967), author of Grande Sertão: Veredas, Corpo de Baile, Sagarana, Primeiras Estórias, Tutaméia - Terceiras Estórias; Clarice Lispector (1925 - 1977), author of A Paixão Segundo G.H., Laços de Família, A Hora da Estrela; and João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920), author of O Engenheiro, Cão sem Plumas, Morte e Vida Severina, A Educação pela Pedra. In the aftermath of these three major artists, who were connected with the last modernist generation, contemporary trends are becoming clearer. In poetry there is on the one hand the concretism of Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, as a formal plan sculpting the signs in their own medium. On the other hand, there is the so-called marginal poetry or the poetry of the mimeograph generation practiced by, among others, Francisco Alvim, Chacal, Ana Cristina César, Cacaso, with their school of colloquial and spontaneous speech.

In the field of prose, which is always better represented, there are various clear trends, from the provincial cruelty of Dalton Trevisan to the urban thriller of Rubem Fonseca and the lively populism of João Antonio. All these writers carry weight on the literary scene and have their imitators. Outside these categories there is also a strong biographical current, instigated by opposition to the military dictatorship, in which field Fernando Gabeira is one of the leaders. In this connection two voices are notable for being slightly out of step: Antonio Callado, who, although he writes novels and not autobiography, has come to be the most controversial chronicler of the progress of the left; and Pedro Nava, a participant in Modern Art Week, producing his work several decades later, whose monumental output brings biography to its highest aesthetic point.

At this point post-modernist winds start to be felt, announcing the end of the avant-garde. Writers optimistically throw themselves into stylistic experiments, with the aim of blending incongruous materials in pursuit of an artistic principle. Recently taken up on a large scale, and in tandem with earlier styles, it is hoped that post-modernism will produce much high-quality literature and an adequate answer to the crisis of the avant-garde.

Modernism

The marvelous group that staged Modern Art Week in 1922 changed the face of Brazilian art and literature for ever. Two of the new movement's basic texts appeared in the year 1928: Macunaíma and O Manifesto Antropófago. The first, by Mário de Andrade, is the saga of everyman, Indian, black, white, "a hero without qualities" and at the same time "a hero of our people", split between the forest and the metropolis of São Paulo. It is notable for its high degree of linguistic invention, its carnivalesque atmosphere, and its reappropriation of folklore, including indigenous folklore. It became the most complete example of anthropophagism, despite going somewhat against the taste of its author. Mário de Andrade was the principal theoretician of modernism, as well as being a poet, essayist, musicologist, etc.

O Manifesto Antropófago was written by Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), poet, novelist, essayist, biographer and playwright, spearhead of the avant-garde and master of a splendid polemical prose style. In common with many others in that age of manifestos, his language is acid and unrestrained, a shock tactic that is his hallmark. O Manifesto reaffirms the free-thinking and Dionysian outlook of modernism, as in the following extracts:

"Only anthropophagism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.(...) Tupi or not tupi, that is the question (...)

We want the Carib revolution. Greater than the French Revolution. The uniting of all effective revolutions in the direction of man. Without us Europe would not even have its poor declaration of the rights of man (...)

We were never converted. What we invented was Carnaval. An Indian dressed as a senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or appearing in the operas of Alencar full of good Portuguese sentiments (...)

I asked a man what Law was. He told me it was the guarantee of the practice of the possible. This man was called Galli Matias. I ate him (...)

Against the histories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterre. The world without a date. Without a title. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar (...)

But those who came were not crossed. They were fugitives from a civilization which we are eating, because we are strong and vengeful like the Jabuti (...)

The transfiguration of Taboo in Totem. Anthropophagism (...)

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness (...)

Against the Indian torchbearer. The Indian, son of eleven thousand virgins of the sky, in the land of Iracema - the patriarch João Ramalho, founder of São Paulo (...)

Against social reality, clothed and oppressive, categorized by Freud - the reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitution and without prisons of matriarchy of Pindorama."

Signed by Oswald de Andrade and provocatively dated: "In Piratininga, Year 374 of the Swallowing of Archbishop Sardine."

Biblioteca Nacional

Brazilian Literature: An Introduction