Rodica Ilie
Faculty of Letters, Braşov, Romania
Cultural Anthropophagy – A Poetic Counter-Ideology
Pau Modernism – Futurism’s Re-signification
Abstract: In Brazilian modernism, the anthropophagic movement illustrates a tendency of aesthetic emancipation, sustained by a native, mythical-Indian imaginary and by a rhetoric that is in competition with the nationalist xenophobic movements of the time. The antropophagy movement is in polemic with the xenophobic movements, as it is towards the pattern of Italian futurism. The artistic conception of Oswald de Andrade, Mario de Andrade, Raul Bopp is profoundly critical, ironically reactive towards the themes of exotism, primitivism, colonialism, considered from the European perspective. Thus the theoretical-pragmatic writings, as well as the literature of these writers will be defined by reversing the cultural signs, the ideology of the art produced from the Enlightenment period until the avant-gardes of the XX century. The philosophy of „Pau brasil” and of cultural anthropophagy substitutes the auroral visions specific to Enlightenment, romanticism, the visions of French primitivism and Italian futurism with an original Weltanschauung, specific in fact to a split , antitraditional consciousness which, paradoxically, is defined by ancient tradition, by the pattern of the old mythological representations. This dystopic theoretical consciousness is, at the same time, the founder of a regressive utopia, with a nationalist tint (through its chthonian thematic, the creative laziness, the nativist abundance and sensuality, the still alive rites and myths).Contesting the value of exchange, of cultural import, but at the same time based on its reversal and reconversion, deteriorating its colonizing meaning and formative significations, the movement sustained by the Antropophag Manifesto imposes not only a native culture of authentic freedom, but also a counter-culture, anti-Christian and anti-European, antiacademic and anticonservative, a culture of learned freedom, acquired through the exercise of the retort, this culture being explicable through the theoretical metaphor of the voluntary devouring, aware of the European paradigm.
Keywords: Brasilian Modernism; Paulo Prado; Graça Aranha; Menotti del Picchia; Oswald de Andrade; Manuel Bandeira; Mário de Andrade; Cultural Antropophagy; Avant-garde Counter-utopia.
Identical to the societal model that characterizes the European avant-gardes, modernist Brazilian revolution has its own actors, of whom Paulo Prado, Graça Aranha, Menotti del Picchia, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Mário de Andrade, intellectuals that represent Pau modernism’s leading edge, are the core of the movement resourced by the Modern Art Week in São Paulo (11-18 February, 1922).
According to Wilson Martins’ considerations “it was the modernists who made the Modern Art Week and not the Modern Art Week that made the modernism” (see Luciana Stegagno Picchio, p. 461). The premises of this anti-pompous movement which intended to represent the alternative to the official celebration of Brazil’s Independence Centenary are to be found in the futurism’s influxes, in the disputing and polemic actions that constitute both an aesthetic discourse and a political one, where the latter, indeed, is unleashed by the nationalist attitude imported from Italy, France, England and Germany, attitude that acquires the “yellowish-green” Brazilian shade, xenophobe nationalist, ritualistic-primitive, mythical-Indian, patriotic – anthropophagic shade of the different local groupings.
Although Marinetti’s manifesto where he would found in 1909 the doctrine of the Italian futurism had already been translated only one year before by Almáquio Dinís, the real discovery of the Milanese’s writings in Brazil would occur only later and that thanks to Graça Aranha who would synchronize the visit of the Italian mentor to the re-launching of his programs in Portuguese (Manifestos de Marinetti e seus companheiros, 1926). For Aranha futurism means “liberation from aesthetic terror”, as Marinetti himself specifies in his manifesto Per una Società di Protezione delle Macchine. In this text Aranha’s name is placed next to Benedetto Croce’s who understood by futurism “anti-historicism”, Marinetti emphasizing in this context the international propaganda for action- art, for progressive art, for a new religion of speed, and for „estetica della macchina”. The contacts of the Brazilian diplomats and intellectuals with the Europeans become productive by mainly Ronald de Carvalho and Luís de Montalvor who will publish with Fernando Pessoa and Marío de Sá-Carneiro in their magazine, Orpheus. Luciana Stegagno Picchio (p.454) states that the futurist influences do not spread in Brazil by the Spanish path, but either directly by the Italian model, or by French mediation (or Portuguese, we could add).
Despite the international connections, reactions against the Italian movement appear immediately, Menotti del Picchia mentions in Correiro Paulistano (1920) the real contribution that this avant-garde movement consists of: “Futurism defines as an innovating movement, beautiful and strong, present and daring, waving a flag in the blow of an anarchic ideal in art, (…) Without accepting the follies, without applauding the absurdities, I admired its beauties” (see Luciana Stegagno Picchio, p. 455). At the beginning Mário de Andrade joins del Picchia’s critical position who abhors scandal, the fascist conception that governed the doctrine of the Marinetti futurism, both Brazilian writers contesting the ideological excesses, but appreciating the vigor of the aesthetic action. The impulse of “building a local futurism, different from the European one” is to be noticed in the unified actions of the young writers who write in the magazine „Fon-Fon!”, then in its follower, „Klaxon”, signal-pages that testify to the divorce from Marinetti. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda defines the Paulist futurists by their liberation action from the models and conventions that already turned out-dated, by the act of original and “unique” reformation. Menotti del Picchia disagrees to the caste organization of the Italian futurist grouping and, as compared to this, he loathes Pau futurists’ affiliation to a school. The criticism of the European avant-garde model becomes more than acid, the author of this deposition becoming even sarcastic: “to use, inappropriately, a term used in Europe, to designate the brilliant and idiotic reaction of a horde of retrogressive avant-gardists whose generals were some talents and whose followers were some imbeciles” was tantamount to unnaturally borrowing a label and a way of being that do not correspond to the local character. Brazilian futurism means something different, it “was born as a rebellion against the schools organized in rites and literary masses… The formula of the Pau futurism is actually: utmost liberty within the most spontaneous originality” (idem. p. 458). In a futurist-creative direction, Ronald de Carvalho proclaims the art liberated from tradition’s prosodic constraints: „Cria o teu ritmo e criarás o mundo / create your own rhythm and you will create the world”. The dynamist creed of this writer makes use of Marinetti theories surpassing the doctrinaire boundaries of the European movement by the very futurist statute of the movement. In Brazilian perspective, rhythm means life, belongs to daily, natural and regular life, to the initial throbs and not to the mechanic movement induced by the motor. In the unique evolution of the Brazilian modernism, meaningful moments will reveal such as Oswald de Andrade’s actions, the writer of a Marinetti picturesque, who “always behind with a book and always ahead with a manifest” will launch several avant-garde directions, being against the politic profile of the European mentor by the left-hand ideology that he takes up after the 30s, ideology of which “he will know to choose only the anarchic and destructive aspects (which reiterates his conscientious and permanently re-embodied anthropophagic vision of the world)” ( Stegagno Picchio, p. 473).
Primitivism’s counter-manifests
In 1924, Oswald de Andrade launches a movement of a retrogressive nature proclaiming the “Pau Brazil” primitivism (after the name of a tropical tree exploited for its wood used in building furniture or in obtaining a reddish dye). The denial of the primitivist fashion imported from Europe brings about the assertion of a local value used as currency in Brazil’s foreign commerce. This is how the writer motivates the birth of a new avant-garde direction: “The primitivism that appeared in France as exoticism was for us, in Brazil, an authentic primitivism. Then I thought about producing an export and not an import poetry relying on our geographic, historic and social habitat. And since «pau brasil» had been the first Brazilian exported treasure, I called the movement «Pau Brasil»” (see Stegagno Picchio, p. 467). Oswald de Andrade’s attitude is firstly influenced by the criticism of the cultural borrowings, then it clearly breaks away with the idea of school, emphasizing the desideratum of the original assertion. Issued in a magazine in Rio („Correio da Manhã”), the manifesto from March 18th 1924 legitimizes the nativistic conception on art, extolling a natural exoticism, “of a contrary sign” – as Luciana Stegagno Picchio mentions -, a localized exoticism negatively assimilated and endowed with the archaic force of the elements of the Brazilian chronotope.
Despite its emphasis on identity construction, the «Pau Brazil» act-manifesto imposes a modern concept of poetry, a universal model, backed by a language without archaisms. Without erudition. Natural and neologistic, a language where the word revels in the vitality of the dawn, but also in the effervescence of the technical progress which demands the immediate creation of a new dictionary. Understood by Oswald as “The millionaire contribution of all errors”, this poetry legitimates itself by making it devoid of mysticism and anarchic, being characterized by ferocious, ironical and challenging argumentation. Blaise Cendrars, to whom the Brazilian poet will dedicate the poetry volume which takes on the movement’s name, will notice, besides the “crazy talent” of these Pau modernists, the burlesque spirit of their feat „un vocabulaire argotique, nègre, et un sens aigu de la provocation, de la polémique, de l’actualité”(idem. p. 468).
One year after its issuing, the «Pau Brazil» manifesto will be followed by a series of reactions that categorically orient to the fascist ideology. By deserting the aesthetic desiderata, there will be engendered, on a yearly basis, such movements as «Verdamarelo» (1925), nurtured by the nationalist Menotti del Picchia, by Cassiano Ricardo, Plínio Salgado, then «Anta», in 1926 the regionalism, put forward by Gilberto Freyre, in 1927 the movement from triggered by the „Festa” magazine, published in Rio, nurtured by Tasso da Silveira, Barreto Filho, Cecília Meireles etc. As a consequence of these movements, Oswald de Andrade will retort by another manifesto, launched in a new magazine.
In May 1928 in Sao Paolo, „Revista de Antropofagia” is issued, published under Antônio de Alcântara Machado and Raul Bopp’s guidance. In its pages, the strongest anti-conventionalist and anti-traditionalist voices that decide on the purpose of disputing the European models and not only will become famous. The configuration of the Brazilian modernism will define by the framework of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagus manifesto”, the leader of the cannibalism movement.
The sectarian character of this grouping stands out by the very rhetoric imposed in the magazine, rhetoric aggressively primitive, imposed by the author of the manifesto, but also by Mário de Andrade or by Alcântara Machado. These set up by their theoretical or poetic discourse a auroral consciousness, unspoilt by the dogmas of the European culture and of the Christian moral.
Just as in Huidobro’s manifesto (Non serviam) in which he derives creationism’s principles from “a religious invocation in the language of a native ethnic that lived in the area Perú-Bolivia” (Clemente Padín, 2000), the Brazilian modernists reacted upon the mimetic spirit and the European invasion by the display of the values of autochthonism. In this sense, myths and national emblems will be valued, identity symbols (pau-brazil, tapir) that will confer both counter-weight to the colonizing influences and the security area and the strength of personal assertion. Pau-brazil, the dialects and the ethnologic-anthropologic elements, natives’ imaginary and behaviour structure will be exploited in the programmatic writings, as well as in the literary ones with the same determination and identical discursive incitement, aspects motivated by the urge of expressing a unique identity (e.g. Brazil, Ronald de Carvalho’s Whitman-like poem, Cobra Norato, the masterpiece of the anthropophagus modernism written by Raul Bopp, the poems of the daily life and of the modern Brazilian rhythm written by Rui Ribeiro Couto: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Reef, The Birth of the Brazilian Poetry, etc).
Consequently, Manifesto Antropófago is intended to be the answer to the attack of civilization, a wild, critical and polemic answer: “Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi or not tupi that is the question”. Elaborated in the apodictic formula of the archaic wisdom, the manifesto begins, paradoxically, by paraphrasing a famous Shakespearian sentence of Hamlet’s monologue, which becomes in a revealing and grotesque manner a quip as famous as the dilemma of the European character. The essential issue is transferred to the adoptive culture which yet defines at a collective level by the same tragic Hamlet-like consciousness, manifested when the social, political and cultural identity is threatened. The emblem that the author of the manifesto uses is the one of the name of the Tupi Indian cannibals in Brazil who gastronomically took their revenge on an uninvited bishop.
Nativistic anthropophagous utopia – a dystopic (disenchanted) approach to the European cultural paradigm
Leaving the meta-literary witticism aside, Oswald de Andrade will transform his manifesto into a real defensive weapon against history, against the bourgeois progress and person’s reification, against cultural import, against tagging and dogmatizing, of the literary and artificial. His reactions grow to universal dimensions, and these translate rhetorically by the redundancy of the negation – assertion relationship. The values of the European paradigm are attacked: the author places himself utterly against, making use of attack instruments such as sarcastic reply, irony and parody. The rejection of the literary tradition, the denial of the classic philosophy, and of the modern thinking, the psychoanalysis and the anthropology sheds new light on the local values. The manifesto relies on permanent associations, it indirectly develops its program, by presenting issues in contrastive pairs which reciprocally appraise.
Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos.
I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.
We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers.
Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality.
We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men.
The dispute between natural and artificial takes place on different levels: firstly, a hint to the civilized society is ironically introduced, to the behaviours that are affiliated to the cult of clothing versus the cult of nudity, signalling in the same manner the philosophic issue of telling appearance from essence: “What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this.” The revolution of manners is placed then at the level of falsity awareness, Oswald de Andrade’s pleading leaves the palimpsest construction and clarifies his preoccupations by emphasizing his desiderata: “We want the Cariba Revolution”, “One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm”, “We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata. // But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic”. The shaping up of the self-portrait of the cannibal movement relies on the fury of invective, on the spontaneous reaction, on the humoristic-sarcastic answer, asserting speech liberty, proclaiming the autonomy of his nativistic model and a consciousness characteristic of Adam’s existence, nostalgically repeating the meaning of utopia and prophetically highlighting dystopia:
“Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake.
It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil. (…)
The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls”.
Contradictory movement, issued of the dual orientation, from outside to self and from self to the world, the cannibalism actually illustrates the image of a split anti-traditionalist consciousness, but which peers into its nature by the ancestral tradition, by the pattern of the old mythological representations; dystopic but simultaneously setting up a regressive utopia, slightly nationalist by the chthonic themes, by the creative laziness, of local nativistic and sensuality of the still living rites and myths; denying the value of the exchange, of the cultural import, but simultaneously relying on the upheaval, the reconversion of this undertaking, by debasing its colonizing purposes and exotic meanings.
If Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto is related to the Dadaism by the name of the “Cannibale” magazine, or to the primitive energetic spirit of cubist-futurists and of the Russian raionists that signed manifestos having incisive titles (“ A slap to the public taste”, or “ Why are we painting our faces”) this is due to a attitude synchronization and not necessarily to the influences, which in this case, are despised. The Brazilian modernist makes of his programmatic text more than a doctrinaire writing, just as Tzara – who emphasized that he rejected systems, rules, models – de Andrade puts forward a living manner, a Weltanschauung, which he validates as the all-Brazilian manner, rejecting all manner code or all grammatical/ prosodic structure, all socio-political determination, all economic and work law, cultivating on the contrary the imaginary of ingenuity, the innocence’s primordial age. The regaining of the paradisiacal condition does not face cultural and historic obstacles that the Dadaism (the black poems, Tzara’s translations and adaptations from the African dialects of Kinga, Lordja tribes) or the cubist-futurism (Hlebnikov, Krucionîh) have to face. By the anthropophagic movement, Oswald de Andrade rediscovers the Adamic condition of the Brazilian culture, yet by regressing in the same space – it does not become devoid of cultural identity, as Tzara – in order to grasp times / the original rhythms of an uncontaminated sensuality by colonizing influxes.
The pre-imperial period symbolically recovered by his rhetoric and imaginative exercise matches the self-sufficient identity of the aboriginal tribe, the revitalized innocence of the “good savage” being thus extolled, ironically enumerating the cultural moments that segregated the European acceptations of this topos. Sharing the same prevalent features of mockery and parody that got us already used to, the author of the manifesto puts down the illuminist clichés, by making their significations devoid of mysticism.
“Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along. (…) I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him”.
The upheaval/ the sudden change of situations in exposing the ideas turn Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto into a real show deployed in the intended grotesque, humorous, burlesque register. A motivation of the aesthetic cannibalism summarized by Manifesto Antropófago consists of the fact that, by presenting this existential model it is not only a local culture that is necessary, but also an anti-Christian, anti-European, anti-academic and anti-conservative counter-culture.
Conceived as a rebellious movement, the anthropophagy finds its explanations not only in the game of the futurist negotiation, but mostly in the necessity of putting behind the European tradition, by its gargantuesque swallowing: ”an assimilation of the western culture, a way of «devouring the enemy so that his virtues become ours»” as stated by the initiator of the movement in an interview in 1928 in „Nouvelles Littéraires” (see Stegagno Picchio, p.471). An archaic way of excessive consumption – connoted as abundance, potlatch, spending – which secures the maintenance of sovereignty, according to the royalty’s significations in Georges Bataille’s vision (2004). This form of consumption goes “beyond utility”, joining “the divine, the miraculous, the sacred” (p. 12) by the symbolism of prestige and fame guaranteed to the sovereign subject by the objects of spending. In the case of Oswald’s aesthetic cannibalism Bataille’s mechanism of the abundant feast is expressed both at the imaginary level (by the cultural metaphor of the European paradigm’s devouring) and at the structural level, in the architecture and rhetoric of the manifesto that lives on the consistent texture of the cultural references, by violently tearing the body of the spiritual food / of the imported tradition.
The cultural answer put forward by Oswald and Mário de Andrade will be thus the one that will acknowledge the fact that – as Cătălin Avramescu deems – the aboriginal cannibal represents, paradoxically, “a sovereign over a species of freedom”, his bizarre story being “one that sheds light on the origins of the modern state and the boundaries of the modern civilization and weighs their right of being” (2003, p. 10). It is not by chance that auroral images that define a stage of the human being’s unity, the time of the undeposed freedom by the externally imposed rules re-occur in the text. In contrast with these, the crisis of the modern world, a world of the mockery, of official direction/ religion, of the artificial is signalled at a dramatic level of acceptance.
“We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.
Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests.
Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.
Cariba instinct”.
As a consequence of the evil’s finding, Oswald de Andrade proposes the individual’s release, his rescuing from his puppet’s condition, and the revolution is firstly prepared by increasing awareness of the lack of coherence I – cosmos, then by dispelling social contracts, by annulling the object status of the subject, by rejecting individual’s reification forms exerted by the civilizing mechanisms, of the western philosophical and political thinking. From here issued a similar reaction to the Dadaist roar which seems to irrationally spread in the last part of the Manifesto on feeble love and bitter love. The difference is that the Brazilian writer builds up a counterpoint discourse which seems to self-limit by the tensions contained in each dispelling, critical and at the same time concentrated statement, reduced to a gnomic-apodictic wording. The summary of the anthropophagus philosophy presented by the initiator of this vision could be the following:” Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism. (…)We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings. // We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age”. The rhetoric variety is very generous in these lines, the symbolic calling for the Dionysian existence, for the carnival-like model of the world is not hazarded, de Andrade mixes the serious to the ironic and mockery register, emphasizing the radical divorce from colonial power or from any form of cultural supremacy irrespective of the location and time it comes from. The adaptation of the utopia generated by the left-hand European politics to the local formula is done not by transplant and adaptation, but by the nativistic convictions which attributed Arcadia’s concretization in the Brazilian Outopia, actually an Eutopia mystically and magically outlined, a realm without memory, without being haunted by the “terror of history”, a world without dates. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar”, ucrone and self-sufficient: “Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms”. This Utopian projection can be described by the features of a society specific to the primitive communism, identified as an existence and action model in the cannibal society. The words that Cătălin Avramescu uses for describing this model are almost identical to the ones that Oswald de Andrade used in his manifesto:
“Let’s imagine a society where all individuals are equal and free, where neither State authority nor crimes exist, where private property is unknown and where everybody has got enough for his needs, where there is no money, where people are healthy, sturdy, and live more than a hundred years, where you needn’t work, where the most different pleasures are practiced, where women are available to anyone who feels like having them and from where religion is chased. A communist Utopia? Possibly, if we place ourselves in the perspective of the 19th century socialism. But, till the 18th century, a reader would have rather identified the features of a cannibal society in the above description”.
The socialist-communist ideological interpretation of Oswald’s anthropophagy is thus an organic component of the aboriginal life philosophy and the characteristic features of the reveries of this archaic communism, of the golden age (the theory of the natural right, freedom, equality, the communist of the property, prosperity; and entranced consumption) will be taken over by the modern communism, having an inescapable political deformations. By becoming a real “code of revenge”, the cultural cannibalism making its option for “the permanent transformation of taboo into totem” by defying its own rule. The Brazilian modernism expresses thus by Oswald de Andrade’s personality the radical position of the negating and self-negating action, the critical, de-mystifying and self- demystifying consciousness specific to the dissident intellectual in his own country, who by his attitude imposes nativistic models, actually opposing the left-oriented nationalist-xenophobe movements (yellowish-green, Antei), opposing the progress, empirically understood by the Italian futurists, actually contesting most of Marinetti’s aporias (mechanization, publicity, urbanism, the theory of the de-humanized hero that became a mechanic body “spare parts” – “Against urban sclerosis. Against the Conservators and speculative boredom”). The critique of robotization, of the implication in imposed / induced manifestations by the social political models progressively multiply, turning into contestation which takes on the most virulent expressing modes:
“We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our instruments and our stars. (…) Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibal instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate – envy, usury, calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized, it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals. (…) Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, defined by Freud – in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy”.
From reaction to attack, the manifesto gets to express the rebellion by the very self-humbling Dada formula, it is only Tzara who similarly acts in order to maintain the shock and implicitly the longevity of his movement, calculating, with every line, the effect of mockery and self-mockery, of contradictions, ironies and self-ironies. As to the reaction of the Brazilian modernism to the understanding habits of literature, from Mário de Andrade, co-participant to the anthropophagous revolution, one can transparently notice its detachment from futurism, and even more, the very re-interpretation of Marinetti and his company’s aesthetic revolution concerning art democratization by making use of the music-hall ideology. The commitment to Dadaism appears to be much more prominent in these assertions which seem to subscribe to the perspective pertaining to the concrete poem, to the phono-gestural poem-display or to the autotelic poem, performance and an act of socio-cultural dissent at the same time: ’Poems…are not written so as to be read by mute eyes. Poems are to be sung, shouted and wept. He who cannot sing shall not read Scenery 1. He who cannot roar shall not read Ode to the Bourgeois. He who cannot pray shall not read To Despise Religion, The Ascent, To Suffer, Sentimental Colloquium…I will not continue. I loathe to provide the key to my book’. (see Stegagno Picchio, p. 465). The antibourgeois reaction is mirrored in the imperatives of a reading presumably aware of itself and of the fact that it recreates the work, the anti-conformism and the non-directive character of these peritextual notes render their author a worthy successor of the Baudelairian elitism. The writer who interprets his/her creation loses his status of demiurgic entity and becomes a journalist, a doctrinal person or a mere scriptor (in Roland Barthes’ terms). The decline from this sacred role brings about the reconversion from shaman, wizard or magus, Prophet or rival of divinity into a grammarian, an intellectual or interpreter who vulgarizes the meaning of messages which are conveyed in an orphic, mystical and magic manner through the invention of a self-sufficient poetic language. The metaphors that Barthes adopted from Claude Lévi Strauss are more that suitable in the given context as they endorse the Pau-Avant-gardist action in the very fundamentality of its enterprise, they motivate it through the nativistic-anthropophagic and primitivist-aesthetic precepts that the manifestos and works of Oswald or Mário de Andrade, Ronald de Carvalho or Raul Bopp, Manuel Bandeira or Ribeiro Couto were based on.
The ‘anthropophagic’ manifesto demonstrates that the reinvention of Brazilian literature is possible by means of a forceful action as it provides a cultural substantiation to the renaissance of spontaneity as a counter-reaction to the influence of the traditionalist or Avant-gardist European canon, irrespective of the form in which the latter would be adopted. Although it has a fine literary thread, it manages to involve the receiver in the string of contrasts and refrains which renders the utterance dynamic. The surprising architecture, based on the duplex structure, confers on the text an alert organization and a type of diction which converge towards the discovery of the fact that a culture is legitimized by means of this act as Oswald de Andrade dated the manifesto ‘374 the year of the Gulp of the Bishop of Sardinha’. Through this meta-historical observation the manifesto turns against its own denomination, against its own being, becoming an inter- and intra-textual game with Postmodernist rules. The mythological, literary and historical references could be overlooked when taken separately but, in the activism of uttering its precepts, the text works so as to acquire integration, actually preparing an enhancement of the cynical-metaliterary European system that has Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Urmuz, Tzara, Breton as its pillars. The savour of arguments and the unprecedented nuances of the Anthropophagus Manifesto reside precisely in joining quotations and cultural references to the primitivist-nativistic ideology of spontaneity and freedom. Thus, the solution of cannibalism put forth by Oswald de Andrade is nothing but an aesthetic resolution of the crisis of indigenous literature/culture and its paradoxical form is also present, as a typological invariant (Adrian Marino, 1974), in the framework of European avant-gardism that construed the doctrine of primitivism as a way of recuperating the plenitude of the beginnings, a way of language resignification and of restoring harmony between the subject and the universe.
A convergent view of the exegesis of the second and third decades of the 20th century lays emphasis both on the multitude of reforming tendencies and on the ardent passion of denial and change. Alongside European theoreticians and critics of the avant-garde, Fernando Aínsa outlines the critical-innovatory character of experimental movements in South America to the reactive exercise of contesting modernism, understood in the sense of the European concept, as tradition as opposed to the dynamiting and caustic spirit of the representatives of the avant-garde.
„La prosa y la poesía de los años veinte, aparecen en el centro de la gran reacción contra el modernismo. Sus autores son particularmente permeables a los nuevos “ismos” con que el fin de la primera guerra mundial marca a las nuevas generaciones europeas. Tónica general de “insolencia”, como la llamara un crítico, derrumbe del andamiaje lógico levantado por el racionalismo en el correr del siglo XIX, como se lamentara un filósofo, o una nueva afirmación de algo que el mismo modernismo había propuesto en sus orígenes: la literatura entendida como una revolución permanente” (see Padín).
The diffusion of European schools of the historical Avant-garde triggers, in the Latin-American space, the issue of a range of aesthetic doctrines, of programmes and tendencies which find the nucleus of their artistic ideology in Futurism, in creationism and then in ultraism: nativism, runrúnismo, estridentismo, “gaucismo cósmico”, “pastoralismo”, “gongorismo”, antropofagismo, the parodic-buffoonish movement of the “Aliverti Liquida. 1er. Libro Neosensibile de Letras Atenienses. Apto para Señoritas” (1932) group of several writers from Montevideo who, despite distancing themselves ironically from the Futurist and cubist methods they practise the visual poem but also the re-creation, at the acoustic level, of a form of the semantically presented object (the concrete onomatopoeic poem).
All these movements confirm the vitality of the prototype even if, sooner or later, they disclaim it, repudiate it or reform its doctrine. Generally, delimitations are organized departing from the problem of the aesthetic-political amalgam, from the frenzy of dogmatizing literary programs, from the ideological schematization of Futurist rhetoric. Concerning the options of satellite-movements, the latter situate themselves critically with regard to the fascist bellicose proclivity either by remaining neutral before a historical ideological involvement or by more willingly favouring the political left. In actual fact, they promote themselves as counter-ideological and counter-theoretical movements, they detest the rigidity and sternness of programmatic items, they reject ostentation and purely anarchical attitudes, the pompous rhetoric and its proliferation only at the para-textual level discovering nonetheless the necessity to restore the artistic codes and the desire to instate the creative and ‘creationist’ logos. However, we have to stress the fact that these movements, situated beyond Futurism, actually write the real Futurist literature and not only in The Sentimental Memoirs of João Miramar, in Pau Brasil or Primero Cardeno do Aluno de Poesia Oswald de Andrade, in Lira Paulistana or Macunaima (written by Mário de Andrade), in Raul Bopp’s Cobra Norato or in the great poems of Pessoa-de Campos.
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