Brazil

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Brazil

Although there is some debate among scholars as to what period and what specific works mark the beginning of Brazilian literature—one written by a Brazilian population aspiring to or conscious of an identity that is separate from that of its colonial master—the earliest written account of Brazil dates back to 1500 and is part of the vein of chronicles of the New World. Written by Pero Vaz de Caminha (1450–1500), the Carta do a El-Rei Dom Manuel sobre o achamento do Brasil (Letter of the Discovery of Brazil) is an account of the territory and people found by Admiral Pedro Álvares Cabral's expedition to the northeast of Brazil. Its lyrical descriptions reflect an idealization of Brazilian indigenous peoples that continued to have currency, albeit inflected with different meanings, through the rise of Brazilian modernism and well into the twentieth century.

COLONIAL LITERATURE

Colonial literature can be divided into chronicles, travel narratives, and pedagogical Christian, or "salvationist" literature written for indigenous people's evangelization. The most significant author of the sixteenth century is Father José de Anchieta (1534–1597), a Jesuit imbued with the spirit of the Council of Trent (1545) who arrived in Brazil in 1553 and whose didactic theater pieces—medieval autos, reminiscent of Gil Vicente—attempt to reconcile local cultural vocabularies with a Catholic evangelizing message. His Autos de São Lourenço, for example, incorporates Tupi names and imagery, including them as both townspeople in need of defense and salvation and as the cohort of demons—Guaixará, Saravaia, and Aimbirê, all of them Dionysiac in their lust for earthly pleasures—against whom São Lourenço battles. The poetic works of the period, influenced by medieval verse structures, also propagate the Catholic religion.

In 1601 Bento Teixeira (1561–1600) published Prosopopéia, notable for being the first book of poetry written by a man born in Brazil—though some scholars have claimed he was in fact born in Portugal—rather than for its quality. Regardless of Teixeira's birthplace, this work is the first epic poem in Brazilian literature and inaugurates its Baroque period. It was not until Gregório de Matos's (1633–1696) forceful nativismo, however, that Brazilian poetry came into its own. Matos produced a poetry steeped in the European Baroque tradition that at the same time incorporated the flora, fauna, landscape, and sociopolitical context of Brazil. Noted for his strong poetic personality and caustic critical voice, Matos earned the nickname "Boca do inferno"—Hell's Mouth. He also produced religious sonnets and lyrical love poems. Another remarkable figure of the Baroque period was Antônio Vieira (1608–1697), whose sermons exemplify the ideal of conceptismo, a style known for its rhetorical mastery and concise expression of complex ideas. Critical of the flourish and luxuriating linguistic complexity that characterized Baroque culteranismo, Vieira endeavored to produce sermons of clarity and rhetorical force. Among his noted works are the "Sermon of the Sexegesima," the "Sermon for the good success of Portuguese forces against those of Holland," and the "Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish."

In the eighteenth century, with the boom in gold and diamond mining, Minas Gerais rose to become the new economic center of Brazil. Young people from the region went to Portugal to be educated and returned drenched in the ideals of the European Enlightenment. They absorbed aesthetic innovations encouraged by the rise of the bourgeoisie—the adoption of classical paradigms as a counterblow against the Baroque, seen as a reflection of the excesses of the aristocracy. Absorbing this influence, but consciously seeking a national mode of writing in the later eighteenth century, the Mineira school of writers founded Arcadia Ultramarina in 1768–1769; the name of this poetic academy alluded to Brazil's distance from Portugal (hence ultramarina, "beyond the sea") and consolidated the Mineira school. The most notable of the Mineira school and indeed the most important lyric poet of his time was Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, who took the pastoral name "Dirceu"; his love poems were collected in Marília de Dirceu. Along with the other members of the Mineira school, Gonzaga took part in the 1789 rebellion against Portuguese rule, known as the Inconfidência Mineira. The plot was discovered and the rebellion stifled, its leaders exiled or executed. Among the other participants were the poets Claudio Manuel da Costa (1729–1789), Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–1793), and Silva Alvarenga (1749–1814). Claudio Manuel da Costa's epic poem Villa Rica tells the story of the emergence of Ouro Preto, the city at the heart of Brazil's eighteenth-century golden age, and confers heroic status on the bandeirantes—Brazilian pioneers.

This period of transition to romanticism is also marked by epic poems that engage the ideal of the "noble savage" within the context of Brazilian history. In Caramuru (1781), José de Santa Rita Durão (1722–1784) recounts the history of the discovery of Bahia. In the epic poem O Uraguay (1769), Basílio da Gama (1741–1795) describes the massacre of the indigenous peoples of the Sete Povos das Missões; the poem is also notable for its formal innovations, as it is written in blank verse and without strophic divisions (traditionally oitavas reais, or decasyllabic eight-line stanzas with an abababcc rhyme scheme). These poems present idealized images of Brazilian indigenous peoples and the landscape that surrounds them, and find an echo in later romantic mythologizing of Brazilian heroes.

ROMANTICISM

In Brazilian poetry, 1836 marks the beginning of the romantic period. In that year Gonçalves de Magalhães published his poetry collection Suspiros Poéticos e Saudades and launched Nitéroi, a journal of Brazilian letters in Paris. In Nitéroi, Magalhães published his "Discurso Sobre a História da Literatura do Brasil," a romantic manifesto that exhorts his countrymen to produce a literature reflective of the nation's independence, gained in 1822. This Brazilian specificity finds expression in the rejection of the influence of classicism and Latinizing expression, and in nationalist portrayals of nature where Brazilian flora and fauna were represented in their own terms, rather than as local versions of European loci amoeni. In many ways, these trends, and the emergence of indianismo, are heirs to the innovations of the Mineira school.

If Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães is the ideological leader of early romanticism in Brazil, Antônio Gonçalves Dias (1823–1864) is undoubtedly its best lyrical poet. His "Canção do Exílio" (Song of exile) in which he evokes, with poignant simplicity, the Brazilian landscape and the intense longing (saudade) for his homeland (he was in Comigra, Portugal, from 1838 to 1845) reverberates through later poetic representations of Brazil. Casimiro de Abreu (1839–1860), for example, wrote his own "Canção do Exílio," echoing the longing for the "birdsong of the Sabiá," a birdsong that functions as a metonym for the ideal Brazil of Gonçalves Dias. Gonçalves Dias exploration of the local also manifests itself in his Indianist poetry; "I-Juca-Pirama" is the quintessential idealized, indigenous Brazilian hero. Manuel Araújo Porto-Alegre (1806–1879), also a member of this first generation of romantics, through his contributions to the journal Nitéroi and his Brasilianas (poems) aided in the consolidation of the romantic movement in Brazilian letters.

The second generation of romantic poets is one of pessimism and mal-de-siècle. Luís José Junqueira Freire (1832–1855), Manuel Antônio Alvares de Azevedo (1831–1852), and Luís Nicolau Fagundes Varela (1841–1875) are the most notable poets of this period. Their solipsistic poetry, exploring the subjectivity of a cosmopolitan poetic self, was for the most part indifferent to the project of Brazilian specificity. These poets are not concerned with Brazilian nativism, landscape, saudade, or mythologizing of an indigenous past; rather, they represent a current of Brazilian poets whose preoccupations were in keeping with romantic expressions—of the unreachable, the contradictory, the fragile division between reality and dream—across Europe and the American continent.

The third generation of romantic poets turned its gaze toward its historical, political, and social context. The most representative poet of this socially conscious generation is Antônio de Castro Alves (1847–1871). Although he also wrote beautiful love lyrics, he is best known for his social critiques in verse, especially "Navio Negreiro," which marks the high point of abolitionist poetry. The Brazilian historian Capistrano de Abreu named this generation the condoreiros (from the word "condor"), suggesting their high-flying aspirations. Joaquim de Sousa Andrade (1833–1902), known as Soussândrade, though not very successful in his own era, was rediscovered by the concretismo poets (concrete poetry movement) in the 1960s. They popularized his Guesa Errante (1888), and literary critics have come to regard him as one of the best poets of the romantic period.

Gonçalves de Magalhães played a role in launching romantic theater with Antonio José ou O poeta e a Inquisição (1838); but it was Luís Carlos Martins Pena (1815–1848) who consolidated Brazilian drama by introducing and perfecting the costumbrista play, a sort of comedy of manners depicting provincial customs. Romantic prose developed the vein of indianismo—a nationalist idealization of indigenous Brazilians that seeks to establish Brazilian identity as distinct from, and often antagonistic to, Portuguese and European identities. José Martiniano de Alencar (1829–1877) is the most important representative of romantic indianismo. His novels O Guarani (1857) and Iracema (1865) exhibit the nationalist impetus to create and fortify Brazilian literature; Alencar's regional descriptions and love stories between indigenous heroes and sympathetic Europeans contributed to a new set of foundational myths that mark the separation of Brazilian culture from European literary traditions. In his literary autobiography Como e porque sou romancista (How and Why I Am a Novelist, 1893), Alencar notes his readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, and especially René Chateaubriand, but insists that his novels' overriding aesthetic is drawn from a knowledge of the nature he encounters in Brazil. Most critics agree that his works—not only his Indianist writings, but also his urban, psychological, and historical novels—laid the foundation for the Brazilian novel.

Other novelists of note during this period are Joaquim Manuel Macedo (1820–1882), who published A Moreninha in 1844, and Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1831–1861). Almeida's Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias (1854–1855), which explores the underbelly of Brazilian society with seedy characters and antiheroes, is often seen as the first costumbrista novel in Brazil. He is widely recognized as the precursor of realism and naturalism in Brazilian literature. The first naturalist work, O Mulato (1881) by Aluísio Azevedo (1857–1913), was published in 1881; although the influence of the Portuguese realist José Maria de Eça de Queirós and the French naturalist Émile Zola is evident, Azevedo's novels spring from a local impetus: He is an abolitionist and broaches questions of race and slavery specific to a critique of Brazilian society.

REALISM

Several writers of the romantic period began to experiment with narrative styles such that they dovetailed with realist conventions. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is the most significant bridge between romanticism and realism in Brazil. Machado wrote romantic poetry and short stories, but his most remarkable works were the novels Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, 1880), widely seen as the inauguration of realism in Brazil; Quincas Borba (1892); and Dom Casmurro (1900). A contemporaneous work by Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), Os Sertões: Campanha de Canudos (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902), concerning the decimation of an apocalyptic religious enclave in northeastern Brazil, combines elements of realist narrative, journalistic reporting, sociological study, and personal testimony. Like many naturalist works, it exhibits the influence of positivism and geographic determinism. Da Cunha's work marks the end of realism and naturalism and the beginnings of modernist literature in Brazil. Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (1881–1922), whose works do not fit neatly into any particular movement, had a significant impact on Brazilian intellectuals' debates on national identity and culture. Barreto's work, in particular the novel Triste fim do Policarpo Quaresma (The Sad End of Policarpo Quaresm, 1915) offers a scathing critique of Brazilian racism in portraying the lives of Rio de Janeiro's underprivileged classes. His direct style and simple prose anticipated the modernist rebellion.

Because of its rejection of certain romantic parameters and its search for objective approaches to poetic subjects, Parnassianism can be understood in broad terms as the poetic counterpart of realism. This movement encompasses the works of Olavo Bilac (1865–1918), Alberto de Oliveira (1857–1937), Raimundo Corréia (1859–1911), and Vicente Carvalho (1866–1924). Like European Parnassianism, it seeks to cultivate form and turn away from the free verse and blank verse of the romantics. It uses the search for the perfection of form not as an end in itself but as a device to create an objective distance. This is a period of meditative and philosophical poetry and of a return to classicism.

SYMBOLISM

The publication of two books in 1893—Missal and Bróqueis—by João da Cruz e Sousa (1863–1898) marks the beginning of symbolism in Brazilian literature. Aside from being the most important exponent of symbolism in Brazil, Cruz e Sousa also expresses an internal fragmentation related to race and culture. The son of freed slaves, Cruz e Sousa experienced numerous obstacles in his professional endeavors because he was black. In his poetry, he explored the ways in which his embrace of Parnassianism and then symbolism distanced him from his race and culture; but he adhered to the maxim of art for art's sake and to the cult of beauty as two absolutes in his work. Another symbolist poet of note is Alphonsus de Guimaraens (1870–1921), notable for his mystical poetry. Augusto dos Anjos (1884–1914) is the most important poet between the end of symbolism and the rise of modernism. His original lyrical mode reached into scientific language and other surprising imagery to present meditations on existence and love and sympathy for the suffering of others. His collection Eu ("I"), published in 1912, is still widely read.

MODERNISM

Marking the moment when modernismo took root in the national culture, in 1922 the city of São Paulo celebrated Semana de Arte Moderna ("Modern Art Week"). The keynote speech of the writer and diplomat José Pereira da Graça Aranha (1868–1931), an important figure in the modernist movement, introduced a series of lectures, readings, and art exhibits. Modernismo shares with other avant-garde movements the impulse to redefine poetic language and revise traditional conventions and ideals of beauty, to explore a radically free verse, and to rethink the relationship of the artist to society. It also has a strong impetus to continue the search for a national and culturally independent literature. Oswald de Andrade's (1890–1954) famous 1928 "Manifesto Antropófago" (Anthropophagous Manifesto) declared metaphoric cannibalism as the new aesthetic ideal, and the Tupi people as the symbol of both Brazilian otherness and the absorption of European influence. "Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question," he wrote, suggesting that the use, ingestion, and digestion of all foreign cultures that had an impact on Brazil, paired with creativity and irreverence, may lead to a newfound identity that supersedes imitation and that might open the floodgates of originality. Other proposals for a new literature are Mário de Andrade's (1893–1945) Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City, 1922), a long poem organized as a carnivalesque stroll through the twists and turns of the city of São Paulo. His Macunaíma (1928) was another fundamental modernist text. The urban turn of literary nationalism also signals the interest of the modernistas in negotiating a national identity that would encompass both the Brazilian metropolis and the large expanses of rural land in the interior of the nation.

A less radically experimental manifestation of modernism emerged in Rio de Janeiro, with Cecilia Meireles (1901–1964) as one of its foremost exponents. Despite her more lyrical and symbolist tendencies, she was associated with a literary journal that also espoused brasilidade (Brazilianness) and universality as joint precepts. Before 1922 several poets had produced works that engaged in a modernist aesthetic. The poems in A Cinza das Horas (1917), by Manuel Bandeira (1886–1968), displayed a marked symbolist influence; but his subsequent collections, such as Carnival (1919), experimented with dislocated rhythms, ridiculed sentimentalism, and played with language in ways that foreshadowed modernist experiments. Other poets who emerged during the first phase of modernismo reshaped the movement in the 1930s—Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1901–1987), Murilo Mendes (1901–1975), Jorge de Lima (1895–1953), and Vinicius de Moraes (1913–1980). Whether explicitly politicized or not, the poetry of this period looks toward the world and distances itself from the metapoetic experimentalism of the first wave of modernismo. In the 1950s João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920–1999) became one of the most influential poetic innovators; his Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of Severino, 1954–1955) is a poetic rendering of the life and death of a simple man in the economically depressed region of northeastern Brazil.

The prose of the 1930s and 1940s tended to be socially conscious and regionalist. Among the representative authors of the period are Jorge Amado (1912–2001), Raquel de Queiroz (1910–2003), Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953), and José Lins do Rego (1901–1957). Among urban novelists, Cyro dos Anjos (1906–1994) stands out with O amanuense Belmiro (Diary of a Civil Servant, 1937) and Abdias (1945). The generation that followed focused on psychologically complex explorations of individuals, whether set in the backlands or in middle-class urban households. A study by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933), which discussed Brazil's colonial heritage and history of slavery, had an impact well beyond the confines of the social sciences. João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967) published Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1956), widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century in Brazil. At this time also Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) published her lucid short stories. In the theater, Ariano Suassuna (b. 1927) was the most influential playwright.

In the 1950s and 1960s concretismo, an approach to a poem as a visual and musical object, was followed by a neoconcretist movement. In between, Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) and Decio Pignatari (b. 1927) experimented not only in response to modernist literature, but also to other art forms including film. The repressive dictatorship that began in 1964 created a shift in certain poets, with many of them beginning to write social and political critiques. Carlos Drummond de Andrade in the meantime passed from a politically engaged period (notably with A Rosa do Povo (The Rose of the People, 1945) to an intimist meditative poetry in Claro Enigma (Clear Enigma, 1951).

In the late 1960s through the 1980s, the atmosphere for writers was heavy with politics. It was a period of introspection but not of solipsism, when novels and short stories were quests for the elements that define Brazilian society. Such explorations often entailed deconstructing popular images of the nation and its foundations—hence the popularity of the historical novel genre. Of note in this period are José Cândido de Carvalho (1914–1989), Nélida Piñon (b. 1937), João Ubaldo Ribeiro (b. 1941), and Moacyr Scliar (b. 1937). Silvano Santiago (b. 1936), and Marcio Souza (b. 1946) both explore the genre of the New Historical Novel. A special place deserves to be saved for the shining chronicles of this period. Already announced as a new creative genre since Rubem Braga (1913–1990) published Um Pé de Milho (A Foot of Maize, 1948), the chronicle became a creative and fruitful field with Nelson Rodrigues (1912–1980), and Luis Fernando Verissimo (b. 1936). The urban short story was a fruitful genre, with Dalton Trevisan's (b. 1925) O Vampiro de Curitiba (The Vampire of Curitiba, 1965) striking an irreverent note; dark, violent, and abject characters populate Rubem Fonseca's (b. 1925) short story collections.

POETRY AND POPULAR MUSIC

After the 1960s Brazilian poetry grew in popularity through a collaboration with musicians. Songwriters' influence crossed over into the realm of letters, aswith Chico Buarque (b. 1944), Torquato Neto (1944–1972), Caetano Veloso (b. 1942), and Gilberto Gil (b. 1942). Tropicalismo emerged in the late 1960s and picked up on the innovations of the numerous avant-gardes in Brazil, including the concretist movement and its offshoots, and the politically informed poetry of violão de rua ("guitar of the streets"). In the 1980s political poetry reacted to years of dictatorial repression, notable examples being João Cabral de Melo Neto's A Escola das Facas (The School of Knives, 1980) and Alex Polari's (b. 1951) Inventário de cicatrizes (Inventory of Scars, 1987). Other significant poets of the late 1970s and 1980s are Paulo Leminski (1944–1989), Ana Cristina César (1952–1983), Adélia Prado (b. 1935), and Sebastião Uchoa Leite (1935–2003). Glauco Mattoso (b. 1951) was active in the "marginal poets" group of the 1970s but his poetry has only recently begun to be included in poetry anthologies.

From 1990 to 2006, poetry sees a new turn, with the context of globalization and the emergence of the Internet as another means for poems to circulate. Several significant literary journals emerge strictly in the virtual world and literary blogs begin to have an influence in determining the fate of poems and poets. The 1990s can be characterized by a popularization of poetry through mass media, and a productive erosion of the division of high and popular culture. Alberto Martins (b. 1958), Claudia Roquette-Pinto (b. 1963), Paulo Lins (b. 1958), Moacir Amâncio (b. 1949), Arnaldo Antunes (b. 1960), Carlito Azevedo (b. 1961), and Contador Borges (b. 1954) are among the poets who provide a glimpse of the many trends of the 1990s. Other poets of note are Jussara Salazar (b. 1959) and Paulo Henriques Britto (b. 1951). The turn of the millennium has also witnessed some remarkable young poets, such as Micheliny Verunschk (b. 1972) and Ademir Assunção (b. 1961). In prose, novelists and short story writers who explore the chaos and contradictions of Brazilian modernity are João Gilberto Noll (b. 1946), Bernardo Carvalho (b. 1960), Fernando Bonassi (b. 1962), and Chico Buarque (b. 1944). Other notable novelists are Alberto Mussa (b. 1961) and Milton Hatoum (b. 1952).

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Claret M. Vargas

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture