Modernismo and regionalism

Prior to the vanguard Modernismo movement of the 1920s, several writers emerged with unique and lasting contributions. Euclides da Cunha, a journalist, wrote Os sertões (1902; Rebellion in the Backlands), a moving account of a fanatical religious and social uprising in the Northeast. His work called national attention to the “other” Brazil, that of the interior backlands neglected by the government. José Pereira da Graça Aranha wrote Canaã (1902; Canaan), a novel that examines immigration to Brazil in view of the polemical issues of race and ethnicity as these influence notions of nationalist purity and pride. The novel’s narration takes the form of a dialogue between two German immigrants. In it “Aryan purity” is pitted against the potential harmony of Brazil’s racial admixture. José Bento Monteiro Lobato immortalized the backwardness and apathy of the Brazilian caipira/caboclo (backwoodsman/mestizo) in the character of Jeca Tatu. The plight of the neglected, malnourished backwoods populations was described with sarcasm and compassion in Lobato’s short stories, collected in Urupês (1918; “Urupês”). Faced with the paucity of Brazilian books for young readers, Lobato also wrote 17 volumes of children’s stories and is considered a master of juvenile literature.

Unlike the Spanish-American Modernismo that emerged in the late 19th century—which paradoxically expressed innovation and tradition, primarily in poetry, in defining a chaotic and exotic present—Brazilian Modernismo, which came later, was a vanguard movement that sparked a veritable rupture with Portuguese academicism and colonial cultural practices. In art, music, literature, architecture, and the plastic arts, Modernismo became a way for artists such as the painter Tarsila do Amaral to modernize national thought. If 1822 represented Brazilian political independence, 1922 symbolized Brazil’s cultural independence. Influenced by European vanguardist and futurist movements and led by the cosmopolitan traveler and writer Oswald de Andrade, a group of artists and intellectuals from São Paulo officially celebrated Modernismo in February 1922 with the famous Semana de Arte Moderna (“Week of Modern Art”). This cultural event, which consisted of lectures, readings, and exhibitions, pronounced new and disruptive concepts of art to a public not always prepared for their irreverent innovations. As a collective effort, Modernismo involved a renewed study of the past intended to discover what was singular about Brazil, especially its mixed ethnicities and cultures. Of all the manifestos articulating a modern view of civilization, culture, ethnicity, and nation, Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago (1928; Cannibal Manifesto) formulated the most lasting original concept to emerge from Brazilian Modernismo. Drawing from the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, Andrade metaphorically “digested” the practice of cannibalism and transformed it into a cultural process of the foreign being swallowed for the purpose of inventing, re-creating, and “expelling” something new. In his primitivist Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil (1924; “Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry”), Andrade inverts the notion of cultural imitation through imports by promoting poetry for “export,” in homage to Brazil’s first natural product. He also published a coming-of-age novel, Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar (1924; Sentimental Memoirs of John Seaborne), that attempted to adapt to literature the methods of Cubist visual art.

As the “pope of Modernismo,” Mário de Andrade was the poet, novelist, essayist, folklorist, musicologist, and ethnographer who promoted the idea of an “interested art” that could reach the people. His interest in folklore and in the culture of the past led to his appreciation of Brazil’s cultural and racial heterogeneity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his novel Macunaíma (1928; Eng. trans. Macunaíma). The constant metamorphoses that its protagonist undergoes represent not synthesis but the juxtaposition of differences between Brazil’s three major ethnic groups and among its various regions. Diminishing the boundary between high art and popular culture, Mário de Andrade studied their interrelationship in order to define an authentic national culture. Modernismo produced other notable poets, including Jorge de Lima, Cecília Meireles, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade; the last became known as the poet of the people with his satirical views of bourgeois norms, written in a voice employing Brazilian colloquial and syntactical forms. A precursor to Modernismo, Manuel Bandeira is recognized as a lyric poet who introduced colloquial language, “trivial” topics, and popular culture into verses that challenged “correct” and well-behaved lyricism.

A second phase of Modernismo produced a genre known as the regionalist novel of the Northeast, which emerged during the 1930s when a group of novelists in Brazil’s Northeast dramatized that region’s decline and underdevelopment after the heyday of sugar production. The sociologist Gilberto de Mello Freyre spearheaded this regionalist current and immortalized the social structure of the plantation house in Casa grande e senzala (1933; “The Big House and the Slave Quarters”; Eng. trans. The Masters and the Slaves). This sociological study characterized miscegenation and the Portuguese racial practice of commingling with black slaves for the first time in a positive frame; it categorized them luso-tropicalismo, a concept later criticized as contributing to the myth of racial democracy. In a cycle of novels beginning with Menino de engenho (1932; Plantation Boy), José Lins do Rego used a neonaturalist style to depict the decadence of the sugarcane culture, as perceived by the impressionistic eyes of a city boy. Rachel de Queiroz, the only female regionalist writer, wrote about the climatic hardships in the state of Ceará in the novel O quinze (1930; “The Year Fifteen”), and in As três Marias (1939; The Three Marias) she evoked the claustrophobic condition of women victimized by a rigid patriarchal system. Jorge Amado, a socialist and a best-selling novelist, focused on the oppressed proletariat and Afro-Brazilian communities in novels such as Cacáu (1933; “Cacao”) and Jubiabá (1935; Eng. trans. Jubiabá). Amado also created strong and dynamic mulatto heroines in Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands), the latter a tour de force that has been interpreted as an allegory of Brazil’s paradoxically bawdy yet conservative proclivities. The most revered regionalist is Graciliano Ramos, whose pungent novels—which include Vidas sêcas (1938; Barren Lives) and Angústia (1936; Anguish)—denounce, in a terse narrative style, the social and economic tragedies of the impoverished Northeast. Memórias do cárcere (1953; “Prison-House Memoirs”) is his autobiographical account of incarceration under the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship of the 1930s and ’40s.

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