Literary and Cultural Relations between Brazil and Mexico

Deep Undercurrents

P. da Luz Moreira

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137377357
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Joining a timely conversation within the field of intra-American literature, this study takes a fresh look at Latin America by locating fragments and making evident the mostly untold story of horizontal (south-south) contacts across a multilingual, multicultural continent.

Chapter 1

First Undercurrents

The relations between Brazilian and Mexican artists and intellectuals predate the establishment of these two paradigmatic giants of Latin America as independent nations. The first signs of contact involve no other than two outstanding figures of colonial literature: the Jesuit Antonio Vieira (1608–1697), who lived in Brazil from the age of 6 until 33, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–1695), born and raised in Nueva España. Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagórica, published in 1690 by the bishop of Puebla, links the world-famous Jesuit preacher and the greatest poet of colonial Mexico. In this letter, Sor Juana offers a bold refutation of one of Vieira’s Sermões do Mandato [Maundy Thursday Sermons] first heard in 1655 in the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Misericórdia of Lisbon at the very height of Vieira’s influence in the Portuguese court,¹ when Sor Juana was four years old.

A Maundy Thursday Sermon takes as theme the love of God for mankind. The title refers to the “new” commandment in John 13:34: “That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” These sermons typically versed on the love of Christ, contrasting the perfect love emanating from God (agape) with the lesser one from human beings (eros), but in his sermon Vieira concentrates on two instances of divine love: God’s love on the day of the incarnation of Christ and in the institution of the Eucharist. Vieira, with customary eloquence and wit, concludes that the latter is greater, since Christ gave us then his own flesh and blood through the sacrament and thus, in corporeal absence, He is incarnated in all of the faithful who commune with God in the Eucharist.

A fundamental element in Vieira’s sermon and in Sor Juana’s response is the notion of fineza (a powerful instance of agudeza, which means shrewdness or discernment), related in this sermon to the subtle power of Christ’s “nonpresence” in the world as a powerful act of love devoid of earthly interests in reciprocity. Sor Juana parses each argument of Vieira’s, proposing distinctions between different dimensions of fineza: its cost to the doer, its utility to the receiver, and its cause and effect. For the Mexican, fineza is a sort of performative act: “¿Es fineza, acaso, tener amor? No, por cierto, sino las demostraciones del amor: ésas se llaman finezas” (21). Sor Juana chastises Vieira for refuting three eminent church scholars (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Chrysostom) and then boldly refutes each of the main theses Vieira puts forward in his sermon. Her conclusion is a baroque rhetorical jewel in which she bids the reader to thank God for what He does not do:

Let us appreciate the good God does to us in not doing to us all the benefits we wish from him, and also the good that His Majesty wants to do us but does not so He does not give us more to account for. Let us thank Him and ponder on the delicacy of the Divine Love in which to reward is a benefit, to punish is a benefit and to withdraw benefits is the greatest benefit; not doing a delicacy [fineza], the greatest delicacy. (27)²

Sor Juana’s bold eloquence is couched in customary demonstrations of humilitas: the gracious opening declares her “admirable impact of the ingenuities” and her “secret empathy” to Vieira’s “generous nation”³ while the end contains an apology for her unpolished text, compared to a formless embryo. Nevertheless, there were repercussions for the daring nun, who was characterized by one of her critics as “una mujer introducida a theóloga y scripturista” (Poot Herrera, 77). Just as this Carta Atenagórica came out, three powerful men of the Church in México rallied against her: Antonio Núñez, sor Juana’s Jesuit confessor and prefect of the Congregación de la Purísima Concepción de la Virgen María, Fernandez de Santa Cruz, the bishop of Puebla, who took the mantle of a fictitious Sor Philotea in order to include criticisms of Sor Juana’s boldness in the very body of the publication of the Carta Atenagórica, and Francisco de Aguiar y Seixas, the archbishop of Mexico, who demanded a profesión de fe from the nun.

Ermilo Abreu Gómez describes a multicultural seventeenth-century Corte del Virrey, “mitad española y mitad portuguesa” (38):

In that pseudo-court in the style of Felipe IV . . . filled with Portuguese and Jews, Juana Inés finished her language studies. Portuguese made it easier for her to read of the works of Father Antonio Vieira, whom she criticized in her Carta Atenagórica. In some of her Villancicos [ballads], she introduced in popular form some less than pristine Portuguese expressions. (49)⁴

Furthermore, Abreu Gómez emphasizes Sor Juana’s knowledge of Portuguese and its importance in her intellectual formation: “La limitación de su cultura por la escasez de los libros que podía leer en castellano, la instó a estudiar el latín y el portugués” (76), “que participaba tanto del lenguaje culto como del que arrastra el sentimiento de lo popular” (37).⁵

The discovery of a lovely group of enigmas written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz perhaps a few months before her death in 1695⁶ confirms that not only did the nun continue to write after the affair of the Carta Atenagórica, but also that her relationship to the Portuguese world continued, since these enigmas were dedicated to a group of literate Portuguese nuns gathered around an Asamblea de la Casa del Placer. Enigmas ofrecidos a la discreta inteligencia de la soberana Asamblea de la Casa del Placer por su más rendida y aficionada Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, Décima Musa (Martínez Lopez, 140–170) is a collection of riddles written in beautifully fluent redondillas. Martínez López assures that the answers to these riddles revolve around multiple definitions of love, proof that Sor Juana was still able to display her art, still preoccupied with the theme of Vieira’s bold sermon, and still in close contact with Portuguese letters. Long before Brazil and Mexico became independent nations, deep undercurrents of Portuguese and Spanish exchange were rising closer to the surface, tracing a course that passed through Portugal and Spain, their colonial metropolises, which had been unified for almost 60 years.

The nineteenth century saw important Brazilian writers react to turbulent events in Mexico, with Maximillian’s Mexican adventure capturing the imagination of Brazilians living under Pedro II’s reign. In 1862 Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis wrote a poem called “Epitáfio do México” (Chrysalidas, 87–88), just as French troops brought Maximilian to power. The poem’s epigraph alludes to the Grecian resistance against the Persians in the Thermopylae (grossly outnumbered, the Greeks lost but the Spartan hero Leonidas I resisted bravely until the end) and, while the poet laments “the lukewarm cadaver / of a vanquished people” (87), he prophesies the nation’s rebirth “when the fateful voice / of holy freedom / comes in prosperous days” (88).⁷ In 1865 Machado de Assis’s column in Diário do Rio de Janeiro features lively exchanges with a reader who signs himself “O Amigo da Verdade” and writes in defense of Maximilian’s regime (Correspondência 89–105). Reacting to a speech by Maximilian’s envoy about Brazilian and Mexican mutual interests and the two nations’ “regime identity,” Machado de Assis affirms unequivocally:

In our opinion the empire in Mexico is the product of violence and a subsidiary of the French Empire. What reciprocity of interests can there be between this and Brazil’s Empire, which is the result of the nation’s will? ( . . . ) Universal justice and the American spirit protest against the reciprocity of interests between the two empires. ( . . . ) Brazil cannot share interests or concerns with Mexico, because our origin is legitimate and our spirit is, above all, America. (94–95)⁸

Benito Juárez’s fight against Maximilian also had a great impact in Brazil. Still in 1865 the poet Fagundes Varella published his admired “Versos Soltos ao General Juárez” (Poemas de Fagundes Varela 79–81),⁹ an exalted acclamation of the Mexican statesman whose name “It will be ( . . . ) the magic word / The world will utter in remembrance of the glories / Of the Mexican race!”¹⁰ Four years later Varela’s last book, Cantos do Ermo e da Cidade, features another eulogy, “O general Juárez” (91–101), which calls the Mexican leader one of the few “among the children of these ungrateful times”¹¹ who deserves to be called a hero for fighting for the freedom and redemption that are the essence of the Americas:

Nobody can erase

The glory of a race from the vast book

That belongs to future existence.

Though slavery, wars, infamies

May tarnish your brilliance,

A nation cannot die, nor be disowned! (99)¹²

Firm in his belief that “the spirit of a People never dies” (97), Varela proclaims Juárez “more than a genius” (101),¹³ a true Romantic hero, who finds a source of essential freedom in the depths of his own country:

In America’s bosom

There is yet a new world to discover:

Gentlemen from overseas,

Would you care to know where it is?

Do you want to know its name?

Examine the heart of the American race,

And in this endless sea,

Yet warmed by the first sun,

You’ll see freedom! (95)¹⁴

About the same time, the conflict in Mexico reappears in Machado de Assis’s Phalenas. Instead of glorifying the victorious Juárez, Machado de Assis, who always believed Maximilian to be well intentioned, centers attention on the dramatic story of Maximilian’s wife, Carlota, who had been driven mad by her husband’s debacle and death. “La Marchesa de Miramar” (21–26) focuses on tragic pathos, dramatizing the last moments of Maximilian’s deranged wife and imagining that “a bloody dew falls in the Mexican night. . . . ” (24).¹⁵

In 1881 as the movement for the proclamation of the Republic gained momentum, the republican militant Quintino Bocaiúva turns the phrase Olhemos para o México [Let’s Look to Mexico]—the title of his column in his newspaper, O Globo, into a cri de coeur against the monarchy and in favor of a closer relationship with Spanish America. The column had such profound impact that it would still be remembered in the 1930s, during the debates about oil exploration in Brazil.¹⁶ One of the debaters, the author of Petróleo para o Brasil, was the 1930 revolutionary veteran Juarez Távora, his first name, still common in Brazil, a sign of Juárez’s enduring popularity.¹⁷

While Bocaiúva sang praises to the progressivism of Porfirio Díaz’s authoritarian republic in Mexico, at the other end of the political spectrum the monarchist Eduardo Prado criticized Mexico in A ilusão Americana (1893), accusing Bocaiúva of believing in “estatísticas ultra-fantasistas” (77) about Mexican development. Prado castigates republican regimes in Latin America as servile imitations of the United States, a form of government unsuited for the Latin peoples of the Americas, which “denied the traditions of their race and their hist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 First Undercurrents
• Chapter 2 Ronald de Carvalho (and Carlos Pellicer): Modern Poets of America
• Chapter 3 Alfonso Reyes: Brazil and Mexico in a Nutshell
• Chapter 4 When Mexican Poets Come to Rio de Janeiro
• Chapter 5 Érico Veríssimo’s Journey into Mexico
• Chapter 6 João Guimarães Rosa between Life and Death in His Own Páramo
• Chapter 7 Why and for What Purpose Do Latin American Fiction Writers Travel? Silviano Santiago’s Viagem ao México and The Roots and Labyrinths of Latin America
• Chapter 8 Nelson Pereira dos Santos and the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema
• Chapter 9 Paul Leduc Reads Rubem Fonseca: The Globalization of Violence or The Violence of Globalization
• Chapter 10 The Delicate Crime of Beto Brant and Felipe Ehrenberg
• Chapter 11 Undercurrents, Still Flowing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index