Brazilian Literature as World Literature

Eduardo F. Coutinho

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501323270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théorie de la critique littéraire

Brazilian Literature as World Literature is not only an introduction to Brazilian literature but also a study of the connections between Brazil's literary production and that of the rest of the world, particularly European and North American literatures. It highlights the tension that has always existed in Brazilian literature between the imitation of European models and forms and a yearning for a tradition of its own, as well as the attempts by modernist writers to propose possible solutions, such as aesthetic cannibalism, to overcome this tension.

1

Introduction

Eduardo F. Coutinho

As the result of a long process of colonization that lasted over three centuries, Brazilian literature has always been marked by a tension between the mere incorporation of a European tradition and the attempt to create a new one of a local or native coinage. These two trends have oscillated throughout the history of the country’s literary production; yet, with a look at the cadre of Brazilian literature, from its first manifestations to the present times, it is not difficult to observe that it has gradually moved away from the influence of European writings and has begun to deal with the native themes and types, and to express itself in the new Brazilian idiom. This search for a proper profile does not mean, however, that Brazilian literature has broken completely with European literary tradition and that it has enclosed itself in a kind of ivory tower. Rather, it has never ceased to receive contributions from European literature and to incorporate them into its own local tradition. The difference lies in the fact that now these contributions, instead of being blindly accepted, are critically filtered and blended together with the local elements, often producing new aesthetic forms. Thus, rather than being simply influenced by European production, Brazilian literature has now turned to establish a dialogue with it, and it is precisely this dialogue that has projected the country’s literature in international terms.

Brazilian literature has constituted a proper tradition throughout the centuries, but it is obviously also a part of Western tradition, and its connections with what is produced in other nations of the West, particularly in the European countries and the USA, are increasingly evident. New trends and movements appear in different parts of the world and are spread out rapidly in times of globalization. Yet, their voyage to other contexts is no longer a one-way itinerary, nor are they merely imported without taking into account the cultural and historical differences of the context of reception. The fact that this context is now considered is at the basis of the dialogue mentioned above, which conquered a wide space in Brazilian modernism, and is now perhaps one of the main traits of this literature. Brazilian Literature as World Literature is an attempt to draw a picture of the relationship between Brazilian and world literature from the time of colonization to the present, focusing on some of its most significant moments. The chapters have been designed to offer a view of these moments, starting from one or more of its representative figures and moving outwards to the period as a whole. In this movement, topics and questions of world literature will appear and be treated from their local cultural, ideological and historical perspectives. Brazilian literature will be focused on, then, from a wide variety of aspects, and will be approached in a way that includes its relationship with African literatures in the Portuguese language. As such, the book is meant to offer a contribution not only to the study of Brazilian and world literature, but also to comparative literature as a whole, as well as to Literary Theory and history.

At the beginning of colonization, the literary manifestations which appeared in Brazil were seen as extensions of Portuguese literature. Such is the case with Pero Vaz de Caminha’s letter of discovery—the first document written about the new land—and of the reports which followed: accounts of the first travelers, descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, and the chronicles of missionaries and soldiers. It was the literature of Portugal that generated the nascent Brazilian literary spirit. It served as a vehicle for the inheritance of European, Western and Christian ideas that laid the foundations of Brazilian consciousness. It brought about classical values, literary techniques, and aesthetic models that were adapted to the new environment. Yet, it also gave rise, from the very beginning, to a yearning to create something endowed with a Brazilian sense. Portuguese literature brought to Brazil the medieval and Renaissance heritage. From the Middle Ages came Brazil’s old poetic yardstick, in the form of popular lyrics and courtly versions of troubadour ballads, traditional dramatic forms that had grown up in the plays of Gil Vicente and the Jesuit theater, whose legacy can be seen in the voice of José de Anchieta and his colleagues, particularly Manuel da Nóbrega. And to the Renaissance atmosphere Brazilian literature owes the boastful lyricism of the exaltation of local things and countryside, the cycle of the literature of expansion and the prestige of the classical languages, especially Latin, through the first three centuries of colonization, and also of Greco-Roman culture.

But if the first great influence exercised on the nascent literature of Brazil was that of the Portuguese, whose great authors—Camões, Gil Vicente, Sá de Miranda, the chroniclers, the poets of the cancioneiros, and the prose writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—constituted a constant presence in the Brazilian psyche, the baroque period opened up a new and important source of influence: the Spanish. The baroque movement was introduced into Brazil by the first Jesuit writers, but it penetrated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, appearing in the prose and poetry of ufanismo (a logical exaltation of the land and countryside), in the native poetry of Gregório de Matos, in the exhortations of Father Antônio Vieira and his successors, and in the poetry and prose of the literary academies. In spite of the fact that the major manifestations of baroque art in Brazil are to be found in the plastic arts—in painting, sculpture and architecture—particularly in the works of Aleijadinho and in the extraordinary art forms and collections of Bahia and Minas Gerais churches, it was under the aegis of the baroque, defined not only as an artistic style, but also as a cultural complex, that Brazilian literature was actually born. The literary genres mostly cultivated at the time were the dialogue, lyric and epic poetry, and the theater, along with historiography and pedagogical meditation. In most cases, literature was used to serve the religious and pedagogical ideal of conversion and catechism; the theater, for example, was an extraordinary vehicle in the process of expanding Catholicism.

What mainly characterizes baroque art in general is the fusion of opposites, such as natural and supernatural, light and shadow, good and evil, etc., and the contradictions emerging from these opposing terms found a fertile ground in Brazil, due to the tension already existing between the European and the nascent native traditions. As a result of this, the baroque style became a kind of a modus vivendi in the country and was at the basis of the long process of interbreeding, which came to be one of the most significant traits of Brazilian culture. At the time baroque art reached its zenith in Brazilian literature, the seventeenth century, two figures deserve particular mention: Father Antônio Vieira (1608–97), whose sermons had a great impact on the colonizing process, contributing, among other things, to protest and in some cases preventing the slavery of the Indians; and Gregório de Matos (1623–96), whose poetry constitutes a formidable satire on every single aspect of the colony’s way of life. Matos’ poetry was dominated by baroque dualism: a mixture of religiosity and sensualism, mysticism and eroticism, earthly values and spiritual aspirations. He is a good example of the baroque soul, in his polar situation, his state of conflict and spiritual contradictions.

By focusing most especially on the work of these two figures, but also referring frequently to other writers of the same period, Dalma Nascimento offers in her “Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira and Gregório” an accurate cadre of the role and importance of the baroque style in the constitution of Brazilian literature. The author starts her essay with a discussion about the differences between mannerism and baroque to affirm, in consonance with other Brazilian critics, that Brazilian literature was born under the sign of the baroque, and since this style was brought to the New World by the Spanish Jesuits, she takes some time to analyze the poetry of José de Anchieta, considered by many as the “father of Brazilian literature.” Anchieta’s poetry is simple and naïve, though highly lyrical at times, but his theater, crammed with images and devices employed to impress its audience—mostly composed of Indians—played a relevant role in the process of their catechization. His theater, as well as that of his companions—among whom was Manuel da Nóbrega—regardless of its aesthetic value, was, above all, a strong ideological weapon.

Dalma Nascimento’s analysis of Father Antônio Vieira’s work, which is composed of sermons, reveals a high-quality production, built up in the most distinguished baroque style—characterized by a conglomeration of images and a highly contorted syntax—and committed to the problems of his time, such as the Dutch invasion of the country and the enslavement of the Indians. With a highly eloquent tone, Vieira raises his voice against such issues, as well as against others of a social, political, religious or economic character, and this fact grants him a special position in this phase of Brazilian literature. Yet the most significant figure of the time, in the author’s view, and the one that best expresses the baroque spirit, is that of Gregório de Matos, the “accursed” poet, whose vicious tongue did not spare any of his fellowmen, particularly governors, priests, politicians and members of the wealthy classes, who lived at the expense of others. Gregório de Matos’s formidable satire constitutes the sharpest criticism of the country’s colonizing society and it anticipates, according to Dalma Nascimento, the anthropophagic banquet of twentieth-century Brazilian modernism. He was, in her words, “the most authentic native base of Brazilian literary formation”.

In the eighteenth century, the baroque taste for hyperbole, for ostentation and the outsized, was followed in Europe by a search for the classical qualities of measure, convenience, discipline, simplicity and delicacy. This constituted the rococo or Arcadian, or, to use a more general term, Neoclassicism. In Brazil, the eighteenth century was a moment of great importance for it constituted a phase of transition and preparation for independence. From the discovery and possession of the land, from the deeds of the bandeirantes as they pushed back the Western frontiers, from the defense against the invader, there came naturally the formation of a common consciousness, a national feeling, which replaced the nativist description of nature and the Indian. The lyrical sentiment of the previous century was replaced by a kind of national pride. There emerged the figure of the “Brazilian” half-breed in blood and soul: the local type, a product of miscegenation, who spoke a language that differed considerably from peninsular Portuguese in accent, intonation, lexicon, and syntax. The literary product of this cultural complex was the Arcadian movement, which flourished among the poets of the so-called Minas School—Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Basílio da Gama, Santa Rita Durão, Alvarenga Peixoto, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, and Silva Alvarenga—and its beginning was marked by the publication of Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s Obras poéticas (1768). It was a movement of European origin, but marked by a strong nationalist feeling that inspired a group of poets who used to call themselves shepherds and who lived in direct contact with nature. Among these, Gonzaga achieved the highest expression.

In a clear intertextual dialogue with the ideas of European Enlightenment, Gustavo Bernardo Krause offers in his text “Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil” an accurate view of the Arcadian movement that flourished in Minas Gerais in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was strictly associated with a political movement of independence—the Inconfidência Mineira—aborted in 1789 as a result of Portuguese repression, a few months before the French Revolution. The writers who formed the Arcadian movement were mostly, if not all, engaged in the political insurrection and their work, though mainly of a lyrical sort, was also highly critical at moments, as in the case of Basílio da Gama’s epic poem O Uraguai (1769), a strong denouncement of the Jesuits by a former member of the Order, and the Cartas Chilenas, a fierce satire against Portuguese dominance that was only published much later, in 1845, and usually attributed to Gonzaga. Gama’s poem, one of the few epics of Brazilian literature, has been appreciated by critics due, among other qualities, to the fact that its protagonists are Indians, rather than Portuguese, and that the drama’s main focus falls upon these Indians. Twelve years after the publication of O Uraguai, another epic is published by Frei José de Santa Rita Durão—the poem Caramuru—but of a lesser quality than the former, and more conservative in political terms. Among the lyric poets of the Arcadian movement, Gustavo Krause centers his attention on the two most relevant: Cláudio Manuel da Costa and Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, in particular the latter, who took pastoral poetry to its peak in Brazilian literature with his poems dedicated to Marília, a fictitious creation based on a girl with whom he fell in love, but could never marry. His lyrics to her, which anticipate Romanticism, are considered to be the first love myth of Brazilian literature.

Romanticism, the movement which followed the Arcadian in European literature, assumed in Brazil a particular makeup, with special traits and characteristics of its own, along with the broad elements that linked it to the European movement. Besides, it is a movement of extraordinary relevance, for the country owes to Romanticism an acceleration of the evolution of the literary process as never before. The period between 1800 and 1850 shows a great leap forward in Brazilian literature as it passed from a mixture of decadent neoclassicism and nativist exaltation into an artistic manifestation by which a whole group of lofty poets and prose writers was brought together. Some critics even state that this period consolidates in Brazilian literature the autonomy of its national tonality and of its forms and themes, as well as the technical and critical self-awareness of that autonomy. Here, in prose writing,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Translator Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Baroque Voices in the Primordial Voices of Brazilian Literature: Anchieta, Vieira, and Gregório
• 3 Light and Shadow: From Enlightenment to Neoclassicism in Brazil
• 4 Indigenism and the Search for Brazilian Identity: European Influences and National Roots
• 5 The Multifaceted Works of Machado de Assis
• 6 Naturalism in Brazil and its European Connections
• 7 Brazilian Modernism and the Modern Art Week: The Influence of the European Twentieth-Century Vanguards
• 8 The Dialogue between Brazilian and World Poetry in the Twentieth Century
• 9 Jorge Amado: The International Projection of the Brazilian Writer
• 10 Regionalism vs. World Literature in João Guimarães Rosa
• 11 Crossing Borders: Clarice Lispector and the Scene of Transnational Feminist Criticism
• 12 The Brazilian Theater in the World: From Modern Dramaturgy to the Contemporary Post-Dramatic Scene
• 13 Postmodern Brazilian Literature on the World Stage
• 14 Comparative Literature and Supranational Community Relations: The Administration of Difference, the Ways of Articulation, and the Hegemonies of Cultural Flows
• Index
• Copyright