Literature 詩 · 14
Brazilian Literature
From Machado de Assis to the 1922 Modernists and Clarice Lispector — the great Portuguese-language literature that Brazil built, from Machado's irony to the introspective prose of the twentieth century.
enBrazilian literature is, alongside the Portuguese, one of the two great branches of letters in the Portuguese language. It shares the same idiom and part of the same heritage, yet over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it builds a voice of its own — alert to the society, the landscape and the speech of the country — that makes it one of the most original contributions to modern Western literature.
The making of a national literature
Political independence in 1822 quickened the search for a literary identity distinct from the metropolis. Romanticism supplied the first symbols: the indianismo of José de Alencar (O Guarani, 1857; Iracema, 1865), which turned the indigenous figure into a founding hero, and the poetry of Gonçalves Dias, whose Canção do Exílio (1846) became almost an anthem. The critic Antonio Candido would later describe this process as the formation of a literary system — authors, works and public constituting one another.
Machado de Assis
On that foundation rises the central figure of Brazilian letters: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908). Born into a humble family, of mixed race and self-taught, he rose to become founder and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (1897). His mature work opens with Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (“The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas”, 1881), narrated by a dead man, with an irony, a formal freedom and a scepticism that anticipated twentieth-century fiction by decades.
Ao verme que primeiro roeu as frias carnes do meu cadáver dedico como saudosa lembrança estas Memórias Póstumas.
The dedication of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881): the narrator is a dead man dedicating the book ‘to the worm that first gnawed the cold flesh of my corpse’.
There followed Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899), the latter centred on the never-resolved doubt over Capitu’s faithfulness — one of the most debated enigmas in Portuguese-language literature. Machado dispensed with tropical local colour and made psychological analysis and moral ambiguity his territory.
The Modernism of 1922
In February 1922, at the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, the Week of Modern Art (Semana de Arte Moderna) broke noisily with the academic past. The movement sought an art at once modern and Brazilian, able to absorb the European avant-gardes without imitating them.
- Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) — poet of Paulicéia Desvairada (1922) and author of Macunaíma (1928), a “rhapsody” that fuses myths, regions and ways of speaking into a hero “with no character at all”;
- Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) — author of the Pau-Brasil Manifesto (1924) and the Cannibal Manifesto (1928), which proposed “devouring” foreign culture in order to turn it into something of one’s own.
Tupi, or not tupi, that is the question.
The famous motto of Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto (1928), which swaps Shakespeare's verb for the name of the indigenous people and language.
The freedom of verse and vocabulary that Modernism won opened the way to one of the century’s richest poetic traditions: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Cecília Meireles and, later, the constructive rigour of João Cabral de Melo Neto.
The 1930s and the sertão
The 1930s gave Brazil the regionalist and social novel, in dry, denunciatory prose. Graciliano Ramos carried it to an extreme of concision in Vidas Secas (“Barren Lives”, 1938), about a family of migrants in the north-eastern sertão (backlands); José Lins do Rego, Rachel de Queiroz and Jorge Amado complete the picture.
| Author | Key work | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Machado de Assis | Dom Casmurro | 1899 |
| Mário de Andrade | Macunaíma | 1928 |
| Graciliano Ramos | Vidas Secas | 1938 |
| João Guimarães Rosa | Grande Sertão: Veredas | 1956 |
| Clarice Lispector | A Hora da Estrela | 1977 |
The sertão would return, transfigured, in the prose of João Guimarães Rosa, whose Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) reinvents the Portuguese language with neologisms, archaisms and unheard-of syntax in the service of a metaphysical narrative.
Clarice Lispector and introspection
Born in Ukraine in 1920 and taken to Brazil as a baby, Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) shifted the focus of the Brazilian novel from social exterior to the interior of consciousness. From Perto do Coração Selvagem (“Near to the Wild Heart”, 1943) onward, her writing pursues the instant, the epiphany and the unsayable. A Paixão Segundo G.H. (“The Passion According to G.H.”, 1964) and the last, brief A Hora da Estrela (“The Hour of the Star”, 1977) confirmed her as one of the most singular voices in Portuguese-language prose.
The language of a literature
From Machado’s scepticism to Clarice’s inner vertigo, Brazilian literature showed that Portuguese could give voice to a new world. Its growing international standing — translations, readers and university study — has made it one of the pillars of the language’s global reach.
Sources
- Formação da Literatura Brasileira . Livraria Martins Editora (1959)
- História Concisa da Literatura Brasileira . Cultrix (1970)
- The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature . Cambridge University Press (1996)