Mário de Andrade
- For the Angolan politician and writer see Mário Pinto de Andrade. For others with the name see Andrade.
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism and its chief organizer, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry in a single iconic moment at the age of twenty-seven. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a scholar and essayist—he is a major predecessor of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.
Andrade was the central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best-known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that participated in São Paulo modernism, becoming Brazil's great national polymath. He was the driving force behind the Week of Modern Art, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil. After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. At the end of his life he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing the role he had long held as the catalyst of the city's—and the nation's—entrance into artistic modernity.
Early life
Andrade was born in São Paulo and lived there virtually all of his life. As a child, he was a piano prodigy, and he later studied at the Music and Drama Conservatory of São Paulo. His formal education was solely in music, but at the same time, as Albert T. Luper records, he pursued persistent and solitary studies in history, art, and particularly poetry. Andrade had a solid command of French, and read Rimbaud and the major Symbolists. Although he wrote poetry throughout his musical education, he did not think to do so professionally until the career as a professional pianist to which he aspired was no longer available to him.
In 1913 his fourteen-year-old brother Renato died suddenly during a football game; Andrade left the Conservatory to stay at Araraquara, his family's farm. When he returned, his piano playing was afflicted intermittently by trembling of his hands. Though he ultimately did receive a degree in piano, he gave no concerts and began studying singing and music theory with an eye toward becoming a professor of music. At the same time, he began writing more seriously. In 1917, the year of his graduation, he published his first book of poems, Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema (There is a Drop of Blood in Each Poem), under the pseudonym Mário Sobral. The book contains hints of Andrade's growing sense of a distinctive Brazilian identity, but it does so within the context of a poetry that (like most Brazilian poetry of the period) is strongly indebted to earlier European—particularly French—literature.
His first book does not seem to have had an enormous impact, and Andrade broadened the scope of his writing. He left São Paulo for the countryside, and began an activity that would continue for the rest of his life: the meticulous documentation of the history, people, culture, and particularly music of the Brazilian interior, both in the state of São Paulo and in the wilder areas to the northeast. He published a few essays in São Paulo magazines, accompanied occasionally by his own photographs, but primarily he began accumulating massive amounts of detail of Brazilian life and Brazilian folklore. In between these trips, Andrade was teaching piano at the Conservatory, and he became a professor there in 1921.
Semana de Arte Moderna
While these folklore-gathering trips were going on, Andrade was developing a group of friends among young artists and writers in São Paulo, who like him were aware of the growing modernist movement in Europe. Several of them were later known as the Grupo dos Cinco (the Group of Five): Andrade, poets Oswald de Andrade (no relation) and Menotti del Picchia, and artists Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti. Malfatti had been to Europe before World War I, and introduced São Paulo to cubism and expressionism. Jack E. Tomlins, the translator of Andrade's second book, describes in his introduction a particularly crucial event in the development of Andrade's modernist philosophy. In 1920, he had recently met the modernist sculptor Victor Brecheret, and bought a sculpture from him entitled "Bust of Christ," which depicted Christ as a Brazilian with braided hair. His family (apparently to his surprise) was shocked and furious. Andrade retreated to his room alone, and later recalled, in a lecture translated by Tomlins, that—still "delirious"—he went out onto his balcony and "looked down at the square below without actually seeing it."
- Noises, lights, the ingenuous bantering of the taxi drivers:they all floated up to me. I was apparently calm and was thinking about nothing in particular. I don't know what suddenly happened to me. I went to my desk, opened a notebook, and wrote down a title that had never before crossed my mind: Hallucinated City.
Retaining that title (Paulicéia Desvairada), Andrade worked on the book for the next two years. He very quickly produced a "barbaric canticle", as he called it in the same lecture, and then gradually edited it down to half its original size.
These poems were entirely different from his earlier formal and abstract work. The lines of verse vary greatly in length and in syntactical structure, consisting primarily of impressionistic and fragmented descriptions interspersed with seemingly overheard, disconnected bits of speech in São Paulo dialect. The speaker of the poems often seems overwhelmed by the maze of dialogue that constantly interrupts him, as in "Colloque Sentimental":
| A rua toda nua . . . As casas sem luzes . . . E a mirra dos martírios inconscientes . . . |
The streets all naked . . . The lightless houses . . . And the myrrh of unwitting martyrs . . . | |
| —Deixe-me por o lenço no nariz. Tenho todos os perfumes de Paris! |
"Let me put my handkerchief to my nose. I have all the perfumes of Paris!" |
After the poems were completed, Andrade wrote what he called an "Extremely Interesting Preface", in an attempt to explain what the poems are doing in hindsight (though Bruce Dean Willis has suggested that the theories of the preface have more to do with his later work than with Paulicéia). The preface is self-deprecating ("This preface—although interesting—useless") but ambitious, presenting a theory not just of poetry but of the aesthetics of language, in order to explain the innovations of his new poems. Andrade explains their tangle of language in musical terms:
- There are certain figures of speech in which we can see the embryo of oral harmony, just as we find the germ of musical harmony in the reading of the symphonies of Pythagoras. Antithesis: genuine dissonance.
He makes a distinction, however, between language and music, in that "words are not fused like notes; rather they are shuffled together, and they become incomprehensible." However, as Willis has pointed out, there is a pessimism to the preface; in one of its key passages, it compares poetry to the submerged riches of El Dorado, which can never be recovered.
In 1922, while preparing Paulicéia Desvairada for publication, Andrade, Malfatti, and Oswald de Andade decided to create a single event that would introduce their work to the wider public: the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art). The Semana included exhibitions of paintings by Malfatti and other artists, readings, and lectures on art, music, and literature. Andrade was the chief organizer and the central figure in the event, which was greeted with skepticism but was well-attended. He gave lectures on both the principles of modernism and his work in Brazilian folk music, and read his "Extremely Interesting Preface." As the climactic event of the Semana, he read from Paulicéia Desvairada. The poems' use of free verse and colloquial São Paulo expressions, though related to European modernist poems of the same period, were entirely new to Brazilians. The reading was accompanied by persistent jeers, but Andrade perservered, and later discovered that a large part of the audience found it transformative. It has been cited frequently as the seminal event in modern Brazilian literature.
The Group of Five continued working together in the 1920s, during which their reputations solidified and hostility to their work gradually dimished, but eventually the group split apart; Andrade and Oswald de Andrade had a serious (and public) falling-out in 1929. New groups were formed out of the splinters of the original, and in the end many different modernist movements could trace their origins to the Semana de Arte Moderna.
Macunaíma
Throughout the 1920s Andrade continued traveling in Brazil, studying the culture and folklore of the interior. He began in this period to formulate a highly developed theory of the social dimensions of folk music. As Luper describes it, this theory is at once nationalistic and deeply personal. Andrade's explicit subject was the relationship between "artistic" music and the music of the street and countryside, including both Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian styles. The work was controversial for its formal discussions of dance music and folk music; those controversies were compounded by Andrade's style, which was at once poetic (Luper calls it "Joycean") and polemical. His travels through Brazil, however, became more than just research trips, as Andrade in 1927 began writing a travelogue, called "The Apprentice Tourist," for the newspaper O Diario Nacional (see Esther Gabara). The column served as an introduction for cosmopolites to indigenous Brazil, but also as an introduction to Andrade himself. A number of Andrade's photographs were published alongside the column, showing the landscape and people but also, occasionally, Andrade himself, usually filtered through the landscape, as in the self-portrait-as-shadow on this page.
At the same time, Andrade was developing an extensive familiarity with the dialects and cultures of large parts of Brazil. The speech-patterned technique he had developed in writing the poems of Hallucinated City he began applying to prose fiction. He wrote two novels during this period, both using these techniques; the first, Love, Intransitive Verb, was largely a formal experiment. The second, written shortly thereafter and published in 1928, was Macunaíma, a novel about a man ("The Hero without a Character" is the subtitle of the novel) from an indigenous tribe who comes to São Paulo, learns its languages (both of them, the novel says: Portuguese and Brazilian) and returns. The novel's style is composite, mixing vivid descriptions of both jungle and city with abrupt turns toward fantasy, the style that would later be called magical realism. Linguistically, too, the novel is composite; as the rural hero comes in contact with his urban environment, the novel reflects the meeting of languages. Relying heavily on the primitivism Andrade learned from the European modernists, the novel lingers over possible indigenous cannibalism even as it explores Macunaíma's immersion in urban life. In fact, critic Kimberle S. López has argued that cannibalism is the novel's driving thematic force: the eating of cultures by other cultures.
Formally, Macunaíma is an ecstatic blend of dialects and of the urban and rural rhythms Andrade was collecting in his research. It contains an entirely new style of prose: one deeply musical, frankly poetic, full of gods and almost-gods, and yet containing considerable narrative momentum. At the same time, the novel as a whole is quite pessimistic. It ends with Macunaíma's willful destruction of his own village; the meeting of cultures the novel documents, it makes clear, is inevitably catastrophic despite the euphoria of the collision. As Severino João Albuquerque has demonstrated, the novel presents "construction and destruction" as inseparable. It is a novel of both power (Macunaíma has all kinds of strange powers) and alienation.
Even as Macunaíma changed the nature of Brazilian literature in an instant (Albuquerque calls it "the cornerstone text of Brazilian Modernism"), the novel's inner conflict was part of its influence as well. Modernismo as Andrade inspired it was formally tied closely to European methods and based on the productive meeting of cultural forces within Brazil's diverse population, but it was also fiercely nationalistic, based in large part on distinguishing Brazil's culture from the world and on documenting the damage caused by the lingering effects of colonial rule. At the same time, the complex inner life of its hero suggests themes little explored in earlier Brazilian literature, which critics have taken to reflect back on Andrade himself. While Macunaíma is not autobiographical in the strict sense, it clearly reflects and refracts Andrade's own life. Andrade was a mulatto; his parents were landowners but also tied to agriculture more than Brazil's Portuguese pseudo-aristocracy, of which they were in no sense a part. Several critics, including Maria Luisa Nunes, have paralleled Andrade's race and family background to the status between categories of his character Macunaíma. His body itself is a composite—his skin is darker than that of his fellow tribesmen, and at one point in the novel he has an adult's body and a child's head—and he himself is a wanderer, never belonging to any one place.
Other critics, such as James N. Green, have argued for similar analogues between Andrade's sexuality and Macunaíma's complex status. Though Andrade was not openly gay, and there is no direct evidence of his sexual practices, many of Andrade's friends have reported after his death that he was clearly interested in men (though the subject is still reluctantly discussed in Brazil). It was over a published, pseudonymous accusation of effeminacy that Andrade broke with Oswald de Andrade in 1929. Macunaíma prefers women, but his constant state of belonging and not belonging is tied clearly to sex in addition to everything else. He is sexually precocious, beginning his romantic adventures at the age of six, and accomplished (he gives in reluctantly to one seduction out of concern for his "reputation"), but his particular form of eroticism seems always to lead to destruction of one kind or another.
Perhaps inevitably, Macunaíma's polemicism and sheer strangeness have become less obvious as it has grown ensconced in mainstream Brazilian culture and education. Once regarded by academic critics as an awkwardly constructed work of more historical than literary importance, the novel has come to be recognized as a modernist masterpiece whose difficulties are part of its aesthetic. Andrade is a national cultural icon; his face has appeared on Brazilian currency. Macunaíma was made into a film in 1969.
Late life and musical research
Andrade was not directly affected by the Revolution of 1930, in which Getúlio Vargas seized power and became dictator, but he belonged to the landed class the Revolution was designed to displace, and his employment prospects declined under the Vargas régime. However, he was able to remain at the Conservatory, where he was now Chair of History of Music and Aesthetics. With this title he became a de facto national authority on the history of music, and his research turned from the personal bent of his 1920s work to textbooks and comprehensive chronologies. He continued to document rural folk music, however, and during the 1930s created an enormous collection of recordings of the songs and other forms of music of the interior. His techniques in producing these recordings were influential for the development of ethnomusicology in Brazil and elsewhere.
In 1935, during an unstable period in Vargas's government, Andrade and writer and archaeologist Paulo Duarte, who had for many years desired to organize and stimulate cultural research and activity in the city through a municipal agency, were able to create a unified Department of Culture of São Paulo (Departamento de Cultura e Recreação da Prefeitura Municipal de São Paulo). Andrade was named founding director. The Department of Culture had a broad purview, overseeing cultural and demographic research, construction of parks and playgrounds, and a considerable publishing wing. Andrade approached the position with characteristic ambition, using it to organize and expand his work in folklore and folk music while organizing myriad performances, lectures, and expositions. He moved his collection of recordings to the Department, and augmenting and organizing it became one of the Department's chief functions, overseen by Andrade's former student Oneyda Alvarenga. The collection, called the Discoteca Municipal, was, according to Luper, "probably the largest and best-organized in the entire hemisphere."
At the same time, Andrade was refining his own theory of music. He attempted during this period to pull together his vast but specific research into a general theory. Concerned as always with Modernismo's need to break from the past, he formulated a distinction between the classical music of 18th and 19th century Europe and what he called the music of the future, which would be based simultaneously on modernist breakdowns of musical form and on an understanding of folk and popular music. The music of the past, he said, was conceived in terms of space: whether polyphony (or counterpoint) with its multiple voices arranged in vertical alignment, or the symphony with its dominant voice projected on top of a complex accompaniment. Future music would be arranged in time, rather than space: "moment by moment" (in Luper's translation). This temporal music would be inspired not by "contemplative remembrance" but by the deep longing or desire expressed by the Portuguese word saudade.
Andrade's position at the Department of Culture was abruptly revoked in 1937, when Vargas returned to power and Duarte was exiled. In 1938 Andrade moved to Rio de Janeiro to take up a post at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. While there he organized the Congresso da Língua Nacional Cantada (Congress of National Musical Language), a major folklore and folk music conference. He returned to São Paulo in 1941, and took up his old post at the Department of Culture, though with less oversight, and necessarily with a less ambitious project.
Andrade's final project was a long poem called "Meditação Sôbre o Tietê." The work is dense and difficult, and was dismissed by its early critics as "without meaning," though recent work on it has been more enthusiastic. One critic, David T. Haberly, has compared it favorably to William Carlos Williams's Paterson, a dense but influential unfinished epic utilizing composite construction. Like Paterson it is a poem about a city; the "Meditação" is centered around the Tietê River, which flows through São Paulo. The poem is simultaneously a summation of Andrade's career, commenting on poems written long before, and a love poem addressed to the river, and to the city itself. In both cases, the poem hints at a larger context; it compares the river to the Tagus in Lisbon and the Seine in Paris, as if claiming an international postition for Andrade as well. At the same time, the poem associates both Andrade's voice and the river with "banzeiro," a word from the Afro-Brazilian musical tradition: music that can unite man and river. The poem is the definitive and final statement of Andrade's ambition and his nationalism.
Andrade died at his home in São Paulo of a heart attack on February 25, 1945, at the age of fifty-two. Because of his tenuous relationship with the Vargas régime, the initial official reaction to his career was muted. However, the publication of his Complete Poems in 1955 (the year after Vargas's death) signalled the beginning of Andrade's canonization as one of the cultural heroes of Brazil. On February 15, 1960, the municipal library of São Paulo was renamed Biblioteca Mário de Andrade.
Major works
Poetry
- Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Poema (1917)
- Paulicéia Desvairada (1922)
- Losango Cáqui (1926)
- Clã do Jabuti (1927)
- Remate de Males (1930)
- Poesias (1941)
Published posthumously:
- Lira Paulistana (1946)
- O Carro da Miséria (1946)
- Poesias Completas (1955).
Novels
- Amar, Verbo Intransitivo (1927)
- Macunaíma (1928)
Stories and Crônicas
- Primeiro Andar (1926)
- Belasarte (1934)
- Os filhos da Candinha (1943)
Posthumous:
- Contos Novos (1947)
Essays, criticism, and musicology
- A Escrava que não é Isaura (1925)
- Ensaio sobre Música Brasileira (1928)
- Compêndio de História de Música (1929)
- O Aleijadinho de Álvares de Azevedo (1935)
- Lasar Segall, 1935
- O Movimento Modernista (1942)
- O Baile das Quatro Artes (1943)
- O Empalhador de Passarinhos (1944)
Posthumous:
- O Banquete (1978).
English translations
- Hallucinated City (Paulicea Desvairada). Trans. Jack E. Tomlins. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1968.
- Macunaíma. Trans. E.A. Goodland. New York: Random House, 1984.
References
- Albuquerque, Severino João. "Construction and Destruction in Macunaíma." Hispania 70, 1(1987), 67-72.
- Gabara, Esther. "Facing Brazil: The Problem of Portraiture and the Modernist Sublime." CR: The New Centenial Review 4,2 (2004) 33-76.
- Green, James N. "Challenging National Heroes and Myths: Male Homosexuality and Brazilian History." Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 12, 1 (2001). Online.
- Haberly, David T. "The Depths of the River: Mário de Andrade's Meditação Sôbre o Tietê." Hispania 72,2 (1989), 277-282.
- López, Kimberle S. "Modernismo and the Ambivalence of the Postcolonial Experience: Cannibalism, Primitivism, and Exoticism in Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma". Luso-Brazilian Review 35, 1 (1998), 25-38.
- Luper, Albert T. "The Musical Thought of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945)." Anuario 1(1965), 41-54.
- Willis, Bruce Dean. "Necessary Losses: Purity and Solidarity in Mário de Andrade's Dockside Poetics." Hispania 81, 2 (1998), 261-268.
External links
- Mário de Andrade in Modern Discoveries of Brazil.
- Biography (in Portuguese).
- Biography of Victor Brecheret, sculptor.