Biting the Hand that Feeds You: (On the 70th Anniversary of the Manifesto antropófago)

BmNG THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU (On the 70th Anniversary of the Manifesto antropófago) JEFFREY SCHNAPP Stanford University Every text bears the traces of the rhetor's body, but none is more gestural , none more charged with his sweat, body heat, and muscles than the manifesto. A literal handbill, the manifesto reaches out. The manus in the manifesto is both beckoning and fending off (fendo). It is a hand that has been taken out from behind the toga or out of the pocket. It is a hand that has started to work the room very hard, whether it is preaching, teaching, laying down the law or just goofing around. It matters little whether the chosen medium is the voice or the printed page: the context will be at once festive and solemn. Things hidden, if not since the beginning of the world, then at least by the generation of our fathers, are being exposed to the day's harsh light. Things that waver between the obvious and the scandalous, the heroic and the silly, the private and the public. What is urgent is to draw a line: the line between Tupy and not Tupy, between sinners and saints, capitalists and communists, passéists and futurists. If a bit of fun is had along the way, so much the better. Time is short; the manifesto is in a hurry. It needs new converts, or, if not converts, then at least a few enemies kind enough to grant it a momentary ubiquity. Silence = death in the realm of the manifesto, which is to say that noise = life. The more you pump up the volume, the more angehe the music. The hand in the manifesto is sometimes reaching out for food: bread of angels, a philosophical banquet, just plain old bread. There being no assurances that it will be served, however, it feeds itself from fragments of prior writing. Marx and Engels cannibalized portions of their works in the Communist Manifesto; Jean Moréas rehashed the commonplaces of his era ("comme tous les arts, la littérature évolue...") in Le Symbolisme to soothe his critics; disjecta membra from each and every Marinettian manifesto recur in each and every subsequent one as if they were just as fresh as when first cooked up. The repast is satirical, made up of a medley of heterogeneous dishes. A little salt here, there some innuendo; here some puns, there some hyperbole; everywhere the trappings of didacticism (numbered lists, equations , aphorisms) and calls for action and reaction. Oftentimes the cook is in©1999 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XII No. 23/24, Enero a Diciembre 1999 244___________________________________________________________JEFFREY SCHNAPP a foul mood. He waves his fist, traffics in punches and slaps. He's a clown, but his aims are serious. Stirring up the pot, he is dictating new laws. Oswald's Manifesto antropófago falls squarely within the triangle formed by rhetoric, cookery, and lawmaking. It opens by turning the triangle on edge and driving it, like a wedge, between us and them. We are unclothed Tupi, modern totemists who worship at the altars of "Jesus de Belém do Para" and the mother goddesses Guaracy and Jacy; fleshly masqueraders in the perpetual Carnival of Pindorama; somnambulists and diviners who reject idealism in the name of magic, personal experience, and the concrete. We are flesh lovers and meat eaters. They axe the clothed non-Tupi armed with their patriarchal culture, catechisms, regulations, and taboos; the vegetable elites who colonized Brazil, worshippers of the Jesus of Bethlehem; missionaries , logicians, and speculators represented by Father Veira and the court of Dom Joäo VI. Diffident towards the world of the flesh, they are our food. The Manifesto closes with a signature dish: OSWALD DE ANDRADE Em Piratininga Ano 374 da Deglutiçâo do bispo Sardinha. (52) Four years earlier his Manifesto da Poesía Pau-Brasil had served up a hodgepodge of Marinettian fare for the readers of the carioca daily Correio da Marihä. It preached synthesis, dynamism, surprise, and illogic; drew the line between os futuristas e os outros ("futurists and non-futurists" [42]); and looked beyond the "cyclopic toils" of a generation to a fresh challenge: ser regional e...