Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present

Chapter 4. The Foundations of a National Literary Imaginary

The Foundations of a National Literary Imaginary eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee c h a p t e r 4 Whoever examines present-day Brazilian literature will soon recognize, as its first trait, a certain instinct of nationality. machado de assis, “Instinto da nacionalidade,” 1873 The Indian: Redux In truth, these people are not of pure white blood and European pride looks upon them with scorn. But all the great qualities of their ancestors compete within them. The descendant of the white male with the Indian female resembles the mother more than the father. For him, liberty is everything. The mulatto is lively and filled with imagination. From both of these races great poets will emerge. carl schlichthorst, Rio de Janeiro Wie Es Ist, 1829 The sustained interest in the indigenous inhabitants by foreign travelers and scientific and artistic expeditions in the early part of the nineteenth century may give some indication why Brazil continued to be linked in the global imagination to the figure of the Amerindian.1 Yet with some notable exceptions, Brazilian literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely looked to the indigenous inhabitant as subject.2 This is partly explained by the neoclassical orientation of the lyric sensibility of the period and the disregard as poetic material of the poor and marginalized indigenous population in the cities. Historian Nelson Werneck Sodré has observed that writers of this period “failed to offer anything specifically Brazilian and, therefore, should be considered part of the protohistory of our literary development” (1943, 28). His assessment overlooks the Indian protagonists created by Antônio Dinis da Cruz e Silva in Metamorfoses, posthumously published in 1814, and Cláudio Manuel da Costa in Fábula do Ribeirão do Carmo, published in 1768, which recall the Edenic hybrid figure of the sixteenth-century imagination .3 But perhaps even more “specifically Brazilian” was the writing of The Foundations of a National Literary Imaginary | 133 African-Brazilian poet Domingos Caldas Barbosa, who traveled to Portugal in 1763 and was celebrated in Lisbon society for his playful and witty modinhas and lunduns—poems inspired by African-Brazilian music, song, and dance. His “Lundum em louvor de uma brasileira adotiva” (Lundum in Praise of an Adoptive Brazilian Woman) is just one example of a consciousness of the land that was not readily apparent in Brazilian writing of the period . Somewhat like early nativist poets, Barbosa also used African-Brazilian terms such as moleque (black boy), iaiá (missy), and nhanhanzinha (little missy) in his lyric and comic-satiric verse. His success as a writer irritated Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, Portugal’s much-admired poet of the late neoclassical period, who satirized him more than once in verse, referring to him in deprecatory terms as “Orpheus with kinky hair” and even more violently as the “vile monster / that you produced, oh land / Where nature flattens noses” (1875, 185–186).4 Another potential exception to Sodré’s observation is the 1784 “Ode ao homem selvagem” (Ode to the Savage Man) by the Reverend Antônio Pereira de Souza Caldas. Inspired by Rousseau, Caldas lamented the decline of a once proud and free people whose purity, he says, God made in his own image: Oh Man, what did you do? everything cries out; Your former greatness Has been totally eclipsed; your golden peace, Liberty, finds itself in irons. (1821, 125) Although Caldas may have been speaking about an Everyman in imitation of Rousseau’s Du contrat social (The Social Contract), which declares: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (1950, 3), his image of a shackled liberty was both a historical and contemporary reality for indigenous inhabitants , who, as the Swedish traveler Johan Brelin noted in 1756, were still being hunted, put on display locally, and shipped abroad as exotica.5 It is unclear at what precise moment the Indian emerged in Brazilian literature as a symbol of the newly independent nation,6 but Caldas’s elegiac ode about a noble savage in irons foreshadows the appearance of a literary movement whose nationalism had a liberal-populist flavor.7 One might say that the rise of the Indian as a symbol of the nation-state is directly related to the sociopolitical and economic tensions that continued between Portuguese and Brazilians after independence. As we have seen, in the 134 | brazil imagined seventeenth century Gregório de Matos criticized the privileges bestowed upon the foreign-born...