Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade

Part Two. Poetry as Contraband from the Unconscious: M

Part Two Poetry as Contraband from the Unconscious M á r i o d e A n d r a d e 101 Mário de Andrade Although Mário’s most important poetics texts—“Prefácio” and Escrava—like Huidobro’s manifestos, seek to define an avant-garde poetics and address the issue of balance, they differ from the manifestos in structure and style. Whereas “Prefácio” could be said to resemble Huidobro’s and other manifestos’ typically loose structure characterized by aphorisms , it nonetheless affects an overriding purpose in the defense of the Paulicéia poems; furthermore, the tone, while subjective, is more deeply personal. Escrava continues this tone yet sets out more pretentiously to be a treatise on poetics rather than a mere manifesto. In contrast to “Prefácio,” as Thomas R. Hart notes, Escrava does not concern itself directly with Mário’s own poetry, which in fact is never cited (267–68). In general, both works are characterized by their penchant for dialogue through the documentation of Mário’s sources, many—including Huidobro (“La création pure”)—from L’Esprit Nouveau. Grembecki has studied Mário’s marginal notes in his issues of L’Esprit Nouveau to explore his points of agreement and disagreement with these contributors in both “Prefácio” and Escrava—insight that will be explored in more detail in these chapters. Poetics and aesthetics are generally dominant subjects among Mário’s extensive writings. The present analysis will be limited to “Prefácio,” Escrava, and two crônicas published in the collection Taxi e Crônicas no Diario Nacional, with limited references to Mário’s other works and to salient extracts of his prolific correspondence as organized by Charles Kiefer. The principal focus will be on the structural and thematic unity of “Prefácio” and Escrava as Mário’s two most important texts on poetics. The two texts can be structurally linked as, in toto, a somewhat paradoxical formal treatise on avantgarde poetics. Critical analyses of “Prefácio” and Escrava tend to pursue intertextual approaches, comparing characteristics of Mário’s stated poetic goals with his poetry, but including little or no analysis of the narrative fragments’ illustrative role within the poetics. Luiz Costa Lima limits his observations regarding “Prefácio” to the qualification of Mário’s “eu” [I] as a Romantic 102 Part Two remnant; in general, Lima describes Mário’s aesthetic as “passadista” [outmoded] (40). While similarly finding Mário’s “eu” “enraizado na tradição” [rooted in tradition], Teles develops a “tensão eu x outro” [I-vs.-other tension] in which the Other, variously portrayed as Europe, São Paulo, and Brazil, describes a trajectory through Mário’s work (Escrituração 193). Teles affirms the importance of Mário’s poetics texts but does not elucidate any symbolic narrative meanings. João Pacheco paraphrases “Prefácio” and Escrava together, criticizing perceived gaps—“patentes e grandes” [patent and large] (123)—in Mário’s aesthetics without defining what these gaps may be. José I. Suárez and Jack E. Tomlins focus on Escrava, a corrective to the “flippant” “Prefácio,” as Mário’s reworking of Dermée (46). In his now classic essay “O psicologismo na poética de Mário de Andrade,” Roberto Schwarz considers “Prefácio” and Escrava as manifestations of a “quadro manique ísta de oposições” [Mannichean frame of oppositions] that Mário never manages to resolve: “A superação dessas antinomias , a dialética do particular e do universal [. . .] torna-se inconcebível na oposição absoluta em que são mantidos os pares conceituais” [Overcoming these antonymies, the dialectic of the specific and the universal (. . .) becomes inconceivable within the absolute opposition in which these conceptual pairs are maintained] (18). Indeed, such opposition seems to plague Mário’s expressive attempts, subverting even the symbolic loci that he creates—the dock and the street—as possible points of contact and reconciliation. Schwarz constructs a scheme of polarities involving later texts by focusing on Mário’s clarifications of degree (of conscious or unconscious activity), but does not enter into a detailed analysis of Mário’s symbolic narrative fragments. David T. Haberly’s and Adrien Roig’s treatments of “Pref ácio” are representative of many critical intertextual approaches in that they seek to compare and contrast that text with...