By OSWALD DE ANDRADE*

Unpublished article collected in the recently released book “1923: Brazilian modernists in Paris”.

The Iberian Peninsula, which created Don Quixote, also created The Lusiads. Which of these two poems is the greatest of Latin idealism?

Quixote had to fight against the disciplined organization of the villages, the barriers of the roads, the reactions of the people. He embarked on Vasco da Gama's caravels and went with Cabral to search for Dulcinea del Toboso in South America. A Latin force of cohesion, construction and culture accompanied him. It was the Jesuit.

With the Roman Empire destroyed, the Catholic Church inherited its spirit of organization and conquest. The last legionary did not limit himself, as history would have it, to the Latin borders of Romania. In the sixteenth century, he laid the foundations of his “Missions” in Uruguay and found, in Brazil, the town of Piratininga, which would produce the strength and wealth of today's São Paulo.

In the initial formation of Brazil, there were therefore three different elements: the indigenous, the Portuguese and the Latin priest. Shortly afterwards, the black man from Africa arrived.

Recognizing the usefulness of faith in the success of his undertakings, the Portuguese, being the only one who could resist the missionary, gave him immediate ascendancy in the first assemblies of the discovered continent. The polytheistic indigenous had no difficulty in adding a new God to his oral mythology and the black, willing to see supernatural manifestations everywhere, allowed himself to be baptized with the joy of a child. One only has to think of the names of the mountains, rivers and villages of Brazil to see that the Roman calendar lacked saints to patronize the boundless land.

This phenomenon of the intellectual domination of the Latin priest in the birth of South American society contributed more than one might think to preserving it from the dangers of future heterodoxies.

Scholasticism therefore quite naturally constituted the core of Brazilian thought. It continued its long career at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of São Paulo, in the seminaries and colleges of the Confederate states and, currently, is the basis of Alexandre Correa's culture.

But, alongside it, a national movement found its highest expression, at the beginning of this century, in the work of the philosopher Farias Brito.

Two books precede, as documents, the work of this master. I am talking about the picturesque report with which João do Rio debuted in Brazilian literature, The religions of Rio, and this romanticism of Catholic thought that is Severiano de Rezende's book entitled My holy waters.

Farias Brito's work has no relation to these curious essays. And if we can cite them alongside the metaphysical efforts of this philosopher, it is only to demonstrate the speculative mentality of Brazil in a graph that could be continued, in recent years, by the work of Jackson de Figueiredo, Renato Almeida, Castro e Silva, Nestor Victor, Almeida Magalhães, Xavier Marques, Perillo Gomes and Tasso da Silveira.

Farias Brito was guided by a high culture. He emerged at a time when the two most famous imported movements that were guiding us – that of the Germanists of Tobias Barreto and that of the positivists of Teixeira Mendes – resulted in a third movement that I do not even consider a movement, so flagrant is its exoticism.

In the law schools of São Paulo and Recife, professors preached the pseudoscientific skepticism that came from the deterministic schools of law in Germany and Italy, while Farias Brito, ignored and modest, at the Faculty of Pará, expressed the anonymous impulse of the pantheistic faith of our race.

The first part of Farias Brito's work is a beautiful critique of the nihilistic psychologies of England, France and Germany. Regarding the “physical basis of the spirit”, he seeks to establish an authentic psychology, to take this research further, a little later, to the “inner world”.

Deism assumes all the seductions of a nature that does not need exegesis. God is present energy, where idea and reality merge. The world is his intellectual activity. The world is God who thinks.

An example of our intellectual and critical curiosity can be found in the recent book by Teixeira Leite Penido, published in French by Félix Alcan, which expresses well the place of Brazilian thought in relation to Henry Bergson's intuitionism.

In the field of ethnography, Roquete Pinto illustrates the work of catechesis, recently renewed by General Rondon, of indigenous origin, who brought a vast region where forgotten tribes were isolated closer to the fast-moving civilization of Rio, São Paulo and other capitals.

One side of our history, that of the conquest and geographic settlement by gold explorers who set out from São Paulo to the interior, finds an excellent biographer in Washington Luís. Affonso Taunay also elucidates and criticizes the past of the “Paulista” explorers. In addition to Fernando Nobre’s highly documented book on the southern borders.

The sociologist Oliveira Vianna, with his studies of customs, traditions and psychic panoramas, establishes the thesis of our idealism, contrasted with the realities of the earth.

In fact, when Don Quixote crossed the sea, he did not forget what he had read. He had loved to the point of madness the romances of chivalry, the sonnets, the beautiful and precious names and the ideal deeds.

Thus, Brazilian literature initially follows a descending line that starts with imitations of Iberian classicism and ends up shattered by the national efforts of Machado de Assis. It is at this point that it begins to have a reality that is both superior and national.

It is true that the Brazilian sentiment was announced in the colonial songs of Basílio da Gama, in the Indianist instinct of our great poet Gonçalves Dias and in the picturesque language of José de Alencar. Alencar's novels even contained the outline of types that could still serve as the psychic basis of our literature today. The adventurer Loredano, Isabel, Robério Dias, the explorer of illusory mines are the true "standards" of our creative concerns. But, alongside these realities, there was the false and idealized Guarany, as well as Iracema, who was really very Chateaubrianesque.

The Portuguese were surprised by the nature of the discovered world and, to express their enthusiasm, used Greco-Latin knowledge. José de Alencar was not one of those good colonists who wrote our first poems, mixing the cunning Ulysses and the divine Aspasia with coconuts and bananas. But he also could not shake off the feeling of importation that increased the spectacle of the new land. In Brazil, the reaction against South American loquacity was made by black blood.

Black is a realistic element. We have seen it lately in the decorative industries of Dakar, in the African statuary, highlighted by Picasso, Derain, André Lhote and other famous artists in Paris, in Anthology, very complete, by Blaise Cendrars.

Besides, he who came from Africa could not be surprised by our landscapes. The Portuguese, upon arriving, wrote sonnets, the black man beat the first drums, to express his joy and his sadness.

Machado de Assis, white-skinned and full of honors bestowed by whites, achieves his equilibrium because of his black blood. In his novels, which are still our best works of fiction, there is not a single useless deviation from the landscape, nor a single lyrical gaffe.

However, Machado de Assis, tied to his bureaucratic duties in Rio, was unable to give the full dimension of Brazil.

So, an excellent contribution came from a man of science. Euclides da Cunha, a powerful writer, engineer and geologist, took part, as an army officer, in the repression of a mystical revolt that was convulsing the state of Bahia. And he recorded in his book the sertões, the scenery, the soul and the life of the people coming from the adventurer and the mestizo.

The search for materials for a definitive national literature was continued by Inglês de Souza, who presented a very rich picture of Amazonian societies, by Afrânio Peixoto and by the naturalists Aluísio Azevedo and Julia Lopes de Almeida.

Afrânio Peixoto was the doctor who penetrated the interior of the country. The dangerous character of the young woman from the “backlands”, outlined by other writers, was studied in depth by his observation, which was at once clinical and divinatory. “Fruta do mato”, created by him, is one of the most interesting female types in our literature. We can already see in her what Alba Regina would later become in the drama of the American capital, produced by the current lyricism of Menotti Del Picchia.

On the other hand, Graça Aranha was the first to address the problem of new immigration from Europe. In Canaan, the romance of European weariness, which sees the territory of all freedoms and regenerations grow beyond, is outlined and realized. Here, too, the woman stands up on the path of the emigrant.

A whole series of writers had been preparing today's novel. On the other hand, the sentiment announced by the distant poets who took part in the attempt to gain independence for Minas Gerais was gradually breaking free from the classical molds of Portugal, so well defended by the Lusitanian culture of Gonçalves Dias. This sentiment was produced everywhere, in black songs, in caboclo songs, to spill over into the initial naivety of the poor rhythms of Casemiro de Abreu. He is the first singer of our melancholy of exiled races in a barely conquered paradise. From his sadness are born the best love songs of his successor Olavo Bilac.

Another trend was established: that of emerging cities that were beginning to reflect European poetic movements. Álvares de Azevedo reproduced Lord Byron; Castro Alves imitated Victor Hugo; Alberto de Oliveira, Emílio de Menezes, Raimundo Correa and Francisca Júlia followed the procedures of the French Parnassus. Felix Pacheco added a revolutionary contribution. And after Cruz e Souza and Alphonsus de Guimarães, we entered a period of musicality, represented by Olegário Mariano in poetry and Álvaro Moreyra in prose.

Other spirits also seek an approximation of the pure national truth, announced by the anonymous songs of the “backlands”, by the nostalgic “song” of the cowboy, the tropeiro, the black man and the “caipira”. Regionalism flourishes in the rustic scenes of Ricardo Gonçalves and Cornélio Pires in São Paulo and, above all, in the spontaneous and lyrical poems of Catulo da Paixão Cearense (it is as if your Cézanne wanted to be called Paulo da Cor Provençal). He sings of the calm murders and the moon that enchants the panthers. He sings of the periodic floods of the Amazon that destroy forests and villages. This drama of the fallen lands and then swallowed up is the phenomenon that occurs in the heart of the Brazilian who sees his beloved depart in the arms of another.

Our South American love has a totally different flavor from the love of ancient civilizations, where definitive lexicons have all kinds of prescriptions and regimens for cases of misfortune and where tradition reproduces the same age-old solutions. In general, our men see in every woman they pass a Sabina woman to be kidnapped, despite all the consequences, because our love is made of the sexual memory of the white woman that the first navigators left behind in Europe, at the beginning of their uncertain expeditions.

Given our psychological material and our ethnic feeling, the work of contemporary Brazil consisted of combining these acquired riches with an expression and a form that could take our art to its apogee.

We see, at first, the scientific effort to create a language independent, through its evolution, from the Portuguese language of Europe.

We benefited from all the syntax errors of the novelist José de Alencar and the poet Castro Alves, and folklore had not only reached the philosophical domain.

Two learned philologists are fulfilling the desires announced by the backlands grace of Cornélio Pires and the expressive power of Catulo. While João Ribeiro tried to establish a national language in thirty-two remarkable lessons, Amadeu Amaral was constructing our first regionalist grammar. However, the work of these two illustrious academics left aside the contribution of the slang of the large Brazilian cities, where a surprising literature of new immigrants is beginning to grow, especially in São Paulo.

What was missing was the emergence of present realities, where background and form, matter, feeling and expression could give today's Brazil the intellectual measure of its industrial, technical and agricultural mobilization. The debut of the writer Monteiro Lobato, in São Paulo, finally announced that Brazil was assuming this responsibility. Lobato had the chance to leave the purely documentary domain to which Veiga Miranda, Albertino Moreira, Godofredo Rangel and Waldomiro Silveira had confined themselves, and he also reacted against the urbanism that gave rise to the historical vision of the polygraph Elísio de Carvalho, the work of Thomas Lopes and João do Rio and the first poetic phase of Guilherme de Almeida.

Monteiro Lobato had a broad knowledge of Brazil, having studied in São Paulo and later become a farmer. The work of fiction so desired by Machado de Assis came with his creation of the Jeca Tatu character. He was the useless insect of the magnificent land who, in order to give himself a spectacle and an occupation, burned the forests. Senator Ruy Barbosa, leader of Brazil's honest political aspirations, seized upon the symbol and launched it in one of his main electoral campaigns. Jeca Tatu became the apathetic Brazil of healthy idealism.

The symbol had its revenge. The popular imagination saw in it a tenacious Brazil, ready for physical and moral resistance, “fatalized” but not fatalistic, and to which it had adapted, due to the circumstances of its origin and its exile, that kind of vocation for misfortune, unconsciously observed by ethnologists and novelists. Monteiro Lobato had to agree that Jeca Tatu was burning the native forests to give the new immigrant the chance to extend the “green wave” of coffee plantations. He was the precursor of American wealth, open to any enterprise of the virile races.

Monteiro Lobato's influence grew. Just as he became an ethnologist without meaning to, he also became an aesthete. These words, which I borrow from his volume entitled The green wave, in which he studies the planting of thousands of coffee trees by the “paulistas”, transforming the old dream of gold from distant mines into the reality of immediate cultivation, are the program of the current Brazilian literary generation: “The epic, the tragedy, the drama and the comedy of coffee will be the great themes… feeling and telling the story of the green wave that digests the virgin forests”.

We are beginning to see, in fact, in the poetic works, novels and short stories of our country, a true anthology of coffee, in its most varied and remote consequences. It always debates the problem of the struggle of the old aristocracies against the immigrant invasion of the new races.

Monteiro Lobato, however, paid little attention to the critical research of Suarès, Jules Romains, André Salmon, Élie Faure, Lhote, Cocteau, Gleizes, Henry Prunières and the new generations in Portugal, Italy and Spain. He does not attempt to verify whether our Indianism was natural in Chateaubriand's time and whether, once again, there could now be a coincidence of stages between our literature and that of Europe. He even provokes a feeling that something was missing to accomplish, even though he brought to light unnoticed aspects of our American life. His documentary side fascinates him and produces a return to regionalism, poorly counterbalanced by the imagination of Deabreu and the verve of Léo Vaz.

Mário de Andrade then published his first poems. With his knowledge of the country and its language, its regular rhythms and new research, he created a free and erudite poetry, still unknown in Brazil, where, however, some verses by Manuel Bandeira had already appeared. Menotti Del Picchia had written the poem of the race Juca Mulato. His prestige was as great as that of Ronald de Carvalho, who already had two books crowned by our Academy, one of which is a history of Brazilian literature.

The two fought alongside Mário de Andrade, who was attacked by the Parnassians and the documentalists. Guilherme de Almeida, a poet rightly favored by the public, joined the innovative movement. And the arrival of Graça Aranha, from Europe, made the moment even more interesting. He is one of our most respected writers. An academic and law professor, having lived for many years in great civilizations, his influence was profound. He immediately joined the generation of builders. And in São Paulo, under the patronage of Paulo Prado, nephew and heir to the aristocratic and intellectual qualities of the writer Eduardo Prado, a Brazilian Modern Art Week was held.

The trend led to aesthetic achievements: the Ironic and sentimental epigrams by Ronald de Carvalho, in which Brazilian poetry reaches its highest national expression, and Man and death, by MenottiDel Picchia, whose beauty recalls that part of Claudel's work that bears the lyrical mark of Brazil.

Likewise, quite naturally, other writers of our generation relate more to the psychological America of Valery Larbaud, the cinematic Brazil of Jules Romains and the precise visions of Joseph Conrad and Gómez de La Serna, than to the simple exaltations of our regionalist anecdote. It is a question of results.

Pedro Rodrigues de Almeida even seeks to create an American classicism in the composition of his short stories. Serge Milliet, in his continuous stays in Europe, combines a sense of contemporary French culture with the free poetry of vastness, gold mines and travel. And Ribeiro Couto and Affonso Schmidt brought to the calm of Brazilian cities the particular sensitivity of modern poets.

The country's critics, through their best representatives, Tristão de Athayde, Nestor Victor, J.-A. Nogueira and Fabio Luz, were very receptive and encouraged the first works of the movement that found greater expression in the magazine Horn. A whole generation of young people became enthusiastic. Among them were the poets Luiz Aranha, Tacito de Almeida, Agenor Barbosa, Plínio Salgado, the short story writer René Thiollier and the essayists Rubens de Moraes, Candido Motta Filho, Couto de Barros and Sergio Buarque de Hollanda. Joaquim Inojosa introduced the new ideas in Pernambuco, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Mario Ruis in Minas.

At the same time, the theater, which was favorably directed towards national sources by the work of Cláudio de Souza and Oduvaldo Vianna, found in Graça Aranha a strong lyrical expression. Malazarte, a portrait of our pantheistic energies, was staged by the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre in Paris. And, alongside the fervent regionalists who wanted a documentary theater, an elite followed the work and research of Jacques Copeau in France and of Dario Nicodemi who, in Italy, renewed the scene with Pirandello.

The other arts also undergo an evolution in relation to the realities of the country and its expressive measures.

Sculpture had a precursor in the old colony. He was a carver from the state of Minas Gerais known as “O Aleijadinho”, who was left deformed by illness.

It is from there and from the first saint makers of Bahia and Rio, among whom the most famous are Chagas, the Goat, and Mestre Valentim, that our sculptor Victor Brécheret extracts his art today.

Victor Brécheret first wanted to give São Paulo, where he was born, an expression of its history. The movement of immigrants from the time of discovery to the present day, by Europeans of all climates and origins, inspired him to design the monument “to the flags”. The “flags” were the ancient organizations of the inhabitants of São Paulo who, leaving the capital towards the interior in search of gold, indicated the geographical limits of the homeland and the ethnic characteristics of the race.

In Paris, the traditionalist side of Victor Brécheret's current work has its origins in a small statue entitled Idol, in which he directed his lines and style towards the black-indigenous statuary of the colony.

In painting, created in Rio by Jean-Baptiste Debret, who was part of the French cultural mission summoned by Dom João VI to Rio, there was a whole tradition of portraiture and historical themes. Two precursors, called Leandro and Olympio da Matta, were continued only by the native strangeness of Helios Seelinger.

Leandro, who had painted, for a church, the Portuguese royal family arriving in the colony, with the Blessed Virgin in the clouds and the guardian angel at her side, was forced by the patriots of 1831 to destroy this panel which was perhaps the masterpiece of our ancient painting.

If Jean-Baptiste Debret had the good sense to combine his anecdotal themes – he was a disciple of David – with the elements of the nascent nationality and the indigenous decorative sense, the Portuguese painter Da Silva and the other masters of the French mission led our painting down the paths of an old-fashioned classicism that has made it, to this day, an art without personality. In fact, as in literature, the memory of classical formulas prevented for a long time the free blossoming of a true national art. Always the obsession with Arcadia, with its shepherds, Greek myths or the imitation of European landscapes with gentle roads and well-tended fields, in a country where nature was untamed, the light vertical and life in full construction.

The revolution against the museums of Europe, which produced the decadence of our official painting, was felt during the Modern Art Week held in São Paulo. We protested against the methods of Pedro Américo and the Albuquerque couple, and also against the simple nationalist documentation of Almeida Junior.

The new artists, who had been preceded by Navarro da Costa, began the reaction by adopting the modern techniques that had emerged from the Cubist movement in Europe. Cubism was also a protest against the imitative art of museums. And although it would be absurd to apply it to Brazil, the laws that it managed to distill from the old masters were considered acceptable by many young painters in the country.

Di Cavalcanti, Anita Malfatti, Zina Aita, Rego Monteiro, Tarsila do Amaral and Yan de Almeida Prado lay the foundations for a truly Brazilian and contemporary painting.

The reaction produced in Brazil by the energetic techniques of Anita Malfatti and the imagination of Di Cavalcanti was enriched in Paris by the research of Rego Monteiro, who dedicated himself particularly to the stylization of our indigenous motifs, seeking to create, alongside a personal art, the decorative art of Brazil, and by the aesthetics of Tarsila do Amaral, who combined the themes of the Brazilian interior with the most advanced techniques of modern painting.

Music in Brazil suffered from this same misplaced imitation of Europe. Carlos Gomes, until a certain point the greatest Brazilian musician, was diminished by the reaction to our true origins, helped by the rhythmic freedoms acquired after Debussy. Our music is not the melodic Italian song; it exists in the black drum, in the vivacity of the indigenous rhythm, in the nostalgia of the Portuguese “fado.” In this sense, the composers Nepomuceno, Alexandre Levy and Francisco Braga announce all our riches. Glauco Velasques initiated the current stylization, which found in Villa-Lobos its strongest and most daring representative.

Villa-Lobos participated in the Modern Art Week in São Paulo and shook up the conservative ideas of the public. He brought, with modern techniques, the bitter melancholy of African dances, the Brazilian scope of regionalist symphonies and the sweetness of our popular songs.

Contemporary Brazilian music, which finds in Tupinambá and Nazareth a constant revitalization of documentary productions, is represented in Paris by the purist and very modern orientation of our virtuoso João de Souza Lima, by Villa-Lobos' disciple, Fructuoso Vianna, and by the illustrious singer Vera Janacópulos.

In music, as in literature, the 20th century was directed towards realities, tracing emotional sources, discovering the origins, both concrete and metaphysical, of art. France received a new lease of life with the fresh air from abroad, brought by Paul Claudel, Blaise Cendrars, André Gide, Valery Larbaud and Paul Morand. Never before has the suggestive proximity of the black drum and indigenous singing been felt so strongly in the Parisian atmosphere. These ethnic forces are at the height of modernity.

And there, under a deist sky, Brazil becomes aware of its future. In a century, perhaps, there will be two hundred million Latin inhabitants in America. The effort of the current generation must be to unite, not with empty formulas, but with the spirit of its classical traditions, the new and precious contributions made to this graft of Latinity by the historical elements of the conquest.

In France, our diplomatic ambassador, Souza Dantas, is also our intellectual ambassador. With the prestige of his intelligence and culture, he presides over an artistic delegation from contemporary Brazil that seeks to serve, more closely, the common work of Latinity.

*Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) was a poet, playwright and writer. Author of, among other books, The king of the candle (Company of Letters).

Lecture given at the Sorbonne on May 11, 1923, supplemented by the author in the 1950s.

Translation: Roberto Zular.

Reference

Genesis Andrade (org.). 1923: Brazilian modernists in Paris. São Paulo, Unesp, 2024, 490 pages. [https://amzn.to/3VQYLpv]

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