Mario de Andrade was the great intellectual mentor of the Generation of 20, he was also a poet, prose writer, pianist, civil servant and, above all, a man committed to the cultural development of Brazil.
His work, divided into books of poetry, prose fiction, folklore, essays and history of music, is, until today, a milestone in national literature, as it introduces a new literary languagewhich appropriates the language of the people, unlike the Parnassian academicism in vogue until then.
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short biography
Mario Raul de Morais Andrade was born on October 9, 1893, in the city of São Paulo. He studied piano from an early age, having completed the course at the Dramatic and Musical Conservatory of São Paulo in 1917, the same year that he published his first book of poems, still in the Parnassian style, entitled There’s a drop of blood in every poem.
Still in 1917, with the death of his father, he started to work as a piano teacher. He also works as an art critic and frequents the artistic circles in São Paulo, where he meets Oswald de Andrade and Anita Malfattiwith whom he became very close and with whom he articulated the Modern Art Week of 1922.
It was also in 1922 he published frantic Pauliceia, a book considered a landmark of Brazilian modernism. From that period on, he became one of the most important figures in Brazilian literature and culture, reconciling an intense literary production with a dedicated life of study of Brazilian folklore, music and visual arts.
Autograph by Mario de Andrade.
Between 1934 and 1937, was in charge of the Department of Culture of the Municipality of São Paulo, founding the Public Discotheque, in addition to promoting the 1st National Singing Language Congress. In 1937, he founded the Society of Ethnography and Folklore of São Paulo.
He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1938 and became director of the Federal District Institute of Arts. Back in São Paulo, he worked at the Historical Heritage Service. victim of a heart attackdied in São Paulo, on February 25, 1945.
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literary characteristics
considered as the great intellectual name of Brazilian modernism, Mário de Andrade stands out for his pioneering spirit. Your early poetry retrieves elements from european vanguards, such as automatic writing, characteristic of the surrealist movement, which the author later revisits, in the light of consciousness, mixing a bit of theory with unconscious lyrical impulses. The influence of Cubism is also present, which, in Mário’s poetry, appears as an abstract deformation and valorization of primitivism.
Stamp with portrait of Mário de Andrade on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.
At first, the poetic work of the author intends to break the canonical artistic paradigms of academic poetry, in clear modernist action. Afterwards, he turns to an increasingly intense exploration of rhythm and themes taken from Brazilian popular folklore.
With your eyes always turned towards brazilian social problemsas well as for the culture nationalMário also wrote prose fiction, which reflects the author’s commitment to the creation of a national literary language.
Don’t stop now… There’s more after the publicity 😉
Construction
- 1917 – There’s a drop of blood in every poem (poetry)
- 1922 – frantic Pauliceia (poetry)
- 1925 – The slave who is not Isaura (speech)
- 1925 – First floor (Tales)
- 1926 – Khaki lozenge, or Military affection mixed with the reasons why I know German (poetry)
- 1927 – love, intransitive verb (idyll)
- 1927 – tortoise clan (poetry)
- 1928 – Macunaíma, the hero without any character (rhapsody)
- 1929 – Compendium of music history (music)
- 1930 – end of evils (poetry)
- 1930 – imperial fads (music)
- 1933 – Music, sweet music (music)
- 1934 – fine art (Tales)
- 1935 – Aleijadinho and Álvares de Azevedo (essay)
- 1936 – Popular music and song in Brazil (critical-biographical essay)
- 1939 – Dating with Medicine (rehearsal)
- 1940 – Musical expression in the United States (music)
- 1941 – Brazilian music (history and folklore)
- 1941 – poems (poetry)
- 1942 – Little music comic (music)
- 1942 – the modernist movement (theory)
- 1943 – The Dance of the Four Arts (rehearsal)
- 1943 – Aspects of Brazilian Literature (essay)
- 1943 – Candy’s Children (chronicles)
- Sd – The bird stuffer
- [1945–Father Jesuino of Monte Carmelo (biographical research)
- 1946 – São Paulo lira (poetry)
- 1946 – The Car of Misery (poetry)
- 1947 – new stories (Tales)
- 1966 – complete poetry (poetry)
In addition to this vast published work, Mário left enormous volumes of mailpublished posthumously.
Macunaíma, the hero without any character
It is one of the best known and most commented works by Mário de Andrade. To write it, the author based himself on a project to represent the Brazilian differencein a synthesis of national folklore that takes the form of a picaresque novel, mixing oral tradition and primitivism with the typically bourgeois genre of the novel.
His intention was to deal with countless problems in Brazil, such as cultural submission and the importation of socioeconomic models, the lack of definition of a national character, linguistic discrimination, and, mainly, the search for Brazilian cultural identity.
Cover of the first issue of Macunaíma1928.
Mixture of epic and picaresque novel, the work is characterized as rhapsody Modernas it brings together vast knowledge of Brazilian folklore and cultural traditions, countless legends, foods, beliefs, animals and plants from different regions, as well as various cultural and religious manifestations, without referring to any of the regions of origin in particular, giving an impression in national unity.
Full of these regional mergers, Macunaíma is critique of regionalism and tries to break the limits determined by geography. O space is a mixture of several Brazilian regions, and the time varies between the mythical of the legend and the contextualized and contemporary time.
Macunaíma is a hero without any character, because what he builds in one chapter, he deconstructs in another. He experiences moments of extreme courage and also of extreme cowardice; he is lazy, but he is bold; he is an adult yet a child; he is the primitive that inhabits civilized man. Macunaíma is not a person, he is a hybrid linguistic.
«There! How lazy!…” is a recurring catchphrase of the character. The theme appears as an “Amazonian sign”: in a land of sun and heat, laziness seems much more natural than work. It is about a Opposition to “civilizing” rules of Europe for valuing work. By evoking the images of laziness and the hammock, the author outlines a connection with primitive feeling.
In Macunaímais found at both appreciation of “tropical feelings” as a catalog of third world diseases, which appears, among other terms, in the image of ants, present throughout the entire work. The ants also represent what Macunaíma and Brazil lack: organization, calculation. The ant is a bourgeois animal par excellence, as opposed to the cicada, associated with the figure of leisure or, in more tropical terms, the sloth.
Offering a compendium of Brazilian inconsistencies, Mário de Andrade does not make it clear, in Macunaíma, if you are proud or ashamed of Brazil. That incoherent hybridism reproduces the cultural dynamism and the lack of national organization, concluding in pessimism.
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Phrases
“Little health and a lot of ants are the evils of Brazil.”
“Before modernism, Brazil was a Portuguese country with French cultural modes.”
“I am a Tupi playing a lute.”
«The past is a lesson for reflecting, not for repeating.»
“All my work goes like this: Brazilians, the time has come to create Brazil.”
image credit
rook76 / Shutterstock
By Luiza Brandino
Literature Teacher