Presentation and Representation of Self and City in Paulicéia Desvairada

Abstract

While having historically occupied positions on geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural peripheries of the Western world, Brazil has participated vigorously in transcontinental schemes of development and paradigmatic exercises of aesthetic behavior. The major changes and innova? tions in the arts of the early twentieth century in Europe and North America had surface or immediate reflections in Brazil, as well as more profound original implementations and reformu? lations, especially in the multifarious center that the city of S?o Paulo was becoming. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote that [i]n many respects the literature of experimental Modernism . . . was an art of cities (96), he was referring of course to Paris, Berlin, New York and other hegemonic centers of innovative activity in literature and beaux arts. That he did not contemplate Latin American sites should not diminish in any way the relevance of his overarching affirmation to S?o Paulo, which in the early 1920s was experiencing ever-increasing industrialization, urban evolution, and an enriching renewal of nationalist artistic thought in Modernismo, or Brazilian Modernism (see Morse). Historian Nicolau Sevcenko calls the third decade of the twentieth century in S?o Paulo vibrant, agitated, bustling: os frementes anos 20. In Western letters, the city itself and the artist in the city, observing and bringing a distinct new consciousness, were themselves the two major themes of modernism (Lehan 77). Again, this fundamental truth of the general renovation of literature up to 1930 is eminently applicable to Brazilian counterparts, notably to Paulic?ia desvairada (1922) by Mario de Andrade, inaugural publication and oeuvre par excellence of the combative phase o? Modernismo) This multifaceted collection of verse initiated a city/artist-in-the city thread in Brazilian poetry that passes through such other principal modernistas as Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Murilo Mendes, and finds pointed expression both in the mid-century neovanguard of poes?a concreta and in numerous discursive texts in the domain of later twentieth-century lyric.2 Emerging from and reflecting upon the hub of S?o Paulo, Paulic?ia desvairada comprises