(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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contemporary Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), who along with Oswald
de Andrade (1890–1954) is the main representative of Brazilian modernism.
Significantly, this movement did not take place in the capital Rio de
Janeiro, but in São Paulo, the emergent industrial and economic center
of the country, with immigrants from all over the world. The modernists
broke with two patterns of the self-image of Brazil cultivated by the traditional
literary elite, which both were forms of alienations, because they
internalized the European way of seeing Brazil and obstructed the search
for Brazil’s own identity: on the one hand, picturesque exotism and, on
the other, the inclination of cities like Rio, Manaus, or even São Paulo to
consider themselves a kind of Paris in the Americas. Mário de Andrade
turns this impasse into a matter for critical reflection. In the verses “São
Paulo . . . / Gallicism to cry in the deserts of America” 19 he articulates
the status of the city as that of a dependent, peripheral metropolis and
also the necessity to incorporate reflection on this conditio periferica in
the search for identity. This posture goes hand in hand in de Andrade
with assimilating and elaborating poetic techniques that can be universally
relevant. In this context is situated the desvairismo, as he calls his representation
of madness and his dialogue with it.
The poem cycle Paulicéia desvairada (Hallucinated City of São Paulo
or São Paulo, City of Madness), published in 1922, after the Week of Modern
Art that took place in São Paulo, is Mário de Andrade’s most significant
work, along with his novel Macunaíma (1928). The conclusive part
of Paulicéia (PD, 103–15) is a “profane oratorio,” offering an allegorical
representation of that programmatic event, which occurred on the centennial
of Brazil’s independence. Almost all the city’s three-quarters of
a million inhabitants are shown on the stage in four choruses of people:
first, the “Trembling Senilities,” that is, the millionaires and the grand
bourgeoisie; second, the “Conventional Orientalisms,” or artists at the
service of the holders of power; third, the “Green-and-Golden Youth,”
rebels full of hope, having in their middle the poet accompanied by “My
Madness”; and fourth, the Indifferent Masses of the Poor. The struggle
between these forces results in victory of the Green-and-Golden Youth,
but they are exhausted and fall asleep. My Madness sings them a lullaby.
Like an expressionist woodcut, this polyphonic spectacle evokes the archimage
of madness: nobody wants to listen any more, and nobody can stop
to cry any more.
Unlike Walter Benjamin, who wants to fight madness with the axe of
reason, Mário de Andrade aims toward a constructive dialogue with the
state of madness (desvario) by means of what he calls desvairismo (PD,
59), which is a major component of his poetics. In the form of elliptical
sentences or “vibrations” — as in the verse “São Paulo! Shock experience
of my life . . .” (PD, 83) — the voice of madness, mixed with sensations of
pain, hallucination, and trance, reverberates through the verses of Paulicéia