(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

PARIS ON THE AMAZON?
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desvairada from the beginning to the end. Through his poetic forms de
Andrade tries to master the state of madness provoked by the big city. The
allegorical figure of My Madness, with which the poet converses, represents
the collective feeling as well as a major component of the poetic
task. Madness and delusion (Benjamin’s Wahnsinn and Wahn) are for de
Andrade the basis of poetic production, insofar as they are linked to the
lyrical impulses of the soul; these are explicitly designated as “a sublime
affective state — near to sublime madness” (PD, 72). This state, called
lirismo by de Andrade, is for him the primitive state per excellence.
Primitivism is an important component of the poet’s dialogue with
modern technological civilization, and it is crucial for the question of how
to deal with the non-rational element (represented by Benjamin as the
“Urwald”) when it is detected in urban civilization. On the scale of the
dialogue with “primitive thinking,” in the twentieth century, Benjamin’s
position is closer to that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s colonialist vision of the
thinking of “inferior societies” 20 than to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s valorization
of the “savage mind,” 21 of which Mário de Andrade may be considered
a precursor. The poet’s characterization, in 1922, of the lyric impulse
as a “cry of the unconscious” (PD, 59), is on his part an assimilation
of Sigmund Freud’s finding, in 1913, that “den Inhalt des Ubw kann
man einer psychischen Urbevölkerung vergleichen” (“the content of the
unconscious may be compared to a psychological primal population”). 22
Hence both authors, Freud and de Andrade, overcome the biased vision
of primitivism, recognizing it as a not-to-be-exorcized part of modern
urban humankind. One may regret, in this context, that Benjamin — who
created a suggestive philosophical constellation with concepts such as
“Ursprung” (origin, source), “Urphänomen” (primordial phenomenon),
“Urpflanze” (primordial plant), “Urbild” (archetype), “Urgeschichte”
(primal history) — did not integrate in it the terms “Urwald” (primeval
forest) and “Urbs”/”Urban” (city, urban), which could be understood as
dialectical poles (via “urbar machen” and “urban machen”) in the spirit of
his new historiography.
For the author of Paulicéia desvairada, poetry has an aesthetic function
in the sense of structuring the new kind of perception imposed by the
rhythm of the modern metropolis. The poet transforms himself into a test
subject. With his work he aims to register the shocks that are hitting the
nervous system of the city’s inhabitants. Here de Andrade takes up again
the topos of the “experience of shock” that originated with Baudelaire in
the Paris of the nineteenth century and anticipates Benjamin’s description,
who understands it, moreover, as a major symptom for the decline
of the aura. 23 The big modern city is indeed the place where the uninterrupted
flow of sensations — “shocks and ever more shocks” 24 — becomes
the normal condition. The prophecy cited in the Passagen-Werk that “die
Menschen . . . von dem Tempo der Nachrichtenübermittlung wahnsinnig