Barefoot Modernism Mário de Andrade and the Rural Culture

Abstract

After exercising the boldness of “words in freedom” on his Pauliceia Desvairada futuristic verses, Mário de Andrade began a new phase in his literary work in the mid-1920’s, which coincided with the reorganization of the Brazilian modernism itself, moved by the search for the “millionaire contribution of all mistakes” (an expression by Oswald de Andrade on Manifesto Pau-Brasil). Standing up against grammar rules and the literate discourse, modernists sought to emulate the “wrong language of the people”, well aware that this would be the route to our “native originality”. In the particular case of Mário de Andrade, the desire to define the popular speech resulted in a project called Gramatiquinha da Língua Brasileira (Brazilian Language Little Grammar), which had as one of its main inspirations the rural dialect. The dialogue with the Brazilian rural culture actually occurs in key moments of his writing in the 1920’s: on the novel Macunaíma, on the Clã do Jabuti poems, and on the Os Contos de Belazarte suburban stories. By studying Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings, Mário says its Brazilianness lies in the rural aspect of the colors and shapes – a principle that also applies, and even more radically, to his increasingly rooted writing, in which language “mistakes” and the presence of rural or wild characters represent the displacement of Brazil and the writer himself regarding the modernization process.