Literature in Brazil began to exist from the moment of the discovery of the country by the Portuguese in 1500, commemorated by a literary event in the broadest sense of the word: the Carta by Pero Vaz de Caminha, scribe of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s fleet, reporting the finding of new land and its inhabitants to King Manuel. However, the first title that legitimized the identity of literature as Brazilian appeared after three centuries of colonization, at the time when political subordination to Portugal had been severed. For only after Independence was proclaimed on September 7, 1822 would literary historiography begin to appear in Brazil, concomitant with the implantation of Romanticism, to which it owes its legitimacy, and in direct relation to the appearance of a national historiography. Amounting to a second beginning, that legitimacy conferred a lawful existence on literature as opposed to its earlier de facto existence during the colonial period. Historiography as the writing of history thereby carried out the singular recuperation of the past of which it is capable in accord with its founding function – a function more pronounced in the countries to which European colonialism gave rise, as in those of the Portuguese and Spanish Americas.

A consequence of political separation, the ambiguous relationship between the Americas and Europe, at times antagonistic and at other times identifying with the earlier state of dependence on the external capitals, disposed the countries of the Americas to the writing of their own history, capable of recuperating the past as a long and continuous phase of preparation for nationhood, highlighting the struggles or the yearning for emancipation during the colonial period of subjugation.

For more than a century Brazilian intellectuals have agonized over their country’s national identity. Until the 1950s they attempted to capture its essence by relying on colorful language and historical allusions. Building on a paradoxical combination of faith and doubt, they wrestled especially with the troublesome question of how racial intermixture had affected the Brazilian character. Such a preoccupation had been common among elite thinkers of Latin America since the late nineteenth century, when the theories of white racial superiority arrived with the prestige conferred by North Atlantic “science.” The questions remained constant. Who are we? How have we become this way? Does a racially mixed people have a future in the “civilized” world?

This chapter focuses on some of the most influential Brazilian writers who have taken up these themes. They all tried to define Brazil’s national identity in both a cultural and a political dimension. For each historical period, the context is sketched and the focus turns to one or two of the period’s most widely read books on Brazilian national identity. All of these works went through numerous printings and are still read in Brazil.

The years from 1870 to 1889 saw the Brazilian empire in decline. Despite Brazilian victory in the Paraguayan War (1865–1870), Emperor Dom Pedro II faced increasing opposition at home from a republican movement. In 1889 the higher military, endorsing republican ideology, deposed the only genuine monarchy that nineteenth-century Latin America had ever produced. These years also saw the rapid rise of coffee as Brazil’s chief export, restricted largely to the south central areas, especially the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo.

The first three decades of the twentieth century witnessed the continued prevalence of the comedy of manners, with only slight attention being paid to the symbolist and psychological plays of Goulart de Andrade (1881–1936), Roberto Gomes (1882–1922), and Paulo Goncalves (1897–1927). Rio de Janeiro’s uncontested role as national center of theatrical activity was reinforced by the stagings of the important but short-lived Teatro da Exposição Nacional (1908) and Teatro da Natureza (1916), and by the opening of its grand Teatro Municipal in 1909. Although there was a significant increase in the number of Brazilian plays written and performed, there was nevertheless little improvement in the overall quality of the theatre, as producers and authors adhered to the hackneyed but commercially safe formulae of the comedy of manners and musical revues. Burlettas continued to draw large audiences; one of the more successful of these plays was Forrobodó (produced in Rio de Janeiro in 1911) by Carlos Bettencourt (1890–1941) and Luiz Peixoto (1889–1973), with music by the immensely successful composer of popular music and theatre scores, Chiquinha Gonzaga (Francisca Hedwiges Neves Gonzaga [1847–1935]).

The better-known playwrights of the time, such as Cláudio de Souza (1876–1954) and João do Rio (Paulo Barreto [1881–1921]), continued the spirit of earlier generations but did not break new ground. Without the hallmarks of Martins Pena’s and Artur Azevedo’s geniuses, their twentieth-century followers failed to give convincing theatrical representation to new situations and character attributes, unable as they were to steer clear of nostalgia and naive nationalism.

Positioned between the rise of Parnassianism and Symbolism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the drastic innovations of Modernism in 1922, the period from 1900 to 1922 brought no dramatic changes of direction to Brazilian poetry. This period, which many literary historians agree to label “pre-Modernism,” yielded more remarkable prose narratives – by Lima Barreto (1881–1922), Graca Aranha (1868–1931), Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909) – than poetry.

An absence of sustained quality in the works of poets who began writing in that period did not mean an absence of poetry. Much verse was in fact produced, read, and recited. Parnassianism (usually dated from 1882 with the publication of Fanfarras by Teófilo Dias (1857–1889)) and Symbolism (dated from 1893 with Broquéis and Missal by Cruz e Sousa (1861–1898)) continued into the new century. Major figures of established reputation were still alive and writing, such as the Parnassians Olavo Bilac (1865–1918), Raimundo Correia (1859–1911), Alberto de Oliveira (1857–1937), Vicente de Carvalho (1866–1924), and Francisca Julia (1874–1920), and the Symbolist Alphonsus de Guimaraens (1870–1921). The younger poets starting out in those styles – the so-called neo-Parnassians and neo-Symbolists – did so as contemporaries of their masters, sometimes under their auspices. Symbolism never set down roots as firmly as Parnassianism, and the reign of the latter was tenacious. Otto Maria Carpeaux reminds us that in Brazil the sequence of movements did not follow the European one, where Symbolism supplanted the earlier Parnassianism: “the two great poets of Brazilian Symbolism, Cruz e Sousa and Alphonsus, did not manage to prevail, succumbing to a hostile environment. Parnassianism, outliving itself, continued; and when it was in turn defeated, the victory belonged to Modernism . . .”

Brazil’s is the most independent, and perhaps most original, national literature in the New World. Whereas the United States’ powerful literary tradition is, nevertheless, in some synchrony with that of England, its former metropolis, as is the case with the Spanish American literary tradition with regards to that of Spain, Portugal ceased long ago to be a significant literary presence in Brazil. This is ironic because, of all the American nations, with the exception of Canada, Brazil is the one whose break from the mother country was least painful and radical. Instead of becoming independent from the metropolitan government, the metropolitan government actually moved to Brazil. Brazil absorbed its origins, like some mythological figure who swallows its parents. The emergence of Brazilian literature is, thus, the product of this assimilation.

The foregoing does not mean that modern Portugal is devoid of influential literary figures. Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, and currently José Saramago are authors of well deserved world-wide acclaim, who are much respected in Brazil. Yet Brazil itself was able to boast, as early as the nineteenth century, of a writer second to none in the Hispanic world (Spain included, of course); Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Machado was the first world-class Latin American writer; he enjoyed a reputation whose only worthy predecessor may have been Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in colonial Mexico. In the twentieth century, Brazil has generated its own artistic movements, and produced a number of writers of indisputable quality, from Euclides da Cunha, whose Os sertões (1902) [Rebellion in the Backlands] is an influential masterpiece in all of Latin America, to João Guimãraes Rosa, whose Grande sertão, veredas is considered by some (for instance, the late Uruguayan critic, Emir Rodríguez Monegal) the greatest Latin American novel ever.

The colonial period

Although there may have been occasional representations for the entertainment of the colonists in the half-century that followed the Portuguese conquest of Brazil in 1500, no record of theatrical activity exists until the Jesuits, who came to the colony in 1549, resorted to the theatre as a tool in their effort to educate the settlers and convert the Indians to the Catholic faith. The kind of theatre the Jesuits practiced in Brazil profited from their previous experience with the art form in Portugal. The new environment, however, required an overall simplification of their performances. As a result, the colonial Jesuit theatre marked a departure from the scholarly texts and ponderous productions they were known to stage in Portugal.

The major figure of the Jesuit theatre in Brazil is José de Anchieta (1534–1597). Born in the Spanish Canary Islands but educated in Portugal, at the age of sixteen Anchieta joined the Society of Jesus, which in 1553 sent him to Brazil, where he was to stay for the rest of his life. In the forty-four years he spent in Brazil as a teacher, missionary, and advocate of Indian rights, Anchieta proved to be a prolific writer of chronicles, letters, sermons, poems, and plays; he is also the author of a Tupi grammar and dictionary. Whereas Anchieta wrote tragedies in Latin for the benefit of his fellow Jesuits, his more important legacy, the autos, are in Portuguese, Spanish, and Tupi, and sometimes a combination of two or three of those languages. From the beginning, Anchieta understood that if he was to succeed in his didactic effort to convert the Indians and propagate the faith, the natives’ language had to be used.

With the advent of Modernism, intellectual and cultural life in Brazil found new impetus. The pioneers of the movement launched a programme of reform and renewal. They defended artistic freedom and encouraged innovation. Even sixty years later, the excitement they had engendered had scarcely abated. Modernism was officially launched in February 1922 at São Paulo’s Teatro Municipal with the participation of writers, artists, and musicians. Three separate programmes included lectures outlining the movement’s objectives, readings of prose and poetry reflecting the new aesthetics, and musical recitals. The exhibition of cubist and expressionist works of art displayed in the theatre foyer aroused hostile reactions before the public even entered the auditorium. Graça Aranha (1868–1931), an established writer who achieved lasting fame with his best-selling novel Canaã (1902) [Canaan], gave the inaugural lecture entitled “A emoção estética na arte moderna”. Expressing unequivocal support for the radical changes proposed by younger artists working in various media, Graça Aranha’s provocative statements enraged die-hard traditionalists and aroused some skepticism even amongst the Modernists themselves. With suitably opulent rhetoric he welcomed this “Maravilhosa aurora!” [“Wondrous dawn”] with its “pinturas extravagantes, esculturas absurdas, música alucinada, poesia aerea e desarticulada” (Espírito moderno, 1925) [“extravagant paintings, absurd sculptures, hallucinated music, vague, disarticulated poetry”]. The poet Menotti del Picchia (1892–1989) expounded modernist ideals. Mario de Andrade (1893–1945), the movement’s guiding spirit, read extracts from Vaulicéia desvairada [Hallucinated City] and his scornful dismissal of bourgeois values provoked heckling and jeering, and when Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935) recited Os sapos [The Toads], parodying the literary establishment, the outraged audience became hysterical.

Any pattern which the literary historian discerns in the last half-century of Brazilian prose-writing is bound to be somewhat speculative and imposed on a very heterogeneous mass of material, but three conclusions at least seem inescapable, and can act as preliminary markers.

First, no-one can doubt that the political events of the 1960s and 1970s – the military coup of 1964, the ensuing repression, and censorship (gradually removed in the 1970s) – had a profound effect on the manner of, and the subject-matter tackled by, many writers. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the whole period, one of widespread and often traumatic change in all spheres, not simply political, changed the whole climate in which authors wrote. On the most immediate level, writers had to battle with censors: if, like Antônio Callado (b. 1917), they had already established a reputation, this could mean a cat-and-mouse game of novels printed then impounded, then allowed again (as happened with Bar Don Juan, his novel about middle-class guerrillas); in other cases, like that of Zero by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (b. 1936) it could mean banning and even publication abroad (though for obvious reasons this was not such a frequent outlet as is the case in Spanish America). More important than such dramatic “cases,” censorship also meant a general clamp-down and curtailing of possibilities. On a deeper level, the imposed silence, and the events of the 1960s themselves, produced the sensation that nothing could, or should, be the same again: when censorship was lifted, fiction looked very different. There was a spate of novels and stories, hardly removed from documentaries, which tried to tell “the real story,” and some of these achieved an immense popularity, leading to what was described as a kind of Brazilian "Boom," very different, however, from its Spanish American model.

Spain occupied the New World as the Spanish language was undergoing its last significant linguistic revolution and Spanish poetry its most profound and lasting change. Perhaps this coincidence explains the pervasive presence of poetry during the Conquest, as well as in the viceregal societies created as a result of colonization. In the sixteenth century, Spanish poetry was in the midst of a feverish renewal, adopting the style and spirit derived from Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance, and elevating its traditional forms, notably the romancero, to written and printed expression. At the same time as the Italianate style was being adopted, the inherited medieval poetics of the courtly cancioneros, and the ballads of the romancero, endured, proliferated, and contaminated the new poetry. Changes in poetry, as in all else in the Spanish sixteenth century, meant more often than not an uneasy coexistence of medieval and renaissance ideas and practices. The resiliency of the Medieval is one of the elements that led, in due time, to the style that characterizes colonial lyric, which is the Baroque.

But the renewal was radical enough. Perhaps the most profound change, because it affected the very rhythm of poetic language itself, and its distinction from everyday speech, was the adoption of the eleven-syllable line. The hendecasyllable became the standard for cultivated poetry, in contrast to the shorter lines used for ballads, other popular verse, and in cancionero poems, like the ones written by Hernando Colón, the Discoverer’s son (Varela, “La obra poética de Hernando Colón”).

That the 1970s should have been the decade to inaugurate the field of Afro-Hispanic (American) studies is scarcely surprising: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the United States had prepared the ground for the founding of numerous Afro-American studies programs while the Boom of the Latin American novel - sponsored largely by the United States’ aggressive investment in Latin American culture aimed at defusing the political threat of a post-revolutionary Cuba - continued to draw international attention to Latin America’s literary production. This, in turn, provided publishing outlets and markets for many poets and novelists of African descent, whose work received special attention and support from newly founded organizations, such as the Afro-Ecuadorian Studies Center in Quito (1979), the Center for the Study of Black Culture in Bogotá (1977), and the Afro-Hispanic Institute at Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1981). Like their predecessors, the Institute for Afro-American Studies in Mexico (1945)and the Society for Afro-Cuban Studies Against Racism in Cuba (1936), these and other institutes also launched new journals: Cuadernos Afro-Americanos (Caracas, 1975), Negritud (Bogotá, 1977), Studies in Afro-Hispanic Literature (Purchase, New York, 1977), and the Afro-Hispanic Review (Washington, D.C, 1982, now located in Columbia, Missouri). Conferences were organized, most notably the Colloque Négritude et Amérique Latine (University of Dakar, Senegal, 1974), the Primer Congreso del Negro Panameño (1981), and several Congresos de la Cultura Negra de las Américas (Colombia, 1977; Panama, 1980; Brazil, 1982).

A number of publishing houses, among them Casa de las Américas, Ediciones Universal, and Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, started to reprint “classic” twentieth-century Afro-Hispanic texts, such as Adalberto Ortiz’s Juyungo (1968); Arnoldo Palacios’s Las estrellas son negras (1971); Juan Pablo Sojo’s Nochebuena negra (1972); Sofía (1972) and La familia Unzúazu (1975) by Martín Morúa Delgado (1856-1910); Autobiografía de un esclavo (1975) by Juan Francisco Manzano; Nicolás Guillén’s Motivos de son (1980); Marcelino Arozarena’s Canción negra sin color (1983); Regino Pedrozo’s Poesías (1984); and the complete works of Alejo Carpentier, the first volume of which includes all of his “Afro-Cuban” texts.

The greatest challenge to the concept of a universe in which humankind was central to the explanation of history took place during the sixteenth century. The nature of the relations between peoples across the world took a new turn as European states embarked on unprecedented commercial and colonizing ventures in areas of the world inhabited by people of different races, beliefs, and social organizations. Those undertakings entailed a cultural exchange of political, social, and religious values through a process that was never peaceful, and that implied either the imposition of values by one dominant society on the other, or the displacement of the weaker group. While Europeans found a powerful cultural resistance in India and China, and were unable successfully to establish their culture there, the indigenous societies of the Americas became vulnerable after their military defeat. Spain, the main beneficiary of the first allocation of the newly discovered hemisphere to its west, through the Treaty of Tordesillas (1493) had an explicit interest in replicating its society and in furthering its religion there.

This goal implied a massive and long-term cultural enterprise. Cultural transfer involved many processes, some of which took place simultaneously and began to unfold from the time Christopher Columbus set foot on land in 1492. Others took time and developed through trial and error. Three hundred years of historical evolution meant that none of the peoples who met in the Spanish Indies escaped from change and no institution remained static.

It was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the idea of literature as an independent category emerged, that it became possible to conceive of a Spanish American literature, one, moreover, worthy of a history. From the early Renaissance on, arts and letters were thought to be derived from the classics, the immanent and ideal model of all aesthetic expression, either as copy or corruption. The fundamental change that allowed for the possibility of a Spanish American literature was the gradual abandonment of the formalist abstraction of Neoclassicism, and the adoption of a psychological, empirical, and contingent concept of artistic creation. If the milieu, in all its concrete details, and the individual psychology of the creator are determining factors in artistic creation, then the work will reflect the conditions that define that individual and the particular nature that surrounds him and which he expresses. The issue of the difference of American nature could not be thought of in terms of its influence on the creation of literature until the emergence of what can be broadly termed the romantic spirit.

This does not mean, however, that some writers of the colonial Baroque did not write as if there were already an American literary tradition. Tradition is not synonymous with literary history. Tradition is the sum of works that a writer or group of writers conceive as antecedent, as origin, as the connection with a literary past from which they issue. Tradition is a binding, living, and dynamic past. Its existence may or may not be explicit, but it is necessarily and always implicit. Literary history, on the other hand, is the conscious and deliberate activity of recounting how certain works determine each other in time and among people who share a language and sometimes a geographic space.

Literary criticism already has a long and distinguished history in Spanish America, one that encompasses such diverse figures as Andrés Bello (1781–1865), Jose Enrique Rodó (1871–1917), Pedro Henriquez Urena (1884–1946), Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959), Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1921–1985), and Angel Rama (1926–1983). Nevertheless, Spanish American literary criticism has sometimes had to contend with feelings of inadequacy, not only in comparison to its subject but also to the literary criticism of Europe and the United States.

The inadequacy has often been real, of course, and Spanish American critics have been the first to point out the deficiencies and vices of criticism in Spanish America, as well as the obstacles it has had to face. Among the former, critics note its mimetic character, journalistic superficiality, lack of patience with serious scholarship, and ideological tendentiousness; among the latter are censorship, exile, and sheer lack of financial and institutional support. The absence of any book-length history of Spanish American criticism is probably symptomatic of the unease Spanish American critics and literary historians share with regard to this subject.

Feelings of inadequacy and belatedness are nevertheless endemic to literary criticism wherever it occurs, however much critics may try to hide them beneath an authoritarian rhetoric. In modern literature, which has absorbed criticism into its make-up to a very high degree but without its institutional or ideological constraints, there is always a propensity to surpass the exegetes. This in turn has forced critics to compete with creative writers in the elaboration of ever more probing theories of what literature is and how it achieves its effects.

A radical shift in the way in which history and literature were conceived, interpreted, and written produced a change in the self-perception of Spanish American novelists between 1950 and 1975. The development of the cities, the coming of age of a large middle class, the Cuban Revolution, the Alliance for Progress, an increase in communication between the countries of Latin America, the greater importance of the mass media, and a greater attention to Latin America from Europe and the United States, contributed to this change. The most important political events of the period were the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Chilean coup d’état in 1973, but there were also others that affected writing, as they generated explanations, testimonies, or served as a troubling background: the fall of General Perón in Argentina, the protracted violent struggle of the urban guerrillas, brutally repressed in Argentina and Uruguay, and the unending violence in Colombia. These events are more than simply a framework in which to place the literary production of this period. Most of the novelists studied in this chapter believe there is a political and social discourse that only shows its weakness when exposed in the literary text. Their novels are engaged in an intense dialogue not only with other works of literature, but also with oral tradition, speech-writers, police reports, priests, and all defenders of blind orthodoxy. A history of this period must start by stating that history itself became problematic since the new generations questioned the traditional version of history and sought to replace it with their own, a more hesitant, shaded, and distrustful one than the clear-cut oppositions that prevailed before.

The contemporary Spanish American essay is born simultaneously with the twentieth century in 1900, the year in which José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) publishes Ariel [Ariel] in Montevideo. Nearly a century later, it is a book that continues to be read with interest and even debated with passion. While much of what was once at stake in Ariel is largely outdated, Rodó’s essay has not lost a certain brand of intellectual mundonovista charm which still touches something deep within the Spanish American spirit. Before establishing what is today at issue in Ariel, it is necessary to situate it within its historical context.

When Ariel appeared in 1900, the modernista wave that swept America and even extended to Spain was at its apogee. After publishing Prosas prof anas (1896), a founding text of the modernista aesthetic, Rubén Darío travelled to Spain in 1899 and to Paris the following year. It was a moment of apotheosis for the great poet whose revolutionary writing was already a phenomenon internationally known and revered. Ariel was at once a reflection and an exaltation of this spiritual climate, as evidenced by its florid, précieux language and its gallicized Hellenism, not at all different from that cultivated by Darío. Yet what is striking is that Rodó was among the first harsh critics of Modernismo and specifically of Darío, in whom he recognized a superior artistic sensibility but whom he nonetheless eschewed for remaining aloof to the profound intellectual questions of the day. Rodó’s 1899 criticism of Darío is perhaps best characterized by its famous accusatory declaration: “He [Darío] is not the poet of America” (Rodó, Obras completas, 169).

The history of colonial and republican America is also – in its margins, footnotes, and backpages – the history of the Indian. Not of the Indian as he is but as white and mestizo writers from Alonso de Ercilla (1533–1594) to Ventura García Calderón (1886–1959) and José María Arguedas (1911–1969) have chosen to typecast, vilify or idealize him.

The inexorable modification of the first Americans begins with the Arcadian portrayal of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), a fanciful notion that provides the germ for Rousseau’s noble savage two centuries later. This process of transfiguration is not the only feature that harnesses together the colonial perception with that of our contemporaries, however. Curious as it may seem, almost all of the elements that were to typify the literature of Indigenismo [Indigenism] in the 1840s are already in evidence in the chronicles of the Conquest and the literature of the early colonial period.

The blend of romantic idealization and social indictment favoured by Las Casas and El Inca Garcilaso (1539–1616), Alonso de Ercilla’s vision of warring braves and passionate heroines, the picturesque traditions and unprecedented myths portrayed in the work of Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496?–1584?) and Bernardo de Balbuena (1568–1627) enter as one unit into the fiction of authors who, since Independence, had been avidly searching for colorful imagery to portray what they saw as the originality of America. And, since independence from Spain came at a time when the romantic movement held sway, a good many of the Indian protagonists during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century developed as exotic objects, faithful reflections of Chateaubriand’s and Walter Scott’s literary conceits.

The conception of Spanish American literature as a distinct category emerged from romantic scholarship and was loosely based on deterministic and transcendental notions of history, tradition, and cultural milieu. Indeed, romantic literature represented with singular ease factual and legendary events that were often drawn from a broad legacy of texts. Yet, in the nationalistic context of nineteenth-century Spanish America, European belles lettres could not be assumed to be the sole precursor of an American literary tradition. Instead, influential authors of that period chose to look upon the early chronicles of discovery and exploration of the New World as fundamental components of Spanish American literary historiography and prose fiction. Such a foundational notion is suggested in the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1680) and other writings by the Mexican savant Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700). Much the same can be said of the Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1773), by the Spaniard Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (1715–1778). Predictably, the references to historiographic models represented by the narratives of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1478–1557), Francisco López de Gómara (1512–1572) and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (?1490–1557?), become more assertive in the essays and fictions written by the Argentinians Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), and by the Colombian José Caicedo Rojas (1816–1897), among others. Without intending to do so, the early chronicles of the Indies had consolidated, for readers of many nations, an American iconography and typology that was further codified in major poetic texts.