Brazilian Literature

It was with the collection Urupês that Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence upon Brazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes – or rather reprints – too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his intention, owing in no small measure to a lack of self-discipline and an artistically unripe sincerity.

Urupês was soon followed by Idéas de Jéca Tatú, his Jéca Tatú being a fisherman of Parahyba, a “cobrizo,” first introduced in the preceding book and symbolizing the inertia of the native. In the second book, however, the ideas are anything but those of inertia; Lobato has got into the skin of the fisherman and produced a series of admirable essays and critiques. Of similar nature are the chapters embodied in Cidades Mortas. Negrinha is a collection of short stories. In addition to being the author of these books, he is the editor of a splendid magazine, Revista do Brazil, the publisher of volumes by the rising generation of literary redeemers, instructor to his nation in hygiene, and his energies flow over into yet other channels. He is also the writer of several books for children. The best known of these is Narizinho Arrebitado or, as who should say Little Snub-Nose, and with an appropriate blush I confess that the little girl’s adventures among the flowers and creatures of her native land were responsible for the theft of some hours from the study of fatter, less childish, tomes. As one who would renovate the letters of his nation, Lobato naturally has much to say, inside of Brazil and outside, of the former and present figures of the country’s literature. His work in every phase is first of all an act of nationalism.

From the exclusive stylistic standpoint Lobato is terse, vigorous, intense, to the point. The chapters devoted to the creation of a style (in Jéca Tatú) form a valid plea for a genuinely autochthonous art, and it is instructive to see how he treats the question in its relation to architecture. Brazil has native flora, fauna and mythology which its writers are neglecting for the repetition of the hackneyed hosts of Hellas. (Yet Lobato nods betimes and sees the Laocoön in a gnarled tree.) He is an “anti-literary” writer, scorning the finer graces, yet, besides betraying acute consciousness of being a writer, he employs situations that have been overdone time and again, and worse still, in plots that are no more Brazilian than they are Magyar or Senegalese. Thus, in O Bugio Moqueado we encounter a tale of a woman forced daily to eat a dish prepared by her vindictive husband from the slain body of her lover. It is characteristic that the Brazilian author heaps the horror generously, without at all adding to the effect of the theme as it appears in Greek mythology or in the lore of old Provence.

The truth would seem to be that at bottom Lobato is not a teller of stories but a critic of men. His vein is distinctly satiric, ironic; he has the gift of the caricaturist, and that is why so often his tales run either into sentimentality or into the macabrous. When he tells a tale of horror, it is not the uncannily graduated art of a Poe, but rather the thing itself that is horrible. His innate didactic tendency reveals itself not only in his frankly didactic labours, but in his habit of prefixing to his tales a philosophical, commentative prelude. Because he is a well-read, cosmopolitan person, his tales and comments often possess that worldly significance which no amount of regional outlook can wholly obscure; but because he is so intent upon sounding the national note he spoils much of his writing by stepping onto the pages in his own person.

At his best he suggests the arrival in Brazilian literature of a fresh, spontaneous, creative power. Tales like A Modern Torture (in which a rural dabbler in politics, weary of his postal delivery “job,” turns traitor to the old party and helps elect the new, only to be “rewarded” with the same old “job”) are rare in any tongue and would not be out of place in a collection by Chekhov or Twain. Here is humour served by – and not in the service of – nation, nature and man. Similarly Choo-Pan! with its humorous opening and gradual progress to the grim close, shows what can be done when a writer becomes the master and not the slave of indigenous legend. A comparison of this tale with a similar one, The Tree That Kills, may bring out the author’s weakness and his strength. In the first, under peculiar circumstances, a man meets his death through a tree that, according to native belief, avenges the hewing down of its fellow. In the second, the Tree That Kills is explained as a sort of preface, then follows a tale of human beings in which a foster-child, like the Tree That Kills, eats his way into the love of a childless pair, only first to betray the husband and then, after wearying of the woman, to attempt her life as well. The first story, besides being well told, is made to appear intimately Brazilian; the death of the man, who is a sot and has so bungled his work that the structure was bound to topple over, is natural, and actual belief in the legend is unnecessary; it colours the tale and lends atmosphere. The Tree That Kills, on the other hand, is merely another tale of the domestic triangle, no more Brazilian than anything else, with a twist of retribution at the end that must have appealed to the preacher hidden in Lobato; the analogy of the foster-son to the tree is not an integral part of the tale; the story, in fact, is added to the explanation of the tree parasite and is itself parasitical.

Lobato’s attitude toward education may be gleaned from his child’s book Little Snub-Nose and the epigraph from Anatole France. He wishes to cultivate the imagination rather than cram the intellect. And even in this second reader for public schools – refreshingly free of the “I-see-a-cat” method – one can catch now and then his intention of instructing and satirizing the elder population.

To this caustic spirit, the real Brazil – the Brazil that must set to work stamping its impress upon the arts of the near future – lies in the interior of the country. There he finds the genuine Brazilian, uncontaminated by the “esperanto of ideas and customs” characteristic of the centres that receive immigration from all over the world. There he discovers the raw material for the real national art, as distinguished from cities with their phantasmagoria of foreign importations. And for that art of the interior he has found the great precursor in Euclydes da Cunha – a truly remarkable writer upon whom the wandering Scot, Richard Cunninghame-Graham, drew abundantly, as we have seen, in his rare work upon that Brazilian mystic and fanatic, Antonio Conselheiro. “It was Euclydes da Cunha,” writes Lobato in his Idéas de Jéca Tatú, “who opened for us, in his Sertões, the gates to the interior of the country. The Frenchified Brazilian of the coast cities was astonished. Could there, then, be so many strong, heroic, unpublished, formidable things back there?.. He revealed us to ourselves. We saw that Brazil isn’t São Paulo, with its Italian contingent, nor Rio, with its Portuguese. Art beheld new perspectives opened to it.”

To present a notion of Monteiro Lobato’s style and his general outlook, I shall confine myself to translating an excerpt or two from his most pithy volume, Idéas de Jéca Tatú.

One of the pivotal essays is that entitled Esthetica Official (Official Esthetics). “The work of art,” it begins, “is indicated by its coefficient of temperament, color and life – the three values that produce its unity, deriving the one from man, the other from milieu, the third from the moment. Art that flees this tripod of categories and that has as its human-factor the heimatlos person (the man of many countries brought into evidence by the war); that has as terroir the world and as epoch all Time, will be a superb creation when volapuk rules over the globe: until then, no!

“Whence we derive a logical conclusion: the artist grows in proportion as he becomes nationalized. The work of art must reveal to the quickest glance its origin, just as the races denote their ethnological group through the individual type.”

Yet note how Lobato, for all his nationalism, in the very paragraph that opens his somewhat uncritical critique, employs a German word, soon followed by a French, and all this a few seconds before ridiculing volapuk! Not that this need necessarily vitiate his argument, which has, to my way of thinking, far stronger points against it. But it does serve to indicate, I believe, that the world has grown too small for the artificial insistence upon a nationalism in literature which only too often proves the disguise of our primitive, unreasoned loyalties. Lobato’s unconscious use of these foreign terms provided, at the very moment he was denying it, a proof of the interpenetration of alien cultures. He has, too strongly for art as we now understand it, the regional outlook; for him Brazil is not the Brazil that we know on the map, or know as a political entity; it is the interior. His very nationalism refers, in this aspect, to but part of his own nation, though, to be fair, it is his theory that sins more seriously than his practice.

“Nietzsche,” he says elsewhere in the book, “served here as a pollen. It is the mission of Nietzsche to fecundate whatever he touches. No one leaves him shaped in the uniformity of a certain mould; he leaves free, he leaves as himself. (The italics are Lobato’s.) His aphorism —Vademecum? Vadetecum!– is the kernel of a liberating philosophy. Would you follow me? Follow yourself!” Now this, allowing for the personal modifications Nietzsche himself concentrates into his crisp question and answer, is the attitude of an Ibsen, a Wagner; in the new world, of a Darío, of a Rodó, and of all true leaders, who would lead their followers to self-leadership. And once again Lobato answers himself with his own citations, for he himself, showing the effect of Nietzsche upon certain of the Brazilian writers – a liberating effect, and one which helped them to a realization of their own personalities – produces the most telling of arguments in favour of legitimate foreign influences.

His characteristic attitude of indignation crops out at every turn. In an essay upon A Estatua do Patriarcha, dedicated to the noble figure of José Bonifacio de Andrade, he gives a patient summary of the man’s achievements – as patient as his nervous manner and his trenchant language can accomplish. As he approaches his climax, he becomes almost telegraphic:

“He (that is, Bonifacio) works in the dark.

“His strength is faith.

“His arms, suggestion.

“His target, the cry of Ipiranga.

“The work that he is then accomplishing is too intense not to sweep aside all obstacles thrust in his path; his power of suggestion is too strong not to conquer the Prince Regent; his look too firm for the shot not to hit the bull’s eye.

“He conquered.

“The fatherland went into housekeeping for itself and it was he who ordered the arrangement of all the furniture and the standards of a free life.

“This is José Bonifacio’s zenith. He is the Washington of the South.145

“Less fortunate, however, than Washington, he afterwards sees the country take a direction that he foresaw was mistaken.

“He starts a struggle against the radical currents and against evil men.

“He loses the contest…

“Brought to trial as a conspirator, he was absolved.

“He betook himself to the island of Paquetá and in 1838 died in the city of Nitheroy.

“There you have José Bonifacio.”

There, incidentally, you have Monteiro Lobato, in the quivering vigour of the phrase, in the emotional concentration. But all this has been but the preparation for Lobato’s final coup.

“José Bonifacio is, beyond dispute, the greatest figure in our history.

“Very well: this man was a Paulist, (i. e., a native of São Paulo). Born in Santos, in 1763. It is already a century since the Paulists were struck with the idea of rearing him a statue. Not that he needs the monument. In a most grandiose manner he reared one to himself in the countless scientific memoirs that he published in Europe, the greater part in German, never translated into his own tongue, – and in his fecund political action in favour of the fiat of nationality.

“It is we who need the monument, for its absence covers us with shame and justifies the curse which from his place of exile he cast upon the evil persons of the day…”

Now, Monteiro Lobato’s nationalism, as I try to show, is not the narrow cause that his theoretical writings would seem to indicate. It is, as I said at the beginning, really an evidence of his eagerness for the expansion of personality. But it is contaminated – and I believe that is the proper word – by an intense local pride which vents itself, upon occasion, as local scolding. The entire essay upon José Bonifacio was written for the sake of the final sting. Not so much to exalt the great figure as to glorify São Paulo and at the same time excoriate the forgetful, the negligent Paulistas. It is such writing as this that best reveals Lobato because it best expresses his central passion, which is not the cult of artistic beauty but the criticism of social failings.

This is at once a step backward and a step forward. Forward in the civic sense, because Brazil needs the unflattering testimony of its own more exigent sons and daughters, – and is Brazil alone in this need? Backward in the artistic sense, because it tends to a confusion of values. It vitiates, particularly in Lobato, the tales he tells until it is difficult to say whether the tale points a moral or the moral adorns the tale.

That Lobato is alive to the genuineness of legitimate foreign influence he himself shows as well as any critic can for him, in the essay upon A Questão do Estylo (The Question of Style), in a succinct paragraph upon Olavo Bilac’s poem O Caçador de Esmeraldas. “The poet … when he composed The Emerald-Hunter, did not take from Corneille a single word, nor from Anatole a single conceit, nor a night from Musset, nor a cock from Rostand, nor frigidity from Leconte, nor an acanthus from Greece, nor a virtue from Rome. But, without wishing it, from the very fact that he was a modern open to all the winds that blow, he took from Corneille the purity of language, from Musset poesy, from Leconte elegance, from Greece the pure line, from Rome fortitude of soul – and with the ancient-rough he made the new-beautiful.”

But what, he asks, shall we say of a poem composed of ill-assimilated suggestions from without, – “in unskilled adaptations of foreign verses, and with types of all the races? The ‘qu’il mourût’ of Corneille in the mouth of a João Fernandez, who slays Ninon, mistress of the colonel José da Silva e Souza, consul of Honduras in Thibet, because an Egyptian fellah disagreed with Ibsen as to the action of Descartes in the battle of Charleroi?..”

Even such a mixture does Lobato discover in the architecture of latter-day São Paulo. But more to our present point: note how, as long as Lobato sticks to actual example, his nationalism is a reasoned, cautious application. As soon as he deserts fact for theory he steps into caricature; nor is it, perhaps, by mere coincidence that the longest essay in the book is upon Caricature in Brazil.

There can be no question as to the dynamic personality of this young man. There can be little question as to the wholesome influence he is wielding. Thus far, however, he is weakest when in his rôle as short-story writer – with the important exceptions we have noted – and strongest as a polemical critic. His personal gifts seem destined to make of him a propagandist of the ironical, satirical sort, with a marked inclination for caricature. One may safely hazard the opinion that he has not yet, in the creative sense – that of transforming reality, through imagination, into artistic life – found himself fully. He is much more than a promise; it is only that his fulfilment is not yet clearly defined.146

1

I take these examples from Senhor De Carvalho. Students of Brazilian letters will not find it difficult to multiply instances from their personal experience with educated friends.

2

London, 1905. Page 113.

3

Cf. Spanish and Portuguese brasa, a live coal. Also, English brazier.

4

Le Roman au Brésil. Paris, 1918.

5

Sylvio Romero (See Litteratura Contemporanea, Rio de Janeiro, no date, pages 45-46, chapter upon the poet Luiz Murat) refers in characteristic fashion to the Brazilian habit of overstating the case of the native imagination. There is no audacious flight, he declares; no soaring of eagles and condors. “Whether we examine the popular literature or the cultured, we find overwhelming proof of this assertion. Our popular novels and anonymous songs are scant in plot, ingenious imaginings, marvelous imagery, which are so common in their Slavic, Celtic, Greek and Germanic congeners. And the contribution brought by the negroes and indigenous tribes are even poorer than the part that came to us from the Portuguese. Cultivated literature … is even inferior to the popular productions from the standpoint of the imagination… Our imagination, which is of simply decorative type, is the imagination of lyric spirits, of the sweet, monodic poetry of new souls and young peoples.”

6

Sertão. Literally, interior, midland part. It refers here to the plateau of the Brazilian interior. In the opening pages of his excellent A Brazilian Mystic, R. B. Cunninghame-Graham suggests as a periphrasis, “wooded, back-lying highlands.” The German hinterland conveys something of the idea.

7

Ronaldo de Carvalho. Pequena Historia da Literatura Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro, 1919. Pp. 13-14. For Euclydes da Cunha, see the special chapter devoted to him in part two. Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) was a distinguished publicist and writer, born in Pernambuco. In 1905 he was ambassador to the United States.

8

Rio. 1902. (2a Edição, melhorada pelo auctor.)

9

Op. Cit. 16-17.

10

De Carvalho. Op. Cit. P. 27.

11

Saudade. Compare English longing, yearning, or German Sehnsucht.

12

Rufino José Cuervo (1842-1911) was called by Menéndez y Pelayo the greatest Spanish philologist of the Nineteenth Century.

A species of national pride finds vent in philological channels through the discovery of “localisms” in each of the Spanish-American republics. At the most this is of dialectic or sub-dialectic importance, but it illustrates an undoubted trend and supports Cuervo’s contentions.

13

New York, 1921. Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged.

14

Estudos de Literatura Brazileira. Sexta serie. Rio de Janeiro, 1907. Pp. 47-133.

15

An important monthly published at São Paulo, then under the editorship of Srs. Afranio Peixoto and Monteiro Lobato.

16

Note, for example, the various spellings of the word literature here used as in the originals.

17

The famous Portuguese seat of learning at Coimbra.

18

João Ribeiro. A Lingua Nacional. São Paulo. 1921.

19

Varnhagen, in his Introduction to the Florilegio da Poesia Brazileira (Vol. I of the two volumes that appeared in Lisbon in 1850, pages 19-20), has some interesting remarks upon the early hispanization of Portuguese in Brazil. Among such effects of Spanish upon Brazilian Portuguese he notes the transposition of the possessive pronouns; the opening of all vowels, thus avoiding the elision of final e or converting final o into u; the pronunciation of s at the end of a syllable as s instead of as sh, which is the Portuguese rule.

20

The wise Goethe once said to Eckermann: “The poet, as a man and citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of his poetic powers and poetic action is the good, noble and beautiful, which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds it. Therein is he like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony… And then, what is meant by love of one’s country? What is meant by patriotic deeds? If the poet has employed a life in battling with pernicious prejudice, in setting aside narrow views, in enlightening the minds, purifying the tastes, ennobling the feelings and thoughts of his countrymen, what better could he have done? how could he have acted more patriotically?”

21

New York, 1917. P. X.

22

Op. cit. P. 48.

23

Julio Cejador y Frauca. Historia de la Lengua y Literatura Castellana, Madrid, 1915 to the present.

24

In their Compendio de Historia da Literatura Brasileira (1909, Rio, 2a edição refundida) Sylvio Romero and João Ribeiro point out the existence of a certain Germanism from 1870 to 1889, due chiefly to the constant labours of Tobias Barreto. Italian influence is very strong in law, and that of the United States in political organization. As will be seen in a later chapter, the United States had, through Cooper, a share in the “Indianism” of the Brazilian Romanticists. Our Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe are well known, the latter pair through French rather than the original channels.

25

Rio. Second edition, Revised

26

This by no means implies acceptance of Romero’s critical standards. See, for details, the Selective Bibliography at the back of the book.

27

Op. Cit. P. 51.

28

See his Cantos Populares do Brasil, Contos Populares do Brasil, Estudos sobre a Poesia Popular Brasileira. These works he summarizes in Chapter VII, Volume I, of his Historia da Litteratura Brasileira, 2a Edição melhorada pelo auctor. Rio de Janeiro, 1902.

29

The frank, practical song, minus the African refrain, runs thus: “You like me and I like you. If pa consents, oh my darling, I’ll marry you… If you’ll give me my clothes and furnish my food, if you pay all the household expenses, oh, my darling, I’ll come to live with you.”