MODERNITY IN CORNELIO PENNA

by

Flávia Vieira

When it comes to gender and sexuality, however, the historical avant-gardes were - and very much so - as patriarchal, misogynistic, and masculinist as the great currents of modernism. - Andreas Huyssen

Whether in literature, philosophy, the arts, or politics, black discourse has been dominated by three events: slavery, colonization, and apartheid. They constitute a kind of prison in which, to this day, this discourse still struggles. -Achille Mbembe

On the centennial of the Brazilian Week of Modern Art, 1922, celebrations were marked by empty virtual polemics and by a clear institutional disinterest. The lack of interest is partly due to the conflictual period through which we are living in Brazil, since 2016. The “white coup” suffered by president-elect Dilma Rousseff and the arbitrary and illegal arrest of former president Lula, who would have been the current president’s direct contender in the 2018 elections, reinforce the current political scenario, evidencing an effort to empty the debates about our history and our culture. The situation is thus marked by a strategy of permanent discrediting of the symbolic constellation which constitutes Brazilian identity.

The coming to power of an extreme-right government, averse to the Arts and openly hostile towards culture, is the probable cause of the weakening of the historic event, despite it being widely considered a watershed in our conception of Culture: a significant aesthetic turnaround in the cultural representation of Brazil. It is, therefore, part of an effort of cultural and political resistance to critically reevaluate the Week of Modern Art — an event that (re)defined the aesthetic directions of Brazil — through an investigation of the components of our Cultural Identity.

The 1922 Week of Modern Art’s cultural significance and historical unfolding, nevertheless, remain open. There are contradictions beneath the demolishing outbursts of its creators, which announced a clear rupture with the academic tradition. The carefully constructed image of unity of the historic event hides divergent currents and tentative assertions. It is thus necessary to review aspects that form our cultural representation. This exercise is in part a way of understanding how we got here and the role of Modernity and Modernism in this unstoppable emptying that prevails today in Brazil.

From a contemporary perspective, it is urgent to reassess the controversial elements, as well as the brutal composition of one among so many unfortunate pages of our history. I intend to emphasize how a prevailing model of modernity, under the broad notion of Modernism, reduced and concealed, within the paradigm of rupture vs. tradition, a wide range of dynamics in favor of a partial renovation. This refers to the identification of undercurrents of literary production that, even if historically accepted as “modernist”, were characterized by a more nuanced stance relative to the two antagonist positions within the literary production at the time of the 1922 Week of Modern Art.  On one side, were those who defended the continuity of nineteenth century academic tradition, through the construction of an idealized country that enshrined within the Romantic ideals; on the other, the rupture inaugurated with Modernism, a declared break with the past, projecting Brazil into the panorama of aesthetic modernization after the European avant-gardes, seeking to build a new Brazilian identity.

The current revisionist energy is part of a process of reparation, based on a critical look at a historic process which, concerned with determining the contours of a modern Brazilian Culture, would have itself contained stereotypes and generalizations reinforced within the movement. Contemporary critical re-examinations of the initial modernist events in Brazilian literary history aim to question, reassess, and review a moment of enthusiastic transformation and its ties to reductionist points of view. This process repositions the symbolic significance of the 1922 Week of Modern Art and aims to reestablish the role of divergent, non-canonical and fringe contributions, forming a more complex and multilayered history.

1. A PRODUCTIVE CONVERGENCE OF CLASSES: OSWALD AND MARIO (THE ANDRADES)

The 1922 Week of Modern Art was a confluence event; an attempt at synthesis of dispersed or not yet consolidated local vanguards. It sought to build a positive look at Brazilian culture and to represent it as an autonomous entity: an attempt to conflate individual efforts within the broad lines of European modernism, while adding overtones of “local color” through the search for native expressions. The effort also aimed at breaking with a nostalgic view of Romanticism and sought to establish a “true” aesthetic autonomy in Brazil.

The symbolic and social significance of the Week of Modern Art was also bound by the cosmopolitan views of a Brazilian elite coming mainly from São Paulo, with strong ties to Europe. Its main figure and idealizer, the poet Oswald de Andrade, had begun a process of intellectual maturity years before, in 1911, having gone to Paris where he came in contact with modern European vanguards. Oswald had committed himself with urgency to a modernist aesthetic revision in Brazil.  From the spirit of the Week of Modern Art, he will propose the Pau Brasil Manifesto (1924) and the Anthropophagic Manifesto (1928), the latter containing the “guidelines” for a “cannibalistic absorption” of European models within the Brazilian cultural matrix. The manifestos and the event set the tone for a first phase modern rupture: a recycling of sorts of the traditional Brazilian myths under the framework of Dada critical irony, among other avant-garde lines.

Born in the city of São Paulo, the Movement inherits its provincial character and conforms itself to the network of interests of the cultural and economic elite of its state, despite a growing interest in the regional characteristics of Brazil. If there is a more radical multicultural immersion, mainly observed in Rio de Janeiro, of which Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928) is a major expression, this is still an exception within the generally idealized connections to the “undomesticated” rhythms of culture.  In combating the Romantic and Parnassian aesthetic heritages, structural issues of Brazilian society remained alien to the movement, despite its impetus for renewal.

The so-called heroic phase of the modern movement in Brazil, inaugurated in 1922, made little progress in the resolution of the contradictions of cultural representation. It was founded on theories that tended to neutralize the conflictive nature of the social structure, as was the case with the myth of “racial harmony” proposed by Gilberto Freyre, as observes Costa Lima. The attenuation of social contradictions seems to be a characteristic of Brazilian institutions. Even the nation’s most prominent historic ruptures, such as the Proclamation of Independence and the establishment of the Republic (1889), were not a true search for autonomy, having been built on asymmetric institutional arrangements, in which economic dependence on Portugal, and indirectly on England, remained a central element. We identify in this dynamic the forces that spoke on behalf of economic power on one side and, on the other side, we aim to rehabilitate the forces committed to an aesthetic revision and to the deconstruction of entrenched paradigms rooted in European culture, predominant until that moment in Brazil.

In this sense, concerning Literature and the production of the period, the understanding of each author’s trajectory, especially regarding their “rediscovery” of Brazil, is as important as registering the legacy of iconic authors of the Modern Movement, such as the contributions by Mário and Oswald. To a great extent, Brazilian Modernism embraced the founding myth of racial harmony, despite its lack of correspondence to the socio-institutional spheres. In Mário de Andrade we identify an initial step towards an effective reappraisal of this stance, taking the form of an awareness of the immensity of the Brazilian territory still to be “discovered”, as we can see in the poem Descobrimento:

Benched at my desk in São Paulo
In my house on Lopes Chaves street
Suddenly, I felt a chill inside.
I was shaky, very moved
with the silly book looking at me.

Can’t you see that I remembered that there in the North, my God!
so far away from me
In the active darkness of the night that has fallen
A thin, pale man with hair streaming down into his eyes,
After making a skin with the daily rubber
Has just gone to bed; he is sleeping.

This man is a Brazilian like me.

The search for an identity synthesis that could unite the regions of Brazil in Mario de Andrade’s notion of “a Brazilian like me” becomes a kind of literary utopia. Meanwhile, Brazilian reality pointed in another direction, as evidenced by the laws of repression that came into force in the recently proclaimed Federative Republic of Brazil. One of these instances, as points out Antonio Simas, was the Vagrancy Law (1890) which, shortly after the abolition of slavery, in 1890, aimed at keeping the recently freed slaves under a tight rein. The Penal Code thus provided for a penalty of 15 to 30 days for “vagrants and capoeiristas”, characterized as those “failing to exercise a profession, trade, or any occupation which earns a living; not having means of subsistence and a known domicile; or earning subsistence by means of occupation prohibited by law, or manifestly offensive to morals and good customs” (Simas, 3).

In mentioning the “capoeiristas” — a mixture of dance and martial art performed by the slaves — the legal excerpt carries explicit reference to the social group its force was directed at. The New Republic was committed to alienating those who did not have a job or a fixed dwelling, targeting the black populations of cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital. The social structure thus perpetrated a system of humiliations toward those who did not have the means of subsistence, shortly after the proclamation of the Lei Aurea (1888), Brazil’s law of abolition. The segregation practices from the time of slavery were thus written into law and became an integral part of the systematic ordering of cities. The model sustained by capital in favor of the elite was updated, and it was in the cities that the system appeared most flagrantly. Simas observes that the first governments in Rio de Janeiro

incriminated the various manifestations of popular culture - almost all of them markedly linked to the Africas that existed in the streets of the city. Playing capoeira was made a crime by the Penal Code of 1890, and [the religious practice of] macumba was systematically repressed. The possession of a tambourine was enough for the police to charge the samba dancer with the law against vagrancy. (4)

The civilizing force, translated into violence either against indigenous peoples or against enslaved individuals, was undertaken in Brazil since colonial times. Simas observes that “there is no record of public initiatives seeking to integrate former slaves to the full exercise of citizenship and to the formal job market”. On the contrary, the immigration process “was encouraged as a means of whitening the population and instituting western habits among” Brazilian people (5). The Portuguese legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes that this is a process of epistemicide: the deliberate effacement of local forms of knowledge through assimilation. The mechanisms of social structuring that dominated during the time of slavery were thus strategically altered so as to be transposed and to remain in effect in the Republic.

Despite Oswald de Andrade’s efforts to incorporate local tones, the events surrounding the Week of Modern Art contained aspects of an aesthetic assimilation. A disparity between literature and reality remained. Part of this “disparity” came from a lack of understanding, by the first-phase modernist authors, of the mechanisms of social structuring, stemming from a biased view of the Brazilian social matrix. The well-known voyage of the modernist group, including Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, to the historic cities of Minas Gerais, in 1924, was a key moment in the formation of a new aesthetic perception. They were joined by Goffredo da Silva Telles, René Thiollier, Tarsila do Amaral, Olívia Guedes Penteado and Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-born poet (Batista, 288). Cendrars was Oswald’s last link with the historical avant-garde and an important figure in the perception of the exceptional qualities of the baroque works found in Minas Gerais. The trip was part of an aesthetic mobilization which played an important role in the consolidation of the formal characteristics of Brazilian modernism.

There is a widespread sense of amazement in the accounts of the historic trip that took place only two years after the Week of Modern Art. In the article “Brazil’s Religious Art in Minas Gerais”, Mario de Andrade observes that: “it was in this oscillating milieu of inconsistencies — eighteenth-century Minas Gerais — that the most characteristic religious art of Brazil developed. There, the Church could, freer from the influences of Portugal, protect a more uniform style, more original than the pruned, aulic, opinion-less ones in other centers” (4). Mario concludes that “the churches, some built by more acclimatized Portuguese and some by autochthonous artisans, probably like Aleijadinho — these unaware of Rio and Bahia — took on a much more determined and, we might say, much more national character” (5). Batista points to a similar perception in a later testimony by Tarsila do Amaral, the painter of Abaporu:

recently arrived from Europe, I felt dazzled by the popular decorations of the houses of São João del-Rei, Tiradentes, Mariana, Congonhas do Campo, Sabará, Ouro Preto and other small cities of Minas, full of popular poetry. A return to tradition, to simplicity (...) Aleijadinho, in his statues and in the brilliant lines of his religious architecture, everything was a reason for our admiring exclamations. I found in Minas the colors that I adored as a child (Botelho, 180)

The sensibility mediated by Tarsila do Amaral through a gaze “newly arrived from Europe”, demonstrates the procedures under which the “ex-optic” was represented.  The acquired gaze is described as an experience of “passing through”, “full of admiring exclamations”. Its valuation is based on the personal experience of the painter’s childhood. This reaffirms the intention of celebrating — even if anthropophagically — an aesthetic synthesis of our identity under Modern tenets.  Early modernism thus left aside the more problematic relationship with the segregatory practices of the State, which had been in force in Brazil since the early years of slave politics:

If we understand the relationship of confrontation - in which the State is an adversary to be defeated - and of negotiation, in which the State is a possible ally whose means of action are desirable, but whose end is distinct - I think that the main difference is more in the second pole, that of “negotiation”. The tension between the cultural movement and the State would be in the incompatibility of means, together with the divergence of ends (objectives) and the convergence in the object of action (civil society). While the social movement (in the classical model) organizes itself to demand from the State a change in the redistribution structure of resources (material or relative to political power), the cultural movement seeks, through the state apparatus, to undertake a change in the cultural matrix of society. (183)

The widely documented trip to Minas Gerais is perhaps a more profound moment of contact with Brazil’s roots, partially intuited by the modernists in their previous incursions into the lively Rio Carnival, where the city’s multicultural splendor would have shown itself in the early twentieth century. But the modernist incursion to the interior of Brazilian southeast states, such as Minas Gerais, was founded on a cosmopolitan worldview acquired in Paris and a class ethos shaped in São Paulo, as we have seen. The clash between these realities might have seemed like a “voyage to another world”, one characterized by picturesque landscapes. In the case of the historic cities of Minas Gerais, the beauty of the architectural ensemble built by Aleijadinho, the famous Brazilian baroque architect and sculptor, impressed the modernists. Aleijadinho was the son of the Portuguese master builder and architect Manuel Francisco Lisboa and “his” African slave Isabel, and was himself born a slave, in 1730. This fact reaffirms the drama of the structural construction of a Brazil forged in profound cruelty.

The cultural historian Walter Benjamin, in his famous text On the Concept of History, argues that “there was never a cultural monument that was not also a monument to the barbaric” (232). I believe that we can take this idea as a paradigm to understand how the monumentality of the nation’s cultural cornerstones imposed itself on the critical consciousness of the Brazilian elite. Though the modernists might not have had a full understanding of the nation’s structural inequality at the time, the problem also involved reconciling the aesthetic tenets of European Modernism and regional Brazilian expressions, within the field of literature.  The translation and gradual transposition of a new set of tenets was itself a means of opposition to the Academic conservatives — these perhaps even more committed to the preservation of the status quo. This cultural clash involved defining the principles that would reshape Brazilian institutions.

The modernist voyage to the historic cities of Minas serves as theme for a series of articles by Mário de Andrade, who, at the time, was an employee of the Ministry of Education under the command of Gustavo Capanema. Mário’s institutional affiliation brings about the question of the role of intellectuals in Brazilian State policies at the time. In the essay “Modernism as a cultural movement: a political sociology of culture”, André Botelho emphasizes that “treating Modernism as a cultural movement implies discussing it as a mode of collective action, at least initially, frankly institutionalized, but which, when seeking to produce cultural changes in society as a whole, finds itself constrained to interact in a conflictive and collaborative way with the state” (177). Conflict of interests and intricacies of public policies are here emphasized regarding an appropriation of culture and its conformation to an official perspective.

The construction of official public policies, just as the efforts to capture Brazilianness through the picturesque landscape of Brazil’s interior, did not significantly contemplate the events related to the violent process of slavery and its social consequences. Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo had been leading states in the trade that involved the exploitation of slave labor, a lucrative machinery at the root of inequality, with consequences up to our present-day society. As the carioca historian Luis Antônio Simas explains, Rio de Janeiro, replacing Salvador, became the world’s largest slave trade port after the transfer of the trade machine from the Northeast to the Southeast of Brazil: “The experience of African slavery in the Americas is, strictly speaking, an experience of dispersion, fragmentation, breaking of associative ties and death, symbolic and literal. It is also, at the same time, an experience of constant reconstruction of practices of cohesion, invention of identities, dynamization of sociability and life” (1). The author also observes the consequences of this process in social formation: “[…] African cultures, apparently shattered by the fragmentation brought about by the experience of captivity, were redefined with the creation in Brazil, and more specifically in Rio de Janeiro, of associative institutions (zungus, terreiros de santo, carnival associations, etc.) construction, maintenance and promotion of community identities” (2).

Thus, while the search for Brazilian roots elsewhere fascinated the moderns, a deep restructuring of society was taking place at the base of the major Brazilian cities. The fundamental perceptions that guide the first phase modernist sensibility, and that bequeathed us seminal works as Macunaíma (1928), can be seen today as somewhat diluted in the passing fascination of the voyages, in the romanticized aesthetics of poverty, and in the folkloric syntheses that suppressed violence. They form the basis of the founding myths that undermined the structural conditions in favor of an aesthetic autonomy belonging to the cosmopolitan character of major cities but that ignored its founding layers. This perspective clouded the perception of Culture as a complex set of invisibilities in favor of an idealized collective inflection which suppressed individualities. It operates from a game of interests that makes certain manifestations visible, without elucidating the material conditions related to the production of modern works. It pertains to a “civilizing” clash that modernizes so as to serve the elites, forging criteria intuited as “cultural”: to modernize without fundamentally altering the social structures, which would have meant an expansion of access to republican benefits.

This process unfolds itself in a series of strategies which erased constitutional rights and resulted in social alienation, particularly through the obliteration of the symbolic representations pertaining to those caught within the black Diaspora, of which Brazil was one of the main perpetrators. The agricultural elite operated a systematic replacement of its labor force in the face of abolition, adapting to social and demographic changes in order to maintain profits and thus perpetuating domination and inequality. Citing Frantz Fanon, Simas notes that racism inherited from colonialism manifests itself explicitly - and most fiercely - on the basis of physical violence, but not only there. Discrimination is also established from the diminishing of the symbolic goods of those whom colonialism tries to subject: beliefs, dances, food, worldviews, ways of celebrating life, burying the dead, educating children, etc. The discourse of the European colonizer in relation to the indigenous and the African established the idea that they would be naturally backward, dispossessed of history. Only elements external to them – science, Christianity, representative democracy, the market economy, the Western school, etc. – could insert them into what we imagine to be the history of humanity. It is the attempt, in short, to impose a homogeneous world view. (Simas, p. 3) Thus, while public institutions established policies around broad cultural lines, repressive mechanisms reached every level of society and operated on the specific.

A deeper, more complex incursion into the interior of Brazil, far from the network of coastal cities like Rio de Janeiro, will be the task of the second phase modernist authors. These authors would be committed to the representation of regional inequality through works such as Vidas Secas, by Graciliano Ramos, and Grande sertão Veredas, by João Guimarães Rosa, both dealing with life and survival in the arid regions of Brazil. This represents a significant shift, though discussions on the structure of inequality sometimes appear as a schematic backdrop to the oppression suffered by the characters individually. The works have the merit, however, of seeking to penetrate social layers in search of individuality through the composition of vernacular character and regional landscapes.

2. CRUELTY AND PERCEPTION OF A DEEP BRAZIL

From the 1940s onwards, there is a renewal of postulates by the second generation modernism with a growing interest in the investigation of Brazilian social structure. Structural inequality had been present in the works of pre-modernist authors, such as Lima Barreto, who had harshly criticized first phase modernism in what he believed to be a literature produced for the ruling class. A renewed approach to social issues gradually displaces the utopian Brazilianness linked to the avant-garde and its manifestos. After the heroic years surrounding an initial radical and wide-ranging reformulation, thus, a less monumental literary production emerges, operating a fundamental revision by addressing the controversial episodes of our cultural formation. Dense works, concerned with aspects of Brazil’s slave-holding past, loaded with silences and traumas, will deepen the regional and social characteristics of this formation process.

From a contemporary perspective, in the wake of the recent revisionist movements that are essential to the inclusion of black, silenced and invisible voices, I propose to make a brief reflection on the work of the Brazilian author Cornélio Penna (1896-1958). Placing his literary production in the period of the so-called second phase Modernism, Penna adds complexity to the regional approach and to the structural issues of Brazilian formation. From the publishing of his first novel, Fronteira, the author “walks” the stony roads of Minas Gerais: its mineral aridity a symbolic representation of the Brazilian territory. Unlike the Minas Gerais imagined in the first modernist voyages in 1924, however, Penna inaugurates a third way, seeking an aesthetic and social convergence.

Cornélio Penna develops his work around a landscape of social decadence, setting his literary production in the suffocating spaces of the waning plantation system, where an atmosphere of terror, to which the enslaved were subjected, formed a network of physical and psychological violence. Penna will be particularly interested in the interior spaces which are kept from the public eye. The reader is allowed to see how these spaces are conformed: rooms, bedrooms, slave quarters; environments not often explored in the literary production of the period. In these spaces, subjectivity replaces the idea of character “types” and of the unspecific representations of the collective of earlier works.

The “interior” of these spaces, in the labyrinthine plantation, reveals unsuspected nuances of the pictorial representations of the period. The character construction finds parallel in the complex construction of the local landscape. Cornélio’s work is ahead of its time, imagining a voice for black people and especially for black women, giving these characters unprecedented depth and individuality. The nuanced representation of spaces and characters is a key element of the Penna’s critical approach, allowing a fuller understanding of the social framework within which individuals move.

This construction, unusual at the time, finds parallel in our current literature.  The novels Quarto de despejo, by Carolina Maria de Jesus, Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves, Torto Arado, by Itamar Vieira Júnior, O avesso da pele, by Jefferson Tenório, among others, are recent examples of the representation of silenced versions of history.

At the height of modernity, in the 1930s and 1940s, Brazil was expanding economically, greatly due to the unequal working conditions that dated back to slavery and that would produce a stratified and oppressive social structure. Cornélio Penna sets his novels precisely in this process of silencing, around that which is not usually mentioned, but which screams and increasingly requires a more accurate look. The author returns to the oppressive atmosphere of slavery through a different perspective. Setting his plots around the manor house and in the daily routine of the plantation, Penna portrays a dark panorama of the relations that opposed slaves and masters, examining the proximity between cruelty and religion and exposing how power was secured through torture: an immersion in relationships that constituted the Brazilian people, but often remained suppressed by rigid moral and religious codes. This was an insidious atmosphere left by slavery, with its wide spectrum of cruelty and submission, humiliation and pain.

Penna’s novels present a third way: neither the exotic, portrayed by the Brazilian avant-garde as a positive trait, nor the more schematic and sometimes shallow denunciation of inequality, found in the initial regionalist approach by the second-phase Modernists. The author adds psychological components to the character development, establishing a refined connection between the broader social structures and their implications on the psyche of different social groups and individuals. The portrayal not only gives depth to the characters, but also reveals the inner workings of structural inequality.

In his last novel, A Menina Morta (The Dead Girl), from 1958, this structure gains monumental contours. The Manor House, the nervous center of the Grotto Farm, constitutes a microcosm; a terrifying synthesis of the oppressive social relations prevailing in the hierarchy of the 19th century coffee plantations. The plot revolves around the death of a child who perishes after hearing a secret from her mother. The book, inspired by the story of the author’s maternal aunt, the Baroness of Paraná, is a vertiginous dive into the stratified structure of Brazilian society in the 19th century, outlining a suffocating environment where death announces itself in every room. This can be seen in the author’s description of the procedures of one of the domestic slaves, shortly after the child’s death, revealing an intricate relationship between psychological state, daily chores and social strata:

now it was for death that he was working, to help it take away the Little Sinhá to a place where you can’t come back, and he hurried on without needing the overseer to come see if he was really working, if he followed orders well. But the black inspector also had teary eyes when he told him what to do on that bright morning, under the glaring white sun, which seemed threatening and suffocating to all the residents of Grotto. (15)

As he walks us through the different spaces of the plantation’s environment, the author uncovers an entwined network of relationships and reveals racism as a structural reality, present more or less evidently in everyday practices. Breaking with this structure was also breaking with something that had always been at the base of the “civilizing” process. Since colonial times, Brazilian society was founded on power relations that oppressed the weakest and increasingly strengthened the elites. In another passage, we see how the child’s sister is also caught and moves within this structural reality:

everyone walked in darkness, looking for one another, she thought confusedly, and the blinding light of day gave her black hunting dress a strange appearance, as the absence of shimmer seemingly negated the sun itself. She was entirely alone on the terrace, as life on the farm continued to seem suspended and the blacks had not left the slave quarters, where they had voluntarily shut themselves up. (532)

The author thus adds spatial and hierarchical complexity to the regionalist approach and explores the psychological component of this ambience.

The violent strategies of domination since colonial times can also be seen in the ordering and fragmentation within the slave quarters: “the part of the slave quarters inhabited by single black women became busy as soon as the sun illuminated the bars of the windows overlooking the valley. Women dressed in coarse and near-white chimangos, their very black arms sticking out, spoke in low voices and gesticulated nervously. Some of the older ones spoke African words in the excitement they were in but could not understand each other because they had been brought from different nations deliberately so that they would not form separate groups, through the secret language of a single dialect (Penna, p. 75). Penna describes how the quarters are constructed under a meticulous order for control, with the separation of individuals through a deliberate choice of origins. The author thus establishes a network of relationships between the local structure and the broader geography of slave trade.

In contrast to the production of the period, here blacks also have voices, and plot revenge as a way of escaping the oppression suffered by them. The conflicts are not resolved but laid out within the permanent social tensions. In his four novels, published between 1939 and 1958, Penna will examine some unsuspected aspects of the construction of a nation that neither pass through the modernist paradigm of the first phase, nor fit into a more schematic regionalism. The contrast between the manor house and the slave quarters stands out as two spaces of social and geographic circumscription and can be taken as a symbolic representation of what happens on a larger scale in Brazil. If, on the one hand, there is opulence and plenty, on the other, what stands out is scarcity and precariousness.

To elect the paradigm of a canonic modernism as a portrait of Brazil’s rupture with the colonial social structure would imply the election of one among many counter-cultural possibilities in the early twentieth century. Literature, perceived as image and transfiguration of reality, as Antônio Cândido alerts us, is a fundamental element of our perception of Brazilianness. The strategies that were used to cover up or to uncover the most cruel moments of our society are a part of the construction of our nationality and reappear in the recent historic revisions. The writer Cornélio Penna gives Modernism of the second phase its critical commentary by constructing, under the optic of the nightmare, one more face of the varied spectrum of the Brazilian symbolic imaginary.

His work reminds us that in order to build a future Brazil, it is essential to revisit the controversial episodes of our past. This would also be a commitment of Literature, when building imaginaries more consistent with the plurality of a Culture. It is from the present that we can better perceive the real dimension of these temporalities. They are built in a continuous effort so that the horrors perpetrated by the slave holding elites are shown in contrast to inclusion and reparation.

WORKS CITED

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Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto Antropófago (1928). https://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf

Andrade, Oswald de. Manifesto Pau Brasil (1924). https://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf

Batista, Eduardo. Blaise Cendrars – “O Terceiro Elemento do Movimento Pau Brasil.” 2011. https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/itinerarios/article/view/4865

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Penna, Cornélio. A Menina morta. Artium, 2001.

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Vieira Santos, Flavia. Transgressão melancolia e mal na Obra de Cornélio Penna. Doctoral Thesis. Rio de Janeiro: PUC-Rio, 2008.