Influence and Cannibalism in the Works of Blaise Cendrars and Oswald De Andrade
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Modernist Poetics between France and Brazil: Influence and Cannibalism in the Works of Blaise Cendrars and Oswald de Andrade Sarah Lazur Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 1 © 2019 Sarah Lazur All rights reserved 2 ABSTRACT Modernist Poetics between France and Brazil: Influence and Cannibalism in the Works of Blaise Cendrars and Oswald de Andrade Sarah Lazur This dissertation examines the collegial and collaborative relationship between the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars and the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s as an exemplar of shifting literary influence in the international modernist moment and examines how each writer’s later accounts of the modernist period diminished the other’s influential role, in revisionist histories that shaped later scholarship. In analyzing a broad range of source texts, published poems, fiction and essays as well as personal correspondence and preparatory materials, I identify several areas of likely mutual influence or literary cannibalism that defied contemporaneous expectations for literary production from European cultural capitals or from the global south. I argue that these expectations are reinforced by historical circumstances, including political and economic crises and cultural nationalism, and by tracing the changes in the authors’ accounts, I give a fuller narrative that is lacking in studies approaching either of the authors in a monolingual context. 3 Table of Contents Abbreviations ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Foreign Paris 20 Chapter 2 – Primitivisms and Modernity 57 Chapter 3 – Collaboration and Cannibalism 83 Chapter 4 – Un vaste malentendu 121 Conclusion 166 Bibliography 170 i Abbreviations ABBC A Aventura Brasileira de Blaise Cendrars: Eulalio and Calil’s major anthology of articles, correspondence, essays, by all major participants in Brazilian modernism who interacted with Cendrars. ALS Archives littéraires suisses, Bern, Swiss National Library. CDA/MA Carlos & Mário: complete correspondence between Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Mário de Andrade. CM Cannibalist Manifesto: citations from Leslie Bary’s English translation of the Manifesto Antropófago. When necessary, I have provided the original wording from Jorge Schwartz’s Vanguardas Latino-Americanas. FdR Feuilles de Route: the English translation in Complete Postcards from the Americas. IEB Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, at USP (University of São Paulo): location for the Arquivo Mário de Andrade and the Arquivo Oswald de Andrade. MA/MB Correspondência Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira: complete correspondence between Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira. MPBP Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry: citations from Stella M. de Sá Rego’s English translation of the Manifesto Pau-Brasil. When necessary, I have provided the original wording from Jorge Schwartz’s Vanguardas Latino-Americanas. PB Pau-Brasil: citations from the edition of the poetry book listed below, and the translations into English are mine. SPG Serafim Ponte Grande: untranslated version. SPGE Serafim Ponte Grande, in English: translation by Jackson and Bork. TADA Tout autour d’aujourd’hui: Denoël’s 15-volume collection of Cendrars’ complete works; should be accompanied with volume number. ii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the invaluable input and support of its many readers. I would first like to thank my dissertation advisor Vincent Debaene for his patience in reading drafts, and for his thoughtful comments and advice, whether it was guiding me on a tricky interpretation or on the writing process itself. I am also very grateful to Emmanuelle Saada for sponsoring the project, and tirelessly helping to bring it ashore to complete its odyssean journey. I also want to thank Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Brent Edwards, and graciela Montaldo for joining the dissertation committee, for their attentive reading, and for their insights and suggestions for taking the material beyond the dissertation stage. I also want to thank Marc hertzman for his guidance in the earlier stages of the project, opening it up to wider avenues of inquiry into Brazilian cultural history, and I want to acknowledge the kindness and support of the late Phil Watts, who let me believe that this dissertation project was possible in the first place. As an interdisciplinary project with a progressively widening corpus, my project also benefitted from many sources of support. I am grateful to gSAS and the French department at Columbia, for providing the dissertation workshops led by Emmanuelle Saada and Joanna Stalnaker, and for the fellowship to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, which allowed me to take advantage of their library and the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as to make my first visit to an archive. I am very grateful to the archivists and librarians at the Archives Littéraires Suisses in Bern for making my first archival trip an instructive and productive one, and I am grateful to the archivists and and librarians at iii the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros in São Paulo for helping me to do the same, despite my greater linguistic hesitation. My dissertation odyssey would also not have been possible without peers and close friends like Leanne Tyler, Michelle Lee, Aleksandra Perisic, and Noa Bar who took on upaid labor to read my chapters, talked through my many points of confusion with me, and lifted my spirits. I also had interlocutors in the French department - Laure Astourian, Paul Wimmer, Mehammed Mack, Diana King, Jason Earle – and fellow travelers in various other departments – Alexis Radisolou, Elik Elhanan, Shirley Matthews, Robert Brink, Joel Bordeaux, Seema golestaneh, Tamar Blickstein, Ama Awotwi, Michelle hwang – who made it possible to keep going. What I called “the coalition of the willing” included other friends like Severine Ambrus, Aspasia Burnworth, Peter Michalik, and Hadley Suter, who did anything from checking out books for me to giving me a place to sleep in Switzerland. I also to want to thank my pedagogical mentors, because a desire to teach is what led me to pursue a PhD in the first place: Pascale Hubert-Leibler, for her guidance when I was a teaching fellow, and Anne Boyman and Peter Connor, for taking a chance on me as an ABD at Barnard College. Lastly, I want to thank my family for their love and their (mostly) patient support! iv Introduction “The Swiss poet thought he had rediscovered Brazil and scalded his Brazilian friend in a cosmopolitan fondue pot. Oswald borrowed his camera and returned the favor by eating him.”1 The friendship and collaboration between Blaise Cendrars and Oswald de Andrade is both improbable and at the same time representative of the varied cultural encounters that were taking place in Paris in the 1920s, among the French and foreigners. The first was an established Swiss poet and world-traveler, or bourlingueur, who created a reputation for frequenting both the elite circles and underclass of every country where he went looking for a homeland, and the second was a young member of Brazil’s cultural avant-garde, striving to bring his nation out of the world’s cultural periphery and becoming progressively more interested in the politics of class struggle. The unlikely friendship began in Paris, included three trips by Cendrars to visit urban and rural Brazil with the rest of Andrade’s vanguardist cohort, and during this period they read and discussed each other’s writing, helped each other find professional opportunities, and made plans together for future projects in ballet and film. Within a decade of their meeting, however, both writers had disavowed their collaborative period and the value of the other’s contributions to what we today would call international modernism, from very different perspectives: Andrade had engaged himself in communist opposition to the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil and dismissed his own earlier writing as well as Cendrars’ as bourgeois formalism; 1 Haroldo de Campos, “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (Jan.–Jun. 1986): 44. 1 Cendrars, trapped in the nationalist doldrums of 1930s France, rejected his former friend’s modernismo as less authentically Brazilian than the regionalist novels coming out at that point. Despite their mutual dismissals, the collaborative period resurfaced in the writing of each, which suggests that despite their protestation or revisionist histories, the encounter was a crucial period for both, a catalyst for change in the form and content of their literary production. This collaborative transnational artistic relationship is interesting enough on its own as a case study in the aesthetic and cultural possibilities of early 20th century “world literary space”2; both authors engaged in debates about the literary future and questioned their relationships to national literary traditions. The partnership’s dissolution, however, is equally interesting in how each writer justified its dissolution, how their justifications evolved over time, and how literary scholars from different periods and linguistic backgrounds have reacted to their revisionist histories. By examining Cendrars and Andrade’s own poetic and polemical writings, correspondence among them and the other Brazilian modernists, as well as their reception and their conditions of possibility, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that this unusual