Protean Ulyssisms in Portuguese Modernism: Reconceptualizations of Nationhood and Interactions with Brazil Sousa, Lisandra
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Queen Mary Research Online Protean Ulyssisms in Portuguese Modernism: Reconceptualizations of Nationhood and Interactions with Brazil Sousa, Lisandra The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/12920 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] 1 Protean Ulyssisms in Portuguese Modernism: Reconceptualizations of Nationhood and Interactions with Brazil Lisandra Sousa Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Queen Mary University of London, Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. 2 Statement of originality I, Lisandra Sousa, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Lisandra Dora Silva e Sousa Date: 27 October 2014 Details of collaboration and publications: I would like to thank the Portuguese Fundação da Ciência e da Tecnologia for awarding me a doctoral studentship; without such a grant I would not have been able to develop this research. The Fundação António Quadros provided me with an unpublished letter of Brazilian Oswald de Andrade to Portuguese António Quadros (Chapter Three). The support I got at the Fundação has been valuable and their contribution enriched my research. This project would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my supervisors: Professor Else Vieira, Professor Omar García and Dr Manuela Parreira. I also want to acknowledge the staff working at Queen Mary University of London and at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa for their work and service to me as a student. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the spaces of interaction between Portuguese and Brazilian modernists. Relocations and transfigurations of the Ulysses myth are the main threads reconceptualizing the nation in the works analysed. In this respect, ‘Portuguese Ulyssism’ is an axial cultural construct, which this thesis partially absorbs but also departs from, in order to assert mutating literary experiences referring to the Camonean version of the myth in the Renaissance epic Os Lusíadas/The Lusiads. The research, therefore, suggests a Ulyssian voyaging of the mind in Pessoa’s and the brothers Campos’s works. For this, it reveals a dialogue between the modernists of both countries who, outside of their respective national literatures, open a space of interaction beyond the territories of nation-states through texts on exile, national identity, and colonialism. This thesis suggests that Portugal’s Modernism is evidence of the double-writing on the nation of the country’s leading modernists: Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá- Carneiro, and António Ferro. The research focuses on Pessoa’s ‘Ulisses’ in Mensagem; his meditations in Os Portugueses/The Portuguese (1928), and the writer’s ‘invisible translator’ in Pessoa’s heteronymic performance. It also analyses correspondence between Portuguese and Brazilian modernists, including between Pessoa and Brazilian Ronald de Carvalho, and an unpublished letter between António Ferro and Brazil’s Oswald de Andrade. The two issues of the Luso-Brazilian quarterly Orpheu, 1915, and Ferro’s contributions to Brazil’s Klaxon, 1922 (celebrating the centenary of Brazil’s political independence from Portugal), are also examined, as are Brazilian Haroldo de Campos’s later poems Galáxias/Galaxies (1984) and his ‘Finismundo a última viagem’/‘World’s end, the last voyage’ (1997), where Haroldo’s intertext engages in dialogue with Pessoa and Camões. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................. 5 CHAPTER ONE A Mute Heteronym Called Ulysses: Fernando Pessoa’s Reconceptualization of the Nation as a Ulyssian Voyaging of the Mind ...................................................................... 25 CHAPTER TWO Fernando Pessoa’s Heteronyms and Identity in Modernity: A Nationhood of ‘Invisible Translators’ ........................................................................................................................ 86 CHAPTER THREE Brazilian Modernists, Portuguese Modernists, and their Spaces of Interaction .............. 123 CHAPTER FOUR The Anthropophagic Agenda of Modernism as a process of inclusion of the other in the work of Haroldo and Augusto de Campos: a Translational Ulyssism in ‘Finismundo, a última viagem’ and Galáxias ........................................................................................... 166 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................... 214 5 INTRODUCTION This thesis examines interactions between Portugal’s and Brazil’s Modernisms, which are generally studied separately from the perspective of national literatures. Arnaldo Saraiva’s work details correspondences between Portuguese and Brazilian modernists. This work, of undeniable value in terms of primary sources, lays an important foundation for this comparative study. This thesis aims towards a more analytical study, moving beyond an historical and aesthetical interpretation of the two Modernisms in order to investigate the interactions, including the differences, between Portugal’s and Brazil’s Modernisms. My research raises the hypothesis that certain publications, including Orpheu – the quarterly magazine which Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was both a director of and contributor to – create a space of interaction between the Modernisms of Portugal and postcolonial Brazil. Dialogue in the two landmark issues of the Luso-Brazilian Orpheu, launched in 1915, mark the beginning of Brazil’s Modernism and express the fierce attempts of young poets gathered around Pessoa to destabilize the historicism of the nation and the superiority of Portuguese Modernism. For, as it says, ‘nossa intenção é formar, em grupo ou ideia, um número escolhido de revelações em pensamento ou arte, que sobre este principio aristocratico tenham em ORPHEU o seu ideal esotérico e bem nosso de nos sentirmos e conhecermo-nos’, in order ultimately to change conceptions of art in Portugal and Brazil (Orpheu 1). The thesis will thus argue that Portugal’s Modernism, usually seen as monolithic, in fact disrupts the centre-periphery binary and reveals the double-writing of the nation. This study will also provide insights into the contribution and role of one of Orpheu’s ‘exiled art temperaments’, Ronald de Carvalho (1893-1935). De Carvalho was a Rio-born poet and Brazilian Ambassador to Lisbon who contributed to both Orpheu and Brazil’s equally groundbreaking Semana de Arte Moderna/ Week of Modern Art, 6 which, in São Paulo in 1922, launched the country’s Modernism in the centenary year of Brazil’s political independence from Portugal. This thesis will analyse de Carvalho’s work, which is generally overlooked, to investigate de Carvalho’s 1922 concept of liberdade criadora. De Carvalho’s poems are, according to Pessoa, ‘suaves e doentios’, Pessoa adding that the poet himself is ‘um dos mais interessantes e nossos dos poetas brasileiros de hoje’ (Pessoa in Saraiva 2004: 534). My examination will also correlate Brazilian emancipatory discourses on the colonial mentality with Pessoa’s meditations in Os Portugueses (1928) on Portugal’s ‘mental tragedy of provincialism’, whilst looking at Pessoa’s perception of ambivalence in the images projected by Portugal’s cultural and territorial project abroad. Why Protean Ulyssisms in Portuguese Modernism? Ulysses, the tragic Greek hero, has been part of the Portuguese imaginary from the country’s formation as a nation. According to a legend based on (false) etymology, Ulysses discovered Lisbon – the city bearing his ancient Latin name of Olisipona or Ulixibona – whilst on his odyssey through the Mediterranean and after trespassing Hercules’s imposed markers westwards in Dante’s Inferno. Ulysses reappears in the Portuguese epic Os Lusíadas in the sixteenth century (1572), a work highly influenced by the European culture of the Renaissance but rooted in the context of the maritime expansion of Portugal.