De la parole vers la musique : Mário de Andrade à la recherche d’une langue brésilienne

Resumen

The article focuses on the first literary manifestation of the main project of the modernist literature in Brazil, that of the creation of a “Brazilian language”. Throughout the 1920’s the Brazilian avant-garde writers attempted to forge a language capable of expressing and representing, in an appropriate and authentic way, social and cultural specificities of the country. The analysis proposed here concentrates on the technique of the “harmonic verse”, developed in the inaugural work of the Brazilian modernism, Hallucinated City, by Mário de Andrade, who took the search for a Brazilian language to its extreme. This book, a collection of poems, is the first step of the author’s language program. Although one cannot find in it all the elements of this project, the work shows its main trend: the passage from word to music. The effort to formulate a language in tune with the Brazilian society leads the poet to push the word till its limits – to the threshold of music. This contradictory movement towards abstraction will not, however, be analysed here in an abstract way, but studied from a historical perspective: it will be understood as an extreme aesthetic solution to the irreducible antagonisms which modelled Brazilian society in the early twentieth century.