The Rules in the land of wizards : Time in the poetry of Rio de Janeiro
Nobuhiro Fukushima
This thesis aims to clarify how Time appears in the works of four Brazilian poets of 20th century that resided in Rio de Janeiro: Manuel Bandeira, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinicius de Moraes and Ceciliaí Meireles. In so doing, we will also describe the relative concepts in the Modern Western thought such as philosophy and literature.
In the first chapter, we treat Infancy in Manuel Bandeira's poetry, who most influenced on the Modernism in Brazil. To speak about the topic, we cannot forget Proust, who elaborated the concept of "involuntary memory" in his romance In Search of the Time Lost. Though, infancy is an important theme not only for Proust, but also for modernist poets like Baudelaire and Rilke. What was new in Proust was that infancy was something emerging from oblivion. Infancy, etymologically derived from latin word that means "that which unable to speak," and is described as such in Hölderlin or Fernando Pessoa's poems. This is why lyric poetry continuously heads for infancy as a destiny never achieved. Bandeira too, like magic, summoned unrecoverble infancy in his poems. Novalis said that the greatest wizard of all is that who can deceive himself.
In the second chapter, we focus on the junction of the ephemeral and the eternal. These two categories originally at the opposite extremes often appear inseparable, as in photographer Henri Cartier-Bressson's works. The relation between the two was already existent in Classicism, but it underwent a transformation after Romanticism appeared. Keats began to doubt the potency of poetry to transform a momento into an eternity. Baudelaire, considering that the beauty exists in the connection between the fugitive and the eternal, demonstrated this esthetics in his sonnet ≪To a lady passing by≫. Benjamin discerned a sign of Modernity in this esthetics which he called "love at the last sight." But before him Proust had already fully described this effect. Cecília Meireles' poetry, in this lineage, presented the poetess almost as a "lady passing by."
In the third chapter, we work on carnival in Vinicius de Moraes' poetry, a well-known poet of Bossa Nova. Carnival, often imagined as something full of joy, had appeared something inseparable from sadness as in Manuel Bandeira's poetry and Vik Muniz's works. One reason for this is, as Cesare Pavese's and Proust's romances suggested, that it is impossible to speak of festival in the middle of it, and after it finishes, festival must be necessarily recalled with melancholy. The most significant genealogy of thought on festival is provably the one that goes from Nietszche to Bakhtin, as Bakhtin inherited the concept of the Dionysiac in his literary theory. Heidegger also inherited the concept of the festive from Nietzsche, and elaborated his own concepts of festival as time preceding festival and of festival as unique source of joy and sadness. Vinicius, also conscious of Nietzsche's philosophy, localized Brazilian carnival in the history of thought on festival.
In the fourth chapter, we again treat Manuel Bandeira's poetry, investigating the motif of phantom in his works. Art work is, for Proust and Borges among others, a way to survive with the death of oneself. To anticipate one's death while still being alive is a peculiar mode to Dasein, as Heidegger analyzed in detail in Being and Time. Through critical reading of Heidegger's book, Giorgio Agamben concluded that language is only rendered possible with the possibility of death. Maurice Blachot also insisted that death is condition of language in that words have meaning only by annihilating existing things. Therefore, language is something phantomatic from its origin. Bandeira's poetry can be interpreted through the concepts of phantom. The poet came to be suspiscious of possibility of survival of art work in his later years. It is critics' task to salvage desappearing art work from oblivion.
In the fifth chapter, we investigate some interrelated themes as lost time, history and memory in Carlos Drummond de Andrade's and Proust's works, referring to the arguments on Auschvitz. A contemporary critic of Melville's insisted that in Moby Dick he should not have written a scene on which there is no witness. The figure of witness who survived a tragedy has been a symbol of composition of poem. Nonetheless, García-Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude describes a history of a village which perished leaving no survivors. Controversies surrounding Auschvitz occured precisely about this point. Nazi's strategy was to deprive the internees of voice to testify. And the poetry after 20th century is persecuted by the anxiety that something may be missing from memory. Memory of the forgotten was one of the main interests for Benjamin already in the 1920's. He provably had in mind Proust's "involuntary memory." Drummond, who continuously payed attention to the forgotten, may have inherited the same critical mind from Proust, whose work happened to be translated into Portuguese by the poet. What they pursued in common was unfound time that spreads beyond the past which remains in form.
In the sixth chapter, we again treat Cecília Meireles' poetry, focussing on the figure of mermaid (Siren). The most tragedic thing in Andersen's mermaid, who got legs in exchange for voice and in the end lost the Price's love, was not this fact itself, but that she could not speak of her tragedy. Then, Homer's Sirens may not be ancestors of Andersen's mermaid, but descendants, and that is why they are revenging upon human beings. If so, Kafka's Odysseus is even more cunning. He defended himself from Sirens, who, deprived of voice, exercised more powerful weapon than song, silence, pretending to believe in the effects of chains and wax in the ears. In one of Mallarmé's sonnet, a scene with an atmosphere of shipwreck and of mermaid is described, but true fact is hidden by sea bubbles. What this poem suggests is that the purer a tragedy is, the less chance it has to be testified. So Cecília's mermaid, also conscious of this, could say "The sadness of this life is/ to be unable to speak./ The words said and written are/ nothing but air on air..."