MACUNAÍMA: THE HERO WITH NO CHARACTER AT ALL

The "hero without a character" created by the brazilian novelist Mário de Andrade in 1928 remains a classic and incomparable literary achievement. Andrade reelaborates themes of the indigenous mythology on this novel where one can find dadaism, futurism, expressionism and surrealism traces all combined. The invention of the language (expressed by neologisms, modernist techniques, onomatopoeias, multiple style resources and the general primal environment) accompanies this idiosyncratic version of the creation of the world, based on a profound knowledge of the native legends and on the celebration of invention as a (r)evolutionary matrix.

 

Trying to "conceive Brazil as a homogeneous entity, from the literary point of view", Andrade mixes (sometimes even just through the use of enumerations) dialects, expressions and traditions from distinct geographic regions. The super-humanity of the hero, the prevalence of marvellous/fantastic elements and the magic atmosphere around which the novel unfolds, they all turn Macunaíma into a special book and a prototype of the latter magic realism style tendencies.

Curiously, the narrative path follows the inverse direction of the 16th century chronicists' narratives: from the woods to the big city, and then back to the woods - unlike the "navigators" who left the European civilization to "discover" the New World.

Painting: "The Baptism of Macunaíma", Tarsila do Amaral, 1956.

Thus Macunaíma as a hero is full of contradictions and happily enjoying them: he is the anti-hero also, the character with no character intended to represent and sinthetize some kind of national identity: Andrade wrote that the brazilian people, as a trait and general rule, had no character (not only in the moral and european sense of the word, but mainly in the sense that brazilians had no "century-old own civilization" nor a "tradition consciousness", still spontaneously acted as the rich inheritors of a yoruba civilization, an indigenous civilization and a european civilization). In fact, Macunaíma is an unpredictable character with no conscience dilemmas nor morality on the european traditional and religious sense of the word, he is free-minded as a 20-year old should be and acts accordingly: he is light and rich and full of opportunities, with all the surprisingly creative possibilities of a brand new society which is trying to build and invent itself.