I left fiction in favor of being a learned man that I fundamentally am not. But I had decided to imbue everything that I did with a utilitarian value, a practical value, something more down‐to‐earth than fiction, aesthetic pleasure, or divine beauty” (Andrade 1974, p. 254).
Not everything was dead, however, and the living would be able to move forward. In that same early 1940s testimony, Mário de Andrade synthesized three principles derived from the modernist adventures of the 1920s: the permanent right to aesthetic research (here understood as the right to modern culture), the modernizing of the Brazilian artistic intelligentsia, and the establishment of a national creative consciousness (Andrade 1974). This was the positive outcome of an “individualism that took risks” but that now, under the renewed politicization of the intelligentsia (“March with the multitudes!”), needed to be thought of in the collective sense. To enact these three principles, argued Andrade, it would be necessary to think of culture and art beyond the aesthetic (and “aristocratic”) imperatives of early modernism. This was to be done through engaging in a politics for the masses – although there was no sign that such a politics would be about class, as it had been for the CAM only a decade earlier. This was a peculiar call to transition from writing fiction to a new sort of intellectual practice, whose place would be neither the aristocratic opera theater nor the bourgeois‐proletarian salon; it would be the university.
“Class” was, however, an important concept for Oswald de Andrade, the modernist and Marxist convert. Oswald did not commemorate the coming of age (or the death) of the Semana in 1942. He waited for a more practical, but not less symbolically charged, opportunity. In 1944, at the invitation of Juscelino Kubitschek, then the mayor of Belo Horizonte (the capital city of the state of Minas Gerais), he announced his version of the modernist movement, tracing the path traveled from 1922 to 1944. There, “in the perfect city,” in front of new Mineiro allies (who were not Marxists, but developmentalists), he gave his version of the scene 20 years earlier: “It is necessary to understand modernism with its material and enriching causes, exhausted in São Paulo's industrial park, with the class commitments of the gilded‐bourgeois period of the first coffee boom, ending with the harrowing watershed moment that was antropofagia (anthropophagy), foreshadowing the global shock of the Wall Street crash. Modernism is a diagram of the height of the coffee boom, its fall, and the Brazilian revolution” (Andrade 1972, p. 102). All of this meant to explain that the Semana was more pre‐anthropophagy than it was truly modernist. Oswald de Andrade had written his famous Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) in 1928, six years after the Semana, proclaiming that Brazil's lack of a modernist tradition meant paradoxically that it could inventively “cannibalize” European traditions to produce something uniquely modern and Brazilian.11 “In the first decade of modernism,” argued Oswald in hindsight, “Antropofagia was the ideological apex, the first contact with our political reality because it divided and oriented us in relation to the future” (Andrade 1972, pp. 95–96). In his view, it was anthropophagy that would guide the destiny of Brazil.
The future had already arrived, and it was in Belo Horizonte – in the architecture of Pampulha and in Jucelino Kubitschek himself.12 Oswald compared the Paulista modernist experience with the eighteenth‐century Minas Gerais intellectual Arcades Mineiros (Arcadian Movement) group culminating in the independence movement, Inconfidência Mineira (Minas Gerais Conspiracy).13 He exalted the young, modernizing Kubitschek and the bourgeois democratic revolutions, pointing toward the flow of modernism, and above all toward anthropophagy as the beacon of Brazil's future. In Oswald's history, full of continuities and conflicts, there is no trace of Mário de Andrade's crisis of conscience. The aristocratic character that Mário denounced was of little interest to Oswald, and even less so any sense of a nationalist crisis.
The strong association of modernism with Europe was not a source of shame for either of the Andrades. On the contrary, “importing” the European modernist spirit, as Mário called it, was essential to synchronizing “Brazil's pace with the rest of the world,” as Oswald explained. However, the similarities between the two ended there. Oswald enumerated examples of Brazilian cultural backwardness that would be swept away by the modernist drive, one that would make “the people” the protagonists of art produced in Brazil. The task for the new generation would be political, the result of a new alliance that would substitute the café com leite (coffee with milk) politics of the old Republic from which modernism emerged with a new type of postfascist Brazil on the verge of revolution.14 “Let us create a brotherhood between Mineiros and Paulistas, a great triumph of national brotherhood,” clamored Oswald, “Let us pay tribute to the union that is proclaimed! Here today we validate the twenty‐two years of struggle on this journey. From São Paulo to Belo Horizonte” (Andrade 1972, p. 101). For Oswald, both the verde‐amarelista (green‐yellow, nationalist fascist) modernists and Mário's liberal followers would remain in the past of the Estado Novo. The future of Brazil would lie in his now‐Marxist anthropophagy with new allies among the developmentalists of Minas Gerais.
By the time they delivered their speeches on the twentieth anniversary of the Semana, the Andrades had already experienced concrete political engagement. Mário was one of the organizers of the Democratic Party and head of the Division of Cultural Expansion during the Vargas government. Oswald was a member of the Communist Party, engaging in political agitprop in the provinces with his wife, the militant Communist poet Pagu, and writing radical tracts about politics.15 Jobless and with no desire to engage in constructing the state, Oswald allowed himself to be an optimist, egocentric, and utopian.16 “We need to know how to take our place in contemporary history,” he reasoned, “Today the role of the intellectual and the artist is as important as that of the fighter on the front lines.” Oswald's memory of 1922 was as self‐centered as Mário's but was much more forgiving and optimistic. He aimed to form militant armies and in this sense was very close to the CAM. After establishing parallels between the Inconfidência Mineira and the Semana de Arte Moderna as movements that sought “to keep pace with the world,” Oswald argued that subsequent political developments, such as Tenente revolts, the related Coluna Prestes, and the 1930 Revolution, directly followed the path opened by the Semana's “semaphores of 1922.”17 And from there he made his appeal, his version of Mario's “walk with the masses” exhortation: “Intellectuals of Minas Gerais, take your places in your tanks, in your airplanes. Exchange your serenade for a machine gun… Define your position!” (Andrade 1972, pp. 100–101).
Both Andrades shared in common an effort to appeal to young people. Although the Semana seemed more and more alienated and reactionary as it aged, both felt that in Brazil's youth there was hope for the future. At the same moment in which the Andrades positioned themselves to breathe new life into the movement of modernist advancement, a new generation of modern intellectuals was evolving, many of whom owed their perspectives to Mário de Andrade's crisis of conscience. The founding of the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, fostered by modernists, modernizers, and progressive descendants of the 1922 oligarchs, was crucial for the emergence of this new moment committed to the study of Brazilian culture. Its principal consequence was the formation of a certain intellectual radicalism, or in the words of literary critic Antonio Candido, a “modest radicalism that became a tradition that has produced positive effects” (Candido 1980, p. 103).
Candido defined the poet and modernist critic Sérgio Milliet as the homem‐ponte (man‐bridge) between the generation of 1922 and the one that he himself represented. And Milliet would be the thinker with whom Candido would have the closest allegiance; Milliet's work would be the starting point on which he based his own critical ideology. Candido stressed the qualities of essayistic writing
