Exiled in Modernity: City Change, Nostalgia, and Mário

Exiled in Modernity: City Change, Nostalgia,
and Mário Pederneiras in Kosmos
Sarah Moody
University of Alabama
Abstract: This article studies the work of Mário Pederneiras published in Kosmos (1904-9),
especially the prose chronicles of a writer principally remembered today as a Symbolist poet.
The archival rescue and analysis add nuance to critical discourse surrounding the urban
His aesthetically subtle and carefully structured chronicles point to city change as a painful
reshaping of individual and community identity that lingers in memory. Gender in particular
emerges as a system in radical flux due to mayor Pereira Passos’s remodeling of urban space.
Keywords: Mário Pederneiras, Rio de Janeiro, urban space, crônica, nostalgia
In “Arvores da rua,” a 1905 poem by Mário Pederneiras (1867-1915), an idyllic countryside contrasts with the “viver anormal de uma grande cidade” (2.3).
Written from an urban viewpoint, the poetic voice laments his surroundings,
noting that “As arvores aqui têm a velha tristeza / Dos que vivem no exilio,
/ … têm o ar desolado / E esta triste expressão de uma vida moderna.”1 The
piece is Pederneiras’s first in Kosmos, an illustrated magazine published in Rio
de Janeiro between 1904 and 1909, and the themes it introduces—saudade,
modernity, and the city—would continue through his later publications in the
magazine. Pederneiras was “carioca da gema,” Carioca through and through, a
poet who was born and died in Rio de Janeiro when that city was still the capital of the Republic, and whose work sustains a lifelong reflection on the city.
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reforms of Rio de Janeiro and the widespread triumphalism that Pederneiras critiqued.
In at least one regard, however, Pederneiras’s writing is sharply at odds
with the dominant spirit of his time and place, showing a melancholia that
goes against the optimism and forward momentum characteristic of his milieu.
Antonio Carlos Secchin considers him “um poeta ‘à beira’: percebe o rumor
da iminente modernidade, mas a ela não se entrega” (XXI). This is especially
apparent in Pederneiras’s many writings on city change, which approach mayor
Pereira Passos’s modernization of the national capital as cause for anxiety and
persistent sadness. His poetry has been studied by Rodrigo Otávio Filho and
Secchin, among others, but its richness as more than an example of Brazilian Symbolism remains largely unexplored.2 Moreover, Pederneiras’s extensive prose writings have not been analyzed. This essay will study his crônicas
(or chronicles) published in the illustrated magazine Kosmos, particularly as
regards the topic of urban space and modernization, and including the counterpoint of Olavo Bilac’s Kosmos writing on the same topic. Pederneiras offered
a reflection on city change that diverged significantly from that of Bilac and
Kosmos editorialists; rather like the “arvores da rua,” he wrote as an exile in his
hometown, estranged by the city’s reinvention as modern. The author’s ambivalence and critique in relation to city change called into question the value of a
top-down, aesthetically-oriented hygiene project, and lamented the imitation
of European styles and the loss of local cultural memory that accompanied the
razing of familiar places. His bewilderment and melancholy before the urban
remodeling insist that the city’s forward momentum was leaving something
important behind. At the same time, Pederneiras’s prose writing posited social
relations as a system in drastic flux due to the reshaping of material space, with
intergenerational relations and especially gender emerging as areas of reformulation. This analysis will bring new subtlety to our understanding of the
chronicle as a genre, as well as of Carioca responses to urban change in the first
decade of the twentieth century.
As a hybrid of journalistic and literary styles, the chronicle provides a
rich opportunity to study the genre-bending prose of the turn of the twentieth
century. The genre offered commentary on current events in a particular place,
usually emphasizing immediacy over aesthetic polish, with topics including
politics, cultural events or celebrations, and even the weather. The Pederneiras
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chronicles studied here are more literary in style than others, which is to say
that they show a greater attention to aesthetics and to structure. They each
address a single topic, rather than the multiple focuses of, for example, Bilac’s
chronicles in Kosmos, which jump from topic to topic within a single piece.
While both writers focused many or most of their chronicles on the city, participating in a trend that was noteworthy throughout at least the Spanish—and
Portuguese-speaking world, Pederneiras does so in a much more subjective
and intimate tone. Antonio Candido argues that the genre became gradually
lighter in tone throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while
at the same time maintaining an engagement with serious issues of the time.
He locates the 1930s as the decade that defined and consolidated the modern chronicle in Brazil, proposing that in this period the genre became less
an argumentative or expository commentary, and more “conversa aparentemente fiada” (8). “É curioso como elas [as crônicas] mantêm o ar despreocupado, de quem está falando coisas sem maior consequência; e, no entanto, não
apenas entram de fundo no significado dos atos e sentimentos do homem, mas
podem levar longe a crítica social” (9). In this regard Pederneiras’s chronicles
would appear to be ahead of their time, using many of the techniques Candido
describes, about thirty years earlier.
Julio Ramos has studied the genre in the Hispanic-American context,
proposing that for the Cuban José Martí, representation of the city served to
represent an epistemological crisis brought on by modernity:
Martí’s understanding of the city is that it spatializes the fragmentation of
the traditional order of discourse, a fragmentation that the city has brought
in its wake … . [I]t is the space of the city as the field of signification itself
that needs to be thought, a space that in its own formal assemblage (that is,
with its disarticulations and networks) is enmeshed in the fragmentation of
codes and traditional systems of representation as they appear in modern
society. (118-9)
Like Martí in this description, Pederneiras points to the changing space
of the city as a sign of a radically new epistemology. The city reforms forced
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a restructuring of social relations and memory, leaving Pederneiras’s narrators with a disconcerting sense of being out of place in one’s time and a painful awareness of how things used to be. Reading Martí’s chronicles of disaster, Ramos proposes that “[t]he rhetoric of disaster is systematically nostalgic”
(122). When considered alongside Pederneiras’s Kosmos chronicles, the statement suggests that, as the inspiration for obsessive nostalgia cleaving a “before”
from a nonetheless inescapable “after,” the urban reforms of Rio de Janeiro
can be interpreted as a kind of disaster for the city and its inhabitants. More
recently, Viviane Mahieux’s comparative study notes that the chronicle “was
recognized for its literary value earlier in Brazil than in Spanish America,” but
even still “was considered a ‘minor’ genre devoid of the permanence and ambition of other literary forms” (17).
Pederneiras’s chronciles in Kosmos fall into three types. His non-narrative articles take an objective tone to critique the limits of city modernization,
namely, the proposal for the Largo da Carioca (in 3.11)3 and the demise of the
Mangue palms (in 4.3). In the second grouping, the “Eu e Márcio” series (in
3.10, 5.1, and 5.5), a narrator and his friend stroll through the city and debate
the value of the remodeling projects, with the critical narrator gradually convincing Márcio that the reforms have failed. The third category of chronicles
are also dialogue narratives (in 4.1, 4.2, 4.11); they juxtapose the thrill of novelty in remodeled Rio with nostalgia for the old city, while introducing a slippage in the narrative voice that undermines narrative authority. This essay will
study these three types of chronicles, focusing especially on the complex narrative constructions of the second and third types. What we will see is that
Pederneiras’s prose writing in Kosmos provided a counterpoint to the dominant tone of optimism and triumphalism in other writings on the topic of Rio’s
modernization, using a dialogic structure as well as an unstable narrative voice
to bring into question the surrounding triumphalism, and to insist that Cariocas allow themselves to remember the city’s traditional spaces and social structures, despite the continually reshaped forms around them.
The five-year run of Kosmos coincided with the city reforms realized by
Carioca mayor Francisco Pereira Passos, which, under the slogan “O Rio civiliza-se,” broadened and straightened roads, razed hills, improved sanitation
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infrastructure, and overlaid urban spaces with a Beaux Arts style that included
taller and more ornamented buildings, landscaping, and a general beautification of urban space: in the words of Jeffrey D. Needell, a “frenchification” of
the capital’s downtown (33).4 Though articles in Kosmos were very diverse in
subject matter, as was true with other illustrated magazines, Antonio Dimas
cites attention to city change as the magazine’s strongest unifying thread. “Na
verdade, o que ocorre com Kosmos, … é a formação e consolidação de uma
nova mitologia urbana, a qual esta revista se encarregou de propagar e dela alimentou-se: a mitologia da Avenida” (133). The avenue Dimas mentions is the
famous Avenida Central, today Rio Branco, which was the most prominent
point of reform. For Olavo Bilac, prominent “Parnassian” poet and regular
contributor to Kosmos, this urbanization was the means by which Rio would
be reinvented as modern, and the remodeled space of the capital city was proof
positive of a reformed national culture. In his chronicle opening Kosmos’s
inaugural issue, Bilac describes the magazine as a vessel for communicating
the modernity of all Brazil: “Kosmos será, se o favor publico não a abandonar,
a demonstração viva do nosso progresso geral” (1.1).5 Demonstration as evidence that Brazil was up on the latest fashions, that it had overcome its recent
history of empire and slavery, that it was, in a word, modern.
In Bilac’s chronicles, the city reforms of Pereira Passos functioned as a
sign of the city’s and the country’s progress, in a play of synecdoche that put
forward the young Republic of Brazil as ready to define anew its relationship
with the world. In typical fashion, his third chronicle for the magazine exultantly celebrates the razing of sections of downtown Rio, primarily poor residential neighborhoods, as a necessary aspect of the city’s reinvention. Bilac’s
phrasing here is heavy in personification, religious metaphor, and good-versus-evil binaries, which leave little room for debate regarding the desirability
of the demolition:
No aluir das paredes, no ruir das pedras, no esfarelar do barro, havia um
longo gemido. Era o gemido soturno e lamentoso do Passado, do Atrazo,
do Opprobio. A cidade colonial, immunda, retrogada, emperrada nas
suas velhas tradicções, estava soluçando no soluçar daquelles apodrecidos
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materiaes que desabavam. Mas o hymno claro das picaretas abafava esse
protesto impotente.
Com que alegria cantavam ellas,—as picaretas regeneradoras! E como as
almas dos que ali estavam comprehendiam bem o que ellas diziam, no seu
clamor incessante e rythmico, celebrando a victoria da hygiene, do bom
gosto e da arte! (1.3)
This deafening scene casts the city reform in a mold of moral extremes,
leaving the reader no choice but to side with the chorus of angels that accompanies the “regenerating picks” as they clear a swath through the dense city
in preparation for the new avenue. The paradoxical collapsing of destruction
and rebirth attempts to void any potential critique of the project, including the
identification of the reader with disrupted populations. As Needell reminds us
in A Tropical Belle-Époque, most of the displaced residents of the cidade velha
were members of the working class and former slaves, many of whom were
forced to move to the slums near the city’s remodeled ports when their homes
were destroyed (46-51).
The Bilaquian celebration of Rio de Janeiro’s reform can be understood
as an aestheticizing gesture, typical of Kosmos as a whole, that took pains to
avoid topics that might be perceived as unpleasant or banal, including the difficult realities of life for the city’s poor and displaced residents. This avoidance
extended even to political concerns, in spite of their popularity with other
chronicle writers at the time.6 The editorial in Kosmos’s first issue explains that:
… queremos fazer das paginas de Kosmos, um artistico album das nossas
bellezas naturaes, dos primores de nossos artistas, propagando o seu conhecimento a outros pontos do paiz e do estrangeiro.
Alheios inteiramente ás lutas politicas, guardará nossa Revista, nesse terreno, que por sua natureza lhe é vedado, inteira neutralidade, registrando os
acontecimentos politicos sem comtudo ultrapassar os limites da chronica.
Franqueamos suas paginas a todas as manifestações intellectuaes, esperando assim, modestamente, cooperar para o desenvolvimento e progresso
de nossa terra … . (1.1)
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An “artistic album,” a vehicle of display that would travel the world as
nationalistic advertising, Kosmos was crafted as the most polished facade of
Brazilian culture at the time. The editorialist considers the magazine to be
inherently and literally blind to politics (“lhe é vedado”), as if excusing himself from an implicit responsibility. Moreover, he slips in a definition of the
chronicle as thoroughly separate from politics; even to neutrally register political events, he suggests, puts Kosmos in danger of violating the genre’s limits.
This piece takes the magazine’s interest in mannered exhibitionism so far that
it demarcates an entire genre of writing as apolitical, only partially masking
this illogical step with convoluted phrasing and negative sentence constructions. Regarding Bilac’s participation in the magazine, the editor need not have
worried; as he surely knew already, Bilac’s chronicles elsewhere were much less
political than those of his peers, and in Kosmos this tendency would be exaggerated, limiting his political involvement to praising specific projects and figures, especially mayor Pereira Passos and his city reforms.7
Olavo Bilac’s chronicles in Kosmos are rich, lively, and often brilliant, but
in relation to the theme of the Pereira Passos reforms, they stick close to a formula of optimism and praise. In contrast, Mário Pederneiras’s prose pieces in
the magazine offer a more varied approach to the city changes, ranging from
tentative approval and aesthetic enjoyment, to nostalgia and harsh critique on
the basis of class issues. Among his eight chronicles and six poems published
throughout Kosmos’s run, Pederneiras’s writing revolves around two themes:
the death of his young daughter, and the relationship between the city and its
residents. Though our attention will be primarily on the latter of these, the melancholy resulting from his daughter’s death can be said to tinge his work as a
whole, which is characterized by a profound ambivalence, torn between longing for what has been lost and pleasure at the first signs of a better future. In his
work, city change causes an uncomfortable double vision, in which images of
the past overlay the beautiful but disconcerting city of the present. His narrators seek consolation in observation but often find disappointment instead.
From a narratological perspective, Pederneiras’s simplest writings in
Kosmos are his critical articles, which employ a single narrative voice to critique a city reform project. He uses this method twice, to argue against the
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planned remodeling of the Largo da Carioca (3.11), and to lament the inability
of modern science to save the Mangue palms (4.3). Noteworthy for its classbased critique of the Pereira Passos administration, this second piece grieves
the loss of a working-class destination in the city, suggesting that the mayor’s
attentions are misdirected at bourgeois spaces and interests. The author’s other
chronicles use more complicated narrative structures, with multiple characters
and dialogue that dramatizes debates on the topic of city change. Each of these
six “dialogue chronicles” narrates an immediate experience of the new city. For
example, the “Eu e Márcio” series, which includes three chronicles, presents the
two characters walking down the Avenida Central, searching for traces of the
old city and struggling to make sense of what the new space means for Carioca culture and society. The other dialogue-based chronicles place characters
in similarly advantageous positions for the observation of urban change: in a
rental car, the quintessential symbol of modern speed and exhilaration; in the
street during Carnival; and seated at an outdoor café table, near a popular location for promenades in the new city. The pieces’ sum effect is of ambivalence or
condemnation of the urban reforms, an effect created in part with the author’s
manipulation of narrative voice to create an anxiety in the reader in relation to
the instability of social conventions in this new, modern space. For Pederneiras, the changing city represents a shifting sense of self that leaves few certainties upon which individual and collective identity can rest.
Pederneiras initiated his prose writings in Kosmos with a dialogue
between the narrator and Márcio, a scenario he would take up again two
years later, with his final two pieces in the magazine. The three “Eu e Márcio”
chronicles present a conversational sort of flânerie, in which two friends stroll
through the city, observing and debating the significance of the space and the
culture it supports.8 The focus of their conversation is, of course, the Avenida
Central, “aquella sumptuosa arteria carioca, rasgada atravez de um longo labyrintho tradiccional de ruas velhas e feias” (Pederneiras 3.10). The two have
set off “em busca de algo que nos descobrisse, alli, a Saudade lamentosa das
Tradições.” What they find at first matches Márcio’s expectation and disappoints the narrator: “Nada. Tudo novo; tudo Civilisação, desde o feitio semicircular das vitrines, ao estylo arte-nova das frontarias; desde a miuda pedra
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arabescada do calçamento, á polychromia estonteante das pinturas.” Márcio gloats, “É Paris, puro Paris, até na cor das lanternas e na posição desanimada dos cavallos. Tudo novo, tudo Civilisação.” The bars of the pair’s youthful memories, like the very Morro do Castello where the city originated, have
been swept away by the remodeling project. Márcio exults in the changes, but
the narrator is dejected: “Como era cruel aquella verdade.” Finally, near the
Convento da Ajuda, the pair catches sight of a vendor of peanuts and couscous,
out of place in the remodeled space: “Sim! Era ella, que alli estava, oppondo ao
clamor barulhento da Civilisação dominadora, a ingenuidade simples do seu
pequeno commercio primitivo.” Márcio’s enthusiasm lessens, and the narrator
lectures him: “E dizem, meu caro Márcio, que somos um paiz sem Tradições.
Olha, repara, certifica-te. Não; para nós, velhos Tradicionalistas, nem tudo está
perdido. E como resumo da nossa Vida simples de outr’ora, não pode haver
prova mais saborosa de que esta ingenua Bahiana do mendobi e do cuscús.”
Here a working-class woman, an immigrant to the city, uses public space to
cultivate a different social dynamic, and the perceived simplicity of her situation recalls for this narrator a simpler time.9
The ensuing year would bring several Pederneiras chronicles in Kosmos,
but the “Márcio e Eu” series was not continued until 1908, with the publication
of “O quintal e a porta” in January, and “A vida de hoje” in May. In the first of
these, the narrator continues his invective against the mayor’s attempt to reinvent Brazilian civilization in facades and avenues: “não se é civilizado pelo simples motivo futil de se possuir novas Avenidas e jardins floridos. … estas espaçadas injecções de Civilização que nos andam proporcionando, difficilmente
nos depurarão o velho sangue d’aldeia” (5.1). The remodeled streets are empty,
a conundrum that, they decide, results from a national culture accustomed to
different uses of space. “[N]ós não nos habituamos ainda á alegria e ao convivio da Rua,” because the personal gardens and thresholds—the “quintal e a
porta” of the chronicle’s title—meet the needs of the population. “Se se fica tão
bem, de chinellos e pijama, á porta da rua ou do quintal, a converser com a
visinhança, para que ha de a gente enfronhar-se em roupas leves e vir gozar
o carinho velludoso de um luar destes, na commodidade civilizada dos nossos lindos logradouros publicos[?]” For Pederneiras, it would seem, Carioca
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culture has no need for modernization. The pair sip drinks and observe the
urban spaces, beautifully designed but empty of revelers. Márcio’s enthusiasm
for the reforms seen in the previous chronicle dissipates as, in the piece’s final
words, he deconstructs the famous slogan of the modernization project. He
exclaims slowly and with acid irony, “Nao ha duvida, o Rio civiliza-se.” The
shift of Márcio’s enthusiasm to skepticism and regret gains strength in the final
“Eu e Márcio” chronicle, “A vida de hoje” (5.5), which argues that “Quanto mais
largas são as nossas Ruas, quanto mais vastas e arborisadas são as nosas Avenidas, mas o nosso povo ás evita, mais procura a casa, mais volta aos seus habitos aldeãos.” The “Eu e Márcio” series of chronicles initially presents a debate
about the value of the urban reforms, followed by an increasing rejection of
these based on their foreignness to local culture and lack of necessity. Moreover, the name similarity between “Márcio” and “Mário” (Pederneiras) suggests
that the author saw himself as a direct participant in the dialogue. By the series’
final installment, the narrator has convinced “Márcio” with his sharp critique,
and the remodeling project is thoroughly criticized and even scorned. The scenario combining observation and dialogue would prove useful to Pederneiras
in other pieces as well.
In the January 1907 issue, he published a chronicle titled “Tradições,”10
which narrates the adventure of three friends, all young, male, and bourgeois,
on a Sunday afternoon. They decide to skip the siesta and go out for a walk,
seeking “o consolo da contemplação” (4.1), but are at a loss for a destination
until one of them suggests a car ride. “Um automovel nos levaria, rapido, á
observação flagrante de quasi toda a linda cidade carioca.” Observation will
provide entertainment and “consolation” for an unspecified malcontent, and
the project is exhilarating because of its spontaneity and the vehicle’s speed.
In addition, the luxurious novelty of the vehicle itself, of which there were still
very few specimens in Rio de Janeiro, marks these friends as powerful figures
in their cityscape. The scene takes on an air of enchantment when they meet
the car’s driver, who “tinha na voz e na cabelleira denuncias mellifluas de poeta
lyrico,” and whose “intuição esthetica” whisks them away on a whirlwind of
sensation. In spite of the jubilation that generally characterizes the scene, however, moments of doubt and nostalgia break through.
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As they race through their tour of Rio de Janeiro’s various new avenues,
heading toward the Botafogo waterfront, the narrator cannot seem to keep
up with the mood and finds himself distracted by memories of the past. His
double vision superimposes memories over this modern, polished cityscape.
The friends discuss the contrast between their memories and the remodeled
city before them, and soon the narrator’s logical analysis dissolves into pure
emotion—saudade—and an ellipsis, the sign of the ineffable: “Depois era o Flamengo, a mais linda das nossas Praias centraes e, para mim, o trecho mais triste
da cidade. Se foi alli que nasceram as minhas primeiras saudades....” (ellipsis
in original). Upon passing a dock favored by the popular classes for observing Guanabara Bay, our narrator diagnoses his illness of comparison and confides, “eu senti—porque não confessar—uma rapida saudade deliciosa daquelle
modesto terraço primtiivo [sic], dando para o Céo e para o Mar. Não era mais
a Tradição que me fallava, era a propria Saudade carioca.” This phrase, “Carioca Saudade itself,” with its self-important capital letters, locates saudade, that
anguished longing for what has been lost, in the material spaces of Rio de
Janeiro. While urban space initially functions as the inspiration for a character’s saudade, the narrator soon realizes that it is better described as its home,
and personified saudade speaks to him from the cityscape where it rests. This
new character in the chronicle, “Carioca Saudade itself,” exists paradoxically
because it does not belong. Having violently effaced “Tradition,” it represents
the emotional response to urban remodeling that Pederneiras ascribes to the
community as a whole.
Pederneiras’s narrator blames his uncomfortable double vision, that
strange staining of the past over a beautiful but bewildering present, on city
reform. “No seguimento rapido do ‘auto’ fomos passando por todas essas
recordações da antiga Cidade, que a mão vigorosa do Prefeito Passos, este
moço de setenta annos, transformara, na rapidez espantosa de um quatriennio
de glorias e patriotismo, na mais encantadora, na mais deliciosa das Avenidas.”
The narrator considers the avenues that represent the new Rio to be beautiful,
and he enjoys the day’s excursion, yet he seems unable to keep at bay an ironic
bitterness regarding the remodeling of the city. He treats both Pereira Passos
and his projects as naïve or artificial: the mayor is a septuagenarian “moço,”
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and the destruction and reconstruction of the city are marked by “espanto” at
the flood of celebratory rhetoric that effects far-reaching change so quickly.
The speed of the city’s transformation in a mere four years, like the speed of
the tour by car, creates an effect of nostalgia and disorientation. Steven Kern
considers this reaction to new technology to be typical of modern experience:
the impact of the automobile and of all the accelerating technology was
at least twofold—it speeded up the tempo of current existence and transformed the memory of years past, the stuff of everybody’s identity, into
something slow. Memories have the potential for becoming nostalgic only
after changes have made comparisons possible and the past seems irretrievably lost. (129)
In the case of this Pederneiras chronicle, the elation of experiencing
modernity sparks nostalgia for the old city and its slower pace, and melancholy eventually overtakes the narrator’s exhilaration. This disturbing sense of
ambivalence leaves readers with the lurking fear that the city reforms fail at
their task of reshaping national identity and achieve rather an uncomfortable
sense of being out of place in one’s own home.
The double vision presented in Pederneiras’s early Kosmos work becomes
integrated into the narrative structure in his later pieces, which employ a slippage or ventriloquism in the narrative voice, such that the primary narrator
enunciates very little of the text and prefers instead to sit back and listen to a
character deliver a lengthy monologue. Like bookends to the character’s story,
the voice of the primary narrator only appears at the beginning and end of the
text, or, in an even more disorienting variation, he appears only at the end, after
a reader has mistaken a mere character for the chronicle’s narrator. This technique forces a disjuncture for the reader, who, upon realizing that the narrator
has been veiled until the end of a piece, must reevaluate questions of perspective and authority at the last minute, reassigning meaning to what has just been
read. As a narrative technique, ventriloquism forces readers to continually
evaluate the relative authority of the various narrators, in effect deconstructing the power relations implicit in narration. Although many of Pederneiras’s
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chronicles would seem at first glance to be simple relations of lived experience,
the baroque twist of ventriloquism further destabilizes knowledge and information within a genre that already blurs the boundaries between fiction and fact.
In Pederneiras’s “Tradições” piece of February 1907, the first and most
active narrative voice is that of a young woman who leads an old, male Carioca on a tour of Carnival on the new avenue. She treats him disrespectfully
with “tu,” calls him “meu velho Carioca impenitente” (4.2) and rather cheekily instructs him in the new customs of the modernized city. “Vem dahi, que te
vou mostrar cousas novas e civilisadas, nunca vistas por ti, nunca imaginadas
por aquelles que, como tu, emperraram na ferrugem das Tradições e das Saudades incomprehensiveis.” The young woman makes clear that the older Carioca is now a stranger in his own city, out of place because he is out of time: “Era
assim, no teu tempo, o Carnaval?” she asks him. She continues the monologue
without waiting for an answer. “Não, não era. … Tudo mudou, tudo. Na rajada
destruidora da nossa Civilisação rápida, lá se foram os velhos habitos do teu
immundo Rio aldeão e primitivo.” Though she advocates for the new Rio de
Janeiro, the young woman acknowledges that the old Rio had its charms. She
commiserates with the old man, associating the Carnival of the demolished city
with an exotic luxury that was necessarily accompanied by physical discomfort.
“Sentes a falta daquelle luxo oriental, daquelle disperdicio fabuloso de lantejoulas e fogos de bengala, daquella luxuriosa exposição da Carne, da luxuria tentadora dos ‘maillots’ … . O carnaval mudou, mas tu ganhaste, na commodidade,
no bom calçamento e na boa illuminação.” In spite of the exotic mystique of old
Rio, particularly during Carnival, the young woman judges the new Rio to be
better, even for someone accustomed to the older style. The remodeling of the
city clearly marks a watershed moment in this chronicle, separating a “before”
from an “after” that extends from the spatial to the social. It divides generations
and provides a structure for personal identification within the collective.
The voice of modernity is enunciated by a woman whose tenuous right
to discourse is emphasized by her youth and impertinence in addressing an
older man, her would-be social superior. Because Pederneiras must immediately clue readers into the unexpected sex of his spokesperson, our female
tour guide clarifies in her second sentence, “Ampara-te á suave elegancia do
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meu braço feminino; junta-te á minha alegre companhia de mulher galante, e
vamos apreciar o Carnaval nas Avenidas novas e nas novas Ruas largas.” In contrast with her feminine elegance, liberality, and joie-de-vivre, his masculinity
is represented as serious and “ponderous,” characteristics that ill prepare him
to navigate and appreciate the newly modernized spaces of the city. Whatever
understanding and pleasure he gains for the new Rio is dependent upon her
ability to translate a space that has changed faster than his capacity to adapt.
Without quotation marks, and without any repetitions of the dash that
first marks the woman’s enunciations as dialogue rather than narrative, we
become accustomed to accepting her as the narrator of the chronicle. The surprise is so much the greater then, when, in her last words, quotation marks
make their first appearance around her enunciation, a sign of the chronicle’s
shifting narrative structure. It quickly becomes clear that the true narrator of
the piece is the older man, who breaks in to describe his talkative youthful
companion and in the process deflates the radicalism of a young woman dictating to an older man the reality of current life in the city. “E aflautando a voz, a
linda companheira de troças e loucuras do meu tempo de moço e folgazão, perguntou, num falsête desembidamente carnavalesco e cançado: ‘Você me conhece? Eu sou a Folia.’” The brazen young know-it-all is refigured as shrill and
dissipates into the sour fantasy of a man out of place in his own city, whose
lucidity was presumably recovering from the dual blow of Carnival’s excesses
and his sense of bewilderment before the city’s changing spaces and habits.
The chronicle closes with the only dialogue spoken by the true narrator, which
attempts to wrap up its earlier ambiguities with the convention of a closing
sunset. “A Cidade começava a repousar, exhausta, das loucuras do dia. … ‘Que
cousa lugubre!’ E abalei para casa.” The old man is still serious and ponderous,
as he was described in the first part of the story. Narration is back in a man’s
voice, and the young woman’s radical attitude has been seriously undermined.
Nonetheless, the chronicle’s narrative fragmentation causes the reader to question the conventions—both narrative and social—that the young woman challenged. Moreover, at the end of the chronicle, the association between the feminine and modernity remains unaltered. Pederneiras continues to represent the
modern city as feminine, and there is no doubt that the young woman belonged
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better than the old man in Rio’s remodeled spaces. The suggestion would seem
to be that urban modernization changes the rules of social relations as profoundly as does Carnival.
It is noteworthy that most or perhaps all of the chronicles described above
participate in a dynamic of homosocial desire, in which male characters build
their relationships on the observation of the city and of women.11 This tendency
is staged most emphatically in a November 1907 chronicle, signed “M.P.” and
almost certainly penned by Pederneiras,12 that pushes the association between
femininity and modernity further, celebrating women’s public embodiment of
elegance as a milestone for Brazilian modernization and a direct reflection of
the urbanization project’s success. In “A mulher e a rua,” a first-person narrator
recounts his conversation with a friend, Luiz Gonzaga, as the two stroll through
the Avenida Central and other newly renovated parts of Rio. It is a Saturday
afternoon during springtime and many people are out and about, enjoying what
the narrator calls the “liberdade daquella Rua larga” (4.11). The two celebrate
the modernity of the space as they note their initial difficulty in remembering its former constriction and discomfort, suggesting that the new avenue has
reshaped memory for these friends. The spatial remodeling is visible not only in
the avenue itself, but also on the bodies of Carioca women:
Luiz Gonzaga reparava: “Hoje, até as mulheres são mais lindas, repara.
A principio andei a supor que a idade é que me fazia vel-as mais lindas;
mas não. Outras devem ser as cauzas ezatas desta especie de renacimento
do nosso feminismo. Para mim, a mulher de hoje, sofre, como a Cidade, os
beneficios da Civilização.”
Gonzaga goes on to note that the previously cramped streets in Rio had
created a lethargic community, “de passo bambo e face amarella,” until the city
reforms reinvigorated the population. His language is heavily metaphorical as it
contrasts the new city with the old: “A Cidade eflorava triumfal do seu nojento
canteiro de sujeira.” For Gonzaga, the promenade makes visible, on women’s
very bodies, the modernity of a city. He emphasizes the decorum allowed by
the new shape of the city streets:
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Antigamente, nos apêrtos do nosso velho bêco do Ouvidor, no circulo
dezairozo do nosso Largo da Carioca, nem eu, nem tu, podiamos ver bem a
Mulher, nem ella se nos podia mostrar com a ezigida perspectiva. … Na confusão dos apertos, na estreiteza das Ruas, a Mulher não encontrava o espaço
necessario para a devida ezibição. Era obrigada a caminhar conosco, lado
a lado, quasi hombro a hombro. Além disto, o máo calçamento, sempre em
pessimo estado, tirava-lhe a cadencia do andar, fazendo-a jingar, como os
nossos capadocios. Com taes dissabores, era natural que a Mulher, na nossa
antiga Cidade, perdesse pelo menos, metade de sua graça e de sua elegancia.
(emphasis in the original)
As Gonzaga invites his interlocutor, the narrator, to join him in observing the women in the city, the invitation is extended to the reader. Gonzaga
narrates our hypothetical stroll through the city, and we participate in his
objectifying gaze:
Repara naquella que ali vai. Traja magnifico tailleur, tem cadencia no passo
firme e toda a linha completa de uma elegancia distinta. Acompanha-a,
segue-a, e quando ella penetrar na Rua do Ouvidor, nota se lhe é possivel
conservar aquelle mesmo aspéto senhorial de rainha em passeio. A cadencia do passo, será substituida pelo bamboleio do corpo, o magnifico movimento que lhe inclina a cabeça, passará despercebido, porque não terás o
espaço necessario para contemplal-o, e esse deliciozo movimento de ancas,
não passará de um reles saracoteio de quadriz.
Here, the city stroll has become a mannered pastime in which the game
of display and observation is acceptable and even desired, and the spectacle
of people-watching is celebrated. A woman’s gait when walking on the street
brings to mind royalty—she has “the noble aspect of a queen on promenade”—
rather than the prostitute with whom earlier generations of women would have
been compared. She is a queen, that is, until she leaves the modern avenue
and ventures into the un-remodeled Rua do Ouvidor, which is narrow and
paved with old-fashioned cobblestones. Within this archaic frame, our queen is
274 ellipsis 12
reduced again to the “vulgar swaying of a rump,” as if whisked back to the time
in which a woman’s presence in a public space signified prostitution. The old
city is dangerous for its cobblestones as well as for its loose women; and in
properly sanitizing and beautifying the space of the city, women are also made
respectable. As a synecdoche of all respectable Brazilian women, the object of
Gonzaga’s gaze is both the inspiration for spatial remodeling and the proof of
its success. In essence, she embodies Brazilian modernity. Gonzaga sums up his
argument by insisting, “A belleza feminina pede ruas largas.”
“A mulher e a rua” is similar to Pederneiras’s Carnival chronicle in that
both pieces forefront gender as a system in flux due to the remodeling of Rio de
Janeiro, while in the “Eu e Márcio” series, as well as the car adventure chronicle, remodeled urban space inspires regret, nostalgia, and a search for authentic memory. In both of these approaches, the celebratory attitude championed
by Olavo Bilac is brought into serious doubt. Pederneiras’s narrators are especially skeptical of the false oblivion they see in a remodeling project that covers
over the past with an orientation towards novel imports and the promise of the
future. It is noteworthy that the most celebratory of Pederneiras’s contributions
to Kosmos is the one that most firmly ties city change to gender: at least where
women’s relationship to the physical city is concerned, he seems to suggest that
the modernization efforts were completely successful. Nonetheless, by identifying the narrator as the old man in the closing lines of the Carnival chronicle, in
this way eschewing and ridiculing the young woman’s point of view, Pederneiras returns to his customary nostalgia for times past and insists on the radical
renegotiation of identity in the remodeled spaces of Rio de Janeiro.
Pederneiras’s urban nostalgia and melancholy are immediately apparent
in his poetry, for which the writer is better known than for his prose. “Terra
carioca,” from Histórias do meu casal (1904-1906), opens with a brief sense of
nostalgia for rural Minas Gerais, a place that retains, he writes, “a feição honesta / Da primitiva Terra brasileira” (Poesia reunida 126). Expressing frustration with his urban surroundings in Rio, the poet starts off in search of what he
calls “este meu exílio” (125): “fui viver na roça. / … E fui armar o meu modesto
pouso / na vida calma do sertão mineiro” (127). Estranged from his urban
surroundings, the poet seeks his own exile in a bucolic space of nostalgia.
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Throughout the poem, however, this sense of longing shifts towards the very
city that the poet at first desired to escape, giving way to an ode to the Marvelous City. The poet’s attachment to the urban space is shot through with melancholy for his lost daughters, and the memory of his family’s irrecoverable happiness has become the stuff of specific streets and trees, of Arpoador beaches,
of Carioca sunsets. Though Pederneiras speaks apostrophically to the city, his
words are shaped by the sorrow and longing that make up his life in the city.
“Demais aquelas / Por quem feliz eu me sentia aqui, / Por quem minh’Alma, em
Dor, soluça e erra / Pelas tristezas que as Saudades trazem, / Aquelas queridas
criaturas jazem / Num pedaço de Céu da tua Terra... / E assim, longe de ti, eu
ficaria mais distante delas” (Poesia reunida 132, ellipsis in the original). This
connection between his lost daughters and Rio de Janeiro as their gravesite
helps to explain both the poet’s attachment to the tangible spaces of the city—
the life and memory shaped there by the concrete forms of a tree, a street, a
hill—and his persistent interpretation of change as loss. Far from the triumphalism and confidence expressed by contemporaries like Olavo Bilac, whose
thought on the city has been briefly considered here, Pederneiras insisted on
the value of maintaining the public spaces of a bygone era.
Rather than reshape Rio de Janeiro in the image of Paris, Cariocas, he
believed, should protect their homegrown specificity: save the working-class
landmark of the Mangue palms, celebrate food vendors as an integral part of
downtown life, and savor the quiet offered by an old-fashioned park like the
Passeio Público. Above all, they should approach the reinvention of Rio with
skepticism. To borrow an idea from Michel de Certeau, Pederneiras’s rhetoric of movement in the city, his characters’ “walking as a space of enunciation”
(98), blurs and particularizes the city planners’ efforts toward the space’s legibility and order, as if punching holes in an ideal plan or map.13 His narrators
insist on seeing a phantom old city that overlays the remodeled urban space;
they revivify that past in their conversation. For this poet of loss, what leaks
through the facades of Rio’s reinvention is memory, that lingering material of
identity, vulnerable to the forward momentum of a new century yet stubbornly
resistant of oblivion.
276 ellipsis 12
Notes
1 I quote here from the poem’s printing in Kosmos, but it is also available in Pederneiras, Mário. Poesia reunida, 72-75. Pages in Kosmos are unnumbered, and I indicate the quotations’ origins with the magazine’s volume and number in parentheses. All citations maintain
their original spelling, with the exception of Kosmos printings of the words “Mario,” “Marcio,”
and “Kósmos,” which I have modernized for consistency.
2 Rodrigo Otávio Filho (1867-1915) published O poeta Mário Pederneiras (Rio de
Janeiro: Renascença Editora, 1933) and Mário Pederneiras: Poesia (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1958),
the latter of which compiled the only anthology of Pederneiras’s poetry available until Secchin’s
2004 edition of Poesia reunida. Secchin calls Otávio “O maior divulgador e o maior entusiasta
da obra de Pederneiras” (XVI).
3 The chronicle on the Largo da Carioca shares similar ideas with a poem titled “Passeio público,” about an old-fashioned space of poetic inspiration and calm, protected from the
“rude rumor da cidade grotesca / Agitada, excitante…” (Pederneiras, Poesia reunida 253). Both
propose protecting rather than modernizing an older public space of the city.
4 For more information on the modernization of Rio de Janeiro under Francisco
Pereira Passos, see Needell’s A Tropical Belle-Époque, especially chapter 1, “Rio de Janeiro: Capital of the Brazilian Nineteenth Century.”
5 Bilac’s monthly chronicle opened each issue of Kosmos. Dimas notes, “ao abrir
mensalmente a revista, Olavo Bilac respondia, ainda que involuntariamente, às atribuições de
editorialista, explorando de modo opinativo os assuntos do momento. … instala-se comodamente nas primeiras páginas e comenta o mundo a seu redor, abordando-o genericamente,
exortando-o ao progresso, enaltecendo os avanços técnicos, mencionando explicitamente os
dirigentes, quando nos louvores, mas calando-se oportunamente, quando na incisão mais
funda e decidida” (51).
6 For example, the chronicles of Machado de Assis, originally published in the Gazeta
de notícias and other periodicals, were heavily political in focus. See Machado de Assis, Bons
dias!, ed. John Gledson, HUCITEC, Editora da UNICAMP, São Paulo, 1990.
7 Bilac had a job with the new, reforming prefecture of Pereira Passos in 1904 (Needell
201), and there is little doubt that his celebration of city modernization dovetailed comfortably
with the municipality’s goals.
8 Referring to the writer’s poetry, Secchin asserts that “Pederneiras falará da rua, mas
quase nunca na rua …. Vendo-a de fora (ou ‘do Alto’), ela será Rua, espaço não especificado,
universal” (XXIII, emphasis in the original). This is clearly not the case with Pederneiras’s prose
writing in Kosmos, which emphasizes embedded characters, immersed in and moving through
the city streets.
9 The class-based critique is unmistakable here and recalls Pederneiras’s similar critique of the Mangue palms’ removal: “nasceram, pode-se dizer, com a Cidade, são as filhas
humildes da Rua, vivem na communhão honesta do povo que trabalha” (4.3). The author thus
critiques the inability of the city modernization and hygiene project to save a beloved workingclass landmark.
10 Though Pederneiras uses this title for his first five chronicles in Kosmos, it does not
signal structural or topical commonality. Rather, it seems likely that it was thought of as a sort
of column he wrote around the end of 1906 and the beginning of 1907. The recurring title was
abandoned beginning with his November 1907 piece, “A mulher e a rua.”
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11 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has defined “homosocial desire” as a continuum of social
but not necessarily sexual relationships of men with other men, particularly those relationships
with a characteristic triangular structure that places women in the role of cementing the bond
between the two men. Though in Pederneiras’s chronicles the men do not appear as rivals for
the woman’s affections, they do function as fellow observers of her display, and their relationship to each other and to their city is the foundation of the narrative.
12 Dimas lists the piece as authored by Pederneiras (Dimas 235).
13 “The surface of this order,” de Certeau writes, “is everywhere punched and torn
open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning; it is a sieve-order” (107).
Works Cited
Assis, Machado de. Bons dias! John Gledson, ed. Editora da HUCITEC, Editora da UNICAMP,
São Paulo, 1990. Print.
Bilac, O. [Olavo]. “Chronica.” Kosmos 1.3 (Mar. 1904): n.p. Print.
Bilac, Olavo. “Chronica.” Kosmos 1.1 (Jan. 1904): n.p. Print.
Candido, Antonio. “A vida al rés-do-chao (Prefácio).” Para gostar de ler, Vol. 5—Crônicas, by
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, et al. São Paulo: Ática, 1985. Print.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.
Dimas, Antonio. Tempos eufóricos (Análise da revista Kosmos, 1904-1909). Ed. Editora Ática.
São Paulo, 1983. Print.
[“Editorial.”] Kosmos 1.1 (Jan. 1904): n.p. Print.
Kern, Steven. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918: With a New Preface. Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
MP. [Mário Pederneiras]. “A mulher e a rua.” Kosmos 4.11 (Nov. 1907): n.p. Print.
Mahieux, Viviane. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life. Austin: U of Austin P, 2011. Print.
Needell, Jeffrey D. A Tropical Belle-Époque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio
de Janeiro. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.
Otávio Filho, Rodrigo. O poeta Mário Pederneiras. Rio de Janeiro: Renascença Editora, 1933.
Print.
Pederneiras, Mário. “Arvores da rua.” Kosmos 2.3 (Mar. 1905): n.p. Print.
———. Mário Pederneiras: Poesia. Rodrigo Otávio Filho, ed. Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1958. Print.
———. Poesia reunida. Antonio Carlos Secchin, ed. Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de
Letras, 2004. Print.
———. “O quintal e a porta.” Kosmos 5.1 (Jan. 1908): n.p. Print.
———. “Tradições.” Kosmos 3.10 (Oct. 1906): n.p. Print.
———. “Tradições.” Kosmos 3.11 (Nov. 1906): n.p. Print.
———. “Tradições.” Kosmos 4.1 (Jan. 1907): n.p. Print.
———. “Tradições.” Kosmos 4.2 (Mar. 1904): n.p. Print.
———. “Tradições.” Kosmos 4.3 (Mar. 1907): n.p. Print.
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———. “A vida de hoje.” Kosmos 5.5 (May 1908): n.p. Print.
Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.
Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.
Secchin, Antonio Carlos. “Mário Pederneiras: Às margens plácidas da modernidade.” Introduction. Poesia reunida. By Mário Pederneiras. Ed. Antonio Carlos Secchin. Rio de
Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2004. XIII-XVII. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New
York: Columbia, 1985. Print.
Sarah Moody is an Assistant Professor of Spanish
at the University of Alabama. She received her
doctorate from the University of California
in Berkeley. Her research focuses on women’s
writing, urban space, and gender in modern Latin
America, with articles published or forthcoming
in Chasqui, Letras femeninas, Latin American
Literary Review, and Beyond Tordesillas: Critical
Essays in Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies. Her
current book project explores gendered aesthetics in
Hispanic-American modernismo.
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