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Discovering “Brazil’s
Soul.” A Reading of Luís da Câmara Cascudo
Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s brief profile of Luís da Câmara Cascudo is very expressive. Drummond highlights specific characteristics, and the poet’s choice of definition for the folklorist and historian is telling both for what it selects and for what it seems to overlook. A twofold movement guides Drummond’s portrait of Câmara Cascudo. On the one hand, it expresses tension between the metonymic value attributed to his most significant work, the monumental Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro (Dictionary of Brazilian Folklore) and the recognition that Cascudo had done “much more.” On the other, it reflects the recurring association between the author and Brazil, since Cascudo is presented as a person who knows and makes “Brazil’s soul” known, and whose intellectual work is guided by the “concern for experiencing Brazil.” The task of presenting a synthesis of Cascudo’s work is not a trivial one. He was an intense and galvanizing personality, son of a Northeastern colonel who assumed the conservative identity of his ancestors as his family surname.[1] Cascudo was simultaneously an internationally respected researcher[2] and an assiduous frequenter of the zona da Ribeira;[3] a translator of Walt Whitman’s poetry and an enthusiast of the cordel[4] of the Brazilian backlands; [5] a passionate husband who, in his later years, liked to contemplate the moon while holding his wife’s hand and also a renowned drinker and carouser; the catholic to whom the Vatican granted the ecclesiastical benefice of the São Gregório Magno order and a specialist in white magic, superstition and fetish[6] and a mandatory presence at all Natal terreiros;[7] coordinator of the Rio Grande do Norte integralist movement in the 1930’s and a writer who in the 1960’s was admired and respected by leftist intellectuals such as Celso Furtado, Jorge Amado, and Moacyr de Góes; a learned expert in classical and renaissance literature and the captivated interlocutor of the fishermen Chico Preto and Pedro Perna Santo and of Bibi, his parent’s old house servant whom he considered a “humble and illiterate Sheherezade;” [8] a great figure in Brazilian ethnography and folklore studies and a writer infrequently read by more recent generations of social scientists. In the labyrinth that appears before those
who dare to approach the life and work of Câmara Cascudo, Drummond’s
short portrait suggests, through the magic of the poet’s words, an
Ariadne’s thread that allows one to follow the paths that cross
the multifaceted body of Luís da Câmara Cascudo’s works: the
encyclopedic nature of the work and the author’s profile as an explorer
of Brazil. “The Cascudo,” thus converted into a noun, is to Drummond and to many other Brazilians, the Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro, published in 1954 by the Ministry of Education and Culture through the National Book Institute. This is why the poet identifies the author with one of his books and asserts that Cascudo “is not really one person, but rather, he’s a person in two thick volumes, in the form of a dictionary, always worth having within arm’s reach.” In the prologue to the first edition, while explaining the genealogy of the Dicionário, Câmara Cascudo provides an important key to its reading. This refers to one of the many attempts to revive the dream of encyclopedists of all times—deconstructing and summarizing the world. The Dicionário was Cascudo’s response to Augusto Meyer, then president of the National Book Institute, who had invited a group of Brazilian intellectuals to carry out Mário de Andrade’s frustrated 1939 preliminary plan for a Brazilian Encyclopedia.[9] Still, the Enciclopédia would remain only as a project. However, its only effectively realized fragment, Cascudo’s Dicionário, seemed to accomplish Mário de Andrade’s hopes for the great Enciclopédia—to provide a synthesis of Brazil both “to the educated man” and “to working-class homes.” [10] The only work of its genre to date, Cascudo’s Dicionário do Folclore Brasileiro is a basic reference for scholarly researchers as well as for celebration participants, popular singers, and carnival directors (carnavalescos) who prepare samba school themes (enredos).[11] The Dicionário reflects a synthesis of Cascudo’s work, and was updated until the end of his life in various new editions.[12] In it, the author expressed his intellectual credo upon asserting:
The Dicionário was also the work of a careful and obstinate collector, who, since the publication of Vaqueiros e cantadores[14] in 1939, had begun to “slowly put together a guide of Brazilian folklore.” [15] His work shaped the majority of the entries, which were collaborated on by some of his many correspondents throughout the country, the musicians Villa Lobos and Guerra Peixe, the folklorists Edison Carneiro and Renato Almeida, and the professors Manuel Diegues Junior and Gonçalves Fernandes. In the prologue, Cascudo summarized his method of work on the rigorous completion of what he understood as the protocol of his occupation: “The three phases of folkloric study—collection, analysis and comparison of data, and research on origins.” [16] Nevertheless, if the importance and publishing of the Dicionário seemed to justify the discursive slippage allowing Drummond to declare that “the Cascudo,” capable of dissolving all doubts about Brazilian popular culture, was the Dicionário, the poet does not fail to establish that the Cascudo-author was “much more.” A prolific writer, Câmara Cascudo authored more than 150 books on the most diverse topics related to Brazilian culture. As an ethnographer and folklorist, he collected, analyzed, and incessantly published legends,[17] proverbs,[18] and stories.[19] He also produced numerous monographs, among which his books on the hammock[20] and the jangada[21] stand out, and wrote texts of a more theoretical character.[22] As an historian he produced works that can be considered part of the tradition of positivist history,[23] as well as many others that characterize what he himself called “micro-history.”[24] A chronicle-writer for more than fifty years, he published his Actas Diurnas (Daily Report) in the Natal newspaper A República, and also wrote for newspapers in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and many other Brazilian cities. A writer of memoirs, he recorded his memories in four books of memoirs; [25] an untiring researcher, he communicated the results of his investigation in scientific journals in Brazil and abroad. Also a man of letters, he wrote poetry and a novel to which he attributed particular importance. For the author, “no other book possesses emotional totality as this one.” [26] A compulsive correspondent, he exchanged letters with intellectuals of the broadest geographical and academic range. Drummond was correct when
declaring that the author from Rio Grande do Norte was “much more” than
his best known work, the Dicionário do folclore brasileiro. Each
time anyone enters into Babilônia, as Cascudo humorously called
his chaotic library which is now threatened by the neglect of those
responsible for preserving culture’s memory in Brazil, new manuscripts
are discovered.
[27] Drummond was not the only one to associate Cascudo so directly with the search for the “Brazilian soul.” He had already been called “a man called Brazil,” and the association of his name with the illustrious modern explorers of Brazil, intellectuals who, with different itineraries in hand, dedicated their lives to the always novel and always unaltered task of unmasking the secrets of the Brazilian land and its people. Câmara Cascudo sought to understand and explain Brazil as did many others, among whom many were his principal correspondents. They included Mário de Andrade, with whom he maintained an extremely important epistolary exchange between 1924 and the author of Macunaíma’s death; Monteiro Lobato, to whom Cascudo wrote more than four hundred letters; Edison Carneiro, with whom he held a rich correspondence regarding the folkloric movement in Brazil; Gilberto Freyre, with whom he also maintained a correspondence governed by a mutual deference characteristic of relationships between Northeastern patriarchs; Villa Lobos; Guimarães Rosa; Josué de Castro and many others. The originality of the itineraries of Cascudo’s explorations and his unique profile as an explorer were less obvious. Distinct to Cascudo’s case is the fact that he was an explorer who developed a vast symbolic cartography of Brazil without lifting anchor from his home port. An eccentric explorer who obstinately refused to be seduced by the large Southeastern urban centers, where intellectual life, the country’s most important universities, the direction of the folkloric movement on a national level, the abundant libraries and the offering of public positions summoned him more than once during his eighty seven years. He repeatedly refused to trade in the Northeastern city of Natal where he was born for other larger cities and he assumed as a proud title the identity of an “incurable provincial,” given to him by Afrânio Peixoto. His countless trips were always work-related, both within Brazil and abroad. But his refuge was always Natal, and his lookout the large Ladeira house that was then called Junqueira Aires and today carries his name. Nevertheless, this mark of distinction was not exclusively his own. Gilberto Freyre, the master of Apipucos, decided to return to his native Recife after his years of study abroad. Like Freyre, Cascudo investigated the Brazil rooted in the Northeast and was a plural and versatile writer, but his navigational routes were different from those taken by the Pernambucan sociologist. The peculiarity of Câmara
Cascudo’s exploration of Brazil resides, in the first place, in the
methods he adopted. The key to this method seems to lie in the notion of
convivência
(shared living). However, if it is through what he calls “convivência” that Cascudo particularizes his research methodology, he enables the identification of the course of his particular exploration of Brazil in the relationship between this fundamental process of shared living and the collection of his work’s most relevant empirical data –folklore studies--, on the one hand, and with its translation into interpretive syntheses, on the other. Possibly, both the description of his process of collection of folkloric material and the understanding of his function as a folklorist, mediator and interpreter of that which, though seen by and familiar to all, is only revealed to very few, is most clearly reduced to its most simple expression in Canto do Muro. In this book, while describing his observations of the animal world, to which he attributes intelligence and inventiveness, Cascudo claims to have carefully noted everything he had observed of the animals that traversed his yard:
The assertion, made in the context of a work with clear allegorical connotations, permits an adaptive appropriation indicative not only of what to him “convivência” as a method meant, but also the modality of his observation as an ethnographer. For Câmara Cascudo, folklore was tradition and tradition was the “science of the people.” In one of his definitions of folklore, he synthesized the importance of his study:
In later writing, he expands on the same topic and points to elements that identify why the secret of the “Brazilian soul” resides in folklore. In 1973, he claimed:
And in 1986:
Consequently, what is Brazilian assumes meaning in folklore, since it is here that the relationship between each one of popular culture’s manifestations and “the general culture of mankind,” between the particular and the universal, and between the momentary and the timeless, becomes evident. Cascudo qualified the
“standard man,” the common man, as the bearer of Brazilian originality.
That which made the Brazilian people both different from all others,
and, paradoxically, what founded their myths, traditions, behavior,
narratives, and beliefs in the universal could be seen in this daily
life of the people and in their imaginary. To Cascudo, the folklorist-explorer seemed to have a mission: that of observing and seeing the world of the people’s culture in way analogous to that which had characterized other explorers, the 19th Century naturalists, in their approach to the natural world, because:
Cascudo pertinaciously sought to follow this same route through the territory of popular culture in both endless research in the library, which he considered his laboratory, and in his fieldwork and in all of his writing. In order to know and explain the “Brazilian soul,” it was necessary to seek out that which identified it, not through paths to the definition of a substantive Brazilian identity, but because, for him, it was possible to discover the secret of “origins” in a twofold process of insertion. First, the exploration was made through the identification of the common “origins” of high and popular culture and through the insertion of both into the same cultural universe, in this case, that of Brazilian culture. Cascudo, undertaking a trip through Brazilian oral literature, was able to assert, with a scientist’s certainty upon finding the empirical evidence that he sought,
Second, Cascudo attempted to map another insertion, which permitted Brazil to be located as a continent in the vast ocean of universal culture. This was possible through the careful classification of popular behavior, myths, legends, and proverbs and the identification of “common origins,” understood as a mysterious permanence, among those and many other similar cultural traits belonging to remote times and distant locations. Em segundo lugar, o que Cascudo pretende mapear é outra inserção, aquela que permite encontrar o Brasil como um continente situado no vasto oceano da cultura universal através da cuidadosa classificação de gestos, mitos, lendas e ditos do povo e da identificação das “origens comuns”, entendidas como misteriosa permanência, entre esses e tantos outros traços culturais semelhantes, pertencentes a tempos remotos e latitudes distantes. The constant search compelled him to physically travel to Africa in search of the waters that depart from that continent and flow into the vast estuary of Brazilian culture. Other trips, representative of this search, led him through classical literature and through the traditions of many lands, in order to find in them a common source of the specific amalgam that, for him, was Brazil. When he encountered what he
sought, he did not shrink from announcing it far and wide, with the
pride of explorers of all ages. This is what happened when he was
surprised to find in the words of a midwife from the backlands of
Rio Grande do Norte in 1920 the long forgotten tradition
recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This tradition swears that in
the room of a woman in labor no one should cross their legs, since doing
so would put the birth of the baby in danger:
Bibliography on Câmara
Cascudo:
[1]
"Cascudo doesn’t really denominate my paternal family name...My
grandfather, Antônio Justino de Oliveira, (1829-1894), son of Antônio
Marques Leal, (1801-1891), derived from the Portuguese name, was, during
his later years called old Cascudo because of devotion to the
Conservative Party which also had this nickname. Two sons, Francisco,
(1863-1935) and Manuel, (1864-1909), had the idea of attaching Cascudo
to the name." Luís da Câmara CASCUDO: O Tempo e Eu. Confidências e
proposições. Natal: Imprensa Universitária, 1968. Pp. 32 and 33. |
