SUBVERTING THE LANGUAGE OF METROPOLIS
As with any trickster-hero, the job of Mário de
Andrade’s Macunaíma is to transform the world
he sees. And his most signifcant transforma-
tion, one could argue, is to the language of the
metropolis. At the moment when Macunaíma
arrives in São Paulo, looking at all the things that
he had never seen before (automobiles, skyscrap-
ers, elevators, etc.) he explains them in the terms
of his own culture, and has therefore to be taught,
by the prostitutes, a new, powerful word:
The women told him laughing that the
sagüi monkey wasn’t a monkey at all, it
was called an elevator and was a machine.
From frst light they told him that all
those whistles shrieks sighs roars grunts
were not that at all, but were rather bells
klaxons hooters buzzers sirens, everything
was a machine. The brown jaguars were
not brown jaguars, they were called fords
hupmobiles chevrolets dodges and were
machines. The anteaters the will-o-the
wisps the inajá palms plumed with smoke
were really trucks trams trolley-buses illu-
minated billboards clocks headlights radios
motorcycles telephones mailboxes chim-
neys...they were machines and everything
in the city was just a machine! (34)
The machine, the prostitutes also explain to the
hero, is not a god nor a woman: it is made by
humans and moved by energy. Macunaíma, how-
ever, does not accept the explanation, and after a
week of abstinence from food and sex, a week in
which the only thing he does is to think (maqui-
nar is the expression used in Portuguese) about
the “bootless struggle of the children of manioc
against the machine,” he starts to feel:
That the machine must be a god over
which humans had no true control since
they had made no explainable Uiara3
of it,
but just a world reality. In all this turmoil,
his mind found a ray of light: “Humans
were machines and machines were
humans!” Macunaíma gave a great guf-
faw. He realized he was free again, and this
gave him a huge lift. (36)
In other words, Macunaíma discovers that the
only way to dominate the machine is by tell-
ing an etiological tale about it—to transform it
into “an explainable Uiara.” Free, Macunaíma
can then have his frst experience dominating
the machine: as he had always done in the region
of the Uraricoera, where he was born as a hero
and had become the “Emperor of the forest,” he
is able to dominate things by transforming them.
Thus he turns his brother Jiguê into the “tele-
phone-machine” and makes a phone call.
This narrative line continues in the chapter
“Carta pras Icamiabas,” the frst attempt by the
hero to show a command of written Portuguese.
This chapter is a parody of the conservative way
of writing that was cultivated by intellectuals such
as Rui Barbosa, Mário Barreto and “those who
wrote for Revista de Língua Portuguesa” (Lopez
1988, 427), as the author himself explains in the
letter to Raimundo de Moraes quoted above. In
his letter, Macunaíma describes São Paulo for the
beneft of the warrior women back home, the
Amazons or Icamiabas of the tribe of his dead
wife Ci. He touches on its geography, fauna, fora,
and people, adopting the colonialist tone used
by the chroniclers who wrote about Brazil. São
Paulo, “the strange place,” is described in terms
of “the known place” Amazonia. Thus, the odd
habits of the inhabitants of the big city have to be
explained to the Icamiabas through comparisons
with things and habits that they already know.
Part of the humor of the letter resides in the
fact that it parodies the chronicles by inverting
several of their references. Some of the daily
habits of the Paulistas, therefore, appear in the
text in a new light, strange and surprising. The
“Imperador do Mato Virgem” (Emperor of the
Virgin Forest, as Macunaíma is often called in
the novel) is depicted in the text as the colonizer,
the one who describes the absurdities found in
the “new world.” But the “colonizer” writes in
the language of the “colonized,” creating a rela-
tionship that is in itself absurd, and for that very
reason, comic. And it becomes yet more comic
because, as an outsider, Macunaíma is able to see
that such absurdity reproduces itself in the “two
languages” used by the urban Brazilians as they
try to express themselves, that is, the language of
the colonizer (Português de Camões, i.e. European
Portuguese) and that of the colonized (língua bár-
bara, i. e. Barbarian language). As he describes it,
Português de Camões, the written language, is com-
mitted to its own desire of separation from the
língua bárbara, the oral language. Macunaíma tries
in the letter to master the Português de Camões,
i.e. he tries to reaffrm the separation that he sees
as a strange cultural fact. Fortunately, however,
he is not successful: another source of humor in
the letter is the fact that while exaggerating the
Português de Camões, he also makes mistakes: mis-
used words, wrong agreements, bad spelling, etc.
Not only that: língua bárbara invades the text all
the time, through the presence of Tupi, as the
hero tries to explain to the icamiabas some facts
and things about São Paulo4
.
Macunaíma’s next attempt to master the lan-
guages of the metropolis happens in the chap-
ter that follows “Carta pras Icamiabas,” “Pauí-
Pódole.” While waiting for the villain to return to
the city, Macunaíma “took advantage of the delay
mastering the two languages of the land, spoken
Brazilian and written Portuguese. He now had
all the vocabulary.” (87) But one day, as he was
invited to buy a fower on the street, he real-
ized he did not know the word for “button hole”
(botoeira). Ashamed of showing his ignorance to
the girl who sold the fower, he introduced into
Portuguese a word from his own language: puíto
(anus). The word became current in the language,
and Macunaíma realized he had been smart in
creating it, and had scored a point over the lan-
guage he was struggling to learn: “At frst, our
hero was overwhelmed and was about to take it
badly, but then realised he was in fact quite smart.
Macunaíma gave a great guffaw” (82). But the
victory will never be recognized by the scientists,
the practitioners of the Língua de Camões:
The fact is that “puíto” had already
appeared in those learned journals that
dealt with both the spoken and the writ-
ten idiom, with much display of erudi-
tion. There was now a measure of agree-
ment that by the laws of catalepsy ellipsis
syncope metonymy metaphony metathesis
proclesis prothesis aphaerresis apocope
hapology popular etymology, by virtue of
all these laws, the word “buttonhole” had
been transmuted into the word “puito” via
an intermediary Latin word “rabanitius”
(buttonhole-rabanitius-puíto). Although
“rabanitius” had never actually been found
in any medieval document, the experts
swore it had certainly existed and had
been current in vulgar speech. (82-3)
The passage strongly satirizes etymology as
it was practiced by the writers of Revista de
Língua Portuguesa. The false origin attributed
by etymologists to the word puíto confrms the
Eurocentric tendencies of those who practiced
the Língua de Camões.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/brazil.amazonlit.sa.pdf