LITMIR.BIZ

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political direction, taking up the mantle of responsibility for rethinking modernism in the name of his generation after Mário de Andrade's departure and under the influence of Oswald's project for critical continuity.

In 1943, still reeling from the 1942 commemorations, the journalist Mário Neme, likely influenced by Mário de Andrade's lecture on the crisis of modernism and the tasks awaiting the new generation, conducted an inquiry into this new generation of scholars who emerged in the 1940s. The results were published in the pages of the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo and later compiled in a book titled Platform of the New Generation. In these interviews, Neme questioned young critics and writers regarding the legacy they had received from previous generations and about their new aesthetic, scientific, and ideological values, especially in relation to the ongoing world war (Neme 1945).¹⁹ This was a sign of changing times. As recorded in a July 1943 note, none other than the “man‐bridge” Milliet himself discerned a generation “on the eve of the emergence of a new aesthetic” (and, I would add, of a new understanding of aesthetics within a new set of circumstances). A new generation was ready for engagement, ready to bring together cultural research with social action: “the generation of 1922 spoke French and read the poets,” argued Milliet, “[but] the generation of 1944 reads English and studies sociology” (Milliet 1981, p. 109).²⁰

      Among the declarations of the young intellectuals Neme interviewed in Platform of the New Generation, that of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes stands out for its admirable lucidity and for its ability to organize the decisive debates of both that moment and what would follow. From the beginning, Paulo Emílio made clear that he was speaking as a young leftist from the “intellectual elite” of São Paulo, but that he belonged to a new generation that possessed no clear ideological unity. It seemed obvious to him, however, that the right was defeated, merely lingering on in a climate of delirium, taking refuge in the lunatic praise of “Argentine soldiers,” and seeing itself “in the [rightist] novels of Clarice Lispector” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 82). All of this pointed to a turn away from the previous generation which, as Mário de Andrade said and Paulo Emílio reiterated, had lost the course of history: “the road of opportunism is a real road, and it was already well trodden by illustrious representatives” of the first generation of modernists (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 82).

      Paulo Emílio remained cautious about Brazil's future. He believed that, because of the era's ideological “confusion” even among the left, fascism could far too easily return. He noted the resurgence of reactionary Catholicism along with widespread political disillusionment reaching from the right to the Communist left. Certainly, liberalism would suffer a great defeat. On this subject, Paulo Emílio made a surprising prognosis that has effectively been realized in recent years: “There is no properly liberal intellectual sector in the old sense of the word. Associated with the intellectual activities of Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo, FIESP), some young economists are perhaps the nucleus for a future neoliberalist current” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 85).

More than the crisis of the right, what concerned Paulo Emílio was the crisis of the left, particularly the one brewing among “young middle‐class and bourgeois intellectuals who express themselves ideologically on the left.” These were young people who had become politicized around the year 1935 – the era of the Intentona Comunista (Communist Uprising), before the Estado Novo and after the CAM – who were influenced by Marxism, psychoanalysis, and “artistic post‐[Semana] modernism” in the aftermath of the “superficial” 1930 revolution.²¹ For many of them, argued Paulo Emílio, Russia had become a “religion,” a result of the “very low” theoretical level of the Brazilian communists. Only a mere “half dozen” had an advanced understanding of theory; the others were nowhere close. Still others took refuge in the leftist opposition (he was perhaps thinking here of Caio Prado and Mário Pedrosa). According to Paulo Emílio, this new left barely limped along for two basic reasons: “no one ever read Das Kapital. From Brazil, no one knew anything.” Stalinists or Trotskyists, for different reasons, “loved Russia,” but no one “knew how to think dialectically” (Salles Gomes 1986, pp. 85–87).

      This was the context in which Paulo Emílio’s generation, that of Revista Clima, emerged and within which it would act. These young artists and critics had “acquired a seriousness and efficiency of thought that would distinguish them in comparison with the bohemian tone of 1922” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 88). To the extent that they saw the Russia of the Moscow Trials as a nightmare, they took France as a paradigm. The Clima generation united around the idea of fostering originality and an alternative to the Soviet model, while also being interested in the critique of that model offered by Trotskyism.

      In this process, Marxism could be revisited through a more speculative, less doctrinaire prism. No longer dogmatic (in other words, free from the Soviet “religion”), it was to be rethought in the light of the new context of Brazil and its history. In addition to reading Marx and classical Marxists, the new generation was likewise attracted to reinterpretations of Marxism coming from North American thinkers, above all, sociologists. (This is why, Milliet joked, it was now necessary to “read English.”) A new period of study began, for which America (whether North American society marked by the consequences of the 1930s Depression or the “peripheral” societies of Latin America) and its problems would be the central focus.

      This revisionist program addressing both modernist and Marxist thought found itself contending with an unfamiliar history: that of the colonial, peripheral, and dependent origins of Latin America's nations. As such, the key concept under scrutiny would be the old, indeed modernist, question of nationalism. To explain this, Paulo Emílio took an unusual example: that of “old” pre‐Soviet Russia. Before the 1917 Revolution, he wrote, semifeudal Russia did not know nationalism. Its internationalism was imported from the West. Yet in the center of Europe the climate was revolutionary, particularly in the countries defeated in World War I. Paradoxically, with the failure of revolution in Europe, Soviet Russian nationalism emerged. It was within this context that Paulo Emílio presented his peculiar argument regarding the dialectics of the national question:

      Without knowing anything about more advanced capitalist countries, the point of comparison for the [Brazilian and Latin American] present was the past of [Soviet] Russia itself. From this came the very high ethical stance seen in certain Russian sectors, particularly the youth. The Russian example shows how ideas about nation and nationalism were not approached completely correctly by Marxism. Nation and nationalism are not necessarily connected to society's bourgeois direction. It was a workers' revolution of an internationalist spirit that allowed the birth of Russian nationalism. Now that nationalism exists, it is possible to contradict and overcome it through internationalism.

      (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 92)

In arguing thus, Paulo Emílio expressed the ideology of his generation: that nationalism needed to be constructed, precisely in order to be superseded. Yet nationalism's overthrow should not occur through a simple internationalism, but rather through a “pan‐nationalism,” i.e. a “higher state” in which national identities would coexist “internationally” without diluting each other (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 93). After speculating about the potential of this odd dialectic between nationalism and internationalism to emerge in various countries, he ended his declaration by calling for open debate on the issue. In a renewed echo of the Andrades, Paulo Emílio urged young intellectuals to leave the “ivory tower” and to take on “questions of culture” as their responsibility. Their main task, he argued, should be to “participate in the disappearance of formal Brazil and in the birth of a nation” (Salles Gomes 1986, p. 95).

      Thus the young university generation, the children of the uproar wrought by the developmentalism of the 1930 revolution, resolved in its own way the call to arms of Mário and Oswald. It was not a revolution in the streets but rather one of ideas and organizations. After being buried by Mário and devoured by Oswald, modernist culture gained new

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