Reversing the decay: invention and reinvention of Pasargada in the work of Manuel Bandeira (1917-1954)
Keywords: Pasárgada; Image; Manuel Bandeira; Brazilian Literature; History; Spaces
ABSTRACT
In this work, we analyze the historical construction of a well-established image in the Brazilian imaginary: Pasárgada. Believing that images are made of the various investments of desire which incide upon them, that they are elaborated and reelaborated in the course of time, we aim to expose here the birth and the successive reformulations of Pasárgada in the work of Manuel Bandeira. Hence, we divided our investigation in four chapters: firstly, we approach the social decline of Manuel Bandeira’s family, marked by the transition of an idealized patriarchal regime and a new era of bourgeois and urban social relations in Brazil. In a second moment, we examine Bandeira’s first works, A Cinza das Horas and Carnaval, composed after the poet became ill in 1904, to expose some of the creative procedures that would persist in his later work, also being used in the creation of the poem “Vou-me Embora Pra Pasárgada”. In the third chapter, we investigate the development of new creative procedures and resources by Manuel Bandeira during the Brazilian “roaring 1920s”, acquired in the contact with three different artistic fronts: the bohemian scene, in Rio de Janeiro; the Brazilian modernist movement, in São Paulo; and the traditionalist regionalism, led by Gilberto Freyre in Recife, which provided Bandeira with the ideas and the poetical resources he would employ in the creation of the poetical space called “Pasárgada”. Lastly, in the fourth chapter, we discuss the “biographical” sense that Bandeira and other authors would associate to this poetical space after the publication of Libertinagem, in 1930, starting a series of biographical and autobiographical texts that culminate in the publishing of Manuel Bandeira’s autobiography, Itinerário de Pasárgada, in 1954.