The harlequin in Mário de Andrade: criticism and practice of a mask

Abstract

The Week of Modern Art’s critical paths unfold both in the texts produced by those participating in the intellectual debate about art at that time and in the critical fortune that the works of those intellectuals prompted. This paper is a critical interpretation of Mario de Andrade’s artistic practice that interrogates how figurations of the Harlequin, which are pervasive inhis oeuvre, are transformed into an aesthetic proposal and into an artistic shape. Looking at the way critics perceived the Harlequin in Mario de Andrade’s writings, we converse with those perceptions and propose a stretching of the character’s meaning, thinking about the reasons for the choice of this mask by the writer and seeing it as the basis for the improvised act of writing and representing an art and an identity which would not still be possible in Brazil. From this perspective, Macunaíma’s rhapsodic features would be an example of ‘harlequimy’, indicating a proximity with the improvising of many sources similar to the Harlequin practice in Comedia dell’arte. Harlequin, this central figure that irradiates metaphors, guides Mário de Andrade’s poetics, through which the artist accomplishes a symbiosis of aesthetics, practice and life.