Cecília and Mário: a romanceiro, a rhapsody, and the ear

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of Romanceiro da Inconfidência, by Cecília Meireles, and Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, focusing on their modern reappropriation of narrative forms associated with the oral tradition. Taking as its point of departure the enunciative devices that conclude both works—the listening to the voices of the Inconfidência in Meireles’s poem and the transmission of the narrative by Macunaíma’s parrot in Andrade’s novel—the article argues that both texts are structured around a reflection on the processes of narrative production, transmission, and preservation. Although they mobilize forms historically linked to the romanceiro and the rhapsody, neither work relies on imitation nor on historicist stylization. Rather, they enact a transfiguration of these generic matrices, incorporating them into a modern horizon shaped by writing, print circulation, an awareness of fictionality, and the centrality of authorial subjectivity.