A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro after 1889

Glorious Decadence

Tom Winterbottom

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319312002
• eBook ISBN: 9783319312019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book studies architecture and literature of Rio de Janeiro, the "Marvellous City, " from the revolution of 1889 to the Olympics of 2016, taking the reader on a journey through the history of the city. This study offers a wide-ranging and thought-provoking insight that moves from ruins to Modernism, from the past to the future, from futebol to fiction, and from beach to favela, to uncover the surprising feature—decadence—at the heart of this unique and seemingly timeless urban world. An innovative and in-depth study of buildings, books, and characters in the city's modern history, this fundamental new work sets the reader in the glorious world of Rio de Janeiro.

© The Author(s) 2016

Tom WinterbottomA Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro after 1889 10.1007/978-3-319-31201-9_2

Begin Abstract

Part I: Space and Time of Rio de Janeiro

Tom Winterbottom¹

(1)

Stanford University, Stanford, USA

Abstract

This chapter establishes the “temporal landscape” of Rio; that is, how space and time dynamically interact in this city. The experience of the “present” in Rio de Janeiro has been consistently defined by strong pushes towards the future and deep nostalgic pulls to the past, leading it to feel somehow perpetually “incomplete” or “in progress.” This interaction creates a temporal landscape that is characterized by absence. In that context, I contend that a glorious and particularly attractive, yet complex, decadence has been a present feature of the city since the revolution in 1889. In this chapter, I define the key concepts behind my thesis—saudades, decadence, landscape, progress—and the key historical moments from 1889 to 2016, in an initial “character study” of the city.

End Abstract

The sensation of a distinct temporality in a layered, and seemingly dislocated, present has been explored before in the Brazilian context, particularly with reference to Brasília. The inauguration of the ultra-modern utopic capital conceived and constructed in the middle of the country in the late 1950s seemed outdated even before its inauguration in 1960, and even more acutely in subsequent years. “This city,” Marília Librandi-Rocha writes, “the ‘capital of hope’ as André Malraux [1971] expressed at its inauguration, was described as early as 1967 as a ‘futuristic ruin.’” ¹ In Rio, a city that has consistently—and particularly acutely in recent years leading up to the Olympics—maintained a symbolic affinity with Brazil as a whole, Beatriz Jaguaribe wrote of the “modernist ruin” of buildings in the city, referring to the “moment positioned between their former newness and their ultimate implosion—or restoration,” a temporal in-betweenness. ² Given its semantic implications and referential imprecision, the concept of the ruin is one that I will not explore in depth here; rather, time, and the passage of time and relationship to it, are particularly relevant in the cultural history of Rio after the revolution of 1889. When the capital moved from Rio to Brasília in 1960, Rio suffered something of an identity crisis in which the sensation of “outdatedness” became even more acute. No longer the federal or administrative capital, institutionally de-centred in the national context, a former capital city, it was by definition left dislocated. However, Rio’s distinct temporality is not simply a post-capital condition. It goes much deeper, much earlier, to the beginning of the history of the modern city, and continues in the present. It is an identifiable and remarkable element of this city’s identity.

Post-1889, a temporally dynamic discourse—of a future full of possibilities and potential, of leaving behind the past—became defining, and whilst that mentality existed before 1889, its nature and prominence changed after the Republican Revolution. The discourse and ideology of progress and of a utopic future was adopted as a motif, and the monarchical past was confined, it was thought, to the past. However, and paradoxically, it was also at that moment that the past, through nostalgia, memory, remembrance, saudades, and the “republic that was not” (as José de Murilo Carvalho calls it), became more acutely and integrally part of the present. The 1889 moment, which theoretically signalled a rupture away from the past, was instead marked by the beginning of a deep memorializing tendency that interacted with those (ideological) gestures towards progress. The examples I use from architecture and literature consistently highlight this complexity in the city’s temporality and its impact on the perpetually evolving present. They are effectively examples of counter-discourses against what François Lyotard theorized as “grands récits” (“grand narratives”), in this case those of historicist destiny and the development of Rio under the banner of progress that were fundamental in and after 1889. ³ The tension between projections and imaginations of the future and a melancholic nostalgia for something other has remained as a broad, identifiable characteristic of the city in creating a layered and sensorially decadent present.

In that sense, and following Bakhtin, space and time are inseparable, where time seems to thicken and become visible in space, and space, in turn, responds to movements of time and history. Not only do we see this in Carioca literature but also in its architecture. It is precisely the specific, dynamic coming together of old and new, “advanced” and “backward,” and natural and urban, which mediate the social construction of time and space in Rio. As Claude Lévi-Strauss reflected on his trip to Brazil in the 1930s, there is “outdatedness” in the present of the human experience in Brazilian cities, particularly in the big cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Outdatedness refers not only to “not being of your time” in the (somewhat negative) sense of “not being up to date,” as Lévi-Strauss implied, but also to an attractive aesthetic condition that has defined the modern cultural history of those same big cities.

Rather than interpreting Lévi-Strauss in an inherently critical light, then, his observations are instead symptomatic of the acute relationship in Rio de Janeiro between intense pushes towards the future coupled with a state of emotive nostalgia for something “other” and “absent” in the present that is fundamental to the city’s cultural identity. The moment of inauguration, of ribbon-cutting, and of being “present” is, therefore, a problematic one: the Maracanã football stadium, for example, was “inaugurated” for the World Cup in 1950, although not “completed” until 1965. Then, it was under almost constant repair, and then completely renovated throughout the 2000s before being reinaugurated, although again not “completed,” in 2013. We will see this tendency as a recurring motif in different guises in much more detail subsequently, so much so that we can understand it as an inherent trait of the city’s character.

As such, Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques [“sad tropics”] is not simply démodés in that they are behind the times (even though he wrote of “travelling back in time”) or that they were aiming to “catch up” with Europe. Rather, on his visits there, he experienced something different, a sensation that permeates his 1955 work and to which he easily and problematically attributed “backwardness,” which Elizabeth Bishop also did. The difference that he saw, however, was precisely the tension—and the beauty in that tension—between being new and being old (encapsulated in his term démodé). It is, then, a question of being “of the present,” and what that signifies and implies, that is at play. Indeed, the identity of the present is, in fact, found precisely in the sensation of “unpresentness,” which we regularly encounter in Rio de Janeiro. The memory of the past and the image of the future are visible in the present day urban fabric, both on a physical level (as the French anthropologist observed) and on the narrative, abstract level. This historical trend applies as much in the early twenty-first century, as it did when Lévi-Strauss visited, or when Getúlio Vargas ruled, or when the city transformed into the republican capital in 1889, or in the city’s post-capital situation. Put simply, it is a productive way to envision Rio’s history.

***

Bruno Carvalho, in his book Porous City, writes about the Cidade Nova [“New Town”] neighbourhood, which borders the port area and Providência. ⁴ The Cidade Nova is one of the (historic) heartlands of the city, a birthplace of samba, and a historically vibrant space, which in the 2000s is a somewhat abandoned and lifeless part of Rio de Janeiro. This part of the city, developed between the Centre and the North Zones and split in half by the wide, east–west Avenida Presidente Vargas, was inaugurated in 1944, and marked by the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Sambadrome, from 1984, a paradoxically depressing concrete structure built to host the proclaimed biggest party on earth. Through the swings between intense modernization in certain periods and neglect in others, the Cidade Nova, the port area, and Providência “became increasingly cut off from the rest of the city and entered a period of accelerated decadence,” and, as the city sprawled after 1960, they became “devalued” places. ⁵ Recently, with the new cable car or the huge port redevelopment still going on (to give just two examples), there has been a swing once again towards directed modernization orientated around the notion of progress; this, though, simply marks the next curve in a historical cycle.

Vitally, Carvalho hints at the concept of “decadence” in reading the city, a term he does not elaborate; instead, he constructed his book around the notion of “porosity.” That Rio is porous is a central intuition, not only on the social or spatial level, but also on the temporal plane; porosity permeates between the future and the past, new and old, as well as on the levels that Carvalho elaborates in moving away from the over-simplistic binaries that often appear in writing about the city. ⁶ Extrapolating from that, we can also problematize the developmentalist binary, which is centred on the notion of the city somehow “catching up” to the supposedly desirable end of the binary, which is the opposite of “backwardness.” Instead, we can again understand Rio’s complex temporality as marked by a present that is seemingly, perpetually, and acutely “in progress” as a vital feature of its historical and ongoing identity.

Beatriz Jaguaribe also implied a complex, distinct temporality at play. She wrote that the Ministry of Education and Health Building in the city’s downtown demonstrates a “repertoire of decadence [as] the former icon of modernist architecture in Brazil,” again invoking “decadence” as a relevant, albeit not elaborated, aesthetic consideration in the city. ⁷ In her reading, broken tiles, rusty steel, and growing weeds in this once-modern building constitute what she labels as decadence without exploring the complexities of that term and how it differs from, for example, decay or ruin. As such, perhaps we can reconceptualise decadence according to temporal parameters and implications to uncover a new perspective in the cultural and aesthetic realm that constitutes a vital part of the city’s identity creation.

In early 2014, as if to highlight the temporal tensions at play in the city, construction workers hit on an old slave burial site of historical and archaeological importance amidst work to lay the foundations for new condominiums and skyscrapers in the rapidly developing port area. The “future”—the “new” city—is permeated, inextricably and inevitably, by the “old” city, with an acute porosity existing between the two ends of the spectrum in creating an “outdated” present marked by a layered temporality. The Porto Maravilha (“Marvellous Port,” drawing on Rio’s alter ego as the “Marvellous City”) project aims to make that area a new centre of the city, the “New Port,” perhaps. The interaction between new and old, and the past and future, is present and vibrant, and an identifying and identifiable, feature of the city. The New York Times, in March 2014, inadvertently signalled the tension that is vital to Rio’s cultural identity and that touched on a complex temporal and historical implication:

But as developers press ahead in the surroundings of the unearthed slave port—with futuristic projects like the Museum of Tomorrow, costing about $100 million and designed in the shape of a fish by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava—the frenzied overhaul is setting off a debate over whether Rio is neglecting its past in the all-consuming rush to build its future. ⁸

This push towards the future is a theme that Rio has witnessed before. Coupled with that rush, however, is the prevailing atmosphere of the city. Channelling Charles Baudelaire, Jane Jacobs wrote about the vitality and intensity—the commotion—that she found in chaotic cities, with her critique based on the sterile suburbanization of the United States in the 1950s. Elizabeth Bishop thought of Rio as a “glorious mess,” based on a letter she wrote to Robert Lowell, in which Rio’s contrasts, commotion, complexities, and the dominant sense of difference appealed to her. ⁹

Rubem Fonseca, in his 1990 novel Agosto, writes about the chaos of the month of August 1954, which culminated in the suicide of Getúlio Vargas, as though that chaos and commotion has a normality about it. He creates an atmosphere of social and political breakdown in Rio in which the moral compass is askew for almost every character. Crime, power, money, and corruption play central roles in this history-based narrative written by a former detective and one of Brazil’s most famous authors. Fonseca paints a picture of the gritty underbelly of the city in which one character—the fictional detective Alberto Mattos—tries to challenge the endemic corruption in the city, and ends up killed by a hired gun for his troubles. After all that happens in a few tumultuous weeks, Fonseca conveys how quickly and easily the city carried on in its normal way: “The city experienced a day of calm. Business was considered very good by the Federal District Shopkeepers Union. Government offices, banks, factories, and commercial offices also functioned normally. Movie theatres enjoyed a great influx of customers, more than usual for a Thursday.” ¹⁰ And that is precisely the point. That sense of chaos in the present, taken to an extreme point in Fonseca’s novel, is vital in the dynamic attraction of the city, drawing residents and visitors in because of, and not despite, that commotion. Fonseca’s narrator continues, “The one thousand and seven hundred tourists who had disembarked from the ship Santa Maria visited the main touristic spots of the city and all enthusiastically agreed that Rio deserved its title of the Wonderful City.” ¹¹ Rather than the exception, then, this chaotic atmosphere is fundamental to the identity of Rio de Janeiro; it is a feature that lends the city its vibrancy and attraction. Chaos and incipient crisis implies a sense of instabilit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Landing in the Marvellous City
• Part I: Space and Time of Rio de Janeiro
• Part II: Decadence in Architecture
• Part III: Reading and Writing Rio de Janeiro
• Past, Present, and Future Rio de Janeiro
• Backmatter