This article examines the many connections between the Brazilian novel Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, and the German cultural tradition, beginning with Hans Staden's narrative about "naked and ferocious savages, eaters of men," and ending with Koch-Grünberg's ethnological study From Roraima to Orinoco. Like the German coming-of-age story (Bildungsroman), Macunaíma should be read within the context of the formation and construction of national identity. But the European idea of formation is no longer a model for the construction of subjectivity in Brazil today. Macunaíma's resistance to a modernity defined by rationality and to responsible action that confirms the reality of this modernity should not be read as a counter-model, but rather as a reaction of despair. Macunaíma connects the coming-of-age story only to a critique of modernity (on the one hand, a critique with its own means and, on the other, an external critique), but also to the conviction that literary narratives can still be successful despite disillusionment toward the project of modernity.
Cultural contact; coming-of-age story; subjectivity; cultural anthropophagy; critique of modernity