O Sentido da metamorfose: precariedade e permanência em Macunaíma

The carnal attitude affected by Macunaíma, the "hero without any trah" of Mário de Andrade's novel (1928), allows us to reconsider this character as an emblem of body, cancelling (in accordance with Bakhtin's. opinion) the barriers between "interior" and "exterior" -a body that passes across the "full places" of identity, combining manifold experiences into a substancial, ideological, uniformity. In this sense, the amorphous condition of Andrade's hero, in connection with his ability to "enter in another's body" (Starobinsky), with his metamorphosing faculty, becomes a paradigm of the Brazilian condition, which is also characterized by his tendency to identify itself in an absence, as a product of mediation between different cultural pattems. Macunaíma, as a text and as a character, is, after all, the novelization, the "metaphor" (Rella), of an identity that consists of a lack, that lasts into and across the transformation.