Comparing Tales of the Tribe

Abstract

This chapter compares two texts written in the same year, 1928, in very different geographical settings: Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Both works narrate, in peculiar allegorical form, the history of their nations embodied in one unusual hero. Macunaíma tells the story of Brazil’s modernization; Orlando begins in Elizabethan England and works its way up to the moment of composition. Although each is deeply idiosyncratic, they arrive at a similar set of conceits for national representation. Orlando famously changes sex halfway through Woolf’s narrative, while Macunaíma changes race, from black to white. To make sense of the contiguities between Macunaíma and Orlando, the chapter reads both as epics responding to the changing discourse of large-scale social Darwinism in the 1920s. In particular, it points out that both authors were aware of fascism’s increasingly rigid interpretations of evolution’s significance. Drawing out the similarities between Andrade and Woolf’s narratives, the chapter explains how Macunaíma and Orlando exemplify and expand this book’s methodology for reading modernist epic fiction comparatively against changing perceptions of evolution. It shows how such a bifocal reading allows us to see connections across traditional disciplinary borders of high and low, center and periphery, European and post-colonial.