A neblina e o redemoinho: narração, rememoração e seus limiares em Grande sertão: veredas

Abstract

The past and the difficulty in rememorating and narrating it is one of the main issues of Grande sertão: veredas (1956), by João Guimarães Rosa. With that said, we have elaborated a critical reflection in which we analyze the articulations between narration and remembrance in the enunciation of the novel. Therefore, in the first chapter, we have analyzed the narrator of the novel, considering that it is from him that the narration and the remembrance are enunciated. Our theoretical reference was, above all, the studies on the narrator figure, by Walter Benjamin, and the investigations by Wolfgang Iser about the thresholds between fiction and reality. As for the second chapter, we have used the whirlpool/vortex metaphor to analyze the narration, which is constituted through a syntax of imbalance. We made a transversal reading of the narrative theory by Gérard Genette and the studies on language by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as the ones by Giorgio Agamben. We also rely on Émile Benveniste's theory of enunciation and Mikhail Bakhtin's speech in the novel. Lastly, in the third chapter, we have focused on the creation and the elaboration of the past in the hic et nunc of narration. In the work of Rosa, the temporal experience is represented by contingency and incompleteness, making Riobaldo question what he lived and it is converted into narrated matter. We inquire here if the remembrance generates a creative process of the past time as the narrator unveils the fog — another image we use as metaphor — of the lived in search of an irretrievable time. At this point, we turn to Paul Ricoeur and, again, to Agamben. Our methodological process followed the foundations of a qualitative, exploratory and descriptive research, still based on an analytical, hypothetical-deductive method