The revisited experience: the natural cunnings of Guimarães Rosa’s narrative

Abstract

The paper intends to elaborate considerations on the narrative of the novelist Guimarães Rosa to the theories of Walter Benjamin about the narrator as well as on the “experience” transformations mediated by critical reviews of José Guilherme Merquior and Davi Arrigucci Júnior. Thus aims to understand how that poetic prose of Guimarães Rosa moves with authority between Benjamin’s Erfahrung to Erlebnis, going up and down the experience stairs with between the cultural universes of “hinterland” and “metropolis” moving between the hinterland’s orality and the Bildungsroman. It is understood that civilizatory tension as an interpretive key that enables us to acquire awareness a central part of our experience and the crisis of our society (WILLIAMS, 1989): a critical antinomy which is linked to the capitalist mode of production that has transformed the Brazilian social life since the early decades of the twentieth century. For that, we listed some of the principal narratives of Rosa’s works as Grande Sertão: Veredas and some of his relevant stories to exemplify the arguments proposed in this paper.