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• Title: Paulo Da-Luz-Moreira, "Guimaraes Rosa's 'Sao Marcos' and Race and Class" (Critical Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 99 KB

Description

In 1937 the yet unknown Joao Guimaraes Rosa wins a prestigious award at Academia Brasileira de Letras with Magma, a poetry collection. In the very same year Guimaraes Rosa submits (under the pen name Viator) a collection of short stories to the Premio Humberto Campos, sponsored by the publishing company Jose Olympio Editora. The five-hundred-page book simply named Contos and written, in the author's own words, in "seven months of exaltation and amazement" (Escritura de Sagarana 12; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are mine), fails to win, although it creates a stir among the jurors. Shortly after that, Guimaraes Rosa separates from his wife and leaves Brazil for Hamburg for the beginning of his diplomatic career (he would eventually be interned in Baden-Baden by the nazis when Brazil and Germany severed diplomatic relations). That book rested for seven years, was revised in 1945 in "five months of reflection and lucidity," and became Sagarana, whose title was to be Guimaraes Rosa's first neologism, applying the Nheengatu suffix -rana, meaning "in the manner of" to the word saga (see Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira 15). Of the nine stories that survived from the original twelve, "Sao Marcos" was considered by the author the "piece I most worked on" (Veredas de Rosa 59) and it is a measure of Guimaraes Rosa's regard for this story that he wanted to republish "Sao Marcos" two years later in the popular magazine Vamos Ler? (see Guimaraes Rosa, Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira 22). Every story in Sagarana has an epigraph taken from folk songs. In "Sao Marcos" the epigraph sets forth the theme of elusive identities: it tells playfully of a man on top of a coconut tree who turns out to be just a coconut that turns out to be the baldhead of a monkey that turns out to be the whole monkey. At first, narrator and protagonist are one in "Sao Marcos" but they soon separate into two related figures, Joao and Jose, that play an elusive game of identities. The relationship between narrator and protagonist is apparent in the way the narrator introduces these two names. He identifies himself as Joao in a passing comment about the bird named Joao-de-Barro [a Rufous Hornero], claiming the bird as his namesake (228). A few lines later, a premonitory episode takes place as the protagonist sets about his customary Sunday walk into the woods: "I was moving along without a thing on my mind, stumbling, not even looking where I went, and it gave me a shock when I heard a shout well behind me: 'Play the man, Joe!' I shivered and looked back, because, in this story, I, too, am called Joe. But I was not the one referred to. It was another Joe, Joe Popinjay, who, thirty yards ahead of me, was trying to keep his seat on a neurastenic bucking roan" (187-88). This uncanny voice, coming so close from behind and yet unidentified, re-baptizes the protagonist as it addresses someone else who is ahead of the protagonist on the path into the forest. Monitory warnings are audible in the passage: the injunction to "take the hit" and implicitly not to "fall from a horse" (cair do cavalo, an idiom in Portuguese meaning "losing face"). Furthermore, the derogatory epithet "Ze Prequete"--still used in Minas Gerais to refer to someone adept at turning himself into an ostentatious fool--echoes the narrator's self-deprecations, charged with dubiousness about associating himself with events that had a humbling effect on this man.

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