Poética das ruínas em terra de Caruaru: estruturas fundantes da cidade literária no romance de José Condé

Abstract

To clear up the foundational structures that make Terra de Caruaru (1960), by José Condé, a fragmented novel of foundation is the main goal in this thesis. The foundational structures refer to the main structural bases of the countryside of Pernambuco that is portrayed in the novel: the rural patriarchy, the casa-grande and senzala system, the dispossession of native Indians, weather conditions, Catholicism as a dominant religion, urbanization, the advent of trade and social stratification, coronelism, oligarchies, nepotism, etc. As an analysis procedure, it promotes an interdiscursive articulation of the literary text with some historical, social, political and ideological aspects, emphasizing plausible relationships in the interface between literature and history. For that, it includes a study of the historical content into the novel and this writer’s literary aesthetics, which has revealed, since his first works, a trend to fragmentation and plural discourses, which can be associated with the concept of “ruins” by Walter Benjamin (1984). These narrative fragments generate the possibility of capturing a historical view of Caruaru “brushed against the grain” (BENJAMIN, 1994). The term “ruins”, which is a metaphor created by Benjamin, refers not only to historical ruins, but also to all the fragments, the smithereens, the shrapnel left as traces of the past. This thesis presents four chapters. History, Literature and Condean Poetics treats of the tensions between literature and history, especially in how José Condé’s work can be seen from Paul Veyne’s, Hayden White’s, Linda Hutcheon’s, Carlo Ginzburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s perspectives. In Foundational Structures I, it analyzes the bases that formed the Caruaru city portrayed in the novel, particularly the transition from its predominant rurality to urbanization, its origin, the economic boost and its religious, artistic and cultural events. In Foundational Structures II, it debates the roles of discourses and power, focused on the figure of the coronel, who is emphasized in the novel, and how his decay takes place after a process of the Caruaru people’s awareness. Finally, in Foundational Structures III, it approaches the subaltern characters, considering their potency and indispensability to the composition of the plot, as well as it analyzes the novel narrative form (fragmented, multifocal, nonlinear). As a result, it was verified that the novel establishes interdiscursivity with the historiography on foundational structures of Brazil, being, therefore, a novel of foundation, but with a peculiar fragmented and multifocal narrative that make the subaltern visible and breaks with the linear narrative convention.