Imagem e palavra em "São Marcos", de Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

The short stories that comprise Guimarães Rosa’s premiere collection, Sagarana, stage a panorama of themes and subjects that fuel all of his work. One of these short stories – São Marcos –is the object of the present study. In it, the author portrays the daily life of a rural community, so familiar in the cultural memory of a Brazilian caboclo – person of amerindian/European miscegenation. Considering the fact that the stories were originally written at the beginning of the 1930s, but only gained recognition in 1947, this work examines the idiosyncrasies of the religious syncretism in sertaneja – backlander – culture, and its importance in the sphere of regional literature at the time of its development, focusing on the literary images. The study aims to show the configuration of these images in the story, according to the ideas of D. H. Pageaux (1988), highlighting its orality (ZUMTHOR, 1993) and the simplicity of its form in the structuring of the text (ANDRÉ JOLLES, 1976), as well as idiosyncratic aspects of popular religion (C. R. BRANDÃO, 1980), relying on the historical-graphic ruminations of Antonio Candido (1976, 1981, 1987).