O imaginário cultural haitiano em Pays Sans Chapeau (1997) de Dany Laferrière: entre o fantástico e o maravilhoso

Abstract

The current investigation proposal directs attention to Dany Laferrière‟s work as an American author who defends a worldwide literature, but who still holds certain traditions related to the culture of his mother country. Pays san chapeau (1997) was specifically focused. It was assumed that the author had as a goal to propose reflection on the Haitian cultural imaginary, intending to work and question an ancestral spiritual attitude of his country (KWATERKO, 2002), utilizing metrics of the Fantastic and Marvellous literary genre. Thus, we seek to understand the aesthetical functions of these genres in parallel to the discussions on the imaginary. Initially, Dany Laferrière‟s professional and personal path was contextualized, and his post-modern writing. Part of his production was presented, intending on constructing the trajectory of the narrator-character Vieux Os and emphasize the frequent use of the uncanny on the narratives which have connexion with our corpus. Afterwards, we pursued to establish a definition of Imaginary, we took support on the ideas of Durand (1989), Laplantine and Trindade (1997). The images of Zumbi and the mythologems present in the work were analysed. Lastly, we focused on the debates regarding the Fantastic, Fantastic-Marvellous, Fantastic-Uncanny and Marvellous Realism literary genres, based on Todorov (2013; 2017), Roas (2014) and Chiampi (2015). The results of our research demonstrate that the fantastic hesitations are essential to the establishment of the Fantastic and Marvellous Realism subgenre, the presence of the latter collaborates to a sociocultural discussion of the imaginary.