Rastros e resíduos da tradição regionalista na trama cosmopolita de Galileia

Abstract

This work starts from the assumption that the novel Galileia, by Ronaldo Correia Brito, prolongs the past in the present based on cultural residue and the trail coupled with memory. Remembering the past is characterized by what remains, which remains from one time to another, which may mean the presence of a society that lives the past in the light of cultural traces. We are interested, therefore, in analyzing the double movement that constitutes such a novel: one aimed at the search for a modern life with the idea that modernity is impregnated with chance and accumulation of renewed experiences; another linked to ways of life based on traditional experience, represented in the image of a decadent patriarchal family, in which the experience comes in the form of a trail in the literary text. Regarding the theoretical foundation, the analytical path is based on the concept of dialogism systematized by Bakhtin (1997), as he understands that literature is a network of dialogical relations between voices from the past and the present. In this direction, the analysis predicts that the novel fits what Antonio Candido (2000) calls ―dialectic of localism and cosmopolitanism‖, since the discourse of the regional tradition remains based on the vestige, at the same time as the creation literary work transforms it into a discourse of modernity, elevating the place to the condition of the universal. Therefore, we will take the notion of cultural residue undertaken by Raymond Williams (1979), and of trail, defended by Walter Benjamin (1994) to support our analysis, in order to think about how components of the regionalist tradition are incorporated into the novel, at the same time they are updated. Such analytical categories, safeguarding their singularities, bring the relationship of present life to the historical past as a common basis for critical thinking. During the analysis, it was possible to perceive that the novelist invested, literarily, in an image of the current hinterland, free of stereotypes, once reappear, in Galileia (2008), scenes intertwined with other speeches that make possible the resignification of the region, no longer understood as a space merely inscribed in nature, but from its historical and political character and outlined by cultural representations.