Rosa, João Guimarães (1908–1967)

João Guimarães Rosa was a Brazilian fiction writer, medical doctor, and diplomat. Born on June 27, 1908, in the rural town of Cordisburgo in he central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Guimarães Rosa enjoyed a multifaceted career and gained international renown with the volumes Sagarana (1946; Sagarana 1966), Corpo de baile (1956), Grande sertão: Veredas (1956; Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963), Primeiras estórias (1962; Third Bank of the River and Other Stories, 1968), Tutaméia (1967), Estas estórias (1969), and Ave, palavra! (1970). He was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961.

Guimarães Rosa appeared on the Brazilian literary scene as an independent successor to the modernist Mário de Andrade. The short-story collection Sagarana, his first published volume, challenged the Brazilian tradition, established in the 1930s, of regionalist fiction based on pictorial recreation of rural life around a crude theoretical framework. Rosa flouted such stereotypes while remaining faithful to the most ancient and enduring qualities of regionalism. Early commentators likened him to Herman Melville because of his simultaneous treatment of inner and outer realities; he was also compared to James Joyce in his use of neologisms, lexical borrowings from classical and modern languages, syntactic inversions, the introduction of an apocopated "telegraphic" syntax, and the preference for an orally based storytelling style reminiscent of medieval archetypes conveying simultaneously a popular and an epic tone.

The nine stories in Sagarana, all set in the backlands of central Brazil, depict a primitive level of existence: Protagonists include a small donkey, a prodigal husband, two old friends dying of malaria, a witch doctor and his "educated" neighbor, a town bully, a pair of vengeful men in a love triangle, a timid rival who emerges victorious with the help of a spell, talking oxen, and a bully-turned-saint. The author's empathy for his characters is evident, as is his use of what may be called redemptive analogy in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Corpo de baile, a series of seven novelettes of varying lengths, Rosa skillfully renders childhood, with its particular perceptions and world-view, in terms adult readers can appreciate without condescension. With great psychological insight he explores fantasies, fears, forebodings, tenderness, suspense, and erotic tensions in an atmosphere bordering on the surrealistic.

Grande sertão: veredas, an epic novel in first-person monologue, is considered the author's masterpiece. The plot of this metaphysical chanson de geste in the backlands of Brazil involves warring bandits, a possible homoerotic relationship and pact with the Devil, a democratic kangaroo court, Herculean trials and travels, and the triumph of Good over Evil. By contrast, The Primeiras estórias is made up of twenty-one brief short stories, and Tutaméia of forty narratives so brief as to be minuscule. The first of this pair structures most of its episodes around epiphanies in the lives of children and other marginal or powerless members of society; the second is a series of "anecdotes of abstraction" interspersed with four longer essays of a theoretical, though fanciful, nature.

Guimarães Rosa's two posthumous works echo the style of Sagarana but incorporate a more cosmopolitan cast of characters and concerns. The oral quality diminishes over the author's thirty-five-year literary career, although all his works may be read from a tripartite perspective: form/sound, semantic value, and metaphysical meaning. He died of a heart attack in Rio de Janeiro on November 19, 1967.

See alsoAndrade, Mário de; Brazil: Since 1889; Literature: Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Duarte, Lélia Parreira, and Maria Theresa Abelha Alves, eds. Outras margens: Estudos da obra de Guimarães Rosa. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Autêntica, 2001.

Hansen, João Adolfo. O o: A ficção da literatura em Grande Sertão: Veredas. São Paulo: Hedra, 2000.

Sperber, Suzi Frankl. Caos e cosmos: Leituras de Guimarães Rosa. São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1976.

Vincent, Jon S. João Guimarães Rosa. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.

                                   Mary L. Daniel