The Chronotope of the Sacred and the Skeptic’s Blindness

Abstract

This article investigates the short story “São Marcos” by João Guimarães Rosa through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope. It analyzes how the narrative’s space-time conception structures the narrator-protagonist’s transformation, displacing him from rationalist skepticism into a violent immersion in the sacred. The study maps the sequential transition between the chronotopes of the village, the road, the forest, and blindness, demonstrating that spatial change corresponds to a profound epistemological crisis. The clash between hegemonic literate culture and ancestral African-matrix knowledge, personified by the sorcerer João Mangolô, is discussed. It is concluded that the blindness imposed on the narrator functions as a pedagogical device that dismantles his intellectual arrogance, forcing him to acknowledge and appropriate the sertão’s mystical forces to ensure his survival.