Subverting the Writing and the History: a Contemporary Glance on Biblical Antiquity in A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia

Abstract

Biblical themes are present in several texts by Jewish-Gaucho-Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar (1937-2011) from the very beginning of his literary career. However, these themes will be the core of his narratives only in his last published novels. In this paper I will discuss only the novel A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (1999), although the group of romances to witch I have given the title of ‘Scliarian Biblical Triplet’ is composed of two more novels, namely Os vendilhões do Templo (2006) and Manual da paixão solitária (2009).The three novels have as a common trait the fact of being constructed by means of re-creation, re-invention and fictionalization of the world, episodes and characters of the Hebrew Bible through a contemporary glance. Due to this procedure, the reader finds in the text the big issues of our present days, such as gender relations, the roles played in the bosom of the families, religious intolerance, power and corruption, the plural and erratic dimension of History, all of this mixed and linked to the point of view that supposedly people living in the time of the facts narrated in the Bible and the witnesses of its books’ canonization should have had. Having this mix of glances and narrative procedures done, Scliar constructs universal reaching narratives that, nevertheless, reveal a lot of Brazilian culture and society.