Intertextuality and Feminine Autodiegesis in Yuxin, by Ana Miranda

Echos and Inversions of the Homeric Epos

Abstract

The Amerindian character populates Brazilian narratives and is one of the unavoidable figures in national literature. Yuxin, a novel by Ana Miranda published in 2009, revisits Indianness, this time giving the literary narration to Yarina, a Caxinauá Indian who embroiders while waiting for the return of her husband Xumani, whose whereabouts she doesn’t know. Set in Acre, in 1919, this Odyssey in reverse becomes, here, an object of interest for the particular way in which it reorganizes the narrative material of the epic poem about Ulysses. This article aims to bring the Homeric narrative closer to Yuxin, identifying, at first, elements of intertextuality in both texts, based on Kristeva (1969). In a second step, we will highlight the position of narrator of the character Yarina and the reflections of a narratological nature that result from the displacement of the female figure from the position of secondary character in the Greek text to occupy the epicenter of narration in Yuxin. Using the concept of autodiegesis, by Genette (1972), we will seek to relate the reconfiguration of the narrative scheme present in the novel, operated through the choice of a narrative focus different from that observed in the Homeric text, to the procedure of dismissing the heroism that structures the epic genre. Such displacement would result in a belittling of the masculine that results not only from the focus on the female character who ignores the destiny of the masculine element, but also portraying, through Xumani, a kind of less virtuous Ulysses. In this way, we will try to understand how these two texts, with striking similarities in the fable that structures them, find particular ways of putting on stage issues related to male and female gender.