Minimal Life and Territory Without Command

The Historical Meaning of Guimarães Rosa’s Last Stories

Abstract

In the short stories of Tutameia (1967), by Guimarães Rosa, the contrast between the countryside and the city is shown against the grain, once all the plots are set in distant villages, where, even when repressive bourgeois institutions are in force, what seems to be at stake are the primitive laws of justice and solidarity, as well as the choice for a free life and the refusal of permanent exploitation. Thus, through both the thematic motivation and the angle of the narrators, the image of an endogenous community is configured; a community that nonetheless only shows itself capable of projecting an individualized life within the bonds of a family clan or a small, isolated territory. The desire for appeasement and continuity of life does not necessarily lead to comic laughter but symbolically tends towards a good resolution in the face of a catastrophic world. Rosa’s work therefore assumes that this Sertanejo-people-in-the-edges-of-the-Earth situation is still a story to be told, a story however introduced by a discourse that alienates the urban reader. The article describes and attempts to understand the structuring of this fictional space, considering its function in the representation of a hidden country, in which progress is neither on the agenda nor even desired.