São Bernardo, de Graciliano Ramos: subjetividade, realismo crítico e transcriação

Abstract

The work of Graciliano Ramos is considered of vital importance for the history of Brazilian literature. His novels, short stories and chronicles are objects of research in Brazil and abroad, read and translated into dozens of languages, transcreated into various interartistic languages. This relevance seems to rest on a double basis, but extremely amalgamated: a subject aware of the metalinguistic process of writing in search of a complex subjectivity fused to the contingencies of the society that permeates him. This perception is present, for example, in Alfredo Bosi's considerations: "Graciliano [...] represents, in terms of a modern Brazilian novel, the highest point of tension between the writer's self and the society that formed him" (2008). , p. 400). São Bernardo, from 1934, can be taken as a synthesis of the author's aesthetic thought, since it combines a deep dive with a debate on social relations. This masterpiece covers important aspects of the 1930 novel, highlighting a work with language, the legacies of the first modernist era and the historical moment in which the narrative was composed, that is, the 1930 revolution.It can be considered that, for Paulo Honório, narrating implies understanding reality while also understanding oneself; understanding the reification that subjugates the farm workers and, above all, Madalena, would also mean considering oneself as a cog in a world that objectifies everything and everyone. Thus, São Bernardo implodes a simplistic definition of what became known as the "1930s novel". Luís Bueno, in Uma História do Novel de 1930, discusses the need to reread the history of Brazilian literature, in general, and the production of the first half of the 20th century, in particular, without ignoring or repeating some judgments crystallized by previous critics. In addition, for Bueno, there is an excessive taste for categorical statements of a generalizing nature and for the elaboration of didactic lists that separate works and authors into supposedly homogeneous and diametrically opposed groups, through a survey of typical traits that insist on ignoring everything that is dissonant and complicates a schematic view of the period