O bandeirante da língua e o Iauaretê

Digestão agônica do modernismo paulista em Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

The conservative and exclusionary modernization process in Brazil finds a critical counterpoint in the work of João Guimarães Rosa, who sought to narrate the nation from its archaic hinterlands, depicted at once as resistance and as the frontier of colonial expansion into lands not yet incorporated. If the São Paulo modernists of 1922 exalted the bandeirantes and sought to sing themselves as heirs to their expansionist and conquering “spirit,” in accordance with the coffee elite that financed them, in 1928 the movement reversed this perspective, seeking, in contradiction, to identify with the metamorphic forest dweller “without any character” (Macunaíma) and the anthropophagous Indian (the Manifesto Antropófago), in order to reposition the national problem on perhaps opposite grounds. “Meu tio o Iauaretê” (1961), in this context, seems to take the mottos of 1928 (listed in the first phase of Revista de Antropofagia) as a kind of program to be swallowed critically or even agonizingly, placing it in confrontation with the barbaric modernization that lay hidden in the original project of modernism. Since then, Rosa's short story has been understood as an allegorical staging of a fundamental confrontation in Brazil between the jagunço (spearhead of the landowning system) and the onceiro onçado (who transitions from killer to relative of jaguars, that is, from “useless usable” to a threat to be wiped out). The meaning of this agony is the tensioning of the border, both external —which opposes the deforestation and de-Indianization of the land to the resistance of jaguars and Indians— and internal —in the movement between the blurring and clarity of belonging in solidarity to the differential universe of the forest.