Mundivivências: Leituras comparativas de Guimarães Rosa (review)

Mundivivências: Leituras comparativas de Guimarães Rosa is the product of Luiz Valente's long-standing interest in and dedication to the works of João Guimarães Rosa, one of Brazil's foremost authors of the twentieth century. Although six of the nine articles were originally published over a significant span of over twenty years (1986-2008) in American journals such as Hispanic Review, Hispania, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Modern Language Studies, the book's introduction and the last two chapters are notable additions that serve to tie the book together as a whole. The essays can be grouped into two categories: three traditional comparative studies that place the works of Guimarães Rosa in dialogue with those of Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Calvino, and a second group focuses on theoretical approaches to some of Guimarães Rosa's most challenging texts, such as Grande sertão veredas (1956) and Corpo de Baile (1956), with the latter in need of critical studies.

The first chapter or introduction begins with a quotation from Machado de Assis's essay "Instinto de nacionalidade" (1873), in which the nineteenth-century master argues that an international perspective is necessary for understanding Brazilian literature. Guimarães Rosa, whose work chiefly addresses regional and Brazilian concerns, is often studied in the context of Brazil alone, but Valente argues that the theories of Bakhtin, Iser, Jung, Ricoeur, and Spivak add significantly to the understanding of his production by highlighting the role of social class and linguistic register in the texts, as well as the role of the reader in constructing meaning. Valente takes into consideration previous readings by Brazilian critics such as Antonio Candido, Walnice Galvão, José Carlos Garbuglio, and Benedito Nunes, while also offering new insights to challenge or supplement these previous interpretations.

After the introductory chapter of the collection, the first essay, on Tutameia (1967), demonstrates how Guimarães Rosa's four prefaces to the work serve to complicate rather than explicate it, illustrating how the reader must be aware of multiple meanings in order to understand this work. This is the most abstract chapter, since it does not deal with a specific narrative, but serves as a hermeneutic model for the readings to come. The following chapter analyzes "Campo geral," the opening story of Corpo de baile. Here Valente uses mainly a Jungian approach, which ties the protagonist to the archetypal or divine nature of several of Guimarães Rosa's child protagonists. In this story, Miguilim is used as a mediating or liminal figure to illustrate the fragility of human laws in the context of a primordial unity or transcendent view of reality, a recurrent theme in much of Guimarães Rosa's work.

The two chapters that focus on Guimarães Rosa's masterpiece, Grande sertão: Veredas (1956), utilize Wolfgang Iser's reception theory. By comparing the narrator's plight in reconstructing his past to that of the reader, we see how the reader becomes involved in the painful process of creating meaning in an often seemingly contradictory narration. The following chapter, which compares Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and Grande Sertão, illustrates the way in which the shifting perspectives of the two works serve to enable the characters and readers to comprehend traumatic events. Iser's concept of "wandering viewpoint" works convincingly here, and Valente shows that while both texts resolve many events, they refuse to fill in all the gaps, leaving a margin of ambiguity.

The comparison of "A terceira margem do rio" (1962), one of Guimarães Rosa's most famous short stories, to Italo Calvino's novel Baron in the Trees (1957) examines how protagonists who withdraw from human society serve as mediators between our plane of existence and whatever lies beyond. However, Valente shows how they both offer a religio (the Latin origin of the word "religion"), or a tie to the sacred, thus allowing the texts to serve as a means to navigate human...