The myth of the Promised Land in Madona dos Páramos

Abstract

In this article, I raise some questions about the theme of the myth of the Promised Land in the novel Madona dos Páramos (1981) by the Brazilian writer Ricardo Guilherme Dicke (1936-2008). In this sense, I try to understand the inner journey of the characters in search of Figueira-Mãe, supposedly located in the legendary Serra dos Martírios. The return to paradise, as thought by Mircea Eliade (1992), is a human need that unites the characters to the space of the sertão, generating the destabilizing context in which the destinies and the frustrations, the search for the survival and the internal conflicts are revealed in limiting situations, giving rise to ambiguous feelings and inadequacy to the world, typical of the contemporary. The labyrinthine universe of narrative is the representation of this metaphorical world in which the reader becomes an accomplice. A world, as Northrop Frye (2013), in which everything is entirely within a single infinite body, which, in the present case, is shaped in the way space, is represented; no longer, the pictorial one, but the performative force of language, often committed to the construction of the stereotypes for which Mato Grosso is still recognized.