Memory and migration: Mato Grosso and the formation novel

Abstract

The character of Brazilian literature produced in Mato Grosso/Brazil goes through the sense (and direction) of a project outlined by the work of the intellectuals who exercised, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a preponderant role in the construction of a regional identity. The Works that condense the literary historiography accentuate the isolation of the spaces that maintained communication with the hegemonic center of production through precarious fluvial or terrestrial means with which, paradoxically, they were connected to the world. After the first half of the twentieth century, a new regional cartography was delineated by the transit between cultures originating from migratory movements, whose antagonisms produced, not always harmoniously, other forms of artistic creation and social patterns. In this perspective, we see the first novels written in Mato Grosso constructed in the middle of this historical “intensity” (Benjamin, 1985) between the tradition to be preserved and the modernity to be assimilated (or rejected). Although timidly, the “periphery moves” (Bosi, 2010) in the action of the characters that are articulated in the plural universe of “foreign” feelings in the literary work. This cultural duplicity produce worldviews and diverse forms of representation, which is a gain to the local culture, because as Octávio Paz (1999) refers, the novel is the place par excellence of the literary representation of “otherness”. In this sense, seeking to understand the romanesque universe that provides diverse meanings to think about the formation of the novel in Mato Grosso, these reflexions bring relational aspects between the works Luz e sombras, by Feliciano Galdino de Barros (1917), Mirko, by Francisco Bianco Filho (1927), Piedade, by José de Mesquita (1928) and Era um poaieiro by Alfredo Marien (1944), recognizing, as Rosenfeld explains (1969), what is commonplace in science and philosophy.