A personagem infantil em primeiras estórias, de João Guimarães Rosa: o jogo da linguagem

Abstract

João Guimarães Rosa’s poetics proposes to search for the new, the ecstasy that will inaugurate the things of the world. Hence his preference for children, the insane, the “closed in on themselves”, those excluded or untouched by the so-called “civilized” world, since their view may be illogical within the logic of the world. The purpose of this study is to analyze the children’s characters in the work First stories (1962), by João Guimarães Rosa, in an attempt to understand how the relationship between childhood, poetry and play is established in/by the language used by the author, in which his conception of art can be evidenced. The research is bibliographic in nature, and in order to dialogue with Rosa’s poetics we relied on the theoretical contributions of Beth Brait (1985), Antonio Candido (1972), with studies on the character; Johan Huizinga (2012), in the book Homo Ludens, which brings the understanding of play; Giorgio Agamben (2014); Yunes (1986); Friedrich Nietzsche (2012), with The gay science, a book in which he discusses the importance of making a joyful science, besides relying on Guimarães Rosa’s extensive critique of childhood. The analysis highlights the importance of the presence of the child’s gaze in Rosa’s work, how the child, with its language games, turned into a sign, can conceive the possibility of a playful existence. As an embodiment of the poetic, playfulness is inherent to it, as it plays with words and senses through the language established in the very materiality of the literary space. The keen eye of the children/poets collects the smallest things, transforming them into maximum expressions of life, which makes Guimarães Rosa’s aesthetics an amalgam in which the “only that” becomes the “Only everything”. “Transliving”, whose short story writer never stops playing, playing with language, his object of infinite assemblages, prompting the reader to do the same.