Cidade e memória: caminhos entrecruzados em Roteiro Sentimental e Pitoresco de Teresina, de H. Dobal

Abstract

The city hit by modernity reshapes itself incessantly, its forms expand, its elements acquire new outlines. The modern life imposes, silently and gradually, an accelerated rhythm, driving its inhabitants to adopt an automated behaviour that stops them from perceiving the changes, as well as from enjoying the city to the full. Literature brings the possibility of reading the city, through the perception and interaction of its characters with the urban space. Thus, the ancient forms of a city can be reached through the wires of memory, supported by tracks and traces of elements and of references at the reach of the vision. In view of the exposed, we aim here at analyzing the memory of the city in ―Roteiro Sentimental e Pitoresco de Teresina‖, de H. Dobal, starting from the way the narrator interacts with the individual and collective spaces of reference. The ―dobalino‖ narrator adopts the posture of ―flâneur‖ and, as he strolls through the streets of Teresina, he gives visibility to the permanence and ruptures of the urban elements. The present work is justified for the importance of the memory of the city in times of fast transformation. The research is based in the vision of Santos (2015), Gomes (2008), Benjamin (1989), among other important scholars. It is attested that the narrator of ―Roteiro Sentimental‖ structures the memory of the city from the observation of the customs, the daily life, the crevasses and street fights, squares and urban facts that slowly give way to another city, timidly modern. Confronting two perspectives: the provincial city and the city that becomes modern. For it is an integrated part of the city, it is moved away to capture the happenings, facts, people, customs, elements of reference that sustain the memory of the city, without letting be influenced by relation nurtured between the narrator and the city, with an outside look. In other moments, this setting of being an integrated part of the urban space, the inside look, is used to show that the transformation that the city experiences tends leave traces which will sustain and frame, and make last the memories of the city.