“Os chapéus transeuntes”

The autofiction of Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

“Os chapéustranseuntes”, a novel that has characteristics that are recognizably different from the other works by the author, is one of his least explored texts by critics, despite being the last longest story that Guimarães Rosa published in his lifetime, in 1964. From a testimony about the meeting that determined the distribution of the deadly sins to seven renowned writers at the time, the story is read here as an autofiction, through which Rosa would have meditated on his own confessed pride, trying, by killing the arrogant protagonist Vovô Barão, and by identifying himself with the young narrator Leôncio Nestorzinho, to reflect (in the sense of “deviating from”) this undesirable trait of his personality. The expression “autofiction” was chosen to describe the tale due to the game it provides between author and reader, allowing both to rehearse themselves performatively in the text. As theoretical support, in addition to the resource, even if sometimes only en passant, to some of the main scholars of autofiction and contemporary biographical criticism, it is used Foucault's article on the “writing of the self”and comments from other readers with respect for the life and/or work of Guimarães Rosa.