PAULO HONÓRIO: GRACILIANO RAMOS’ VOICE IN S. BERNARDO

Abstract

Regarding Critical Realism and through studies of literary composition aspects – narrator, plot, characters, time and space, the intrinsic relationship between Text and Context is analyzed on the novel S. Bernardo (1934), by Graciliano Ramos, in which the main theme is a critique to Capitalism due to its tendency of turning subjects into objects. Therefore Antonio Candido’s Literatura e Sociedade: estudos de teoria e história literária (2000) and A Personagem do Romance, from the book A Personagem de Ficção (1992); and Georg Lukács’ Narrar ou Descrever? from the book Ensaios Sôbre Literatura (1968) were chosen to analyze comparatively this relationship between Form and Content. These theories make clear that: to Candido, text and context merge into the structure of the novel and the author’s social position interferes directly in this structure’s production; to Lukács, literary narrative of realistic aesthetics show reality as a process in constant transformation. Ergo, as from Graciliano Ramos – when writing S. Bernardo – appropriates from social facts from his own context and turns them into a content that structures his literary creation, this content is crossed by the artificiality of artistic composition – form – that becomes an instrument of critique to the capitalism inherent to the agricultural estate in Brazilian Northeast, which reified men – where human relations were priced and turned into goods.