THE CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN HISTORICAL NOVEL AND ITS READING OF THE HYSPANIC MYTHS

Abstract

Analyzing the novel O Chalaça (1994), by José Roberto Torero, this article aims to expose about the reading made by this novel related to the Hispanic literary myths of picaro and Don Juan, intending to point how the Contemporary Brazilian historical novel collects the meaning of those myths in its own deeply overthrowing reconstruction of the official history signs. This meaning integration occurs mainly by parody and intertextuality, language resources projected in the text architecture along the carnivalization of language, what reassures the deconstructionist aiming of this novel type, what it is related to the goal of proposing alternatives of the official historiography discourse. Such myths, taken mainly from the picaresque novel Lazarilho de Tormes, by anonymous, and the play El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de Piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the stone guest), by Tirso de Molina, they were marked by the intemporal and dynamic character that distinguishes a myth, becoming recurrent in a great variety of following works, taking important part in the occidental cultural-literary imaginary. In the contemporary historical novel, which is highly conscious of its intertextual constitution (usually expressed through metalanguage, which gets emerged the textual material in its discoursive nature), developing the deconstructive traits of the contemporary literature, once those myths are inserted in an “ex-centric” social space, refused by the society hegemonic rules.