IN SEARCH OF THE "TRUTH OF GENESIS": THE SYMBOLIC SPACE IN APPARITION OF VERGÍLIO FERREIRA

Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin (1998) announces that the romance genre is constantly "becoming", what means its structure as a genre is far from being consolidated. Being an evolving genre, the novel allows a deeper reflection and sensible evolution of reality itself. Since there is no tight territory to the novel, modernist writers associated that poetry can say what prose can only express, thus creating a hybrid genre, lyrical novel. The writer and essayist Virgil Ferreira wants to show the "invisible" at the artwork, so it sticks to the lyrical romance. Apparition (1959) is the best-known novel of Virgil Ferreira as definitely marked existential cycle. Appearance brings a narrator-protagonist-I-lyrical explores existential time, revisited by memory. The Apparition space is transfigured, that is, reveals the "I" because (Alberto Soares) color images according to their feelings - "liricização" of the space. The village, the white summit of the mountain and the old house arises, always in opposition to the city of Évora, as the truth of life, the life that only come to pass there forever because there is the Principle, the Truth and Order. After his father's death, his "appearance" and the consequent dispossession of the village, and the mountain of the house - places considered by Alberto as "true genesis", the protagonist leaves for a new cycle in another place: small and old town Evora, where he feels himself as victim of indifference and hostility of the city. Alberto sees / feels the city as "mortuary", like a lost world in the plain. Évora is filtered by your imagination, look at his expressionist / impressionist, as a city inaccessible, distant. Thus, the real spaces - the Village with the Old House and the city of Évora, become symbolic spaces as Alberto recalls it.

KEYWORDS: Romance lyric; Virgil Ferreira - Apparition; Symbolic Space.