Crisis of Formation and Historicity in the Contemporary Novel, from the Bildungsroman to Minor Literature in Milton Hatoum

Abstract

This article analyzes the reconfiguration of the Bildungsroman in Milton Hatoum’s novels Relato de um certo Oriente (1989), Dois irmãos (2000), Cinzas do Norte (2005), and Órfãos do Eldorado (2008), grouped here, for the purposes of this study, under the designation “Amazonian cycle.” The discussion takes as its point of departure the historicity of the novel of formation and its connection to specific modern conceptions of learning, autonomy, and the integration between the individual and the social world, in order to examine what happens to these premises when they are reworked under different historical and formal conditions. The study adopts a critical-literary, bibliographical, and interpretive approach, combining close reading of the novels with theoretical discussions of the Bildungsroman and, in a delimited manner, with Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations on minor literature. The analysis shows that Hatoum preserves recognizable elements of the formative trajectory – learning, displacement, experience, return, and retrospective elaboration – while shifting their expected outcomes. In Relato de um certo Oriente, the constitution of the self depends on a shared and fragmentary memory; in Dois irmãos, the search for filiation does not ensure belonging; in Cinzas do Norte, Mundo’s artistic and political formation does not culminate in reconciliatory integration; and, in Órfãos do Eldorado, family and economic inheritance reaches Arminto in the form of ruin. Deformation is therefore understood less as the absence of formation than as a historical reconfiguration of the paradigm, in which experience produces knowledge without guaranteeing identity synthesis, continuity, or social reconciliation.