More appropriations and banditism

Homer revised by Rosa

Abstract

Identifying an intertextual game traceable between the Homeric poems and the novel of Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas [The Devil to Pay in the Backlands], I intend to indicate the interpretative richness to be explored by any reading attentive to the dialogues and echoes evoked by these possibilities of intertextuality. In this sense, such readings ought to pay attention to the originality established by certain displacements and reordering of the literary tradition. In Rosian terms, it becomes possible to glimpse the principle of adherence of the physical world to the moral state of man in certain passages of the Homeric poems, for example. Despite the importance of the Greek epic tradition to the composition of Grande Sertão: Veredas, I believe that no interpretation really attentive to the specificities of this great literary work could exhaust the multiplicity of meanings created by one of the poles of the intertextual dialogues established by itself. Contrary to what important scholars of Rosa’s critical fortune suggest, I believe – as I shall consider at the conclusion of this paper – that the dubiousness and tension characteristic of Rosa’s novel is not resolved by the closing of the narrative but extends well beyond its end.