O fantástico em O Mistério de Highmore Hall e Tempo e Destino, os primeiros contos de Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

Tempo e Destino and O Mistério de Highmore Hall are two of Guimarães Rosa’s first short stories published in O Cruzeiro newspaper when the author was in medical school and was only 21 years old. Despite the great difference in the style of the works that followed, we can already notice in these first exercises the author's great worry in not following realistic, Cartesian and linear models; instead, Guimarães Rosa shows his worry with the aesthetic effect, using the mysterious, the horror and the fantastic, in order to create a non-rationalist effect that seeks the poetic through shock, mysterious and unexplainable. Like Horace Walpolle, Poe and Lovecraft, Guimarães Rosa seeks in these two short stories his inspiration in the matrix of gothic and fantastic literatures from the 18th and 19th centuries. This matrix will soon be replaced by another one, regionalist type, but that will never lose the mistic and the unexplainable taste.