Poetic theotopies from the profound Brazil:

the mystagogy of the pitanga heifer in “Sequência”, by João Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

In the sliding and intermittent territory of theotopies, a utopian encounter between symbolic landscapes, sacred words and demiurgic poetry could open up long lines of mutual fertilization between literature and theology. This is what appears in the hypothesis that guides this interpretative essay of the short story “Sequência” (1962), by João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967). We start from the hermeneutic assumption that this narrative takes place between the convergence of cultural practices from different religious traditions, especially from Judaism and Christianity, in order to draw possible lines of interpretation, regarding the relations of human beings with their deities and the beyond, but also with the other entities of Nature. The path of religious signs is metaphorically mirrored, through palimpsests, under another path — henceforth towards and into the hinterland, the very country and its conflicting cultural landscapes. Across these concomitants and overlapping paths, the reader is led far beyond the writing, grabbed away to the urgent need to decide upon the course of the very undecidability of signs, the very unspeakability of phenomena such as life and death, that subtle matter from which, like a sphinx, the irrefutable Mystery of existence arises, framed by the figure of a mystagogic “pitanga heifer”.