Grande sertão - veredas : o caos ordenado

Abstract

Like Joyce's Ulysses, J.G. Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devi! to Pay in the Backlands) transforms an apparently local and commonplace setting into a . Iabyrinth of heterogeneous languages. The present article is a sistematic reading of Rosa's particular elaboration of a decisive problem in western rational culture - of the question how to articulate ancient mythical languages with conceptual (philosophical and theological) thinking. The seemingly "dialectal", "regional" and "prin1itive" distortions of lexical, grammatical and sintactical structures are here interpreted as the formal reality of an oblique poetical interrogation which undercuts basic concepts of western tradition, like "human nature", "being" or "teleology".