Acessibilidade / Reportar erro

The media and the construction of biographical autofiction characters: a semantic-lexical reading of three stories about the enigmatic death of João Guimarães Rosa

Abstract:

This article proposes to analyze the construction of characters of biographical fiction around the public figure of the writer João Guimarães Rosa, based on the confrontation of three journalistic articles dealing with the enigmatic death of the novelist, that occurred on November 19, 1967. It is worth mentioning that, in 2017, 50 years of this remarkable event of Brazilian culture are celebrated, still to be deciphered in all its scope and significance. From this bias, the present study also starts from the fact that Grande Sertão: Veredas is qualified, by its own author, as an "irrational autobiography": it is unprecedented in the history of literature to tell a life (and a death), and then live it. By this bias, the analysis focuses on the narrative dimension of the journalistic text, on the level of imbrications between the factual universe and the fictional universe (MOTTA, 2005MOTTA, L. G. Análise pragmática da narrativa jornalística. In: Congresso Brasileiro de Ciências da Comunicação, v. 28, p. 05-09, 2005.). With a corpus of three articles published in O Globo, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, the semantic-lexical indexes and the editorial constraints (CHARAUDEAU, 2010) are presented, which induce the consolidation of different protobiographical reports around the image of Guimarães Rosa, a novelist who, in turn, is a conscious artist and demiurge of his own personas (in the Jungian sense of the term), or his characters of biographical autofiction—a poetic category that calls for a deepening of theoretical-critical reflections. In the present case, the biographical news is constructed with support in poetic resources, through a discourse in which, by articulating each other, literature and journalism converge. Finally, the role of journalism as a character builder is questioned, in its dimension of social representations, as in the case of the image of public persons, as well as the indicial forms of fictional induction that certain subjects can exert on journalists and their vehicles as a way to broaden and consolidate the diffusion of a literary work through a biographical character that seduces the reader's attention well beyond the last chapter.

Keywords:
João Guimarães Rosa; Journalism and literature; Autofiction; Fiction character

EDIPUCRS Av. Ipiranga, 6681 - Partenon, Porto Alegre - RS, 90619-900, Tel: 3320-3500 - Porto Alegre - RS - Brazil
E-mail: letrasdehoje@pucrs.br