O fio de Ariadne: uma leitura do inconsciente cultural brasileiro registrado pela literatura

Abstract

The present work suggests a dialogue between Literature and the Analytical Psychology, with the objective of studying the literary records of the brazilian cultural unconscious , present in the works, Iracema, by José de Alencar, Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade and Maíra, by Darcy Ribeiro. Apart from using Jung´s studies about the collective unconscious and the post-Jungian works about the cultural unconscious, the concept of monomith, by Joseph Campbell, the considerations by the brazilian psychologist and anthropologist Roberto Gambini, who studied the brazilian society, the analysis about the heroes´ cicle evolution by Joseph Henderson, and the works of Erick Neumman, who studied the stages of the heroic journey as stages of ego development – about a single human being or about a collective. With the objective of enriching these studies, it also uses the propositions of some literature critics like Tzvetam Todorov, Gilda de Souza Mello, Silviano Santiago, Eneida Leal Cunha, Teresinha Vânia Zimbrão da Silva and Alfredo Bosi, among others. Starting from the Jungian point of view that the heroes are archetypes of the collective unconscious and its characteristics and history also reveal the characteristics and history of the societies that produced them, the analysis of the heroic pathways from Iracema, Martim, Macunaíma, Isaías and Alma, main characters from the cited works, as representations of the brazilian society´s heroic pathways in the pursuit of si mesmo (self), during the period of one hundred years that comprise the written of these novels. What is observed are the literary records of a society in pursuit of its own identity, trying to self rescue itself, emerge from the debris of annihilation from its own culture accumulated from centuries of colonization, slavery and emptying. We also notice the development of the hero´s cicle: the Trickster, in Macunaíma, to the Hare, in Maíra.