Cecília Meireles e o herói inconfidente: um encontro da poética modernista com os arquivos da história brasileira

Abstract

This dissertation develops its questions from the analysis of the book Romanceiro da Inconfidência, by Cecília Meireles (1953), and from the lecture delivered by the poet in 1955, in the city of Ouro Preto. The author recurs to stylistics resources which characterize the form of a “romanceiro”, breaking with the classic paradigm of the construction of the hero by approaching the symbolic construction of Tiradentes to the popular culture, the marginalized characters and the image of transgression. In accord with our reading, the poetic discourse of Cecília Meireles would carry in itself the encounter of distinct temporalities through the confluence of the Brazilian XVIIIth century colonial past, the acquisition and transformation of the archive of the “Inconfidentes” by the Republic in the XIXth century, and the author’s writing moment in the XXth century. Among this, we work with the research of construction of identity and nationalism produced by the modernist author in the XXth century, as well as the consequent construction of memory and modern Lyric by following the path of the archives of Brazilian history. We observe that it is possible to recognize the approach of two fundamental forms of knowledge – the historical and the literary knowledge – that lay the foundation of a concept of History consonant with Walter Benjamin’s Theses on History. In order to understand the research that the poet did through the archive of Brazilian history, we made use of the “archive” as a theoretical category conceived by Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever. Thus, this work seeks to reflect on the construction of the hero as formulated by the modern artist, conceiving the world of text as an open space where layers of time and space that mark the constitution of our nationality and identity intermingle and mirror each other, and from the optics of the modern intellectual and of the discourse as a locus of power where the political and social questions are interwoven.