O plantel de Graciliano: personagens-jornalistas em Caetés, São Bernardo e Angústia

Abstract

In the period from 1930 to 1945 a new type of writing was observed in Brazilian literature and later became known as “the novel of the 30’s” (romance de trinta). Its main subjects were the migration process; the new social organization strategies; the urbanization process; and the changes in the relationships between the traditional rural oligarchy and the new society, notably the fact that many representatives of such oligarchy had positioned themselves either as public servants or in positions among Brazilian intellectual groups. Graciliano Ramos is one of the authors of the so called “the novel of the 30’s” and his work is considered to be situated between the regionalist and/or psychological novels. The economic situation was such that it would be difficult for a writer to make his living only selling books. Therefore, as a means of financial subsistence, Graciliano became a prolific writer of different articles and newspaper chronicles. The present work establishes the relationship between journalism and literature as a starting point for the interpretation of Graciliano’s first three novels, written in first person, from which will then surface 14 fictional journalists. Our hypothesis is that such characters are the literary response Graciliano gives to the pressing matters in his journalistic praxis, addressing not only the reality of his own work as a writer but also that of the other writer-journalists of his time, and even writers of the past who had dedicated their work to the reflection of literature from an intellectual point of view. With this in perspective, this doctoral dissertation aims to investigate how these three novels (Caetés, São Bernardo e Angústia) relate to Graciliano’s nonfictional works, following the approach of the fictional journalists which in their turn point to the social economic and historical condition of many writers of his time, including himself: the aspiration for a status of literature and intellectual writers, in the political context of the period from 1930 to 1945 as well as the social recognition which frequently comes in conflict with the need of autonomy in writing. Such condition is strictly bound to the status of journalist as a stablished labor category and as a group/social class.