Cronotopo e epifania nos romances O moleque Ricardo e Usina, de José Lins do Rego: trajetória de formação da personagem Ricardo

Abstract

The novels O moleque Ricardo (1935) and Usina (1936), written by José Lins do Rego (1901-1957), tell the story of the formative trajectory of the character moleque Ricardo inserted in the post-slavery and pre-capitalist environment of the 1920 s in the patriarchal North-East of Brazil. The temporal construction of the fable is composed using testimonial data of his contemporaries based on actual historical and cultural structures, organized in narrative sequence by chronotopic nuclei consonant with Mikhail Bakhtin s chronotopic theory. These chronotopes reveal the thematic plot generating centers, and the relations of place and time by means of logical variations put at the disposal of the unification of meaningful answers between the author and his character. In the building process of the fabular system, in both novels, epiphany participates in the dramatic action work together with the temporal and spacial nuclei. The epiphanic revelation offers to the reader the apprehension of the illusion of social and humanistic truth of this reality through the narration of the mythical hero s journey emerging from Ricardo s outside to his inside world, through meaning equivalents which reveal epiphanic moments. Both novels by José Lins do Rego are impregnated with the reading intersection of temporal chronotopic logic together with the epiphanic space relationship, and, to achieve this purpose, the author makes use of changes in the structural functions at the beginning of a new epics being formed in the black hero moleque Ricardo consciousness