Expatriados da Infância ou da Viagem em Busca do Pai e do Menino: novas telemaquias nos romances Pedro Páramo, de Juan Rulfo, e O primeiro homem, de Albert Camus

Abstract

With the Odyssey (8th century BC), attributed to the poet Homer, the top corresponding to the archetype of the “search for the Father” was instituted in Literature. This search can be interpreted as the primordial search for an ancestry that is supposed to be lost and that directly influences the establishment of multiple, but essential and foundational identities of the persona. Telemachus, son of Odysseus, is the first representative of this topos in literature and gave rise to what is conventionally called “telemaquia” (combat at a distance). Every trip in search of the father is reversed in a journey around himself, that is, the boy who was trapped in the labyrinths of memory. At the same time that the journey is configured as a physical-spatial displacement, it is above all an inner journey, a retroactive movement full of meaning for those who undertake it, in the desire to regain the usurped, denied or violated homeland-childhood. This memorialistic journey in search of interpreting and narrating childhood will result in catharsis or punishment, redemption or punishment. For this analysis, we will use as a corpus, in the light of comparativism, two narratives of our time: Pedro Páramo (1955), by Juan Rulfo, and The first man (1994), by Albert Camus. Homer's Odyssey will intersect this study as it is a primary reference source. From this conception, we consider the contribution of the dialectic memory / identity, or “identity memory”, an expression used by Joël Candau to be essential. For this scholar, memory gives us the illusion that the past is definitely not inaccessible and can be used as an instrument to restore the present. (2012, p. 15). The chosen authors, on the other hand, propose, in the analyzed works, the connection with their ethnic and cultural roots and with the telluric, thereby reiterating a strong sense of belonging, but without abdicating in their narratives of the humanitarian and universal bias. The use of the expression “expatriates from childhood”, in the title of the thesis, reminds us that the word “homeland” comes from the Latin patria and means “land of the father”. We understand that childhood is the founding phase of individuality, the homeland of being, the stage in which thought, speech and the first impulses for the essentiality of existence develop.