Formas Embrionárias dos Romances Indianistas Alencarinos: uma Contribuição à Nacionalidade Literária Brasileira

Abstract

The brazilian romantics sought to assure the independence of Brazil also into the cultural context, and, for that, used the indianist literature, which explored typically national elements, such as nature, the indigenous populations and their culture, making a distinction between what was properly Brazilian from what was alien to us. Such search was set by Gonçalves de Magalhães when writing the epic poem A Confederação dos Tamoios (1856), which was a target of harsh criticism by José de Alencar in a series of letters that emphasized the formal, thematic and linguistic weaknesses of the text which was intended to be the poem of our nation. The Cartas sobre A confederação dos tamoios (1856) also revealed flaws made by Magalhães and suggested likely “corrections” for them. An incisive reading of such writings allows the observation of estethic set-ups that would be present among our indianism and, consequently, present on the base of the indianist production of the Cearense writer. The intimate relationship between esthetic precepts seen on the epistles and the writing of Alencar’s indianist works took scholars such as Araripe Júnior, José Aderaldo Castello e Marcelo Peloggio to declare that the great indianist works of the writer, O guarani (1857) e Iracema (1865), would all had been based on the letters of 1856. Taking the discussion among the relation between epistolary writings and indianist romances, a parallel is seen between those texts that may identify the possible Embrionary Thematic Forms and Embrionary Structural Forms of the romances in the letters, observing how the ideas present in the letters collaborated with the creation process of the literary works, not giving away the most relevant discussion about the nationalization of Brazilian literature, deeply studying the romantic-age concept of nationality in Brazil and relating the thoughts of Alencar to the thoughts defended by his contemporary intellectuals, in order to showcase the importance of the alencarinas letters to the discussion around Brazilian literary formation. As a matter of fact, we believe that the discussion around the criteria of Brazilian literary nationality gets a new dimension, if once considered the esthetic premises of the letters objectified from works such as O guarani e Iracema, on which the indigenous peoples’ lives, their habits and cultural premises, ideas and feelings, as well as the exhibition of nature, earn relevance and are central to romantic Brazilian literature.