Dialética do descompasso: os tempos de Monteiro Lobato na composição da nação brasileira (1914-1927)

Abstract

This research analyses Monteiro Lobato’s times in the composition of the Brazilian nation, between the years 1914-1927. The writer understood socioeconomic cultural inequalities inherent to the increasing inclusion of the country in the capitalist economy, integrating the most remote corners of the country to the frenzy of the offer, the demand and the competition, through temporal concepts, highlighting the different cadences of the transformation of the Brazilian society. According to this view, the past is something anachronistic, backward and obsolete; the future is “tomorrow”, the modern and the progress. There was a tension between the space of experience related to the caboclos from blackland, “dead cities” and the misery in the backlands and the horizon of expectation represented by the sequence of technological developments, the North American advance and Henry Ford’s principles of prosperity according to Reinhart Koselleck’ s categories. So, I investigate the elaborate projects in order to cadence the time of the nation and finally build the imagined community called Brazil as a nation where the “jecas” would be integrated to the progress through new conditions of work. Monteiro Lobato, through the fictional universe of the Yellow Woodpecker Farm, (re)connected past/future or traditional/modern, removing unethical aspects of these concepts and finding their synthesis. Monteiro Lobato’s complete works constitute the sources of this dissertation as his short stories, novel, journalistic texts, stories and texts about art critic.