Realities accessible through fiction: the cases of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

We propose to give a possible answer to the question: why, being able to choose the journalistic version of reality, do we often prefer its literary version?  The narrative of Guimarães and the poetry of Drummond are interesting examples of references to realities that we can only understand by placing them in a fictional key. In both cases the reference to reality is synthesized in the word "regionalism"; both – although above all Guimarães – made their environment the protagonist of their texts and both masterfully put into practice the very Brazilian philosophy of "cultural anthropophagy", which implies intertextuality, parody and otherness.  At the same time, both have managed to make the Brazilian world intelligible beyond the borders by having known how to show the immanent appeal of those worlds that from Europe we consider "different" and the basic narrative procedure to achieve this has been to give a fictitious status to the truth.