Body and language in Nove noites, by Bernardo Carvalho, and “Meu tio o iauaretê”, by João Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

This paper explores the relation between body and language as presented in Bernardo Carvalho´s Nove noites, and in João Guimarães Rosa´s “Meu tio o iauaretê”. In Carvalho's novel, narrators, orchestrated by the narrator-novelist, try to clarify, from multiple reports, the suicide of Buell Quain, who mutilated his own body, annihilating himself in response to a conflict between his desires and the civilizing process that influences and constitutes the existence of each subject. In Rosa's short story, on the other hand, the reader comes across a narrator-writer who, staging the oscillating discourse of the jaguar, reports how he killed his interlocutor to save himself from being slain. The narrative is therefore about the annihilation of a body that, as a last resort to survival, turns to the animalistic nature, in the face of language´s impossibility to perform satisfactorily before the (dominant) other´s language. For this purpose, Émile Benveniste´s conception of language, Wolfgang Iser´s notion of fiction, and an essay about Guimarães Rosa´s short story written by Valquiria Wey are used as Reading resources