O Mirante vê além do dia: cidade e memória em “Os Canhões do Silêncio” de José Chagas

Abstract

Memory plays a fundamental role in literature, both as a theme and as a tool for reframing the past. Based on this premise, this study aims to analyze the work “Os Canhões do Silêncio,” by José Chagas, from a memorialistic perspective. To this end, it is important to understand how the relationship between the poetic subject and the landscape and spaces of the city occurs; how memories are formed from historical places and what elements corroborate the construction of the memory of the place. The work in question consists of two hundred pages, whose poetic images dialogue with the history and memory of the city of São Luís do Maranhão. In Os canhões do silence, the poet poses a disturbing question about being and time through the use of the metonymy of the viewpoint and the Desterro neighborhood, whose poetic self reflects on the historical trajectory of the place between splendor and decadence, the self The poem metaphorizes the contradictions of greatness and misery, of virtue and vice, of permanence and perishing that mark the chronological history of human beings in the place. From this perspective, literary analysis is based on the works of: Assmann (2011), Bachelard (2008), Halbwachs (1950), Le Goff (1997), Santos (2018), Izquierdo (2018), among others. The work Os Canhões do Silêncio revealed a complete and very well-developed literary universe that captures attention and provokes varied feelings, while the beauties of São Luís are narrated, there is the presence of sadness and melancholy in the lyrical self. while remembering the city's past. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the city represents not only the physical home for the body of the lyrical self, but also the place that houses its emotions and holds deep memories that transcend time and space.