A ressacralização do mundo por meio do fazer literário em Avalovara, de Osman Lins

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze the aspect of the Sacred in Avalovara (1973), by Osman Lins, based on Gérard Genette’s theory of textual transcendence. Lins’s novel is examined primarily through one of these relationships: hypertextuality. Avalovara is composed of five epigraphs, one of which is drawn from The Sacred and the Profane (1957), by Mircea Eliade. We seek to investigate how Lins’s text was influenced, specifically, by this reading — considering that this is a complex and indirect process of transposition, since Eliade’s text appears only among the paratextual elements of the work. After multiple readings of the novel, we undertook a conceptual review of The Sacred and the Profane, selecting as interpretive devices the terms that gained the greatest prominence throughout the study: axis-mundi, homo religiosus, ganz andere, hierophany, among other expressions and notions present in the historian’s work. Among these, we highlight the dichotomy between the sacralized archaic world and the desacralized modern world, which inspired the title of this dissertation. Subsequently, we proceeded to identify the convergences and divergences between the two works — content of the first chapter, “Em busca da sacralidade perdida” (In Search of Lost Sacrality) — and, thereafter, described Lins’s aesthetic composition as articulated through a mechanism of literary resacralization—content of the second chapter, “O Fazer Literário” (The Literary Craft). Through this study, we observe not only how Lins transposes certain concepts from Eliade in order to construct the elements of his narrative — time, space, and characters — but also how he subverts such concepts through artistic transfiguration. In this sense, we understand Avalovara as a literary construction that represents the very emergence of new meanings in the world, opposing the sterile perspective of the world’s desacralization.