História, verdade, ficção: fronteiras epistemológicas no romance de Jorge Amado

Abstract

From inside the border areas of History and Literature, this work approaches the historical senses built in Jorge Amado’s ciclo do cacau, a collection of novels that takes Southern Bahia as their diegetic space and which narratives take place at the beggining of the 20th century. The author proposes meanings regarding Southern Bahia’s past, using benchmarks profoundly associated with the symbolical making of the space as a region. In order to comprehend how the instituting of a region is connected to interactions between literary representations and power relations that vigorated and enforced particular society projects, we are considering the capacity they detain of selecting and perpetuating specific imagetical constructs at the expense of others, which are marginalized. In addition, we reckon that Jorge Amado interpreted the region’s history as his novels address the founding of communities, regional origin myth and how urban development and modernity transformed the place’s landscapes and sociabilities. Attentive to the historical meanings that literature is able to mobilize, we compare History and Literature, their purposes, limits, policies and possibilities. Through a diverse theoretical contribution from historiographic, sociologic, phylosophic and literary texts, we analyse Cacau (1933), Terras do Sem Fim (1943), São Jorge dos Ihéus (1944), Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958) e Tocaia Grande (1984), seeking the meanings which amadian literature arouses over Southern Bahia. Furthermore, we trace interdisciplinary routes which ventilate the historiography status, assuming that the clash of different reality enunciating instances, such as History itself, are inevitable and potentially productive.