João Guimarães Rosa: the invention of language

Abstract

From the point of view of João Guimarães Rosa, language is a singular mark which is inscribed as a particular trace in each speaking subject and is apt to a singular usage. The words lend themselves to communication usage and to convey meaning, but they also resist to meaning itself. Guimarães Rosa puts this process into action in his literary work, creating his own language, which is composed by neologisms, agglutination of words, meanings brought out with the use of homophonies and of sounds which are characteristic of the life and fauna of the sertão (the bush). There is something illegible which comes across and insists in his works, a point that resists any attempt of decoding. According to these notions, the aim of this paper is to approach the linguistics and literary conceptions of Guimarães Rosa, taking as its support the psychoanalytic notions based on the language and writing conceptions formulated by Lacan.