ENVEREDANDO: EXPERIêNCIA E MEMóRIA ATRAVéS DO CONTAR DE GRANDE SERT O

The article presents a brief analysis of the narrative effects of the book Grande Sert o: Veredas, by Guimar es Rosa (translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, by James L. Taylor e Harriet de Onís. New York: Knopf, 1963), as a work of thought about memory and construction of experience through telling. The notion of experience that comes from reading the work is compared to what Walter Benjamin conceptualized as a narrative of collective experience (Erfahrung), which seems to set in motion the impersonal and creative memory, subsuming the concept of the modern subject, whose personal and psychological experience is at stake, as is his interpersonal communication. Thus, Rosa, through the narrative character Riobaldo, makes of the telling a phenomenon of worlds opening and creation, in a contemporary context of declining importance of oral and living history, and the closure of experience as individuality.