Entre a fronteira e o limiar: o autor e o narrador em scenas da vida Amazônica

Abstract

The history of literature was marked by the selection of certain works and authors for the composition of the canon. Others remain on the sidelines, recovered, however, by the reader that who updates and discusses it. Scenas da Vida Amazônica is one of these works, whose reception not only retakes it, but also raises issues about the constitution of the work, which is understood both as an ethnographic text and as a literary one. Based on the first edition of the work (1886), this article aims to discuss the statute that stablishes it, following the theoretical constructs of Walter Benjamim (1994) about the idea of threshold and its relation with fictionality and associating it to the thought of Wolf Schimid (2010) that regards event as an essential condition of narrativity. Furthermore, it considers the studies of Harold Bloom (1995), Gérard Genette (2008), Wolfgang Iser (1983) and Josefine Ludmer (2007). As a result, threshold is understood as the narrator’s point of excellence and as an indelible mark of fiction, which constitutes and afirms itself from a certain event. Within the narratives and descriptions, among the chapters and beyond, relating literature to other productions of José Veríssimo, Scenas da Vida Amazônica is a work circumscribed by passages.