Garranchos: política e alteridade nos gestos da escrita de Graciliano Ramos

Abstract

Even before making his debut as a novelist, Graciliano Ramos’ pen was exercised, above all, in newspapers in Alagoas and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Despite being extensive and regular, this production by the writer is still elementary in academia, little known among readers, and least valued by critics and by the author himself, who took it as a marginal cultural production about his novels and memoirs. They are brief writings, chronicles, short stories, articles, letters, and oral records published in various periodicals in the country. Part of this material written for the Brazilian press between 1910 and 1950 was organized into a book for the first time by the researcher Thiago Mio Salla and comprises Garranchos: unpublished texts by Graciliano Ramos. The collection presents to readers and researchers a multiple and vast material, the plural figure – intellectual, essayist, columnist, novelist, politician – and different figurations of the writer. In this research, we selected chronicles, articles, and speeches for the research that allowed us to explore a facet that is even less known to researchers and readers of the writer from Alagoas: that of the disciplined intellectual and militant of the Brazilian Communist Party, and that directly dialogue with my research purpose, such as: a) show how these texts contribute to the critical-analytical enrichment of the work he left behind; b) analyze how, in Garranchos' texts, the writer from Alagoas elaborates the concern for the other - the subalternized, the proletarian, the woman, the countryman, the black one -; c) expand possibilities of reading and understanding the role played by Graciliano Ramos as an artist and intellectual in the complex Brazilian political-cultural scenario of the first half of the 20th century. The research sought to show that the Alagoan writer contributed to the characterization of a society enriched by the crystallization of its class structure, adopting, in these texts, the point of view of the oppressed class in the domination process. At the same time, he integrated, in the representation of the social process, structural peculiarities that constitute the social life that his romances, chronicles and speeches represent.