Mythic and social structure and individual failure on Jorge de Lima’s Calunga

Abstract

It is aimed, in this paper, to demonstrate that the individual failure of Lula, protagonist of the novel Calunga written by Jorge de Lima, comes from different circumstances. Although it is built on a social and often denunciatory prose, there are engendered on the narrative symbols that, from inside the development of the novel’s mythic and religious structure, transcend its denotative meanings and create a hellish atmosphere. It is followed, inserted in this devilish symbology, the constant representation of Lula’s inner world, who tries, when he returns to his motherland, to make the civilization prospers on Santa Luzia’s island according to the most modern techniques formally learned. However, his unknowing – concerning the alterity that lives there, the encyclic time of suffering from that place and the voracious nature – not only deters his progress but also makes him transform on the barbarian otherness that he so much denied, which is represented by Toto Canindé, his “uncanny” neighbor. In order for us to comprehend the relation between the social and the mythical-symbolical structure on Calunga, the psychical formation of the uncanny and Lula’s failure and the psychical formation, it is respectively used the ideas of Northop Frye (2013) and Mircea Elide (1979), the Freudian concept of uncanniness and others from psychoanalytical tendencies. This theori-cal support helps us to interpret the protagonist’s emotions, from which it is realized his crushing defeat and the destitution of a future that is not lined on an endless repetition of the suffering on the island.