To the hell of the unconsciousness

debt and guilt in the tragic configuration of the novel This Land

Abstract

The novel This Land dramatizes the conflict between the postive expectations concerning the progress and the way as it imposes itself through violence generating crisis, suffering, insanity and death. The outcome of Nelo’s life trajectory, character whom after twenty years living in São Paulo goes back to his birthplace and commits suicide, raises a set of issues about the meanings of the social process as well as the migration. In this article, we suggest an analysis of the tragic configuration of this novel having into account the complexity of the experience that it shapes and its ties to a broader process of imposition of the capitalist social relations, considering its particularity into the context of the national formation of Brazil. The misfortune of the characters and the conflicts that they live, external as well as internally, shapes an experience we can acknowledge as tragic as we recompose the ties between its personal and the social dimensions. We underline, mainly, the presence of the guilt to investigate the way as this novel dramatizes the constitution of the modern subject, simultaneously endowed and deprived of autonomy, aspect that seems decisive to us to grasp our contemporary tragic experience.