Água Funda by Ruth Guimarães: Mário, Valdomiro, the fear and “that philosophy one finds only in the common people’s language”

Abstract

The article gives light to Água Funda (1946), Ruth Guimarães's first novel.  The author’s career had a starting point in an encounter with Mário de Andrade, developed here, which puts her writing into significative approaches of the modernist aesthetics. The text also shows how it was influenced by the pioneerism of her townsman Valdomiro Silveira, when dealing with the folk culture and linguistics from Vale do Paraíba area. Ruth, however, could overcome some of the difficulties he had faced when shaping this ‘caipira’ dialect into something vivid and natural. Água Funda recreates uniquely what her author called “that philosophy one finds only in the common people’s language”, bringing together contributions from oral cultures, such as the Brazilian native American, the Nagô and the European ones, which are also part of her folk study about the fear, from 1950. This way she brings the perspective of a woman who was brought up into that symbolic system, related to the concept of ‘escrevivência’ by Conceição Evaristo and to the ‘place of speech’ one, formed in the 1980’s with the Gayatri Spivak and Linda Alcoff’s contribution to one of the major issues of the cultural feminist criticism today.