Chronos kai Anagke: Dialogues Between Guimarães Rosa and Antiquity

Abstract

The short story “Chronos kai Anagke” presents to the average reader with an enigmatic and challenging title. The expression is a transliteration of the Greek, which Guimarães Rosa translates as “Time and destiny”: this initial translation is our starting point. The writer from Minas Gerais presents a narrative that interweaves elements of literary forms that weave enigma, mystery and oracles. The estrangement present in this narrative allows a dialogue with such figures that encompass predictions, omens and sphinx threats, using symbolic entities from antiquity that range from the modern fantastic, proposed by Rosa, to the mythical and wonderful narratives of the ancient world. In addition to possible intertextuality, this article proposes an approximation between the Rosian character Zviazline and some literary and mythical characters, namely, Macbeth and his witches, Paris, Achilles and Oedipus, who were faced with dilemmas that altered the course of their existence such as the protagonist Rosiana. The fate of these characters from Antiquity and Zviazline seems to converge on the idea of the inescapable, the inevitable, the tragic. For the discussion, we summon Aristotle and Todorov with a view to studying the fantastic and Homer and Ovid for the study of narratives from the ancient world.