Behind the Hill of Myself – There: the place with no name

Abstract

The following article examines the short story "A menina de lá", from the book Primeiras Estórias, by João Guimarães Rosa. The analysis pursues the experience of openness and the impossibility of defining and naming that the particle “lá” ("there") bestows upon the narrative. The concept of "unreason", as outlined by Peter Pál Pelbart from the ideas of Foucault and Blanchot, constitutes the analytical framework. The image of the child, main character, built upon traits of absence, silence and immobility, tensions the ambiguities of lack and fullness, madness and sanctity, normality and abnormality, silence and the Creative Word. This process unfolds the image of “infans,” in its anteriority regarding to the speaking/symbolic processes, to the acculturation and to the utilitarian thinking, and also in a "place of existence" of psychical or metaphysical dimensions. In the weaving of the narrative as well as in the construction of the character, one finds a tissue of meanings and images that compels the reader to inhabit the void, the openness, the anteriority... the "there".