Childhood, phantom sound (Corpo de baile)

Abstract

This essay analyzes the architecture of Corpo de baile and its dialogue with Primeiras estórias, highlighting the repetitions that articulate the two works. Drawing on “Campo geral” and “Buriti,” it argues that childhood remains as a ghostly presence in the narrative, language, and very conception of fiction in Guimarães Rosa’s work. The analysis shows how Miguilim/Miguel’s trajectory is organized through echoes, inversions, and returns, emphasizing sonority – birdsong, nocturnal sounds, echoes, and silences – as an element that connects presence and absence, childhood and post-childhood. The figure of Zequiel, in “Buriti,” highlights this poetics of listening, in which the sounds of the night become a space for the inscription of Miguel’s memories and ghosts. The essay thus argues that sonority is a structuring principle of Guimarães Rosa’s narrative and of his reflection on experience, memory, and fiction.