Brazil jagunço: rhetoric and poetics

Abstract

After the works of authors like Euclides da Cunha, Caio Prado Jr. and Oliveira Vianna, banditism has won, in the novel Grande sertão: veredas, by Guimarães Rosa, a representation that matches its importance in Brazil's everyday life. With the ficcional narration of the jagunços'war (i.e., bands of criminals fighting for power in the central area of the country around 1900), the novel offers a portrait of Brazil which evokes structures that remain present nowadays. The concept of the "jagunço system", introduced by Guimarães Rosa, turns the novel into a form of research that overcomes the best sociological and historical portraits of Brazil. The fact that the narrator is himself a jagunço, a "literate jagunço", not only offers an inside view of the world of crime, but also exposes the mechanism of the jagunço institution by picturing the rhetoric between the bosses and their subordinates.