A JOURNEY TOWARDS REZENDE’S OUTROS CANTOS

Abstract

This article examines how travel literature in Brazil was configured, to outline how the traveling narrator of Outros cantos, by Maria Valéria Rezende, is constructed, and to what extent the plot flirts and breaks with the classic characteristics of national road narratives. In addition, another fundamental point will be the relationship between travel and the figuration of time in the narrative. To this end, the aspects highlighted, especially by the scholar Flora Sussekind, will be addressed. In Rezende's romance, the problem of displacement is an important reading key that permeates the entire narrative. The protagonist Maria is presented to the reader, in the present plan, inside a bus, recalling an experience of forty years ago, during a return trip to the northeastern hinterland, and in the plane of the past, as a kind of outsider recently arrived in a local stranger in the same region. Since the travel report is centrally present in the two planes of the plot, it appears that travel is an essential point for understanding the narrative, and therefore the focus of this investigation.