In-betweeness of readings: O feitiço da ilha do Pavão (1997) e O Chalaça (1994)

This work aims to bring near the contemporary historical novels O feitiço da ilha do Pavão (1997), by João Ubaldo Ribeiro, e O Chalaça (1994), by José Roberto Torero, analyzing the crossing of references where both novels meet. These novels share a zone of mythical-literary appropriation, where they read the Hispanic myths of Don Juan and picaro. Torero’s novel rewrites situations from the Brazilian First Empire and it’s built by changing the perspective to Francisco Gomes da Silva, the “Chalaça”, friend and personal secretary of the emperor D. Peter I. In this way, the novel establishes an intertextual relationship with the traditional picaresque novel, recalling some structural motifs and textual organization that make a parody of the picaro autobiographical account. Ubaldo Ribeiro’s novel retrieves the Brazilian Colonial period, executing a concentration of that society and its time conflicts by parody, following by the tensions between the protagonist group (an its ideal of freedom and equality) and social institutions, such as the Church and Estate, symbols of domination and oppression. Don Juan appears in the novel through the aim of freedom and opposition to the established norms that is observed in the island. From this reading, we’ll try to work on specific dialogue points between both myths that can be noticed in the novels as well relating them to the romantic esthetic: the vengeance and the trip. Our study is based on the notion of the myth as a structuring principle of the narrative, according to Frye (1973, p. 333), and the comprehension of the text as heterogeneous, arranged as a mosaic of citations (KRISTEVA, 1974, p. 64).