A Amazônia extraordinária de Inglês de Sousa: os relatos da memória sob a ótica do Real Maravilhoso Carpentiano no conto “A Feiticeira”

Abstract

The present work develops reflections on the construction of the Amazonian memory from the short story "A feiticeira", composed of the collection Contos Amazônicos (1893), by the writer from Pará, Inglês de Sousa (1853-1918). The research is anchored in the foundations of the critical theory of Wonderful Real formalized by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), in the mid-twentieth century, in the preface to the novel El Reino De Este Mundo (1949). The stories that make up the selected tale make up the cycle Cenas da vida do Amazonas (Scenes from the life of the Amazon), consisting of short stories and novels whose representation emphasizes the formation of Amazonian society in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially tangential to collective memory, traditions, beliefs, customs and the way of perceiving reality. The selected narrative, developed under the primacy of naturalistic Regionalism, converges to a Latin American aesthetics in line with the emergencies of the writers of the Critical Generation of 1945. The investigation of magical and extraordinary traits found the crystallization of historical elements, beliefs and customs, developed by the Amazonian, in view of the colonizing process to which he was subjected. Still, the mythical-sacral and logical-rational tensions found between Maria Mucoim and Delegate Lieutenant Sousa define the instances of the colonized and the colonizer in the region, being an attestation of the debate between fact and fiction, the central motto of the Wonderful Real.