Dialogy and Chronotopy in the Historical Novel Verde Vale, by Urda Klueger

ABSTRACT

This article, based on Bakhtin’s studies, focuses on the historical novel genre and its particularities. The route is based on the concept of chronotope, representing the inseparability of time and space. The materiality of analysis is the novel Verde Vale (1979), by Urda Alice Klueger. The analysis carried out highlights the chronotope of transmigration as a figure that underlies the historical narrative; it unfolds into two subordinate themes: the threshold and soil chronotopes, symbolizing the movements observed in the narrative construction of the novel. Linked to these chronotopic representations, the theme of the soil, which implies rooting and also refers to the origin, allows the expansion of the analysis bringing the phenomena of toponymy and anthroponymy closer together, worked as memory and identity events.

KEYWORDS:
Discourse; Literature; Novel; Chronotopy

RESUMO

Este artigo aborda o gênero romance histórico e suas particularidades a partir dos estudos de Bakhtin. O trajeto se faz em torno do conceito de cronotopo, figurando a indissociabilidade de tempo e espaço. A materialidade de análise é a obra Verde vale, de 1979, da catarinense Urda Alice Klueger. A análise realizada destaca o cronotopo da transmigração como figura que alicerça a narrativa histórica; ele se desdobra em dois temas subordinados: o cronotopo da soleira e o da terra, simbolizando os movimentos observados na construção narrativa do romance. Vinculado a essas representações cronotópicas, o tema da terra, que implica enraizamento e remete também a origem, permite a ampliação da análise aproximando os fenômenos de toponímia e antroponímia, trabalhados como eventos de memória e identidade.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Discurso; Literatura; Romance; Cronotopia

Introduction

In this article, we ponder on the functions of time and space for the discursive analysis, starting from the reading and interpretation of the historical novel Verde Vale [Green Valley], created by the Santa Catarina’s historian and writer Urda Alice Klueger (2012 [1979]). We understand that literary art delineates historical and social contexts presented in a fictional manner. Despite this, it can support itself on truthful cornerstones. This occurs, for example, when it portraits quotidian facts, and events based on existing contexts of a past moment that allows reflections over some qualitative demands, which are bounded to human existence. Verde Vale is, as stated by the literary critic Lauro Junkes (1987, p.290),

the book about Blumenau’s origins, about trailblazing, effort, courage, as well as the decision and persistence of the Germans that believed in Dr. Blumenau.¹ They left their homeland behind and came to build, with their sacrifice and dedication, the colony that would have the founder’s name and would become one of the most remarkable and progressive cities in the State [of Santa Catarina].²

Junkes (1987, p.293) also calls attention to the continuous positive cosmovision of the author in her novels of the literary cycle that he classifies as “the historical and regional novel.”³

When we think about the possibility of comprehending mobilizations linked to specific social contexts, through the literary fictional art, we realize the importance of a signifying way to eternize and, simultaneously, we think on principles and values tied to a particular time and space. In this study, the time-space is in Santa Catarina. Such relation is thought from two perspectives: firstly, a chronological and geographical (the basis for a configurational flight) modality; secondly, in a more centered fashion, from a chronotopic figuration analytically proposed – the transmigration,⁴ which will develop, thematically and figuratively, treating one subchronotope as soil, and a second one as the threshold.

In order to develop the proposition, we first present some guiding principles and the attributes of the historical novel. Due to its mobility and versatility, and as one of the forms of novel genre, the modernity’s renowned genre continues in full development, even because of the relationship sometimes conflictive between the fields it involves: History as science and Literature as art. In continuity, there are some considerations about Santa Catarina’s literature and a treatment regarding the dialog between literature and chronotopy, as seen in Bakhtin (1986,⁵ 1981),⁶ showing the importance of this notion in its bond with social, cultural, and historical aspects. Sequentially, we develop an analysis of the selected novel, specifying its theme in a historical sense and relating the specific narrative theme – the immigration⁷ – to literary characteristics, as well as to the chronotopic interpretation of the book. The study finishes with a synthesis of the interpretation that was carried out.

1 Guiding Principles – The Historical Novel

As regards the study about the historical novel genre, using Bakhtin serves us to comprehend how the time and space delineate and organize the novel – particularly Verde Vale. We observed how this bond, characterizing the narrative movement, contributes for the understanding of notions like memory, history, and happening.

Bakhtin (1981)⁸ brings the topic of novel in The Dialogical Imagination – Four Essays. From the reflections presented, it is possible to conceive the literary into a new manner, considering a new reading and interpretation’s modality regulated by the register of time and space in the form of narrative; it is told a version that is registered in a happening form – historical and fictional. The author does not consider the genre terminable, because it is constantly renovating itself. This renovation happens on a permanent basis through the bond with cultural and social representations, which can assume distinctive characteristics in the context that produces the novel.

In a text of 1941 (Epic and Novel), Bakhtin (1981, p.40)⁹ points out this sensibility to the cultural movement:

The process of the novel’s development has not yet come to an end. It is currently entering a new phase. For our era is characterized by an extraordinary complexity and a deepening in our perception of the world; there is an unusual growth in demands on human discernment, on mature objectivity and the critical faculty. These are features that will shape the further development of the novel as well.

As we know, this evolution is perceptible, and the novel admits various modalities and forms, and narrative style. The historical novel is the modality that interests us here; however, independently of the modality, “the novelistic word (...) registers with extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere; it does so, moreover, while registering it as a whole, in all of its aspects” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.300).¹⁰ He also emphasizes that novel “(…) is a genre that is ever questing,” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.39)¹¹ given its plasticity and the moment when it gets in contact with the becoming of the present – what has only been manifested more clearly from the Renaissance onwards. It is an openly future-oriented time.

In the novel, time and space distinguish the narrative, and guide its structure on the two perspectives presented. Nevertheless, if humanity controls the unfolding of the space-time on the chronology, and the novelist redesigns it, the chronotopy’s concept has a theoretical reality, this being possible when the historical novel’s analysis is done in its completed form as literary text. This is an external view (distance or exotopy) and a feasible perspective.

Verde Vale, the novel selected for the analysis, looks at social and cultural aspects of the German immigration into Brazil from the second half of the nineteenth century until the early 1900s. With this materiality, we show how the relation time-space forms the immigrants’ lives in Santa Catarina, those that, because of their history’s nature, are also travelers, travelers in the space and the time. Crossing a space is to glimpse other time as well, although this seems weird at first glance, and, in this sense, it can give the impression that a reality also becomes a dream. In addition, this does not concern merely to the latitude or longitude, but to memory and historicity. The order was to observe those two elements during the narrative, or rather, in its most substantial excerpts.

Seeking to mark cultural aspects, Klueger inserts the reader in details about the everyday life of a German family that leaves their land in search of better living conditions. Those were times of financial and political crisis, which compromise social and economic support. The storyline describes the persistence of the Sonne family to adapt (to acculturate) and settle in a different country other than their own, more specifically in a strange world, both spatial and temporal considered. Thus, the narrative contemplates the desires and fears in face of the new reality that the German family has to get used to, likewise the accomplishments.

Written in 1979, Verde Vale marks the start of the Urda’s career, nowadays with thirteen editions; the last one is in Braille. The novel’s background registers historical events occurred at the old colony Blumenau, in Santa Catarina, between 1857 and 1917. Working the time distancing of the writing portrayed in the book required the evocation of the distance or distancing¹² concept from Bakhtin (1981),¹³ which helps us to understand the importance of distancing the artist’s view in order to register the time in narrated events (the narrative diegesis) related to the contemporaneity and values within the author’s own experience. It is the distance maintenance of whom narrates relatively to what is narrated (primarily requiring an approximation), making a possible opening to knowledge. There is distinction on the roles.

Through this foundation, we seek to give more visibility to the particularities of the historical novel genre. The investigation over the chronotopy allows to understand how the narrative and its layers are organized, inserting it in a network of narratives that approximate by virtue of certain characteristics, namely, the memory, history, and cultural happening. However, it is necessary to observe that the chronotopic perspective ultimately is not a conscious characteristic of the writer as a creator, but an attitude, in its creation, pertaining to the perception developed by means of the time and space on their relation when creating characters, scenes, and plots. In this way, the researcher’s perspective can scrutinize that sensibility and perceive the chronotopic view as less sensible or more sensible in the works. Presumably, a historical novel creator, as is the case here, will be considerably open to those characteristics. Hereupon, it will be shown how the matter is presented.

The historical novel, being the specific genre of the selected work, needs characterization at this point. Let us start with Bakhtin’s sayings about this facet of the novel genre.

Bakhtin (1986)¹⁴ comments that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, England and Germany had a great interest on the folklore in literary work. For him, it is something like a discovery of the folklore – more specifically, the national and local ones. Short stories, folktales, and sagas were constituted as “(…) a new and powerful means of humanizing and intensifying one’s native space” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.52).¹⁵ He characterizes that as a historical-popular time, which notably influenced “(…) on the development of the historical outlook in general and on the development of the historical novel in particular” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.52).¹⁶ Why? Because folkloric images “are deeply chronotopic;” that is, they are full of time (or the space becomes full of it). This using of the folklore therefore made a mark on the historical novel preparation.

The Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is considered the first historical novel writer. He covered his Scotland to explore a land impregnated with the life of local legends, as everything for him was aimed at a legendary time: “His eye could see time in space” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.53).¹⁷ Nonetheless, according to Bakhtin, Scott was still below Goethe, who is Bakhtin’s chronotopic vision model of the world, in other words, “(…) the ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas (…)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.25; emphasis in original).¹⁸

It seems to us that is commonly obvious to see and comprehend the space and the things occupying it, whereas its connection with the time seems invisible, abstract. Without the time, however, there is no historicity, and that is what Bakhtin calls the attention to, particularly in literature. Thence, he integrated the time dimension on the space vision, following the impulse of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity perspective and the studies of the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), as exposed below – the time is a fourth dimension of the space. Nothing of what we see as spatial detaches from the time, yet our vision and sensibility need orientations to such perception. Bakhtin says that, in Walter Scott’s first phase case, even with his past-looking vision (the popular legends), this past would be a closed, self-sufficient world, since Scott evoked “a remembrance of this past” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.53; emphasis in original),¹⁹ not reaching a fullness of time. It was in the Romantic period itself²⁰ that he freed himself from this limitation and produced works that presented “the fullness of time necessary for the historical novel” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.53).²¹ In this way, Bakhtin is establishing a literary requirement for the characterization of a novel as historical, and that has been considerably discussed on contemporaneity.

Evoking such relation – novel and history – raises a series of questions, because it involves two fields apparently irreconcilable and, in fact, there are many discussions regarding this theme. It is like evoking the reality-fiction relation seeing an impossible logic. In the history’s perspective, the so-called New History needed to reconsider the issue: how can we historize the events but through narratives? That is the discussion in the book (among many others)²² The Writing of History,²³ edited by Peter Burke and published in 1991. He says that, in the age of Enlightenment, “the assumption that written history should be a narrative of events was under attack.” (Burke, 2001, p.283) In the twentieth century, the word was that it should not have narrated events, but a structure analysis. Then Burke reminds of Paul Ricœur’s sayings in Time and Narrative,²⁴ where this affirms that there was an eclipse in the historical narrative, defending at the same time that any written history assumes a narrative form, even if it focuses on the structure itself.

2 Literature and Chronotope

A historical novel author — with his peculiar forms of expression, his narrative strategies, emotions and feelings — registers specific epochs, historical facts and, esthetically, conducts to a single space of literature and historicity, fiction and (the past) reality, promoting a conclusion that sometimes renders impossible to separate those in the narrative.

About the bond with the social in literature, Candido (2006, pp.15-16) says: “we can say that we consider the social factor, this not externally (…) but as a factor pertaining to the very artistic construction; a factor studied at the explicative level instead of the illustrative.”²⁵ For Candido, social factors are not ornamental, yet they are present in literature as an inseparable part of it.

Like historical facts, the general culture also is constituted as materiality of literature; in this perspective, Bakhtin (1986, p.2)²⁶ declares:

Literature is an inseparable part of culture and it cannot be understood outside the total context of the entire culture of a given epoch. It must not be severed from the rest of culture, nor, as is frequently done, can it be correlated with socioeconomic factors, as it were, behind culture’s back. These factors affect culture as a whole, and only through it and in conjunction with it do they affect literature.²⁷

The literature dedicated to historical novel configures as an art that aims to understand and represent the historicity of given epochs and foremost their culture. That said, it is important to emphasize that Brazilian literature constitutes through the registration of different cultures. Santa Catarina’s literature has in its ramifications authors that talk about the immigration and ethnic formation in the State, like Urda Klueger, who also is an historian, with her work Verde Vale representing those themes in this territory.

However, the study done by Sachet (1992), writer and a studious of literature, points to the existence of many points to debate in respect of this specific literature. From discussions originating in literary criticism, he raises some questions about what Santa Catarina’s literature is and whether there really exists such literature. This theme requires an in-depth analysis. According to the author,

the literature done by Santa Catarina’s writers cannot be measured with the esthetical criteria of a thorough criticism applied on Machado de Assis, Drummond or Guimarães Rosa. The literature we do, and the one catarinians²⁸ need to do, must be seen and respected as a heritage of our lands and people, where what matters is not the Art of Estheticism, but the Culture Praxis (Sachet, 1992, p.171).²⁹

Following his thought, we understand that, before anything else, is necessary to see the singularities incited by regionalisms. Each one of them may have in their literary registrations something that seems interesting to signify the experiences, cultures, and peculiarities of the place.

For Sachet (1992, p.171),³⁰ “the contemporary literature in Santa Catarina needs an analysis, not towards the author or work, but the combination of every production/manifestation of a way of being, thinking and acting.”³¹ By doing this statement, Sachet emphasizes the importance of perceiving the literary whole for an expansive comprehension of the Catarinian literature and, mainly, for a response to questions about this matter. This kind of study would demand a big availability, but our objective in this investigation is limited to the novel Verde Vale, among other Klueger’s works focused on the theme. Actually, in the book No Tempo das Tangerinas [In the Tangerine Times], published in 1983, she continues the history of the immigrant family that is the focus in Verde Vale. In that sequence, the family, including the descendants of the patriarch Humberto Sonne, deals with the conflict of the Second World War.

The chronotope notion is fundamental in this movement. It is necessary to understand its formation, particularities, and function on Verde Vale’s narrative, exploring the time-space relation and its figuration, as well as considering the distance of Klueger’s own writing experience in doing her work.

Bakhtin developed the complex study on the chronotope in 1937-1938, including some update observations in 1974. It involves a series of studies and analyses that ranges from the Greek Novel to the idyllic chronotope in the novel, pointing to the evolution of the relationship implied there, and leaving suggestions of opening for the exploration of subsequent novel’s modalities.

Essentially, the chronotope concept tries to apprehend how, in literature, “the process of assimilating real historical time and space (…) as does the articulation of actual historical persons in such a time and space” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.84)³² occurs. Its basic definition is this:

We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space) (Bakhtin, 1981, p.84).³³

We are going to repeat here, as a form of complementation, a quotation done in section two: the chronotopic vision of the world would be “(…) the ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas (…)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.25; emphasis in original).³⁴ The time is the element always felt day by day as a line that extends in the space and that it has as reference each one whom speaks of him and in him (the present), also extending backwards (the past) and onwards (the future). Furthermore, the time is now transfigured as an inescapable space form, i.e., one more dimension that we do not know exactly how to imagine and configure. The capacity of being – or setting – in a present (the utterance reference in the human), in one place, situation (scene) and reading just there the signs that show time in its course is what Bakhtin proposes and aims to examine in literary works.

The chronotope concept has an immense relevance for literary genres, as the chronotopes determine them with its temporal vector, considering there the figurative images of the individuals. In this point, Bakhtin informs what he owes to Kant (in Critique of Pure Reason): “Kant defines space and time are indispensable forms of any cognition (…) but differ from Kant in taking them not as ‘transcendental’ but as forms of the most immediate reality. We shall attempt to show the role these forms play in the process of concrete artistic cognition (…).” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.85, footnote 2)³⁵ Referring to the chronotope role on the existence of genres, Machado (2005, p.159) says:

The chronotope theory allows us to understand that genres have a cultural existence, eliminating therefore the original birth and the definitive death. Genres are constituted from particular and recurrent chronotopic situations. For this reason, they are as antique as social organizations.³⁶

If the space is social, the time characterizes the historicity. This means that there are formations of spatial-temporal images (in the esthetic representation of genres) that guide the use of language. Machado (2005, p.159) explains that, in Bakhtin’s perspective, “the works live in a great time because they are capable of breaking the limits of the present where they emerge.”³⁷ In this sense, we comprehend that in a literary work the basis is constituted of the union between social and historical aspects: there are no limits between them.

One of the subsequent observations Bakhtin does is that the study of chronotopes in a work allows to observe the artistic unity of that work and to perceive its constitution in layers of chronotopic values, which can then be “of different levels and volumes.” In other words, with more or less emotional value and more or less volume in the work, as is going to be shown in our analysis. The space and time combination may vary in the relationship of people (the social) in places and times of happenings. Bakhtin reminds that the figuration of road, as a place of meeting, is relatively common in the historical novel, like in Walter Scott and in Russian novels (in some cases, it concerns more specifically to go from one country to another, not from another (exotic) world. However, in other variances, which is the case of Verde Vale, “a function analogous to the road is played by an ‘alien world’ separated from one’s own native land by sea and distance” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.245).³⁸ The process of transmigration, a chronotope we identified in Verde Vale, also references the long road traveled on a journey that would be of no return.

In all cases of chronotopes that Bakhtin exemplifies, it stands out the one that he called thematic, as well as the figurative: “They [the chronotopes] are organizing centers for the fundamental narrative events of the novel” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.250).³⁹ It is like saying that time gains body; it no longer seems invisible or imponderable, or yet it gains weighting and solidity on the characterization of novel’s scenes. Ultimately, Bakhtin (1981, p.251)⁴⁰ understands that “language, as a treasure-house of images, is fundamentally chronotopic.” Then the matter is how to perceive and to take advantage of the analysis of this property of language.

At last, it should be emphasized that is possible, in a work, to recognize a chronotope that re-covers the literary narrative (big, dominant chronotopes, Bakhtin says). On the other hand, they may include (that is why we mention the layers) little chronotopes, these related to specific themes in the work content, and may interrelate in different forms. This means a formation of a dialogical network that involves the author, interpreter, reader and therefore the work’s own concrete existence, as well as the chronological distance between the subjectivities involved (creator, interpreter, reader) and the world represented in the text. Overall, Bakhtin sees in this a co-creation: “The text as such never appears as a dead thing” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.252),⁴¹ its creation, and everything it brings, “flows in the time.” Behind all this, there is the human voice. It is not our objective, however, to give attention to this kind of chronotopic network that involves the creator author in his time and the relations that the work, in each moment of its history, develops together with those who receive its influence and became co-creators.

3 A Chronotopic Analysis Proposal

The chronotopic marks in our object of study (Verde Vale) must conduct to the deep sense of the narrative in its movement and texture. Treating more specifically the chronotope concept in Verde Vale leads us to observe that many historical and social questions referring to the end of the nineteenth century span the work.

Reading the work means to walk through the old colony of Blumenau, starting from 1857, and to observe the Sonne family, who represents great courage, fears and yearnings of facing challenges in their condition as immigrants. Nevertheless, with willpower and determination, they prospered a lot. In addition, all immigrants of the colony Blumenau were able to flourish widely.

The transmigration embraces the work in its narrative and diegetic movement. Soil and threshold (smaller chronotopes in underlay) symbolize respectively the primordial mother (receptacle and generator of sustenance and life) and “(…) the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (…),” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.248)⁴² the decision of being and to be in another place and time.

Klueger, by using a nostalgic and poetic contour, allows the reader to travel by paths that surprise and, at the same time, shows how much the cultural and sociohistorical aspects impacts the work. With knowledge and experience, she approaches the immigration of foreigners that take/took part on the formation and culture of the Brazilian people. Also because the poetic nature of the narrative, she does not aim to document the history of German immigrants in Santa Catarina. As an example, we brought an excerpt from the work that suggests some traces of this sensation.

They did not sow seeds into the soil only to ensure the subsistence until the next season: sowing them into the soil meant creating the future. Their dreams and expectations were intertwined to the humus that fructified the seeds. Every cob that bloomed, every new crop ready multiplied the dreams and expectations like the cereal grains did (Klueger, 2012, p.75).⁴³

From this excerpt, it is verifiable that the language used by the author brings to light historical marks regarding land cultivation, and the expectations of a future deposited on it. The scene narration uses the symbolism (the seed is future project), which produces the feeling of how much the soil fructification connects to the fructification of life and dreams (the social connected with nature).

When treating the soil as a way to produce and subsist, Klueger provides an illustration of what would be analytically a theme in the main chronotope: the soil, this as a symbol of a primordial mother, humus, root, and a receptacle of living beings. In relation to that, there is a reference in Bakhtin (1981)⁴⁴ about a spatial and concrete time linked to soil and nature. That would be a productive time bounded to the collectivity and “directed toward the future,” where, according to Bakhtin, it reflects a primitive agricultural stage of social development, which he characterizes as folkloric. Bakhtin is talking about the work of François Rabelais (1494?-1553),⁴⁵ whom helped to change the course of the culture at that time, leaving the medieval world to a new one which was in need of a different time perception – oriented to growth and fertility. Moreover, Bakhtin (1981, p.206)⁴⁶ says: “The fundamentals of this ‘creating’ time were present in the images and motifs of folklore.” We can see here that the collective folkloric background awakes at times in the course of life, particularly in dramatic events. It makes sense in this moment, because the immigrants were deracinated and had to take root themselves alone: this kind of event works as a restart of everything, becoming imperative to think about the future: soil and seeds reproduced the ritual of the beginnings.

The soil valorization and the colonies’ formation that settled in are presented in the work. The land cultivation not only provided the sustenance to supplement the physical necessities, but also the one that made possible the personal growth and the expectations of an outstanding destiny.

When working on some questions about how much the Germans are responsible for the Brazilian prosperity, Campos (2006, p.146)⁴⁷ says: “The colonist gets in the virgin forest, walks through the wild backwoods’ interior, transforms the forest into a work and intelligent activity center, and, for the soil that he chose to be his second Country and the Country of his children, he creates new and fruitful horizons.” The German colonists, with their intelligence and excellence, opened paths in the forests, built roads, and transformed uninhabitable places into inhabitable homes through their hard work. Thus, the soil marks an intense and relevant social space in Verde Vale.

The coexistence in the colony represents the interactive and affective organization with other people that shared dreams. The soil, often divided to supply everyone’s necessities, symbolized more than a place to sow food that killed the hunger: it satisfied the hunger and the sustenance of dreams, expectations, and yearnings of those whom, even in fear, spread the seeds of their own ideals and experiences.

Proposing the chronotopic theme soil marks an element that emerges significantly and substantially in Verde Vale. The appreciation for the soil is a strong foundation to a growth in another sense: from there, it came out hope, desire, and life. The immigrants, anchored in principles of organization and labor strategies, configured themselves as a populace with economic and administrative sustenance, mostly capacitated for the construction of a promising future.

Therefore, constituted by social and historical aspects, which Klueger represents using a poetic style, Verde Vale forms a literary whole that testifies how much the soil, and the immigrants create the basis of this literature that is capable of transporting the reader to a journey in the time and space. From this interlacing, we certify the value in the chronotope concept mobilized by Bakhtin:

In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981, p.84).⁴⁸

Social aspect automatically links to the historical moment: one does not subsist without the other. Through this way, the semantic anchorage of narrative can be reached in its amplitude. The perception of chronotopes contributes to enlarge the interpretation paths of the works.

Verde Vale constitutes a milestone in Santa Catarina’s literature, translating the time and space of events and characters that indicates a strong connection with Germany, marked by a memory erected in a bridge-form, a cultural Ariadne’s thread. Pollak’s words are meaningful in this sense:

We can say that memory is a constitutive element of the identity’s feeling, both individual and collective, insofar as it is also a factor extremely important in the feeling of continuity and coherence of a person or group in their oneself reconstruction (Pollak, 1992, p.204; emphasis in original).⁴⁹

In short, due to external determinations – social and political, – Pollak (1992, p.204; emphasis in original)⁵⁰ assumed that “memory is a constructed phenomenon.” This implies that such construction is both conscious and unconscious.

Immigrate does not mean break affective bonds with the homeland. The German soil transfigures by the means of transmigration, in Brazil’s soil, what becomes some kind of retribution for the lost suffered in the past. The immigrants needed to find new routes (new meaning) for their lives, because the venerated land in Germany did not offer necessary conditions to survive there. In this moment of economic and social crisis, the only option was immigrate to a new land. In the nineteenth century, Germany underwent big social, political, and economic transformations, highlighting the fact that there was not a German Estate before 1871. The industrialization deconstructed the existing system, leading many people to poverty. There was an interest from the Brazilian imperial government to attract immigrants (work force, occupations of strategic regions, even the idea of a “whitening”⁵¹ population). Anyway, dissatisfaction and fear for loss of land impelled groups to search for other places to live. The group of Germans in Klueger’s Verde Vale is part of a second phase of immigration, which occurred from 1845.⁵² As Klueger (2012, p.22)⁵³ says: “The old world did not reserve a place for them anymore; they had to conquer their place on that unknown land, by hook or by crook.”

Brazil, the chosen place and yet unknown, offered the possibility to grow economically and financially, but primarily represented the indispensable refuge to immigrants deflated for leaving their homeland. We emphasize that, even apprehensive and resistant to the new culture that was presented, and afraid of the adventures to come, it was in Brazilian territory that they got a chance of living new dreams and moving on – here is the representation of the chronotope of threshold.

The chronotope of transmigration marks the distancing between two worlds divided by the ocean, which would need to be traversed, meaning both disconnection and trial. At another moment, however, although there is the geographic distance between Germany and Brazil, there exists an affective approximation and intense connection with the homeland (work of the memory). In this fact, we have history representativeness of immigrants that crossed the Atlantic in a search for better living conditions, allied to the social aspect assured by the plenitude of characters that portrait so well fears and ambitions of surviving in a foreign land. Even so, the affective bond is not broken, but strengthened. Even though they are distant of their homeland, immigrants do not forget what already was familiar and important to them – there is no oblivion.

In this perspective, in the words of Gaelzer (2014, p.57),⁵⁴ “immigrants that have chosen Brazil did that in the hope of finding better living conditions for their families (…) thence, by abandoning their homeland, they were not abdicating of their roots; to the contrary, they tried to reproduce their customs in a tropical land.”

In view of this fact, in Verde Vale, Klueger describes the intense connection that characters, represented by the Sonne couple, had with Germany. Homesickness grew strong, mostly when Christmas came up, and it was in this moment the nostalgia took over, as we can see in the excerpt below:

Homesickness came and took over; memories in confusion paraded in front of their eyes sored with all the intensity given by the distance lens (…) Christmas and homeland associated in such a way into the sadness of that day. If it were possible to use magic words to go back home which is far away, even if for a few hours in some unknown retreat, the happiness of KNOWING that that soil was German, it would be the biggest happiness of all ever experienced in life. It does not matter if it were some wild place in the German Tyrol or into the heart of the Black Forest: The return! (Klueger, 2012, p.61; emphasis in original)⁵⁵

A strong connection with the place of origin represents how meaningful the roots are. The soil theme incorporates the root to symbolize the origin. This figuration shows the representativeness of characters bound that way. As an illustration, we mention the names choice of the two children of Sonne family that were born in Brazil, respectively registered as Reno (the Rhine, a German river), a region where Humberto Sonne had grown up, and Monique, the youngest, reminding the city of Münich where the matriarch Eileen Sonne had been born and lived until the age of 17. Those choices are not random; they are constituted through reminiscence, showing how much expressive Germany was to them, despite the years of residence in Brazil and the children they had there.

Faggion and Misturini (2014) signalize, in the Linguistics, a study that refers to names’ lexicon, divided in Anthroponomy (people names) and Toponymy (places names). In Verde Vale, we observe that space and subject approach each other because of the memory, one resulting on another (the before and the after). This process helps us to reflect upon representativeness that the place of birth has. The homeland transmits something so intimate that it does not matter how far from it the subject is, as the affective distancing rarely happens. The choice of names of those two children corroborates this conjecture.

In the process of change/adjustment from toponym to anthroponym, it succeeds the transmission of a past idea that does not dissolve over time. Before that, there is a resonance of marks of what stayed distant through geographic course, but they become close through feeling and memory. In this movement of naming (identifying), they create names embodied in Rhine and Münich, which become updated into the characters by their living at the new land, Blumenau.

The new arises from the memory. Thus, the concept of chronotope developed by Bakhtin (1981,⁵⁶ 1986)⁵⁷ shows another aspect in the possibilities of a time-space connection. It is the outer and the far away position that takes part of the present. We cannto forget that we are referring to the language. For Bakhtin, in the language, there always exists a dialog with other utterances. Others’ sayings always reside in our saying: the other comes to take part in history.

Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of “our-own-ness,” varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate (Bakhtin, 1986, p.89).⁵⁸

On all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction (Bakhtin, 1981, p.279).⁵⁹

Every utterance comes from some kind of social interaction, either present or past, oral or written, quotidian or originating in sciences and other fields. They are sayings recreated by the appraisal function of the speaker, and carry the familiar and proximal expressivity of those with whom the subject lives. In this way, words constitute themselves through a collective bond and, at the same time, reflect the subjectivity of the speaker in each situation and time.

In the other’s course that is presented, we understand that in Verde Vale, the outer position is represented by the names of places, and it becomes present on the names of the children because of temporal movement. Therefore, the names of places transformed into the names of the children denote what has been left behind, but, despite that, they continue to be present, becoming current and familiar.

Faggion and Misturini (2014), based on Dick (1990), say that toponyms are connected to history, are vehicles of ideology, and as such, they permeate the memory, experience and imaginary of the group that use them. Following this thought, anthroponyms can also make a return of a nostalgic memory, an experience from the past. The names choice for the characters confirms this proposition. Words represent feelings and attachment to what is meaningful for the human existence – they escape through the memory channel.

Humberto Sonne had grown in the margins of Rhine River. It was following the course of the river that he met his future spouse, Eileen, in Münich, the city where she had lived and faced great challenges. She was a courteous girl, from a rich family, but after she became an orphan, an uncle, whom had custody of her, stole her assets – at least he did not steal her from one main thing: the dream of being happy. That was how she saw Humberto Sonne for the first time, while taking care of children in a square of Münich.

After some meetings in that square, it was in a Christmas day that they united to build a family. Christmas symbolizes birth, and with the relationship of Eileen and Humberto, it is achieved the desire to stay together.

The detailing of the places where they grew, walked, navigated and loved each other were exposed here with the intention of showing that there were reasons enough for the names choice of the children: Reno (Rhine) and Monique (Münich). When mobilizing specific points about identity, Gaelzer (2014, p.21)⁶⁰ says: “In treating identity questions regarding immigrants, we verified that is by the language immigrants kept their wisdom, history and symbols.” Then the names Reno and Monique have vestiges of what was left behind, but in other form by means of the transfiguration with memory as the channel.

1857 is the year when Sonne family arrives in Brazil. However, the novel’s first edition was published in 1979. Historically, and with the romantic point of view, this demonstrates a big temporal distance: 120 years in our calendar. Bakhtin, who developed the concept of distance (distancing, exotopy) before exploring the chronotopes’, in Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff, ⁶¹ dissertates about the culture of an epoch:

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. (…) In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully, because there will be cultures that see and understand even more). A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures (Bakhtin, 1986, p.7).⁶²

The author of Verde Vale, on the one hand, had a special advantage: she also lived in this environment as a descendant of colonists, in Blumenau, where she was born, always bathed in the space-time of the events. On the other hand, the historical knowledge and field research required a methodological exotopy in order to perceive the culture of that specific epoch. However, because of her own experience, even though far away from the epoch focused, we may understand better the style and cosmovision of Klueger as delineated by Junkes (1987) when evaluating her literary work. Primarily, he observes that the plot develops “naturally, with a sensible optimism, healthy happiness, solidarity and harmony, but without falling on the oversimplification” (Junkes, 1987, p.292).⁶³ Secondly: “As a debuting book, it reveals a dependency almost total on narrative and descriptive techniques, constituted in the indirect speech, in the panoramic summary, in the synthetic narrative, technique that produces a certain distancing from the narrative” (Junkes, 1987, p.292).⁶⁴ In this point, Junkes indicated that dialogical techniques and a more scenic narrative could bring the actions to a better present, and the characters would appear more alive for the reader. At the end, he synthetizes the evaluation affirming that Verde Vale has “a conception strength, narrative impetus, and a rich and healthy cosmovision by the author” (Junkes, 1987, p.293).⁶⁵

Let’s go back to the Bakhtinian concepts exposed to proceed to the closure of this analysis. According to Amorim (2006, p.95), here is the difference between the concepts of chronotope and exotopy (this, translated from French, was used at the epoch of the publication):

Chronotope and exotopy are two concept of Bakhtin that talk about the space-time relation. The former was conceived in the literary text’s strict environment; the latter refers to the creative activity in general – initially to the esthetic activity and, afterwards, to the research in Human Sciences.⁶⁶

The Bakhtinian concept helps us to reflect that the temporal path of 120 years, which separated Klueger from the narrated events in Verde Vale, required a displacement of the author’s view (related to the own ulterior experience) to comprehend that epoch. Specifically, in the sense of distancing: the author, in extraposition, had conditions of understanding the epoch looking to it at distance, and in a specialized manner. Klueger needed to investigate thoroughly what was culturally happening in that period, and to create the plot narratively (history and literature associates to produce the historical novel). She also needed to understand that there is a narration time (by the writer) and a time of the narrated events; in other words, a representation time, as well as a time of what is represented.

The idea of portrait is worked by Amorim (2006), who describes how the esthetic creation expresses the difference between two visions, the points of view individualized both by the portraitist and by the portrayed: it is necessary to take distance in order to reproduce. In that way, according to Amorim (2006, p.96),⁶⁷ the artist’s view is in two movements:

Firstly, the moment of capturing the other’s view, of trying to understand what the other sees, and how it sees. Secondly, the moment of returning to its place, which is necessarily exterior to the experience of the portrayed, to synthetize or totalize what it sees, according to its values, its perspective, its problem.

When going back more than a century, Klueger needed to understand the experiences about and of the immigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century, as well as consider social, economic, and political intervening questions, both in Europe and Brazil. In this process, as a return, there is the author’s view in terms of values, her reflections of an own experience. It is the past updating itself on the present through the cautious view of the writer. It has a movement that unites the old and the contemporary – and the historical to the literary narrative.

With this explanation, it is possible to affirm that Bakhtin’s concepts of chronotope and distancing (exotopy) are fundamental for the perception of events.

Final Considerations

We aimed, here, to direct the study to the concept of chronotope. The chronotope that would represent the predominant historical movement is the transmigration (time of migration, change, travel), which draws big lines or the figure that incorporates a starting point, an arrival point and the development of events that mark the narrative closure. It draws and circumvents all the events that will receive attention in the narrative – its diegesis, its character of fictional reality, the nucleus of (distant) attention of the writer.

We observed that, in the narrative, the immigrants maintain deep affective bonds both in relation to the homeland and the new land, respectively, the one left behind, in Germany, and the Brazilian soil that made it possible to survive and build new dreams. The symbology of the soil functions as a theme of the broader chronotopic figuration – the transmigration. The soil, for the immigrants, is invaluable; for many immigrants, the best investment is to have their own little piece of land and take care of it, making it their property of root. This fact is manifested in Verde Vale, which registers the historicity of the land occupation by the Germans, as a background and scenario of the events between 1857 and 1917. However, to the arriving, it represents the decision of being there, after a spatial and temporal journey (because it is about another world). All this to endure the later events, by the chronotope of threshold, the entrance now inevitable of this world as a new home, with the possible hope of being better, especially growing in character and maturity, which is a temporal character appointed with emphasis by Bakhtin from the perspective of chronotope.

In the analysis, we also studied, in connection with the senses of the chronotopy, the relationship between toponyms and anthroponyms, having observed how a displacement in the places names to characters’ names emphasized, through memory, the intense connection with Germany, symbolizing, as if creating fetishes, a loss followed by a finding. The act of naming and identifying Reno and Monique in reminiscence to the homeland portrays how much the family was still connected to Germany, despite the long years of residence in Brazil. The conflict between the land of before and the land of now, in the minds of immigrants, also justifies what toponymy and anthroponymy represent in transmigration. Transmigration configures a journey to another time-space, unknown and initially terrifying, painful traversal, but also rebirth. It recalls, from a religious point of view, the post-mortem passage of the soul to another body, which will have to adapt and live since then (mythological influence). It implies discovery, pilgrimage, and acquisition of new knowledge. In the case of immigrants, the new life remains full of memories (good and bad) and nostalgia, which provides a perennial connection between two forms of life.

The process of analysis also allowed us to think how a literary work can enrich discursive studies, since the displacement of meaning (from places to people) marks the authorship gesture, which succeeds through a memory that reconfigures what was left behind, renovating both signification and identity.

Literary discourse also presents, in the construction of the narrative, a mix of voices, which bring in themselves marks of other speeches presented in the characters speaking parts, as well as in the narrator's speech (its plurilinguistic character). They are traces of other discourses that materialize in a discourse apparently unique. “The unity of a literary language is not a unity of a single, closed language system, but is rather a highly specific unity of several ‘languages’ that have established contact and mutual recognition with each other (...)” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.295).⁶⁸ It is a plurilingualism effect.

The novel Verde Vale, by Urda Alice Klueger, is special because it deals with a theme of social and historical relevance about the German immigration in Brazilian territory. It connects historicity, social and political aspects, those concluded in their prose by a poetic style.

Review I

The authors present a very good discussion. An appropriate choice in respect of the title, which covers fundamental matters developed in the article; a clear explanation of the objective, with a relevant bibliography to achieve the study proposition; a coherent exposition, following the methodology previously presented, including a consistent argumentation and an in-depth discussion; full command over the theoretical apparatus and its articulation with the novel analysis.

In addition, the work examination, based on theoretical elaborations of the chronotope, progresses with fluidity on the discussion regarding important matters raised about the historical novel (relations between historical and sociocultural aspects and literature; the exotopy, etc.), confirming, on the final considerations, the intrinsic relation between that genre and the chronotopic figurations inscribed in the narrative, particularly the transmigration. This perspective offers an original approach to the reading of chronotopy, resulting into a representative contribution to the studies on this concept and the historical novel.

The language is clear, correct, and appropriate to scientific work. There are rare typos and expression mistakes that can be easily solved. ACCEPTED

Aurora Gedra Ruiz Alvarez - https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1055-9233; [e-mail]; Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Centro de Comunicação e Letras, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

Review II

It is an article very well written (including the English abstract) about the novel Verde Vale, by Santa Catarina’s writer Urda Alice Klueger, who writes about the German immigration in this State. Based on Bakhtin’s thoughts, the article aims at analyzing what it denominates as chronotope of “transmigration” (a migration not only to a new land, but also to a new life), specifically the subchronotopes of soil (a land of adoption as a place of a promising future) and of threshold (a new land related with the evocation of the homeland). The text presents a solid knowledge of Bakhtin’s concepts, associated with questions related to novel as a genre and to particularities of historical novel, along with the knowledge regarding the cultural context of Verde Vale. The analytical part is very brief; it works more with paraphrases and a little analysis of the work’s content. Despite this weak spot, it is a very clarifying text about the work mobilized and the theoretical questions that involve it. I recommend its publication in the “Bakhtiniana” journal. ACCEPTED

João Vianney Cavalcanti Nuto – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8091-2912; [e-mail]; Universidade de Brasília – UnB, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, Brasília, Federal District, Brazil.

REFERÊNCIAS

• AMORIM, M. Cronotopo e exotopia. In: BRAIT, B. Bakhtin: outros conceitos-chave. São Paulo: Contexto, 2006. p.95-114.
• BAKHTIN, M. O romance de educação e sua importância na história do realismo. In: BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal Tradução Paulo Bezerra. 12. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006. p.205-260.
• BAKHTIN, M. Os gêneros do discurso. In: BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal Tradução Paulo Bezerra. 12. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2006. p.261-306.
• BAKHTIN, M. O discurso no romance. In: BAKHTIN, M. Questões de literatura e de estética: a teoria do romance. Tradução do russo Aurora Fornoni Bernardini et al 7. ed. São Paulo: Hucitec Editora, 2014. p.71-210.
• BAKHTIN, M. Formas de tempo e de cronotopo no romance (Ensaios de poética histórica). In: BAKHTIN, M. Questões de literatura e de estética: a teoria do romance. Tradução do russo Aurora Fornoni Bernardini et al 7. ed. São Paulo: Hucitec Editora, 2014. p.211-362.
• BAKHTIN, M. Epos e romance. In: BAKHTIN, M. Questões de literatura e de estética: a teoria do romance. Tradução do russo Aurora Fornoni Bernardini et al 7. ed. São Paulo: Hucitec Editora, 2014. p.397-428.
• BURKE, P. A história dos acontecimentos e o renascimento da narrativa. In: BURKE, P. (org.). A escrita da história: novas perspectivas. Tradução Magda Lopes. São Paulo: Ed. UNESP, 1992. p.327-348.
• CAMPOS, C. M. A política da língua na era Vargas: a proibição do falar alemão e resistências no Sul do Brasil. Campinas (SP): Ed. Unicamp, 2006.
• CANDIDO, A. O direito à literatura. 4. ed. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2004.
• CERTEAU, M. A escrita da história Tradução Maria de Lourdes Menezes. Rev. técnica Arno Vogel. 2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2006.
• COUTINHO, A. Notas de teoria literária Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1976.
• DICK, M. V. P. A. Toponímia e antroponímia no Brasil Coletânea de Estudos. São Paulo: Arquivo do Estado, 1990.
• FAGGION, C. M.; MISTURINI, B. Toponímia e memória: nomes e lembranças na cidade. Linha D’Água, São Paulo, v. 27, n. 2, p.141-157, dez. 2014.
• GAELZER, V. Construções imaginárias e memória discursiva de imigrantes alemães no Rio Grande do Sul. Jundiaí: Paco, 2014.
• JUNKES, L. O mito e o rito: uma leitura de autores catarinenses. Florianópolis: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 1987.
• KLUEGER, U. A. Verde vale 12. ed. Blumenau: Hemisfério Sul, 2012.
• MACHADO, I. Gêneros discursivos. In: BRAIT, B. (org.). Bakhtin: conceitos-chave. São Paulo: Contexto, 2005. p.151-166.
• POLLAK, M. Memória e identidade social. Tradução Monique Augras. Estudos Históricos, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 10, p.200-212, 1992.
• RICOEUR, P. Tempo e narrativa A intriga e a narrativa histórica. Tradução Cláudia Berliner. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2011.
• SACHET, C. Literatura catarinense: liberdade para ser autor. Travessia, Florianópolis, n. 25, p.167-181, 1992.
• SEYFERTH, G. Imigrantes, estrangeiros: a trajetória de uma categoria incômoda no campo político. In: REUNIÃO BRASILEIRA DE ANTROPOLOGIA, 26, 2008, Porto Seguro. Anais.. Porto Seguro: Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2008.

• 1
  Hermann Bruno Otto Blumenau (1819-1899), founder of the colony São Paulo de Blumenau.
• 2
  In Portuguese: “o livro das origens de Blumenau, o livro do desbravamento, da luta, da coragem, da decisão e persistência dos alemães que acreditaram no Dr. Blumenau, deixaram sua pátria, e vieram construir, com seu sacrifício e sua dedicação, a colônia que teria o nome do fundador e se transformaria numa das cidades mais marcantes e progressistas do Estado.”
• 3
  In Portuguese: “romance histórico-regional.”
• 4
  Other possibilities for this figuration would be Traversal, Rebirth.
• 5
  BAKHTIN, M. Speech Genres and Other late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
• 6
  BAKHTIN, M. The Dialogic Imagination – Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
• 7
  When talking about the gradual change of signification on the immigrant category, in Brazil, rhe historian Giralda Seyferth (2008, p.4) says that the word “arises in politics at the moment of the Brazilian State’s consolidation, in the 1840s. On the one hand, associated to the territory settling; on the other hand, to the unfettered work, bearing in mind the different needs of the Empire and of some provinces” [In Portuguese: “aparece no campo político no momento de consolidação do Estado brasileiro, na década de 1840, por um lado associada ao povoamento do território e, por outro, ao trabalho livre, tendo em vista as diferentes necessidades do Império e de algumas das províncias”]. Before 1840, colonist was the only word used in official documents. The colony of Nova Friburgo (in Rio de Janeiro), in 1819, is considered the starting point for the word “immigration.”
• 8
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 9
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 10
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 11
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 12
  Exotopy was the translation presented on the first editions of Bakhtin’s works translated from French.
• 13
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 14
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 15
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 16
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 17
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 18
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 19
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 20
  His literary works were formerly poetic. The prose did not receive the same consideration as the poetry at that time.
• 21
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 22
  We recall the work of Michel de Certeau that bears the same title, whose original publication dates from 1975. The case of the History’s narrativization reappears there. For reference: CERTEAU, M. de. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
• 23
  BURKE, P. History of Events and the Revival of Narrative. In: BURKE, P. (ed.). New Perspectives on Historical Writing. 2nd ed. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. pp.283-300.
• 24
  RICOEUR, P. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
• 25
  In Portuguese: “podemos dizer que levamos em conta o fator social, não exteriormente [...] mas como fator da própria construção artística, estudado no nível explicativo e não ilustrativo.”
• 26
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 27
  Note that Bakhtin’s text Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff, origin of this quotation, was published in 1970. The part “as is frequently done” allude to that period of his life, in the Soviet Union.
• 28
  Translator’s note: this “Catarinian” is an uncommon word in English used by some Brazilian researchers to refer to the inhabitants of Santa Catarina. Despite its use in some academic production in Brazil, I use it here as a neologism for English readers and to avoid the exhaustive repetition of the word Santa Catarina.
• 29
  In Portuguese: “A literatura que fazem os catarinenses não pode ser medida com os critérios estéticos de uma rigorosa crítica aplicada a Machado de Assis, a Drummond, ou a Guimarães Rosa. A literatura que fazemos, e aquela que os catarinenses precisam fazer, tem que ser vista e respeitada como um patrimônio de nossas terras e de nossas gentes onde o que importa não é a Arte da Estética, mas a Práxis da Cultura.”
• 30
  Another thing to note is the temporal distance at which we find ourselves away from the moment when the author spoke of that contemporaneity – almost 30 years.
• 31
  In Portuguese: “a literatura contemporânea de Santa Catarina precisa ser analisada, não no valor isolado de um autor ou de uma obra, mas no conjunto de toda a produção/manifestação de uma forma de ser, de pensar e de agir.”
• 32
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 33
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 34
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 35
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 36
  In Portuguese: “A teoria do cronotopo nos faz entender que o gênero tem uma existência cultural, eliminando, portanto, o nascimento original e a morte definitiva. Os gêneros se constituem a partir de situações cronotópicas particulares e também recorrentes, por isso são tão antigos quanto as organizações sociais.”
• 37
  In Portuguese: “as obras vivem num grande tempo porque são capazes de romper os limites do presente onde surgem.”
• 38
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 39
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 40
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 41
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 42
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 43
  In Portuguese: “Eles não lançavam sementes ao solo apenas para garantir a subsistência até a próxima estação, lançar sementes ao solo era construir o futuro. Seus sonhos e suas esperanças estavam amalgamados àquele húmus que frutificava as sementes, e a cada espiga que florescia, a cada nova safra, os sonhos e as esperanças eram multiplicados como eram os grãos de cereais.”
• 44
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 45
  When mobilizing the modalities of novel genre, Bakhtin (1986, p.20) references Rabelais as the author of typical novels in the category called novel of education: Gargantua e Pantagruel. Five books were published about those characters, starting from 1532. Bakhtin (1986, p.25) considers Rabelais the responsible for the better result “at constructing an image of man growing in national-historical time.” For reference, see footnote 5.
• 46
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 47
  In Portuguese: “O colono penetra na mata virgem, palmilha o interior do sertão bravio, transforma a floresta num centro de trabalho e de atividade inteligente, e rasga assim, para a terra que escolheu para a sua segunda Pátria e para a Pátria de seus filhos, novos e fecundos horizontes.”
• 48
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 49
  In Portuguese: “Podemos (…) dizer que a memória é um elemento constituinte do sentimento de identidade, tanto individual como coletiva, na medida em que ela é também um fator extremamente importante do sentimento de continuidade e de coerência de uma pessoa ou de um grupo em sua reconstrução de si.”
• 50
  In Portuguese: “a memória é um fenômeno construído.”
• 51
  Seyferth (2008, p.10) explains that the idea of whitening was “the way of imagining, in the future, a modern, civilized nation with a population formed in a selective miscegenation with the European immigration’s cooperation” [In Portuguese: “modo de imaginar, no futuro, uma nação moderna, civilizada, com um povo formado pela miscigenação seletiva com o concurso da imigração europeia”]. According to her, this idea persisted in the immigration policy until mid-20^th century.
• 52
  IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística; [Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics]). Available at: https://brasil500anos.ibge.gov.br/territorio-brasileiro-e-povoamento/alemaes/condicoes-de-emigracao.
• 53
  In Portuguese: “O velho mundo já não reservava um lugar para eles; tinham que conquistar seu lugar naquele país desconhecido, custasse o que custasse.”
• 54
  In Portuguese: “os imigrantes que escolheram o Brasil o fizeram na esperança de encontrar para suas famílias melhores condições de vida (...) por isso, ao abandonar seu país de origem, não estavam abdicando de suas raízes, ao contrário, tentavam reproduzir seus costumes em um país tropical.”
• 55
  In Portuguese: “A saudade veio e tomou conta, as recordações se atropelaram e desfilaram diante de seus olhos doloridos com toda a intensidade que a lente da distância lhes dava (...) Natal e pátria associaram-se a tal ponto dentro da tristeza daquele dia, que se fosse possível usar de um passe de mágica para retornar à pátria distante, mesmo que fosse só por algumas horas, a algum recanto desconhecido, a alegria advinda de SABER que o chão pisado era o da Alemanha, mesmo que fosse apenas de algum lugar ermo do Tirol alemão ou do coração da Floresta Negra, essa alegria seria a maior de todas já experimentadas na vida. Voltar!”
• 56
  For reference, see footnote 6.
• 57
  In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays [for reference, see footnote 5], it is the text about time and space in Goethe’s works, where Bakhtin emphasizes “Goethe’s startling ability to see time in space. (…) Goethe had a keen eye for all visible markers and signs of time in nature. (…) He had an exceptionally keen insight into all visible signs of time in human life.” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.30-31) At the end of the text, Bakhtin insists on “the exceptional importance of the very problem of the assimilation of time in literature, and particularly in the novel.” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.54)
• 58
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 59
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 60
  In Portuguese: “ao tratarmos de questões identitárias dos imigrantes constatamos que é pela língua que os imigrantes guardavam os seus saberes, a sua história e os seus bens simbólicos.”
• 61
  Let us situate this: the Brazilian translation of this text emphasizes the word hoje in the title (as we can read in the title Os estudos literários hoje). It refers to a publication in 1970.
• 62
  For reference, see footnote 5.
• 63
  In Portuguese: “com bastante naturalidade, dentro de sensível otimismo, sadia felicidade, solidariedade e harmonia, mas sem cair no ingênuo simplismo.”
• 64
  In Portuguese: “Como livro de estreia, revela uma dependência quase total das técnicas narrativo-descritivas, constituindo-se no modo indireto, no resumo panorâmico, na narrativa sumária, técnica que acarreta um certo distanciamento da narrativa.”
• 65
  In Portuguese: “força de concepção, fôlego narrativo e uma rica e sadia cosmovisão por parte da autora.”
• 66
  In Portuguese: “Cronotopo e exotopia são dois conceitos de Bakhtin que falam da relação espaço-tempo. O primeiro foi concebido no âmbito estrito do texto literário; o segundo refere-se à atividade criadora em geral – inicialmente à atividade estética e, mais tarde, à atividade da pesquisa em Ciências Humanas.”
• 67
  In Portuguese: “Primeiro, o de tentar captar o olhar do outro, de tentar entender o que o outro olha, como o outro vê. Segundo, de retornar ao seu lugar, que é necessariamente exterior à vivência do retratado, para sintetizar ou totalizar o que vê, de acordo com seus valores, sua perspectiva, sua problemática.”
• 68
  For reference, see footnote 6.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Aug 2022
• Date of issue
  Jul-Sep 2022

History

• Received
  05 Dec 2021
• Accepted
  02 June 2022