Chuva branca: rastreando a Biblioteca Amazônica em um romance de Paulo Jacob

Abstract

Chuva branca is the novel of greater repercussion of the Jew Amazonian Paulo Jacob, greeted with enthusiasm by authors such as Jorge Amado, Antônio Olinto, and Assis Brasil. It was the work through which Paulo Jacob achieved to overcome some regional barriers and made an appearance at a national level. Based on documentary regionalism, he represents a typology of Amazonian man from his disappointments and his fight against poverty, from his beliefs and culture. This research, when investigating the intertextuality, has as its general objective to track an Amazonian library which should have exercised power of modeling over the writing for Chuva branca, as well as trying showing specifically: that the themes about Amazon reality which appear with expressiveness come from the Amazon riverside, that is, man in Amazon, poverty, imagery, sacred, and indigenous culture; that, although intertexts cannot always be of easy detection, it is possible to make inter-textual relations with works belonging to the Amazon library, probable readings of Paulo Jacob, as in the case of some works linked to Sociology and Anthropology; that Paulo Jacob’s discursive construction, by trying to represent the man in Amazon from his dramas and fights, ended up having documentary nature with the objective of divulgating the culture and showing a significant part of an isolated and unknown region; that reading Chuva branca nowadays, about 50 years later, it known that between the novel’s horizon of expectation and our reading there are profound economic, historic, and social changes that took place not only in Amazon reality but also in world reality. This fact shows that the Amazon which was represented in Chuva branca is certainly less isolated and rural, as well as is permeated by technology and by the urbanization, and the reader’s look about the novel, while going through the timeframe, was renovated. It has to be said that my research is substantiated on the aesthetic reception theory, linked to Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser, its main exponents. Obviously, the research do not remain itself within all limits of methodology suggested by this theory, but relates to it through some key concepts, such as horizon of expectation and fusion of horizons. Finally, I defend that what some author of the Amazonian library, such as sociologists and anthropologists, make with their sciences with respect to the documentation of the Amazonian man and his conditions, Paulo Jacob makes it through the representation, through the discursive construction, and his characters. He ends up divulgating to Brazil a significant part of its own face.