O espaço romanesco em narrativas ficcionais de Paulo Jacob: topoanálise e geograficidade

Abstract

This research studies the romanesque space in nine of the thirteen fictional narratives written by the novelist Paulo Jacob. One of the reasons for choosing this object lies in the fact that the writer adopted the Amazon not only as his lived space, but mainly as his locus of enunciation and as the fictional universe of his characters, which makes this spatial perspective a crucial structuring to access and understand his novels. The proposal brought refers to studies on the literary space category, exploring the interface between Literature and Geography, making use of all the contributions given by these two codes to the investigation of space in literary studies. The aim was to investigate what Paulo Jacob’s fictional narrative’s romanesque space had to reveal about the Amazon, specifically the following: a) to survey the literary topography of Jacobian fiction; b) examine the existential relationship of characters with places; c) describe aspects of Amazonian culture that appear linked to this spatial representation; d) find out what types of problems of place appear in these fictional narratives; e) understand how all this representation of the Amazon present in this romanesque space is related to Paulo Jacob as an author. The fulfillment of these objectives demanded an interdisciplinary incursion by a theoretical-methodological tool, where concepts of Topoanalysis and Cultural/Humanistic Geography, especially the romanesque space and geographicity, helped to constitute the field of argument and proved to be fundamental in the analysis of the research object. Now, given the complexity of the aesthetic object and the objectives outlined in this research, the literary analysis put in place overlapped the need to invest in the field of Sociology of Literature, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Theory of Romance, and Anthropology, without discard documentary research. The study was based on the following thesis: the analysis of the romanesque space can bring in description of places, sociocultural, existential aspects and problems of place linked to the Amazon and this representation is related to the author's geographicity, namely, his relationship with this region as his place of existence. In the end, the research pointed out the following: a) the hunger for space exhibited by Jacobian fiction, extending to the four corners of the State of Amazon and spreading through some others Brazilian states, is related to many places that the writer visited and decided to transform into fiction; b) many of the geographicities manifested by his characters are related to geographicities experienced by the author himself in the Amazon as his place of existence; c) the socio-cultural aspects and the problems of place presented in his work point, respectively, to an Amazonian culture that Paulo Jacob decided to divulge and to environmental issues in defense of which he chose to engage.