Birds, Rivers, Book

Abstract

In his only novel, Grande sertão: veredas (1956), João Guimarães Rosa combines a detailed, complex exploration of the physical characteristics, fauna, and flora of the region where the novel is set with a keen concern about the acts of narrating and reading. As this article argues, both preoccupations find points of intersection in the very materiality of the book: in its long length, lack of internal subdivisions, and labyrinthine narration. At the same time, elements of this landscape, most notably its rivers and birds, metaphorically shape the novel’s approach to narration and the modalities of reading it encourages. By bringing together ecocriticism and narrative theory, this article proposes that Grande sertão: veredas explores a material facet of mimesis, through which the materiality of the book, the problems of narration and reading, and the natural elements of the sertão mirror each other and multiply the mimetic density of the work.