O recado do Morro: profecia e redenção

Inscribed in the spatial referent of the hinterlandish landscape, the fictional narrative of “O Recado do Morro”, by João Guimarães Rosa, grounds its diegetic progression in the pivotal mytheme of the journey. Stemming from the specific circumstance of a travelling, in an indefinite “july-august” (11), endeavored by a five-men delegation (the pedestrian guide Pedro Orósio, three bosses, seo Alquiste, Friar Sinfrão, and seo Jujuca do Açude, besides the rider Ivo da Tia Merência), from the “backgrounds of the municipality”, in Cordisburgh, via the harsh coordinates of the hinterland, the crossing motto gives a poetic pretext for the recount of man’s personal wandering in the magical cartography of the return to himself. Filtered by an utterly subjective angle consistent with the narrative perspectivization, the supernatural instance of the voice of the Morro das Garças stands out in this expressive framework, thanks to the intensity of its poetic message; passed on by an extensive gallery of other dramatic agents, in a symbolic sequence of seven distorting echoes, the message projectively prepares the moments when the plot progresses and obliquely enunciates the signals of the hero’s punishment and redemption. The symbolic grounding of this story is based
on a complex network of intertextual references, wherein many of the echoes of the Greek, Latin and Biblical traditions are discernible. The goal of this paper is, then, to offer the hermeneutics of such echoes.