Screams in the silence: "A Benfazeja", by Guimarães Rosa

Abstract

Starting from the premise of what silences permeate all the artistic species. The objective is to address this scientific craft of constructions of silence and to point out some possibilities of meaning, which we find presently so differently from “A Benfazeja”, that composes the book Primeiras estórias, by Guimarães Rosa (1985). The artistic text is the task of the narrator to seek out its essence, which reposes the exposed fates in a narrative impregnated with implied details and information. The images unseen, the fates, the actions, the reactions of the characters and the circumstances experienced by them, reveal sources of multiple meanings, which reside in the profusion of silences. The discussions are anchored in works related to silence undertaken by George Steiner (1988), Eni Orlandi (2007), Michele Perrot (2005), Tofalini (2020), among other scholars. It is expected to contribute to research on the occurrences of silence that appear in art and in life.