As voltas do círculo mágico: uma leitura de Fronteira, de Cornélio Penna

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyse the first novel published by Cornélio Penna, in 1935, Fronteira. Starting from the assessment that the novel is included in the topos of the manuscript found, it is highlighted the engendering of fiction in the manuscript, which refers to its pages as belonging to a diary entrusted to a compiler, it distances from the novelistic and precisely in doing so, falls into this genre by this irony in the "Epilogue" written by the compiler. The relief of this game set within the fictional emulation requires the analysis of the genre of the diary by the novel at the same time that it retains some of its basic characteristics, ultimately giving it another tone by the novelistic circunscription that is presented. The fact it is a diary alerts to a reading that considers the "I" who writes its pages as the fragmented subjectivity that is exposed, more than his version of the "facts", the unique perspective through which the world he inhabits is conceived, the economic decline of a mining town in Minas Gerais. The perspective of "I" in the novel opens up space to see the present of this narrative as a nightmare, dreamlike place of punishment for crimes committed in the collective past of the city, this nightmare sustained by the constant interdiction perpetrated of the patriarchal order, yet holding the animism of a hostile nature of the colonizer, the mansion that is the center of the narrative, seems alive through the ancestors and fixes under its internal thresholds, the trangressions of the oppressive order, and the subjectivities shattered by the conjunction between the capitalist economic model and the archaic order of patriarchy, the subjectivities that, ultimately, are shown as automatons controlled by the order that oppresses them.