A poética de Manoel Camilo dos Santos: um diálogo entre a poesia popular do nordeste e a literatura culta

Abstract

The course of the Brazilian literature seems to have a negative focus on popular literature. There is an ambiguous feeling of rejection, resentment and nostalgia that permeates art and criticism, mainly, in the romantic manifestation that, for being the crucial moment of such contact, represented the sharpest cut of any influence from a popular tradition. In the movement preceding it, we detected the generalized criticism in which, if the canonical literature was focused on the analysis, the marginal literature was also experiencing a moment of opinions and theorizations which reached their main producers: the mixed-race people from the inner Northeastern Brazilian states. Our main focus in this study was to recreate, on the grounds of the popular literature, a dialogue with the erudite literature, which was taking shape in the poetical and critical speech. Thus, we selected a case of relevant expression: Manoel Camilo dos Santos. Together with this popular phenomenon, there were pleasant surprises, for its complex production shows, from the most ordinary manifestation, a constant dialogue with the erudite literature. This author's body of work may be reviewed in its several forms: the pamphlets; the works in verse and prose in the Autobiografia do poeta (1979); the paratextual elements in the inside covers, which in addition to evidencing a different use, also evidenced the use of renown strategies towards the pamphlet readers, but, mainly, towards the erudite audience which might read his pamphlets; and finally, O livro dos sete episódios de Manoel Camilo dos Santos, a manuscript belonging to the collection of the Brazilian Academy of Cordel Literature, dated 1985 that has never been published.