Tragic Music in the Backlands: Sound and Landscape in Ricardo Guilherme Dicke
Ricardo Guilherme Dicke; Narrative; Madona dos Páramos; “Toada do Esquecido”; Sounds; The Tragic.
Presented to the Graduate Program in Literary Studies at the Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso, Tangará da Serra campus, this research aims to undertake a critical reading of sound in the constitution of Ricardo Guilherme Dicke’s narratives, considering it as a link between the backlands and humankind. Amid a substantial body of works, two are selected as objects of study: the novel Madona dos Páramos (1981) and the short story “Toada do esquecido” (2006). The central focus is to trace the course of the toadas in the backlands, in light of the Nietzschean philosophical perspective of the tragic, and to examine how they are employed in the construction of literary space. The investigation of the selected works centers on paths and mispaths between silences and sounds produced by human beings or captured from the backlands, with their winds, songs, and noises. The study also seeks to expand the critical fortune of a writer whose work is regarded as dense and complex. As for the specific objectives, the research intends to: investigate the resources employed by Dicke to create a sonic world around his characters; analyze being, the backlands, and music through their tragic dimensions; and compare the two narratives, which present, amid certain similarities in plot construction, a foreshadowing of destiny. This is a qualitative study, since the investigation seeks to examine the resources employed by the writer to construct a sonic layer that envelops the characters in a paradoxical journey of flight and search within the world/backlands. Throughout its course, the research relates Dicke’s work to the development of a Nietzschean tragedy, considering dramatic elements such as revenge, betrayal, hatred, passions, ceremonies, mysteries, and deaths—recurring themes that are transformed into songs transfiguring the pains of body and soul. In addressing questions related to literary studies, the research draws on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1992), Octavio Paz (1976), Alfredo Bosi (1977), Gaston Bachelard (2000; 2010), José Miguel Wisnik (1989), Martin Heidegger (2005; 2011), Antonio Candido (2006), among others deemed necessary for the composition of this research corpus.