As paisagens literárias da Zona da Mata Mineira nas narrativas de Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation examines the construction of the literary landscape of the Zona da Mata region of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the narratives of Luiz Ruffato. It focuses on characters in transit, particularly in the works published between 2007 and 2019: De mim já nem se lembra (2007), Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2009), Flores artificiais (2014), Inferno provisório (2016), and O verão tardio (2019). The central premise is that the literary landscape of Minas Gerais has historically privileged the particularities of the Gold Region, Belo Horizonte, and the Sertão (wilderness). In this context, which is marked by the predominance of Minas (mines) over Gerais (general), Ruffato’s work articulates a historical-literary representation of the Zona da Mata, thereby contesting the hegemonic spatial narrative of Minas Gerais forged by the elites and granting visibility to a peripheral and undervalued region in the literary imagination. His narratives portray characters intrinsically tied to these peripheral regions, who are trapped in a cycle of departure and frustrating return, generating a sense of stagnation that resonates with the author’s literary practice and the “landscape-thinking” constructed for the reader. The analysis is grounded in the intersection of literary studies and geography, with particular emphasis on the motivations underlying mobility and their relations with landscapes of routine, anti-routine, and memory. Within this framework, the concept of landscape—understood in both its material and symbolic dimensions—is employed as a key analytical category. The study of the mobility of 47 characters of Italian immigrant descent across 23 cities of the Zona da Mata identified nine main routes of connection among these localities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The research argues that the romantic lament of the elites over the loss of status in the representation of other regions is reinterpreted in Ruffato’s discourse on the Zona da Mata Mineira as an inevitable consequence of progress. This transition is revealed through the intrinsic connection between “environment” and “being,” evidenced in elements such as the functionality of living and working spaces, the chaos of displacements, and the hierarchization of services within the region’s historicity. Although rooted in the regional context of the Zona da Mata, Ruffato’s work transcends the local, employing it as a microcosm to address universal questions concerning the human condition and Brazil’s history. By centering the perspectives of historically marginalized characters, the author fills a gap in the literature of Minas Gerais and offers a critical and multifaceted understanding of the state’s social and historical realities.