As fontes da solidão: ensaios literários

Abstract

The texts that make up ‘The Sources of Solidarity: Essays’, nine selected essays, reveal as a whole the exact dimension of the writer Juarez da Gama Batista, his thematic preferences, the extraordinary erudition of the broad theoretical information, the support of his critical advice, the boldness of his very personal interpretations and the construction of the style that is the greatest feature of his authenticity. The criterion was to give priority to what was unpublished, such as the essay ‘Who’s Afraid of Gilberto Freyre’, which, although it won the 1973 Geraldo de Andrade award from the Pernambuco Academy of Letters, was only distributed among a few students and friends in mimeographed copies. The object of reading for the essay is ‘Ordem e Progresso’, but the conclusions extend to ‘Casa Grande e Senzala’ and ‘Sobrados e Mucambos’, highlighting in Gilberto Freyre the vigorous scientific, reforming and creative thought alongside the highest literary expression, thesis made explicit by the process of comparison, with the interpretation of universal literature and by the constitution of sociological essays in which the detail assumes the casual and revealing importance of points of connection between things and gives an absurd, immediate, natural, pulsating sense of life to everything that happens.