From father to son: Transmission, permanence and change in “The third bank of the river”

Abstract

The paper reflects on the “chains of transmission” in the narratives of Guimarães Rosa. It deals, from this perspective, with the “causos” (tales) narrated orally by backcountry travelers in the store of Mr. Florduardo Rosa, father of the writer, which were conveyed to him in their correspondence and which he later recast in his stories. The processes of permanence and change in this chain of transmission (which includes the literary work and the readers) are brought to bear on the disruptions in the transmission between father, son, story and its readers in the short story “The third bank of the river”. The argument uses a reference taken from the “psychoanalysis of bonds”, which conceives the family as a privileged space for the transmission of messages between generations. Based on this theoretical framework, we propose that the indecipherable message bequeathed by the father – the reason for him abandoning his family and isolating himself in the canoe, without actually going anywhere – might have silenced the son, but become a narrative, shifting the chain of transmission from the son to the literary text and its readers.