1. Narrator
The short story belongs to the work Sagarana, which brings together nine tales featuring the basic themes of João Guimarães Rosa: adventure, death, animals personified as humans, and subjective, spiritualist reflections. Five of them - O burrinho pedrês, Duelo, São Marcos, A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga, and Corpo fechado - bring to the backlands of Minas Gerais the adventures of ancient epic or heroic stories.
The narrator of the Sagarana tales often characterizes the stories he tells as folklore, inserting popular quatrains and giving them an epic and/or fairy tale tone. The omniscient narrator of the third-person stories [O burrinho pedrês, A volta do
marido pródigo, Sarapalha, Duelo, Conversa de bois, and A hora e a vez de Augusto Matraga] is intentionally relativized, giving voice and enchantment to the narratives and accentuating their mythical and poetic dimension. Filled with stories within stories, philosophical digressions, and interior monologues that unveil the world of men, beasts, and things, the Sagarana tales allow us a kind of initiation ritual throughout the reading. This initiation occurs if we can understand them in their symbology, in the illogical, magical, mythical, and poetic worldview that profoundly humanizes the protagonists - seemingly just sertanejos from the Gerais - and universalizes the sertão. The
sertão is the world, says Riobaldo in Grande sertão: veredas. We can say the same of Sagarana, as we will see in the following tale.
2. Plot
Through the summary of the plot and the general commentary, you will be able to perceive the grandeur and cohesion of the addressed theme.
The Time and Turn of Augusto Matraga
Augusto Matraga is a violent and drunken farmer, a troublemaker and a bohemian, who disrespects people and his family. His wife, Dinorá, endures him out of fear of his reaction if she tries to separate. His daughter, in turn, cannot understand why her father acts this way.
Matraga's life changes after an ambush he suffers. Believed dead, his wife and daughter leave with Ovídio Moura, who wants Dinorá as his companion. Augusto Matraga, dying, is rescued by a Black couple, who manage the miracle of keeping him alive despite his injuries.
When he recovers, Augusto goes far away with the couple, trying to set his lost and disorderly life on the right path. He then undergoes a period of asceticism, seeking suffering as a way to purge his sins.
After dedicating himself to work for a long time, without comfort or entertainment, Matraga decides to return, having heard that his wife was happy with Ovídio, but his daughter had become a prostitute.
On his journey, he meets again the bandit leader Joãozinho Bem-Bem, whom he had hosted in his house and with whom he had become friends.
But Augusto and the bandit leader have a falling out because the latter wanted revenge for the death of a henchman and, in the killer's absence, intended to kill someone from his family. Matraga finds this unjust and confronts his relative Joãozinho Bem-Bem.
At the end of the story, both die, but Augusto dies with the sense of a duty fulfilled.
3. General Commentary
The Time and Turn of Augusto Matraga is, ultimately, a story of redemption and spirituality, a story of conversion.
Throughout his plot, the protagonist, Augusto Matraga, goes from evil to good, from perdition to salvation. The agent of this passage is the bandit Joãozinho Bem-Bem. We can associate him with the saying: God writes straight with crooked lines, because it is the wicked Joãozinho Bem-Bem who allows
Matraga's glorious and salvific death. The duality between good and evil seems to mark this world of bandits and landowners, in which there is the possibility of conversion when the right time and turn comes for people, as happened with Matraga.
4 - Language
It is not surprising that Guimarães Rosa's language is compared or associated with the Baroque style, as in both we find wordplay, the playful, almost childish pleasure of puns, unexpected associations of images, and the sonic and poetic work with prose.
The punctuation in Guimarães Rosa's sentences is also linked to this playful concern with language, reminiscent of the Baroque style: it always seeks to associate wordplay with the elements of the narrative [characters, narrator, plot, etc.]. With punctuation, he seeks a rhythm that can only be found in the poetry of the sertão, in the march of cattle drives, in the slow and imperceptible passage of time, in the beating of parakeet wings, in the sinuous sway of buriti leaves.
Guimarães Rosa is, in conclusion, the creator of a work in which elements of popular culture and erudite culture blend to reinvent the strength of the sertanejo and Mineiro language. Knowledgeable of at least eighteen languages, alongside words he brings from the sertanejo vocabulary, there are several constructions imported from Latin, French, English, and German in his books. Few have the capacity to combine the erudition of philosophical reflections with the transposition of the popular imagination, without demeaning the former and simplifying the latter.
Question
1. In The Time and Turn of Augusto Matraga, we know that the protagonist undergoes a great transformation throughout the story. What transformation is it and what are its consequences for the character?
From a bohemian and violent man who mistreated his wife, daughter, and all those around him, Augusto Matraga transforms into a penitent, a sinner seeking asceticism, conversion to God's world. The significance of this transformation is crucial to the overall context
of Sagarana, as this work thematizes exactly good and evil, chance, miracles, physics, and the encounters and misadventures of man in the mythological universe of the sertão.
