Two narratives about lampião: the critical and dissonant voice of Antônio Francisco

Abstract

In June 1927, the group of the cangaceiro Lampião tries to invade the city of Mossoró / RN, being rejected by the armed defense of the citizens organized by Mayor Rodolfo Fernandes. This historical fact has since then been widely represented by artists, whether popular or not. The event is also the subject of two strings of the mossoroense Antônio Francisco (1949). The author dialogues with the literary discursive tradition about the historical event, reinventing meanings usually attributed to what happened in 1927. From that, in a playful and inventive mirror game, Antônio Francisco builds his voracious critique of the present time, proposing a new observation about the past event as a point of questioning today, building a discordant discourse which both questions the interpretations of the past and the common perceptions of the present time. To development of this work, in a first moment I present the historical description, as normally made by historiographic records; I then proceed to an analysis of Antônio Francisco's writing in two strings: The saga of a mayor and the gang of Lampião (2011) and The attack of Mossoró to the gang of Lampião (2006). For such done, I seek to analyze the narratives trying to understand to what extent they constitute themselves as discourses dissonant in relation to the official version of the facts and to what extent they also lend themselves to the construction of a critique blunt to the current status quo. The work has the support provided by the theoretical concepts developed by Mikhail Bakhtin.