ERICO VERISSIMO AND PEPETELA: DIFFERENT LITERARY TRAJECTORIES THAT CONVERGE

Abstract

The literary projects of the novelists Erico Verissimo and Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, known as Pepetela, affiliate themselves with the tradition of social intervention literature, in the same manner as it was configured in the 20th century, as they comprise an ethical project faithful to their world views and their social and human commitments, which is intensified by the aesthetic project that accompanies it. In this sense, there are ideological and aesthetic affinities between the two novelists with the confluence, on the ideological plane, of the humanist ideology and the social and human commitment that both present in their literary projects, and on the aesthetic plane, of the similarity between the narrative structures of their founding novels (the trilogy O tempo e o vento, by Erico Verissimo, and Yaka and Lueji, by Pepetela), due to the fact that the two writers use common themes and narrative strategies, such as the family saga, metafiction, counterpoint narrative technique and polyphony. Thus, we believe that the ideological affinity between Pepetela and Erico Verissimo led the Angolan writer to incorporate into his literary project some thematic and formal elements used by the Brazilian, according to the concept of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva (1974), who conceives the writing of a literary text as a reading of the preceding corpus. However, the relationship between them is based not only on the similarity in their common traits, but also on the differences that exist between their works and between their literary projects.