ALVES, Gliverton Almeida.
Abstract:
The objective of this work is to confront the diverse representations about the cangaço in
the cordel leaflets produced in Brazil throughout the 20th century, particularly those woven
around the emblematic figure of Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, better known as Lampião.
Cordel literature is characterized as a poetry in verses that rhyme with each other and
elaborate a narrative. In the first decades of the twentieth century the cordel leaflets spread
in the urban centers and backlands of Brazil, bringing news and opinions of the poets about
the events that appeared on the pages of the newspapers, as well as public opinion. Thus
the string has a double perspective: to report what happened and, at the same time, to bring
the author's point of view in the poem which, in turn, translates to the verses the opinion of
the readers. In order to attract a greater number of readers and to guarantee the acceptance
of their books, the cordel poets usually convey the opinion of the readers of their texts and,
for this reason, cordel literature has become one of the most widespread genres in the
country, When it came to be recognized as "the art of the people" (GRILLO, 2005). As a
literature, the string necessarily has no obligation to reproduce "what happened, but
through the imagination tell a story, mixing fiction and reality. That is why the cord is
justified as a privileged source of the historian to gain access to thought, to the point of
view, and to the social representations that circulate in a given moment. In this sense,
cordel literature has an extremely significant corpus of leaflets, ranging from those who
daily report "the steps" of the cangaceiros, to those produced after the end of the
movement, when the poets give vent to the popular imagination. The historical
documentation that underlies this work was made from the collection of leaflets written on
the cangaço in Brazil from 1905 when the poet Francisco das Chagas Batista (1882-1930)
published the string The Life of Antônio Silvino (1905). Since then the poets have been
narrating the exploits performed by the cangaceiros, sometimes representing these subjects
as "bandits", sometimes as "heroes", when poets put their characters in heaven or in hell.
The documentation consulted for this research is available in the digital collections of the
National Center of Folklore and Popular Culture and in Casa Rui Barbosa. Initially, 73
(seventy three) leaflets were identified, of which 14 (fourteen) were selected for this work.
From the theoretical point of view, this research identifies itself with the perspectives of
Cultural History from the studies that problematize the relations between history, literature
and collective memory (CHARTIER 1990, 1995, CERTEAU, 1995).
