Língua é realidade: Vilém Flusser e a obra de Guimarães Rosa
This essay examines the dialogue established between Vilém Flusser and João Guimarães Rosa around the conception of language as the creator of reality. In this text, we discuss elements of this dialogue, We consider how the two authors understand language and how this understanding appears expressed in their works, based on essays and testimonies given by both. In this relationship between these two authors and friends, the works’ interrelation is given from the Flusser’s point of view, in his account of the profound impact of Guimarães Rosa’s literature on Flusser, who wrote several essays on it, and in seeing the experience of his own ideas about the language in Rosa’s work.
A dimensão da escrita em Vilém Flusser e Guimarães Rosa
Vilém Flusser wrote about the Brazilian modernist author João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) who he met personally. Although most of Guimarães Rosa’s work had been written before their meeting, Flusser’s thinking might have influenced his writing. In 1961, Guimarães Rosa published the short story Fita verde no cabelo and Flusser wrote an article about it. Both texts were published the same year in the Literary Supplement of O Estado de São Paulo. The essay focuses on questions of style as well as on the cultural and etymological references of the two writers.
A natureza de Vilém Flusser: experiências limites
In the book O mundo codificado, Vilém Flusser claims that the purpose of life is to make us forget the lack of sense in life, which constantly moves us towards death. We are subjected to it in nature's domain. According to Flusser, human communication is unnatural given that its goal was once to organize and store information. However, we ask, is it really possible to oppose culture and nature as entropy and negentropy, the given and the constructed? This article discusses the concept of nature proposed by Vilém Flusser in relation to the representations of nature in the works of the writer Guimarães Rosa and of the botanist C.F.P. Von Martius.
“O Ser que nega”
The article develops the Flusserian metaphor of the mirror as a being who denies, by relating it to the short stories of Machado de Assis and Guimarães Rosa, which have “The Mirror” as their title. The mirror of these three writers, just as their fiction or their philosophical fiction, denies reality to propose an alternative reality. The article also shows how the thinking of Vilém Flusser is connected with the fiction of God built by civilization, with the God of fiction as He appears in literature.