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O "jogo de espelhos": religião, poder e sacralidade no romance "Memorial do Convento" The "game of mirrors": religion, power and sacredness in novel "Memorial do Convento"

2012; PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DE MINAS GERAIS; Volume: 10; Issue: 25 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5752/p.2175-5841.2012v10n25p278-297

2175-5841

Thiago Maerki de Oliveira,

Literature, Culture, and Criticism

When the more insightful reader takes a careful loo k at the details of a literary work, he realizes mechanisms that govern and organize the te xt with specifics goals for the arrangement of the narrative. In the novel Memoria l do Convento, by Jose Saramago, the relationship between literature and religion is one of such mechanisms, which becomes visible in the confrontation between sacred and pro fane, as well as in the reversal of their values and in the affinity between spiritual power and temporal power, resembling what Giacomo Marramao has defined as game of mirrors, i.e. the nationalization of the Church and the ecclesiastization of the State. Th e present text aims to investigate the status of the sacred and the relationship between the Chur ch and the Portuguese court in the 18th century, analyzing its implications in the literary narrative. This article is part of the current movement that Umberto Eco called “the come back to religious thought, one frenetic regress to everything that reports to the sacred, s omewhat that is in the countercurrent of Enlightenment scientism, explicitly bringing back t he question of God to literature.