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Ashley Brock
João Guimarães Rosa's 1956 novel Grande sertāo: veredas has informally been called the original Brokeback Mountain, referring to Ang Lee's critically acclaimed "gay cowboy" film (2005), based on the 1997 short story by Julie Prouett. Though the analogy between the notoriously difficult Brazilian classic and the Hollywood film is generally made tongue-in-cheek, it is not entirely baseless, especially if we consider that the only English-language translation to date transposes Rosa's masterpiece into the world of the western. Grande sertāo: veredas is at its core a tragic love story between two jagunços (cowboy-bandits); like Lee's film, it relates a prohibited romance, which flourishes in the utopic promise of remote, natural spaces where societal norms are not enforced. Lest we make too much of the comparison, it is important to point out that Lee's film, which has been championed by gay rights groups, deploys the pathos of its storyline to denounce homophobic violence as well as the violence of internalized homophobia turned back on the self. In contrast, the politics of Grande sertāo: veredas are far less legible, owing to its anti-realist aesthetics and far more ambiguous, owing to the novel's many contradictions as well as the internalized patriarchal values of its narrator-protagonist, Riobaldo. Nevertheless, in this article I contend that the radically nonlinear form of Grande sertāo: veredas begets an equally radical political project: its recursive, melancholic narrative structure queers the linear temporality of heteronormative subjectivity and of the novel.
