Canudos and end-of-the-century republican media

the reading gestures of Euclides da Cunha and Machado de Assis

Abstract

The article revisits guiding principles of Reception Aesthetics, aiming to highlight the ideas of reading as a creative process that depends on the reader’s imagination and horizon of expectations as a set of previous references that guide the meanings attributed to texts. It then addresses Chartier’s point of view, critical of phenomenological theories and proponent of the ideas of reading communities, paradigms and reading gestures. Based on such theoretical references, the aim was to outline the republican and patriotic reading paradigm of the literate communities that learned about Canudos through the news disseminated by the main media at the end of the 19th century: the press and telegraphs. We then identify two reading gestures about the movement led by Antonio Conselheiro: that of Euclides da Cunha and that of Machado de Assis. We observe that while the latter, distrusting what he reads, diverges from the interpretative paradigms of the literate elite, the former aligns itself with them, reproducing many of the stereotypes attributed to Antonio Conselheiro and his followers. We conclude that, in Os sertões, the republican reading paradigm is contradicted by the experience of the reality of Canudos, but the scientificist reading paradigm is maintained as an interpretative lens for
the social phenomenon witnessed. It is clear that the popular movement led by Antonio Conselheiro was decoded by an urban reading community, with little or no experience of life in the backlands, but which was forming a prejudiced reading paradigm about what was happening in the unknown parts of Brazil. Before his book changed the perception of what was happening in the backlands, however, Euclides himself shared the horizon of expectations formed by the urban, literate and patriotic class, about what was understood as a monarchist rebellion against the Republic.