S. Bernardo, by Graciliano Ramos from the perspective of Émile Benveniste’s notion of time

Abstract

This article examines the manifestation of the time of enunciation and the time of the enunciated in the novel S. Bernardo, by Graciliano Ramos, published in 1934. It starts with a literary analysis of the work, highlighting its most relevant aspects for this study. In order to understand the meaning(s) of the work, we briefly look at the writer’s biography and the history of the time in which he lived, as required by Émile Benveniste in his theory. Before the linguistic analysis, chapter four of Benveniste’s Problemas de linguística geral II (1974), “A linguagem e a experiência humana”, is explored. With the categories of person and time in mind and an understanding of what enunciation and enunciated are, in the linguist’s view, the focus is on the language of the work or of the narrator and character Paulo Honório, linked to time. To this end, the chapters XIX and XXXVI of the novel are mainly investigated. We see the alternation of times according to the narrator’s need to tell what is happening to him at the moment of writing the novel we are reading or what has already happened. In chapter XIX, however, the narrator is in a state of delirium, so he uses either the enunciation or the enunciated time.