Allegory and utopia in O Romance d’A Pedra do Reino, by Ariano Suassuna

Abstract

This article focuses on the Romance d’A Pedra do Reino e o príncipe do sangue do vaie-volta, a novel by the Brazilian writer Ariano Suassuna, and explores the relation between its genre and its content. Analyzing the presence in the text of millenarian and messianic ideas, related to “Sebastianism”, we reveal the importance of a complex allegorical system in this narrative. In spite of referring to a future and idealized reality, such ideas are used as an allegory to an aesthetic evasion through literature, that amounts to creating an utopian world-vision. Hence the use of the genre of “anatomy” (FRYE, 2014) as a way of exploring all the dimensions of this idea.