SUFFOCATION AMONG THE HEIGHTS ON “PÁRAMO” BY GUIMARÃES ROSA

This article proposes an interpretation of the tale entitled “Páramo” by the Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa. The tale was published post mortem, with the first edition released in 1969. Years after his experience in Germany, the author leads the reader to the heart of a traumatic memory: an encounter with death. Yes, an “encounter with death. Not final death – equestrian, Grim Reaper, skinny and so unsettling, but the other one, that one”. Death in the tale appears as psychological suffering (pathos) intensely experienced through soroche – altitude sickness – due to the thin air at high altitudes, but also through the deep depression experienced upon that period of thriving authoritarianism (ethos) in 1 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001). “Páramo”, In Estas Estórias, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2001, p. 261290. The first edition dates from 1969, published posthumously in volume edited by Paulo Rónai e Vilma Guimarães Rosa. 2 Gisálio Cerqueira Filho sociologist and political scientist is a Doctor of Political Science from the University of São Paulo (USP) and Titular Professor of Political Theory at Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Niterói, Brazil. Senior researcher at the UFF “Laboratório Cidade e Poder” [City and Political Power Laboratory], a member of the University Association for Research in Fundamental Psychopathology (AUPPF) of the National History Association (ANPUH-Brasil), of the Brazilian Association of Political Science (ABCP) and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL). Editor of Passagens. International Journal on Political History and Legal Culture http://www.historia.uff.br/revistapassagens/ E-mail: gisalio@superig.com.br 3 Term in Spanish used to refer to bleak uplands. It is also sometimes used more narrowly to refer to the northern Andes of South America and adjacent southern Central America, and in Portuguese figuratively refers to the heavens and the sense of a summit or highest point. Passagens. International Journal of Political History and Lega l Culture Rio de Janeiro: vol. 5, n o2, May-August, 2013, p. 168-205. 169 wartime Germany, expressed in countless genocidal killings. The approach proposes an intertwining of history, political culture and the clinical method.

In Hamburg, Guimarães Rosa and Aracy had already both separated from their former spouses. After the war, both had married by proxy in Mexico and soon after, Guimarães Rosa was summoned to Bogota, Colombia. Since 1946, the author had come to dedicate himself to literature. "Magma" [Magma] was published in 1936, and coinciding with the end of the war, came "Sagarana" 10  and, by extension, an osmosis between mythology and morals, between speaking and writing and between past and present" 11 . We believe that the expression "osmosis" used here refers to a reciprocal exchange between aesthetics, ethics and nature, despite the fact that the metaphor reveals a certain naturalism which is a biologist's in nature and with which the social may be being referred to.
"Páramo", however, was published post-mortem and first released in 1969. Years after his experience in Germany, the author leads the reader to the heart of a traumatic memory: an encounter with death 12 . Yes, an "encounter with death. Not final deathequestrian, Grim Reaper, skinny and so unsettling, but the other one, that one" 13 .
Death in the tale appears as psychological suffering (pathos) intensely experienced through soroche 14 -altitude sickness -due to the thin air at high altitudes, but also through the deep depression (deep pression) 15 experienced upon that period of thriving authoritarianism (ethos) of wartime Germany 16 , expressed in countless genocidal killings. . This article shall take the writing and the trauma of the characters as sources of observation for the concepts of ethos and pathos, referring to the experience of the central protagonist.
This enlightenment which soaks up a person's character by means of a funereal anxiety was not unfamiliar to Guimarães Rosa. In "Meu tio o Iauaretê" 18 , the Brazilian author had narrated the story of a mixed-race man of indigenous and Caucasian descent and his exemplary fate; "a farmer's assistant who has been sent to 'desonçar' 19 the far edges of the Brazilian backlands alone, comes to gradually reject civilisation and recognise himself in animals. He ends up preferring jaguars to humans, becoming a jaguar himself and killing humans" 20 The natural completely consumes him 21 .
Ethos is the sociological construct for humans' social nature, referring to both community and society. In this particular case, it refers to the characteristic features of those who live in the Brazilian backlands, but who also transcend them: features which refer to customs, culture, ideology -in short, the symbolic. They also undoubtedly speak to social identity. Greek in origin, the expression ethos also refers to ethics; ethics from the perspective of values, habits, customs and laws. For Max Weber (1864Weber ( -1920, for example, the bourgeois ethos should be treated as a flaw or duty, and, in this case, related to the capitalist Protestant ethic. For Georg Simmel (1858Simmel ( -1918, social institutions and territory are highlighted in the formation of a society's ethos. The ethos always has an accentuated normative character. Pathos is a psychological construct for humans' psychological nature. It represents suffering, affective experiences, the emotions. The protagonist of "Páramo" accepts suffering as an unavoidable plight, an unappealable condemnation, although for an unknown reason. "Debilitated and alone, having become 17 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit, p. 262. 18 "My Uncle the Jaguar" is the English title with "lauaretê" meaning "true jaguar" in the language of the native Tupi people of Brazil. 19 The verb "desonçar" refers to the idea of freeing an area of jaguars, to "de-jaguar" an area. 20 Veja-se Campos, Haroldo de (1970). "A linguagem do Iauretê". In Metalinguagem, 2. ed., Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 1970, p. 47-53. 21 Almeida, Leonardo Vieira de (2011). Veredas do Grande Conto: a descoberta do sertão em Guimarães Rosa,p. 99. wholly vulnerable, unable to resort to some invisible support, one sees oneself compelled to this too-quick path which is suffering" 22 . Pathos is also an expression which is Greek in origin, and speaks to the imaginary, to feelings, to the unconscious emotions, to the affections and passions which mark and differentiate men and women from the Brazilian backlands as well as being a metaphor for deepest Brazil. Pathos is evocative of a suffering implied in feeling the pain present in the body and in the imagination. We intend to demonstrate here how to articulate ethos and pathos as specific constructs in "Páramo" based on the clinical method. Fundamental psychopathology, in proposing that pathos comes from outside and from far away, assumes an intimate articulation with ethos. This is particularly evident, for example, in Freud's works on war neurosis or traumatic neurosis.
The notions of observation and nature which govern the clinical method certainly include both concepts.
We may say that humans possess subjectivity and a psychological apparatus which features an unconscious dimension. The dynamic of this phenomenon is governed by pathos (suffering, passion, passivity), by affection. However, affection should not be simply confused with emotion. Affection contains emotion, without being reduced to it. Affection is a force, an intensely excessive passion. In Manoel Berlinck's words, pathos is an "afetão" 23 , or in other words, that which touches and alters the subject 24 . Not all emotions provoke this change. In this sense, pathos designates the experience of that which is lived.
It is a transitory state. We may then say that Fundamental Psychopathology is a discourse on affection, a passion which is lived through experience 25 .
The essay entitled "Transference Neurosis: A Synthesis", written by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939 between 1914 and 1915 but only discovered after his death and published in 1987, develops a theoretical construction founded both on a myth and a poetic epic, for the origins of psychoanalytical psychopathology from a phylogenetic perspective, coinciding with human subjectivity. Freud presents his concept that the human psyche is psychopathological based on the ice age catastrophe. He claims that the history of the development of sexual energy, known as libido, repeats a part of phylogenetic development much older than that of the self. He then goes on to speculate that what 22 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit., p. 262. 23 A "big affection". 24 Berlinck, Manoel Tosta (Org) (2005). Obsessiva Neurose, São Paulo: Escuta. 25 Rodrigues, Márcia Barros Ferreira (2008). Ethos e Pathos: Violência e Poder em Casa Grande & Senzala, de Gilberto Freyre. Postdoctoral research (Universidade Federal Fluminense-UFF), Supervisor Prof. Gisálio Cerqueira Filho, Niterói. today are neuroses were once phases of human development. The ice age thus threatened the survival of the species which found in transference neurosis creative forms of protection against this threat and which came to constitute the human psyche. For Freud, at least in this significant text, there is no way of separating body and psyche, especially not in distinguishing between subjectivity and psychopathology. There also is no reason to assume that psychopathological manifestations are not also somatic or different from subjectivity. For Freud, hysteria, perversion and obsession etc, are modes of subjectivity, or rather, subjectivities, as the subject is only constituted by this means. This is why it is possible to speak of a fundamental psychopathology, because what does not establish subjectivity by means of psychopathology produces extermination. Or in other words, our subjectivity has somewhat been constructed through fear 26 . From the perspective of the self, Freudian subjectivity would immediately refer to the strand of psychopathology known as fundamental, unlike the other, psychiatry, which is known as general psychopathology. Thus, from the Freudian perspective, subjectivity is only manifested by means of psychopathology, distancing it from Cartesian rationalism. In any case, the more primitive the passion (pathos), the more the patient finds themselves at the mercy of an action which originates in the Other 27 .
We wish to study the articulation between these two features (pathos and ethos) referred to in "Páramo" as a metaphor for the circumstances experienced in Germany by João Guimarães Rosa and upon his arrival in Bogota, where he would perform the diplomatic role of second secretary at the Brazilian Embassy in Colombia. This undoubtedly deals with a more complex understanding of historic temporality inspired by a diachronic vision (suggested by Walter Benjamin) accentuating "the idea of the survival (Nachleben) of topics and images from the past by means of an empathetic or pathetic sensitive relationship (Pathosfornel) as a project carried out by Aby Warburg in "The Birth of Venus and the Spring of Sandro Botticelli", published in 1891" 28 . Warburg's project is complex, demonstrating imagination and an eye for detail. His method is comparable to [...] detective work on the history of culture in the details and intertwining of times, plays of differences, returns and anachronisms which follow something like an incessant trace, more inconstant than the coming and going of waves on the margins of time. As he said of God, time is also hidden in the details. One must insist on the search. Although cited with reverence and much referred to, Warburg's works remain relatively unread. His writing is both stunning and labyrinthine. It has been said of his publications that each page corresponds to five hundred manuscripts, thousands of notes and hundreds of books read 29 .
Finally, if the methodology to be employed is that of the clinical method, known as When interpreting the discourse of the Other, it must also be taken into account just how much this Other accepts the said interpretation. Very often, it is true that the nonacceptance of the interpretation appears as resistance. But when this Other does not have an alternative to the interpretation proposed, we are always faced with the enigma of having… no interpretation. And here the most acute challenges to innovation occur for studies on human beings. Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan showed how the very construction of observation is a long path in the direction of the word and language 31 . 29 Reguera, Isidoro (2010). "Abby Warburg: Inventor del museo virtual". In El Pais, Babelia, Madrid, n. 962, 01 maio. See also Didi-Huberman, Georges (2009). La imagen supervi vi ente,, Madrid: Editorial Abada. 30 Sobral, Luis Felipe (2012). "No rastro de Piero". In Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais -RBCS, São Paulo, v. 27 n. 79, p. 220. 31 Heidegger, Martin (2003). A caminho da linguagem, Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes. Berlinck, Manoel Tosta (2010). Op. Cit.
Remaining with Warburg and the painting "The Birth of Venus", we may resume our path with European thought: the transformation of funeral pathos into erotic pathos.
"Páramo" deals with the nightmare of death. Guimarães Rosa was working on the tale (perhaps finishing it, who knows?) when he met his end through a sudden heart attack in 1967, three days after his acceptance to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) and after having postponed his entry for four years. The acceptance speech was entitled "The Verb and the Logos" and included the phrase "We die to prove that we lived". A day after he was buried, Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote the poem entitled "Um chamado João" 32 , concluding, "Ficamos sem saber o que era João/ e se João existiu/ de se pegar" 33 . We are left with the play on "o que é o que é...?" 34 and the question-answer that we propose: O que é/ o que é/ não se pega/ e tem pegada? 35 .
Do respond, dear reader.
In the end, and to pass the time, while he was confined in that oppressive Baden-Baden, Joãozito adored participating in this game of questions and answers. Now in an opposite movement and in Bogota, Colombia, the Brazilian author may evoke the difficulties and sufferings of a young foreign character among the summits of the Andes, experiencing "death in life" in the terms of a foreigner's undying anxiety (a Brazilian in Bogota?!). This is why we believe it is pertinent to study "Páramo" both in its Portuguese original and in the translation to Spanish. So as not to speak in the language of decimated ethnic groups, death at those mountain summits must be thought of minimally in Brazilian Portuguese with a touch of the Portuguese of Camões 36 , enriched by oral neologisms taken as new words, and -finally -in Castilian. The translation to the latter was carried out by Bairon Oswaldo Vélez Escallon as late as 2011, through a connection of the South American integration and solidarity (im)posed by the present time. We seek the signs of what ends up being said and done in the foothills of the Cordillera, which serve as a kind of prison. Marks, clues, hints are "symptoms of all that is repressed in the construction of the explanatory reports which aim to award the value of the literary that the imaginary incorporates into existence, guaranteeing its lack of refinement, that is to say, its 32 Roughly equivalent to "A Man Named João". 33 "In the end we could not grasp who João was/ and if João existed/ to be grasped" 34 This is how riddles are introduced in Portuguese. Andrade was thus suggesting the riddle of Guimarães Rosa's elusive nature. 35 "What grasps but cannot be grasped?" 36 Poet Luís de Camões.
survival" 37 . It is no surprise that these foggy heights witness the revival of the anxiety and suffering experienced in Baden-Baden, Germany. The Germanic expression suggests the repeated symptom and the double, replicated. The double to which we refer is present in the walk during which the protagonist imagines something within him of an imperfect death, but projected from him and returning to him as a heavy weight to carry. This double is thus successively represented: it refers to a "man who resembles a corpse". He is further described as a "man who looks like a corpse", a "man with a corpse's fluids", a "man with the presence of a corpse", a "man cold as a corpse", a "man with the air of a corpse" and a "man with an element of the corpse-like". All of these expressions appear during the tale as a reference, in (psychotic?) special psychological circumstances in which his double as replica emerges as a death impulse, at once fateful and invigorating.
All of this chimes with the phrase uttered at the ABL entry ceremony: "We die to prove that we lived". Here there is a connection between death and resurrection. In the tale, a Jewish doctor intervenes and saves the protagonist from an imminent and sad death. The reborn are defined as: "every creature is a draft to be endlessly retouched, until they are liberated by the arcane" 38 .
After saying that there was something of a premonition in that city among the heights to which the character had just arrived, he does not hide "that he felt dazzled by life's sounds, by error after error, between past and future -darkness and mists -and the mechanistic world" 39 . Past, present and future were shuffled together; darkness (Hell), mists (paradise, taking the heavens as a metaphor); the present refers here to the mechanistic world when Guimarães Rosa speaks of the "resentful slumber of the ores", a famous verse from the poem "The World Machine" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. And there is more. For Silviano Santiago, the unexpected verse points to a revision of the tale made by Guimarães Rosa in 1948, hence in the second journey that the author and diplomat made to Bogota; this time accompanying minister João Neves da Fontoura to participate in the 4 th Pan-American Conference. Let us consider Rosa's text alongside Drummond's poem: There in the hidden corners, in the hardness of stone and the weight of pride in the earth, is Hell located in the resentful slumber of the ores? 40 And then the 37 Vélez Escallon, Bairon Oswaldo (2012). "Intrusões: Guimarães Rosa-Bogotá: notas para uma tradução de Páramo". In Revista Tussaji, v. 1, p.68. 38 See Santiago, Silviano (2012b). Op. Cit. 39 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit., p 264. 40  This is when the famous Bogotazo occurs, a series of riots sparked by the assassination of the liberal leader and candidate for president of Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, under the government of Mariano Ospina Pérez. Gaitán had been due to meet that afternoon with Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Rafael del Pino to discuss the Latin American Youth Congress. Gaitán was expected to make the closing speech. Upon leaving his office, he was shot twice in the head and then in the chest with a pistol at 13:15 outside the building. Taken to a local hospital, he died from his wounds some minutes later. Due to the Pan-American event, there were not just many political leaders present, but also diplomats, journalists and newspaper correspondents. Among those was Antonio

43
. 41 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de (2002). "A Máquina do Mundo". In Folha de São Paulo, Mais!, 27 out, p. 20. English Translation: "all that defines earthly beings/ or is extended even to animals/ and falls to the plants to be soaked up/ in the resentful slumber of the ores,/ travels around the world and comes to swallow itself, /in the same geometric order of everything. 42 See Costa, Ana Luiza Martins (2006) . "Memória seletiva -Veredas de Viator". In Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, n. 20/21, p. 25 43 Tadié, Jean-Yves (2012). Le lac inconnu -entre Proust e Freud, Paris: Gallimard. However, only three days after arriving in the city, he was already undergoing a radical experience of de-subjectivation: sick at the heights, but not at sea; by altitude high up from sea level…; the insufferable cold, a diffuse and sombre fog which never lifted, an unrivalled predicament. He was not from there, he had no name, love or home. He asked himself: would there be a body? 44 He could not "manage to see the transient rigour which awaited me, through my clan-destiny, in the misunderstood journey, in-via, and which was the absolute cross, life concluded, for beyond all of human conversation, a return to bitterness" 45 . It is true that this would occur not via common customs, but via the "customs of the soul" 46 . He experienced in advance what Hamlet had described centuries earlier as "the dread of something after death/ the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns".
Yet this was not all. Not yet! There was still the final shot of misery which would come as a "jab 47 . The famous boxing punch known as a "jab" here phonetically recalls Job's biblical suffering 48 . Then very popular across Latin America, in one swoop boxing links love with a sport widespread among the population, the suffering which, in this particular case, is linked with the pleasure of the struggles of boxing, and the everyday ills in a society marked by heavy social inequality. Popular religiosity is associated with a religious perspective on destiny, and pathos is thus highlighted as the acceptance of the sacrifices imposed by God and by religion. And in the end, the "jab" comes as a lack of air, a suffering which gave him the sensation of suffocating from himself. The fear of the dissolution of the "Self". Dizzyness, panic, everything seemed to crumble.

II
And death is within life 49 . A feeling does run through the text as a whole, however. It is resentment, which Nietzsche (1844-1900) qualified as the "worst of feelings", perhaps because we feel it as a dual or double emotion through its force. More than this, resentment is experienced as a strange sacrifice which smells of the past which we were 44 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit., p. 263. 45 Ibidem,p. 263. 46 Ibidem,p. 266. 47 Ibidem,p. 267. 48 Guimarães Rosa refers to the punch as a 'job', rather than 'jab'. 'Jab' originated from a Scottish variation on 'job', meaning to "strike", "pierce", or "thrust". 49 In allusion to a phrase by the poet Fernando Pessoa. unable to overcome as a plight of destiny which heralds discord by means of a notaltogether conscious process.
The character believes that this affection has been produced by hate, although transferred to another era by a mysterious extra-natural transformation. Thus, by means of a kind of self-illusion, although, through ideology, one is transported from the "streets and alleys, from low houses, from a single pavement, uneven rooftops with dark gutters, houses in black and ochre, or great manors, cloistered buildings..." 50 , to "the same streets, in the capital of the New Kingdom, of the Ombudsmen, the Vice-Kings" 51 , or, in other words, to the colonial capital. Colonialism serves as a vector for the accumulated hate which comes to be associated with an old indigenous woman, travelling on a Bogota tram 52 . The trams were the pride of the Colombian city, "beautiful and comfortable, of an unburnt red and with a silver roof. The tramway was very long and extended as far as the city's outer edges". Although she had undoubtedly been offended by something only she knew about it, the old indigenous woman became enraged, without anyone knowing why.
At each imprecation, her tone was so morally scathing that the memory would be forever marked in the character's mind.
She smelt the volumes of the affront, chewed it. Her eyes shone, and she laughed like a hyena. She was a dusky, wrinkled and perverse creature, an indigenous woman with deep eyes. She then began her curses and verbal attacks. Her livid logic possessed the energy of perverse beings, she was unforgiving. Her proclamations were uttered vociferously, with an unfocused tone, vileness and evil and abhorrent formulations, ceaselessly. For almost an hour, almost as long as the journey itself. Nobody dared look at her, she was the mouth to a channel by which more hate entered the world. The mad hurt, they despair. And then she alighted, disappeared, with a long shadow. That woman will stay with me forever. That hurts 53 . The description is beyond harrowing. The woman expresses an unchecked rage unheard of in those climes; with a tone which is at once astonishing, marvellous and disconcerting. There was something extraordinary in that woman, something magical, something of an incontrollable, irascible outburst. 50 Ibidem, p. 263. 51 Ibidem, P. 274. 52 Ibidem,p. 274. 53 Ibidem. Now, this behavior was not the protagonist's style, introspective in his isolation, although not private of conscience and reflection. But it is true that those enchanting trams, "of an unburnt red and with a silver roof", were the target of the city's fury during the Bogotazzo riots. Many vehicles were burnt in high bluish-orange flames in a spectacle of rare and sinister beauty. Such was the mark of these trams, the trademark of imperialism amalgamated with colonialism, of resentment marked by the brutal exploration of peoples' Work by Capital. Those beautiful and comfortable trams, which marked an explosive upheaval by the miserable and working classes, were finally removed from circulation and later disappeared to be substituted by other means of transport.
Another terrible episode which suggests that the character's memory alludes to "Páramo" and which also refers to a central feminine figure, is the news of a woman being buried alive; a piece of news which seems to be adrift in the text, but which we shall interpret in a complementary fashion to the previous item. If for the former, we began with the original before moving on to the translation, here we shall begin with the translation to  Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit., p. 275.
What is the purpose of an obscene story like this if not to offer a glimpse of light that, as a symptom, would refer to other reminiscences?
The chronicle then goes on to say what the protagonist is reminded of: being walled in as a prisoner in custody (remembering Baden-Baden).
However, allow us to interpret in this "dog-eat-dog world/bizarre planet" chronicle the news of the barbarity of Nazism, especially against Jews (but not exclusively), which were being reported to shock around the globe. Hadn't much of this barbarity been experienced by the author at close range while he was a diplomat in Germany? The imaginary phantasmagoried in its entirety […] And we have just used a significant expression, a neologism which Guimarães Rosa would soon come to use. Some other neologisms also appear in order to suggest fear and the gloominess associated with death: lugubrúvio, gelinvérnico, estranhifício, passadidade, clã-destino, discordioso, entreconsciente 57 .
And for the third time, it is a woman who appears on the character's horizon, and not just any woman, but the very one that loved him. He knew from the handwriting on the small envelope. He received the letter at home, when one day he arrived exhausted by the Along the way emerged a singular and unique happiness. He bought a book for next to nothing and it then come to be known as The Book. It was probably a book of poetry.
He had bought it in the first place to fill the tedious time he was experiencing, imagining that it might prove of use to him at some point. He later began to consider it almost as an object of salvific devotion, an amulet. From then on, he carried it around with him, without daring to read it. He carried it closed like a pledge, a hostage. Something mysterious was hidden within it. 57 English approximations or explanations are as follows: "lugubrúvio": a torrent of lugubriousness, "gelinvérnico": the meaning of this term is unknown, "estranhifício": "strangefice", "passadidade": "pastness", "clã-destino": "clan-destiny", "discordioso": discordful, "entreconsciente" -"interconscious". 58 Rosa, João Guimarães (2001a). "Páramo". Op. Cit., p. 273. 59 Ibidem.

III
The poet and novelist Jules Laforgue (1860-1867)  In the second painting, two small, naked children play on the green patch of grass by the side of a tomb. In the background is mausoleum with two highlighted figures. In the eyes of the character who is thinking of the painting, it serves as "the remembrance of its melancholy masterpiece" 63 . It is not one of the artist's masterpieces, but it is a masterpiece on melancholy, which justifies it. The master seems to be melancholia itself.
Arnold Böcklin's images reach the protagonist in a state of drowsiness, torpor and sleepiness. They represent the fearful hours of the night when he is prisoner to insomnia.
In both works, we may detect an archaeology of pathos referring to a "dilated present in which the past grows before us and the future consists of a vision of the past by means of a perspective already seen in Warburg". 64  Freud learnt the news first hand from the baroness, who had been quickly informed by the minister. The interesting aspect is just how much Arnold Böcklin demonstrated the issue of life or death which was certainly intensely experienced by Freud due to his realisation of the desire to be a university professor and in relation to the figure of the father. The reference to Böcklin in "Páramo" is thus transformed into a powerful metaphor for desire and the ethics which it entails.

IV
Guimarães Rosa once said that "stories do not want to be history" 70 , undoubtedly to mark the imaginary as a trait present in tales or novels, for example. He went on to say: "books may be worth a lot due to what they cannot hold" 71 .
Literary text and historic context influence each other in a reciprocal relationship, but are not reduced to one another. Jacques Lacan's proposal is that reality results in the RSI trio (the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary). These three registers are related to each other like three interlinked hoops in which a bond broken between one hoop and another undoes all of the bonds and hoops and frees the links between them. We must, however, remember that reality is not the same as the Real 72 .
We must therefore highlight that text is not exhausted in the context. However, we might seek in the text features and traces of context, and vice versa for both of the circumstances. Perhaps, at a push, we might speak of something like present historical subjectivity, of story and history, so to speak, present in the historian's task as an ever unobtainable goal.
entitled "Death's Return" by Tomás Vargas Osório (1908Osório ( -1941  Now we shall substitute the word "foreigner" every time it appears with "death": "Foreigner" and "death" are somewhat equivalent, and key to the issue at hand.
Death always appears as an intruder; we do not wish for it, we do not want it. But it is invasive and imposes itself through its exteriority. Freud refers to this as Das Hunheimlich which Paulo Cesar de Souza 77 has translated as "the disquieting strange". The ambivalence with which the Hispanic translation receives a foreign text such as "Páramo" is the same as that with which each reader receives the experience of de-subjectivation experienced by the protagonist as "imperfect death". This invasive character of "imperfect death", loyal to Guimarães Rosa's expression, has something of the monstrous about it. The experience of this death belongs to the deep experience of suffering which never ends, but which suddenly changes and is transformed into the most genuine of joys.
While this does not occur, there is anxiety. For Elias Canetti, "hypochondria is the mute exchange between anxiety and anxiety, to distract oneself, seek and find names" 79 .
Sometimes, however, we should be attentive to the absoluteness of solitude. It was not just circumstances and the experience of prison at those heights. It was more than that, it was the intensely-lived feeling of the tearing of the "Self". Castle. Of course Freud did not need Lassalle to refer to Virgil, as he knew the "Aeneid" well, but it is still a suggestive clue, even as a symptom, according to that proposed by the evidential method. This elective affinity was between the activist and political militant Lassalle and the psychoanalyst doctor Freud, who, like Oedipus, was carrying out personal, moral and intellectual searches, apparently unconcerned with politics and the fact that Oedipus was a king.
It is precisely here, in the real, in the royal of royalty -what is more imaginary in this symbolic? -that the intricate "Lacanian" RSI triad (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) appears, as one of the threads in this relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, Oedipus and power, Oedipus Rex in the fullness of Greek culture, a fracture exposed in Sophocles' tragedy. But the elective affinities between Lassalle and Freud were certainly not exhausted by the coincidence of the quotation evoking Virgil. In both, the political and psychoanalysis works are done and undone, encounter themselves and un-encounter themselves in terms, questions, preoccupations and political anxieties at the end of the nineteenth century attesting to Lassalle's cathexis and Freud's "political opinions"; inverted expressions thus consecrate the fluid interchange between political-ideological preferences and the affective experiences inscribed in the Oedipan matrix.
Our main hypothesis is the following: The protagonist of "Páramo" attests to "Joãozito's cathexis" However, the reader should feel completely at ease to write in the blank space which João Guimarães Rosa did not fill… A personal text which is stuck to the real, until death intervenes. On our part, it may well be a fragment of poem, which we happened to find and buy for a few francs by the River Seine in Paris. It goes like this: