Getting out of fiction: Luiz Costa Lima, Hayden White, and the debate on the literary

Abstract

In Control of the Imaginary, Luiz Costa Lima councils against viewing Euclides da Cunha’s foundational text Rebellion in the Backlands as literary or as a discourse of fiction, for he believes that fiction, like mimesis, is misunderstood within a literary context. Costa Lima disagrees with Hayden White’s own metahistorical hermeneutics which posits that literary forms inherently exist within narratives of history. Despite the relative lack of acknowledgment of the other on the part of both critics, their work benefits from a simultaneous reading, as the dialectical nature of their articulations of history becomes evident and informs the other’s approach. Their respective interpretations of LéviStrauss’ notion of ‘getting out of history’ create space for an alternative approach to Cunha’s Rebellion, one which demonstrates that the text exemplifies important elements of the literary and the scientific that both critics touch upon. At the same time, such an approach assists in understanding how Cunha’s text transcends an opposition between fiction and reality precisely because of its incorporation of multiple discourses