The stakeouts after the last big stakeout

Jorge Amado e a representação de uma civilização frustrada

Abstract

Tocaia Grande – A Face Obscura (1984) is one of the last major novels published by Jorge Amado. In this work, the author intended to write a historical novel, problematizing and opposing what is conventionally called official history. In a kind of self-referentiality, the work tells the story of the formation of a town/city where there was, in the past, a massacre that took place in a huge ambush. In the end, Amado ends up guiding in this 1984 novel a discussion whose center is an ideal of civilization – and, by the way, a frustrated one. The emergence and bellicose action of the State and Christian religious institutions, at the end of the narrative, represent the collapse of a community (primitive, even, but fraternal), but it also represents the material, moral and human decay of another supposedly human group. enlightened and modern ideas. In short, it is this contradictory face – the representation of a frustrated civilization in Tocaia Grande – that we will focus on in this essay.