O contador de histórias no livro infantil “Histórias que eu ouvi e gosto de contar” de Daniel Munduruku: Reflexões a partir da teoria da narração de Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Walter Benjamin, when writing The Narrator: Considerations on the work of Nikolai Leskov, defends the possible absence of a figure of ancient tradition, namely, the storyteller. This conclusion was based on the profile of the storyteller Nikolai Leskov, in which he reinforced the extinction of the art of storytelling today, as well as on the social, economic, and political transformations that came with Modernity. In this context, storytelling was increasingly distant from reality of everyone, especially that of children. The stories told did not convey teachings, but rather the description of violent scenes, a lot of fighting, and, at other times, extolled exuberant lifestyles. However, a possible hope of rediscovering this ancestral storyteller in the contemporary world led to the objective of this research, in particular, to correlate the figure of Walter Benjamin storyteller with the profile of indigenous author Daniel Munduruku in the children book Histórias que eu ouvi e gosto de contar (Stories that I have heard and like to tell). It has an interdisciplinary, qualitative, exploratory, investigative and bibliographic character, developed through the analysis of the writings of the referred authors, with the following problems: What is the possible correlation between storyteller of Walter Benjamin and the indigenous child writer Daniel Munduruku from the analysis of the children book Histórias que eu ouvi e gosto de contar? What possible characteristics of Daniel Munduruku as a storyteller allow the reader to revisit the Benjaminian ancestral storyteller? In order to answer the proposed questions, the study is divided into two chapters with the following purposes: the first one is concerned with identifying the causes of the possible extinction of the storyteller in Modernity, pointing out how the absence of the storyteller was also present in the world of child; and the second one seeks to present storytelling in the indigenous world, specifically in the Munduruku culture, correlating the Benjaminian storyteller with the indigenous child author Daniel Munduruku, as a possible way to rediscover his familiar face. In summary, the research pointed to a probable relationship between the archetypes of Benjaminian storytellers, namely, the sedentary peasant and the merchant sailor, with the characteristics of the indigenous writer found in the child book Histórias que eu ouvi e gosto de contar.