O essencial não é tão invisível aos olhos: as representações em “Perdoando Deus”, de Clarice Lispector, sob a ótica da linguística sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

For Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), the ideational meta-function of language consists in representing human experience through the transitivity system. Representation is a way of symbolizing the world through language, and the literary text is a particular case, because a verbal sign can constitute more than one meaning, so that there are first and second order meanings (HASAN, 1989). Taking these assumptions into consideration, this work had as its object of study the tale “Perdoando Deus”, by Clarice Lispector, and sought to answer the following questions: (i) What representations does the narrator construct for God and for herself ?; (ii) How do these representations relate? To this end, WordSmith Tools 6.0 (SCOTT, 2012) features and manual analysis used to select the clauses that made up the corpus (241 clauses), which were subjected to categorization of processes and participants and interpretation of evidenced representations. Analysis has shown that these representations have changed throughout the text as a result caused by an appearance of a dead rat. It changes the narrator's perception of God and the world, whose representations as an idealization of the narrator are recognized. The same thing happens to her, because from the grotesque vision of the rat she perceives in herself a bad side, which she did not want to come across. In this sense, the essential is not so invisible to the eyes, because according to what they reveal, it is possible to reach the truest conclusions, as happened with the character.