"Olhos, espelho e luz": o imbricamento de discursos e a ironia em Os autos de defesa, de Vieira, como marca de atualidade contínua do escritor

Abstract

Irony is seen as an argumentative-aesthetic form of Padre Antonio Vieira’s speech because it is a trope of consistency, especially because through irony we see a view of reality, a political way of being. The author uses arguments and metaphors from religion (his conservatism) and at the same time he presents himself as a defendant of ideas based in science, math, philosophy, astrology etc. (his progressive side). A critic of his age, Vieira embraced and at the same time put away the Baroque code – this is ironic by itself. His own history as well as the history of his work are a paradox. He supported the king but fought against the interests of the Crown, defending the colonized and the Indian in Brasil, but not the black people. For that, he used the biblical myths as a discursive layer to support the historic arguments. In this thesis, in the defense before the Court of the Holy Office in the inquisitorial process, we analyze how the irony is a fundamental trait expressed by the existing contradictions in its speech. For the corpus of this research we have seleceted “Discurso em que se prova a vinda do Senhor Rei D. Sebastião”, “Esperanças de Portugal, Quinto Império do Mundo, primeira e segunda vida de El-Rei D. João o quarto Written by GONSALIANES BANDARRA, commented by Padre Antônio Vieira from Companhia de Jesus, and sent to Bispo do Japão, Padre André Fernandes” and “Defesa do livro intitulado QUINTO IMPÉRIO”, that is the apology of the book CLAVIS PROPHETARUM, and answers to the propositioons censured by the inquisitors: given by Padre Antônio Vieira, that was reclused in the jails of Santo Ofício de Coimbra”. According to Hayden White (1994), and PERELMAN, Chaïm. OLBRECHTS-TYTECA, Lucie, (1996)irony can be a key to understand the Defense of Vieira (text said by him as royal, allegedly true but placed within the oscillating limits between history and literature) as a historic narrative assumed as figurative. Thus, we show that the author used the legal speech to imply veracity to historic facts but, as all narratives, it didn’t fail to use the imaginative abilities from works of arts, from myths and from the popular cultural traditions. Impossible do not consider what there is about fiction in his Defense speech, his juridical work, because we can find, based in his dissimulated character of truth, one of the biggest sources of vitality and renewal of historiography, that is the literary imagination.