Confissão e assacralidade em Fernão Mendes Pinto

Abstract

Fernão Mendes Pinto constructs his narrative from an obviously confessional viewpoint. In the complexity of this experience, he seeks a critical recapture of existential space and time by means of a style of writing that is very specific. The confessional posture of the Peregrinação seems tied to a formal religiosity that runs through almost the entire structure of the work. The obvious denotation of such a religiosity is nevertheless perpetually modified from its customary metaphisical significance by various forms of irony which subtly project a language expressively emphasizing external events at the expense of the possible «penitential interiority» set up initially by the narrative method. In the seemingly religious objectivity there opens out, in this way, with ample connotative meaning, an unsuspected dimension of the non-religious.