AS AVENTURAS DE CHINA IRON E A BÍBLIA

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the novel The Adventures of China Iron (2017), by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and the Bible. There are seventeen allusions to the Bible in the novel, five of which are analyzed comparatively. The novel engages in a subtly mordant dialogue with the Bible. Its appropriation of biblical images, figures, and themes for the weaving of the narrative appears devoid of anguish or any ambition to supersede the sacred text. The novel affiliates itself with a particular tradition, intrinsic to the formation of the Christian Testament and present in established currents of biblical hermeneutics, consisting in the deumbilicalization of biblical texts from their original contexts for the sake of resignifications. The rupture established by The Adventures of China Iron lies in making this deumbilicalizing dynamic — a productive severance — function as a machine of profanation: the opening triggered by the cut causes meaning to overflow from the mythical sphere into the prosaic one. Such a cut is liberating and productive in nature: imprisoned meanings celebrate their freedom, and the prosaic is rehabilitated as semantic workshop and hermeneutics.