A Psychoanalytic Review of João Guimarães Rosa´s short story: “The Third Bank of the

River” (Primeiras Estórias, 1962).

By Claudia Melville, M.A.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and literature is strong. Some literates manage
to teach us psychoanalytic concepts through their playful word usage creating characters
and stories that project the nature of the human being´s psyche. The Brazilian master João
Guimarães Rosa in his short story “The Third Bank of the River” picturesquely portrays the
narrator´s internal conflicts as he watches his father depart into a river only to find that he
stays in the middle of the river, far from sight but close enough to be perceived, moving
about aimlessly without putting foot on land. In this paper I attempt to relate Guimarães
Rosa’s story to basic psychoanalytic concepts described by Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein,
and Donald Winnicott.

INTRODUCTION

Many concepts in psychoanalysis have their roots in major works of literature.

Freud was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky´s writings, specially, The Brothers Karamazov,

where he found Oedipal themes that influenced and shaped the development of his

theory of psychosexual development. After analyzing the author´s unconscious, which he

found displayed in the above work, Freud wrote Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), a

magnificent paper where he explores the writer´s epilepsy as a symptom resulting from an

unconscious conflict of guilt over his father´s death. Freud also admired Shakespeare´s

power of expression of human conflicts. He was particularly interested in Hamlet´s

Oedipus complex and Macbeth´s character types.

Literates, in their expressive freedom, manage to create compelling portraits of the

human unconscious that support psychoanalytic theory in ways that sometimes

psychoanalysts will find limitations. Even though analysts will invite patients to free

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associate, patients symptomatically will choose the content of the session, which is

symbolically restricted in a time and space frame. The writer lacks such restrictions and is

able to elaborate timeless characters and stories paying tribute to the unconscious´s

distinctive characteristic: its no sense of temporal sequence.

João Guimarães Rosa, one of the greatest Brazilian novelists, was born in 1908 in

Cordisburgo, in the state of Minas Gerais. He was also a medical doctor and a diplomat

who, since little, taught himself various different languages. I was particularly captivated

by his short story: “The Third Bank of the River” in his book Primeiras Estórias, written in

1962. In this work he managed to impersonate many prominent psychoanalytic concepts

that authors like Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott attempt to describe.

This narrative is a treat to anyone passionate about psychoanalysis since the reader

encounters double meanings and psychic enigma.

I will first provide a summary of the story followed by a revision of Guimarães

Rosa´s narrative through a psychoanalytic lens. I will also try to leave an open space

between the story and psychoanalysis where readers can interpret through personal

metaphors and symbols.

SUMMARY OF THE STORY: THE THIRD BANK OF THE RIVER

Guimarães Rosa tells the story of a family whose father, a dutiful, orderly and

straightforward man, “neither jollier nor more melancholy than the other men we knew”,

orders himself a canoe made of mimosa wood, sturdy to last twenty to thirty years. The

mother, ruler of the house, asks herself if her husband is going to become a fisherman all

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of a sudden, but he offers no explanation. Terribly upset, she expresses “If you go away,

stay away. Don´t ever come back!” The young son, who narrates the story, worries when

the canoe is delivered and the father rows away into the river.

Rumors about the father´s insanity begin to take place among friends, relatives,

and neighbors. The mother stays quiet trying to maintain her composure.

Interestingly, travelers along the river and people living near the bank on one side

or on the other, report that the father never put foot on land and that he just moves

about the river, solitary and aimless.

The son begins stealing food and leaving it to the father in a hollow rock on the

riverbank, safe from animals, rain, and dew. The mother, wordlessly, facilitates the son´s

stealing of the food.

The mother begins many maneuvers to bring the attention of the father such as

requesting a priest to exorcise the devils that had gone into the father, or, arranges

soldiers to frighten him. He never replies to anyone.

The son explains that in some way he is the only one who understands what his

father wants or does not want but cannot understand how he stands the hardship of

annual floods, sun, dead bodies of animals, etc. The son claims: “We never talked about

him, we just thought... we could never put our father out of mind”. Father remains a

ghostly presence in his canoe.

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 Meanwhile the sister gets married, and has a son, whom she wishes to show to her

father at the riverbank but he does not appear. Devastated, the sister moves with her

husband and baby to another city. Later on the mother follows her.

Even though the father appears to show no interest in them, the son never stops

feeling affection and respect towards him. When he is praised by others he claims “my

father taught me to act that way”.

The son never condemns the father for what he is doing. However he feels as if he

has done something bad, he feels guilt. The son starts aging and he feel even guiltier

knowing that his father is getting really old. “I am guilty of I know not what, and my pain is

an open wound inside me”.

Finally the son guesses what he has to do and yells his father to come back, that he

would take his place: “Father you have been out there long enough. You are old... Come

back, you don´t have to do that anymore. Come back and I´ll go instead. Right now if you

want. Anytime, right now. I´ll get into the boat. I´ll take your place”.

His father listens and maneuvers the boat towards the shore accepting the offer. In

terror, the son runs away begging forgiveness and asking himself if he is really a man after

such a failure. He ends the story stating the following “But when death comes I want them

to take me and put me in a little boat in this perpetual water between the long shores;

and I, down the river, lost in the river, inside the river... the river”.

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ANALYSIS

Jacques Lacan

The storyteller attempts, throughout the narrative, to find an answer to the

question, “what is a father”? He constructs and deconstructs the image of a father who at

first appears to be very real, described as “dutiful, orderly and straightforward”.

Throughout the story, the reader joins the father´s relatives and neighbors in their seeking

an understanding of the father´s sudden departure. The son is caught in this labyrinth of

possible explanations, always discarding insanity as the precipitator of his father´s

decision. Only until he feels guilty enough regarding his non sacrificial position, does he

attempt for a solution: to take his father´s place and to live the father´s experience under

his own skin.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, stated that the real, biological father is

thus to be distinguished from the symbolic structures which organize the relation of man

to woman. According to Leader & Groves (2000) “paternity has a symbolic side; Lacan

called this agency of paternity the name of the father (p.73). “This symbolic operation is

performed by the mother´s speech where she situates a reference to a father who is

beyond her, which need not be identical with the real father, as long as it serves to

separate mother and child” (p.100).

The father in the story, cleverly achieves a transition in the son´s psyche going from

being a real father who is not distinctive from others and who cannot be named by the

ruling mother, to an imaginary father to whom everyone attempts to understand: “We

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never talked about him, we just thought... we could never put our father out of mind”. He

also manages to become the object of the mother´s desire by staying far away enough to

be perceived but not too close to be felt or ruled. This can be evidenced by the son´s

awareness of his mother being his accomplice in feeding the father. Metaphorically this

could represent the reinforcement of the mother´s image of the father leading to a

change in her non verbal speech regarding him, and contributing to the son’s fortifying

image of the father. These series of acts, according to Lacan, would enable in the son a

transition from an imaginary to a symbolic father. We could say that the father´s strategic

position in the middle of the river separated the mother and the son by their awakening

need to name him, and, consequently to symbolize him.

Lacan understands the term “metaphor” as the replacement of a word by another,

a word has substituted another taking its place in the signifier´s chain, while the hidden

signifier remains present through its connection with the rest of the chain (Chemama &

Vandermersch, 2004).

From this perspective, I understand the river shore in the story as the limit where,

metaphorically, substitution can take place between the signifiers ‘father’ and ‘son’, and

their related signifiers. It is in the shore where the son assumes he can take the father´s

representation and the reverse. Even though in the real order of the story nobody dies,

metaphorically he relates this substitution to death: “But when death comes I want them

to take me and put me in a little boat in this perpetual water between the long shores;

and I, down the river, lost in the river, inside the river... the river”. It is in the thought of

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substitution, that symbols emerge and the son is able to identify with the father by

symbolically taking his place.

During the father´s absence the son is caught in many unanswerable questions

regarding his father´s prompt departure. Even though others offer possible explanations,

he doesn´t consider any of them, he sticks to his own theorizations in a narcissistic way.

Leader & Groves (2000) described Lacan´s concept of jouissance, which means “anything

which is too much for the organism to bear, too much excitation, stimulation...”(p.140).

The son´s imaginary narcissistic interpretations of the father become unbearable until

finally he decides to takes his place and interpret his father´s experience in the river

vividly. The son´s final maneuver, an attempt to take the father´s place, might also reduce

his feelings of guilt where unconsciously he might feel, from an Oedipal position, that he

killed his father. If he substitutes the father, nobody needs to die in the real order. This is

where jouissance could be regulated and the son´s organism could rid itself from high

levels of stimulation by substituting many years of tension with words: “Father you have

been out there long enough. You are old... Come back, you don´t have to do that

anymore. Come back and I´ll go instead. Right now if you want. Anytime, right now. I´ll get

into the boat. I´ll take your place”.

The reader might find other substitutions taking place in the narrator’s chain of

signifiers. In my reading, it is at the end of the story that psychic reorganization and

symbolic growth entails the substitution of the son´s question: “What is a father?” to “Am

I a man?”

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Melanie Klein

Even though Melanie Klein did not emphasize the French perspective of the

father´s function (as a symbolic metaphor) as necessary for psychic maturation, her theory

can also be related to the narrator’s psychic development from what she denominated

the paranoid- schizoid position to a depressive position.

Melanie Klein postulated the paranoid- schizoid position as the first attempt to

master the individual’s death instinct experienced during primitive mental states.

According to Rycroft (1995), Klein described this position “as a psychic configuration in

which the individual deals with his innate destructive impulses by (a) splitting both his ego

and his object representations into good and bad parts, and (b) projecting his destructive

impulses on to the bad object by whom he feels persecuted “(p.125).

At the beginning of the story, the river stands between two banks representing, for

the son, two poles that cannot be integrated, leading him to a state of anxiety when his

father rows away. However, the father’s moving about the river aimlessly shortens, for

the son, the distance between the two banks. The father, at first described as a “dutiful,

orderly and straightforward man”, in other words, a ‘good’ man, suddenly becomes the

opposite, a ‘bad’ person for leaving his family behind in the shore. The son, then,

perceives his father in a very split manner and his once projection of love to his father is

later substituted by a projection of destructive impulses. However, since the father does

not disappear completely, he becomes an object towards whom the son can return

everyday, an object who can tolerate destruction: “(the son) could not understand how

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his father stood the hardship of annual floods, sun, dead bodies of animals, etc“. From a

Kleinian perspective, this could be understood as the father’s survival of the son’s

destructive impulses. Gradually the son begins to perceive his father as a separate object

and realizes how much he could have damaged him, achieving a depressive position.

Melanie Klein describes the position reached by the infant when he realizes that

both his love and hate are directed towards the same object- the mother- and becomes

aware of his ambivalence and concerned to protect her from his hate and to make

reparation for what damage he imagines his hate has done (Rycroft, 1995, p.36). It is

during this ambivalence towards his father that he experiences strong feelings of guilt: “I

am guilty of I know not what, and my pain is an open wound inside me”. Klein (1975)

holds that the early aggression of the child stimulates a feeling of guilt and the drive to

restore and to make good, mobilized by guilt, merge into the later drive to explore, to find

new lands. In such pursuit, the explorer is giving expression to both aggression and the

drive to reparation (p.334). From this viewpoint, the son might repair through his eager

need to get into the boat and live what his father went through, ‘saving’ the father.

Donald Winnicott

Winnicott stressed the difference between object relating and object usage. In object

relating, “projection mechanisms and identifications have been operating, and the subject

is depleted to the extent that something of the subject is found in the object” (Winnicott,

1969). The father is perceived as what the son makes of him. The son begins to play with

the idea of who is the father, what the father is thinking and sensing. The father becomes

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a bundle of projections of the son´s own fantasies and needs, a subjectively conceived

object, in Winnicott´s terms. This way, the son´s omnipotence can be satisfied until he

necessitates a more objective connection with reality; in this case, with the father. The

father facilitates the son a transitional space, the river, staying in the middle where he can

be seen at an optimal distance, where projections can be made but staying close enough

to be seen as a real object and not only as a mere hallucination.

The father´s remaining in the middle of the river provides the son the capacity to play

with his image, allows the son to feel omnipotent in his fantasies regarding him and

becomes partially real and partly projected not only for the narrator, but also for the

family. However the son seems to be the one who utilized this transitional space the best

and played with it well enough to grow psychically and reach what Winnicott called the

capacity for object usage. “The object, if it is to be used, must necessarily be real in the

sense of being part of shared reality, not a bundle of projections. It is this, I think, that

makes for the world of difference that exists between relating and usage” (Winnicott,

1969). The son decides to leave this world of omnipotence and face his father as a real

object again or, what Winnicott called, a objectively perceived object. We can sense how

difficult this becomes for he son when the father actually rows towards him and accepts

being real again; he runs away feeling ashamed and asking himself if he’s man enough.

This is a picturesque metaphor of how psychically it is so difficult for individuals to

abandon omnipotent thought only to relate better to shared reality.

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 The narrator’s struggles, I believe, are a good enough personification of Winnicott’s

concepts and allow us to understand why Winnicott conceived the capacity to play as

essential for psychic growth.

CONCLUSION

The short story “The Third Bank of the River” written by João Guimarães Rosa is an

excellent story that captures the double meaning and symbolism that many

psychoanalysts attempt to elaborate throughout their theorizations. I intended to relate

this story to Lacan’s concept of the name of the father as a symbolic function, Klein’s

psychic growth from a paranoid -schizoid position to a depressive position and the mental

states this growth accounts, and Winnicott’s differentiation between object relating and

object usage as well as the capacity to play as essential for a healthy psychological

development.

The relationship between literature and psychoanalysis in this short story is strong,

since this mystic narrative is the product of a brilliant literate’s unconscious. I stress the

importance of leaving a significant enough space between this relationship, just like the

river between father and son in this story or like a painting and its viewer, always trying to

decipher human enigma.

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REFERENCES

Chemama, R. & Vandermersch, B. (2004), Diccionario del Psicoanálisis. Buenos Aires:

Amorrortu/editors.

González Echeverría, R. (1997), The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories. New

York: Oxford University Press.

Klein, M. (1975), In: Love Guilt and Reparation, and other Works, 1921- 1945. New York:

Delacorte Press.

Leader, D. & Groves, J. (2000), Introducing Lacan. Cambridge, UK: Icon Books Ltd.

Rycroft, A. (1995), A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Second Edition. London: Penguin

Books.

Winnicott, D.W. (1969), The Use of an Object. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 50:

711-716.

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