Representations of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the novels by Milton Hatoum, Caio Fernando Abreu and Bernardo Carvalho

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the representations of the Brazilian military dictatorship in novels produced after the democratization. The selected corpus is constituted by the novels Onde andará Dulce Veiga, by Caio Fernando Abreu, Dois irmãos, by Milton Hatoum, and Os Bêbados e os Sonâmbulos, by Bernardo Carvalho, respectively published on 1990, 2000 and 1996. According to Pinheiro (1991), the authoritarianism which characterized the military government does not finish with the political opening, surviving to the new civil governments. We intend to investigate the problematization, on literature, of the relationship between narrator and authority. Dal Farra studies (1978) presents that the narrator, being on first or third person, occupies a central role on the elaboration of a novel, which allow us to comprehend that is given to it the role of the narrative authority. Given this, we propose to investigate the possibility of the narrator suffering any change in its conception by virtue of a problematization of its relationship with the idea of authority, after the Brazilian military dictatorship. We believe that the elaboration of a novel in which are present the fragmentary memory; the constitution of a witness narrator; and the construction of a multiple narrative focus may be an aesthetic solution to this problem between narrator and authority. These aesthetics resources pretend a decentralization of the narrator and are present on these novels. On these works, we see narrators which recover fragments of the past to compose familiar or personal histories which refer to the period of the military government. These fragments are articulated on the construction of an allegoric narrative. The allegories constructed by the novels shall be studied in according to the concept of history and allegory in Walter Benjamin (1984; 2005).