As cicatrizes do tempo: S. Bernardo e Dias e noites de amor e guerra

Abstract

The study “The scars of time: Saint Bernard and Days and nights of love and war”, proposes to comparatively analyze the books “Sao Bernardo (Saint Bernard) (1934) by Graciliano Ramos, (1892-1953) and Dias e noites de amor e de guerra (Days and nights of war and peace)(1978),by Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015). These specific works, memories and stories which reflect the ways of life and perception of the world, shows that Latin America seems to be living the same literary experience during the twentieth century. The reflection of Graciliano’s works, in many aspects, seems to be the same as the one which excels in Galeano’s work in the stories which he tells through his literary and memorialist journalism. The story that was lived and suffered and which appears in books is also in people’s memories. This chain of memory and reality is the one which motivates the comparison between the books, once that between the two authors there is a relation which exceeds que questions related to the distinction in the literary genre. We therefore see that, on one side, the diversified reality in Latin America that Eduardo Galeano shows in his book seems to be the extensive grounds which produces Gracilianos’ literature as if it was his root. On the other side, in Gracialiano’s literature, like an aesthetic product previous effectively to Galeano’s, the little northeastern world, closed in by its strict fictional construction, resonates the sense of a seed through which the Uruguayan author will portray the sad blossoming of the Latin American reality. The theoretical support will be referenced by Tânia Franco Carvalhal’s comparative literature, by the social and historic aesthetics through Antonio Candido’s works, by the memorialist aspects which are highlighted by the traces of time in Ecléa Bosi and by the socio historic developments pointed out by Seligmann-Silva.