Pra não dizer que Não Falei das dores: violência e silêncio no romance de Beatriz Bracher

Abstract

Based upon an understanding of literature that considers social life, as proposed by the integralist procedure by Antonio Candido (2014a, 2017), this study analysed the contemporary novel Não falei, written by Beatriz Bracher. The novel brings the narrative of a narrator that remembers the time when he was subjected to torture during the Brazilian civil and military dictatorship, time frame in which he suffered, besides physical subjugation, with the loss of his brother-in-law, Armando, a revolutionary activist murdered by the Brazilian state. The capture of Armando is linked, by relatives and acquaintanceships, to the narrator himself, accused of giving away information during torture that occasioned the killing. These facts result in a silence of many years, in which the protagonist refuses to address the accusation. Given the novel’s themes, the goal of this research was to investigate, in the literary text, the intercurrences between violence and silence. We studied the first according to the understanding of Jaime Ginzburg (2012, 2017), Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2000) and Sigmund Freud (1989, 2012) on the aesthetic of violence, on the representation of catastrophe and on the residual trauma from experiencing torture; the second, following the propositions of Roland Barthes (2003), that sees silence as a sign, of Eni Orlandi (2007), on the matter of forceful silencing as the interdiction of signification, and of Lourival Holanda (1992) on nonverbalization as a manifestation of social oppression. During the study, we established the fragmentary aspect of the representation of torture, the equivalence amongst the torture victim’s silence and resistance, the impact of violence in the perspective of the narrator and silence as a condition cultivated in different levels through the novel, be it inside the protagonist’s family in the past, with acquaintances in the present or during the military dictatorship. We concluded, confronted by such results, that the narrator’s reticent and reserved linguistic behaviour in defending himself from the accusation that hovers over his head comes from a distrust in language and in men, a disbelief that has its roots in the torture procedure. Furthermore, it was noted how the literary representation creates an incomplete and polysemic narration after the traumas that hit the narrator. The study of these matters points out the relevance of the novel in adopting a singular perspective of a traumatic historical event, evidencing, through the fictional word, what was covered by the official discourses.