Retratos do narrador cínico: confissões em lugares fechados

Abstract

Having in view the relations between literature and social reality, this study analyses the narration process from a perspective that borders history. By verifying the intersections of languages, specially of meanings, which are observed in the correspondence between these two fields of knowledge, and interwoven into the novelistic version is the historiographicand and sociological approach to the facts which provide the basis for the understanding of the real as constructed by literary discourse, with due respect to its relative autonomy. In such dialogue, in a regime of solidarity and exchange of themes and procedures, narration stands out as the textual instance of whose entrails a historico-literary category of well defined contours emerges in the case specifically dealt with in this context: the cynical narrator. By resorting to attitudes and expectations of repetition and reproduction in the social realm, detected throughout Brazilian history, the narrator in focus tends to reaffirm them in his narration, which occurs, symptomatically, in closed, narrow places of reduced dimensions. Hence, one attests the legitimacy of the confessional intimacy scene strategically set by the narrator, so that he can manifest his cynicism with far more safety and freedom. Thus, subtly selfish and authoritarian, the narrator rediscusses the convenience of his representational role, while, while disguising the intervention proper to this function in the reality treated by him. Having selected the corpus (the novels Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis; Em liberdade, by Silviano Santiago; and Passageiro do fim do dia, by Rubens Figueiredo, aligned in this order, ir rigorous chronological sequence of publication), this study revealsthat, regardless the time of production of the texts as well as the peculiarities in style which are presented in each of them, the stories or confessions show a certain similarity in their conceptions of reality, keeping the ambiguously liberal position of their discourses and the ideologies that pervades them veiled and under constant surveillance, as in can also be informed by the results of the historiographic and sociological research carried out with in the same explanatory framework. Finally, the heuristic value of the novel is stressed out, as it follows, by means of aesthetic strategies, the paces of history and culture in Brazil, in a time period whose limits, in its long duration, are extended from the 19th century to the early decades of the 21th century.