“Na solidão e no silêncio, escreve”: história, literatura e recordação em Memórias do cárcere (1953), de Graciliano Ramos

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the book Memórias do cárcere (Memoirs from prison) (1953) (Mc), by the writer from Alagoas, Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953). It constitutes the author’s testimony about his imprisonment in 1936, within the context of the authoritarian escalation that culminated in the Estado Novo (1937). The study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the correlations among History, Literature, and both individual and collective memory. As a historiographical object, Mc is a valuable historical source and embodies what Michael Pollak and Pierre Nora define as a “site of memory.” The “cartography” of Mc refers to two chronological “places”: the biennium 1935–1936, when the communist uprisings in the Northeast led to the writer’s imprisonment, and the period between the 1940s and 1950s, when the book was written—coinciding with Ramos’s political activity and revealing internal tensions within the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), of which he had been a member since 1945. By dispensing with notes and relying solely on memory as his source, the author produced a text that blends memoir and literary writing. Its use as a document requires efforts to discern factual and fictional elements, even though the book remains a trace of a historically verifiable period. All these factors make Mc a unique and provocative work, whose reading, analysis, and appreciation demand the reader’s full attention to the challenge proposed by Graciliano. To achieve our objective, we examined not only Mc but also Ramos’s articles, letters, chronicles, and interviews. The theoretical framework is grounded in several works, including The writing of History (1982), by Michel de Certeau; On collective memory (1990), by Maurice Halbwachs; Memory, History, forgetting (2007), by Paul Ricoeur; Los trabajos de la memoria (2012), by Elizabeth Jelin; articles by Michael Pollak and Pierre Nora on “sites of memory”; and studies by Sandra Pesavento on the convergences and divergences between History and Literature (2003; 2006). The research also draws upon Ângela de Castro Gomes’s study on “writing of the self” (2004) and Philippe Lejeune’s work on autobiography and the autobiographical pact (2008), which provide further theoretical support.