Memories of war in brazilian contemporary fiction: dissolution of a concrete past

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing certain verve of contemporary Brazilian fiction that, opposing the building of an apprehensible past, chooses to drown through the meshes of dissolution, blurring/distorting the memory of one’s experience. We intend to deal here specifically with the memories of war. For that, we are going to analyze excerpts from two fiction texts published in the second half of 20th century, separated by certain period of time: the novel Vaca de nariz sutil (1961), by Campos de Carvalho, and the novella “O oco” (1973), by Hilda Hilst. The narrators of both texts intend to build memories of a war they lived, but such memories lack precise space and time references: we only know that there was a war, but it is impossible do determine when or where it happened, and even against whom or the reason why they were fighting.