Confissão e testemunho em memórias do cárcere

Abstract

This dissertation's main objective is to reflect and analyze the relationship between memory and testimony in the work Memories of prison, by Graciliano Ramos, considering the episodes of torture and physical, moral and psychological violence suffered by the narrator protagonist of the work. This study focuses on some biographical elements of the author and its theoretical contribution is the study of testimony and memory literature, taking takes into account the social and political context of the Estado Novo. The memory perspective is based on the studies of Maurice Hallbwachs, the testimony literature in assumptions of Márcio Seligmann-Silva, Paul Ricouer and Wilberth Salgueiro and to dealing with the writer's literary trajectory, we resorted to studies by Hemenegildo Bastos, Fernando Cristóvão and Antônio Candido. Memories of prison are constituted as a work that reports from an individual point of view an event that inhabits collective memory. The traumas, anxieties and limitations expressed in the book through testimony are collective positions. In this way, the report The author's testimonial reflects and exposes the degrading conditions, the human misery of some Brazilian prisons he visited; the plot, the facts that culminated in the Graciliano's arrest. Here, writing will also be highlighted as a way of not silencing the trauma experienced, as a way of rescuing an unofficial history in ways of erasure at the same time as it is an attempt to reconstruct the individual memory of the narrator, tormented by traumatic memories. The work brings light to a time of authoritarianism witnessed by those who experienced the oppression of the Vargas Era and the dehumanization of prisons.