A escrita da história na ficção de Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

In our research, we developed a reading of Luiz Ruffato's fiction based on the hybrid relationship between literature and history. Luiz Ruffato is known for problematizing in his works historical facts related to traumatic moments in the history of Brazil. From reading his p rose, we observed how the novelist has been consolidating his literary project based on “history seen from below”, that is, on the configuration of voices of subjects excluded by/in history, especially related to the proletariat class. When revisiting hist ory through the losers, one can see the writer's perspective in emphasizing the migratory flows of these individuals. In our dissertation, we will focus on examining two recent narratives in which, in our view, this hybridism between fact and fiction is qu ite productive. These are the novels, De mim já nem se lembra , published in 2007 and rewritten and edited in 2016, and his most recent book, O antigo futuro , released in December 2022. These are works in which the author problematizes specific moments of n ational history through “remnants of history” (DOSSE, 2018) present in the memories and experiences of those who lived under the period of civil military dictatorship in Brazil. From the analysis of dictatorial contexts, based on studies by historians, we will see how political events impact the lives of these simple subjects represented in Luiz Ruffato's fiction. In this sense, our research also aims to examine the elements of historiography that support the construction of these narratives and create a re presentation of Brazil, from a social and historical perspective. As for the structural form of each novel, in De mim já nem se lembra , the novelist rescues the epistolary form, redefining it as the driving structure of the narrative. In this novel, the le tter genre is a self writing that serves as an “archive” of the dictatorship within the narrative. Furthermore, in this same work, the author plays specularly with autofiction, which moves between history and fiction. In O antigo futuro , we see a revisitat ion of history through an anachronistic narrative structure that, based on the mishaps of the Bortoletto family, one hundred years of Brazil (1916 2016) are problematized within the fiction. As a theoretical foundation for our comparative study, we will re ly on the studies of Michael Foucault (2004), Philippe Lejeune (2014), Karl Erik Schøllhammer (2009), Diana Klinger (2008), Tânia Pellegrini (2018), Regina Dalcastagnè (2005), François Dosse (2003), Jim Sharpe (1992), Geneviève Haroche Bouzinac (2016), Gio rgio Agamben (2009), Euridice Figueiredo (2017), Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta (2021), Marco Antonio Villa (2014), Eduardo Bueno (2012), among others.