Novelistic discourse and discourse of memories

Reading of A república dos sonhos and of Coração andarilho, by Nélida Piñon

Abstract

The reading of Coração andarilho, published in 2009, evokes the reading of the novel A república dos sonhos, a work of 1984, both written by Nélida Piñon. In the reader’s memory, the parallelism may seem very marked. The memorialist Nélida brings to remembrance the writer character Breta. The extent
to which Nélida’s life experience is utilized in the construction of Breta may be, from the factual point of view, a curiosity, but it is not a literary question. What will be grasped in this approach is how both novelist and memorialist discursive constitution work. The relations established with the referential are not of the
same order. The fictional discourse and the memorialist discourse are examined, seeking similarities and differences, aiming to understand the resources that allow the creation of the fictional truth. The most consistent theoretical contribution is found in Ricoeur, whether regarding the reciprocity between narrativity and temporality (1994), or the way memory and imagination work (2007).