Between traumatic narrations and the Joker’s interpellation

realities of dictatorship (re)told in literature

Abstract

Literature is the refuge and place of registration of many experiences resulting from the reality of historical periods, especially traumatic ones, such as the military dictatorship, which in Brazil perpetuated from 1964 to 1985, but left its mark even today. Many are the authors who wrote literary works that keep in their story stories representative of these 21 years of military dictatorship. Maria José Silveira (2016), for example, in her book Felizes poucos: onze contos e um Curinga, published in 2016, expresses, in eleven contos, diverse experiences experienced by militants and their families and friends during the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship. At the beginning and end of the book, as well as at the end of one story and the beginning of another, an unusual character appears - the Joker - who has several functions while talking to the reader and the author herself, in addition to commenting on the narrated scenes. In this perspective, the objec

tive is to analyze the representation of realities of the military dictatorship in the aforementioned work amid the narrative strategies raised by the author in order to achieve its purposes. To support such assertions, we use the theory of the aesthetic effect of Wolfgang Iser (1999) and the studies of Walter Benjamin (1985), Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2006), Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2000, 2003) and Euridice Figueiredo (2017) about narrative, history, memory and the possibilities of representing historical traumas. In view of this, the analyzes propose to highlight that the literature, being fictional and formed by several narrative strategies, allows the representation of the reality of the victims of the dictatorship and the resistance of their memory in fiction.