Em teu ventre: when fiction is more verisimilar

Abstract

Literature, in its genesis, has a deep meaning in the myths and narratives that explain the functioning of the world – from collective voices and supporters of the collective, to the logic of civilization and the feeling of man about himself. Contemporary prose, especially the novel, lies in its essence, in the rupture between this world and the subject. Since then, collective memories, as wars, and subjective ones, considering many biographies, have been divided as major trends of writing, according to the importance of events and the people who live them – sometimes more empathic towards what surround us, at times more foccused on individual issues, this is the contemporary mentality. In Em teu ventre, a novel written in 2015, the Portuguese writer José Luís Peixoto contradicts this trend by fictionalizing a story that is part of the Christian imaginary: the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. This essay seeks to understand the interweaving of factual referential elements
and the figuration of the characters, as well as fictitious elaboration, by filling the gaps that history has never told, through the observation of the narrator and on the meaning of memory from Maurice Halbwachs (2004).