Cunhataí: fiction and history intermediated by memory

Abstract

The analysis of Cunhataí: a novel of Paraguayan War (2003), written by Maria Filomena Bouissou Lepecki, is intended to approach issues related to fictional, memorialistic and historical speech connected to a story that took place in a geographic and cultural neighborhood, which formerly was the border between Brazil and Paraguay. This region was equivalent to South of Mato Grosso, nowadays known as Mato Grosso do Sul. The present proposal is to point the possible interrelations among fiction, memory and history in the novel, which presents the background of the Paraguayan War, where it is possible to see the mixture of literary and historical discourse, mediated by memory, complement the narrative. In order to stress the relevance of the novel as a contemporary narrative, whose contribution is significant for understanding the cultural memory of the Brazilian people, especially for the historical formation of Mato Grosso do Sul, it was analyzed certain aspects of the novel following traces of history recovered through memory. Thus, it is from the point of view of a "revisitation" and a fictionalization based on reports of the Paraguayan War that Cunhataí comes up as an unusual approach by the desecration of the record known as "official".