O documental, o testemunhal e o romanesco na narrativa autobiográfica: sobre como Luiz Alberto Mendes veio a ser

Abstract

By observing that the book Memórias de um sobrevivente by Luiz Alberto Mendes presents itself as an autobiography, but also passes through other genres, I propose to examine the documentary, the testimonial and the Romanesque aspects that compose this literary work. The coincidence between the names of the author, the narrator and the protagonist sets an autobiographical narrative, however the presence of elements that clash or conflict with the individual and documentary proposal of an autobiography creates an irresolvable discursive ambiguity. This ambiguity is the tension between the autobiographical, the testimonial and the Romanesque announced in the paratext and maintained in the manner the work is structured and formalized. My work then is to observe how these different aspects discriminate, imbricate and re-write throughout the narrative, so that I reach to the understanding of which representation universe the book conveys. The identity between the author, the narrator and the protagonist in Memórias de um sobrevivente casts a perspective on how far this work would be committed to the empirical world the author belongs to. However the individual level that implies an autobiographical project, the world represented, starts to have a collective dimension so that to narrate his own experiences the narrator starts adding to his report a significant amount of voices and stories of individuals with a similar fate: the prison. The narration of events that put into play not only the life of a particular individual (Alberto Luiz Mendes, a prisoner), but also of a group (the prisoner) is what allows the reading of the book as if it was also a testimony. On the other hand, beyond the autobiographical and the testimonial that suggest the immediate report of any aspect exterior to the work, the creation of the report is subject to written conformation of the confluent genres and the development of a believable story, which involves the deployment of narrative categories and conventions of written language that point to the representational character of the work. It becomes more evident when in a Romanesque perspective the different parts of the narrative are cut and arranged in an interdependent logic that seeks to give meaning to the entire existence of the subject of the narrative. We soon realized the quality of the intervention in the world the book proposes: the reference to empirical reality obeys, in addition to the documentary character, an intervention in the imagination even when the cohesion between different events that constitute the narrated material is compromised not only to register them, but to bring into existence the fate of an individual and his group (the prisoner), in its complexity and conflicts in the social imaginary. Thus, thanks to the autobiographical and the testimonial, the narrative puts light on a specific reality, but transcends it due to its discursive materiality, making it the object of a more comprehensive reflection of the human and world today, what sets the literary function of designing, symbolically, the complex reality in which the work is based.