Com a bexiga perto dos olhos - A forma humorada de narrar o triste nas autobiografias de Frank McCourt

Abstract

This work investigates the humor in Angelas’s Ashes (1996) and ‘Tis: a memoir (1999), autobiographies of the American-Irish writer Frank McCourt. In McCourt’s works, the narrator sometimes participates as a witness, sometimes leads the events narrated. The facts selected by the narrator lead the chronological order of McCourt’s childhood, and they are, most of times, facts that express discomfort. The resistance against hunger, the affection between him and his brothers, the desire of overcoming misery and of establishing a place in the world through the acquisition of culture, and the humorous way like McCourt registers his past are constant features in his autobiographical narrative. The freedom of the narrative form that joins in a same sentence different tenses and different speeches combines with the freedom of content established by the writer, in what a sad story is permeated by comedy. He narrates with critical eyes, relativizes social norms and truths, and exposes the social stupidity in which he grew up. The point of view is given from Frank as an adult, the mature man that comes back to the striking youth “scenes” to constitution of his personality, and tell them without self-pity. What he reports is important in his identity construction, or the different identities that he assumes as the time goes. The temporal displacement allows the narrator to see and to analyze with a kind of exemption what has happened. By close reading methodology, I look for the discursive marks of personal experience which raises issues to the autobiographical genre and how the author’s humorous view reveals his memories, introducing dramatic facts with the mood of humour. The humorous narrative collaborates to reinforce the veracity of what is narrated by the appeal to empathy and, in this aspect, it is evident the importance of the reader to complete both the autobiographical writing process and to decode the humorous utterance. But the McCourt’s aim isn’t to make humor, but to extract comicity and to make the facet of irony available from the drama his youth was. As autobiographer and fiction writer, McCourt enriches literature by building a narrative that leads place to social tension and to historical reflection.