A região submersa: a conjuntura pós-64 sob as máscaras da sátira e da narrativa policial

Abstract

This study analyses A Região Submersa (1978) by Tabajara Ruas. It aims at establishing relationships between fiction and History. It investigates, in the tessiture of this narrative, the employment of satiric resources and the intrinsic elements inherent in the poetry of the detective romance. The incorporation of thematic and stylistic features pertinent to detective stories genres and its posterior transgression engendered by the discursive artifices of the narrator and the sarcasm, end up subordinating the entertainment to the purposes of political criticism. This makes possible the emergence of the denouncing character which was concealed in the intervals of this literature. The transgressive strategies operated in the text of Tabajara Ruas accomplish a restructuration of the conventional stylistics of this detective story, redirecting them to a trajectory that is contrary to that praised in such narrative genre. It inverts its function of accepting the dominant order, utilising it to reveal and, thus, ridicule one of the relevant purposes of the Military Regime establish in the Brazil (1964-1985): to open the country for multinational capital. This openness was homologated with the articulation of a presumptuous rhetoric supported by a truculent performance of the repressive