Entrelaçando memórias: o fantasma da ditadura civil-militar em "A noite da espera" e "Pontos de fuga", de Milton Hatoum.

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze how Milton Hatoum revisits the memories of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship in his coming-of-age novels A noite da espera (2017) and Pontos de fuga (2019), both part of the trilogy O lugar mais sombrio, considering the aesthetic resources employed by the author. This study also investigates to what extent these two literary works portray themes previously explored in literature during the dictatorship: political exile and imprisonment, torture and censorship, repression, and obscurantism. By offering a contemporary (re)reading of the dictatorship, the writer suggests that this dark period is still an open wound in Brazilian history. He aligns himself with those who historically demand their right to promote democratic memory and captures the socio-political and economic transformations in the present time without forgetting the harmful effects of this recent dictatorial past that still manifests itself in the daily life of this democratic country. This investigation also seeks to explore the theoretical interface between memory, melancholy, and identity through Martim's journey, the narrator-protagonist of both sequential plots, whose adolescence and adulthood develop under military rule, especially after the promulgation of Institutional Act 5 (AI-5), the most repressive decree during the 21 years of the regime. Besides, from the perspective of literary and cultural criticism, it examines the composition of Hatoum's hybrid writing adopted in the two referenced works. This hybridism arises from the mixture of the following literary genres: bildungsroman, autobiography, and diary. This plural approach encompasses the memorialism and self-referentiality prevalent in Brazilian literary prose produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Therefore, this artistic gesture reveals a dialogue with the critical reception of literature produced in the periods spanning from 1964 to 1979, 1980 to 2000, and from 2001 to the present day. This fact implies that the fictional work significantly represents a project of life, art, and justice within the social imagination of a nation that continues to be shaped by centuries-old discourses of oppression and resistance.