Alencar e Saramago: configurações da realidade ficcional em Guerra dos Mascates e Memorial do Convento

Abstract

The search for a revelation of the past during Romanticism was achieved in the historical novel, which, although having lost its popularity among writers with the advent of the influence of scientific theories at the end of the nineteenth century, was not entirely abandoned and, taking a new breath from the second quarter of the twentieth century, came to our days with varied nomenclatures. This distinction among the terms is considered valid and is being used in several researches and analyzes of contemporary historical background novels. What is raised in the present research, however, calls into question the contemporary concept of the subgenre, once the questioning of great truths through irony was already in use since the nineteenth century in Brazil. Hence the idea of analyzing the works and concepts of historical novel and historiographic metafiction from their similarities and not from their differences – as emphasized by the studies based on Linda Hutcheon‟s concept –, basing itself on observations from previous studies, which include the analysis of the novel Minas de Prata (1865), by the writer José de Alencar, which indicated that the Brazilian author‟s novels are as innovative and questioning of “the historical truth” as the so-called postmodern historiographical novels that fit the term “historiographic metafiction”, more precisely for the works that emerged from the sixties of the twentieth century. It is attempted to investigate, the “historiographical making” of an author of the nineteenth century and one of the twentieth century, being José de Alencar and José Saramago, respectively, the ones chosen for the analysis, through the novels Guerra dos mascates (1958) and Memorial do Convento (2011). The research deals with the novel configuration of each one, the construction of the characters, the approach of the historical personalities present in the works and its relation with the fictional characters and, finally, the construction of the fictional world from such temporarily distant perspectives.