Silenciosa violência em Não falei, de Beatriz Bracher

Abstract

Violence is a trait of the Brazilian state, but the registry and the public discussion of its consequences are not common practices in the history of the country. Literature, as a mean that influences the collective memory, can represent violence as a reaction to the erasure of historical events. On that perspective, Não falei, novel by Beatriz Bracher, introduces a retired linguistic professor that faces his past during the Brazilian military dictatorship, when he was brutally tortured. Many years later, remembering the events of that time, he is reticent in his linguistic elaboration of his traumas. Considering such prerogative, we study the novel considering two analytical categories: violence, based on Ginzburg (2012, 2017), and silence, product of that violence, according to Holanda (1992) and Barthes (2003). For the analysis, we were anchored on the dialectical procedure of Antonio Candido (2014), considering the literary narrative as a linguistic code capable of shedding light to a content of both social and political nature. We concluded that the violence experienced by the narrator profoundly transformed his relation with language, causing a hesitation that tips repeatedly towards silence.