“A precisão conduz a gente, doutor”: migrações e narrativas de resistência em Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the narratives of resistance in Luiz Ruffato’s work, emphasizing the centrality of migration, with a focus on the novels Inferno provisório (2016) and Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você (2009). The objective is to investigate how the author fictionalizes multiple forms of displacement and the transformation of the Brazilian urban worker, highlighting his literary project of social critique. We proceed from the premise that Ruffato’s work constructs a critical vision of society by centering what Jessé de Souza (2018) defines as the batalhadores (strivers) class — subjects who struggle incessantly for recognition and against falling into the structural underclass (ralé). Methodologically, the study adopts a hybrid character by incorporating Jeanne Favret-Saada’s (2005) notions of “being affected” and the debate on individual trajectories proposed by Suely Kofes (2004). This approach articulates literary analysis with the researcher's own migratory experience, recognizing that the subject's opacity and the affects of displacement inform a critical reading of the work. The concept of the narrative of resistance is initially explored based on Alfredo Bosi (2002), as both a theme and a process inherent to writing, but is expanded through the propositions of Augusto Sarmento-Pantoja (2023; 2024), which allow for an understanding of Ruffato’s writing as a testimonial gesture and an anarchival act of reconstructing historically erased memories. The discussion on uprootedness and identity dialogues with the decentering of the subject in late modernity, according to Stuart Hall (2003; 2006), and the incurable fracture of exile in Edward Said (2003). This theoretical framework is deepened by Christina Sharpe’s (2023) theory of “the wake,” through which Ruffato’s work is read as a labor of vigil that exposes the persistence of colonial and structural violence in the characters' daily lives. The relevance of this work lies in its contribution to the critical reception of a fundamental author in the contemporary scene, highlighting the complexity of migration in his oeuvre. Thus, this thesis seeks to reframe the reading of Ruffatian themes from a perspective that values the strength of the migrant's voice in their struggle for belonging and survival. The analysis demonstrates that, in Ruffato, migration functions as a mechanism for reproducing precariousness, and that the literary form of his work aesthetically materializes the uprootedness and the struggle for belonging of migrant workers. The migrants are, therefore, the synthesis of the social tensions fictionalized by the author.