NÃO FALEI: NARRATIVE REMEMBRANCE ACCORDING TO WALTER BENJAMIN

Abstract

This article elects remembrance and involuntary memory as its central themes to produce a literary analysis of the contemporary novel Não falei, by Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher (2017). Its goal was to investigate the memorialist construction of the novel from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s (1987a) writings. The methodology is based on Antonio Candido’s understanding of the relations between literary work and social life (2014). The fundamental argument presented was that the narrator and protagonist, tortured by the dictatorial regime in Brazil in 1970 and accused of having betrayed Armando, his brother-in-law, by giving away his location, proceeded in a memorialist journey that, in revisiting his infant years with his family, as well as the personal and violent tragedy that changed his life, experiences an involuntary memory by the end of the novel that sheds a new perspective to the narrative as a whole.