REPRESENTATIONS OF A PAST THAT ECHOES IN THE PRESENT

o corpo interminável, by Claudia Lage, and the writing of confronting barbarism and oblivion

Abstract

O corpo interminável (2019) is a contemporary romance written by the Brazilian author Claudia Lage and her plot revolves around individuals who are inserted in the context of living and inheriting the experience of the military dictatorship in Brazil. It's regarding, therefore, a literary work that stresses the necessity of writing about catastrophic events and in which exists the search for a past that, even silenced, remains alive, since it resonates absences, hollows, and lacunar memories. As such, this research questions the possibility of, via the analysis of O corpo interminável, identifying a fictional construction that accentuates, in its aesthetic forms and narratives, the individual and collective history of Brazil's military dictatorship. We search to emphasize, through the literary corpus and the literature's key, the dilemmas born from the relevance of the testimony of  individuals affected by the national catastrophe and part of a plot that mobilizes aesthetic and narrative aspects to achieve the traumatic experience from the Brazilian military dictatorship. As such, we take as a theoretical reference Assunção (2020), Ginzburg (2017), and Gagnebin (2018; 2019). At the end of the work, we hope to contribute to the political and literary characterization of the romance, since, by exploring the horror aesthetic produced in O corpo interminável, we believe it's possible to witness the relevance of the representation of authoritarian political events in contemporary Brazilian literature.