Sobre(viver) no cárcere: Graciliano Ramos e a nudez na casa dos mortos

Abstract

This essay proposes an immanent reading of Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do cárcere [Memories of Prison], examining, mainly via references to corporeality and that which covers it and that which exposes it, attempts to cause a “civil death,” characteristic of the procedures conducted by “total institutions,” as formulated by Erving Goffman in Asylums: Essays on the social situation of mental patients and others inmates, as well as the author’s textually formalized resistance to the social role of the writer faced with this assassination of the self and the other, with whom maximum, forced proximity in inhumane conditions present a challenge to survival in many senses of the word. Staying alive in “the house of the dead,” an expression borrowed from Dostoyevsky’s prison experience, thus refers not only to the biological preservation of life, but also to the challenge of an ever-present state of attention regarding that which cannot be left buried in the past, as the would-be perpetrators of this attempted death would prefer.