Covering and Showing the Face: Possibilities of Recovering Historical Novel in the 21st Century in Torto Arado, by Itamar Vieira Júnior and Formas de voltar para casa, by Alejandro Zambra

Abstract

The return to the past is a historical necessity. Even in times that urge the construction of a national and independent identity, especially in the colonized countries, it is necessary to recover the past, assess the official history and then reconstruct it, considering the achievements of a social margin, that was silenced until then. The historical novel is dedicated to this. This study aims to analyze the possibility of recovering the historical past in two different contexts: the Chilean Military Dictatorship through the fictionalized narrative of memory in Alejandro Zambra's novel Formas de voltar para  casa, published in 2003, and the context of slavery in Brazil reverberated in the book Torto Arado, by Itamar Viera Júnior, from 2018. Within their specificities, these two approaches to historical discourse, aesthetically organized, reverberate the maximum intention of the historical novel as a category, when conceiving history as a guiding factor of actions of the characters, in order to have the ultimate end in the formulation of an identity consciousness.