About the writing of pain

Abstract

The text presents as object of study the testimonial works of Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, Retrato calado (1988), and of Flávio Tavares, Memórias do esquecimento (1999), in which the authors narrate events experienced during the years of the military dictatorship in Brazil ( 1964-1985), including his passages through torture sessions. In this work, the reasons why the reports present certain structural characteristics are explored, such as the narrator's split in the face of the description of events of extreme violence, the incorporation of an interlocutor to whom the narrator addresses, the apparent impossibility of ordering chronology of facts and the repetition of terms and syntactic constructions in the same period. The interpretative hypothesis investigated is that similar devices, added to the evidence that a long time elapsed between the experience of the facts and their narration, indicate that this hesitant narrator is a victim of traumatic experiences. In this sense, the discursive structure of the testimonies of Salinas and Tavares is analyzed, identifying in the reports indicative elements of the difficulties faced in the act of writing about pain.