Censored Brazilian fiction in the 1970s

Abstract

Censorship has intensified in Brazil especially between 1969 and 1978, during AI-5 validity. Meanwhile periodic press was submitted to previous censorship, books used to be hired by censors based on denounces and would be condemned by pressing on cover advertising words as “subversives” or “dangerous to moral”. After condemned, they could be forbidden to commerce, seized or destroyed. The absence of standards by censors brought some agitation, misguides and even self-censorship by authors. It did not miss, however, those who expose themselves, by using forbidden expressions, bringing issue violence and loss of human and social relationships. A manner to surpass this problem, as observed by critics and historians, is the creation of ironic narrators, responsible by satiric or allegoric texts. Among those, we can light Zero, from Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, or “Rebelião dos mortos”, awarded short story written by Luiz Fernando Emediato. The ideological emphasis shown by those narratives shall fatally attract denounces that results, in fact, in its prohibition. On the other hand, the publication of Erico Verissimo’s Incidente em Antares (1973) shows that the allegorical narrative could reach the general public without suffering any restriction by censorship, possibly due to the author’s fame. Considering that in this kind of books emerge thematic components related to denounce and contestation, this article discusses stylistic resources used by writers to get distance of denotative layer and mere descriptive realism, enlarging the row of lectures to those texts.