O difícil disfarce da dor: humor e memória do terror em Luís Fernando Veríssimo

Abstract

This thesis reads a set of short stories and short proses written by Luís Fernando Veríssimo and published in anthologies between 1975 and 2010. The objective is to examine the relations between humor and violence of the 1964 Brazilian military dictatorship, seeking to reflect on the possibilities of laughter in situations involving pain and suffering. Issues such as authoritarianism, censorship, repression, torture, memory and forgetfulness are focused from the topic of humourism. The study starts from the idea that the Brazilian cultural production dedicated to represent the violence of dictatorship usually makes use of several representational strategies. One of them is the mechanism of humor, particularly present in movies, cartoons and literature. The problem is that humor and violence are, as a rule, from ethical criteria, incongruous categories. Laughter produced from episodes of violence and their impact on the victim, individually or collectively, can configure unscrupulous aggression and disrespect for the pain and suffering of others. In this context, it is important to consider the fact that Veríssimo has received, in 1996, the “Chico Mendes Medal of Resistance”, granted by the so called Tortura Nunca Mais Group to people who fight against the violation of human rights and act to preserve freedom and memory of the dead and missing political activists due to State violence. This way, it is widely known that the predominant feature of Verissimo's writing is humor. Generally, the relations between this theme, torture and other forms of violence have no sympathetic reception, especially from the point of view of the victims or relatives of victims of such acts. Looking through this angle, how can a writer who "plays" with serious things receive such a medal? In other words, to what extent can Verissimo's literary production that causes laughter from situations involving pain and suffering be ethically accepted and legitimated as critical of State violence? The hypothesis is that the texts studied are formally constituted by an ethics of humorous representation, once their purpose is not to trivialize suffering, but, through humor, to lead the readers to reflect on State violence, to develop empathy with victims and contribute to the “release of pain” and the “strengthening of the self” in the face of excessive demand of violence. These questions converge on reflections on ethics, aesthetics and authoritarianism. Thus, the thesis dialogues mainly with studies written by M. Buber, E. Lévinas, M. Bakhtin, T. W Adorno, W. Benjamin, H. Arendt, S. Žižek, M. Foucault, M. R. Kehl, A. Bosi, A. Candido, M. Chauí, L. M. Schwarcz and with several works that discuss humourism from the cultural, philosophical and psychoanalytical point of view, such as those written by G. Minois, E. T. Saliba, L. Pirandello, H. Bergson, S. Freud, among others concerned to the reflections about humorous language. To do so, the first chapter of the thesis presents the state of the art, exploring the critical reception of Veríssimo's works, the concept of short prose, the author's intellectual work and his engagement in contemporary literary resistance. The second analyzes the authoritarianism, violence and memory categories, trying to articulate with Brazilian context, and examines some cultural, philosophical and psychoanalytical aspects of humor and its relation to language. The third and last corresponds to the interpretation of the corpus, giving visibility to the ethical and aesthetical aspects formally structured through relations between humor and those elements proper of State violence. The final part of this chapter is dedicated to reflections on the issue of ethics of humorous representation.