Ficções do despojo: memória e performance em A república dos sonhos de Nélida Piñon e La escribana del viento de Ana Teresa Torres

Abstract

This thesis is based on the link between memory and image established in the novels of Nélida Piñon and Ana Teresa Torres. The objectives outlined include analyzing and describing the forms of textualization of memory, highlighting its political and aesthetic implications and identifying the performative elements that configure the images in the narrative production of Piñon and Torres. The memory as waste and ruin proposed by Assmann and Benjamin, serve as a method to trace the memorial forms known as gestural: the smile and the epigraphs. These gestural forms justify the investigation while they they allow dialogue between the authors to recognize in the text identities conditioned by dispossession. The textualization of this dispossession reveals an ingenious modality that is described as a narrative gambiarra whose reverse is an aesthetic of dissimulation. Both the gambiarra and dissimulation configure the “fictions of dispossession” characterized by absence and politics. The performance studies developed by Taylor and Ravetti show how absence leads novels towards modalities of experience close to the sensory. In this sense, the writings of the self become listening to the other. The emphasis on space and the insistence on the scenic “theatricalize” the texts, emphasizing the listening of the narration as a spectacle, whereas the texts are delimited by the scene of writing and the scene of listening. The insistence on space allows the novels to be described as a superposition of “narrative dioramas”. Finally, guided by the thought of Didi-Huberman, we highlight the memorial strategies that behave anachronistically and dialectically to show the “surviving images” elevating the political trait of these novels. In the case of Piñon revealing racist images articulated with slavery, in the case of Torres showing spaces of torture. From the comparison between these two authors, we can conclude that contemporary memory is conditioned by a visualizing drive that includes other modalities and experiences of feeling