(Des)Memória de perplexidades: Brasil, década de 1970

Abstract

Starting from two books, Inventory of Scars by Alex Polari, and K. by Bernardo Kucinski, this article analyses the place of literature in dealing with painful historical experiences in Brazil under the last dictatorship (1964-85). In these works, the notion of perplexity is associated with different strategies of memory as the registration of prison experience for future acknowledgment or the post reorganization of remembrances about the search for a missing person. In both cases, the poetic or fictional approach is fundamental for the mimesis of a damaged life and justifies the hypothesis of “perplexity” as a possible way of translating the “immensurable” experienced during that historical process.

Keywords

• historical experience
• Brazil
• civil-military dictatorship
• perplexity
• fictional approach