A escrita diarística como estratégia narrativa em três romances brasileiros contemporâneos

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the use of diary writing as a narrative strategy in three contemporary Brazilian novels, namely: Diário do farol, by João Ubaldo Ribeiro (2016), Diário da queda, by Michel Laub (2011), and Quarenta dias, by Maria Valéria Rezende (2014), who were selected for this research because they do not present a date in the diary records. Theories that deal with the diary establish that the date is the essence of this genre, both to fix the events reported in a specific point in time, and to ensure that the writing is carried out close to the narrated events. Although the diary as a textual genre does not have a fixed structure or pre-defined models, this commitment to the demarcation of days is crucial for theorists whose perspectives we adopt in this work. From this, and considering Mikhail Bakhtin’s (2010; 2011) theories about novel composition and genres of the discourse – which are relatively stable –, we seek to analyze the fictionalization of the diary in the contemporary Brazilian novel, as well as to observe and investigate the no date in the fictional diarists’ records. In the three novels, there are more or less precise justifications as to why the lack of dating, and it is precisely the absence of this more elementary and superficial feature of the diary, the date, that motivated the questioning and problematization of the stylization of this genre by the Brazilian novel. Therefore, we investigate the atypicalities of fictional diary writing in the three works of the corpus, along with the other narrative strategies and/or thematic peculiarities that we understand to be substances of the fictional diaries elaborated by the narrators, such as metafiction, totalitarian regimes, memory, the old age, interstate migration and perceptions of urban displacement. This is bibliographical research that is based on the theoretical postulates of Bakhtin (2010; 2011), Blanchot (2005), Dalcastagnè (2012), Didier (1976), Girard (1986), Hess (2006), Hutcheon (1984), Lejeune (2014), Picard (1981), Raoul (1999), Waugh (1985), among others. In the end, we understand that the diary that is stylized by the novel can come closer to a greater or lesser degree to its real model, according to the purposes of the narrative. Regarding the date, we understand that the inscription of the days in the three selected novels is not essential for the plot, considering that in these fictional diaries the fundamental commitment is the narration of a story that does not intend (and does not need) to go through a process of verification of the veracity of the events narrated because there is no illusion, for the reader, that they are real diaries.