Autoficção, confissão e história: o escritor-intelectual em Memórias do cárcere, de Graciliano Ramos

Abstract

This paper analyzes the book of Graciliano Ramos Memórias do cárcere and focuses on the relationship between writing and experience, as well as on the problem of the intellectual-writer. The way in which Graciliano Ramos fictionalizes himself results in a hybrid work, mixture of autobiography, memorialismo, essay and novel. This paper focuses on the strategies of textual composition, as well as on the mechanisms of autofiction and confession that form the narrative of Ramos, in his recreation of his journey towards and detention in the extinct Penal Colony of Ilha Grande. In defense of the intellectuals, by Jean-Paul Sartre, is the starting point for advancing the discussion of the role of the intellectual as one who leaves his sphere of action in favor of those who have no voice, a notion problematized by Gayatri C Spivak, in Can the subaltern speak? Spivak considers that the possibility of the intellectual speaking for the disadvantaged is an incongruity to be answered. In this way, the concentration on the political theme represented by the literary discourse of Memórias do cárcere demonstrated an enunciator committed to the strategies of critical action in the intellectual field, so as to establish his political position as an intellectual that is impelled to denounce, through fiction, the structures of power and repression that formed an obscure period of our history, known as the Vargas Era dictatorship.