Vidas em ebulição, miopias e falas interditadas: o trato ficcional de crianças de pés descalços em Inferno, de Patrícia Melo, e em A vida que ninguém vê, de Eliane Brum

Abstract

“Novel’s children” is a category found in Riedel (1980) for characters charged with social denunciations that echo through literature. Within this theme, the present work aims to present how the forms of abandonment of children are fictionally treated by contemporary Brazilian literature, here represented by the novel Inferno, by Patrícia Melo (2000), and by six selected chronicles from the book A vida que ninguém vê, by Eliane Brum (2006), whose photographs that precede each narrative are also studied. The ensemble shapes the abyss between two worlds, the real and the desired, and between two territories that are the same: the city without any subtlety, experienced by children who, like Maria-Nova by Conceição Evaristo, grow up “violently from within”. The predominant voice in both works is that of the third person and the guiding question of this work is: what do these looks comprise? Beyond the reproduction of stereotypes, the look at each tragedy presented, here mobilized by literature and philosophy, enables the denaturalization of images historically and socially constructed about such characters. For this, the work is divided into three chapters, occupied by the universes of each character, comprising reality and fantasy; the characters' confrontation with the city, considering how the world receives them and readings in defense of the insubordination of the look; and the characters' conditions to perceive and enunciate what was experienced. It is about the poetic capture of historically unseen lives. The gradual change of focus, from “novel’s children” to “children with elderly eyes”, a category described by Eliane Brum (2017), brings the reader closer to some leveling of looks with such characters, aesthetically recovered by literary composition. At the same time that we are not dealing with mere reproductions of facts, as in a newspaper article, this interweaving of stories again indicates their repetition, due to the similarity between the trajectories of abandonment