“Meu forte não é a música, mas a literatura”: a faceta romancista de Chico Buarque a partir da figura de seus narradores

Abstract

This work aims to present a research proposal that enables an analytical and systematic study of the novels Estorvo (1991), Benjamim (1995), Budapeste (2003), Leite Derramado (2009), O Irmão Alemão (2014), and Essa gente (2019), all by Chico Buarque de Hollanda, giving primacy, therefore, to the novelist facet of the aforementioned author. With the development of this study, we seek to demarcate the set of structural and thematic specificities that configure Buarque's stylistics and the investigative analysis of the figure of the Buarquian narrator, whose structure reveals unity in his narrative mode. We also intend to emphasize the figure of the narrator as a fictitious entity leading the narrative since we believe that the Buarquian narrator can be categorized as a specular or dream narrator, that is, the narrators opt for a diegesis conducted among delusions, dreams, and speculations about the narrated facts. Furthermore, it is possible to identify another primal aspect in Chico Buarque's aesthetic project, when scrutinizing the figure of his narrator: the aestheticization of obsession in the configuration of the narrators. Behind the plot, under the thematic surface layer of the novel, there is an obsessive movement guiding the volition, goals, and actions of all the Buarquian first-person narrators. Finally, with this research, we expect to collaborate on understanding the author’s aesthetic phenomenology and achieve a significant deepening in the current trends that govern contemporary literary production, triggering a refinement in the understanding of the literary facts that shape contemporary Brazilian literature.