A nostalgia em tempos de exílio: as gramáticas emocionais do reencontro no romance As Brasas (1942)

Abstract

The novel As Brasas (1941), by the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, tells the story of the reencounter between two friends four decades after a separation caused by the breach of fidelity. It combines time and feelings, as it presents a past that has not ended related to a horizon for which one walks. Based on a temporal record of exile, in which I identify the displaced subjective experience in the past, I propose a study of the emotional grammars of reencounter based on an interpretative analysis of As Brasas. From the methodological point of view, the research is based on a type of textual interpretation that considers the dynamics between the author, the work and the reader. It seeks to identify the historical and cultural dimension of the literary work through a receptive process. Based on the drama of the protagonist Henrik, the study triggers a kind of subjectivity based on the inadequacy of the condition in which life is found in the present time. Understanding how people revitalize their past allows us to situate the set of meanings attributed to the notion of nostalgia. Such a feeling is examined having as a key of understanding the experience of exile as a loss of the affective bond with the time-space lived in the past. Positioned on the question of the breach of trust, the drama raised from As Brasas is analyzed on the plane of a specific sentimental order capable of articulating exile and nostalgia, as an absence of a form of existence that is left to have. In the novel, this nostalgia raised by the absence consists in the effort of re-elaboration of the past in order to transubstantiate the consummate one in uncertainty, which reveals specific ways of subjectively experiencing the time.