Diário do Hospício: onde o testemunho é mediado pela literatura

Abstract

Whether it comes from the reports of survivors of the Shoah, whether it comes from political upheavals or from those excluded from knowledge-producing spaces in Latin Ameri-ca, “testimony literature” always has a relationship with violence. Long before the emergence of the term “testimony literature”, in Rio’s Belle Époque at the beginning of the 20th century, violence already relegated poor people, black people, immigrants, alcoholics, or anyone else who disturbed the social order to the hospice. At the Hospital Nacional de Alienados, with the support of the police and science, as it did for so many others, the violence of progress admitted Lima Barreto (1881-1922) for alcoholic delusions from December 25, 1919 to February 2, 1920, a period in which the author wrote the strips that posthumously gave rise to Diário do Hospício. As a representative of the State's strategy of excluding based on racism and poverty, the hospice made time and bodies docile. In Diário do Hospício, however, the testimony passes through the time of the diary, and the time of the diary passes through the time of memory, and this testimony is also permeated by the language of the chronicle, the novel and the short story, without exhausting other possibilities. From within the walls of the hospice, through the voice of the author, the inmate-narrator-writer uncovers the creation of the patient through science and questions the very border between literary genres, responding to the science of the time and the violence of imprisonment with a testimony mediated by the freedom of literature