Nas águas da memória: o rio como metáfora em Dois irmãos e Órfãos do Eldorado, de Milton Hatoum

Abstract

The narratives Dois irmãos and Órfãos do Eldorado, by Milton Hatoum, are surrounded by the river ambience, a fluid, deep and watery space which represents the limit between life and death. The river, mythical scenery, turned symbolic to the fictional plot of the narratives, can also be understood metaphorically as the most intimate and profound of the human being, where the characters are taken to an immersion, into a look at themselves. Therefore, this space is made of transcendence, allowed by a jogging into someone s memory, which is dynamic, instable and fluid as the rivers. On the books of Hatoum, we have first person narrators who are dedicated to recompose the timeline through the reporting facts, creating a lonesome process about the memory. They make a search into the man s inner self and they discover their fragile human condition. On a cathartic work and by a way of self-reflection brought by the memory, they found themselves as strangers because on this reconstruction of their own history, the subject is based on the present tense. Due to this, the time axis of the narration is present-past. On this way, it is important to comprehend that memorization requires strategies. The tales, ritual acts, myths, fables, all of them make part of this group of strategies which transmit from a generation to the next one the reality of the people throughout images and symbols in different space and time. It is clear the narrators of Dois irmãos and Órfãos do Eldorado tell personal stories, but they do through the elements around the individual and collective memory, all of them permeated by the ambience where they are in. Therefore, we understand that studying the memory is to study the culture and the lived history of each subject and each group they are in. When it is plausible that the memory of an individual is also the memory of his/her region and the memory of the groups they are an essential part, it is substantial to consider the memory process as a collective construction. It means the individual memory is a part of a collective memory. Thereby, on the texts which are analyzed, it is throughout the memory tissue which space and time put it together, on a place a river is between two narrated worlds