Identitary Catastrophe and Military Authoritarianism: Literary “Revoicing”

Abstract

　

What we can technically call "forced disappearance" provides us with a relevant subject of reflection about the context of military authoritarianism in Brazil. Numerically limited if compared to other Latin American contexts, the Brazilian case is however significant for its historical antecedence and for the definition of a complex device for state violence. In the most of the cases, the lack of the victims and the impossibility of the mourning transfer the concept of restitution to a larger symbolic plan. Bernardo Kucinski’s dense and fragmentary novel, K. (2011), is exemplary of this theoretical issue: the biographical plane is radically overhauled in a fictional articulation, but it surprisingly acts in a sort of paradoxical realistic mode. Such a condition turns literature and fiction into a potential territory of an effective and affective restitution in order to interlace a public and alternative memory of the disappeared and, more in general, of the repressive times of military authoritarianism.