A narrativa da violência em Memórias de Lázaro, de Adonias Filho

Abstract

This research studied violence in the novel Memórias de Lázaro (1952), by Bahian author Adonias Filho. We analyzed procedures that fictionalized violence into diegesis; to such, we used the expressiveness analysis as our method. Two specific objectives were delineated, in this research we intended 1) to analyze violence in the narrative elements of Memórias de Lázaro, and 2) to distinguish the perspectives about violence expressed in the corpus. As results of the scrutiny of such objectives, three chapters were elaborated providing substance to the research. The first chapter is a study on the narrator, Alexandre, and also on aggressive deeds narrated by him. In the following chapter, we focused on the characters Jerônimo, Roberto and Rosália, to argue about how their discourses function within the violence organization created by the diegesis. And finally, given the contribution offered by the previous chapters, the third chapter discusses aesthetics of violence in the setting. Our research identified Adonias Filho’s novel as part of a Brazilian literary tradition that deals with Bahia’s cocoa region and, within this tradition, the aesthetics of violence of his work is noteworthy for organizing a series of aesthetic procedures in order to dissolve social contradictions and also for composing a pessimistic and conservative discourse on Bahia’s economic development in the 20th Century. We sought grounds in the works of theorists such as Bakhtin (1981, 2015), Candido (2006), Martins (1989), Todorov (1974, 2006), Benveniste (1991), Ginzburg (2012), amongst others.