As virtudes do esquecer: memória e esquecimento em O livro de areia, de Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

"The virtues of forgetting: memory and forgetfulness in short stories of O Livro de Areia, by Jorge Luis Borges" is the title of this research about memory and forgetfulness in the short stories of the work O Livro de Areia, published in 1975, that emphasizes the close interdependence between these two human faculties as a basis for the functioning of these mechanisms which contribute to the socio-historical-cultural construction of the human being, by the memorialistic approach when preserving or forgetting their experiences. Therefore, we analyze how the memories of the characters are represented in the narrative in question and how they are stabilized by the literary language. More pointedly, we seek to understand the relationship between the actions of remembering and forgetting, demonstrating how they support each other to perform the construction of memory. The work is divided into four chapters: the first chapter, constitutes the opening remarks and provides an overview of our work. The second one – The writing of the memory – is subdivided into three topics and discusses the studies of memory in relation to forgetfulness. In the third chapter - Borges and the memory – we make a brief presentation of the author, emphasizing his writing, mainly about memory. The fourth chapter - Memory and Forgetting in Jorge Luis Borges' short stories - is divided into four topics. Here we analyzed the short stories "O congresso"; "A noite dos dons"; "Utopia de um homem que está cansado" and "O Livro de Areia", considering the ambivalence between memory and forgetting in building memories as well as the need to forget, among other factors, as the essential basis for the construction of knowledge. The research analysis was anchored on the theoretical assumptions of Paul Ricoeur (2007), Maurice Halbwachs (2004), Ivan Izquierdo (2010), Friedrich Nietzsche (2011), Harald Weinrich (2000), Beatriz Sarlo (2007) and Antonio Candido (1967), among others. According to the considerations presented during the research, we can confirm that, in the short stories, memory and forgetfulness need to be absorbed and practiced by the subject so that he/she can abstract from all lived experiences what will foster the legacy of his/her memory, allowing thus the ability to create.