Borders and oblivion: Noite dentro da noite, by Joca Reiners Terron

Abstract

Part of contemporary Brazilian literature shows a vigorous effort in the fight against forgetfulness about the period of the civil-military dictatorship lived between 1964 and 1985. Among this production are the works of a new generation of writers who deal with the remains of the past, often from autobiographical record, from points of view permeated by distance, and the perspective of children. In some of these accounts, the presence of traveling characters, deterritorialized and moving between borders and languages, seems to suggest that the work of memory is built from walking and detours that often evade the limits imposed by barriers of identity and nationality. It is from this perception and from a reflection on the conflicts around the memories of the last cycle of dictatorships in the Southern Cone that I propose a reading of Noite dentro da noite (2017a), by Joca Reiners Terron. Presented as an autobiography, the novel is narrated by the character Curt Meyer-Clason, the well-known translator of Guimarães Rosa into German. It is this mysterious narrator who slowly links the childhood of the amnesic protagonist to the recent past of Brazil and Paraguay, both under dictatorship. Such a reading is inevitably cut through by the current context of fragmenting the contemporary democratic horizon.