Através da neblina branca, afastar-se com lentidão da margem em direção ao passado : a narração memorialísitica de Vermelho e A casa do diabo, de Mafalda Ivo Cruz

Abstract

Memory is a recurrent theme in literature, to the point of founding its genre, memoir, primarily characterized by work with time, linked to the narrative voice, which consists of organizing memories into a linear and coherent whole – a natural movement to recollection, as attested by scholars of the subject in different areas, such as sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and psychology. These areas are brought, in this work, together with narrative theory – particularly with contemporary narratology – to think about two novels, Vermelho and A casa do diabo, both by the Portuguese writer Mafalda Ivo Cruz. In them, the expected organization of memory narratives is subverted since there are highly fragmented, linear and confusing narrations, in many points presenting overlapping narrative voices or even impossible intrusions of dead characters’ voices, in addition with working with the time that puts past and present in coexistence. These features play not only with the reliability of the novel’s narrators but also demand from the reader an active interaction with the text, a reconstruction effort in order to have their meanings elucidated. Furthermore, just as it requires a distinct reader, the analysis of the construction of narrators in the novels in question demonstrated that the existing theory, both about memorialistic narrative and about the narrator, does not account for what the author does, demanding that a new typology that starts from Cruz’s writing be proposed – namely, the disruptive mimetic-memorialistic narrator.