INVENTING AND PRETENDING THE PAST: THE MEMORY EQUIVOCATION IN INFÂNCIA, BY GRACILIANO RAMOS

Abstract

The text analyzes Infância, a book by Graciliano Ramos, aiming to demonstrate how its construction of narrative memory can be read through the concept of memory equivocation, which is premised on the idea of controlled ​​equivocation taken from the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2018; 2005). There are moments in the book in which the work of the translation of the past is brought to the surface of the text through the use of the narrator's uncertain and slippery language when telling episodes of his most distant childhood. Throughout the book, the use of the language becomes more assertive, seeking to hide the memory equivocation, an operation that does not deny the presence of such equivocation, which is intrinsic to the materiality of the text.