A “palavra armada”: ficcionalizações da Guerra Grande (1864-1870)

Abstract

This study, on behalf of Comparative Literature, analyzes historical novels related to the Paraguay War theme (1864-1870). Based on theoretical contributions, especially from Latin American authors interested in historical and literary issues, our goal is to demonstrate how the structure of the explored novels, throughout a two-different position called by us as the “armed word”, first of all relies on one or more historiographical inclinations about the war, and, last, builds itself as a fictional resonance organized in trenches being them either national-patriotic, revisionist or allegedly objective. Not going too far from the studies related to the historical novel genre, and from a huge group of narratives coming from the countries directly involved in the armed conflicts, we selected to be part of the corpus the following novels: No robarás las botas de los muertos (2002), by the Uruguayan Mario Delgado Aparaín; Caballero (1986), by the Paraguayan Guido Rodríguez Alcalá; Los papeles de Burton (2012), by the Argentinean Mercedes Rubio; Menina (2012), by the Brazilian Paulo Stucchi. In order to proceed with this reflexive work about part of the Latin American Literature and – to observe it under the same thematic – considering its complexity, we dedicate ourselves, in the first part, to the historic and historiographical aspects. Next, throughout an intermediate manner, we bring the theoretical bases about the hybrid narratives of History and fiction, and a number or novels related to the Paraguay War. We move on, in the third moment, for the enjoyment of the corpus, before returning, in the fourth section, to the discussion around History and Latin American Literature that reassures our hypothesis of associating the literary group presented to the notion of the “armed word”. We place our research in the bibliographical field and the criteria for the approach of the theoretical, historical, and fictional material is of qualitative information. It is needed to value the scope and the voices of literary production in the fertile soil of the four nationalities, besides the extensive material mentioned, so that we can step forward to an indispensable theme in the History of Latin America