Letras do cárcere: Reinventing Memory in Reports by and on Detainees

Abstract

In the context of the emergence of Brazilian literary narratives that come near crime chronicles, observed in late 1990s, Drauzio Varella’s novel Estação Carandiru became the patron of an editorial lode known at the time as letters from prison. The authors who participate in this group, literary rookies, mostly produced narratives that illustrate the relation between memory and history, as formulated by W. Benjamin in The narrator. The transformation of experiences of confinement into shared experience outside their walls (to employ Benjamin’s terminology), by means of narrative operators, can be found in the textual choices made. In the course, certain dissensions between the tales of the detainees among themselves and of the prisoners in comparison to the visitor who acts as narrator (doctor, reporter and researcher) are punctuated. The intermittent migration of histories from the documentary/ journalistic to the memorialistic/ confessional plan is the foundation on which rests the reinvention of reality, in which language is considered, according to the Benjaminian method, a way of exploring the past.