The past within the present in O marechal de costas

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel O marechal de costas (2016), by José Luiz Passos, according to the discussion on the Contemporary (AGAMBEN, 2009) and the mutations in literature since the beginning of this millenium (PERRONE-MOISÉS, 2016). Resuming the metafictional vein, the novelist, born in Pernambuco, looks towards the political coups of 1891 and 2016, focusing on the 2013 stormy protests narrated through the perspective of an assumed great-granddaughter of Marechal Floriano Peixoto (first president of Brazil). Thus, the past and the present overlap in the story in order to construct a reflexive critical scenario regarding authoritarianism and extremism, as well as the financial and political crisis in Brazil in the decade of 1920, whose shadows are cast on the tragic scenery of the early Brazilian Republic, which was “forged by bullets”. For the analysis proposed herein, the works of Nicolau Sevcenko (2001), Octavio Paz (1984) e Karl Erik Schøllhammer (2011), among others, were also taken into account. Lastly, it was found that Passos’s novel is inserted in the contemporaneity due to its ethic commitment to the present, without yielding to a positivist relationship of historical causality, nor to the critical overcoming of the dualism that blurs the present debate.