A (Disen)chant(ment) in Multiple Voices

Figurations of Chorality in Eles eram muitos cavalos, by Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

The article analyzes how Luiz Ruffato, in Eles eram muitos cavalos, stages the contemporary urban experience through an aesthetics of fragmentation and chorality. It adopts as method the articulation of theoretical frameworks drawn from literary studies, contemporary art, and aesthetic theory, with particular emphasis on the concepts of remnants of the real (Garramuño, 2009, 2014), the installation-novel (Carvalho, 2005; Reiss, 2012), and Agamben’s (2009) notion of contemporaneity. The analysis reveals that the novel disrupts narrative linearity and is constructed as a literary installation comprised of multiple discursive forms – voices, documents, scenes, and noises – which blur the lines between fiction and reality. It argues that chorality, rather than promoting harmony, generates a persistent collision of dissonant voices that reflect the precariousness, invisibility, and social violence present in the city of São Paulo. The article concludes that formal fragmentation is not merely a stylistic device, but rather a critical strategy that, by staging the darkness of the present, in Agamben’s terms, exposes the collapse of traditional representational forms, thereby transforming literature into a space of resistance, and denunciation of urban inequalities.