Torture and Enforced Disappearance in the Short Story “Dôia na janela” by Roberto Drummond

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of torture and enforced disappearance in the short story “Dôia na janela”, by Roberto Drummond. Published in 1975 in A morte de D. J. em Paris, the author’s debut book, the story’s main plot has traditionally been interpreted as a hallucinatory episode experienced by the protagonist, who is confined to a psychiatric clinic. Drawing on a text-centered approach, partly inherited from Russian Formalism and New Criticism, and by examining how literary form is modulated by figures of speech, the article first seeks to show that the short story is composed of two narrative planes that generate ambiguity in the representation of the two types of crime. This occurs because these two narrative planes are articulated through a figure–ground interplay akin to the visual arts and to certain devices of cinematic language (zoom in, zoom out, close-up). Through such procedures, the story shifts to the reader the task of adopting an interpretive stance regarding the possible veracity of the crimes it suggests. At this stage of interpretation, that stance depends not only on the historical contextualization of the references and allusions present in the text—the context of political repression and state terror under Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship of the 1970s—but also on the recognition that history and society are constitutive of literary form, not merely as themes but as another materiality, insofar as they are integral components, rather than merely external factors, of literary form and of the text’s effects of meaning.