They Were Many and Unemployed

Narrating Suffering After the Collapse of Modernization in Contemporary Brazilian Literature

Abstract

This article aims to analyze two fragments from Eles eram muitos cavalos, by Luiz Ruffato. Published in 2001, the novel’s fragmentary structure made it possible to select two passages as the corpus, namely “#19 Brabeza” and “#44 Trabalho,” with the purpose of discussing, in a focused manner, the figuration of unemployment experiences. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this reading takes Safatle’s (2020) notion of “psychic suffering” as a mediating category between stylistic resources and antagonistic social processes, understood in light of the “developmentalist promise” discussed by Cardoso (2010) and Schwarz (1999). The analysis thus seeks to demonstrate, in view of the Brazilian socio-historical process, that experiences of suffering structure the very narrative technique, insofar as elements such as narrative focus, the narrator’s discourse, character construction, and the configuration of time in both fragments reveal formal strategies compelled to break with traditional models of representation as a way of giving form to repeatedly frustrated expectations of recognition and belonging linked to the disintegration of formal wage labor. This allows us to infer that such experiences bear a historical weight with a long process of sedimentation in Brazilian society, especially regarding the figure of the “poor free man” (Schwarz, 1990, 2012), while also exposing the collapse of the promises of modernization.