A “Literatura do Desassossego”: A Poética do Autoritarismo nos Romances do Ciclo Sombrio de José J. Veiga

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the representations of authoritarianism in the novels A Hora dos Ruminantes (1966), Sombra de Reis Barbudos (1972), Os Pecados da Tribo (1976) and Aquele Mundo de Vasabarros (1982) from José J. Veiga’s dark cycle. The main hypothesis is that in literary works that directly or indirectly address totalitarian regimes there is an aesthetic singularity. This peculiarity of approach characterizes what in this work is called the “poetics of authoritarianism”. The choice was also based on the premise that José J. Veiga’s works contain representations of the “cerrado”, portraying aspects of the region’s culture and daily life. We conceived the elements of this poetics in conjunction with the dystopian theories of Fátima Vieira (2010), the theses on the origin of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (2012) and the representations in the construction of the narrative by the explanation through ideological imputation by White (2016). We analyzed these characteristics with reference to the aforementioned works by J. J. Veiga, since each of them offers a unique and critical view of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-1985). This assumption is analogous to that of John Gledson (2003) who conceived studies between the fiction of Machado de Assis and his time. Other objectives pertinent to the research include reflecting on whether authoritarian military regimes are configured as a catastrophic event with the hermeneutic study of Oliveira’s “aesthetics of catastrophe” (2008) through the novel genre and thinking about a broad and precise approach to fantastic literature to deal with Veiga’s novel sequence.