Excessive Formality: Use of Language from Bernardo Carvalho’s Teatro to the Comissão Nacional da Verdade

• In Event: Beyond the State: Popular Culture and Anti-State Resistance in Brazil and Puerto Rico

Abstract

In a novel such as Teatro, a commission charged with determining truth would have a hard time establishing justice. Bernardo Carvalho challenges first the idea of realism by creating an enigmatic character that escapes language, then he forces the reader to reflect on the idea of justice and the limitations of juridical meta-language to represent violence. Possibly set in Brazil during the dictatorship, a first person narrator, a fugitive, introduces us to the events that led him to exiting the country. Once sucked into the narrative whirlwind, it becomes impossible to distinguish the terrorist from the policeman, the man from the woman, the porn-star from the writer, the sane from the insane. As the novel challenges those dichotomies, this paper precisely reflects on the linguistic paradox of indexicality: defining an event or an entity creates a category that ultimately becomes exclusionary. In a sense, it is precisely such categorization that represents the limit of truth commissions, which in order to condemn the violence committed by the state, they establish categories of violence that often, and sadly, end up being limiting. In the particular case of Brazil’s Comissão Nacional da Verdade, currently working on its final report, human rights violations are being rigidly divided within typologies, in what can be seen as an excessive formality and logic. In this regard, the paper advocates that literature can offer a space where the ethical dimension of violence can be represented, a space within the illogical that escapes definition precisely because, as Carvalho shows in Teatro, truth can be polysemic and encompassing.

Author

• Giulia Ricco, Duke University