Entre o indivíduo e a nação: memória e esquecimento em “O filho da mãe”, de Bernardo Carvalho

Abstract

One of the constants of Bernardo Carvalho´s works is the investigation of the past understood as incomplete and where the individuals memories becomes an insecure field unable to offer an unified image of the various reports of the characters. In “O filho da mãe”, the author creates characters crossed by the history of Soviet Union wars, including the misery and death inflicted to the independent republics. More important, those characters have the indelible mark of being the "other", which should be vanished from past and the immemorial territory of old Russia. Against the tide of historical novels, Carvalho proposes new ways of dealing with memory and forgetting, so maybe these individuals can survive for another day, in the range between the memory of who they are and attempt to erase their own identities to move on. On the hand, the present article investigates the conflicts between fiction and history, and how the fiction works constantly changing the categories of memory and forgetting to build a space where certain characters tend to escape from essentialist definitions. On the other hand, taking as a theoretical axis, Walter Benjamin and Benedict Anderson intends to discuss the importance of memory and also oblivion, in order to camouflage the crisis of the modern nation, as portrayed by Carvalho.