Narrative and reading: from experience to letters

Abstract

In contemporary society, death is presented as the tragic fate of experience. The urgency of information, the imperative of judgment, the speed and excess of activity make the possibility of something happening to us, or of something touching us, increasingly remote. So it is expected, as of Benjamin (1979), that the traditional narrative, deeply tied to experience, have the same end. However, life has its tricks and always finds ways of proclaiming itself. Even in the present day scenario of different world interpretations, ‘stories experienced in life” inscribe themselves (and are written) in the written text of the contemporary narrator. Thus, narratives, dynamic, escaping the order of the necessary and / or real, survive to be read and retold. To illustrate the persistence of traditionalism in the figure of the contemporary narrator, take a snippet of text from the incontestably literary work "Brazilian origin myths: the art of storytelling and indigenous tradition, " by Francisco Gregório Filho. In this text, the author runs through the ages of his familiar history, presenting those moments which, updated and reinterpreted, construct his identity as narrator. We are interested in observing how the traditional contemporary narrator brings his story together out of experience, making it writable, and how the story can be transformed again into experience for and in readers. Along the way, we tread the paths of memory, identity, and multiplicity. The words of Larrosa (2002), Delgado (2006), Yunes (2003a, 2003b, 2012), Bosi (1987), among others, illuminate our path.