K. – relato de uma busca: fiction in the service of a revision of national history

Abstract

The article analyzes the novel K. – Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, to evaluate the contribution of historical events, present in the work, to the process of consolidating the narrative which, as an artistic manifestation, stimulates the reader to experience the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil through fiction. The story tells the experience of a father whose daughter, a Chemistry Professor at USP in 1974, disappears, and the anguish of a fruitless search for information about what has happened. The central characters of the novel are the father and daughter themselves, and, about both of them, in his memory, the author seeks for crucial events to clothe them in fictionality. In this way he provides the reader with a different approach from that of the historical records to this period of Brazilian history. Thus, in the story, there are elements of the geographical, historical and social context, besides references to personalities, which gives the narrative pseudoveracity and, at the same time, power and authority to impose itself as a means to expose a unique understanding of the dictatorship. In this sense, there is a justification for the investigation that in the text refers back to the extra-textual world, to look at the esthetic treatment that was given to these references, while rooting them deeply into the fictional web. Thus, communication collaborates with current discussions on the constitution of the literary text, especially as regards the correlation between Literature and History.