Testemunhos presentes — “Solução de dois estados”, de Michel Laub: ficção e memória na literatura contemporânea brasileira

Abstract

The present work investigates the relationship of interweaving and mirroring between memory and fiction in contemporary Brazilian literature, taking the work Solução de dois estados, by the writer Michel Laub. Published in 2020, the novel brings together the transcription of interviews with two brothers for a German filmmaker who investigates, through a documentary, the formation of hate speech in the second decade of the 21st century. In the remembrance, which considers family aspects of the brothers, in addition to political, social and cultural issues in Brazil since the 1990s, subjectivities and historical perspective coexist, in a recovery that Beatriz Sarlo (2007) names as testimonial rhetoric. For Márcio Selligmann-Silva (2017), it is precisely the testimony that blurs the boundaries between fiction and “reality”. This search for reality is expressed as a hallmark of the contemporary Brazilian novel, as observed by Beatriz Resende (2008) when elaborating the concept of “presentification”, reinforced by Karl Erik Schøllammer (2009), who identifies a “realistic vocation” (2012, p. 134) in Brazilian literature, whose forms change nowadays, in an urgency for the present. In his Formação da Literatura Brasileira (2000), Antonio Candido points to realism as a national literary tradition. The pursuit of realism in Solução de dois estados is expressed in the report of subjectivities that do not contribute to the formation of the collective memory of the last decades in Brazil. Fiction, points out Sarlo, “can represent that about which there is no first-person testimony” (Sarlo, 2007, p. 118). Furthermore, Laub's novel is also an example of a persecuted memory as a narrative strategy, emulating a process of selections, with erasures and recoveries, with gaps and “simulated memories” (as Maurice Halbwachs conceptualizes in The collective memory about formulations whose keynote is to occupy the voids), with tensions and roots, in a fragmentation that is typical of postmodernity and memory, which assumes a centrality in today's society.