A ruína e a máscara: as contradições de uma modernização conservadora em inferno provisório, de Luiz Ruffato

Abstract

This paper aims at studying the works of fiction consisting of 5 volumes called Inferno Provisório by Luiz Ruffato, a Brazilian writer, born in the state of Minas Gerais. In its origins, the author’s project intends to rebuild individual pathways which, together, depict a kind of history of the Brazilian proletariat, excluded from the undertakings aiming at putting the country on the track of what was convenient to be called modernization. The city of Cataguases, in the state of Minas Gerais, is the place where modernism, as literary school, was adjusted as discourse, primarily in terms of ideology, rather than style, being used as baseline of the effort of the industrial elite, which intended to symbolically break with the past imprinted in buildings, which, in turn, represented a city which lived in prosperity, even if for a short period of time, resulting from coffee business. However, on having placed almost the totality of the narratives in Inferno Provisório in Cataguases, the author is believed to have created a topsy-turvy kind of narrative, if compared to official versions. Thus, in the character’s paths, the contradictions of modernization, which proved to be conservative, are plainly evident. Therefore, the study intends to analyze the set of narratives focusing on the manner which literature constructs a dialog between History and Sociology, triggering the tension that toppled down the discourses legitimating the strategies of hegemony and domination, essential to maintain the power established with relationship based on exchanges, favors and mainly exclusion. In addition to such aspects, we also intend to analyze the features in the project which tracked the destiny definition of modernism (its ideology and style) on building Cataguases’s urban profile by identifying divergent and convergent aspects among modernism, modernity and modernization. To ground this study, the theoretical arguments formulated by Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Nestor García Canclini, Sérgio Miceli, Ángel Rama and Roberto Schwarz were used.