Casa dos Braga, de Rubem Braga: retratos de uma morte feliz

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the similarities and incongruities among the art of registering the instants through the picture and the art of Rubem Braga in writing his chronicles. Starting from the reading of the book Casa dos Braga: memory of childhood, of Rubem Braga (1913-1990), published in 1997, it is attempted to evidence in that work the fragmentary character, the characters and landscapes cutting, the reduced dimensions of the gathered texts and the documentary tendency of that collection of childhood chronicles that drive the reader to surprise the tangency and the contamination of the operations of memorialist writing by the processes of the photographic device, here considered as much as metaphor of the permanence of the mnemonic residues in the psychic apparel, as much as symptom that gathers the picture and the écritures de soi in the same "indecisive tension" between the testimonial registration of the past and the several irruptions from the imaginary and from the fiction. It is sought, also, to demonstrate, in the reading of the Casa dos Braga, the seductive and enigmatic impression of finding before an album of pictures. In the same way that a collection of family pictures arrests us and it interrogates us quietly, the textual substance of Rubem Braga's chronicles, while fixation way and accumulation of fugitive instants, works in the reader similar practices to those of the "amateur" of pictures, because there also fragments and cuttings are to demand of the glance and of the imagination movements and digressions that allow to complement the space and to unite multiple stations of the time. There changed in immobile types, the textualized memory mobilizes us to vivify what is dead, as in the paradox in that the picture is said: "eternization of the instant". Finally, it is intended to emphasize the importance of the space of the house of childhood in relation to the writer's literary space and to discuss the pertinence of the analogy between the "picture album" and the referred work, correlating the literature with the semiotics practice of the picture.