Fiction and document: a reading of Mulheres Empilhadas, by Patrícia Melo and Garotas Mortas, by Selva Almada

Abstract

The main objective of the essay is to reflect on the relationship between literature and the document. If, on the one hand, we can identify a theoretical interest in this relationship and an increase in a nomenclature that tries to capture this impulse – such as the idea of documentary narrations (RUFFEL, 2012), factographies (ZENETTI, 2011) or even what Paula Klein (2019 ) calls a poetics of archives – it is also possible to identify that in recent years many works incorporate photos, archival materials and notes from the writing process to build narratives that challenge their fictional status, although these works do not always repudiate the seal of the novel genre. In this sense, I am interested in rescuing the main argument developed by Flora Sussekind in Tal Brasil, qual Romance (1984) to think about what could be considered another documental shift in contemporary literature. Sussekind states that the cyclical insistence of Brazilian literature on a naturalistic (more than realistic) aesthetic causes the works to deny their own construction as language, once they take as paradigm the objectivity and veracity that the document can guarantee to fiction. If it is true that since the beginning of the 21st century we can speak of a “hunger for the real” (SHIELDS, 2010), the communication wants to investigate how the use of factual data (such as reproduction of legal reports and journalistic stories) can have many nuances. On the one hand, it can serve to reinvigorate a realistic tradition that values the mimicry of fiction in relation to the real, using the document as proof. But it is also possible to think that the tension created by the appropriation of documentary sources by many contemporary narratives might point to an attempt to redefine the value and establish new boundaries for what we understand as fiction. To better discuss this assumption, we will take as our objects the narratives Mulheres Empilhadas (2019), by Patrícia Melo and Garotas Mortas (2014), by Selva Almada