The tortured body and the survivor’s trauma in Bernardo Carvalho’s Os bêbados e os sonâmbulos

Abstract

This text proposes a reflection on the constitution of the characters in the novel Os bêbados e os sonâmbulos, by Bernardo Carvalho, with regard to the relationship between the context of the military dictatorship in Brazil and the traumatic events that involve this socio-historical scenario and the experiences of the subjects represented in fiction. Thus, the reading of the novel here is based on the assumption that when it is impossible to materialize the trauma through words or when it is not possible to understand the reason for the events, there is a transfer of the repressed to the body, to the feelings, to the actions of the characters as a manifestation of bodily memory. In this sense, the traumatic episodes of Guilherme’s plane crash and the disappearance and torture of Filkelstone, the mad psychiatrist, are presented with the purpose of identifying, through analysis and interpretation of the accounts of these characters, how traumatic memory is represented in this narrative as a testimony of the pain and violence that silences and nullifies bodies in times of oppression. Based on this scope, the text seeks contributions from the assumptions of Freud (1930), Ricoeur (2007), Seligmann-Silva (2008), Ferenczi (2011) and others.