Uma farsa: Post-Dictatorial Strategies of Forgetting and Remembering in Bernardo Kucinski’s K. Relato de uma busca

Abstract

The novel K. Relato de uma busca, whose publication coincided with the Brazilian National Truth Commission, has proven remarkably more effective in producing a public and institutional reckoning with the crimes of the military regime than any of the institutional mechanisms implemented by the government or any other testimonial novel previously written about the abuses of the military regime. Its appeal, in part, has to do with Kucinski’s usage of various discourses—fiction, testimonial, epistolary—that successfully challenge the authoritative, and non-dialogic discourse of the military regime. This essay argues that in this novel, politics and fiction are inverted: instead of having a law that fictionalizes the memory of the violence perpetrated by the dictatorship, we have a work of fiction that, by memorializing the struggle of a father in search of his disappeared daughter, brings the crimes committed by the military back into the political discourse.