A casa e os caminhos de dentro: um estudo sobre o espaço habitado em contos de Moacyr Scliar

Abstract

In this thesis, we studied the collection of Moacyr Scliar’s short stories, investigating the representation of living spaces, in particular, the space of the house and some of its variations, such as bungalow and mansion. For this purpose, we identify conflicts implied in such spaces and existential tensions lived by the characters of the selected stories, aiming at analyzing how such characters connect themselves to the living spaces and to the other characters. The selected corpus gather eight short stories by the gaucho writer, namely: “Os leões”, “Coelhos”, “A vaca”, “Cão”, “Uma casa”, “Lavínia”, “Ruídos no forro” and “Pequena história de um cadáver”. The hypothesis that directs this research is that Scliar’s mimics tensions of social and historical order that threat or destroy the feeling of protection the subject experiences when he is in family household. Such representations focus on the spatial element and intertwined with other structural elements of the story, with the narrator, the time, action and character, generating a profusion of feelings related to the space and to the subject’s connections with the living space, with significant aesthetic/symbolic value. The main theoretical categories of this study are the following – literary chronotope, by Bakhtin (2010); protected intimacy, by Bachelard (1978); and ‘ilhamento’, by Lins (1976). From these concepts, we developed the following subcategories: 1) chronotope of the simple house, chronotope of the luxurious house, chronotope of the global house and chronotope of the house of the death; 2) veiled/ revealed intimacy, threaten intimacy, destroyed intimacy and resistant intimacy; and finally, 3) ‘ilhamento’ by threat, ‘ilhamento’ by destruction and ‘ilhamento’ by resistance. Those subcategories can enable the analytical reading of other stories, not only Scliar’s, but of any narrative text, in such a way as to contribute to the analyses of the spatial aspect, involving the space/time of family household, as well as the relations of perceptive subjects with the environment, with the others, with the world and with themselves.