The testimonial novel as a Bildungsroman

figurations of violence and cruelty in the work Memórias de um sobrevivente, by Luiz Alberto Mendes

Abstract

Why does it narrate suffering in the form of memories, (auto)biographies or from other records, such as novels? In addition to the effort to elaborate on suffering and violence, it can be noted that the testimony can be part of the construction of meaning to past events, which does not mean the faithful reconstitution of the events, the participants (victims, perpetrators and witnesses), the scenarios etc., but the different ways in which violence and suffering are treated, figured and signified.

Based on these assumptions, we analyzed the book Memórias de um sobreviventer, by Luiz Alberto Mendes, in which the author's “penal career” as a criminal is presented. We intend to demonstrate that the testimonial novel, in specific cases like this, also presents itself as a kind of Bildungsroman: not as the education of the typical, model bourgeois individual, enshrined in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, but the education of the subalternized individual, product of a peripheral capitalist society marked by deep inequalities, exclusions and all kinds of violence.