“Sem corpo não há rito, não há nada”:

as vozes narrativas e o espaço em K. Relato de uma busca, de Bernardo Kucinski

Abstract

In the novel K: Relato de uma busca (2011), by Bernardo Kucinski, the imminence of testimony is evident - which also implies the threat of its impossibility (SELIGMANN-SILVA, 2008) - as well as the endless work of mourning an absent body. In this sense, the work, faced with loss as its fundamental axis, presents specific ways of telling the unspeakable reality, so that this struggling testimony, emerging from the necessity/impossibility of narration, manifests itself above all in the representation of voices and in the space of the narrative. From this perspective, the aim is to reveal how the tension between impossibility and necessity drives the composition of the narrator and the space in K: Relato de uma busca. Furthermore, the specific objectives are to analyze how the conflict of narrative voices in K constructs the representation of violence and the truth of traumatic events, and to investigate how space traces the breadth of the character's mourning. To sum up, the novel not only presents, metalinguistically, the abysses of literary creation, but also specificities in the elements of the narrative in the face of loss: whether in space, revealing the dimensions of absence, or in ellipsed voices. In the latter, the impossibility of narrating the traumatic experience, an indispensable aspect of the testimonial narrative, mobilizes the various other voices (tentacularity), triggering other narrators. Prosthetic memory, that is, the appropriation of other people's memories, supplements the unspeakable truth and contributes to the composition of the work.