Tempo e história na literatura educativa de Dyonélio Machado: o eterno retorno e a dissolução da historicidade

Abstract

This text aims to study the relation between time and history in the novel The rats (Os ratos), by the writer Dyonélio Machado. To this study, it was necessary to analyze the function of the time in the evolution of the narrative that circles around the character Naziazeno Barbosa, who was tormented by the debt of fifty-three thousand “réis” with the milkman. He has only twenty-four hours to get the money. His zigzag on the streets from Porto Alegre to solve the today problem, immersed in the present, made necessary the study of temporal circularity based on the theory of eternal return, because the repetition is the central point in the novel, expressed in both circular writing and content. The character, who was a fictitious public agent, has been built by the author with no particularization, no past and future. An a-historic man because he has his history silenced within a power relation from a capitalist system and Vargas government that has relegated proletarian classes to alienation. As it is a literary work that is little known, the purpose is to understand its contribution in the learning of high school students as well. The problem that emerges from the narrative and has been motivated this research is centered in the relation between time and history: how does limiting the notion of time to circularity (the eternal return or the plunge into presentism) lead to the dissolution of the notion of historicity (past and future)?