The other who is me: literary narrative as a form of knowledge

Abstract

In “O direito à literatura” (“The right to literature”, 1^st ed. 1988), the Brazilian essayist Antonio Candido stands that literature “is a form of knowledge, even as a diffuse and unconscious incorporation” and that “[...] the humanizing power of that construction, as a construction, is great” (CANDIDO, 2011, p. 179, author’s italics; originally in Portuguese). Candido’s view, focusing specifically on the literary studies, relates to some of contemporary philosophical keystones concerning the field of hermeneutics as exerting a central role in the process of all human knowledge. Following these assertions and defending that “[e]pisodes of sickness are important milestones in the enacted narratives of patients’ lives” (GREENHALGH & HURWITZ, 1999, p. 48) and that “the formal aspects of the text convey very important information about the [patient’s] narrative world, information that is just not available in the content of what is represented” (CHARON, 2006, p. 98), this paper analyzes two literary narratives about illness (Graciliano Ramos’ “Paulo” and José Cardoso Pires’ De profundis: valsa lenta) in comparison with a short text by the youngster L. F., who died from an osteosarcoma in 2012, at the age of 19, aiming to show in them a pattern related to the narrator’s depersonalization or split in two or more subjectivities, one of them representative of the sick part of his body and/or self. Ultimately, based on philosophical hermeneutics, it postulates the concept of narrative humanization.