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Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing "the way it really was." It means appropriating a memory, as it flashes up in a moment of danger. (Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" 391)
Introduction
A new close reading of Rubem Fonseca's Agosto (1990), three decades after its publication and the first years of transition from Brazil's longest dictatorial regime to its current democratic experience, could not be more timely. The following article aims to provide this new reading, engaging with the intersections of literature and history in Fonseca's novel, a re-elaboration of Getúlio Vargas's last days before his suicide in August 1954. Building on literary and political theory (Barthes, Foucault, Virno, Esposito, Spivak, and others), I discuss personalism and personification in this text, that can be read both as detective fiction and as a historical novel. Finally, I offer a reading of a set of metonymies that Fonseca uses to portray unsolved political tensions between individualism and the state, mythology and historiography, the people, the subaltern and the multitude.
Introduced with the famous definition of history given by James Joyce's hero Stephen Daedalus, "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (5), Agosto portrays the Brazilian state in ways that still prevail in the present: a suicidal state whose nightmarish past does not allow the emancipation of its citizens. If Fonseca uses Joyce's citation, echoing Karl Marx's opening of his essay on Louis Bonaparte: "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (5); it is because the Brazilian state, now as before, has torn itself down repeteadly as a result of self-destructive forces. In short, the novel partakes in a tradition that has proven to be very prolific not only in Brazil but also in Argentina and Chile during the past few decades: representing the postdictatorial state through the narration of a detective story.
In this sense, Agosto is closer to the Argentinean tradition, from Borges to Piglia. This distinction is rooted in history. Pinochet, Chile's longest-serving head of state, lasted in power under dictatorial rule for almost twenty years, after decades of consecutive democratic governments. By contrast, Brazilians and Argentineans have witnessed military regimes that interrupted their democracies more often during the second...