PRESO NO TORVELINHO DO PRESENTE

A FORMA NARRATIVA DO COLAPSO EM "O RISO DOS RATOS", DE JOCA RANIERS TERRON

Abstract

Environmental and social tragedies of the present challenge our capacity to narrate, displacing traditional ways of organizing experience in time and space. "O Riso dos Ratos", by Joca Reiners Terron, is representative of this context by presenting a fragmentary narrative that breaks with conventional ways of narrating the world. Terron’s novel destabilizes the Aristotelian structure of linearity and causality of action, replacing it with a discontinuous flow in which the protagonist is swept through overlapping historical times, experiencing cycles of violence and neglect without resolution. This fragmentation can be understood in light of Jacques Rancière, for whom the rupture with mimetic logic allows for a reconfiguration of the relationship between narrative and reality, organizing the sensible not through verisimilitude but through the juxtaposition of perceptions and affects via fragments of the real. From this perspective, Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction offers a key to reading "O Riso dos Ratos" as a collection of fragments that, when assembled, reveal a collapsing landscape. Thus, this study argues that by deconstructing traditional narrative forms, the novel reflects the contemporary experience of disaster: a world in which the need to narrate clashes with the inability to derive order from chaos.