Lygia Fagundes Telles at the Edge of History

Abstract

This essay analyzes the convergence between fictional narrative and historical experience in the work of Lygia Fagundes Telles, taking the novel As Meninas (1973) as its central object. The investigation is grounded in the premise that literature does not function as a mere documentary mirror, but rather as a “verbal artifact” (White, 1994) capable of refiguring temporality and rendering collective trauma intelligible. Structurally, the essay traces the evolution of Telles’s writing, from the domestic enclosure of the 1940s to the political maturity of the 1970s, observing how the city of São Paulo shifts from setting to agent acting upon subjectivities. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of “narrated time” and Márcio Seligmann-Silva’s notion of “testimonial literature,” the discussion examines how the novel inscribes the fractures of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship through stream of consciousness and the polyphony of its protagonists. It concludes that Telles’s aesthetic establishes a “politics of memory” that confronts the silences of official historiography, presenting fiction as an indispensable source for understanding authoritarian continuities and the shadow zones of human experience in Brazil’s recent history.