Narrating the great white: word and image in Noite dentro da noite, by Joca Reiners Terron

Abstract

This paper conducts an intersemiotic analysis of Noite dentro da noite - uma autobiografia, by Joca Reiners Terron (2017), problematizing how the photographs that open the chapters of the novel contribute to structuring a decentralized and fragmentary narrative. The hypothesis is that the character's inability to speak and the erased images place the military dictatorship and the historical and individual trauma under the sign of the unspeakable - either because it was erased or because its memory is unbearable.  The reading presented here articulates the composition of the second-person voice with the problematization of addressing in the narrative, questioning how fragmentation and the whites of memory show, in the novel, achievements of contemporary Brazilian culture in which word and image are connected to the unspoken aspects of History, either by the subjective impacts of political disappearance, or by the impossibility of narrating the trauma.