THE POETICS OF SPEECH: ORALITY, SPACE, AND MEMORY IN THE NARRATIVE LAVOURA ARCAICA, BY RADUAN NASSAR
Raduan Nassar. Orality. Contemporary novel. Arab immigration.
This study presents a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the contemporary Brazilian novel, focusing on Lavoura Arcaica (1975) by Raduan Nassar. The research aims to examine how orality—understood as a remnant of traditional cultures and a foundation of symbolic transmission—constitutes a structuring element in the narrative and the fragmented discourse of the narrator-character, particularly in its articulation of space, memory, religiosity, and subjectivity. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how the novel form critically engages with the Western canonical tradition and the cultural traces of Arab immigration in Brazil, addressing themes such as identity, exile, taboo, and symbolic violence. The methodology adopted is qualitative in nature, grounded in critical and interpretative analysis of the novel through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that combines literary, philosophical, anthropological, and cultural studies. The theoretical foundation includes authors such as Paul Zumthor (2000), Walter Benjamin (1980), Theodor Adorno (2004), Michel Foucault (1979), Georges Bataille (2017), Edward Said (2001), and Alberto Sismondini (2017), as well as contributions from Brazilian literary criticism on Nassar’s work. The research also incorporated empirical and sensorial approaches to the universe portrayed in the novel through experiences in rural settings and analysis of interviews, public appearances, and autobiographical references of the author. The results demonstrate that Lavoura Arcaica reworks the novelistic tradition by subverting narrative and stylistic conventions while incorporating elements of orality as both aesthetic and political devices. The fragmented discourse, the musicality of the language, the lyrical confessional tone, and the intertextual presence of religious and literary references reveal an aesthetic of transgression, in which the narrator enacts the conflict between desire and repression, modernity and archaism, body and law. The analysis further reveals that orality in the novel is not limited to a formal feature, but rather emerges as an ethical and poetic gesture of resistance to the symbolic violence of patriarchal tradition, reaffirming the act of speech as a means of subjective reinvention and rupture with oppressive structures.