The intricate game of remembering and forgetting in Euclides da Cunha's speech on the Canudos campaign

Abstract

This essay intends to investigate how the interweaving between remembering and forgetting is processed in Euclides da Cunha's speech on the Canudos Campaign. The visibility of the conflict today leads readers to believe that interest in the topic has remained unchanged since 1897, when news about the war was widely disseminated in Brazil and in several countries around the world. However, in the years after the event, an effort to forget Canudos became a trend in the press. Os sertões, released five years after the end of the conflict, also assumes the inscription of oblivion. In the “Preliminary Note” to the book, Euclides da Cunha refers to the Canudos Campaign as a dated theme, signaling to the reader that the work's guiding theme would be another. However, in the very forging of the writing, as it replaces the first theme (the campaign in the backlands of Bahia), the second theme (a racial discussion, completely dated in contemporary times) is the protagonist of its own oblivion, and the intention to forget the Canudos conflict becomes another way of bringing him to mind. The notions of forgetting and remembering appear in this study according to the perspective of Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, history, forgetting. In this context, the essays “Mourning and melancholy” and “Remembering, repeating and elaborating”, by Sigmund Freud, are also used as a theoretical foundation. The conception of discourse that guides the essay transits between the notions of “greater narratives” and “founders of discursivities” or “instarators of discursivity”, both by Michel Foucault, in the texts The Order of Discourse and What is an Author?, respectively.

[Received on: November 20, 2022 – Accepted on: December 15, 2022]