The little heads popping, the scientist's arrest and the smell of rain: trauma, perplexity and hope in Não Verás País Nenhum

Abstract

Não Verás País Nenhum: between 1976 and 1981, in the notebooks of Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, a country in a dystopic future was born, "that would no longer be seen". Post-environmental catastrophe, in a moment of capitalism's heyday, and under an authoritarian political regime, Loyola Brandão's non-Brazil is presented by Souza, who, through an act of remembrance, weaves a narrative aimed at answering the maximum question "how was it possible that we got here?". Thus, the present work, taking into account Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's notion of "reading by Stimmung", seeks to analyze how Souza's narrative presents the trauma, perplexity and opacity of hope in order to apprehend, as far as possible, something of the atmosphere of the time and the world of Loyola Brandão: Brazil in the late 1970's and early 1980s.