The territory of old age in Dalton Trevisan

Abstract

From the late 1940s onwards, modern Brazilian prose was driven by a group of writers who began to define the core of urban short fiction. As a result of this moment, the tale is established and expands its content universes, visiting from urban themes to regionalist themes, from documentary reports to intimate attacks. Among the urban and collective themes we highlight old age. This theme is present in the narratives of several representatives of the middle line that characterized Brazilian fiction from the 1950s to those first decades of the 21st century. Of the thirty stories that make up A guerra conjugal (1969) by the short story writer from Curitiba, Dalton Trevisan, some bring protagonists into old age, exposing them in a phase of marriage in which loneliness is incisive and dry. If in other narratives the failure of marriage is spurred on by constant ironies, in the plots where old age is the central theme, silence predominates as a greater meaning of the distance between couples. In "Battle of tickets", the theme of old age is problematized through the main characters João and Maria. The tale plays alternately with the voice of the narrator, who introduces the scenario and describes the actions of the characters; with the dialogue between them, short and sterile, suggesting the lack of communication; and with the language of the notes, a key element for our comments and, as the title itself prompts, "war instrument" used by the characters. In this article we seek to analyze the marks that differentiate the perspectives adopted and how the distance of the discourse builds the image of the couple's isolated old age. For the reading we will use Bosi (1988) on old age and in the analysis of the utterance plan and the utterance plan.