Between losses and repetitions: the traumatic realism in Barba ensopada de sangue by Daniel Galera

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Barba Ensopada de Sangue (2012), a novel by Daniel Galera, which starts from its ties with realist tradition, reverberating on contemporary Brazilian literature, to investigate some marks of traumatic realism in the narrative, especially the established repetitions between the protagonist and his grandfather. To this end, I visited Schøllhammer (2013) on the marks of realism in Brazilian prose, Ginzburg (2002) on the repercussion of trauma aesthetics in Brazil, and Foster (2017 and 2020) on traumatic realism as an essential category for understanding contemporary. The theme of loss is pivotal in the novel, seen as trauma simultaneously repeated and displaced, and its relationship with a pattern of masculinity that insists on resurging. The importance of the Beta dog is highlighted along with the narrative as a symbolic figure stressing the parallelism to prevent the repetition pattern from becoming a simple copy.