Somos um povo de caminhos salgados: a representação do envelhecimento e da reificação em Valter Hugo Mãe

Abstract

The respective writing aims to weave a materialist literary criticism about the Spanish machine (2016), by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe. Their social relationships during this period of life. The aforementioned enunciations are applied to Mãe’s work from the beginning of the narrative, considering that the plot is inaugurated with the insertion of antónio in the asylum after the death of his partner, being deposited in the institution as if he were a “thing”. In addition to the content, the work demonstrates in its formal literariness the way in which the character feels like a bureaucracy, as well as, the home of happy age is configured as a space of solitude, social instances become limited and exclusive, among other reifying aspects. To this end, the lines of Karl Marx in Capital (1867/1996) will be fundamental with regard to the conceptualization of the phenomenon of alienation and commodity fetishism, very expensive concepts for understanding the category of reification proposed by György Lukács in History and class consciousness (1923/1989); articulating the concept to contemporaneity, Axel Honneth in Reification: a study of recognition theory (2018) proposes arguments and elementary perspectives for such displacement, making the definition of “recognition” permeate the entire writing; when dealing with aging, the voices of Nobert Elias in A solitude dos moribundos (2001) and Noreena Hertz in The century of solitude (2020) will be fundamentally evoked; Due to the fact that the theme is essentially modern, Marshall Berman’s view of modernity in Tudo que é solid desmancha no ar (1995) proves to be of equal importance with regard to the motto of this research. Finally, because the narrator expresses a memorialistic bias about his experiences, the texts by Ecléa Bosi (1994) and Walter Benjamin (1997) regarding the memories of the elderly and the narration of everyday experiences are also essential.