Read the letters of Lobo Antunes and the letters created by Inês Pedrosa: Between the lines of Literature and History in Portugal

Abstract

The present article intends to discuss the written reading of the letters and its use in fiction, sometimes as document of a historical period, sometimes as mimesis and fictional narrative. For this investigative purpose, the following works are used as a corpus of the research: Letters of War, by António Lobo Antunes (2003), edited by the author's daughters; and (2005), by Inês Pedrosa. The first author, in this work, witnesses in aerograms the mishaps and In Your Hands horror of the Colonial War in Africa and writes to his young wife, directly from the territories in conflict. The second author, Inês Pedrosa, creates a character, Natália, the daughter of a Mozambican guerrilla, who writes letters to her grandmother, in which the character records her impressions about life. To bring the two works closer together, it would make possible, even briefly, a comparison between the letters of life and the letters of life in fiction in narratives and as disturbing materials for the relations between Literature and History and between narrative genres hybrid. As main theoretical reference, the work The autobiographical pact: from Rousseau to the Internet (2008) of Philippe Lejeune was used.