The narrator and the landscape: Milton Hatoum, Bernardo Carvalho and the end of the project of a national literature

In this paper, we discuss the end of the project of a national literature as a guiding project of the Brazilian novel, having in mind the changes in the construction of the narrator and the representation of natural and social landscapes. To characterize such conditions, we review Echevarria's proposition that the 19th-century Latin American novel adopted the local landscape as an identity symbol under the interpretive and authoritative mediation of non-fictional discourse. Then, we analyze Sussekind's characterizations of fictional narrators that consolidated that function in Brazil until the 20th century. In contrast, in Hatoum's and Carvalho's works, the multiplication of voices, the fragmentation of truths and the self-observation of the narrator block the mobilization of the landscape for an identity-function, in a deviation of the founding assumptions of a national literature which indicates its demise as a common project - an important historical transition for the Brazilian novel.