Bionarrative through the different reports of Vladimir Herzog’s murder and the prose by Eduardo Galeano in "Días y noches de amor y de guerra"

Abstract

In one of his wonderful books, El escudo de Perseo (Translates to The shield of Perseus), the late professor José Calvo González created a new literary category, which he called bionarrative, and in which, according to the author, “literature writes life”. This category was fertilely designed in the vast scenario of his “narratological theory of Law” as a unique epistemic space of the fruitful relationship between Law and Literature, or its syntactic transposition, between Literature and Law. This paper is an attempt of correctly applying this category, by examining the intertwining of two events: the first one, the historical, tragic, unjustified, treacherous murder of Vladimir Herzog, which happened in dark times in Brazil; the other one, the significant account of this event, in the prose by Eduardo (Hughes) Galeano, the celebrated Uruguayan writer, in a text from his successful Latin American literature, Días y noches de amor y de guerra (Translates to Days and Nights of Love and War), in which the author’s ideas are always gifted with a historical, political and philosophical profile, in a narrative that draws reality into truly overwhelming fictional lines.