Dialogic capital city: the building voices of Brasilia in Free City (Cidade Livre), by João Almino
Free City (Cidade Livre); Polyphony; Brasilia; Dialogism; Mikhail Bakhtin
In this dissertation, we analyze the aesthetic construction of the novel Free City (Cidade Livre),
by João Almino, constituted by candangos’ voices’ narrative construction of the city of Brasilia.
We evaluate such discourses, the way they reflect, refract, or reverberate the builders of the
capital city, in equal value and strength, implying the novel as polyphonic. We also consider
the issue of Brasilia as a “dialogical city”, a multifaceted capital city by nature, in its founding
social relations. João Almino, himself, as writer-author, reviewer, or everything at the same
time, elaborates a multi-handed story in individual memories that are not only possible, but
necessary, alongside the grandiloquent stories. Narrator, characters, and city complement each
other with the mythical heroes: they all serve the true builders, migrants and trailblazers, whose
speeches were erased by official rhetoric, which masked massacres, flattened accidents, and
deleted memories. A narrative composed by structural discourses is manifested, portraying in
a mirror the physical construction of the city, in which elements about alterity, incompleteness
and responsiveness, besides ethical components, confirm the coexistence of voices whose
dynamic relationships forge an essential narrative. Such problems and objectives are close to
Mikhail Bakhtin's theory, insofar as the Russian theorist identifies dialogism as the basis of
language – of subject and of life, ultimately. Therefore, the feasibility and importance of this
study are justified in view of the almost inexistence of aesthetic analysis of the candangos’
voices when the capital city was being built. The syllogistic deductive method is adopted,
applying major premises (Bakhtinian concepts) to minor premises (narrative elements), primary
focusing on works endorsed by Bakhtin, then on metatheorists, in review of João Almino and,
finally, in works on historical, anthropological, aesthetic, and social peculiarities of the
construction of Brasilia. We offer as results: a) Bakhtinian concepts, with their proper
theoretical and axiological delimitation, applying “polyphony” to the novel, separating it from
“dialogism”, attributable to the city of Brasilia; b) the dialogic levels of Free City (Cidade
Livre), from the most extensive to the most restricted strata, from the “great time” in line with
novels by other authors, later within an aesthetic project of João Almino's work, and, already
within the scope of the novel, from the analysis of the dialogical relations between author,
narrator and protagonist, under the focus of exotopy, constructed and invoked discursive genres,
use of new media (the blog), the miscellany between formal and familiar discourses, the
distance from officialdom in the face of a necessary profane narration and the mixture of
memory and discourse; c) a reading of the dialogic relationships between chapters, between
other characters and their global meaning. Therefore, this work contributes not only to the
dissemination and understanding of João Almino's work, especially Free City (Cidade Livre),
but also deepens the understanding of the city of Brasilia, through the prism of the novel that
fictionally represents it.