Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada (Dec 2023)
THE LIFE OF THE TEXT AND THE COMMON READER
Abstract
This homage to Eneida de Souza tries to open a window within her book on biography and archives so that it may connect Osman Lins’s writings to the ideas of anesthetizing the writer’s pact with literary destination and fictional autobiography. While death, announced by fiction, can change the subject into a character, the text is brought to life through the writer’s gesture. In Os gestos, the room, as well as the window frame, are then symbolic passageways to the exterior world in the expanded search of the body/house which are written through memory. In Domingo de Páscoa (2013), as well as in his last writings (1978), there is this original sheltering gesture while it is being crossed by an analogous space turned inside out, as seen by a patient’s sickroom perspective. Thus, this theoretical/critical autobiographical reading seeks to update both the poetical gesture to the common reader and to the feeling of sickness.
