Reconfigurações do sujeito autoficcional em Menino sem passado (1936-1948), de Silviano Santiago

Abstract

In this dissertation, we analyze the reconfigurations of the autofictional subject in the work Boy without past (1936-1948), by Silviano Santiago. Thus, we built this study based on three different faces of the subject Silviano: (1) the author of autofiction, (2) the character of autofiction and (3) the subject/reader of (sur)lives, losses and absences. In the first chapter, we rehearse concepts of autofiction based on theorists such as Serge Doubrovsky (1977, 2005, 2014), Vincent Colonna (2014), Evando Nascimento (2010) and Silviano Santiago (2008), showing that autofiction is not a literary genre strictu sensu, but a “category of reflection” (NASCIMENTO, 2017) that encompasses different perspectives and theoretical-literary experiments. Next, we discuss, with the support of Evando Nascimento (2010, 2017), Leonor Arfuch (2010, 2012), Michel Collot (2004, 2006), Silviano Santiago (2004a) and Diana Klinger (2006), the idea that the work Boy without past is driven by otherness. In the second chapter, we investigate Silviano's face as a “sleepwalking boy” who (re)configures himself as a character and narrator of memories. With this in mind, we worked on the constitution of memories in the narrative based on authors such as Wander Melo Miranda (1988, 2008), Eneida Maria de Souza (2007a), Maurice Halbwachs (1990) and Silviano Santiago (2015, 2020, 2021b). In addition, we reflect on the relationship between the body and subjectivity, since it is through physical pain and bodily sensations that the boy, immersed in sleepwalking, is brought back to reality. This subject-body relationship was established with the theoretical contribution of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1999), Roland Barthes (2005), Michel Collot (2004, 2018) and Eurídice Figueiredo (2022). Finally, in the third chapter, we show how, since childhood, Silviano Santiago's life was marked by losses and absences. Thus, we thematize the premature death of the mother as the core of the life and literary art of the writer from Formiguense, sustaining ourselves on the idea that the maternal figure manifests itself not as an absent body, but as a lack that loves. This discussion about Silviano's orphanhood was supported by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (2015), Mário de Andrade (1988), Roland Barthes (1984), Eneida Maria de Souza (2008) and Silviano Santiago (1988, 2004b, 2005, 2021b). Sustaining his life-graphics in the presence-absence of his mother, the narrator proposes the deconstruction of the “tables of Minas Gerais family law” based on patriarchy. In spite of the patriarchal legacies that insisted on prescribing his existence, Silviano assumes, as his only and legitimate testament, the poetics of Drummond de Same Poetry (1930), especially that of the poem “Infância”. This conversation between the Formiguense and the Itabirano was subsidized by Roland Barthes (1971), Tania Franco Carvalhal (2006), Julia Kristeva (2005), José Guilherme Merquior (2012), Alcides Villaça (2006) and Silviano Santiago (2006, 2021b).