Abstract

BARRENTO, João. Identity and literature: The “I”, the OTHER, the “THERE IS”. Diacrítica [online]. 2012, vol.26, n.3, pp.9-39. ISSN 0807-8967.

The main issue (dealt with from a theoretical point of view and with reference to three paradigmatic examples): the almost compelling impulse of creators to say “I am the Other/I am Others”, that can be explained by the very essence of the creative act. In the more radical cases of identitarian oscillation there are, in the field of literature, different ways out of the “dilemma of the name”. In the work of Fernando Pessoa through dissociation and dramatization of the ‘I’ (thus making of all his work, including the ortonimous one, a heteronymic, or heterographic construction); in the case of Paul Celan through a tragic annulation of the ‘I’, by means of an absolute poetry in which a ‘Id’, the voice of language itself, speaks from the ruins of nameless barbarity; in the work of Maria Gabriela Llansol, through a triple path: the discursive one (the entangled voices of the text); the one of genre (the unique case of autobiography turning out to be a “signography”); and the philosophical one (the leap from the level of the ‘I’ to that of the ‘There is’, from a simultaneously personal/impersonal writing to a form of wiring at a distance from oneself and one’s own name).

Keywords : Identity-alterity; representation and self-representation; Fernando Pessoa; Paul Celan; Maria Gabriela Llansol.

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