O homem que não sabia javanês

Abstract

This paper intends to show that the writing has a wandering side, built on the ruins of the order, a power of seduction that doesn’t sustain itself in the truths of the rational world. The writing in subject is the story “O homem que sabia javanês” [“The man that knew Javanese”], by Lima Barreto, narrated while both the storyteller and the listener were drinking beer, detail that Massaud Moisés sees as a flaw of the work, and that this paper proposes as an exorbitance that contributes to manifest the unfinished in the text. We also intend to think Lima Barreto’s story as the space in which the text is written without the safety of the knowledge, in which the insolubility moves away the possibility of dialectics. In a symptomatic way, Lima Barreto’s narrative suggests that the verb “sabia” [“knew”] in the title should be read as “não sabia” [“didn’t know”].