O breu & algumas histórias do Breu$il!

Abstract

In the novel Opisanie Świata (Stigger, 2013b), the breu was neither dark nor darkness, but something quite concrete and material as pitch, tar or even resin. I then began to observe it, questioning about its leading role in Modernity, thinking about literalness, comparison, metaphor/metonymy and analogy, and I compared several entries from different types of dictionaries, trying to elaborate, through the indicial paradigm (Ginzburg, 1989), read as incendiary , a hypothesis to understand the 🔥🔥🔥breu in this book, going from narrative detail to dramatic emphasis, also commenting on various issues of Stigger's work. Still attentive to the feeling of strangeness, “Das Unheimliche” (Freud, 2010), produced by the faces that were painted black, with grease and breu , in the first test of the “Neptune’s party” (Stigger, 2013b), as part of a bizarre sequence of proofs, which took place on a ship, right in the middle of the book Opisanie Świata, when crossing the Equator to baptize the neophytes, as a kind of “reverse” rite of passage; I addressed the violence of this gesture, discussing it through the idea of “Brazilian-style” racism (Gonzalez, 2022), based on Freud's (2014) denial/negation, and I gathered several memories (Benjamin, 2017) that emerged at different moments of reading, from thinking about these faces painted black, working with some issues such as: masks (Thompson, 2021; Fanon, 2020; Kilomba, 2019); stereotype (Bhabha, 1998); black color (Andrade, M. de, 2019); among several others, and also the dialectical image (Benjamin, 2018). Seeking to approach the breu in Modernity, I started from the idea of parody in The Solar Anus (Bataille, 1985) and arrived at the darkness of the poems in Cobra Norato (Bopp, 1998), both published in 1931. Observing this also in relation to the breu, I examined some Amerindian myths, present in Lévi-Strauss (2004, 2006, 2010) and Câmara Cascudo (2003, 2012), among others, and sought to compare the dynamics of Bopp's and Stigger's poetics, discussing “Ballet da Cobra Norato” (Bopp, 2012) and “O livro” (Stigger, 2019a). However, upon encountering, by chance, other breus – “a thick breu was boiling ” , in🔥🔥🔥 Canto XXI of Inferno (Alighieri, 2017a), from c. 1304-1321, and “boiling breu ” , in the novel 🔥🔥🔥Ursula (Reis, 2018), from 1859 – practically at the same time, in other readings for my PhD, I mentally related these breus to those in Stigger's novel (2013b) and had an insight: I saw the possibility of thinking about breu in Modernity and its presence in contemporary times in an even broader, expanded way, with the idea of Breu$il. And I thought of doing this through the stories (Labatut, 2020; 2022) that I began to collect about breu and Brazil. Together, these breus (Stigger, 2013b; Alighieri, 2017a; Reis, 2018) began to function as a tricky trigger, showing me a very unique path to carry out research in Comparative Literature, in a PhD that was already underway, and which resulted in the writing of this thesisessays: “The breu & some stories from Breu$il!” Since these references opened up the possibility for me to begin research that is still ongoing, I presented only a few fragments at the end and focused on a reinterpretation of the "Neptune’s party" which was, in fact, a fictional version – based on the real versions of Charles Darwin (2006), from 1832, and Clarice Lispector (2018), from 1971 – of a ritual that has been taking place when crossing the Equator, “ Line-crossing ceremony”, from the Colonial Period until today. To do so, I analyzed these and other versions (Frühbeck, 2017; Bandeira, 1946), discussing the research of historian Jaime Rodrigues on various other versions of this ritual, mainly Rodrigues (2016), but reflecting on Silvia Federici (2017). And to address masquerades, I started with the novel Quincas Borba (Assis, 2012), from 1891, which mentioned the comedy The Tempest (Shakespeare, 2013, 2014 and 2022), from 1611, and commented The Masque of Blackness (Jonson, 1995), from 1605... The end?