A linguagem de um corpo, o corpo de uma linguagem: a poética do real inscrita na literatura contemporânea de Wesley Peres

Abstract

The present thesis focuses on two books authored by the Goiás writer Wesley Peres: the novel As pequenas mortes (2013) and the poetry book O corpo de uma voz despedaçada (2019). The research itinerary starts with a call from literature to discuss about man himself, his relationship with himself and with the other, in an eternal duel of alterities. Departing from the Odisseia, Homer's epic poem, an anchoring in contemporaneity is sought to position the works under analysis, as it is in the whirlwind of the present that both the lyric and prose of Wesley Peres emerge as strange fruits or literary genres of hybrid structure, in which a high poetic voltage contaminates the word, fabricating it new and other, in an exhaustive attempt to give voice to the tragedy of Cesium-137, which occurred in Goiânia, in 1987. Anchored in the notion of the real, by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1974-75; 2007; 2008a; 2008b), as well as in the ideas of the thinker Giorgio Agamben (2006; 2009), regarding the impossibility of testimony from those who survived the Holocaust, Wesley Peres' lyric reveals itself as a compelling territory for reflection on the fear and death of those who were stripped of their share of humanity and, therefore, deprived of sufficient language to tell their own story. Thus, we have the reality of the letter, embodied in the impossibility of testimony, leaving poets to establish a new and other language, whose word is a symptom of the writing body, sense and meaning of those who, dead, can only speak through those who survived. The iconoclastic figure of Felipe Werle, narrator of the novel As pequenas mortes, whose title alludes to the constant state of enjoyment of the protagonist, is marked by countless obsessions around the figure of the father, brother, music, lover, literature, cesium, and above all, a cancer, still undetected. Here the body emerges as a repository of multiple symptoms, making it cursed, erotic, acoustic, meaningful, and notably deadly, joyful, and painful. Created freely, the fourth chapter dares a new arrangement based on minimalist poems, woven from those written by Wesley Peres, resulting in a playful anthology of his particular lexicon and some neologisms, which revolve around his fragmented lyrical voice. Finally, the fundamental hypothesis of this thesis is that the poet mimics the language of his body, alive, speaking, and driven by impulses, marked by the impossibility of absolute testimony, especially regarding death and sex, whose produced literature condenses the body of a language, imperfect and gappy, in the absence of a signifier, first and last, capable of saying everything.