Escrever outra vez: luto e jogo em Quatro-Olhos, de Renato Pompeu

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that the novel Quatro-olhos (1976), by Renato Pompeu, alternates between mourning and play in approaching life during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). This ambivalence can be understood as a way of indicating the irreparable grievances caused by authoritarian violence, while at the same time re-inscribing in the present a gesture of insubordination that avoids melancholic immobility. Writing is defined in the novel as the attempt to “write once more” or to “write another time” (“escrever outra vez”) a book seized by political repression and missing ever since. In the act of “escrever outra vez”, what returns from the past is the gesture of writing itself. Incapable of retrieving what is lost and undo what has been done, this gesture incorporates a measure of invention. The gaps of remembrance become an open field for experimentation, and mourning is combined with play