Candido and Freud: lived fragments in Boitempo I

Abstract

Antonio Candido focuses on the question of memory in the article “Poesia e ficção autobiográfica” in authors from the state of Minas Gerais, concentrating especially on Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes and Pedro Nava. The objective of this text is to trace Antonio Candido’s analytical proposal related to the first poet mentioned above considering particularly his book Boitempo I, underlining those lived fragments captured from “scenes, stories and emotions from the poet’s childhood”. Candido highlights the construction of such traces, which are created by the adult speaker, that is, the way through which the present acts in the past giving literarily new meaning to it without ignoring different interpretative viewpoints. He also quotes Freud when he retakes J. Guilherme Merquior, thus incorporating psychoanalysis as the theoretical framework. In the wake of criticism, the essayist reaffirms – and goes beyond it – the presence of a lighter mood in Drummond, something different from the whole of his work more focused on the world plot as a spectacle, central idea linked to an association between the I and the culture, but also the “creation of visibility” that can be thought in psychoanalytic terms. In most of his texts, Antonio Candido synthesizes fine reflections that once dismembered open up various interpretative paths. One of those is the intention of this paper.