O jogo do rigor em Carlos de Oliveira

Abstract

This thesis establishes the centrality of play as poetics in the work of Carlos de Oliveira. The critical itinerary demonstrates that the process of incessant rewriting — characterized by a “geological patience” — reveals a body of work marked by a multiple duration, in which different times constellate. Childhood thus emerges as a primary stratum and a model for obsessive representation. The rewriting process of Pequenos Burgueses functions as a laboratory for a growing playful perspective that settles at the center of his literary creation and reaches its zenith in Finisterra. The poetic radicalization, allegorized by the descent into a primordial magma in search of the “defossilization” of the word, reveals that craft-like rigor acts as the engine of this playfulness. The work is approached as the visible third of a submerged archive that sustains it through the combination of materials generated by the rewriting process. Play is then established as a driving force capable of subverting the stasis of time and forging a language apt to provoke revolutions and invite the reader into its game.