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Auto/Fiction

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ISSN: 2321-4309

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Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.autofiction.org.in First published online: 22 July 2013.

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IAFA/CES/CLWS 2013

Poetry, Criticism and Autofiction: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Sonia Miceli

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Abstract: In Joo Csar Monteiros documentary on Sophia de Mello Breyner Andreseni and in Ruy Duarte de Carvalho'sii critical essay on a poem by Antnio Jos Forte, the Portuguese poet and the Angolan writer play with their own image, striving to draw continuity between poetry and life. This, nevertheless, seems to be belied by certain clues within the film and the text, showing the inevitable fictionality of the poetic gesture as the invention of a voice. Starting from the analysis of the documentary and of the critique, I will outline the strategies that both poets use to build an image of themselves. These strategies fit within the concept of autofiction, which is also explicitly referred to by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho regarding his writing. Close attention will be paid to the role of the signature, which works in both texts as a point of connection between the inside and the outside of the text, while it also questions that very claim of continuity and transparency of the writers figure.

Key words: Poetry; auto-critique; poets voice; writers image.

Un crivain est une crature imaginaire. On le rve, on ne le rencontre pas. Il nexiste pas, il fait semblant. Ce n'est gure qu'un nom, une espce d'image convenue ou de lgende tardive, la photographie d'un homme seul fait de plusieurs. Jean-Michel Maulpoix

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What is the relationship between autofiction and poetry? Can the concept of autofiction be used in relation to a poet and his or her work? And, can literary critique be autofictional? I am going to answer these questions, focusing on two texts, which, according to canonical genre and discourse distinctions, cannot be strictly identified within the label of fiction: Joo Csar Monteiros documentary film Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1969) and Ruy Duarte de Carvalhos critical text on a poem by the Portuguese poet Antnio Jos Forte, included in the anthology of Portuguese contemporary poetry Sculo de Ouro (2002). The main reason for looking at these texts is that they share though in very different ways a deep preoccupation with the figure of the writer, and, in a sense, they dramatize its construction. However, while Andresen strives to show a sort of complete coincidence between herself as a woman and as a poet, Carvalho shows a deeper awareness of the complexity surrounding the concept of authorship, which he questioned and investigated throughout all his novels. As a consequence of this awareness, he plays with three figures that, although related to each other, are not coincidental: the man, the poet and the subject of autofiction, as he says, not without a trace of self-irony. These first considerations are the starting point of my reflection. What I am interested in is the way writers create fictions about themselves, that is to say, make autofiction, not only in texts whose fictionality is assumed from the beginning (novels, short stories), but every time they publicly speak or write about themselves and their work. This position is sustained by Diana Klinger, who connects autofiction and performance, claiming that both the fictional texts and the performance (the public life) of a writer are complementary faces of the same production of the figure of the author, instances of the performance of the self which [] cannot be thought apartiii (24). This means that all the elements of the public exposure (interviews, public speeches, chronicles, self-portraits, etc.) of the writer contribute to the construction of his or her figure, as if s/he were always acting or performing.

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To clarify what she means by performance, Klinger makes reference to Judith Butlers gender theory, which offers an interesting perspective on the concept of performance in a broad sense. According to Butler, gender is not something innate to the subject, but an illusion or, in other words, a fiction, serving the purpose of regulating sexual life within the matrix of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality. In this sense, gender is a kind of performance, carried on through the repetition of rules that make it seem natural and not conventional. But, if the performance is a construction, a sort of mask, is there an original? Butlers answer is negative, since she believes that the performance of gender is always a copy of the copy, with no original behind or before it, as parody makes clear: Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself (186). The performance enacted by parody, in Butlers view, deconstructs the very idea of the natural, showing that what common sense considers natural or original is performative as well, since it is the result of the repetition of certain conventional rules, the product of which is known as gender identity. Now, Klinger says, why not look at the subject of autofiction from this perspective? Indeed, she claims, also autofiction presupposes no prior subject, no model, which the text might copy or betray, as in the case of autobiography. There is no original and no copy, only a simultaneous construction (in the text and in life) of a theatrical figure a character which is the authoriv (20). The fact that in autofiction we do not find what is essential to autobiography, that is, the belief in, or at least the hope of the self-reconstruction, in a narrative form, of a subject pre-existing to the book, is widely known. In autofiction there would be rather a new subject, which would be the (always contingent, since there can be nothing definitive) result of the investigation and the questioning carried out in the fictional text. But this subject would also be the product of the construction of a figure made in other contexts, which are considered non-fictional (the public exposure I have just mentioned), but which nevertheless refer not so much to the subject as a

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human being, but rather to the subject as a writer, this means to someone whose personality is strictly linked to a literary work. Of course I am not suggesting that the performative self of the writer is something unrelated to the subject with whom s/he shares at least the name. The point is not to distinguish the character from the person, but rather to understand how in the autofictional text a new subject is created, like what happens in the performance. In this context, Klinger suggests (25), that we might establish a correspondence between theater and novel, and between performance and autofiction. Indeed, performance theorists point out that the performance actor, on the one hand, cannot completely identify himself or herself with the character, because this would produce an effect of pure illusion, since it would try to make the spectator forget s/he is watching an enactment, as realistic theater does. On the other hand, the actor does not completely coincide with the person s/he is out of the performance space either, because in this case s/he actually would not be acting (s/he would just be) and no new subject would come out of the performance:

[J]ust like in the fictional text, in the theater spectacle space and time are illusionary, in the theater and in the novel everything alludes to the imagination. The more the actor (or the author of the text) enters the character, and the more realistic he tries to make it, the more the fiction, and therefore, the illusion is reinforced. Because of this, the performance art rejects the illusion, it is precisely the final outcome of a long battle to make arts free of illusionism and artificiality (Glusberg, 2003, p.46) v (25).

In this sense, writers are performers and their performances do not only take place in the relatively well-established world of fiction (and of poetry), but also in other texts, of the sort I have mentioned before. I have chosen a documentary and a critical essay as working material for this

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reason, as they show how this kind of performance works, though sometimes not explicitly or even unconsciously.

My biography is in my poetry Regarding his documentary, centered on the figure of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, the director Joo Csar Monteiro said: I suppose this is the evidence, for whoever wants to understand it, that you cant shoot poetry and its not worth going after it. Indeed, the film seems to be an attempt to show poetry, through the voice and the acting of a poet. There is no narrative, nor a voice-over introducing Andresen, her life and her work. The main aim seems to be to show the connection between her poetry and some of the most important elements of the poets life: her family (she had five children) and the sea the film was set in the region of the Algarve, in the South of Portugal, where she had a house. The connection is clearly shown by a ring-composition structure: the film opens up with Andresen sitting at a table, starting to write we assume a poem, and ends up with the conclusion of that poem, sealed by her signature. The first time we hear Andresens voice is when she tells a story to her youngest son, taken from her most well-known childrens book, A Menina do Mar (The Sea Girl). At the end of her reading, she asks the boy if he liked the story and he answers that he did, but that she could have made her voice sound more natural. Apparently surprised by this comment, she replies: A more natural voice? How would it be?. The answer is striking for its nave spontaneity: Yours. That one wasnt yours. She obviously cannot reply and the scene ends up with her, looking at the camera, smiling and closing the book. This is the first disturbing moment within the film: if Andresens performance in front of the camera means to show an essential continuity between herself as a woman (and a mother) and as a poet, other elements seem to suggest that things cannot be thought so easily: the reaction of the spectator could not actually be more in agreement with the little boys, since the shift from

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the declaiming voice of the storyteller to the one that might be considered natural (when she asks the son if he liked the story) is easily perceivable even for someone who obviously does not know Andresens natural voice. But who really knows it? Andresen herself? Her beloved ones? The reader? Does that voice actually exist? A couple of minutes later, the poet speaks while looking at the camera, perhaps answering a question asked by the director. I report part of the speech: If I wanted an appraisal of my life, the appraisal I would do would be exactly the same I made many years ago when I wrote the Coral, which is: I believe in the nudity of my life. I dont believe in biography, which is life told by others. My only biography is what is in my poetry. There are two things to observe in this declaration. Firstly, this is the moment when Andresen gives full expression to what she tried to show along all the film: that her poetry would be a sort of a mirror of her life, and vice-versa. Between poetry and life there would be a connection we might even say a coincidence as strong as the one tying the poet and the woman. Secondly, this disbelief in biography is also clearly a disbelief in autobiography, meant as the reconstruction of ones own life, usually done at the end of it. Saying that the only possible biography one could have can be found in ones poetry means denying the possibility of making an a posteriori reconstruction, considering that ones autobiography is something to be constructed written day by day, like poetry or a diary. But can this be conceived? Can the autobiographical report of ones life be expressed in poetry? I think that the documentary provides a kind of answer to these questions, as we are going to see now. Indeed, just like in the episode I mentioned before, a disturbing external element comes to contradict Andresens display of self-confidence. While she is talking to the camera, carefully choosing the words that could better express her thoughts, we see one of her daughters sitting on the floor, near a record player, and looking at something we are not able see, as if she was waiting for a signal to do something. In fact, precisely when her mother says she does not believe

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in biography, the girl perhaps following an instruction from Monteiro turns toward the record player and puts on a disc, which starts playing after a few moments, forcing Andresen to abruptly interrupt her monologue and making the other children laugh at their mothers irritation. What becomes evident in both this scene and the previous one is the radical contrast between what Andresen says and what her children say and do. Whereas she insists on demonstrating that there is no gap whatsoever between the woman and the poet, which would imply a transparent relationship between her work and her life (my biography is in my poetry), her children clearly (and humorously) show that that gap indeed exists: they do not recognize the declaiming voice as their mothers voice; they subvert her attempts to make life and poetry coincide, showing that poetry, as Monteiro said, cannot actually be shot, because the very subject of poetry does not actually exist out of it. In this way, an answer to our question can autobiography be poetic? is implicitly provided and seems to be a negative one. What we find in poetry cannot be the autobiography of the poet, because poetry is, first of all, the invention of a voice. As Jean-Michel Maulpoix observes, if a poetic autobiography exists, an autobiography of the poem, or within poetry, it constitutes less the identity card of a specific subject than the hypothetical otherness card of its transactions with others that carries within. The adventures of an alterationvi (Maulpoix). What is interesting about this observation is that the opposition it focuses on is not between identity and otherness, but rather between identity and the dynamics that make the subject an (always changing) other to him or herself. However, this other does not exist without the text, even if it is not exclusively confined to it otherwise, it would be just a character. It is the result of a complex interplay between text and life, which causes les pripties dune altration and happens in the entredeux (in-between) place Doubrovsky talked about in Autobiographie/vrit/psychanalyse and which is where autofiction occurs.vii

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Therefore, much like the poet invents a voice (or perhaps multiple voices) in her poetry, I suggest that what the spectator sees in this documentary is the invention of literally a new voice. This voice, displaying its interaction with other voices (which respond to different instances of the subject), makes a performance of itself, or, in other words, makes an autofiction. Indeed, the poet speaks in behalf of herself and of her poetry. She says shes one and, at the same time, she confirmsviii what she wrote many years before, which means that she recognizes her present self in her past self, in spite of the changes every human being passes through. Nevertheless, this public declaration of integrity is immediately broken down by the intervention of her daughter as I said, probably devised with the director who, enacting a sabotage, shows that what her mother is doing is presenting the plurality of the others she carries within herself as a unity, inventing (in spite of what she says) a new voice, which is an attempt to gather all of them. As I have mentioned, at the end of the film we return to the first scene, when we saw the poet writing at a table. She is still writing, then looking at a window, through which she (and we) can see the sea and we hear her voice reciting the two lines of the poem Inscrio (Inscription).ix Finally, we see her hand while she is writing her name on the notebook she had been writing on. Therefore, the signature that seals the poem she has just finished writing also works as an element allowing the transition from the inside to the outside of the film. Indeed, since the name of the poet is also the title of the film, when she stops writing and the camera keeps still for a couple of seconds on the signature before the film ends, that name plays the same role as the titles that usually come up at the end of a film, meaning that the film has finished and marking the passage from the fictional dimension of the film to reality. To sum up, the name of the poet plays two different but connected roles: as her signature on a paper which was part of the film, it is a fictional element though the documentary is supposed to be a non-fictional text, it is clearly an enactment and we can be sure that Andresen was not really composing a poem while she was being filmed ; but, as title of the film, it is also a paratextual element in limbo between two dimensions. Sealing

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both the poem and the film, this is the final act of the performance Andresen has enacted for the spectator and, being simultaneously inside and outside, fictional and real, resumes all that she has done. The signature is surely the most powerful element of connection between ones work and ones name. Indeed, it is performative because it literally does something, claiming its exclusive relationship with a person and with a work. However, the importance of the signature raises questions that deserve a closer analysis. Indeed, what is a signature? And what is in a signature? I am going to try to answer these questions in the second part of this paper, since they are crucial to the reflection I am going to present about the next text.

Between reading and writing A text with a very different literary agenda is the critical commentary to a Portuguese poets poem (Quase 3 Discursos Quase Veementes by Antnio Jos Forte), written by the Angolan writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho for Sculo de Ouro, an anthology of twentieth century Portuguese poetry. The collaborators were asked to choose a poem and to write a short essay about it, avoiding historical analysis and preferring a close-reading approach. For this reason, the results were significantly different: some of the essays kept the usual critical distance from the text, while

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others were written from a more personal perspective. The latter is also Ruy Duarte de Carvalhos case, first of all for a very specific reason: he was summoned not as a critic (which he never was), but as a poet, and this special condition made him obviously feel free to adopt a personal point of view, as well as it made him think about the relationship between himself as a poet, as a man, and this is especially interesting for this paper as the subject of his own autofiction. First of all, the author makes clear that he did not choose the poem as a poet, but as a man, and that he would have chosen it even if he had not become a poet. Therefore, focusing from the beginning on the reasons of the choice of the poem, the text is, rather than a proper commentary to Fortes poem, the story of the reading that Carvalho did of that poem, in the light both of his human and poetic experience. This becomes clear when the author enumerates the orders of things implied in the reflection that follows: (1) a biographic detail on ones pathway []; (2) an autobiographical glimpse if, urged to tell myself telling about a poem, I decide to tell it now; (3) an autofictional exercise if I get into the game, take my place and choose to believe in what they tell mex (543). These three elements are interconnected, but also logically subsequent. Indeed, while the first order of things refers to the two encounters in Carvalhos life with that poem something concretely happened in his past, but whose effects are apparently still working in the present , the second concerns the very moment of the choice of the text and of the writing, meaning that a reflection on that side might shed some light on the present of the author. But what about the autofictional exercise? Why does Carvalho evoke autofiction to develop his thinking? In order to answer these questions, lets see what the author actually says about autofiction. In a long paragraph put into brackets, he gives a definition of autofiction, clarifying that only recently had he learned what it was, when he happened to read two articles about this theme, published in the Magazine Littraire and found out that the literature he had been writing for many years seemed to fit within that concept. In his own words:

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Autofiction is a literary modality that appeals to the fictionalization of the authors personal life. While the autobiographical novel would tend to deal with personal events underneath fictional characters, autofiction would make real characters live fictional, or at least fantasized, events. Passage from the static aspect to the dynamic aspect of fiction. In the place of representation, presentation. Which means, if I understand correctly, fidelity to the present more than to the past. And present is the work, the text concerning only itself, narrating the conditions of its own elaboration, displaying its own dissection.xi (544) This long parentheses, that I summarized to its essential part, not only has the purpose of explaining to the reader what autofiction means, putting Carvalhos works under a new and fashionable literary category, but gives us a key to understanding this text, a text that not only deals with autofiction, but that is autofictional itself. Indeed, what the text displays is a plot, telling the story of the encounter of the subject with a poem, a story that could be told from different points of view, referring to the aforementioned heterogeneous orders of things: the biographical detail, the autobiographical glimpse and the autofictional exercise. The story narrated, the story of the text, is the result of the interplay of these three potential plots in the present of the writing. In this sense, it is also the story of itself, narrating the conditions of its own elaboration, displaying its own dissection.

The biographical story concerns the two circumstances in which the author read Fortes poem. The first one was in 1969, the second one in 1990. According to the author, what was most surprising to him, at the time of the second reading, was the poem revealing itself as a sort of premonition of his future life. This is the autobiographical aspect, since autobiography is a reading and an interpretation of ones own life, and this is what Carvalho actually tried to do, in two

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moments (which correspond to two levels): first, in the light of Fortes poem, then in the light of the reading of that poem. In fact, the author recognizes in this poem not only things that he himself had written in his own poetry (something that would not be so weird, since we can easily assume that, despite being stored, things we have apparently forgotten are kept active within ourselves anyway), but also and he found this much more uncanny things that he had actually seen with his own eyes. So, he decided to reflect upon this strange coincidence in order not to fall, as he says, in a sort of Borgesian trap, where reality is but a reflex of literature, as can be fully expressed by this observation: in order to configure my own life the text had to exist before perhaps it was me who had to live to realize the poemxii (547). The relationship between text and life can be seen from more than one perspective. Following precisely a kind of Borgesian way of thinking, Carvalho says, it can be assumed that perhaps every human being, and therefore himself (me, in the end, but configured by my own autofictionxiii, p. 548), in his or her own life, is realizing, even if unconsciously, another persons text. This fascinating hypothesis of literary glimpse (548) actually opens up the way to (auto)fiction, but says nothing about human experience, which would therefore be only a matter of literary recognition of life through reading. Instead of this solution, Carvalho turns towards the present which is the present of the writing and looks at himself when reading and writing on Fortes poem: the author of this text, the protagonist of autofiction, when comes back to AJF [Antnio Jos Forte], when opens the book again, comes across the nearly final lines of Quase 3 Discursos Quase Veementes, and recognizes, there, finally, the fear. Here, unmistakably, AJF is talking to me about nowxiv (548549). The deictic elements, indicating the hic et nunc of the writing, stress that the connection between Carvalho and Fortes poem happens in the present both of the text which is being read and of the text which is being written, and not in the unlikely retrospective interpretation of facts reread in the light of a poem. That is to say, the encounter with Fortes poem surely happened in

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Carvalhos life, but, to be fully meaningful, it must be read in connection with a new text, the one we are now reading. Encounter of lives generating an encounter of texts. But, the author asks, who will be responsible for this new text? Will it be the man, the poet or the subject of autofiction? The answer is given in the ending lines (549):

Whos feeling this true fear is nor the protagonist of the autofiction, neither the poet called to talk about a chosen poem, whos feeling this fear is the undersigned, with identity card and designated, complete,xv RUY DUARTE DE CARVALHO

Just like the documentary, the text ends with a signature, which simultaneously occupies two dimensions. Indeed, since the essay does not finish with a full stop but with a comma, the signature should be included within it. At the same time, its central and separated position on the page suggests it also belongs to the book and not only to the text.xvi So, we have returned to the meaning of the signature, with which I ended the analysis of the documentary on Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. In the documentary, the signature seals both the poem (inside the film) and the filmic text (between film and reality), allowing the transition from the inside to the outside of the film. This is a strongly symbolic element, representing the way autofiction works: nourishing itself of a never-ending oscillation between reality and imagination, fiction and life report, autofictional performance is the performance of the multiplication of the self in several potential selves, all of them responding to the same name, being gathered and confirmed by the signature. All of them co-exist in an in-between place, which is precisely the space of the signature. In the same way, in Carvalhoss text, the signature allows the passage from the text to the book, that is, from fiction to reality. This gesture has two important effects, i.e., to confirm (the
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signature is a confirmation, since it means: this text was written by me, so its mine), on the one hand, the belonging of a text to a subject immediately identifiable through the name and the documents that identify him, and, on the other hand, the unmistakable connection between that subject and the literary figures that he indicated along the text, the poet and the protagonist of the autofiction, who are partly coincident and partly not with him. The closure obviously ironizes the entire discussion, concluding that, in spite of all the potential plots that he might have conceived to talk about Fortes poem, the only thing he could actually do was to speak from the hic et nunc of writing, and this he would do exclusively as a man, feeling fear and pain in his soul and flesh, not as a poet nor as the subject of autofiction. But this conclusion hardly leaves the reader convinced. This short text (barely five pages) narrates the story of its making, it presents alternative plots and alternative authors for itself, and stresses the interconnection of all these instances, with which the author plays until the end. Just like Andresen did, Carvalho, speaking from within the text, claims the subordination of those figures to an external figure, himself, able to sign and to go beyond the texts dimension. This figure can speak on behalf of all of the other figures, stressing that, although being a poet and a subject of autofiction certainly changed his life, he is first of all a man, feeling fear and pain. In this way, he returns to what he anticipated at the beginning, when he said that he would have chosen Fortes poem even if he had not become a poet. However, how can he forget that if he had not been a poet he would have not been summoned to talk about another poets poem? Certainly what he means is that Fortes poem would have been meaningful for him anyway, since he actually saw in his own life what he read in that poem. But and this is important the recognition of the premonitory power of those poems happened, firstly, through Carvalhos own poetry. Indeed, he says he saw what Forte had written many years before and he himself had written poems about those images: not about Fortes images,xvii but about what he had seen with his own eyes. This is the reason why he feels fear

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and pain in the present, because of the striking coincidences that link his poetry with that of a poet he hardly knew. Therefore, in this discussion, there cannot be an artificial separation between the man and the poet, and, performing it on purpose, the author actually strengthens their relationship, allowing the reader to look suspiciously at the closure, considering the whole text a fictionalization of the act of writing and, therefore, a performance on authorship. Is this not autofiction? Indeed, if metacritical self-speech is a hallmark of autofiction (Gasparini), then it should be possible to assume that a deeply metadiscursive critique written as a fiction is autofiction as well, since this critique is actually an auto-critique. As Joost de Bloois points out, when the artistxviii or the writer is summoned to talk about his or her work, inevitably, a proliferation of the selves happens, because, in a way, s/he must occupy two places simultaneously: for being both part of the work and outside of the work, the author becomes engaged in a potentially infinite back-andforth between a topos at once inside and outside of the work (as soon as he/she posits himself/herself outside of the work as critic, he/she is drawn is back into it as its author (de Bloois). The topos de Bloois refers to is precisely the space of signature and what I have called an inbetween place, recovering Doubrovskys idea of an ungraspable place where text and life cross each other, originating something which is nor autobiography neither novel, but precisely autofiction. The recurrence of this image suggests that it is an inherent characteristic of autofiction, as a discoursexix intrinsically in-between. To conclude, both Andresen and Carvalho produced, in the works analyzed, discourses that showed the potential fictionalization that the auto-critical performance of the writer can bring into being. Although the strategies they used to construct an image of themselves had opposite goals, the results were actually similar. On the one hand, Andresen struggled for unity, but she was contradicted by internal (her own voice) and external (the interventions of her children) elements, which showed how fragile her gesture was. On the other hand, Carvalho wrote a text in which he tried to trace three instances of himself, proclaiming his autonomy from two of them

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(the literary ones), but precisely the way the text was conceived made this project fail. In both cases the signature revealed itself as a symbolic place, summarizing all the problems discussed. Clearly, the performance of the text and the performance of the self are intertwined in these texts, which stand at the edge or in the intersection (this is just a matter of point of view) of multiple worlds, whose boundaries are as liquid as in performance (in the strict sense of the term), where there is no stage anymore, no curtains separating performers and audience, what is enactment from what is supposed to be real. Also multiple are the images of the writers they convey: the one(s) they present and the one(s) unfolding among the lines of the text (or the pictures of the film), in a double movement that is a never-ending construction and deconstruction, in the entredeux place of writing.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Oporto, 1919 Lisbon, 2004) was one of the major Portuguese poets of the XX century. She wrote poetry, children's books, essays and short stories. She won several prizes, among which, the Cames Book Prize (1999). ii Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (Santarm, 1941 Swakopmund, 2010) was born in Portugal, but spent most of his life in Angola and turned into an Angolan citizen as soon as the country got independent. He was an anthropologist, cineaste and writer. He published several books of poetry, essays and novels. iii tanto os textos ficcionais quanto a atuao (a vida pblica) do escritor so faces complementares da mesma produo da figura do autor, instncias de atuao do eu que [...] no podem ser pensadas isoladamente. iv a autofico tambm no pressupe a existncia de uma sujeito prvio, um modelo, que o texto pode copiar ou trair, como no caso da autobiografia. No existe original e cpia, apenas construo simultnea (no texto e na vida) de uma figura teatral um personagem que o autor. v [C]omo no texto de fico, no espetculo teatral espao e tempo so ilusrios, no teatro e no romance tudo remete ao imaginrio. Quanto mais o ator (ou o autor do texto) entra no personagem, e mais real tenta faz-lo, mais refora a fico, e portanto, a iluso. Por isso a arte da performance rejeita a iluso, ela precisamente o resultado final de uma longa batalha para liberar as artes do ilusionismo e do artificialismo. vi Sil existe une autobiographie potique, une autobiographie du pome, ou dans la posie, elle constitue moins la carte didentit dun sujet spcifique, que lhypothtique carte d'altrit de ses transactions avec les autres quil porte en lui. Les pripties dune altration. vii Ni autobiographie ni roman, donc, au sens strict, il fonctionne dans lentre -deux, en un renvoi incessante, en un lieu impossible et insaisissable ailleurs que dans lopration du texte. Texte/vie: le texte, son tour, opre dans une vie, non dans le vide. (Neither autobiography nor novel, thus, in a strict sense, it works in the in-between, in an unceasing return, in a place impossible and ungraspable elsewhere but in the operation of the text. Text/life: the text, in turn, operates in a life, not in a vacuum; 70) viii I will return to the full meaning of the act of confirming in the discussion about the signature. ix Quando eu morrer voltarei para buscar / os instantes que no vivi junto do mar. (When I die I will com e back to fetch / the moments I didnt live by the sea).
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(1) detalhe biogrfico no caminho do prprio; (2) rasgo autobiogrfico se, instado aqui a dizer -me dizendo de um poema, decido diz-lo agora; (3) exerccio de autofico, se entro no jogo, assumo o lugar e decido acreditar no que me dizem. xi Autofico uma modalidade literria que recorre ficcionalizao da vida pessoal do autor. Enquanto o texto ... autobiogrfico tenderia a tratar acontecimentos pessoais a coberto de personagens fictcias, a autofico faria viver acontecimentos fictcios, ou pelo menos fantasmados, por personagens reais. Passagem do aspecto esttico ao aspecto dinmico da fico. Em lugar de representao, apresentao. Quer dizer, se bem entendo, fidelidade ao presente, mais que ao passado. E presente a obra, o texto a no tratar seno de si mesmo, narrando as condies da sua prpria elaborao, exibindo a sua prpria dissecao. Here Carvalho reports, almost literally, the words of the authors of the articles published in Le Magazine Litterire: on pourrait dire que le roman autobiographique consiste raconter des vnements personnels sous le couvert de personnages imaginaires, tandis que lautofiction ferait vivre des vnements fictifs ou pour le moins fantasms des personnages rels, mme nom, mme adresse. [...] luvre ne raconte plus quelle-mme, narrant les conditions de sa propre laboration, affichant sa propre dissection (Montremy, 62-63). And: A un langage de reprsentation, ncessaireme nt infidle, le critique [Jean Starobinski] opposait [] un langage de prsentation, caractris par une relation de fidlit une ralit prsente. [] O lon voit que laccent est mis dsormais sur laspect dynamique de la fiction plutt que sur un aspect statique. (Reigner, 65) xii para configurar a minha prpria vida o texto, antes, havia de existir talvez seria eu a ter de viver para cumprir o poema. xiii eu, afinal, ma configurado pela minha prpria autofico. xiv O autor deste texto, o protagonista da autofico, quando regressa a AJF, quando abre de novo o livro, para deparar com as linhas quase finais dos Quase 3 Discursos Quase Veementes, e reconhecer, a, finalmente, o medo. Aqui, sem lugar para equvocos, AFJ est-me a falar de agora. xv Este medo real quem o tem no o protagonista da autofico, nem o poeta convocado para dizer de algum poema eleito, este medo quem o tem o abaixo-assinado, com carta de identidade e designado, completo . xvi Indeed, all the other texts of the anthology finish with the name of the author in the same position, but, as it is usual, it comes after a full stop, which closes the text, delineating a clear separation between texts and books dimensions. xvii They are images of war, which Carvalho lived in Angola. xviii He addresses visual autofiction, but his perspective, from a theoretical point of view, applies also to literary autofiction. xix Autofiction as a discourse and not, necessarily, as a genre. Indeed, my main goal in this paper was to show how autofiction can be activated in texts whose fictionality is not assumed by their creators, nor is it immediately evident to the reader or the spectator.
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Works Cited: Butler, Judith. Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Carvalho, Ruy Duarte de. Comentrio a Quase 3 Discursos Quase Veementes de Antnio Jos Forte. Sculo de Ouro: Antologia Crtica da Poesia Portuguesa do Sculo XX. Eds. Osvaldo M. Silvestre and Pedro Serra. Braga: Angelus Novus, 2002. 543-549. Print. De Boois, Joost. The artists formerly known as... or, the loose end of conceptual art and the possibilities of visual autofiction. Image [&] Narrative 19 (2007) Web. 20 January 2013. Gasparini, Philippe. De quoi lautofiction est-elle le nom? Autofiction.org. Autofiction, 2009. Web. 13 January 2013. Klinger, Diana. Escrita de si como performance. Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada 12 (2008):11-30. Print. Maulpoix, Jean-Michel. La posie, autobiographie dune soif. Maulpoix.net. Jean-Michel Maulpoix, 2001. Web. 20 January 2013. Montremy, Jean-Maurice de. Laventure de lautofiction. Le Magazine Littraire May 2002: 6264. Print. Reigner, Thomas. De lautobiographie lautofiction: una gnalogie paradoxale. Le Magazine Littraire May 2002: 64-65. Print.

Film Cited: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Dir. Joo Csar Monteiro. Cultura filmes, 1969. Videocassette.

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