Impressions and archives: notes on survival, literature and literary living in Quarto de despejo, by Carolina Maria de Jesus

Abstract

In this essay, we propose a critique of literary archives, reflecting, above all, on the archive of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Our first motivation comes from reading the author's Quarto de despejo (1960); book that is her debut in literature, and contemplated her notebooks of memories, an edition that had, in a first hour reception, a documentary focus, in the aspects of the social environment in which she lived, and about which she had recorded her memories. Regarding the release of this book, that interest in peripheral places has passed. In addition of this, a so-called Brazilian literary tradition that does badly receive a memoir writing, that depend of the author, Carolina had not managed, in life, to have a stable place, and to be recognized for the quality of her writing, in the profession of writer. We consider reflecting on the writer's archive, thinking about the performance path towards custodian institutions, which are, above all, for the conservation of archives of traditional writers; displacement of her literary text, previously read as documentary, for the collection documents, which are potentially literature to be edited and / or reedited, therefore, received and possibly rethought in other criticisms. We observe the path from the archive that is “the poet's brain”, to her literary “impressions”, to which the book analyzed here is quite representative, reinforced the impressions about life, literature, literary life and "survival", this in a Deridian sense, to which we will connect to the perspective of “livature”, an act / term elaborated by the critical writer Conceição Evaristo. For this essay, we call, additionally, Foucault, Derrida, Bhabha, without whom we would not be able to question the forms and contents of the archives of coloniality, these also contributing to the formation of the idea of nation, which is represented in the nation's archives, either by the presence of genius, the hero, or by the absence of what is considered popular, as antagonist, as marginal.