Men in shadow times: Cruz e Sousa and Benjamin

Abstract

In this article, the prose poem “Umbra”, by João da Cruz e Sousa (2008 [1891]), is taken as the epitome of the collapsed urban space, reporting it to Charles Baudelaire and to the post-symbolist poem “Sub-umbra”, by Artur de Sales (1987 [1950]), as an enunciation of saturnian estrangement (Giorgio Agamben) and renunciation (Paul Valéry) in juxtaposition to the concept of “eternal fugacity” (BENJAMIN, 2006). In this dialectic, the image of the limestone outcrop described in Umbra finds the relations between memory and stratigraphy (Walter Benjamin) and, having as its object this “micrological framework of everyday culture” (BOLLE, (2006 [1994]), the nineteenth-century prose poem unfolds in contemporary texts – becoming-clay in the novel by Itamar Vieira Júnior; geocritique of José Miguel Wisnik; tugurization and counter-architecture by Antonio José Ponte and experimental symbolism by Claudio Daniel – and on the site-specific Testemunho, by artist Daniel de Paula, seeking to register urban fugacity in its becoming-nature. In this drift of readings, Cruz e Sousa and Benjamin approach in another “image of thought”.