Reasons of haunting and ruin: Murilo Mendes and Ouro Preto

Abstract

This text performs an enigma based in the first publication of the poem Motivos de Ouro Preto in 1951 at the Brazilian review Anhembi. After, the poem was included in the book Contemplação de Ouro Preto, published in 1954 by the Documentation Service of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture. The edition under government auspice, and the fact that the book was illustrated with photographs by Humberto Moraes Franceschi and Erich Hess make us think about the advanced relations between Modernism and State for the patrimony’s preservation. The poem inscribes itself, with other images, therefore, in the documentation proceedings and in the transformation of baroque torsion forces into forms. The essay tries to brush these texts against the grain and find, inside a work easily identifiable to autonomism, the specters that haunts it and, marking God’s death (and consequently the death of the absolute principles), entangle the statal reading of this documental, tourist, and patrimonialist production inside Murilo Mendes’ poetic.