Owl, werewolf, firefly: Animal trace narrator

Abstract

The route by a network of narrators from different eras finds a trace of animality in the look and in the flâneur writing, since Restif de La Bretonne proposed, in the eighteenth century, the similarity between the reporter/narrator and a night bird. This track permits that one proposes the category of the owl-narrator, which puts into practice an inhuman method of looking at the shadow areas of the cities. Here considered as narratives of the dark, this cartography runs several textualities intertwined by the desire to see what is beneath the everyday life – from Bretonne and Mercier, through Poe, Baudelaire, João do Rio and arriving to Clarice Lispector. Sometimes, the owl narrative disappears to resurge in every city where there is a stubborn wanderer who overcomes the invisibility spot on the human eye. The crowds go ahead inattentively, overshadowed by the proliferation of signs and advertisements, they march to the future without looking back. The owl does not; it retains the time to envision the disappearance of singularities and to foresee what the today story points out as more clandestine. As claims Benjamin (1994, p. 231), “thinking not only includes the movement of ideas, but also their immobilization”. The walk by the early writer-reporters allows us to consider that the owl-flâneur inaugurates not only himself, but also this kind of narrative based on a poetic of looking to the rubble. The physical roaming characterizes it, but does not determine the narrative, as it does not determine the trip, the inner displacement. Mostly, the impulse to see the unknown awakens other obscured powers, reintegrating them to the perception of the urban movements and driving the narrative to walk, to hear, to smell, to feel. In the nightly flight by means of a pivoting look, literature announces the survivals that do not cease to disappear in front of the contemporary life.