Plurissignificant provocateur: the strategies of ana cristina cesar's pretending ethos and the reader's interventions

Abstract

Ana Cristina Cesar’s literary work is a bold, complex and well-calculated artistic experience. Her texts, marked by the fragmented, dry and often elliptical structure, whose language combines the discursive repertoire of missive, diary and confession, require, more than emotion, a critical intervention of the reader. One of the factors that justify that action seems to be the unveiling of the various self-poetics created by Ana Cristina Cesar, situated in a prosaic poetry marked by the dilemmas of the Brazilian military dictatorship years. To begin our considerations about the creative strategies of Ana Cristina Cesar, having as analysis some poems present in the Ana’s pink portfolio found after her death and in the four books that forms the volume A teus pés (1982), we make use of the reflections of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the first understanding the act of writing as something intransitive, without the requirement of an appropriate motive and technique for a particular type of text, the writer being anyone who writes – and no longer the one who writes something; the second critical, in his turn, qualifies the author as a function in the text. Thus, also led by the theory of Wolfgang Iser about the acts of pretending and the role of the reader as a enjoyer, as well as by the researches of Italo Moriconi, Tânia Cardoso de Cardoso and Silviano Santiago about the literature of Ana Cristina Cesar, we seek to verify how the poet elaborates her “pretender” ethos, which conceals to question the alleged sophistication of poetic language in favor of the constitution of a non-poetry poetry, in order to understand, above all, why – and in what way – her aesthetic intention causes effects on the reader to the point of stimulating him to decode ambiguities and supplement the gaps in the structure of the texts.