Self Writing as Minor Literature: The Letters of Anita Malfatti to Mário de Andrade

Abstract

In a falogocentric culture letter writing has been considered by literary critics as aminor form of literature. Historians, on their part, have considered personal letters as an inadequatesource of historical knowledge. In this text I seek to give positive value to the epistolary literatureoriginating from a private exchange of letters, stressing that this kind of literary production can beas transgressive as the so-called “great literature”, i.e. that literature that seeks to transpose thelimits of language, since in this specific case we recreate ourselves, transgressing the limits ofwhat we are in the intersubjective space of letter exchange and of friendship. Thus, I interpret thepersonal letters of the São Paulo plastic artist Anita Malfatti (1889), addressed to the modernistwriter Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), as a form of “minor literature”, in the sense given by GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari. This private kind of writing is connected to the construction of a selfsculpture,an “art of oneself”, in the words of Michel Foucault. I therefore read the self writing in theletters of Malfatti as a counter hegemonic and political writing, for in the plot developed in herletters she produces an autonomous feminine subjectivity which resists subjectivities connectedto the family, to the state, and to the church.