As cidades mutantes de Valêncio Xavier: espaço urbano e memória em "Minha mãe morrendo e o menino mentindo" e "Crimes à moda antiga"

Abstract

Valêncio Xavier‟s literature stands out in particular by its experimentation in composition. Using various discursive excerpts from the city, the author elaborates a work in which the urban space and the memory figures as centerpieces. Rescuing avant-garde elements and disrupting the conventional mode of elaboration of the prose, Xavier uses techniques derived from various artistic languages and techniques that permeate the modern urban environment, such as montage, cutting and imbrications – resources exploited by various languages, ranging from the movies to the press. His innovations in the field of literature can be seen from the peculiar way of conceiving the structure of his narrative: alternating written text and images, the author elaborates scenarios in which the verbal text, in its different manifestations – press, literature, advertising or even pornography – joins the photography, illustrations, maps and other graphic resources within a montage process that is unique in the history of Brazilian literature. This process is based, above all, in an exercise of overlapping clippings, images and fragments from the most varied instances of the modern city, which intertwine in the composition of his narratives. A quick glimpse at his work is enough for us to realize that the way chosen by the author to narrate his plots, by itself, already conveys a message, an intentionality: the layout used by the author itself already carries a content. Thus, through a bibliographical review followed by the hermeneutic analysis of the latest Xavier‟s works, this research sougth to understand better both the compositional method, arrangement mechanisms and functioning of the montage made by Valêncio Xavier; and how his work is inserted in Brazilian literature from the late 1980‟s until the early 2000‟s. In addition to this, continuing the research on the representations of urban space in Xavier's work (begun during our Masters degree, when we investigated the city as a character and the metaphors associated with it in O mez da grippe) we try now, through an extensive study of the last two works produced by the author right before his death, to understand better the representations of urban space and its relation to memory contained in the speeches that cross the modern city. By analyzing the books Minha mãe morrendo e o Menino Mentido and Crimes à moda antiga we seek to understand how, by exploring the power of meaning generation in the speeches from the cities of the twentieth century (and the mnemonic charge contained within it), Valêncio Xavier makes us reflect not only on city and memory, but also, on time, materiality and finitude.