Enquanto Curitiba agoniza: as configurações do espaço urbano em O Mez da Grippe, de Valêncio Xavier

Abstract

The city emerges in literature from the most varied settings as years go by. However, with the advent of Enlightenment and, consequently, Industrial and French Revolutions, urban space will be designed as a modern environment, based on the ideals of postindustrial progress. This transformation of city environment will affect literature, reconfiguring it, so as the concepts of art and authorship. Nevertheless, the same city that transforms the literature becomes – more and more repeatedly – its theme in narratives where the urban space emerges in its most distinct and subtle delineations, as in the work of Curitiba's writer Valêncio Xavier, who constructs a narrative using newspaper clippings, official documents, advertisements and photographs of the past century to trace the everyday life of a Curitiba stricken by the Spanish flu in 1918, in his novel O mez da grippe (1981). This narrative unfolds from the assumption that the voice of the city is captured through many speeches – architectural, illustrative or verbal – which pervades it, fragments which meaning mobility is explored by the author, that, by merging them, builds a plurissignificative work, evoking a city stricken by the epidemic flu, proving that everyday objects can be used to produce a literature marked by a wide range of interpretations and reinterpretations in a kind of collage album which holds various meanings. The city – built with pieces of its own speech rescued by the author – appears in his work as a space of convergence and divergence of voices, where the arrangement of fragments shows a network of discursive nodes among the threads that compose the plot of the urban environment. By analyzing characteristics of the author as well as the compositional method he performs, this study discusses the configurations of Curitiba in O mez da grippe, both as the place where events take place and as character of the narrative itself. Considering that the city transforms the individual while is transformed by him, this research examines representations of space in novel, sice its presentation to the reader until its gradual transfiguration from cityspace into city-character, trying to discern delineations and features which situate it as a fundamental part of Xavier's narrative