A poesia entre os círculos do inferno: uma leitura da melancolia brasileira a partir dos diários de Lima Barreto

Abstract

The present work aims to understand, from the work of the writer Lima Barreto, how the melancholic posture can play a role of social symptom that points to the malaise in the historical context of Brazil. The figure of the melancholic, in the romantic tradition, would be the one who perceives the subtle contradictions that often go unnoticed in the society in which they are inserted. With this conception in mind, we seek to relate the nowadays’s melancholy to the expression of Lima Barreto's particular suffering, the melancholy in his autobiographical production. Highlighting his condition as a black man who experienced the passage from slavery to capitalism and, also, from the Brazil’s Empire to It’s Republic, we seek to understand how the writer's intimate suffering would still have an intrinsic relationship with his social context. Thus, we specifically analyzed the works “Diário Íntimo” (1956/2011) and “Diário do Hospício” (1953/2019b), in order to emphasize the link between the social and the psychic, endorsed by psychoanalytic theory and the works of Frantz Fanon, declaring the need to recognize colonialism and racism as structuring in the psyche of Brazilian subjects. Finally, through the artistic works of Lima Barreto, we point to the possibility of collective and individual elaboration of our history of oppression and barbarism and the contributions of this possibility to think about a psychology more involved with the Brazilian social problems.