The unfolding of autobiography into heterobiography

a study on the poetic memory in Boitempo, by Carlos Drummond De Andrade

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing the narrow and conflictive relationship between autobiography and poetry in the poems of Boitempotrilogy, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. This is a significant topic to question naïve readings, which search for the explanationsof a poem in the extraliterary scope, that is, in the poet’s life, and reach a wider perspective about the speaker as a complex fictional element. To do so, this work forms its grounds in the theories of Hoisel (2019), Lejeune (2014), Arfuch (2010), Smith(1971) and Iser (1996, 2002), debating on the self-biographic space in poetry and a more astute reception of Drummond’s memorialistic voice. This paper also discusses, based on Halbwachs (1990), Silva (2009), Miranda (1988) and Santiago (2008, 2004), the collective ingredient of memory, and the new meaning of subject in fiction. The analyses of the poems resonate the theories by Candido (2000), Villaça (2006) and Pedrosa (2011) and aim at clarifying how the memorialistic writings of Drummond propose the recreation of the past of a speakerwho recognizes themself as an otherand projects themself onto an other, being constantly co-written at the action of reading.