A fauna rupestre de João Cabral de Melo Neto

Abstract

In this dissertation, I intend to broaden the boundaries of the receptive, poetic and imaginary systems that surround João Cabral de Melo Neto through the elaboration of an analytical-interpretative reading of his poetry guided by the presence of animals and forms of animality, under the prism of Zoopoetics. This study is guided by the understanding of Cabral's creative stance as a poetics attentive to otherness, including, in this inventory, animals. Situated in the field of Comparative Literature, from a methodological point of view I consider the transitive aspect of the poetic text and the valential relationship between literary studies and other fields of knowledge, such as Philosophy, Ethology and Zoology. I aim to build a catalogue of the animals written by the author in order to characterise the ways in which these non-human living beings are formalised in his poetic work. In pursuing this goal, I specifically intend to: i) map words and images belonging to the zoological semantic field present in Cabral’s work; ii) trace the value trajectory of animality in the entirety of Cabral’s poetics; iii) unveil the mechanisms by which animals are engendered in the author’s poems; and iv) examine the ways in which some of these animals are apprehended in the fabric of the composition. In accordance with this research horizon, I propose a bifurcation of the reading in order to contemplate an extensive movement, encompassing the totality of the volumes of poetry, and an intensive one, with the aim of leading the interpretative effort towards a collection of poems, namely: “Poema(s) da cabra”, “Formas do nu”, “O urubu mobilizado” e “Touro andaluz”. The corpus was selected on the basis of perception of the centrality of the animal as an element of compositional irradiation and the identification of interspecific relationships that gain materiality in these poems. Through this research, I identify a broad and heterogeneous collection of references to animals in the author's poems - from generic allusions to uses of singular species - to which equally diverse values are attributed. The journey through João Cabral's work opens up the reader to a perception of the modalisations that animality undergoes: at first, taken from the instinctive and monstrous dimension to be combated in the conscious process of writing, to the consideration of animals as forms of life from which aesthetic and ethical knowledge about the cohabited world is learned.