À terceira margem do Atlântico: um sertão de silêncio e desejo em Desmedida, de Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Abstract

Taking Desmedida as a compass and the route of the Portuguese-Angolan Ruy Duarte de Carvalho as a route, this article discusses and problematizes the search for an origin and a meaning for the sertão in the Brazilian symbolic production. From the accounts of the first travelers who arrived in the country, through texts by researchers, historians, or writers, the sertão is described as an empty immensity to be explored and circumvented by words – a stage for multiple figurations, transgressions, and subversions of language. Desmedida works as a trigger of meaning and a guiding for the path undertaken in this work: one that points to the sertão as an excess of emptiness – or lack of measure, limit, and frontier – already in the structure of the signifiers selected to name it. When crossing the sertão of Euclides da Cunha and Guimarães Rosa, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho presents two different ways of dealing with the real of the sertão and with the impossibility of narrating it. The twisting of texts, times and existences undertaken by Carvalho is read as a turning point in the subjectivation modes of the subject and language and its effects on the concepts of fiction and representation in the arrival of modernity, as identified by the philosopher Jacques Rancière. To investigate the concepts of real and emptiness, articles by Raul Antelo and Jacques Lacan were used as theoretical references.