A narração afásica de A arte de produzir efeito sem causa, de Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

As Walter Benjamin's studies attested, the collective experience inscribed in the act of narrating tradition has lost ground in modernity, as fragmentation has given way to an individual increasingly “lost in the crowd” and without experiences to share. A arte de produzir efeito sem causa (2008), by Lourenço Mutarelli, marks this fractured site in which the ruin of the art of narration is verified. The objective of this research was to study the narrative processes of this graphic-verbal novel focusing on how aphasia functions as the creative principle of the narrative, materializing itself in its literary body. With a narration that mixes itself up with the thoughts and hallucinations of the protagonist Júnior, who is in a progressive process of mental deterioration, the reader is faced with a story of psychic chaos, narrated in a chaotic way, which precludes them from a static-univocal reading, or one that has very established principles of reasonableness. When the aphasic crisis of the character becomes evident, beyond his psycho-emotional collapse, we are led to assume that the cognitive-linguistic disorder of aphasia, more than a mere fact of the plot, constitutes a structuring device of the work, a device which, by contaminating narrator, characters and even the graphic-visual project, breaks with the connections of the narrative structure and logical-causal thinking, generating disharmony, instability and investing in the non-sense. Roman Jakobson's studies on aphasia, as well as the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben on the (non) place of the author in contemporary literature, substantiated our analytical path. We have claimed that the disabling of the discursive rules provided by this aphasic narrative resulted in two paradoxical effects: on the one hand, the loss of communicative capacity, the desubjectivated contemporary man who is not a subject of discourse, has no history and is marked by infamy; on the other, the deactivation of the standard, informative language, which leads to new and possible uses, to a foreign, nonsense language, in which the analogical logic of poetic creation enables the experience of non-sense as privation pregnant with potential, and not merely as illogicality and the destruction of any possibility of meaning. Following a type of realism that we could call, according to Schøllhammer, performative, we find in this work an audacious authorial project that, interested in questioning the relevance of a point of view, not only aesthetic, but also ethical and political, can be considered a limit-experiment of the possibilities of the novel as a genre today