Esgotamento, esvaziamento e preenchimento : a historia de uma criação

Abstract

This novel, shaped as an artist's book, tells the story of a character that, given the addiction and disease circumstances, suffers a home accident. The fall causes him to injure his hippocampus, but, luckly, he does not acquire any language aftereffect. On the contrary, language is the salvation to the abruptly interrupted memory. Evaristo erases the year before the accident and starts suffering from short-term memory loss. Everything that happened before that date is intact and can be retrieved with clarity. The upcoming events are kept in mind for no longer than a half-hour. Some months of questionnaire later, the only way out is the technological and analogical record of each step taken. It is the alarm clock. It is the cellphone. It is the agenda. Evaristo decides to expand this record, which is now a project for a book. The problem is to start, every day, the same story over again. The sparsed and completely fragmented memories trace the poetry of a human being miserably honest about blunders, divergence, and silence, fearing repetition. It is the technological narratives and the digital tools that locate him so that he understands in what midst he truly lives. The nonrecognition of time, space, and subjects could mistake him for an Alzheimer's patient, but it is only time that can no longer be shaped. The spaces endure, the subjects overlap, and, in time, all stories lived start being documented - just in case. The seams of the novel and of the memories are visible, but elements of subversion and of visual and graphic deconstruction elevate the trial to an identity confusion of son, father, memories and author. It is the extratext that supports the reflection that goes through memory, fiction, reality, and identity. The book is composed of two parts. The first one, mentioned above, is fictional in tone (or intended to); the second one, academic and essay-like in tone, intends to be seen as memory of creation, metalinguistic reflection, and record of the creative process, simultaneous and organic. It is this part, divided into three: Depletion, Emptiness, and Fulfillment, that suggests a visit to the six proposals of Italo Calvino, 1985. More than the previously known lightness, quickness, exactitude, multiplicity, visibility, and consistency, the idea is to forge an expasion of these words to the concepts of strangeness, unfixture, spacing, resonance, hybridity, simultaneity, fragmentation, temporariness, detachment, and plasticity, and understand how they sustain the performance of the contemporary text on page. In the second part of the essay, an inventory that blends the subject of memory from the theoretical perspective and as building material of the fictional text. In the third part, the diary about the statute of creation. The fourth part is the fiction itself, The story of cebola. Both parts are distinct and are faced in a complementary and independent manner regarding graphic language that intends to give a new meaning to the very book as a hybrid support.