O (anti)silêncio tece seus vazios na poética de Orides Fontela

Abstract

When we come into contact with a fictional object – or rather, when we become entangled in reading – we are, at first, compelled to abandon external reality in order to enter the reality of the text. For a moment, we suspend our own existence to embrace that of the Other, narrated. However, when textual indeterminacies emerge, we are called to participate actively, combining the perspectives suggested by the text, filling in the gaps and, antithetically, allowing those very gaps to fill us. Thus, if reading initially demands a distancing from lived experience, it soon reverses course: the voice of the text pierces us and calls us into question, such that, upon emerging from the reading, we are no longer the same as when we entered it. In Teia (1996), by the poet Orides Fontela, the poetic subject's movement in search of self mirrors this doubling of the reading act: it seems to seek, incessantly, to remake itself through the silences of the symbol, which reappears in her lyric only to vanish once more. Accordingly, the general objective of this study is to map the aesthetic experience of the reader-author with the book Teia, emphasizing the Iserian concept of the blank and its multiple relations with the category of silence. In addition to the central aim, the following specific objectives are outlined: a) to review the bibliography of the Theory of Aesthetic Response and Literary Anthropology, discussing their theoretical implications and possible connections with poetic reading and the premises of the lyric genre; b) to relate Iserian concepts to poetic silences as proposed by Sontag (2015), Steiner (1988), Suzuki (1960), Friedrich (1978), and Paz (2012); c) to exemplify poetic silences in Orides Fontela’s publications prior to Teia; and d) to map the reading of the poems “Teia” and “Gatos” from the book Teia (1996), paying attention to the effects of meaning provoked by textual blanks in the aesthetic experience, especially in their articulation with silence. Methodologically, this is a qualitative study that adopts the Mapping of Aesthetic Experience (MAPEE) as its theoretical-methodological tool, applied to the reading of two poems from Teia. Through this approach, it was revealed that in Teia, textual gaps function as central compositional strategies, both in the external structure and the internal fabric of the poems, fostering a multiplicity of meanings arising from the reader’s singular experience.