O conto catatônico ou a estética quadricular de Maura Lopes Cançado

Abstract

This study examines the literary interpretation of fictional narratives produced by clinically diagnosed authors, specifically writers whose biographies were shaped within psychiatric hospitals. In this context, the Brazilian writer Maura Lopes Cançado presents overlapping narratives: autobiographical and fictional – respectively, Hospício é Deus: diário I  (1965) and O sofredor do ver  (1968) – intertwined with an institutional narrative composed of clinical diagnoses. Thus, the critic is situated between the author’s aesthetic text and the technical text of psychiatric institutions, risking the use of textual interpretation as clinical analysis. To avoid this interpretative trap, the short story “No quadrado de Joana” from O sofredor do ver, is analyzed to explore the implications of meaning in a movement that occurs after reading. The story features the character Joana, a patient integrated into an institution, diagnosed with catatonia. While the representations of hospitalization and catatonic symptoms are integral to the story’s content, the interpretation proposes a reading of confinement and the catatonic sign within the story’s structure and form. Consequently, the action, time, and space align not only with the character’s symptoms but also with the aesthetic composition of the story, particularly the geometric form of the square, which expresses the institutional space and the character’s mode of existence. In psychoanalysis, the interpretive movement that ascribes meaning to trauma at a later time is called Nachträglichkeit  (noun) or  nachträglich (adj. and adv.). This concept is applied to the post-reading analysis of Maura’s story, enabling a reconfiguration of meaning within the quadrangular form and the catatonic sign. This approach suggests a connection between the story’s aesthetics and the avant-garde artistic aesthetics of Cubism, specifically Juan Gris’s painting Portrait of Germaine Raynal (1912). 

Keywords: Maura Lopes Cançado; interpretation; catatonia; aesthetics; Nachträglichkeit.