The deployment of autobiography in heterobiography: poetic memory in Boitempo by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Abstract

This article discusses the conflicting relationship between autobiography and poetry in poems within Drummond’s Boitempo trilogy. Exploring this theme is significant for the problematization of a rather naive reading that seeks the reasons for a poem in its extraliterary sphere, that is, in the life of the poet, providing a broader understanding of the lyrical subject as a complex fictional element. Accordingly, in this study, we apply the theoretical conceptions of Hoisel (2019), Lejeune (2014), Arfuch (2010), Smith (1971) and Iser (1996, 2002) to debate autobiographical space in poetry and the reception of the most astute part of Drummond’s lyrical remembrance. The article also discusses, following Halbwachs (1990), Silva (2009), Miranda (1988) and Santiago (2008, 2004), the collective nature of memory and the resemanticization of the subject in fiction. Moreover, our analysis of selected poems dialogs with the critical arguments of Candido (2000), Villaça (2006) and Pedrosa (2011) to clarify how Drummond’s memorialistic texts propose the recreation of the past — of an “I” that is recognized as an “other” and projects itself in this “other”, which is constantly cowritten through the act of reading.