"Os Guarda-Chuvas Cintilantes" by Teolinda Gersão: a risk in time

• Autor(a) principal: Sequeira, Rosa Maria
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.58155/revistadeletras.v1i7.437

Teolinda Gersão's diary Os Guarda-Chuvas Cintilantes is a text of a hybrid nature that encourages us to reconsider the theoretical issue of literary genres. Presented as a diary in the subtitle, it exposes an experimental and revolutionary writing that questions the tradition of genres and the expression of the self. Being a speculative reflection of writing on writing itself, it reveals the very ambiguity of the diary genre and challenges known boundaries by assuming the crisis of forms in current literature. Through the ludic, the surreal and the fantastic and also through an unnamed unstable narrator, this text denies the individualizing characteristic of diary writing, thus expanding the possibilities imposed by conventions and evading the control of interpretation. Teolinda Gersão, like Gide, prefers inconsistency to the order that deforms. The aesthetics of the fragment that this text adopts is a strategy for writing subjectively, avoiding the traps of an imaginary and an alleged transmission of the veracity of the self. Moreover, the fragment fits in well with the polyphonic architecture of the text, contradicting the tendency of diaries to focus on a single voice. Some moments of inflection are considered in the tradition of the diary, namely French, Anglo-Saxon and Portuguese-speaking, to conclude that Teolinda Gersão's Diary occupies a separate place in which the notions of truth and subject of discourse are dissolved and in that the absurd is intricate in the critical dismantling of everyday bourgeois life. Due to its experimental and defying character, this text is a challenge for the reader.