"A castaway's look": the writing of the wreck-metaphor in Catherine Pozzi's diaries

• Autor(a) principal: Aline Magalhães Pinto
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/47889; http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0164-0061
• topic: Self-referential discourse; Metaphor; Selfreflexivity; Catherine Pozzi; Metáfora

French poet and writer Catherine Pozzi is a remarkable figure of the late 19th century and the period between the World Wars. In 1893, at the age of 13, she won a little notebook from her grandmother and started a diary-writing practice she maintained until the end of her life, except for a few interruptions. This research stands at the intersection between intellectual history and literary studies. It is focused on the role played by the “castaway” image, developed by Pozzi as a self-reflexive construction in her diary. As a reflexive and metaphorical image, her castaway’s wreck draws from three main motifs, which are noticeable in her self-referential discourse: the sadness of an ill-fated love affair with one of the most celebrated men of French intelligentsia, namely Paul Valéry; the impact of tuberculosis on her body; and a frustrated intellectual vocation. Based on Hans Blumenberg’s views about metaphors and dialoguing with his theoretical construction, I sought to understand how a self-referential statement acts on a discourse by resorting to the textual composition of a metaphorical image, in order to be capable of representing the experience of a painfully stimulated conscience. This image emerges as an intimate and unique element, which can be interpreted as Pozzi’s entries accept the wreck image as the reflexive form of a metaphorical destiny.