Cabeça debaixo da terra: escrita literária e saúde em Lima Barreto

Abstract

This work presents a fictional experience in order to denote perspectives on the relationship between Literary Writing and Health in the work and life of writer Lima Barreto, mainly from the novel Clara dos Anjos. In this sense, I use Literary Criticism and Mental Health supports in order to question the relationship of Resentment within the Health/Disease binomial demonstrated by the philosopher Nietzsche. Starting from marks in the biography and in the work of the writer of Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma, I try to open interpretative fields through fiction as a possible proposal for the re-elaboration of History beyond criticism, emphasizing a character of liberation of certain concepts that wall an author within. from certain lines of thought and research, but mainly to rewrite one of the possible solutions for the black character, Clara dos Anjos, in order to think about her contemporaneity within the history of black women. Therefore, I raise the Nitzschean idea of Resentment as a necessary process to see the psychic and social disease that involves the post-slavery drama, and thus create means of liberation, writing a health concomitant with the disease, using the unhealthy path of a body and thought to generate a new immune system. As a method, I chose to have the characters in contact with part of the History of Brazil, from the Minas Conspiracy to the Hospices, using the investigation that writer Lima Barreto carried out in his time, questioning the Intelligence around him, whether in his literary generation, in Science or Medicine. I demonstrate these points by helping me with Gilles Deleuze's Literature/Health relationship, in which he brings the writer closer to a kind of doctor of society, as well as Nietzsche, who does not oppose health/disease, but sees the need for the game of both for the constitution of the vital body. As a temporal strategy, I create a historical thread from 1900 to 2022, from the young Lima Barreto to the centenary of the writer's death, to give continuity to scientific and artistic formulations at the beginning of the 20th century.