O sujeito e suas confissões em O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby, de Hilda Hilst

Abstract

In O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby (The Pink Book of Lori Lamby), by Hilda Hilst, book taken as corpus for our search, we listen to an eight-year-old girl s voice who writes about her sexual experience with an older man, on her diary. We consider the book as a confessional writing. By the 17th century, the Catholic Church started a job: transforming the sex in discourse via confession. The individual was incited to talk about sex, pleasure and the deepest desires to achieve the salvation. Thus, the sexuality was not denied but incited, organized, building a connection between the individuality and subjectivity. Furthermore, the sexuality is not deleted from the individual. From this perspective, we can verify the sexuality construction as a historical object and production of knowledge. Besides, analyzing the procedures of power and resistance from the book, we want to think about the ways that memory can be recalled through the images which come with the discourses produced, supported by Courtine (1999) who articulates, from the direction shown by Michel Foucault, the linguistics intersection with the History. Considering this theory position, we will identify the statements from the extracts taken for analysis. Thus, we will consider Foucault s postulates about the discursive formations. In accordance to Foucault s postulate, a group of formulations can be considered as a statement if the position of the subject is shown. Certainly a word or a phrase can appear in different times but at each moment it signifies a new meaning and can be understood as different statements. It is considered that when those formulations are reported as a statement, one does not analyze the relation between an author and its writings but, according to Foucault (2008), it determines what position can and must be occupied by any individual to be the subject of a statement. Starting from the selected statements and based on Courtine s theory, we will reflect about the memories which are established as an historical existence through the discursive practices. These memories, however, help us better understand the statement to be read. Afterwards, we aim to investigate O caderno rosa (The Pink Book ) and its form of confession as a kind of self writing, the way the subject of our search becomes subject of its desire and how this relationship happens from the exterior to the interior and, then, from its interior to his own inner. It has been considered by Foucault (1995) that when one looks to its own sexuality, confessing it, one constitutes as a subject. Looking to itself, the individual discovers, from its desire, its self truth in a relationship from self to self and makes itself subject of its own moral.