Os espaços de confinamento nas obras de Samuel Beckett e Maura Lopes Cançado: geometrias da loucura

Abstract

This thesis aims at a critical reading of the circular spaces in The Lost Ones and Espiral Ascendent and the quadratic spaces in Quad I+II and No quadrado de Joana and how these geometric figures of confinement will contribute to the madness of the characters, being the first works by the writer and playwright Samuel Beckett and the last ones, by the Minas Gerais writer Maura Lopes Cançado. The concern with representation in art has always been present both in criticism and in Beckett's works. His search for the expressive minimum portrays his interest in an art that, having a reference in reality, seeks its transposition through the discussion of the role of the fragmented subject, which will be analyzed in the short story The Lost Ones from 1970 and in the television play Quad I+II from 1981 In the short story, the plot takes place in the confinement of a cylinder where around 200 people, placed in an extremely dismal place, err in search of what is called depopulation. In the television play, four actors dressed in a long hood with their faces hidden, respectively, travel the perimeter of a square, without ever meeting, faltering or reaching the center of the square. Due to its internal tension, this waltz of exhaustion represents the distancing of memory and reason, existing, according to Deleuze, as an “illogical, amnesic and almost aphasic image” (2010). The writing of Maura Lopes Cançado, on the other hand, brings in the autobiographical mark of schizophrenia, the familiar locus of madness: the asylum. The author's illnesses and her experience as an intern gave her living material to write about a space that evokes physical and mental confinement. Joana's square was a tribute to her colleague who walked the quadratic perimeter of the courtyard in an attempt to eliminate the curvilinear traces of humanity (and sanity) that still remained in her. In Espiral Ascendent, the author narrates, in the first person, an episode where she tries to commit suicide in a waterfall, linking it with what happened when she was rescued and taken back to the clinic. The tale has explicit intertextuality with Shakespeare's Hamlet and is supported by the biography of Maura Lopes Cançado, who played Ophelia in the theater group at the asylum. Her writing will recreate her life, which is based on art: all in a vertiginous spin to the torpid taste of sonifene, medication to control her virulent attacks of madness. The symbolism of the circle can be understood as a representation of all aspects of the subject's psyche and its relationship with the external world and people. More particularly, the symbol of the spiral would be this mental circle in endless projection. In this way, we approximate Beckettian and Cançadian circles and squares, seeing in these literary spaces a field for the critical reflection of the bonds of reason under confined bodies and thoughts.