Me, in the singular, plural: Boy without Past as a vast tissue of subjectivities

Abstract

This article discusses the expansions of the subjectivity of the narrator-character in Boy without past, by Silviano Santiago. In the narrative, the writer reinvents himself as the protagonist, calling himself a “sleepwalker boy” to narrate his childhood memories. Such somnambulism signals the hybrid nature of the subject and their memories, understanding the self as a tissue of alterities that coexists in the real and the invented and that cultivates an “obsession of wanting to be other” (Santiago, 2021a, p. 36). To this end, we use the neologism alterfiction, by Nascimento (2017), as a category of reflection to think about reinventing ourselves, in writing, based on networks of intersubjectivity. We also anchored ourselves in Collot (2004, 2006) and Santiago himself (2004) to reflect on how this self-other relationship manifests itself in the work. In this intersubjective line, we approach the “textual community” – a Barthesian idea taken up here by Carvalhal (2006) – established between Boy without past and Some Poetry, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, especially the poem “Childhood”. Thus, in the constant search to reinvent himself, Silviano Santiago refuses the patriarchal legacies that insist on prescribing his life and, with this, assumes Drummond’s poetics as his only and legitimate testament. This conversation between Minas Gerais authors was supported by Barthes (1971), Carvalhal (2006), Kristeva (2005), Merquior (2012), Villaça (2006), and Santiago (2006, 2021b).