Call for papers — Dying by one’s own hand: literature and suicide
Literature has always been one of the most inviting stages for the reflection on the meanders of voluntary death. If we go back to the tragic destinies of Ancient Greece, for example, we can still hear the echoes of the messengers who found Jocasta’s and Antigone’s bodies hanging from the rope. Further, the Middle Ages paint suicide in colors of courtly love, Dante grants it one of the most elaborated sceneries of his Inferno, Shakespeare gives life to a dozen of suicide characters; Goethe, through Werther’s letters – and all the romantics after him –, turns suicide into an attempt of embracing the Absolute; Flaubert and Tolstoy can’t manage to save their heroines from the arsenic and the train track; Dostoevsky gives Kirillov’s suicide a philosophical dimension. Yet: in Ulysses, by Joyce, L. Bloom’s father is a suicide. In Faulkner, we have Quentin; in Virginia Woolf, Septimus Warren Smith. Sylvia Plath, as well as Anne Sexton, leaves several poems around the border act, and transmutes herself into Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar. More recently, we have Bernhard, Eugenides, Roth, Styron, Vila-Matas, Evandro Affonso Ferreira, Reyes, Kertész, di Benedetto, Busi, Kane, Keret, Bernardo Carvalho, Wallace, Lísias, de Leones… All these writers had dwelt somehow, in great breath and artistic sensitivity, with the impasse of those who decided to die by their own hands, and many others could still be added to the list.
The same logic applies to a second list: that of the writers who ended up choosing voluntary death, carving the subject not only in ink, but also in blood: Nerval, Castelo Branco, Antero de Quental, Pompeia, London, Sá-Carneiro, Rigaut, Florbela, Mayakovsky, Crane, Quiroga, Woolf, Pavese, Hemingway, Plath, Mishima, Pizarnik, Sexton, Ana C., Koestler, Márai, Kane, Thompson, Wallace, and many, many others.
In the field of literary studies, though in small numbers, we have significant contributions on the issue: a good example is The Savage God (1972), by A. Alvarez. Although rejected by many scholars, the study developed by Alvarez, both in terms of reach and in offering some theory on the relations between suicide and literature, remains current and stands for a good starting point for the reflections we propose here. In the Brazilian context, we owe to Ana Cecília Carvalho the expression “poetics of suicide”, stated out from her psychoanalytic studies on Sylvia Plath. Along with Carvalho’s expression, we sew up another one: the constant bond between self-annihilation and literature ultimately allows the building of a “suicidological puzzle”. This way, adopting an interdisciplinary sight, the puzzle opens for a conversation with various fields of knowledge, claiming the contribution of several authors: from Plato to Seneca, from Hume to Schopenhauer, from Camus to Cioran, Augustine, Burton, Kierkegaard, Freud, Durkheim and Solomon, we limit ourselves here to a small number among the possibilities of dialogue.
In face of such questions, this number of Criação & Crítica aims at beholding the most varied points of intersection between literature and the act that, for Camus, was “le mythe décisif”, considering literary manifestations from the most diverse times and in all possible genres and subgenres, betting on the plurality of analysis’ perspectives and theoretical unfolding. Considering the growing concern of researches on the subject, the dossier intends to gather articles, essays, reviews, translations and creative exercises motivated by inquiries such as: how, and by means of which aesthetic procedures, suicide is represented in literature? What is the influence of self-annihilation on creative imagination? To what extent the boundaries between fiction and biography are blurred in the case of those writers who died by their own hands? And to what extent literary perspectives on voluntary death draw near or turns away from perspectives by other fields of knowledge? Thinking about the death of the author, from Barthes and others, and of the literary experience by means of death, from Blanchot, is it possible to draw a theory of literary “écriture”/writing as a suicide? Lastly: how is the subject configured in the most diverse literary manifestations, and how can literature contribute for its understanding?
Deadline for submission: November 30, 2018. Works must be sent through the journal’s website:
http://revistas.usp.br/criacaoecritica
