The aesthetics of silence as a cry of disenchanted maturity – O Eu Desconhecido (2016) de Carlos Carranca

Abstract

Carlos Carranca´s collection of poetry, O Eu Desconhecido (2016), is a turning point in his literary aesthetics, a re-orientation in his craft of poetry, now striving towards greater linguistic reduction and hermeticism. Composed of 69 poems, all of which with three blank verses, resembling haikus, this collection is imbued with an aura of freshness and vitality where words gain their primeval, more refined and true essence. From these poems emanates a kind of aesthetics of silence, an essential condition not only for the survival of poetry, but also a means to unravel the mystery and underlying meaning of this apparent absurdity that is life itself. The quasi-opaque
nature of such a rhetoric of silence, often associated with traumatic or dysphoric realities, is for the poem´s subject also a means of contemplation, of holding back time, in the sense of fostering thought, reflection, while plunging into his unknown self. In my view, this is how Carlos Carranca’s new poetic approach must be understood – where the rhetoric of silence, a form of resistence, meets what Susan Sontag defines as the “mythic project of total liberation”. Additionally, the quasi-obsessive and solitary quest for an ‘unknown self’ is reminiscent of Carl G. Jung’s concept of “individuation”. In fact, the poetic self’s dilemma when faced with a traumatic reality seems to stem from a certain inability to respond to the questions of the meaning of life and of a meaning for life.