Das janelas aos porões: a construção da sensibilidade criadora em cadernos de infância, de Norah Lange

Abstract

This assignment seeks to analyze the construction of the self by the memorialistic writing in the book Cadernos de Infância, by argentinian writer Norah Lange. Published for the first time in 1937, the literary work is composed of several fragments, narrating the childhood of the character-Norah, which combine to build this personal identity. This identity is linked to a specific way of being in the world and a personal look at events, and its development is the main focus of the narrative. This paper intends to examine a few of the constituent aspects of this writing, such as the selection of episodes and the language marked by poeticity, looking to unravel the (self) portrait that they set out to create. This memorialistic report is thought of as a search in the fertile soil of childhood for the self that will become the writer at a later point in life, however not in a mere search on the past, but a construction that is given from the act of remembering on the present, with all the reframing that accompany this move. In that sense, this article seeks to analyze three fundamental aspects in the narrative, exploring how they connect to each other searching for some kind of coherence, even if disperse, but necessary for the creation of this authorial sensibility: 1) the poetized, connotative language that expresses these happenings, 2) the focus given to the details, to the minuscule, to the silence between the words, 3) the thematic choice for episodes related to death, diseases, fears and everything that presents some sort of frailty. As a theoretical base, this paper utilizes texts from scholars such as Aleida Assmann, Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin, Joel Candan, Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Pollak, among others.

KEYWORDS: Cadernos de Infância; memorialistic writing; identity construction.