Revisiting Enigma Variations through the lens of French semiotics: from the thematization of the first love to the subversion of the sacred

Abstract

This article aims to present some results of a research that investigated discourses about sexuality among individuals with same-sex attraction (Sutton, 2015) in André Aciman's novel Enigma Variations (2018). Therefore, the research is based on the theoretical and methodological framework proposed by the French school of semiotics, or Greimassian semiotics (Greimas, 1973; Greimas and Courtés, 1994; Bertrand, 2003) and its developments in Brazil (Barros, 2002, 2008) and Fiorin (2008, 2009). Methodologically, this study, understanding Aciman's work as a discourse and since discourse is one of the units of analysis of Greimassian semiotic theory, consisted of mapping procedures of dissemination of themes and figures and their respective thematic and figurative paths related to sexuality issues in the narrator's childhood period, in order to verify how these components of discursive semantics, the level par excellence of the manifestation of ideology, reproduce social imaginaries in the text. In addition, through the analysis of enunciation projections regarding categories of person, time, and space (Fiorin, 2008), the mechanisms and strategies of constructing sense effects proposed by the author were analyzed. The results, at first, indicated that the realization of desires and sexuality relationships occurs among discursive actors who are recipients of figurative investments similar to each other, that is, one loves someone who is similar. Secondly, these results allowed us to advance our interpretation of Aciman's work, revealing how the thematic journey of first love was based on a journey of subversion of the sacred, represented mainly by the figure of the Norman chapel. From this semiotic analysis, we understand that sexuality found its thematic-figurative concreteness in the intersection between the search for a similar object of love and the symbolic subversion of the sacred.

Keywords: discourse semiotics; thematization; figurativization, sexuality;