“A moldura deste retrato em vão prende suas personagens”: fotografia, memória e esquecimento em Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Abstract

The present research discusses the uses of the photographic device in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, since we often find in this poetry a lyric I that is a reader of photographs, that from the observation of a portrait or a photo album, tries to elaborate the past, to organize and to reconstitute his memories. The photography thus appears in Drummond lyricism not only as a recurring theme, but also as a mode of world observation that pervades even poems that do not speak about photographs. In this sense, we set as goals of this research to verify how the photographs operate in the preservation of a memory that in Drummond is uncertain and fragile, as well as discuss how the notion of the impossibility of apprehending the totality of the past through memory affects Drummond lyricism. For this, we base our theoretical discussion mainly on Susan Sontag (2004), Walter Benjamin (2017), Georges Didi-Huberman (1998), Giorgio Agamben (2007) and Joan Fontcuberta (2010). We delimited our corpus based on the works of Drummond that fit the trend pointed out by Alcides Villaça (2006) whose development of the memory theme occurs in a more reflexive way and the poet problematizes the dialectical movements between remembering and forgetting. Thus, we selected poems of the following works: Alguma poesia (1930), Brejo das almas (1934), Sentimento do mundo (1940), José (1942), A rosa do povo (1945), Novos poemas (1948), and Lição de coisas (1962). Were analyzed poems in which were found references to photographs, portraits, images and other visual referents, also paying attention to those who presented visual language characteristics manifested in poetic language. The analyzes confirmed our hypothesis that there is a relation between the consciousness of the inability to perceive the past through the photographic device and the gauche characteristic, since the variation of the modes of interpretation of the uses of the photographic device is permeated by ambivalences and contradictions, a fact that reiterates the mismatch in the poet personality, since at the same time that the lyrical self uses photographs and the photographic language to construct its own poetics, showing even the social function that they can exert, insists on problematizing its failures and limits. By highlighting the fissures of the photographic device, all the poems analyzed also emphasize certain melancholy and pessimism, characteristics once again associated with a subject to the left of events.