Conference Presentations by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
It was Shakespeare who once wrote, in one of Hamlet’s renowned monologues, that Man is nothing bu... more It was Shakespeare who once wrote, in one of Hamlet’s renowned monologues, that Man is nothing but the “quintessence of dust”. In other words, Man is no more than an embodiment of inconsequentiality. In Jorge Luis Borges’s short-story “A Weary Man’s Utopia”, part of his short-story collection The Book of Sand (1975), the reader is presented with a brief vision of a bleak future, where immortality is certain but undesired. “A Weary Man’s Utopia” tells the story of an Argentinian time traveller, Eudoro Acevedo, who comes across a man of the future. This man, unnamed in the short-story, introduces Eudoro to a desolate world of pessimism: space-travel, for example, although possible, is no longer encouraged, as humanity’s interstellar journeys proved only the impossibility to go beyond Man’s physical and intellectual limitations. Similarly, literature is undervalued, for it is an art which stimulates an unnecessary proliferation of texts, an art of reflection and forgery: in Borges’ hypothetical future, literature can be reduced to six essential, albeit unspecified, texts. In this paper, it will be postulated that Borges’ story promotes the idea of humanity as inconsequential and incapable of transcending its own imperfections. Through a portrayal of a utopian society which, paradoxically, endorses the creation of ‘liberating’ death-chambers, Borges is putting forward the notion that Man, in his perfected form, leads a solitary, purposeless, monotonous existence, and that ultimately death is consciously selected as an alternative to this existential torment. Furthermore, Borges’ representation of civilizational decay will be interpreted as a commentary not only on Man’s cosmic irrelevance but also on the futility of textual accounts that depict places of utopia: they illustrate an unattainable project that is only unattainable because, once it is materialized, the utopian locus becomes static, hence no longer subjected to progress. In other words, Borges’ utopian place becomes a place of solitude, of insignificance, a lifeless future. It is this utopian perpetual stasis that leads Man to an existential weariness.
An incomplete heptalogy, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has, of late, been a lush s... more An incomplete heptalogy, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has, of late, been a lush spring out of which fact and fiction are born. Its incomplete status as a series renders its complex machinations, and often convoluted plot, into sources of endless possibilities and inexhaustible speculation. This paper, however, circumscribes itself only to the character of Rhaegar Targaryen and the techniques appropriated by Martin in his work to produce this legendary heroic figure. When the series’ first volume, A Game of Thrones, opens, Rhaegar, son of Aerys II, the Mad King, has been dead for fifteen years. As such, to the series’ reader, he is sculpted not by description or narrative events but out of legend itself, an image carved by the rumours and memories of the people of Westeros and Essos (the series’ settings). Essentially, Rhaegar is an amalgam of truth and imagination. He is represented as either a messianic figure or an offspring of villainy and misogyny. Frozen in this mire of divergent representations, the reader is never in possession of an authentic idea of Rhaegar and is forced, instead, to collect and make sense of the scattered pieces of factual and fictional evidence provided by a plethora of accounts of his life and deeds. It is my intention in this paper to prove that, through this multiplicity of representations of the hero figure, Martin is recreating the process of mythologization from which both legend and myth are born. In other words, to demonstrate how Rhaegar’s legendary status is only achievable through a posthumous reevaluation of the character’s past deeds, a revisionist reading, in fact, that ruptures the line separating man from hero. Consequently, the character is rewritten, appropriated by the people of Westeros, manipulated into a symbol to serve a specific purpose, be it to symbolise a beacon of hope, the face of the enemy, or an afterimage of an idyllic, albeit irretrievable, past. To this end, I will explore Joseph Campbell’s ideas on the figure of the hero, and consider previous representations of traditional heroic figures such as Cú Chulainn, Achilles, and Launcelot. It will be concluded that Rhaegar not only fits the archetype of the hero but also subverts it, by interpreting its symbolic role as erroneous, since profuse and impossible to fixate. A hero, therefore, perennially changing his face.
In Chris Ware’s Building Stories, a graphic novel published in 2012, youth is plural and plastic.... more In Chris Ware’s Building Stories, a graphic novel published in 2012, youth is plural and plastic. Building Stories narrates the story of a nameless woman and of her life in a brownstone apartment in Chicago. Unusually structured, featuring fourteen volumes of different size and length, Ware’s novel is meant to be read arbitrarily. His graphic and fictional representation of life is, paradoxically, painstakingly described in an ordinary, commonplace manner. The novel’s representation of youth, however, eschews definability and expressibility: in Building Stories, youth has an unfixed meaning. In light of the novel’s attraction to realism and to the ordinary, as opposed to the imaginary and the extraordinary, this pluralized representation discloses an attraction to youth’s literary potential as a theme. It is my objective to demonstrate how Chris Ware’s portrayal of youth is couched in three concepts: indefiniteness, irretrievability, and crystallization. In order to trace the process of pluralization that the novel undergoes, I will begin by recognizing in the text these three recurring concepts, which are attached to the theme of youth. The first of these concepts, what I call indefiniteness, will be considered as a depiction of how youth, observed by those who are no longer young, is an object of confusion and undefinability. In this sense, the daughter of the novel’s protagonist will be read as a character suggestive of this indefiniteness to her middle-aged mother. The second and the third of these themes are linked by their origin, but disassociated in nature and purpose: irretrievability and crystallization. In order to analyze these themes, I will use the character of the old woman, the protagonist’s landlady, as a model to demonstrate how youth is suggestive of a twofold nostalgia. This twofold nostalgia, representing the aforementioned irretrievability and crystallization, is represented as follows: youth is seen as something lost, irrecoverable, and, as such, something to be resented (this I call irretrievability); youth is seen as something idyllic, a state of bliss and perfection (this I call crystallization, thinking of Stendhal’s theory on the crystallization of love). I will posit that the many metamorphoses of youth in Building Stories evince a representation of youth that is not only pluralized in meaning but also never formally constant, always in perpetual evolution. Thus, youth, emulating the unconventional structure of the novel, is portrayed as impossible to contain in literature, and therefore expressed in a multitude of ways so as to prove its literary instability.
Keywords: youth; Chris Ware; graphic novel; Building Stories; metamorphosis.
Papers by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
The object of this dissertation is the interpretation of the structural disintegration of the nov... more The object of this dissertation is the interpretation of the structural disintegration of the novel form in the postmodern era. It will be verified that the structural design of the novel form allows for the identification of a twofold paradigm, crystallized in the concepts 'structural fixation' and 'structural disintegration'. The significance of this conceptual schism will be considered of paramount importance to this dissertation.
The methodological approach employed is founded on a principle of deduction. Through the perusal of a considerable number of novels, representing the multiple aspects of the typology here devised, the essayist will arrive at certain conclusions that, whilst not based on a comprehensive overview of the novel form, are notwithstanding founded on firm deductive ground. The idea of structural denial is validated by the set of novels classified under the term 'structural disintegration'.
The neologistic nature of the vocabulary employed in this study performs a specific function, one which is allied to the obvious lacunae that prompted this investigation: given the fact that this dissertation centres on a fairly neglected area, usually glossed over by most academic writing (apart from Espen J. Aarseth’s theories on the cybertext and ergodicity), the essayist opted to exercise a vocabulary that would identify the defining characteristics of each of the types of novels discussed in the dissertation at hand.
The novel, an apparently immutable form, has been subjected, throughout its history, to a substan... more The novel, an apparently immutable form, has been subjected, throughout its history, to a substantial quantity of experimentalism, with writers striving to bend its conventional structure and content to the form’s limits. In this essay, I will analyse novels which engage with this experimentalism by resorting to formally disintegrated structures. These structures are dependent on the reader’s active engagement with the novel so as to be read and, in a sense, ‘created’, as they lack a predefined form devised by its author. Thus, the conventional novel, which I define as being structurally fixed, is counterposed by a novel without an apparent, normative structure, which I define as structurally disintegrated. Within this category of structurally disintegrated novels I attempt to create two typologies in which to define and categorize them: generative fiction and idiorealist fiction, the former a specific kind of fiction that generates other fictions, its essence rooted in the many combinatorial possibilities of structural disintegration, and the latter consisting of structurally disintegrated novels, whose main purpose is to present reality in its fragmented and arbitrary nature, impossible, there- fore, to contain and fixate in a conventional novel. I thus postulate that this structural disintegration, in its attempt to deconstruct the limitations of the conventional, structurally fixed novel, results in an involuntary self-negation. This produces an inversion of structural disintegration’s principle, restricting and limiting the reader’s interaction with the text.
Keywords: novel; structure; structural disintegration; narratology.
Books by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
A war hero is forgotten. A writer is hanged. A German composer passes away. A nation is deconstru... more A war hero is forgotten. A writer is hanged. A German composer passes away. A nation is deconstructed. A gathering of beat poets goes terribly wrong... Twice! A train station becomes sentient and decides to speak its mind. A mythological being forgets his pocket watch at home. Apóstrofe, Apostrophe, a strange collection of seemingly unconnected poems, attempts to establish a dialogue between two distinct languages, English and Portuguese, and to redefine the borders of poesy, in its multiple metamorphoses and linguistic varieties. The insular poetry — insular in form as well as in content — of the book’s first section, “North”, is counterposed by a more condensed, formally competent poesia, albeit less rational and more onanistic, presented in the book’s second section, “Sul”. The bastard son/daughter of two schools of thought, embodied in Greek Mythology by Apollo and Bacchus, Apóstrofe, Apostrophe may be described as a collection of poesy about the Universe and the Man, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the relevant and the superfluous. After all, binary oppositions are interdependent, and the North is inherently linked to the South. And one must not forget how an apostrophe may represent, concomitantly, an omission and an addition. In short, a silent speech.
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Conference Presentations by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
Keywords: youth; Chris Ware; graphic novel; Building Stories; metamorphosis.
Papers by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
The methodological approach employed is founded on a principle of deduction. Through the perusal of a considerable number of novels, representing the multiple aspects of the typology here devised, the essayist will arrive at certain conclusions that, whilst not based on a comprehensive overview of the novel form, are notwithstanding founded on firm deductive ground. The idea of structural denial is validated by the set of novels classified under the term 'structural disintegration'.
The neologistic nature of the vocabulary employed in this study performs a specific function, one which is allied to the obvious lacunae that prompted this investigation: given the fact that this dissertation centres on a fairly neglected area, usually glossed over by most academic writing (apart from Espen J. Aarseth’s theories on the cybertext and ergodicity), the essayist opted to exercise a vocabulary that would identify the defining characteristics of each of the types of novels discussed in the dissertation at hand.
Keywords: novel; structure; structural disintegration; narratology.
Books by Hugo Ferraz Gomes
Keywords: youth; Chris Ware; graphic novel; Building Stories; metamorphosis.
The methodological approach employed is founded on a principle of deduction. Through the perusal of a considerable number of novels, representing the multiple aspects of the typology here devised, the essayist will arrive at certain conclusions that, whilst not based on a comprehensive overview of the novel form, are notwithstanding founded on firm deductive ground. The idea of structural denial is validated by the set of novels classified under the term 'structural disintegration'.
The neologistic nature of the vocabulary employed in this study performs a specific function, one which is allied to the obvious lacunae that prompted this investigation: given the fact that this dissertation centres on a fairly neglected area, usually glossed over by most academic writing (apart from Espen J. Aarseth’s theories on the cybertext and ergodicity), the essayist opted to exercise a vocabulary that would identify the defining characteristics of each of the types of novels discussed in the dissertation at hand.
Keywords: novel; structure; structural disintegration; narratology.