Melancholy in Camilo

Abstract

By reading Coração, cabeça e estômago [Heart, head and stomach], we propose to look at how Camilo Castelo Branco adopts medical, philosophical and literary approaches to melancholy. We will see how this condition, which goes back to the core of human self-affection, appears in various texts by Camilo, not just as a physiological observation of melancholy, thereby reduced to its pathic dimension, but as the support of a satirical and critical position, anticipating literary themes from the second half of the 19th century. Camilo’s melancholic observation is dependent on a frugal realism in expression that is only possible in a threshold position capable of reading the limits of the human comedy – vulnerability, suffering and death – in the light of the asymmetries and divides that mark his time. The heartbreak that is so often inseparable from the tentacular calculus of the alliances is counterpointed by a schematic resignation and self-indulgence, the consistency of which reveals its basis in Camilo’s traumatic experience. Bearing in mind the novelist’s temperament, as indicated in various biographical texts and in the accounts of contemporaries, the way in which his adoption of a melancholic outlook becomes concrete in a poetics of affect is highlighted.