What’s in a name? Resonances between Ana Cristina Cesar and James Joyce

Abstract

Ana Cristina Cesar, in Luvas de Pelica (1980), shows us a singular type of intimate diction in which the purpose of the secret is deactivated, and a mixture of travel diary, letters and personal notes is transformed into a space of poetic drift, in which the subject’s position becomes a matter of literature. There is in this text another possibility of understanding what we could call “intimate sphere”, since here, intimacy ends up gaining a different status from that of enclosure, characteristic of previous decades. We know that in this work Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf are referenced, but to what extent could the work of another modern author, James Joyce, shed new light on Ana Cristina’s writing? Joyce intensely addressed the theme of intimacy in his book Ulysses (2012), not only through letters, but also through a stream of consciousness, in which the body matter of the character runs “along” with what is presented to us textually. Taking into account Ana C.’s problematization of the intimate instance, would there be in Luvas de Pelica a kind of Joycean tone reflected in her textual corpus? This paper intends to explore this theme, pointing to possible relationships between the writing strategies of Ulysses and Luvas de Pelica, in order to discover common points that can further illuminate the poetics of the writer from Rio de Janeiro.