Conjured Time

On João Cabral de Melo Neto’s “Para mascar com chiclets”

Abstract

A reading of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s (1998) “Para mascar com chiclets”, this essay explores the syntactic and figurative complexities of the poem, taking as a point of departure the tensions between the anti-illusionistic commitment of modern poetry and the anthropomorphic and hallucinatory intimations of western lyric tradition. Furthermore, by enhancing the subtle net of disruptions which pervades the verses, one tries to show how, in this poem, the sense of an unsurpassable cleavage separating Man and Time is enacted less as an explicit statement than as frail compromise solution between resistance and abstraction, prosaic and sublime, in which a mechanical and obsessive plunge into pure repetition becomes an unexpected gateway to a weird ritual of self-destitution.