Paulo Leminski’s quick writing in Catatau

Abstract

In Catatau (1975), a work subtitled by the author himself as a “novel idea”, Paulo Leminski lives the adventure of writing itself and criates his text from the permeability of words, languages, times and spaces, showing the writer as a speaker and the reader as a listener of his magnets words. In this sense, the purpose of this article is to verify how this path of Leminskian writing in Catatau converges to the construction of a quick writing, culminating in a reflection on literary practice, a recurring feature in the author’s work. Then, the weaving of Catatau’s writing stands out through the constant interweaving of alliterations, typographical games, paronyms, juxtapositions, tongue twisters, in a proper rhythm, like a whirlwind of language. In order to be able to circulate in this whirlwind, we sought to compare the writing of the “novel-idea” with some of its poetic texts, dialoguing with the ideas of Jacques Derrida (1973), Gilles Deleuze (1997), Anne-Marie Christin (2006) and Márcia Arbex (2006), Arnaldo Antunes (2005) and Jorge Luis Borges (2011). It is noticed that the writing of Paulo Leminski is always in the hitch of the word, following its tracks, either through sound or image. In Catatau, writing is like a laboratory where the language is experienced at sound, syntactic and imagery levels, always in search of an explosion of surprising meanings.