“Saturn has no Surface”

Traces of Melancholy in Marília Garcia’s Undecidables

Abstract

How are the remains of loss, of mourning, of melancholy combined in a poetry recognized for its containment, whose investigation and description of the processes often seem destined to subtract emotion, outbursts, pathos? In order to try to answer such question, this article is centered on the work of the poet Marília Garcia, focusing mainly on her book Expedição: nebulosa (2023), which, from the title, is marked by the topics of death and mourning, but also by the founding “yes” of new beginnings. It is assumed that traces of melancholy run through the voices of the poems and, despite this, the formal procedures vary and widen the possibilities of registering situations of loss that are not necessarily expressions of a lyrical speaker who suffers, but of an analytical subject, marked by certain references. More than restricting itself to a given conceptual field, this work is based, primarily, on reflections by Didi-Huberman, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, about montage, melancholy, loss and mourning.