Victor Heringer and the invention of a neighborhood

Abstract

This article is based on the thesis that the fictional neighborhood presented in Victor Heringer's novel O amor dos homens avulsos is the product of its narrator-writer's invention, intended to give space to affections centered on an absence that is not solely grounded on the materiality of the present. To this end, the narrative structure of the novel is first analyzed, highlighting the influence of the narrator's return to his neighborhood of origin thirty years after leaving it. Through the disruption caused by the return between the virtually superimposed places of perception and memory, it is argued that the narrator is driven to create, through writing, another place capable of accommodating the affections stemming from the loss of his first love, who introduced him to his native neighborhood. In a second moment, following the idea of ​​a legibility of space, explored by Renato Cordeiro Gomes through Barthes and Raquel Rolnik, writing is associated with the concept of place and understood, in itself, as an act of returning to other places of the past, fueling our belief in the narrator's invention of the fictional neighborhood as a conscious act of writing. The neighborhood thus acquires a scenographic dimension. Adopting Nelson Brissac's thinking, based on Benjamin and centered on the simulacra that aid urban experience, writing is associated with the production of precise scenarios, serving the invention of the neighborhood presented by the novel.