Romances de viagem: políticas e poéticas da mobilidade contemporânea na coleção literária Amores Expressos

Abstract

Through a transdisciplinary study, this thesis aims to analyze, , how the multimedia Project Amores Expressos – Express Love, in English – (RT Features, Academia de Filmes e Companhia das Letras) builds a literary collection founded on travel narratives, whose leitmotiv of contemporary mobility agglutinates the ten published novels. More specifically, it seeks to analyze the discourse of international travels which structures the enunciation and the enunciating plans of these collectible works, stipulating a political-poetical arch of motility for the characters, these strangers whose displacements point towards an anti-bildungsroman. From structuralist and genealogical studies about literary collections that enable the understanding of the “aesthetics of interruption” as an identifying factor of the volumes - , and of the constitution of the three topoï considered to be arguments of travel literature – i. the space-time of mobility; ii. Motivations and consequences of traveling; iii. The corpo lá(r) and their relations with hospitality with the other archetypical characters of traveling -, we carried out a comparative literature study of the novels which comprise the Amores Expressos collection. As a result of the analysis, we came to the conclusion that the authors and their works constitute a bourdieusian force field in the collection. We have subdivided Amores Expressos into two categories, based on the reviews they have received. Cordilheira, O filho da mãe, Do fundo do poço se vê a Lua, O único final feliz para uma história de amor é um acidente, O livro de Praga and Estive em Lisboa e lembrei de você, constitute what we call a “high-collection”, or, in other words, those that were critically (or perhaps relatively) acclaimed; while Barreira, Digam ao Satã que o recado foi entendido, Ithaca Road and Nunca vai embora comprise a subfield of the, thus, “lower-collection” of Amores Expressos. Through the analysis of the arch of mobility of seventeen characters, we can see that the “high-collection” is one of female and homosexual travels, presenting high motility, being unwilling to depart and facing tragic endings. Meanwhile, the lower-collection is composed of heterosexual male travels, with linearly similar mobilities, whose subjects also set out feeling demotivated, having as closure their moorings in their arrival places. And, until this moment, being a collection comprised only of male writers, this created some very specific characteristics for the travel narratives, being synthesized in the Christian myth of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise: the reckless woman who harms men; the banishment and the mobility which ensued, as punishment; the eating of the forbidden fruit as an act of independence which upsets the divine. Being a stranger is a condemnation, since the subjects that do not fit the traditional family values are expelled from home, punished with displacement and the ills that followed (i.e. death, vanishing, arrests, delusions, escapes). Before all, the travellers are sinners who are incapable of going back home; and the collection uses the arguments of travels to deconstruct them, suggesting that the mobility is for those who are in trouble and have been convicted of crimes. Mononuclear and patriarchal families, apparently, have good fortune in their sedentariness, bypassing the need to travel in order to find the pot of gold (or even happiness) at the end of the rainbow of the journey. Finally, we suggest that the studied collection exists much more in the media circle used to promote it, than in materiality and in the reading habit of its consumers, who do not seem eager to read all the volumes and, consequently, are not collectors.