Manoel de Barros: em que acreditar senão no riso?

Abstract

One of sources from which Manoel de Barros' poetry draws its strength are "these beginnings of things / indistinct". In saying that he merely wanted to be in things, he designates the poet as "a device for being useless", someone who, through the derangement of the body and by creating "inutensílios" [useless utensils], is led to fuse with things and to an intensive disobedience of the senses of language. This disobedience bears directly upon the physical reconstruction of the phrase - which, by disturbing the order, seeks to articulate the unnamed, the larval, the lowermost and undermost of things, the pre- or ante-things, and the unnameableness of language.