(In)tangible phantoms on Murilo Rubião’s short stories

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the treatment given by Freud to the German signifier unheimlich, the paper will examine the issue of the Biblical epigraphs in Murilo Rubião’s text, a device
used to give voice to the subject’s phantom. The use of the concept of the “phantom” points to the undeniable possibility of reading Rubião’s short-stories through psychoanalysis (however
uncommon this may be). Complex crossings of subjectivity, as well as the subject’s inner conflicts, are constitutive elements of Rubião’s fantastic literature, a literature that deals
extensively with the conflict between compulsion and its regulation, the individual and his/her surroundings, represented above all by the allusion to family ties, the family, and the clan, as the primary location of unease. Nevertheless, in Rubião’s text, the phantoms – strange and uneasy – become familiar through obsessive work with the linguistic code and with the text’s composition. The latter, at first expected to be orthodox, traditional, and classical, embraces, as signifier, a signified in a state of tension between the logical and the a-logical/illogical, the real and the supra-real, reducing, albeit fleetingly and illusively, the strangeness that pervades the author’s writing.