Body, voice, cinema and performance in “text 1”, in Antropofagias, by Herberto Helder

Abstract

Based on a reading of “Text 1”, from the series Antropofagias, written in 1971 in Angola, I intend to understand how the inaugural text of the series reveals aspects of the Helderian poetics as a whole. The Portuguese poet's choice for a reclusive life, preceded by his avoidance of interviews and public appearances in general, puts his work, his corpus, in the foreground. His absent figure changed significantly the way he is read since he only puts his textual body in the foreground, in a process of desubjectivation that confers less importance to the authoral dimension. In “Text 1”, Herberto Helder uses procedures such as the evocation of the body, the reader’s centrality, the relation between poetry and other arts – particularly cinema. These recurrent elements in his poetry, added to the physical invisibility to that which the poet makes a point of imposing himself in, give corporeal value to his corpus. At the same time as Antropofagias, in the early seventies, the significant change in the discourse of the arts influenced artists' attitude towards the world and artistic making, which resulted in a new form of expression that lodges itself in the limit between life and art: the art of performance, a hybrid expression that uses the body as the basic materiality for its experiences. Investigating the continuous exercise of assimilation between art and life, from the mediation of writing - which does not present itself as an end - I seek in this reading – which intends to be performative – to articulate Helder’s poetic practice by approaching it with procedures of his contemporaries in the art of performance