A primeira pessoa em prisma: uma leitura de “O unicórnio”, de Hilda Hilst

Abstract

This essay analyzes some aspects of Hilda Hilst’s narrative “O unicórnio”, published in 1970: the formal fragmentation and the displacement of voices to narrate in the first person. These formal procedures are associated with conflicts arising from a homogenizing and authoritarian social structure. The notion of a decentralized narrator, outside the heteronormative center, as it is presented by Jaime Ginzburg (2012), contributes to the analysis of the construction of the first person voice in “O unicórnio”. In the narrative, the displacement gives voice to characters outside the patriarchal and heteronormative center, such as the lesbian woman, the female writer, the unicorn, among others. This decentralization of the narrative voice dialogues with Stuart Hall’s (2006) notion of the decentered subject. For this author, with the structural changes in societies at the end of the 20th century, the subject starts to assume different identities, which are not unified around a coherent “I”. This “loss of sense of self” would characterize a decentralization of the subject, whose identity is not fixed, essential or permanent. In “O unicórnio”, the voices that narrate the story are decentralized, displaced, and fragmented, under the oppression of a hegemonic perspective that responds to globalization, mass culture and authoritarianism. This reading proposes connections among the fragmentation of the narrative, the decentralization of the first person and a disorderly and violent social structure.