“The shortest distance between two dots...” On the concept of fold as a world vision and writing technique in Maria Gabbriela Llansol

Abstract

This article proposes a particular reading of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s writing process based on the concept of the fold as developed by Deleuze in The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. This concept addresses to a peculiar baroque trait which is able, however, to surpass its historical boundaries. In the baroque, the fold defines an aesthetic resource as well as a component of its human perspective, for it grants an immanence effect that contradicts the traditional opposition between the material and the immaterial, between the visible and the intelligible. In the Portuguese author’s writing the fold is presented as a fundamental element regarding both the characterization of her human perspective and the technique she develops, opposing textuality and narrativity. The concept, therefore, would summarize the perception of reality through the folds this writing evokes such as what the author’s characterizes as the over-impression through which the language would open way to several levels of reality, binding them and undiscerning their limits, just as the baroque does with the divine and the mundane. Evidence of how this concept can be applied on writing itself, through the proliferation of images (opposed to metaphor by the author) that sets the flashier scenes.