<i>Ursamaior,</i> by Mario Claudio: seven stars, a falling body

Abstract

In the year 2000, Portuguese writer Mario Claudio publishes Ursamaior, a novel that do not escape from his tendency of turning real data into fictional pieces. Together with Orion (2003), and Gemeos (2004), that book composes the “Trilogy of the Constellations”, according to Maria Theresa Abelha Alves. The first element of that triptych exposes several types of violence, among which an exhausting rape scene suffered by Jorge, the last star of Ursamaior constellation. Therefore, we will depart from that scene in order to reflect on the preponderant role of the playful element over the mourning body, basing our text on, for example, Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Baroque Drama. We will also focus on the intersemiotic game that establishes a dialogue between literature and other artistic languages, in this novel, notably cinema. Finally, the act of writing will be understood as a means of suturing torn souls and bodies, and also as a way of reorganizing chaos, highlighting the neobaroque characteristic of the pair mourning-game, and the self-reflection and the metalanguage as textual strategies not rarely evidenciated by mauroclaudian works.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/abriluff.2017n18a411