The Orphic subject in Livro de Memórias, by Teixeira de Pascoaes: keepsake, desire and missing

Abstract

Livro de memórias, by Teixeira de Pascoaes, depicts the narrator's world populated with memories that constantly present themselves as being an integral part of the narrator. To achieve this, the author uses several rhetorical processes which help him in his evocation of the past. However, rather than simply evoking, the subject seeks to remove from the bonds of the past the images that constitute his memory and bring them back to him, "to dissipate the darkness of time and to raise the dead", as he says. In this way, I suggest we view the subject of the first chapter of Livro de memórias as an orphic subject, who, through writing, aims to bring back his Eurydice — that is, his childhood or the images that make it up — back to the present time, rescuing it from the past (Hell). The likening of the subject to the mythical character, Orpheus, intends to contribute to the understanding of a book that in almost every way escapes the characteristics which one would expect to find in authors' memoires.