Abstract
In Paulo Leminski's Catatau ["Chitchat"], the author depicts a hypothetical visit of René Descartes to Brazil, during the Dutch government of Maurício de Nassau. Published in 1975, this novel presents a continuous, unpredictable, heterogeneous textual flow. Its main character, Descartes, threads language towards the world and towards language itself: poetry. This paper discusses two possible, unreached destinations for Leminski's Cartesian trip: colonial Brazil, from the XVth to the XVIth centuries, and Brazil during Leminski's life. Speaking about trajectories that are only consolidated as possibilities, this critical discussion takes Maurice Blanchot's concepts of image, the work's solitude and wandering parole, developed in L'espace littéraire, and describes the Brazils in Catatau as images distanced from one another, and from the spaces and the times they allegedly came from; images that function as a type of non-transparent, opaque double signs, which point to those two Brazils while turning away from them, transforming them into a non-Brazil: language, restlessness.
Keywords:
image; wandering parole; Paulo Leminski