Wandering Writing. Nietzsche and the Contemporary Portuguese-Language Literature

Abstract

By emphasizing the historicity of certain prevailing values in his time, Friedrich Nietzsche questioned the aura of universality that surrounded modern European culture and its agents. His criticism of metaphysics has contributed to trigger an epistemological crisis that crossed the 20th century and continues until nowadays. Although his legacy in the humanities is broad and varied, this article highlights examples in contemporary Portuguese-language literature. In such a way, we try to observe how some literary works peculiarly respond to this philosopher. The selected corpus includes four texts: O livro das comunidades, by Maria Gabriela Llansol; “O mundo estranhado: esboço de filosofia fisionômica”, by Juliano Garcia Pessanha; “Duas pessoas”, by Herberto Helder; and “Floema”, by Hilda Hilst. In the first two, we analyze how they reframe the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence; in the last two, the perspectivism. Instead of establishing generalizations and consensus, we emphasize the various rapports to experience and writing, both understood as unique transformation. In conclusion, these literary works stray from a substantialist bias to manifest themselves as a performance, hence their mobile, wandering structure.