Entre ruínas e fantasmas: as relações entre escritas de si e subjetividade em Bolor, de Augusto Abelaira

Abstract

This study examines Augusto Abelaira's novel Bolor (1968) through the relationship between self-writing and the obliteration of subjectivity, investigating how the novel transforms literary forms traditionally associated with the constitution of the self into experiences of its progressive dissolution. Metaphorically structured according to the biological stages of mould growth–germination, colonisation, and decomposition–the analysis argues that the novel's fragmented narrative accompanies the gradual erosion of subjectivity, reflecting the symbolic, aesthetic, and political effects of life under the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's reflections on self-writing, Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity, Maurice Blanchot's discussion of the dissolution of the subject in language, Judith Butler's notion of the precariousness of recognition, and Maria Alzira Seixo's studies of contemporary Portuguese fiction, this dissertation demonstrates that Bolor transforms language into a space of ruin, making the impossibility of self-narration one of its central aesthetic strategies. It concludes that the novel transcends the historical representation of the Salazarist experience to engage with broader debates on the crisis of modern subjectivity, the precariousness of language, and the critical power of literature in the face of processes of subjective erasure.