“A loucura zomba de todas as vaidades”: uma leitura de Diário do hospício, de Lima Barreto

Abstract

The presente work aims at analyzing the Diário do Hospício by Lima Barreto (1881-1922) from the theoretical studies on the genre that understand the intimate diary as a hybrid text, open, that holds everything, including fiction, subject only to the rhythm of chronology. The narrator, confined in a hospital for psychiatric treatment, deprived of his freedom, kept under control by medical assistance at that time, turn this hard period of confinement into a rich experience through the observations and memories found in the pages of his diary. In the book, the narrator-observer focus on the sanatorium and explores different spaces and times juxtaposed and heterotopics (FOUCAULT, 2001), which let us treat the individual and collective memories simultaneously. We can see in Barreto’s diary both the locked space of the sanatorium, powerfully and hierarchically structured, and the outside of it, Rio de Janeiro city, through his imagination and reflections which introduce some liricism. However, this is a literary production that interchanges spaces, times and languages (MAINGUENEAU, 2009), analyzing specially the space of insanity and its social consequences such as the racial and the poor segregations, the role of psychiatry at that time and the modernization of Brazilian culture in the early decades of the twentieth century