Ciranda de Pedra: Manifestations of the Living Statue in Portuguese-language Literatures

Among the studies of Portuguese-language literature dealing with the simulacrum, there is still a lack of a diachronic perspective on the issues associated with its many possible representations. Our incipient study started from the need to verify how literature outlines figures of the simulacrum in peripheral, contaminated and hybridized cultural areas such as those of the Portuguese-speaking world, and what role it attributes to them in relation to the sphere of the human. In order to answer these questions, however partially, we have focused our research on one of the possible conceptions of the simulacrum – the statue – and we have tried to identify texts that reformulate this theme across various historical phases (classical, Romanticism, Modernism, and Post-modernism) of Portuguese-language literature (in particular, from Portugal, Brazil, Angola). Camões, Melo, Carvalhal, Sá-Carneiro, Clarice Lispector, Pepetela, and Jaime Salazar Sampaio are some of the authors examined in this initial journey through living stones. What emerges is that, beyond the peculiar hybridizations bearing on the conventional love theme, the axis on which the use of the living statue in the Lusophone sphere most insistently pivots is that of social criticism.