Melancholic nuances in letters from Caio Fernando Abreu

Abstract

Between 1973 and 1975, Caio Fernando Abreu wrote numerous letters to his friend Vera Antoun, which contained a description of the places he traveled, even sentimental confidences. Using as corpus some of these letters written by Caio Fernando Abreu and addressed to Vera Antoun, we aim to present some nuances of melancholy, in the form of unspoken words, a striking feature of the epistolary genre and so explicit in the last correspondences of the author from Rio Grande do Sul. For that, we will use postulates of letter theorists, as well as those of psychoanalytic theory, with regard to the melancholic symptoms present in the author's writing in the last years of his life, in order to compose a theoretical-reflective analysis about how such writing could not conclude, in the signs that compose it, everything that the author would have liked to have said.