Tetralogia das minúsculas: o insólito como fissura da cosmovisão ocidental

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates how the unusual manifests itself in the four novels that comprise Valter Hugo Mãe’s so-called tetralogy of the lowercase — o nosso reino, o remorso de baltazar serapião, o apocalipse dos trabalhadores, and a máquina de fazer espanhóis. Rather than treating the unusual as merely an aesthetic or thematic category, the research approaches it as an ontological rupture within reality itself, one that reveals the limits of Western rationality and destabilizes the symbolic contracts of modernity. In this sense, the unusual is understood as a critical force arising from characters’ limit experiences marked by childhood, old age, class and gender subalternity, animalization, and disenchantment. The central hypothesis is that these narratives not only depict extraordinary situations but articulate a literary project that reconnects contemporary Portuguese literature with a tradition of desconcerto, reaffirming fiction as a space for ontological insurgency.The methodology combines comparative literary analysis, philosophical theories on absurdity and alterity, and the hermeneutic model of dialogical webs proposed by Adna Candido de Paula, inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of language. This study shows how the insólito functions as a transversal axis throughout the tetralogy, materializing in elements such as linguistic fragmentation, symbolic inversion, and the presence of limit-figures that embody the collapse of traditional binaries. Ultimately, the thesis argues that Valter Hugo Mãe’s literature gives voice to what has been silenced and shape to what has been excluded, calling upon readers to confront the unbearable aspects of everyday life with a sensibility that breaks through the margins of mimetic representation, thus engaging in contemporary debates on decolonial epistemologies, metaphysical collapse, and aesthetic resistance.