Aphasia and unreason in A arte de produzir efeito sem causa, by Lourenço Mutarelli

Abstract

Lourenço Mutarelli's fourth novel, A arte de produzir efeito sem causa (2008), is a fertile field for reflection on the literary penomenon under the marks of unreason and nonsense, effects of an aphasic process that invades all the plans of the novel. The
cognitive-linguistic disorder of aphasia, more than a mere fact of the plot, constitutes a device that contaminates the narrator, characters, intra and inter-chapter connections, as well as the graphic-visual project that structures the book. The deactivation of discursive rules caused by aphasia generates a narrative in which the chain is broken,
exposing a fractured place which reveals the ruin of the art of narration. By putting the logical principle of causality in crisis, which determines that every effect must be the consequence of some cause, the novel reaches an aesthetic, ethical and political
dimension and can be considered a limit-experiment of its kind today.