Campos de Carvalho and the Devil

Abstract

The article aims to contextualize and analyze Campos de Carvalho’s interview to Jornal de Letras in September 1959. In the reception of the author's work, moral arguments are used as if they were aesthetic judgments, either positively or negatively. Against both, the author rises, proposing a break with the metaphysical paradigms that guided such readings. His self-representation as a pact-maker of the “Devil” appears in the interview, blurring the line between fictional persona and writer – which critics had already mixed up – within the context of a controversy over the legitimacy of the theme of madness in his books. The interview, as a critical intervention, reinvents the writer himself as a fictional entity and provides iconoclastic responses to formulations against the work and the author. In it, “Devil” equates to the figure of radical immanence, the horizon of Carvalho's nonsense fiction.