Language and dialogue in Água viva

an hermeneutic interpretation

Abstract

By proposing the arts as an experience of truth and understanding as a way of unveiling all meaning, philosophical hermeneutics strengthens the expressive power of works of art and imposes interpretation on the horizon of language as a concrete possibility for investigation. It is in this sense that the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) proposed from the book Who am I, who are you? a hermeneutic interpretation of the poems of the Romanian Paul Celan (1920-1970) to analyze the indeterminacies between poetic people and the discursive terrain of language. From there, this article proposes to experience the sense of truth in art, choosing literature and, in particular, the novel Água viva by Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), since it also deals with the themes of language and dialogue. The result of this undertaking is a fruitful rather than categorical analysis of the manifestation of dialogicity as a founding process in the constitution of “I” and “you” (poetics).