Imagens da memória em contos de Heliônia Ceres

Abstract

As a contribution to the abundance of reviews of the work of Heliônia Ceres de Melo e Motta (1927 – 1999), an analysis was made into the relationship that exists between the images in the characters’ memories from five short stories written by the Alagoas writer. The short stories drawn from the collection Rosália das Visões were: “Rosália das Visões”, “Tempo Vazio – Emptiness of Time”, “Dívidas de Amor – Debts of Love”, “Novos Dias de Sempre – The Same New Days” and “Os Gatos – The Cats”. The analysis is aimed at spurring critical perception of how these image relations do occur. With that in mind and making use of interpretation and analysis, I delved into the texts to scrutinize and assess their inner workings. That is how I attempted to see if Heliônia Ceres’s short stories are not devoid of a rich diversity of relations connecting those images from the memory, a fact confirmed by the study. In “The Cats”, the relation between the images is seen especially through the superposition of past and current images, when Anita and her pets return to the house they had lived in. The central element in the short stories “Debts of Love” is the sentimental shift of the mother character from a negative to a positive outlook regarding the world and her daughter; as in a turning of the tables, there is a reversal in the image from the memory. In “Emptiness of Time”, there is a broadening of some images; for instance, when Maria José gazes at any object inside the house, maybe a picture or a toy horse, she then enlarges that image by adding related facts. In “The Same New Days”, one can see the false projection of images when Semeão, starting with images from the past, projects false images of the future. In “Rosália das Visões”, still, there is personification of the images from the memory, in which the shadow represents the facts that lead to a feeling of nothingness or a fear of living, whilst the narrator symbolizes courage and existence; they both talk to one another. Just as I recognize the diversity in the way images of the memory are related in Heliônia’s short stories, I set the foundation for bringing into the limelight a lesser known writer.