Limit and Transgression in Hilda Hilst’s Pornographic Trilogy

Abstract

Hilda Hilst’s Pornographic or Obscene Trilogy, composed of the novels O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby (1990), Contos d’escárnio/textos grotescos (1990), and Cartas de um sedutor (1991), were deemed by many to be a scandalous offense for their explicit (and comic) representations of sexuality, particularly for their treatment of sexual taboos. Hilst regarded the novels as part of a larger effort to gain more attention after years of relative obscurity. In this essay, I argue that the trilogy signifies an important change in the philosophical concerns that characterize her poetry, theatre, and fiction. If in other works by Hilst, one finds a certainty in the ability of thought and language to represent the real, whose condition of possibility assumes the presence of a divine figure, the Pornographic Trilogy marks the absence or death of God. As a result, the novels trouble notions of a centered individual and collective subject. This shift in the ontological assumptions that underlie Hilst’s work is evoked in varying figures of limit and transgression that inform the novels’ enumeration of sexual taboos, as well as a recurrent tension between three images of writing. I show that the novels consider the death of God as it relates to writing, particularly as it concerns narrative voice, authorship, and genre. Finally, I contend that it is through the decidedly comic mode of the trilogy that the novels signal the attempt to think of self as singular being and community as a sharing of the condition of human finitude.