"Será que você não entende que não há resposta?": l'oscena vertigine letteraria di Hilda Hilst

Published in 1982, A obscena senhora D condenses all the basic themes of Hilda Hilst's prose, being particularly representative of its singular writing. The incessant search for answers to the insoluble existential questions haunts Hillé, the protagonist of the novel, who goes beyond the limits imposed by rationality and common sense to scrutinise the depths of the human being. Hillé constantly questions the human existence marked by abandonment and condemned to an inscrutable nothingness in which any meaning is dissolved. The literature of Hilda Hilst brings into question the pre-established truths and the moral norms of the civilized modern society, going back to a primordial dimension from which emerge human instincts and passions that are embodied by the ambiguous figure of Hillé. Therefore, as this article intends to demonstrate, Hilda Hilst's attempt to say what cannot be said and to show what must remain outside the scene becomes the inside of a writing that makes the obscene the symbol of that remote and obscure origin that modernity has removed, that is, an abject alterity according to the meaning suggested by Julia Kristeva in the book Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection (1980). In this perspective, the obscene will be considered not only as a thematic element, but also as the substance and essence of a literature that can be interpreted, in the words of Michel Foucault, as a "discours de l'infamie"(La vie des hommes infâmes, 1977).