THE INVENTION OF KADOSH

VOICE AND PERFORMANCE IN HILDA HILST'S PROSE

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how the voice of the narrator of the short story “Kadosh” (1973), by the Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, is constituted, and how the narrator's pilgrimage leaves clues in the text from his performative poetics. For this purpose, Paul Zumthor's concepts of voice and performance were used, also drawing on the perspectives of corporeality, from the studies of George Bataille and Michel Collot. In this research, textual marks were found that create an experience of the way of doing things that transpose the theoretical definitions of performance: it is not just the voice that performs in this corpus, but the text itself, an aesthetic structure that communicates and is made on stage, making the page the stage for words.