Liquidare, illiquidire. Strategie di ridimensionamento del tabù nei racconti per bambini di Eugénio de Andrade e Clarice Lispector.

In A mulher que matou os peixes (1968) by Clarice Lispector and História da égua branca (1972) by Eugénio de Andrade, there are topics normally labelled, at least in children’s liter- ature, as taboo: death and sadism in Lispector, sexuality and violence in Andrade. The study analyses the results achieved by the two authors, where success is understood as the ability to convey a complete message to children. Lispector manages to exonerate the narrator, guilty of killing the fish of the title, by multiplying examples of how an animal can die and suffer. The insistence on animal pain and its arbitrariness produces what we will call detabooisation through exhaustion of the themes – while building a bond with the reader, who is exposed to a long series of bereavements but also drawn into an equal relationship with the narrator, whom they come to trust despite her shortcomings. Andrade, on the other hand, recoils from his own content, ultimately rendering it inaccessible to the child. The sexualisation of the mare, victim of the donkey that mounts her and is therefore killed, suffers from the author’s self-censorship strategies, which resort to euphemisms in describing the copulation but insist on the details of the killing. The interruption of causal links between the first scene and the second inhibits the child’s access to the deeper reasons for the donkey’s slaugh- ter, which remains unexplained. Andrade’s embarrassment also affects the critical apparatus, which tends to analyse the less disturbing aspects of the story, and the illustrations, which depict only the parts most likely to meet changing criteria of acceptability.