Mia Couto: the future of the past, in Sleepwalking Land

Abstract

Abstract: what I aimed at, in my reading of Mia Couto’s novel, was to bring to light the derridean «logic of the supplement» involved, not only in reading and (re)writing, as they emerge in the novel, but also in the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, which entails a different conception of time: that of a certain retroactive aferwardness, through which the past is to be re-signified. That has, in fact, been true of the temporal construction of the plural and multi-layered subjectivity of different characters of the novel, in their struggling for survival. Different texts by Jacques Derrida were helpful: «Freud et la scène de l’écriture», «La différance», «Signa-ture événement contexte», «Dialangues», «Ce dangereux supplement…» or «Envois» – on memory and the non-destination in writing; also by Freud: letters to Fliess, «Literary creation and day-dreaming», or L’interpré-tation du rêve, – on phantasy, dreaming and secondary elaboration.