The labyrinthic path in the archives of a silenced author

Tulio Carella and his Orgia in a Roteiro Recifense

Abstract

The archive, serving as a potential avenue for literary inquiry, offers myriad possibilities. Such was the case with our investigation into the Argentine intellectual, writer, and poet Tulio Carella, who was enlisted by Hermilo Borba Filho to instruct at the nascent Theater School of the University of Recife. During his brief sojourn in the city from 1960 to 1961, Carella produced two works rooted in personal and collective memory: Orgia, structured as a novel with pronounced homoerotic undertones, and Roteiro Recifense, a collection of poems, many of which also featured homoerotic themes. Navigating this terrain of literary archives, informed in part by experiences documented by Marques (2015), our research encountered scant critical analysis pertaining to Carella’s works and limited archival material documenting his time in Pernambuco. Consequently, the primary aim of this article is to elucidate our engagement with archival sources, particularly those within the public domain, and to share insights garnered throughout this ongoing research endeavor. We aim to delineate the challenges inherent to such inquiries, the pathways traversed during our investigation, and the discoveries unearthed within these archives.