“I want peace to write”: a biographematical reading of the self-admittance of writer João Antonio (1937-1996) at the Muda Sanatorium

In May 1970, João Antonio (1937-1996) had a hiatus in his public career that caused a turnaround in his literary project: the journalist and writer voluntarily hospitalized himself for two months at the Muda Sanatorium in Rio de Janeiro, even without a psychiatric recommendation. A brief episode, but one that if observed closely, in detail, reveals a lot about the author’s biography - what Roland Barthes (1977) defined as a biographema. Based on extensive documentary research that includes letters, drafts, personal notes, unpublished testimonies and newspapers from the time, this essay reconstructs the writer’s period of isolation, when João Antonio delved definitively into the life and work of Lima Barreto, whose ethics and style he began to pursue in the works he wrote and published from that moment on.

Keywords:
João Antonio; Lima Barreto; biographema