A phantom and two works: narrative strategies in O Beijo da Mulher Aranha and O Fantasma de Luis Buñuel

Abstract

This article intends to make a comparative analysis between the books O Beijo da Mulher Aranha (1976), by the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig, and O Fantasma de Luis Buñuel (2006), by the Brazilian novelist Maria José Silveira, focusing on their narrative strategies. Setting their plots in dictatorial periods, these novels demonstrate the possibilities of fictional languages to produce critical readings about historical times, as they explore the memory of these periods from different perspectives. Thus, using either different discursive points of view or languages and signal codes different from those of literature, both novels create plural, multi-meaning narratives. In this sense, we sought to verify how the two books build their narratives strategies and how the approaches and differences between them occur. Therefore, this study was based on theoretical considerations that the Canadian Linda Hutcheon makes in her book Poetics of Post-Modernism (1991), and in the narrator’s typology proposed by Norman Friedman in his essay “The Point of view in fiction” (1967), whose concepts were revisited by the scholar Ligia Chiappini Moraes Leite in the book O Foco Narrativo (ou A polêmica em torno da ilusão), published in 1985. For the historical contextualization of the Brazilian dictatorial government, we have used, above all, the studies of Carlos Fico (2013), and, for the Argentinian context, of Juan Ferreira Fiorini (2018) and Pilar Calveiro (2008), among others that complement such analysis. Considering the relevance of these books on contemporary literature, this study enables to enlarge the critical reception of the authors and their works.