Da linguagem ao círculo: estudos sobre a composição do conto em Amilcar Bettega

Abstract

The present thesis presents three studies on the composition of the short story by observing the way this literary genre is designed in three short story books by Amilcar Bettega: O voo da trapezista [Flight of the trapeze artist] (1994), Deixe o quarto como está [Leave the room as it is] (2002) and Os lados do círculo [The sides of the circle] (2004). Understood as a whole, the three volumes are read in its autotextual repetitions, relations and circularities. In Bettega’s most recent work, Os lados do círculo, a kind of obsession is evidenced in relation to circular forms, which appear not only as the book theme and in its organization, but also in the way the narrative endings allude to its beginnings. This choice of the geometric form of the circle – or, from the symbolic standpoint, of a possible poetics of the infinite in the composition of his short stories – shows the metafictional dimension of his narratives. Besides, this search for a circular form and, therefore, geometrically perfect, works as the search of the literary text inside itself, and can be understood as a utopia of language in which the metafictional dimension of the narratives plays a key role in the achievement of a self-critical reflection about the short story genre. For this reflection about a possible utopian dimension of literary writing, I revisit Maurice Blanchot’s The book to come (1959) and Ernst Bloch’s The principle of hope (1959). From the standpoint of literary studies, as theoretical framework, this reading articulates its theoretical bases by resorting to studies by Wolfgang Iser (1996), Gustavo Bernardo (2010), Karl Erik Schøllhammer (2011; 2013), among others; and, specifically with regard to the short story genre, the contributions by Julio Cortázar (1993), Ricardo Piglia (2004), Nádia Battella Gotlib (2006) and Edgar Allan Poe (1842). In promoting the present readings and reflections, this work argues for the possibility of reading Bettega’s three books as a whole, creating a significant and complex web of narratives concerning a distinct literary project, as a kind of puzzle whose reading possibilities indicate a necessary investigation into the developments of the short story genre nowadays.