The wheel of life of Machado de Assis in the short story "Viagens e Viajantes na História da Literatura”

Abstract

This paper is the result of a transtextual analysis, as discussed by Ginette (2006), of the short story "Viagem e Viajantes na História da Literatura" (1988), by João Inácio Padilha. To help with the analysis, other concepts were also used: the concept of the dual formal structure of short stories, by Ricardo Piglia (2006); the precepts of historiographic metafiction, by Hutcheon (1989); and the concept of autobiographical fiction, by Perrone-Moisés (2016). This analysis, typical of the hipertextual practice, allows us to observe how the short story retakes original statements to resignify and recontextualize them during the construction of its narrative.In this process, the short story by João Padilha shows, indirectly, the way the readers should read the story because it activates references that work as reading metaphors, as a way of going through Machado de Assis’s work/text through the principle of palimpsestic construction. Through this reading operation, the reader is invited to be a traveler, but she/he should, therefore, activate a determinate reading repertoire which equals to moving through a vast series of literary traditions.