AUTORES, NARRADORES, NÃO-AUTORES: A EXPERIÊNCIA DE PARTES DE ÁFRICA.

Abstract

: Helder Macedo's first novel, Partes de África, plays with both the status of the narrator and the memorialistic narrative, problematizing both in a clever, provocative game. In order to put his “author”-narrator (a device who certainly merits another, more complete, study) in perspective, he uses inside the novel texts such as a report suppposedly written by his own father and a Drama written by an “heteronim” of his, Luís Garcia de Medeiros. Comparison between Medeiros and Macedo's writing devices and structural choices – Medeiros' are creative, but outdated – results in visible difference between a certain “post-modern”, political narrative of the 1960's and 70's, and Macedo's prose. Medeiros uses Don Giovanni (Don Juan) as the obscene obverse of the stolid bourgeois, at peace with Salazar's dictatorship, creating a binnary, almost manicheistic solution which can be explained through lacanian materialism. On the other hand, Macedo adopts a radically tolerant, self-questioning point of view: creating his novel with texts that bring different voices and addopting as his own voice a discourse strongly marked by the admission of his own doubts an by the use of the conditional, he establishes a kind of parody (paralel ode), weakening his apparent hierarchy of points of view, as in a new approach of bakhtinian's dialogism – which Bakhtin pointed out as found only  in Dostoievski.