Ver o livro como buraco negro: a formalização material da Antologia da Literatura Fantástica, de Bioy Casares, Borges e Ocampo

Abstract

Considering that editorial mediation plays a constitutive role in the functioning of the discursive regimes of literature, we state a hypothesis: whenever a literary work is (re)published as a new editorial object, the imaginaries about the literary text and how it should circulate are updated, displaced, and transformed. In order to discuss that, the theoretical framework is based on some principles of French Discourse Analysis (Maingueneau, 2006), and related areas, such as Mediology, History of the Printed Book, Design and Semiology. The main objective is to investigate how the Antología de la Literatura Fantastica (ALF), organized by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and Silvina Ocampo, and published in 1940 by the Argentinian Editorial Sudamericana, materializes new imaginaries when published by the Brazilian Cosac Naify in 2013. Methodologically, it is possible to identify these imaginaries from the ethé projected by the discursive scenography of the book. This scenography shows itself by the conjunction of textual, paratextual, graphic, and material elements formalized in the book. A descriptive study reveals how imaginaries related to the ALF have been transforming since the first edition, throughout the decades. Nevertheless, a constant factor works in the material formalization of these editions. There is a constitutive vanishing of information about the editorial processes every time a new edition of the ALF comes out, as if the book was a black hole that “swallows” its own history. Second, there is a dynamics between the force created by the use of images, symbols, and themes of the fantastic, which tend to suspend rational references to a certain time or space, and the editorial vestiges (Debray, 1995) that bond the object to its context of production.